Horseshoe Politics and the ‘Hidden Hand’

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, June 26, 2026

 

“People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about,” Thomas Frank wrote in What’s the Matter with Kansas?

 

Rarely has an idea been simultaneously so right and so wrong.

 

Progressives loved this thesis when Frank put it forward, because what Frank meant by it was that Republican voters were idiots who didn’t understand or vote on economic issues the way Frank thought they should. According to him, American politics was one long exercise in bait-and-switch. Voters are fed a steady diet of culture war issues, but get sops to fat cats. As Frank writes, “The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. ... Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation.”

 

Now, in the Trump era, my hostility to this thesis has softened somewhat. It’s hard to read this passage, 21 years after publication, and not see the glint of a point shining amid the bile “... the people at the top know what they have to do to stay there, and in a pinch they can easily overlook the sweaty piety of the new Republican masses, the social conservatives who raise their voices in praise of Jesus but cast their votes for Caesar.”

 

After all, we have a president who turned the GOP into a pro-choice party and periodically ends his tweets “Praise be to Allah!” He won saying that “she’s for they/them” while Trump is for you, and then proceeded to put his name on everything he could and dedicate the government to punishing his enemies and building monuments to himself.

 

But I still disagree with Frank because his understanding of “interests” was cartoonishly tendentious and arrogant. The question-begging was off the charts. He took for granted that he understood the interests of voters better than they did, he defined “interests” as narrowly economic, and he assumed that his preferred policies were uncontestably correct and effective.

 

Take his scorn for the pro-life argument. Who is to say that some pro-life voters didn’t actually believe what they professed to believe? Why is that not a valid reason to vote for a candidate? Surely, if we still had slavery in America, he wouldn’t gainsay someone who voted for an abolitionist, even though that abolitionist candidate opposed universal healthcare or a hike in the minimum wage. In a democracy, people decide what their interests are. Defining interests as support for a welfare state that more “generously” transfers wealth to the voter is fine. But saying that’s the only definition of legitimate interest is b.s.

 

But if you take that part out of it, I have to say I have a newfound respect for Frank’s claim. Voters do get their interests wrong. A lot.

 

I can make this point about Trump voters all day long. The Hispanic voters who believed he was just going to deport rapists and murderers, the farmers who thought he would be good for agriculture, the exporters and manufacturers screwed by tariffs, the hawks and the doves, and the friends and enemies of Israel have all been handed high fecal-content sandwiches at various points, and the larder is not close to bare.

 

But let’s look at the anti-Israel craze running through the Democratic Party. Basically, the prevailing demand is that Democratic politicians must say Israel is committing genocide and must commit to withdrawing support for Israel. Some resist, but the pressure is everywhere.

 

Now, I think it’s simply a lie that Israel is committing genocide. But let’s say that it is. How is making opposition to Israel the signature litmus test of the Democratic Party in the self-interest of voters? How does it lower rent in Brooklyn? How does it expand healthcare in Detroit? Answer: It simply doesn’t.

 

The answer to this from the anti-Israel crowd is much like my point about abortion voters. People get to decide what their interests are. For the left, and for much of the right, Israel is now a culture war issue. And left-wingers are just as capable of voting on culture war issues as the benighted right-wing voters Frank mocked.

 

Sure, some will hide behind a tiny fig leaf and say that aid to Israel could be spent on priorities at home. The fact that the numbers involved are a rounding error on a rounding error in terms of the money they want to spend doesn’t matter to them. You could probably fund Medicare for All for 15 minutes with all of the aid to Israel over the last decade combined. Their fig leaf covers their animosity like a postage stamp on Godzilla’s knee—it doesn’t conceal the true scope of the monstrosity at all.

 

But, as J.D. Vance might say, let’s forget about Israel.

 

I spend too much time thinking about horseshoe theory, or at least many readers tell me as much. I’m not the first to note that antisemitism is often the tip of the spear of horseshoe theory. I think that’s true. But why?

 

One easy answer that certainly explains a lot of it is simply bigotry. When a British visitor to the White House wanted advice on how to get in good with Woodrow Wilson, “Colonel” Edward House advised his friend on how to get a sympathetic hearing: “Never begin by arguing. Discover a common hate, exploit it, get the President warmed up and then start on your business.” I can think of several presidents this would work with.

 

Shared hatreds bring people together. Peter Viereck called this phenomenon “trans-tolerance.” When anti-Communism was a unifying cause, anti-Communists would forgive almost any other factor to broaden their coalition.

 

But I think this is only a partial explanation. Antisemitism boils down to a conspiracy theory. And pretty much all conspiracy theories work from the assumption that hidden forces and interests are manipulating events for their benefit. Most forms of Marxism work on this kind of assumption. But so do most forms of populism. The same tendency that ascribed lightning and volcanic eruptions to angry or mischievous gods fuels the assumption that our material circumstances were intended by the Powers That Be.

