World War 2.5

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, August 27, 2026

 

It’s not often that the director of the CIA swings by Moscow for a tête-à-tête. The last time it happened before this week was November 2021, when William Burns felt obliged to warn the Kremlin in person that we knew what it was planning for Ukraine.

 

The physical presence of America’s top spy was obviously meant to communicate the gravity of the White House’s concern. Hence the suspense surrounding CIA chief John Ratcliffe’s surprise visit to the Russian capital yesterday: What unknown yet undoubtedly alarming development might have led the Trump administration to order its own extraordinary intervention?

 

Could Vladimir Putin be considering an atomic solution to the Ukrainian stalemate?

 

“The escalating spiral of strikes is leading a growing number of Russian officials to the conclusion that Putin could eventually opt to use tactical nuclear weapons as a last resort in Ukraine,” sources close to the Kremlin told Bloomberg. Yet as much as that prospect might delight vatniks and/or Tucker Carlson, it’s probably idle saber rattling (for now). Firing off a small nuke or two at the widely dispersed Ukrainian front line would likely gain Russia less militarily than it would cost in terms of international isolation.

 

Another theory: Maybe, contra Burns, Ratcliffe was dispatched not to threaten the Russians but to feel them out on a devil’s bargain aimed at curing the president’s migraine in the Persian Gulf. For instance, “if you can get Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, we’ll pull out of NATO.”

 

With Trump all things are possible, but the director of the CIA would be an odd choice to deliver that message. A grand bargain with Russia in which Europe ends up stabbed in the back is the sort of deal the president would relish brokering himself, one would think. Or, at least, something he’d farm out to a Putin-friendly toady like Steve Witkoff.

 

By the very nature of his agency’s work (not to mention its cooperation with Ukraine), Ratcliffe is the guy you send when you’re taking an adversarial position toward the Kremlin. A more likely explanation for his visit is that he was there, à la Burns, to try to deter the Russians from some dangerously reckless new action they’re planning in their near-abroad.

 

Like attacking NATO.

 

That was in fact the purpose of the visit, according to the Wall Street Journal. Earlier this month the paper reported that U.S. intelligence now has reason to believe Putin “could try to test NATO’s resolve with a limited assault on an allied country in the next few years,” with options ranging from cyberattacks to a “small-scale land incursion.” The fact that Ratcliffe felt moved to warn Russia now suggests that the timeline for the expected provocation skews more toward sooner than later, though. And if you’ve been following the news overseas, you know why.

 

Numerous weapons factories in Ukraine-supporting European countries have been targeted in mysterious acts of sabotage this year, mirroring Ukraine’s attacks on Russian logistics sites. Germany recently discovered three drones carrying explosives at Leipzig’s airport, a hub used to ship military supplies to Kyiv. And last month Russian military officials visited Kaliningrad, a small Russian exclave located between Poland and Lithuania, allegedly to oversee “readiness planning and procedures for a mobilization of the region’s residents, with details on how to house, feed, and arm them.”

 

Coincidentally, last week NATO staged an unusually large air exercise near Kaliningrad, part of a “flurry of activity” by the alliance in the Baltics lately. Today Elbridge Colby, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, is meeting with the head of NATO and the North Atlantic Council to discuss … something, possibly America’s defense posture in Europe, possibly matters more urgent. And news broke yesterday that Germany is negotiating with Britain to invest in the latter’s nuclear deterrent, part of a plan to extend Europe’s nuclear umbrella eastward toward Moscow.

 

It all seems ominous—except for the fact that the battered Russian military is in no condition to test Europe, right? By one estimate Russia has suffered 1.4 million casualties in Ukraine, including upward of 500,000 deaths. Ratcliffe himself claimed last month that the average Russian soldier lasts just 20-30 minutes on the battlefield before being killed or disabled. Surely a country that’s choking to death from trying to bite off a piece of its much smaller neighbor isn’t about to sink its teeth into NATO. Why is the CIA chief so worried that it might do so, let alone do so soon?

 

The answer to that question is another question: If not now, when?

 

Now or never.

 

Strange as it may sound, in many ways this is an opportune moment for Putin to confront the West. The point of a Russian incursion in the Baltics wouldn’t be to defeat NATO militarily, which is implausible given the two-front war Moscow would be compelled to wage. The point would be to defeat it strategically—that is, to gamble that the alliance would fold rather than fight, provided that the incursion is small enough.

 

A likely target is the Suwalki Gap, a corridor that runs through Poland and Lithuania and connects Kaliningrad with Russia’s ally Belarus. Taking it wouldn’t necessarily require a huge force. In one war game conducted last year, a contingent of 15,000 Russian troops successfully seized a Lithuanian city there. “The U.S. didn’t invoke Article 5 and Germany dithered, ultimately leaving Russia victorious in its territorial snatch and in its goal of undermining NATO,” Newsweek noted of the outcome.

 

But why would Russia try it now? Because: Even more so than usual, an overextended White House is compelled by circumstance to think twice before involving America in any new wars.

 

Set aside the president’s own fecklessness and ideological sympathies, to which we’ll return later. Logistically, the U.S. is in no position at the moment to wage a two-front war of its own. “In a potential conflict with Russia, weapons such as the Precision Strike Missile and Army Tactical Missile Systems … are crucial to repel a land invasion,” the Journal explains. Thanks to Trump’s folly in Iran, we’re a little short on both.

 

Considering how unpopular that folly has become with American voters, any president would be leery of thrusting the country into a second military conflict—especially one that would have us fighting Iran and Russia simultaneously, the closest the United States will have come to a world war since 1945. (So much for Trump the dove.) With the midterm election impending, Putin isn’t crazy for surmising that the White House would sooner betray NATO than foist another conflict on a disgruntled electorate.

 

The timing is opportune for Russia in another way. After four years of combat in Ukraine, it’s used to war and can hit the ground running if it chooses to extend hostilities westward. Europe isn’t, and can’t—for now.

 

That window of opportunity for the Kremlin is slowly closing, though, as Germany’s interest in a nuclear deterrent demonstrates. Europe is rearming, spooked by Putin’s brutality in Kyiv and America’s romance with postliberalism; the day is coming when NATO will be able to repel Russia even without U.S. support. The day is also coming when our romance with postliberalism will end and an Atlanticist will return to the White House, more willing to defend the liberal Western order against Moscow than the current occupant is.

 

Realistically, then, if you’re Vladimir Putin, your dream of breaking NATO might have a shelf life of as little as two years. So why wait? In particular, why wait until after the Ukraine war is over, when relieved Russian citizens will expect a period of quiescence to recover from their nightmare? If the rumors are true that the Kremlin is about to order a huge new military draft to replenish its manpower, why not capitalize on the surge in forces to test Europe now?

 

As Tablet writer Park MacDougald put it, the Russian leadership believes “that the West, which sustains Ukraine, is not psychologically, morally, or politically prepared for war. Russia is, and that gives Russia an asymmetric advantage.” The West will be prepared again someday. But not today.

 

Attacking Europe would do something else for the Kremlin, supplying a rationale for an ongoing national trauma that’s conspicuously lacked one for years.

 

Although they’d never admit it, the average Russian must be wondering what the point is of a conflict that’s dragged on longer than it took the Red Army to smash the Nazi empire and seems to be getting worse for their country over time. How can a few miles of the Donbas be worth four and a half years of wanton bloodletting and the incremental depopulation of Russian males?

 

Seizing European territory would give Putin an answer. We’re not fighting Ukraine, we’re fighting the entire West. And we’re winning. We took the Suwalki Gap. We broke NATO. We’ve achieved something that even Stalin and the Soviet Union never dared attempt.

 

The idea of extending the fight westward might appeal to Russians emotionally too, as they must realize that the explosions that now routinely rock their country wouldn’t be possible without material support from Ukraine’s European allies. “Moscow increasingly views the Ukrainian strikes as attacks by NATO states because alliance members supply Kyiv with weapons and intelligence,” sources told Bloomberg. Turnabout is fair play in the Kremlin’s eyes: If the Ukrainians are going to try to cripple the Russian military by targeting its supply lines, Russia will respond in kind by targeting the nations supplying Ukraine.

 

That’s the message that the explosive drones found at Leipzig’s airport were undoubtedly meant to convey. A modest invasion of the Baltics would convey it in a much grander way.

 

Escalating to de-escalate.

 

There’s one more reason Putin might want to test NATO sooner, not later. Even if he orders another military draft, the war is likely to get harder for him if it drags on.

 

Russian citizens have begun pulling their money from banks for fear that the cash-hungry government will start seizing their savings to fund the conflict. Hopes that a friendly American president might squeeze Ukraine to surrender to the Kremlin have faded amid Trump’s preoccupation with Iran and his admiration for the Ukrainian drone offensive. And Ukraine’s military capabilities continue to grow: Very soon, with help from its European friends, the country will begin striking deep inside Russia with homemade ballistic missiles.

 

It’s all (or mostly) downhill from here. The poor prognosis for the Russian economy led one European consultant to tell CNBC, “If I were Putin, God forbid, I would probably decide that it is in my interest to escalate now and try to finish the war on my terms, than wait until the money ends sometime in the future.”

 

It seems counterintuitive that a nation that desperately needs a war to end might choose to expand it, but there’s logic to it. It’s known in military doctrine as “escalate to de-escalate,” which we’ve discussed here before.

 

“Escalate to de-escalate” is a close cousin of “the madman theory” made famous by Richard Nixon. The idea in both cases is to scare the hell out of your enemy by making them believe you might do something so wildly reckless (usually involving nuclear weapons) that they see little choice but to appease you. A “small-scale land incursion” by Russia into the Baltics would be a perfect example. Instantly it would force the West to the brink of its most dangerous military conflict since World War II, risking all-out war with Moscow …

 

… unless, of course, certain concessions were made that convinced the Russian army to withdraw peacefully from NATO territory and end its offensive against Ukraine.

 

Cut off all military support to Kyiv and convince Volodymyr Zelensky to sign a peace deal coughing up the Donbas and we’ll give back the Suwalki Gap. How’s that for a de-escalatory bargain?

 

Europeans wouldn’t want to accept that offer, fearing that doing so would encourage Russia to stage additional not-so-small-scale land incursions in the future (see, e.g., Ukraine 2014 and Ukraine 2022), but they might not have a choice if the president of the United States wanted to accept it. Do we think he’d accept it?

 

I’m not sure.

 

There are obvious reasons he might, starting with the fecklessness and ideological sympathies I mentioned earlier. Trump has always craved détente with authoritarian Russia; no president since the Cold War has been more reluctant to confront Moscow militarily than he is. He’s also a ripe target to be terrorized by an “escalate to de-escalate” ploy, as he’s been bleating about the Ukraine war as a prelude to World War III since his last presidential campaign—and chastised Zelensky about it to his face during the latter’s infamous Oval Office visit in 2025.

 

The president is also chronically aggrieved at Europe, more so than ever lately after America’s NATO allies declined to join his silly war in Iran. It’s easy to imagine him reacting to news of a Russian invasion of Poland with a shrug: “They didn’t help us with the Strait of Hormuz, why would we help them with Putin?” I wouldn’t even put it past Trump to dial up the Kremlin and offer to recognize their authority over the territory they’ve seized if they can persuade Iran to reopen the strait. He’s a fan of quid pro quos, you may have heard.

 

If nothing else, he might decline to join a military effort to oust Russian troops for simple fear of what war in Europe would do to the U.S. economy. Which wouldn’t be the first time that he sold out to a rogue regime to spare himself a presidential legacy of economic hardship.