 

Since long before the name “capitalism” was affixed to notions of the free market, this has been the heart and soul of complaints about capitalism. I refer you to a famous observation by Balzac, if you can forgive the potty mouth: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.” This summarizes the thinking of centuries of anti-capitalist thought. It’s based on some variation of the assumption that there is a finite amount of wealth in society and therefore when one person gets richer, someone else gets poorer. For those committed to this idea, the protestations and denials of the capitalists are lies in service to their conspiracy against the public good.

 

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that all defenses of capitalism are to one extent or another based on refuting this mythology. Adam Ferguson, the “father of sociology” who inspired Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, observed:

 

Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.

 

Ferguson’s “establishments” became known as institutions, which in economics are simply rules. From this insight, Adam Smith developed the idea of the “invisible hand” and Hayek the “spontaneous order.”

 

The problem is that we are wired to believe that social arrangements are intentionally designed. As Michael Polanyi observed, “Wherever we see a well ordered arrangement … we instinctively assume that someone has intentionally placed them in that way.” This tendency leads to what Karl Popper called the “conspiracy theory of society.” This is “the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon.”

 

In short, it’s a cui bono theory. If Group X benefits from something, Group X must have intended it.

 

And we, as a species, like cui bono theories. Robert Nozick called them “hidden hand” theories, and they’re the opposite of “invisible hand” theories, because the whole point of Smith’s invisible hand is that there is no hand; beneficial cooperation operates “as if” guided by an invisible hand.

 

This sort of thinking explains a lot of the horseshoe. The antisemites of the left and right share the same conspiracy theory about how the economy—or Congress—works. But it’s not just the antisemites. Identitarians of the left and right believe that society is a zero-sum competition over scarce political resources. They disagree on which groups should win the competition, but they share the same worldview about how “the system” works—or should work. Donald Trump has declared that oil companies are “price gouging” because he thinks gas prices should be lower. It’s the exact same logic as Elizabeth Warren’s: look at inconvenient facts and assume sinister intentions.

 

This is the gateway drug to big government and what the Catholic Church calls “statolatry”—idolatrous worship of the state. If all the private institutions and private interests are greedy and selfish, then only the state—which looks after the interests of all the people—can be trusted to advance the people’s interests. Take the profit motive out of industry, and the “exploitation” vanishes, according to this fairy tale (tell North Koreans there is no exploitation in their factories and mines). If you think everything in our society is intended by someone, best to give power to the state so it can act in everyone’s interests.

 

We should get back to the problem of voters getting their interests wrong. Their error is not necessarily that they have the wrong interests. Most people vote on the economy in one way or another, and that’s entirely defensible. It’s wholly legitimate to want lower rents or more affordable groceries. So it’s not so much that they get their interests wrong, it’s that they’re wrong about how their interests are best advanced.

 

Rent control doesn’t work. Price controls don’t work. But if you think the economy is a static pie and that someone’s fortune is the intentional cause of your misfortune, then “make the billionaires pay for it!” politics not only makes sense but is morally compelling. Bill de Blasio, the ridiculous and failed former mayor of New York City, campaigned for mayor, and later president, on the slogan, “There’s plenty of money in this world. There’s plenty of money in this country. It’s just in the wrong hands!”

 

It would take me a thousand “news”letters to catalog all of the misery and bloodshed that can be laid at the feet of this idea.

 

Never mind that this idea would be morally wrong even if it were true. But it’s a lie. The “robber barons” of the 19^th century were accused of every manner of evil based on this Balzacian thinking. Now, not every so-called robber baron was an angel, but the truth is that the robber barons weren’t, as a class, robbers—they were givers. Cotton magnate, businessman, and public intellectual Edward Atkinson explained it well. “Through competition among capitalists,” he wrote in Addresses Upon the Labor Question, “capital itself is every year more effective in production, and tends ever to increasing abundance. Under its working the commodities that have been the luxuries of one generation become the comforts of the next and the necessities of the third. ... The plane of what constitutes a comfortable subsistence is constantly rising, and as the years go by greater and greater numbers attain this plane.”

 

Talking to some workers in 1886, Atkinson tried to explain how everyone gained from a free market. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Atkinson observed, made a profit of 14 cents from every barrel of flour shipped over his railroads. His efficiency in transportation lowered the price of flour for consumers. Atkinson asked, “Did Vanderbilt keep any of you down?”

 

If you’re the kind of voter who answers, “Yes,” it’s not that you have your interests wrong, you’re just wrong about how your interests are best served.

Silent Treatment

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, June 26, 2026

 

The vice president shared this thought yesterday with an audience at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, drawing applause at the end.

 

If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. Like, the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy. And by the way, if you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.

 

Even for J.D. Vance, that’s pretty J.D. Vance. Let’s give the devil his due, though: He’s right.

 

Not about the “deep state” supposedly persecuting poor Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. That’s dumb MAGA chum that a man who aspires to lead his party in 2028 is obliged to dump into the political waters. But he’s correct that Watergate wouldn’t have ended the Nixon presidency had it happened today and probably correct that it wouldn’t have made waves in the press for long.

 

The fact that Vance is happy about that makes what he said an almost pristine expression of postliberal psychopathy, capturing in two sentences everything that’s disgusting about him and his movement. Self-serving revisionist history. Gleeful vice-signaling. Flaunting the corruption of the White House in which he serves. Celebrating the brainless partisan tribalism of degenerate Republican voters.

 

We could do Watergate and no one would blink is just the sort of boast you’d expect from someone bent on undermining the moral assumptions on which Western liberalism is built. It’s elegant shorthand for Trumpism’s core conviction, that the less accountability there is in politics—for the right, not for the left—the better.

 

A timely illustration of that philosophy came a few days ago when Pete Hegseth successfully forced one of America’s most admired soldiers into early retirement.

 

If you don’t know who Gen. Chris Donahue is, take a moment to acquaint yourself. The four stars on his chest and the position he momentarily holds as the top Army commander in Europe barely tell the tale. He led Delta Force in battle against ISIS. As commander of the 82^nd Airborne, he was famously the last man out of Afghanistan when U.S. troops withdrew in 2021. In his current role he’s been “leading the service’s effort to take lessons from Ukraine and apply them to future conflict,” per The Atlantic.

 

Not a man the military would lightly part with, one might think. He must have done something awfully bad for our defense secretary, who famously loves warfightin’ warriors, to send him packing.

 

Nope. No one’s sure why Hegseth wanted Donahue out—and that seems to be how the secretary likes it. “The less accountability there is in politics, the better” means he doesn’t owe Americans any explanation for wrecking the military that’s supposed to keep America safe.

 

Trust in Trump.

 

I wonder if Chris Donahue himself has been given the courtesy of an explanation for his de facto dismissal.

 

Maybe not. Retired Navy Adm. Nancy Lacore spent 35 years in the service before being canned by Hegseth and “has said she was given no cause for her firing,” the New York Times noted this week. We can take an educated guess in her case as to why a guy who thinks one of the big problems with the military is that it isn’t more macho might not want her around.

 

What’s confounding about Donahue’s departure is that he seems to be a Hegseth stereotype about bad-ass soldiers come to life. Why would the secretary want to get rid of him?

 

The closest thing on offer to a meritorious reason is that “Hegseth has sought to oust anyone who doesn’t fit his idea of a military leader, including those involved in the calamitous American exit from Kabul under President Biden.” But Donahue bears no blame for that. He “was called in to restore security at Kabul airport” only after the U.S. withdrawal there had turned chaotic. And it was the Marines, not his Army troops, who failed to secure the airport’s Abbey Gate, where a suicide bomber killed 13 American service members.

 

Besides: Given how the last four months have gone, if failure in war is grounds for dismissal from the military, then Pete Hegseth should be the first person out the door.

 

“Donahue would be at least the sixth three- or four-star Army general to depart unexpectedly, out of the roughly 60 generals in the service who hold those ranks,” according to The Atlantic. That includes former Army Chief of Staff Randy George, another esteemed commander who was let go in the thick of conflict with Iran for similarly unexplained reasons. George’s firing offense appears to have been his support for four officers, two of them black and the other two women, whom Hegseth had declined to promote.

 

But whether that’s the real cause is anyone’s guess. The secretary hasn’t explained.

 

On Thursday, another legendary military officer, retired Adm. William McRaven, a former special ops commander, chimed in to observe how deeply weird it is that the service branches are being purged of their most talented leaders without a word of justification from the man in charge of the Pentagon to the public he allegedly serves.

 

“I can tell you from experience that Generals C.Q. Brown, Randy George, Jim Mingus, J.P. McGee, Dave Hodne, Jim Slife, and Joe Berger and Admirals Lisa Franchetti and Jamie Sands were war fighters through and through,” McRaven wrote, naming a few of the brass inexplicably purged by Hegseth. “When crucial decisions regarding the professionalism, effectiveness, or morale of the military are made, the people and their duly elected representatives have a right to know why these decisions were made.”

 

Under liberalism, sure. But not under postliberalism.

 

To postliberals, electing a figure like Trump implicitly amounts to a sort of waiver by voters of their right to accountability from their government. You don’t hand power to a nationalist strongman expecting that he’ll dutifully explain his thinking on policy periodically like some egghead technocrat. You do it because you don’t expect that. You trust him. Your vote is a vote of confidence in him and his instincts.

 

Under postliberalism, the people’s role in government ends on election night. (Unless the Democrats win, of course, in which case rigorous oversight going forward is a must.) The administration couldn’t be any plainer about that. “TRUST IN TRUMP,” the official White House Twitter account declared a few weeks ago amid spiking anxiety over gas prices, going on to quote the president: "Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end - It always does!"

 

That’s your answer as to why Chris Donahue was fired: Trust Trump and Hegseth. It’s what Americans supposedly agreed to do in 2024, so that’s all the explanation to which they’re entitled.

 

The last 16 months are littered with examples of that ethos at work. DOGE ran roughshod over federal agencies with little explanation to Congress or voters about what it was cutting and why. Dozens of outrageous federal pardons were issued without elaboration because the obvious reason for them was indefensible. The “Liberation Day” trade war arrived without warning of how ambitious and disruptive it would be, and later a hot war was launched on Iran with the same problem.