 

Still, to believe that Trump would meekly surrender to a Russian incursion into Europe means believing he’d compound his current show of weakness in Iran with a second, more consequential show of weakness toward Putin. That seems unlikely. You can’t obsess about “strength” as much as the president does and run around losing—or ducking—fights repeatedly. If you do, some of the kids on the schoolyard whom you’re hoping to bully in the future might begin to draw certain lessons about you.

 

There are also plenty of Russia hawks in Congress and more than a few in and around the White House, of whom Ratcliffe appears to be one, who’ll egg him on to show some spine. If Trump were planning to sit idly by while the Kremlin stages a sneak attack on Europe, it’s strange that Ratcliffe would have been deputized to formally warn them against doing so, no?

 

My guess is that the president would approach a Russian incursion into NATO territory the way he’s approached U.S. backing for Ukraine, splitting the baby by reducing America’s support without ending it altogether. Kyiv doesn’t get free weapons from us anymore, but it does still get intelligence. NATO wouldn’t get any American troops to help push the Russians out—RIP, Article 5—but Trump probably would pledge intelligence, some weapons, and perhaps a few fun bonuses like access for Ukraine to Starlink inside Russia to help with long-range targeting.

 

But before the fighting got going, he and his team would be desperately trying to broker a ceasefire in which Russia withdraws in exchange for, say, promises of an urgent international diplomatic effort to settle the war in Ukraine plus sanctions relief to ease the pressure on the Russian economy.

 

I suspect Putin would take that deal, having scored a moral victory by dividing America from NATO. Trump would take it too, as it would revive his dream of midwifing a compromise to end the war and give him a chance at a diplomatic win after the Iran debacle. And Europeans? They’d have to decide whether rejecting his proposal, risking a total break with America and having to fight Russia alone, is preferable to grudgingly acquiescing. As ever, the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

The Brewing Anti-DSA Backlash in Seattle

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, August 27, 2026

 

The Seattle residents who filmed a shootout between what locals called the “known drug dealers” operating out of a city park and “roughly six ‘bounty hunters’” sounds like something out of a movie. In the footage, Seattle’s KOMO News said the gunmen were “wearing bulletproof vests and firing a 40 mm launcher into an RV after smashing some of the vehicle’s windows.”

 

That’s just the latest, and most spectacular, episode of mass violence and vandalism on Seattle’s streets — a phenomenon that has residents so fed up that one man has taken to publicly advertising his concerns, literally. “Would the last taxpayer to leave the Emerald City change the name to ‘The Blue Tarp City of thieves, druggies, and shooters?’” the nearly $3,000 billboard ad that went up this week over Seattle’s Aurora Avenue read.

 

Perhaps Seattle’s deteriorating security environment explains why the city’s new socialist mayor has seen a 20-point decline in her favorability rating since she took office at the beginning of the year. Mayor Katie Wilson’s image is in free fall as city residents bristle over her efforts to implement the soft-on-crime agenda that she made no effort to hide during last year’s campaign.

 

Seattle’s citizens are calling on Wilson to repair the $1.7 million hole in the city’s police budget and turn on the crime surveillance cameras she shuttered. So far, Wilson has been deaf to their appeals. Rather, it was the petition to recall her from office that got Wilson’s attention, albeit briefly.

 

The mayor brushed off the threat to her tenure posed by the August 11 petition alleging that Wilson is “derelict in her duties for public safety in the city of Seattle.” When pressed by reporters to explain her commitment to lax law enforcement amid growing public disquiet, Wilson only restated her dedication to her ideologically anti-carceral politics. “We’re continuing to stay the course that I laid out earlier this year,” Wilson insisted.

 

That will not satisfy the three-quarters of Seattle poll respondents who want the CCTV cameras turned on now, not at the end of next month following a public audit of their impact on privacy rights. Nor will it assuage the two-thirds who told pollsters they could not say they had any confidence in Wilson’s public safety plan.

 

Seattle’s own Jason Rantz has a note of caution for the socialist mayor’s opponents: “Katie Wilson is not going to be recalled,” he wrote. He observed that, due to Washington State’s “deliberately high bar” for recalling politicians, Wilson is almost certainly right that the challenge to her mayoralty lacks the requisite legal merit. And yet, Rantz sees a sudden shift in local media’s coverage of their mayor, whom they treated like a “folk hero” during last year’s campaign, as a phenomenon that corresponds with the collapse of Wilson’s support among the only constituency that matters to the press: the left.

 

A Seattle Metro Chamber poll found Wilson’s favorability collapsed from 57% in April to 37%, with 62% of respondents viewing her unfavorably, and only one in three Seattle voters say they are confident she has an effective public safety plan. The drop also comes from her own base, with double-digit losses among progressives and liberal Democrats.

 

“That is the permission slip for outlets to target the vulnerable mayor,” Rantz concluded. Indeed, there’s a hint of incredulity in the questions with which Wilson is being peppered by an increasingly hostile press corps, as if they cannot understand why she remains as impassive as she is amid a brewing public revolt.

 

Media expect hard-bitten cynicism from their politicians, but that’s not what they’re getting from the Democratic Socialists of America. Wilson isn’t playing a radical for the cameras. She’s the genuine article.

The ‘Vocabulary’ Is Only a Symptom of the ‘Problem’

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, August 27, 2026

 

Over a year after the self-consciously anti-partisan think tank Third Way warned Democrats against adopting the left-wing newspeak native to the American faculty lounge — “hiding behind unfamiliar phrases to mask extreme intent,” in its memo’s terms — Democrats are still doing it.

 

The list of words Third Way would banish from Democratic mouths was overbroad. Sure, “chest feeding,” “heteronormativity,” and “holding space” should meet the chopping block, but there’s nothing wrong with using “heuristic” as long as you’re describing a process of reasoning and not trying to verbally muscle your interlocutor into submission.

 

As Axios reported on Thursday, however, many of the phrases the think tank tried to anathematize are still with us. Its report chides Democratic lawmakers for still calling mothers “birthing individuals.” They’re still describing the homeless as “unhoused people.” They persist in their efforts to replace “felon” and “convict” with “criminal-justice impacted individual.” And they’re doing so even though they know they shouldn’t.