 

Even the Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, an obsession of the president’s own base, would still be hidden if not for a revolt in Congress that forced their publication. MAGA fans who turned out in 2024 may have thought they were voting for transparency on Epstein by voting for the president, but that’s not how postliberalism works. To Trump, they were voting to signal their absolute trust in him.

 

If he thought they shouldn’t see the Epstein material, that should have been good enough. No further explanation required.

 

The virtue of arbitrariness.

 

If I had to guess the actual reason that Pete Hegseth wanted Chris Donahue out, I’d bet on some combination of fragility about being out of his depth as defense secretary and the weird grudge he seems to hold against the Army, a recurring target of his purges.

 

The nature of that grudge is unclear, but Hegseth is a former Army man himself and claimed in one of his books that he quit the service in a rage after it identified him as a potential “insider threat” due to one of his sketchier tattoos. He’s also allegedly paranoid about being replaced as defense secretary by Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and has moved to sideline Driscoll by dumping allies of his like Randy George. Maybe Donahue was another ally.

 

Or maybe it simply bugged Hegseth to have someone in the chain of command as universally admired as Donahue is. It’s not just a matter of jealousy (although it probably is that too). An officer as distinguished as Donahue having to answer to a cosplaying yutz who used to host Fox & Friends Weekend only made Hegseth’s yutziness more glaring by contrast to the brass, I’m sure.

 

A more mediocre military will make the secretary’s own mediocrity less conspicuous.

 

Wittingly or not, by refusing to explain Donahue’s dismissal, Hegseth is advancing postliberalism in a few ways. For one thing, he’s conditioning the public—and its representatives—not to expect accountability from their leaders, even in matters as grave as who’s in charge of the military on which Western civilization’s survival depends.

 

As with every other form of recurring Trumpist corruption, outrage at the Pentagon purges has become increasingly hard to sustain due to the sheer enervating familiarity of it. Pay-for-play pardons, rampant White House graft, firing generals like Donahue, all of it without explanation: That’s just how things work now. A country that’s been forced to adapt to authoritarianism expects nothing more from its leadership.

 

That’s why Watergate would be a 12-hour news story in 2026 and why Vance is darned excited about it.

 

McRaven identified another postliberal achievement in his essay about the Pentagon purges:

 

What is particularly concerning about these firings is the effect the dismissals will have on the officer ranks. Throughout my time as a senior officer, I never hesitated to provide my best military advice to the secretary or the president even when that advice ran contrary to their stated position. Never once did I fear that by providing my advice I would be fired or asked to retire early. Not only was it my obligation to be forthcoming, but it was also the expectation of those leaders that I would be brutally candid. Hopefully, that level of honest engagement kept the secretary and the president from making poor military decisions. However, these recent firings raise a real risk that senior officers will be overly cautious about providing their best advice and, therefore, that the chance for military miscalculation will grow dramatically.

 

On the one hand, we needn’t worry too much about the quality of the advice military officers are giving the president. If he wants to do something, he’s going to ignore them regardless.

 

But insofar as firing people like Donahue signals to the rest of the military that no soldier is indispensable if he displeases Hegseth, it surely will influence the willingness of military advisers to say things to Hegseth that displease him. The secretary himself is a notorious yes-man, of course. He “strives to tell the president exactly what he wants to hear,” as one source put it to The Atlantic in April, with others pointing to Hegseth’s insufferable press briefings during the war about all the stuff being blown up as obviously designed to pander to his boss.

 

To postliberals, the great virtue of not telling anyone why Donahue was fired lies in its arbitrariness. If a dissenter in the ranks knows which lines he can and can’t cross, he’ll avoid the latter but might test the former. If he doesn’t know where the lines are, though, he’ll err on the side of biting his tongue in all situations lest he inadvertently step over one. In a sycophantic authoritarian personality cult, in which dissent is seen as disloyal even when it involves telling hard truths, that sort of arbitrariness is essential to enforcing conformity.

 

Not coincidentally, as the last four months have demonstrated in Iran and the last four years have demonstrated in Ukraine, authoritarian personality cults tend not to be very successful at war.

 

Demoralization.

 

There’s one more benefit to postliberalism in Hegseth’s arrogant silence about his purges. It’s demoralizing to the military.

 

That seems counterintuitive. Why would any administration, particularly one as theatrically militaristic as Trump’s, want to hurt morale? To which I would answer: for the same reason postliberals seek to demoralize any institution. The more demoralized it is, the easier it is to co-opt.

 

The last 16 months can be understood as one long exercise in demoralization for the Pentagon. Trump’s second term began with a bombing campaign against the Houthis, which was cut short after it became too costly and is remembered now mainly for the editor of The Atlantic being accidentally added to the Cabinet group chat. The president then began deploying the National Guard to left-wing cities like Los Angeles and Washington, pitting the troops against public opinion and dragging Guardsmen away from home for long stretches. (At last check the force in D.C. was standing watch over the slime in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.)

 

Soon the White House started targeting boats in the Caribbean with airstrikes over alleged drug trafficking, the very first instance of which resulted in a probable war crime. Service members participating in the operation began consulting with attorneys due to the questionable lawfulness of what they were doing. Hegseth, meanwhile, went out of his way to make clear that atrocities would no longer be punished by a military that prioritized toughness and “lethality.”

 

The administration did score some impressive successes, destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities last year and capturing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro with no loss of American life. But both victories were largely spoiled.

 

Not much has changed for Venezuelans since their leaders began answering to Trump. The Maduro operation was little more than a play to coerce Caracas into forking over some of its oil, turning the U.S. military into muscle in a shakedown. And last year’s successful strikes on Iran were superseded by a strategic debacle this spring that depleted American munitions, damaged American bases, and led to a capitulation over the Strait of Hormuz so humiliating that the president has lately resorted to defending the regime’s right to have ballistic missiles.

 

Through it all, the secretary of defense has behaved like a clown, interrupting his frequent made-for-Instagram workouts to lecture generals about haircuts and physical fitness, take joyrides in military aircraft with Kid Rock, wage culture war on right-wing bugaboos like vaccinations with predictable results—and of course rid the Pentagon of figures like George, Donahue, and others whose authority the rank-and-file might respect more than his own.

 

Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon is like Todd Blanche’s Justice Department, a formerly disciplined and (somewhat) ethical institution from which those who are discomfited by the ethos of postliberalism will be forced out, incentivized to quit, or discouraged from joining in the first place. As the quality of personnel degrades, so will the quality of the institution—but whoever’s left to staff it will accept, whether grudgingly or enthusiastically, that they’re now working for a government that thinks Watergate was either fine or ackshually good.

 

Like any virus, postliberalism will infect everything it touches if it isn’t stopped. In the long run, there’s no such thing as a “partial” kakistocracy.

A Reading From the Book of J.D. Vance

By Emmett Rensin

Thursday, June 25, 2026

 

Histories have been written about the great political conversions: Constantine to Orthodoxy for victory in battle; Henry VIII to Anglicanism for a divorce; Henry IV, of France, to Catholicism in order to ascend the throne in Paris. But J.D. Vance may be the only political leader in the history of the known world to convert to Catholicism in order to become Protestant.

 

J.D. Vance is running for president. Communion—notionally a memoir of his journey from a vaguely Pentecostal nondenominational youth, through the Randian atheism of his 20s, and ultimately into the present embrace of the Catholic Church—is preparation. Despite being a relatively simple book, it is susceptible to three distinct readings, none of them particularly Catholic. The first is that Communion is a book animated, despite its author’s conversion, by a particular kind of historical, political Protestantism, the faith of petty kings and princes always eager to bend faith in service of the crown. The second is that it is a book about Christianity as a secular force, a thin gruel of moralizing talk disconnected in all but name from the demands of real faith. The third, and perhaps most likely, is that it is what it plainly is: a book about how J.D. Vance would like to be the president of the United States.

 

The first reading comes, perhaps unavoidably, from J.D. Vance’s most literal Protestant tendencies: Despite being, as he puts it, “the most senior Catholic in the United States government,” Vance has spent a great deal of time in office feuding with the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The month he took office, he appeared on Fox News and insisted that ordo amoris—an old Augustinian concept meaning, literally, the order of love—comported with administration policy because it commanded believers to “love your family and then your neighbor and then your community and then your fellow citizens and your own country and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world” before being rebuked by Pope Francis. The next month, Vance accused the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops of being motivated by “the bottom line” before being rebuked by a sitting cardinal. When Leo XIV assumed the papacy last year and condemned the U.S. invasion of Iran, it was Vance’s turn to do the rebuking, advising the Vicar of Christ to “be careful” when opining “on matters of theology.” But that was all “exaggerated” by the media “for clicks and ratings,” Vance writes in Communion. He would like to be known as a Catholic, despite the existence of a rich religious tradition already available to those who profess Jesus Christ as their savior but who believe that they possess a more direct and intimate understanding of God’s will than the Romans and their priests.

 

Still: It is difficult to read Communion without detecting, if not a crypto-evangelical still lurking in J.D. Vance’s heart, then a kind of political Protestantism. Separate from the arguments of theologians, the appeal of the Protestant churches to the various kings and German princes who adopted it throughout the 16^th and 17^th centuries was in its flexibility, in its usefulness to earthly power. It became, in the hands of statesmen, a parochial Christianity, its protest not so much against the theology of the Catholic Church but against its catholicism, its universality. Rome imposed obligations toward the whole communion of the faithful. This or that denomination of Protestant religion imposed only those obligations it could assert within its small domain: a duchy, an island kingdom, the Ohio backwoods town where some charismatic pastor built his pulpit. Should the current denomination fail to meet the needs of a new leader, it could be reformed or replaced.