 

The reason Democrats resist this obvious imperative is contained within Axios’s report. They might know they have to change, but they resent it.

 

Axios reporter Mike Zapler admits that this language is “natural in liberal spaces.” The patois of the professorate was “created for the right reasons,” Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear sympathetically intoned. The whole enterprise was just an “effort to show more cultural sensitivity,” but it was “easily weaponized by Republicans.” Poor, Democrats.

 

So, the problem Third Way set out to identify endures. And it endures because the left’s linguistic signifiers are only a symptom of it. The real problem is that this language is designed to render their speakers “foreign,” as Axios put it, to most Americans. It marks its user as apart, distant, or even entirely removed from broader American culture, perhaps because that culture is irredeemable. These aren’t expressions of empathy for a select few but, rather, contempt for everyone else.

 

As I wrote a year ago, what Third Way tried to put its finger on was the distaste for American common culture conveyed within the subtext of the words they use in place of everyday vernacular. “The words they use to convey that animus are truly secondary.”

The Future of World War II

By Alan Jacobs

Thursday, August 27, 2026

 

Long, long ago, in an America far, far away, I got my first job: working in a bookstore in a new shopping mall. Mainly we had shelves, miles and miles of shelves, along the walls and across the aisles, but we also had a couple of rotating racks, and one of those was devoted to a series of books: Ballantine’s Illustrated History of the Violent Century. What a title for a series.

 

Almost all of the books we had were about World War II, and I often grabbed one off the rack and took it to the stockroom to look through while eating lunch, which I typically picked up from a then-new and then-small chain of restaurants called Chick-fil-a. (I wonder whatever happened to that little enterprise? I liked it, anyway.) Over the years—I worked my way through college at that bookstore—I probably read every book on that rack, but the one I kept coming back to was a little item called Nazi Regalia. Jack Pia took the fascinating photographs that fill the book’s pages, but its introduction was written by one Alan Wykes—“Author, journalist, raconteur and professional clubman,” according to his obituary—who says:

 

So far as the gorgeousness of their raiment was concerned the Italians always had the edge on the other Axis powers. It was positively Ruritanian. The Germans settled for the practical and sombre rather than the gorgeous. But no one could equal them in the width of the psychologically influential net they spread over civil, political, military and para-military branches of the organization. The Nazi Party was everywhere evident; and its protocol was distinguished by its insignia – witness the infinite variety shown here. You will find medals for varying degrees of valour and achievement, medallions to commemorate occasions such as games and rallies, weapons with subtle distinctions implied by the decoration of haft or blade, gorgets, tabs and lanyards to declare rank or regimental fervour. Everyone in any kind of official position, civil or military, was instantly recognizable through the descriptive language of regalia.

 

“Infinite variety” is scarcely an exaggeration. Medals in great profusion, several kinds of daggers with several kinds of scabbards, metal identification discs, pistols with carved wooden handles, caps and hats and helmets, gold-embossed book covers, clothing for every possible situation, flags, banners, elaborate gates and fencing, and, on everything of course, swastikas, swastikas, and more swastikas.

 

I thought about Nazi Regalia—indeed, fairly swooned, in a Proustian fashion—when I heard Nick Fuentes say about the Nazis: “It’s just cool—the uniforms, the parades, it’s cool. As a guy, you look at World War II, and it’s fascinating, and it’s interesting, and it’s compelling, and it’s cool.” Well, here’s the thing, Nick: It was supposed to be cool. That was the whole point. You know those companies that think they can get away with a lousy product if their branding is on point? That was Nazi Germany.

 

Think of all the movies you’ve seen with Nazi officials in their sleek knee-high boots and riding breeches—no, wait, go to this page and watch the clip from Fritz Lang’s Hangman Also Die (1943) in which the German emigré actor Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, playing the real-life monster Reinhard Heydrich, makes the most gloriously Nazi-campy entrance ever. He’s even got a riding crop, which he waves about sensually, to accompany the breeches and boots. But about those boots … as James Holland has pointed out in a recent episode of the king of World War II podcasts, We Have Ways of Making You Talk, they may look cool, but they’re not very practical—especially when you consider that the period from 1939 to 1945 featured some of the coldest, wettest winters that anyone then alive could remember. Get boots like that wet a few times and they stiffen, after which they start to peel and rot.

 

Hey Nick: Maybe you should develop some sales resistance? You’ve bought a clunker.

 

Nazism was almost from the beginning an aesthetic phenomenon —see Leni Riefensthal’s famous documentary Triumph of the Will (1935)—because the aesthetics were intrinsic to the propaganda, and propaganda was the Nazis’ chief weapon. Everyone in the Nazi hierarchy, even Adolf Hitler in his more sober moments, understood that Germany simply did not have the resources to win a long war—this is one of the most dominant themes of We Have Ways—and therefore had to overwhelm its enemies. This is what Blitzkrieg was all about, and what the propaganda is all about; this is why (hello, Graham Platner) you wear items featuring a Totenkopf: to induce people to surrender immediately. You do this even at the risk of having your soldiers wonder whether they’re the baddies, because you either win quickly or you lose.

 

Spoiler alert: The Nazis didn’t win quickly.

 

Also, the moral of this story: Make sure you know the morals of a story, and not just its aesthetics.

 

So then I wonder: Is interest in the Second World War today largely an aesthetic matter, not just for Nick Fuentes, but for most people, especially younger generations? Are they far enough away from it all that the only real question is whether something looks cool or not?

 

One intriguing point: If you look at the #ww2 tag on TikTok you see, sure, people explaining the whole war in 90 seconds, but also a lot of colorized video with that muted artificial-antique grain, which makes images of actual warfare look like exercises in retro kitsch. But it’s also the case that the average age of listeners to (and watchers of: it’s also on YouTube) We Have Ways of Making You Talk is 37—and nobody is going there for the pretty pictures.