 

It is in this sense of Protestantism—the cynical sense, the political sense, the parochial sense—that Communion may be read as a Protestant text, and J.D. Vance as a Protestant leader. There is no conflict between his professed belief in what was once called the religion of women and slaves and the needs of his own electoral ambitions that cannot be squared in favor of the latter. The “job of a Christian statesman,” in Vance’s telling, is to “preserve … social cohesion.” A “world of limited resources” means that “those duties necessarily come up against other responsibilities.” These are “thorny issues,” Vance writes. How convenient, then, that he is always ultimately allowed to do precisely what his nation demands, what his party expects. What a relief to discover there is little friction at all in presiding over the Trump administration’s various terrors and calling it the proper exercise of his Christian faith.

 

Vance tells us in Communion that what he misses most about the family and religion of his youth is the way they “cared far less about credentials … than about people and kin.” This, he writes, is “far more Christian than anything I’ve encountered in the halls of power.” Elites, exchanging God for “technocracy,” have “traded away the right of citizens to value their own labor in favor of mass migration.” The immigrants are not among the parish in J.D. Vance’s faith. His religion, whatever he may call it, or whatever we may call it, is found in the boundary, in the limits of the enclave of the faithful.

 

There is of course no sin in a love of family, of community, of kin. But a universal church imposes universal obligations, a charity extending from the parish to cover the whole world. It is only the German princeling or the ambitious vice president who finds true Christianity in the fact that “any application of moral principles in the real world requires a constant evaluation of trade-offs,” who believes that such evaluations are “undoubtedly” what “the Christian faith demands of us.” These trade-offs are not spiritual. They are political. The trade-offs demanded by the faith of Vance’s Communion are matters of expediency, of what is necessary and useful. In his telling, the “Christian faith” demands that J.D. Vance cheer for an invasion in Venezuela and perform apologetics for the deal with Iran. The “Christian faith” demands he vote to subsidize rum importers and gambling companies while cutting SNAP. The “Christian faith” demands he call the murder of an unarmed woman by federal agents a “tragedy of her own making.” It never demands dissent. Vance performs his evaluations, makes his trade-offs, and discovers, time and again, that for all the “thorniness” and “complexity,” the demands of God are perfectly compatible with an attitude indistinguishable from that of the Greek pagan: bound by sacred duty to his polis against a world teeming with barbarians.

 

Communion is a book about some kind of Christian faith; the Protestantism not of Martin Luther but of Henry VIII. It is the kind that professes Jesus Christ as the savior of the world but discovers, after great calculation, that His demands in no way limit what you must do to lead a party that will murder anybody, as long as it puts America First. This is not materially distinct from discovering, after great theological reflection, that the Gospel in fact makes the king the head of the church in his own country, and that means you’re free to chuck that Spanish nag they made you marry and try for a son with Anne Boleyn.

 

***

 

The second possible reading of Communion arises from the strange fact that for a book purportedly about Vance’s return to adult faith, there is very little faith to be found in it. Vance writes of religion more than he writes of faith. Religion, unlike faith, is not a set of beliefs. It is only one sociological force among many, an ideological and cultural matter that J.D. finds attractive. It is possible to read Communion not as the story of a man who has found a form of Christianity that just happens, at all times, to comport with the demands of earthly expediency, but the story of a man who believes that the purpose of faith is to serve earthly, social ends.

 

J.D Vance tells us that his deliberate return to Christianity began with the birth of his first son. He needed, he said, a way to talk about virtue, and “the most practical thing I could do to ensure that he was taught the language of virtue and sin was to raise him in the faith.” He begins to attend church because his wife believes it’s “good for him.” His specific interest in Catholicism is born, by his own admission, of originally “intellectual” interests (some of which are actually aesthetic): He likes Thomas Aquinas, he likes Saint Augustine; he liked 19^th-century Catholic prayers that “sound medieval.” He is attracted to the “historical legitimacy” of the church, to its durability and tradition; he is “drawn to the hierarchy and sense of authority,” even if, like all reactionaries, he loves obedience only until it is time to be obedient.

 

His final decision to convert occurs during a family trip to France, when Vance comes upon a beautiful cathedral, largely abandoned by a secularizing Europe, and feels a “sense of possession” over the legacy of “Christian Western Civilization” that it represents. When he was an atheist, “getting drunk and acting like a jerk” had filled a void in his heart. Now the church could take its place: just another of many possible occupants of a functional hole. The problems of the nation are similarly practical: the “dismal science” of economics “stepped into the vacuum” left by “the decline of Christianity” as a “shared moral language” in the West; professional striving and ambition has “supplanted religion as the core source of meaning.” In Munich, Vance marvels at the death of the postwar liberal order, an order he says was once presided over by men beholden to “Western Christian Civilization and the values particular to it”; now they made empty paeans to “liberalism” and “democracy.” They “had taken God out of their postwar oaths and alliances, and they wondered why so much else had been lost as well.”

 

Vance may be correct that the “values” and “moral language” of the West once held the world together, that without it, civilization may begin “falling into disrepair,” but this has little to do with the question of whether or not you believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and forgave the world its sins. Even when he discusses the sacrament of confession—the only particular sacrament about which Communion has anything to say—he understands it in practical terms: He found therapy too permissive, and the culture of political correctness too unforgiving. Confession was a “third way,” like therapy, “but with less whining and more guilt.” Over and over, Vance returns to Matthew 7:20, “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” Christianity, he writes, “bore the best fruit.” Its “ideas and practices … generated the most good, the most truth, and the most beauty of anything I’d encountered.” In Communion, Christianity—the Catholicism in particular barely matters—is just good fruit.