 

This YouTube video by Fin Harrington on the Gen Z interest in the Second World War—with a quarter of a million views and nearly 8000 comments—argues that the appeal is not primarily aesthetic, but rather … well, moral. These young people haven’t inherited the Good War story; their education has mostly taught them to think that all wars (and almost all nations, certainly including our own) are shameful. According to Harrington, what seems to fascinate them most is the fact that millions of young men, from all the nations involved, thought the matters at stake in the war were so vital that they were worth fighting for, dying for, and yes, killing for. The young people surveyed in the study Harington draws on are so interested in World War II that nearly a third of them worry that they could become obsessed.

 

There’s one problem, though: The study that Harrington cites to support his claim that “Gen Z is Becoming Brutally Obsessed with WW2” is based on a survey of German young people only. And in Germany—where reminders of the war are inscribed on the very stones of the cities, where schoolchildren take field trips to the sites of concentration camps, and where one political party, Alternative Für Deutschland, is maintaining what one commentator calls a “strategic ambiguity” toward the country’s Nazi past—a purely aesthetic interest in the war is harder to sustain, and people whose grandparents fought for Germany and perhaps were even enthusiastic Nazis certainly have a greater incentive to imagine what their participation in such a culture would have been.

 

The German educational system treats Vergangenheitsbewältigung—“coming to terms with the past”—as a moral obligation. And the American educational system does also, as long as the past that we must come to terms with is our history of slavery and racism. World War II? Not so much. In this regard a 2025 YouGov survey—conducted on the 80^th anniversary of the end of the war and involving people Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the USA—is both interesting and frustrating. From it we learn, unsurprisingly, that people from Spain (which never entered the war) and Italy (which got out early) feel that they know less about the war than people from the other nations. Nevertheless, when asked “How important, if at all, do you think it is for schools to teach about World War 2 and the events leading up to it?” and “How relevant, if at all, do you think the events of World War 2 and the years leading up to it are to the world today?” the Spaniards and Italians are just as insistent about the war’s significance as the people of the other countries.

 

For those who think this war was the most significant event of the past few hundred years—I am among them—this is encouraging. But while we get a sense from this survey of how much people care about the war, we can’t discover how much they know. Among the American respondents, 59 percent say that they know “a great deal” or “a fair amount” about the war—which puts them ahead of Italians and Spaniards, and behind the other three nations—but self-reporting in such matters isn’t worth much. How would these people do on the exam I imagined in my first essay in this series? There’s no way to know. Similarly, that YouGov study surveyed adults only, and doesn’t break down its results by age. What would such a survey look like if it started with teenagers and broke down its results by age cohort?

 

This much is clear: In the absence of real, substantive knowledge of the war—its causes, its prosecution, its consequences—an aesthetic response is the only readily available one. But what starts as an aesthetic response need not end as one. When Piers Morgan pointed out to Nick Fuentes that there are people still living who were imprisoned in the camps built by those “cool” Nazis, Fuentes simply replied, “I don’t care”—but it’s possible to care. Early on I may have been fascinated by Nazi Regalia, but my interests grew and deepened. The success among some relatively young people of shows like We Have Ways of Making You Talk suggests that many even now are willing to go deeper when they’re given the chance. And in this matter as in others we’re able to teach our children well. I believe it matters very much whether or not we do so.

Fears of a Clown

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

 

Let’s play “One of These Things Is Not Like the Others.”

 

This week began with influential progressive Hasan Piker blaming Jews for the violent anti-Semitism against them and threatening them that more was coming. Here are three statements by Democratic Party figures on Piker’s comments:

 

1.      “The malicious claim that American Jews are inviting violence against themselves is dangerous and antisemitic. There is zero justification for threats against the safety of our Jewish brothers and sisters at a moment of rising hate. We will fight the cancer of antisemitism with the fierce urgency of now.”

 

2.      “Hasan Piker’s talk of violence against American Jews, and directly naming a Michigan elected official, and future member of Congress, Jeremy Moss, is unacceptable. Full stop. Piker is a hack who thrives on hate, shock and awe because he lacks substance. It’s dangerous for everyone. We should all be calling out this disgusting rhetoric so it loses its grip on our politics once and for all. It has no place in Michigan, and no place in our country.”

 

3.      “Criticizing the policies and actions of the Israeli government is one thing. Blaming American Jews for the hatred, threats, and violence directed at them is something else entirely. It is dangerous, wrong, and antisemitic. No Jewish American should be held responsible for the actions of a foreign government, and there is never any justification for threatening the safety of Jewish communities. We must confront antisemitism wherever it appears, with resolve and zero tolerance.”

 

The outlier should be obvious: Only one of them mentions Hasan Piker by name. We can infer from this that the two others are afraid of Piker for one reason or another.

 

The only one of the three unafraid to invoke Piker’s name is Hillary Scholten, a Democratic congresswoman representing Michigan’s 3rd District.

 

And who are the two who cower in fear of a Chairman Mao-worshiping social-media influencer? The first is Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrats’ House leader and would-be speaker. The latter is Ken Martin, chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

 

The national Democratic Party is led by jellyfish, though Scholten’s presence in the party means they are not entirely without vertebrates.

 

One defense of Jeffries here is that we all know who he’s talking about. And it’s true, Jeffries’ statement could have been weaker. But that’s a low bar to clear for someone who wants to be speaker of the House.

 

“Why not call him out by name in your statement, if you feel so passionately about this issue?” Wolf Blitzer asked Jeffries, who didn’t have much of an answer.

 

The main defense of Ken Martin is that nobody knows or cares who he is. The DNC has managed the rare feat of making itself irrelevant even in a blue-wave year, when it should be minting money. And yet, as with Jeffries, I’m not sure how much of a defense that really is.

 

All of Piker’s caveman anti-Semitism is being done for the benefit of Abdul El-Sayed, the angry Jew-baiting Democratic candidate for Senate in Baby Gap t-shirts who also fears Piker’s disapproval.