 

If you are secular, you may imagine that nothing insults the faithful like the spitting atheism of a Christopher Hitchens or a Sam Harris. But no atheism, no matter how disdainful, can condescend like the man who says that he does not believe in God, but that it would be good for the rest of us to be persuaded. I believe J.D. Vance when he says that he is not this man, but there is little in Communion to suggest that J.D. Vance has ever felt God acting in the world, that he has ever felt Him doing anything that the mere idea of God cannot accomplish, true or false.

 

***

 

The final and most cynical reading of Communion is simple and it arises from a simple fact: Despite being marketed as a conversion narrative, only about a third of the slim, 280-odd-page text is dedicated, even in the broadest sense, to Vance’s actual conversion. He is still an atheist on page 100; he is baptized on page 173, with 100 pages left to go. Communion otherwise consists of what you might find in any light and sentimental memoir about community and family, fused with a soft-launch campaign platform: the wonderful wife, the wonderful kids, the promise of America, the values that guide this particular man as he contemplates foreign policy, trade policy, and the culture war issues of the day.

 

Vance replays the hits of Hillbilly Elegy: endless sentimental glazing about dear departed “Mamaw,” who “loved to say the f-word,” although Vance will only ever render it as “effin” (this is a family book). He idealizes Usha, who is smarter and more ambitious than anybody he has ever known, but who “found beauty everywhere, from the birds in the trees to the shapes of leaves to the way the light fell on Yale’s Gothic halls at dusk” and who otherwise has zero interiority and seems to exist exclusively as a projection board for J.D.’s own neuroses. We hear about J.D.’s friendship with Peter Thiel, and—in one of the very last chapters—how Charlie Kirk had become “one of his best friends.” We are treated to more extended quotations from New York Times opinion columns and Atlantic essays than from Saint Augustine or Holy Scripture. We get the ordinary denunciation of “elites,” by which he means woke college professors and media members, not the salt of the Earth plutocrats who finance the Ohio GOP nor his sole example of a good immigrant, Elon Musk. Even the apologetics here are flimsy: sophomoric musings about how, like, you know, we take a lot on faith, really, such as the boiling point of water (this is a real example), and how the “complex” knowledge of a sacramental faith may take time and discernment to attain, which is also, he says, how you might discover that raising the minimum wage is actually bad.

 

The most charitable thing that I can say of Communion is that it is simply boring. It is an obligatory document in anticipation of a presidential run. If there is anything to discern here, it is that Vance is acutely aware that he must thread the needle between a largely Protestant GOP primary base and a 2028 general electorate he believes will be looking for a break from Trumpism. When he writes, near the end of the book, that “to believe in God and His only begotten son is to have hope,” and immediately follows this by waxing on about the hope he derives from the “dynamic” future of American “innovation,” it is difficult not to imagine that one has awoken from a long dream to discover that it is still the year 2004, and that while you slept, George W. Bush was warming over his stump speech on a nearby television screen.

 

In the first third of Communion, Vance returns over and over to the hollowness of careerism, ambition, and striving for striving’s sake. He renounces his empty pursuit of Yale Law School, of judicial clerkships, of an entire career in the law sought only because it was prestigious, because it felt like “winning” a competition he barely understood. One must remind oneself constantly that this is a book written by a man who “found” his purpose in his family, put his faith in the Roman Catholic Church, gave up all this empty “elite” striving, and then immediately ran for Senate. Then ran for vice president. Then published a book where the true subject is how J.D. Vance would like to be the president of the United States at the earliest possible convenience.

 

But it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a president to enter the kingdom of heaven. Vance may want to keep the faith. He may want to fight the soulless elites, the rich, the empty technocratic men of industry and economics. But he must please the base. He must not say or do or promise anything that might seriously displease the men who will finance his presidential campaign. He must not lose the favor of the most selfish venal idiot to ever hold high office in the United States—a man whose sole contemplation of God came when he could indulge the narcissistic fantasy that he was saved from an assassin’s bullet by divine intervention—and claim, in print, that “in the Trump administration … we care about wages and how many people are dying of drug overdoses,” and that’s why they need to assassinate people on rafts in international waters. Instead, he must find, over and over, how useful the “values” of “Christianity” turn out to be, particularly when he needs a sensible argument against handouts. He must discover, over and over, how the “tough trade-offs” demanded by the “Christian faith” always fall within the acceptable politics of the very avaricious “elites” that J.D. Vance claims he turned his back on just before he ascended up their ranks in record time.

 

The most moving passages of Communion—the ones where one feels that Vance is not being utterly cynical—concern the difficulty of Christian life. The Gospel, he writes, is an “inconvenient message.” It “demands … so much, in fact, that it tells us up front that every single living person will fail in some profound way.” He is right. For every believer, the demands of Jesus Christ are impossible. The Lord our God does not command us to love our families and then our countries and then see if there is any love left over for the rest. He does not command us, in other words, to do what we want to do anyway.