 

But nobody expects anything of El-Sayed. Jeffries, however, is responsible for the direction his party takes. So is Ken Martin, even if nobody knows that.

 

So we’ve determined whom the party’s powers-that-be are afraid of: a Twitch streamer. And we’ve determined what they are afraid of: mean tweets from Piker or his fans.

 

The question remains: What can be done to immunize them from the fear? Mostly, the answer has to do with a cynical cost-benefit analysis. Normally, you’d love to appeal to someone’s principles, but Jeffries has misplaced his and forgot to put an AirTag on them. What the wannabe speaker is left with is political incentive, and right now he doesn’t have the incentive to do what he should do, which is to tell El-Sayed to choose between Piker and the party.

 

Nor did the fact that Piker seemed to threaten another Democrat, Jeremy Moss, move Jeffries to act. What he wants—what he needs—is for the steady drumbeat of headache-inducing stories to make it impossible for him to allow this to go on.

 

“You have a finite amount of days in campaigns, and any day you’re not on your message and on the offensive, you’re losing,” Tre Easton, a Democratic Party think-tanker, told Politico Playbook this morning. Easton had El-Sayed in mind, but the point stands for Jeffries as well.

 

Here is where Democrats are at a bit of a structural disadvantage. Mainstream media do not hound left-wing anti-Semites. If anything, they massage their image with puff pieces. (CNN, which actually does challenge Democratic anti-Semites, is the exception.) It would take a wholesale turnabout for most of these media companies to give progressive shock jocks like Piker the scrutiny they deserve.

 

In the long term, Jeffries would be thankful for such help. Because unless someone forces the New York congressman’s hand, the Democrats will appear to be just as much Piker’s party as Jeffries’.

Now for the Good News: Five Problems America Has Largely Solved

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

 

One: Islamist terrorism a shadow of its former self.

 

Whenever I write this, I knock on wood; the world seemed peaceful and quiet on September 10, 2001, too. But the available data indicate that the preeminent threat in American life for most of the past quarter century is genuinely smaller, weaker, and so minute a menace that most Americans rarely ever think about it.

 

From the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS):

 

First, the frequency of recorded jihadist attacks and plots against targets in the United States has been low since the territorial defeat of the Islamic State in 2019. Between the beginning of 2020 and New Year’s Day 2025, CSIS counted 8 jihadist attacks and 10 disrupted plots — an average of about 3 attacks or plots per year. Between 2013 and 2019, jihadists conducted 27 attacks, and 46 jihadist plots were disrupted — an average of about 10 attacks or plots per year.

 

Second, the lethality of jihadist terrorism in the United States has fallen since the territorial defeat of the Islamic State. This decline is likely the result of a decrease in the Islamic State’s ability to inspire violence rather than a loss of operational support from international terrorist organizations.

 

The U.S. National Security Strategy, published by the Trump administration in November, used the words “terrorism” and “Islamist” once in 33 pages, and the word “terrorist” three times. The words “al-Qaeda” and “ISIS” did not appear. Yes, some of that might reflect the administration’s own priorities and worldview. But reviewing the major threats to the U.S. and not mentioning any Islamist terrorist group would have been unthinkable in the days of the “Islamic State,” or while Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was alive.

 

ISIS is barely a factor in Syria anymore. “ISIS attacks declined by 17 percent in the months following the SDF’s losses (that is, from January to April 2026) and then plunged by a further 67 percent after the departure of American forces (from April through June 2026).”

 

Note that as Islamist terrorism has become a non-factor in the average American’s life, we can’t say the same for our friends in Europe; the monitoring group Armed Conflict Location and Event Data writes, “Since 2020, ACLED has recorded 41 jihadist attacks in Europe, six of which took place in Germany.” Still, even in Europe, there’s a bit of a silver lining in that the attacks are getting less sophisticated. “Vehicle rammings and stabbings have become the dominant methods used in Islamist attacks across Europe, reflecting a broader shift towards violence that is less sophisticated and easier to plan and carry out. Compared with the large-scale jihadist coordinated bombings and shootings Europe experienced a decade ago, perpetrators increasingly rely on readily available methods that require little preparation or specialist capability.”

 

Things have gotten so bad for some former employees of al-Qaeda front organizations that they’ve been forced to desperate methods of making a living, such as running for Congress as a Democrat in New Jersey. Because of the heavy Democratic lean of the Garden State’s twelfth district, there is a good chance that Adam Hamawy, who testified as a witness for Omar Abdel Rahman, the Blind Sheikh, in the trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, will become a representative soon. Hamawy can already start thinking about what he’ll wear for his swearing in; I’m sure somewhere in his wardrobe he has a vest that is pure dynamite.

 

Two: The terrifying spike in violent crime from during the pandemic is . . . largely fixed?

 

After a troubling spike during the pandemic and immediately after, the violent crime rate has not just returned to pre-pandemic levels, some analysts contend it is now dropping to levels lower than before the pandemic. From the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ):

 

Following the historic 30 percent increase in homicide from 2019 to 2020, CCJ’s last report estimated that the 2025 national homicide rate will likely be at its lowest level since at least 1900. Trends through the first half of 2026 show that the decline, which began in the second half of 2022, has continued, advancing well beyond the “return to normal” phase seen after the spike in 2020. There is no single or easy explanation for these historic lows. Researchers and practitioners have pointed to a range of possible influences, including changes in criminal justice operations and strategies, technological advances, and broad shifts in society and culture.

 

This report updates CCJ’s previous analyses, examining yearly and monthly rates of 13 violent, property, and drug offenses reported to police from 2018 through June 2026. The analysis is based on data from a sample of 36 large American cities that have consistently published monthly crime figures over the past nine years and make those data available shortly after each month ends.

 

The cities studied in the CCJ report include a nice, wide geographic range: Albuquerque, N.M.; Arlington, Texas; Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Baltimore; Boston; Charlotte, N.C.; Chicago; Colorado Springs, Colo.; Dallas; Denver; Detroit; El Paso, Texas; Fayetteville, N.C.; Fort Worth, Texas; Lincoln, Neb.; Little Rock, Ark.; Los Angeles; Louisville, Ky.; Minneapolis; Nashville-Davidson, Tenn.; New York City; Norfolk, Va., Omaha, Neb.; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Raleigh, N.C; Richmond, Va.; Rochester N.Y., Salt Lake City; San Antonio; San Francisco; Seattle; Saint Louis; Saint Paul, Minn.; and Washington, D.C.

 

There are those who argue that city crime statistics only tell part of the story; once certain crimes become ubiquitous, like stolen bicycles and property crimes, local residents stop reporting them to the cops. The National Crime Victimization Survey, conducted by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, offers another measurement, but that database is currently only updated to 2024, and as crime data analyst Jeff Asher concludes, “Neither property nor violent crime were statistically different from 2022 and 2023 levels.”

 

Right now, the only city on the CCJ report list that has National Guard troops still on patrol is the nation’s capital. The National Guard just concluded an eight-month deployment in New Orleans, and National Guard troops are still in Memphis, Tenn., but neither of those cities are on the CCJ list. The guard deployments to Los Angeles and Chicago ended in December, and the one in Portland, Ore., ended in January. Troop deployment may have been a factor in reduced crime rates in those cities, but because the decline in crime occurred in so many cities that never hosted a National Guard deployment, it clearly cannot be the only factor and may not be much of a factor at all. (With that said, only an idiot tries to snatch a purse in front of a National Guardsman.)

 

Notice that several cities on the CCJ list changed their district attorneys or chief prosecutors. In San Francisco, when Brooke Jenkins replaced Chesa Boudin after his 2022 recall; the city saw a steep drop in a wide variety of crimes in 2024. In Baltimore, Ivan Bates replaced Marilyn Mosby in 2023, and that city’s homicides dropped by two-thirds from 2022 to 2025. In Los Angeles, Nathan Hochman defeated George Gascón and took office in December 2024; in 2025 the city’s homicide rate dropped to 5.9 per 100,000 people, the lowest rate in the city since 1959.

 

The idiotic Soros prosecutors are getting flushed out and replaced by district attorneys who actually believe in putting violent criminals behind bars for a long time, and lots of big cities are safer because of that change.

 

Three: Drug overdose deaths are declining rapidly.

 

It wasn’t that long ago that the term “deaths of despair” — fatalities caused by suicide, drug overdose and alcohol-related diseases — was common in our discourse and a sign of a faltering, failing country.

 

But we’ve made significant progress on the drug overdose front over the past three years. Total opioid drug overdose deaths dropped from 105,007 in 2023 to 79,384 in 2024. The provisional count for 2025 is 70,637; that’s the steepest drop ever recorded, and we’re on pace for about 68,000 this year. As the AP noted about last year’s figure, “The 2025 total is about the same as the tally in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic.”

 

What’s driving this welcome change? One factor is an increase in the availability of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone, commonly referred to as Narcan. There are also signs that U.S. policies, or pressure on China, have finally had a measurable effect on the availability of fentanyl:

 

Yet, in the past year, Caulkins has been struck by what appeared to be an important disruption of supply. In the study published in Science, he and five other U.S. researchers looked not just at data on fentanyl seizures and fatalities, but what the actual users were saying. Examining the Reddit platform, the researchers found the number of posts complaining of fentanyl shortages rose in July 2023, spiked later that year and remained high in 2024, roughly tracking the drop in overdose deaths.

 

There were other signs of a supply shock. The DEA reported a decline in fentanyl purity throughout 2024. It appeared that fentanyl cooks in Mexico were finding it harder to get key ingredients for the opioid from China, the main producer of such precursor chemicals, the agency said. Mexican cartels are the main supplier of U.S. fentanyl. The U.S. researchers hypothesized that a Chinese government crackdown on precursors led to a huge fentanyl shortage. To test that conclusion, they examined fentanyl overdose deaths in Canada. That country’s fentanyl is largely produced not by Mexican traffickers, but by domestic criminals. Therefore, “whatever we do on the southwest border will have no effect on Canada,” said a second researcher involved in the Science paper, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. But Canada also had a notable decline in overdose deaths. What their fentanyl producers had in common with the Mexican cartels was the use of Chinese precursors.

 

There’s another grim potential factor, mentioned by Mary Beth Sheridan in her article linked above: “Fentanyl killed off many of its customers.”

 

Four: The teen birth rate hit another record low in 2025.

 

Think of this as the silver lining to the declining birth rate discussed earlier this week. While every child is a blessing and parenthood is one of the greatest joys in life, we all recognize that high schoolers having children of their own is extremely suboptimal. This is part of a 35-year-trend; in 1990, there were 521,626 births to U.S. women aged 15-19 years, and last year there were only about 126,000. But what’s more, in 1990, there were approximately 8.83 million teenage girls aged 15 to 19 living in the U.S.; in 2025, there were 10.76 million teenage girls.

 

Somewhere out there, someone will argue this reflects the availability of abortion. But the teen abortion rate is also in a long-term decline: “From 2013 to 2022, abortion rates decreased among all age groups, except women aged 30–34 years for whom it increased. The decrease in the abortion rate was highest among adolescents (33 percent and 34 percent for adolescents aged <15 and 15–19 years, respectively) compared with any other age group.” (I’ll admit I wish we had more recent statistics in this category.)

 

Some will also argue the lower teen birth rate and lower teen abortion rate reflect more widespread access to contraceptives. While that’s no doubt a potential factor, other data suggest that today’s teenagers simply aren’t having as much sex as generations past. “According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey from 2023, 32 percent of high schoolers said they’ve ever had sexual intercourse. That’s a noticeable drop from 54 percent in 1991 and 47 percent in 2013.” (Insert jokes about the reliability of teenage boys’ accounts of their sexual conquests here.)

 

For those of us who grew up in the era of ABC Afterschool Specials, warning teenage girls not to sleep with Rob Lowe, it is extremely bizarre to see a Heritage Foundation report entitled, “The Decline in Teen Sexual Activity: A Warning Sign.” No doubt, the trends decried in that report — less dating, less in-person social interactions, retreating into digital spaces, sexting, porn, etc.– are genuine concerns. But considering the large-scale life disruption caused by teen parenthood, the decline in teen sexual activity feels like a net positive.

 

Five: The sharp rise in cancer survivorship.

 

As of 2025, about one out of every 18 Americans — 18.6 million people — was a cancer survivor. About one half (51 percent) of survivors were diagnosed within the past 1ten years, and nearly four out of five (79 percent) survivors were aged 60 years and older.

 

This is a positive development that can seem negative, as people say things like, “It seems like lots of people I know are getting diagnosed with cancer!” Yes, it seems that way because we’ve gotten better at spotting the signs, run more tests, run better tests, and are much better at treating cancer!

 

From January:

 

New findings from the American Cancer Society’s annual report released Tuesday show for the first time that the five-year survival rate for all cancers has reached 70 percent, with the most notable survival gains occurring among people diagnosed with more fatal cancers such as myeloma (a blood cancer), liver cancer and lung cancer.

 

“Seven in 10 people now survive their cancer five years or more, up from only half in the mid-70s,” Rebecca Siegel, senior scientific director of surveillance research at ACS and lead author of the report, said in a news release. “This stunning victory is largely the result of decades of cancer research that provided clinicians with the tools to treat the disease more effectively, turning many cancers from a death sentence into a chronic disease.”

 

This wonderful trend is driven by a variety of factors:

 

For example, the HPV vaccine, approved in the U.S. in 2006, combined with cervical cancer screening, “can eliminate cervical cancer,” says Dr. Cardinale Smith, chief medical officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Other notable areas of progress include improved screening for breast cancer and lung cancer, Smith says, and decreased rates of smoking. Smoking rates in the U.S. fell from about 42 percent in 1965 to about 11 percent in 2021.

 

Cancers that tend to be more fatal, such as myeloma (a blood cancer), liver cancer and lung cancer, saw the largest survival gains, the American Cancer Society report found. For example, the five-year survival rate for lung cancer, which is the deadliest cancer in the U.S., increased from 15 percent in the mid-90s to 28 percent by 2021; for liver cancer, the survival rate rose from 7 percent in the mid-90s to 22 percent.

 

Presuming the day is not overtaken by breaking news, tomorrow’s edition will list five more positive trends and examples of America solving big, thorny problems with ingenuity, innovation, good policies, good decision-making, and strong leadership. See, this newsletter isn’t always gloomy.

Good Luck Making Jared Moskowitz into a Household Name, Progressives

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

 

“Translation: a giant f*** you from Democratic leadership to Democratic voters.” So wrote Ben “Hamas” Rhodes in response to Representative Jared Moskowitz’s cheerful announcement of his latest congressional committee assignment.

 

Rhodes is in a tizzy because Moskowitz (D., Fla.) will serve as the ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). In that relatively obscure role, Moskowitz promised to “strengthen America’s relationships with Israel and our Gulf allies,” which, as his party’s point man on MENA-related issues, is more or less his job description.

 

To the Israel obsessives on the far left, however, Moskowitz’s language and Democratic leadership’s failure to punish him for it are betrayals.

 

“Critics argued that placing one of Congress’ most outspoken supporters of Israel in a key Middle East policy position shows that Democratic leadership remains badly out of step with its own voters,” the progressive venue Common Dreams observed. Moskowitz is accused of failing to mouth the “genocide” shibboleth, conflating “criticisms of Israeli crimes with hatred of Jews,” and of voting to support an Israeli aid package within a month of the October 7 massacre.

 

The cad.

 

Their paranoia notwithstanding, the far left’s anti-Israel monomaniacs can’t be accused of imagining that the Democratic Party is trying to sideline them. Handing Moskowitz this assignment means he will chair the subcommittee if Democrats retake the House, limiting the left’s ability to drive a wedge between Israel and the United States. The maneuver is of a piece with the party’s rejiggering of the presidential primary calendar that Joe Biden all but explicitly confessed was designed to reduce the influence of the unrepresentative affluent, white progressives in states like Iowa and New Hampshire.

 

Then as now, Democratic institutionalists are fighting back against the socialist invasion via committee, but a weak fight is better than no fight at all.

 

But will Rhodes have the last laugh? Is he right that the Democratic rank and file share his pathologies and will lash out at the party over their failure to heed the demands of their infallible base voters? It’s no secret that Democratic voters, younger ones especially, have taken a hard turn against Israel. But is the issue salient enough that those voters will bother to learn what the MENA subcommittee is, much less who serves as its ranking member? Probably not.

 

Last October, the Institute for Middle East Understanding — a group that maintains that Kamala Harris’s campaign was doomed by virtue of the Biden-Harris administration’s “support for Israel” — took the Democratic Party’s temperature when it came to Israel. The polling it sponsored found that, while just over one-third of self-described Democrats said Israel would factor into their 2026 vote, just 16 percent said Israel was one of their top three issues. And for a handful of those Israel-focused Democrats, the Jewish state is top of mind because they want to increase U.S. support for it.

 

And that poll was in the field while Israel was concluding the last of its high-tempo operations on the ground in Gaza. Ten months after a cease-fire was announced, it’s unlikely that Israel occupies as much real estate in the minds of Democratic voters as it once did.

 

Rhodes’s assertion should not be dismissed out of hand. Any conservative Republican with a long enough memory should be able to recall moments when the machinations of congressional leadership that seemed banal at the time came to be regarded as grave sins against the collective will. Maybe someday, Moskowitz’s accession will come to be regarded in that light.

 

For now, though, this is a very inside-baseball story. The Democrats rending garments over it aren’t championing an ongoing revolt. Rather, they’re hoping to catalyze one.