 

The God of the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church and Protestant churches commands you to give everything: to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Him. He commands you to love totally and unconditionally every person on Earth. He commands you to forgive your persecutors and your enemies, to show meekness and mercy even when you are certain that your tormentors will take advantage of your softness. He commands you to abandon every earthly thing, to attain perfection by selling everything you own and giving to the poor, to tend to the foreigner and the prisoner as if you attended to the Son of God himself. Critics of American immigration like to say that if you love immigrants so much, you should let them all move into your house. God commands you to do precisely that. God commands you to know that you owe everything to everybody with no expectation of return. He commands you to annihilate yourself, to pluck out your own eye, to burn in righteousness even to the point of death and to do all of this for no reward on this Earth or in this life. It is an inconvenient message. Everybody will fail.

 

I do not expect J.D. Vance to abandon everything and become a saintly desert hermit, nude and preaching under the hot sun outside Antioch. But the extent of his particular failure is not inevitable. It is not unavoidable, in the practice of a Catholic life, to fail to ever say or do anything that would leave you living out your days as a famous rich guy who did not get to be the president. Vance writes over and over about how he misses the simple community and Christianity and spirit of his Ohio childhood, and sure, you can’t go home again. But you do not have to go to the White House.

 

A very long time ago, a fisherman called Simon was casting his net in the Sea of Galilee, when Jesus Christ appeared upon the shore and commanded Simon to give up his life and follow Him. Simon, who was called Peter, was the first to know the truth. At Caesarea Philippi, when Jesus asked Peter who He was, the disciple replied that Jesus was “the Christ, the Son of the living God.” But even Peter could not accept Christ’s insistence that He would suffer terribly and die at the hands of the Romans. He wanted a victorious king, a messiah who conquers and rules in this world. Christ rebuked him. You are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of men, he said. And then he asked: For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

 

At the end of Communion, J.D. Vance contemplates Saint Peter as he stands in Rome: The Roman Empire had long collapsed, but the church and the Gospel “endured.” In Rome, Vance writes, “it was obvious: Caesar was dead. Christ still lived.” Saint Peter kept his soul and founded the church professed by J.D. Vance. But J.D. Vance has not yet decided, not yet shown, whether he will follow him, or if he prefers the profits that come to an ambitious man by gaining the whole world.

The Heart of Conspiracy

By Bryan A. Garner

Thursday, June 11, 2026

 

When I was about seven, I heard my father talk about one of his quirkiest colleagues: a college professor who, if his saltshaker ran empty, would blame it on a Russian conspiracy. For some people, a bad outcome is never just a bad outcome, and a coincidence is never just a coincidence. There must always be a hidden hand behind it, coordinating events that, on the surface, look random or trivial.

 

Not long ago, this instinct seemed like harmless eccentricity. Conspiracy theorists lived at the margins, alongside doomsayers and end-time prophets. Most people treated them as curiosities rather than participants in serious argument. Today, though, that boundary has eroded. Conspiracy thinking hasn’t just survived into the present — it has moved into the mainstream of  political and cultural life, shaping how large numbers of people interpret ordinary events.

 

Many explanations point to social media — an easy target. Platforms accelerate the spread of conspiratorial content. But stopping there misses something deeper. Conspiracy thinking didn’t become mainstream because people suddenly became irrational. It became mainstream because habits that once signaled intellectual seriousness — skepticism, independence, distrust of authority — have mutated into forms that are less disciplined and less self-correcting.

 

Consider skepticism in its healthier forms. A skeptic is supposed to withhold belief until evidence justifies it. But conspiracy thinking often inverts that discipline. Official explanations are treated as suspect by default, while unofficial ones are treated as credible precisely because they’re unofficial. The burden of proof is quietly upended. Instead of asking what would make a claim true, people ask what would disprove it — and the claims are structured to resist disproof.

 

A healthy mind doesn’t begin with suspicion; it arrives there. It starts with a provisional willingness to accept ordinary explanations, then shifts toward doubt only when specific features of the evidence justify it — persistent anomalies, independent corroboration of misconduct, patterns that resist simpler accounts. Suspicion is an earned response, not a default posture, and it remains tethered to standards that allow it to be revised or abandoned when contrary evidence appears. Conspiracy thinking breaks from this discipline by treating suspicion of traditional sources as the starting point and then insulating that mindset from the kinds of evidence that would ordinarily dispel it.

 

What makes this especially strange is that conspiracy thinking often presents itself as the most skeptical stance available. Yet it routinely demands greater leaps of faith than the explanations it rejects. It’s easier to believe that institutions sometimes make mistakes than that vast networks of journalists, scientists, judges, and officials coordinate deception over long periods without leaks or contradictions. The posture of skepticism masks a corresponding credulity.

 

Oddly enough, the conspiracy theorists are occasionally right. Governments sometimes conceal information, corporations sometimes coordinate misconduct, intelligence agencies sometimes undertake secret operations, and powerful people sometimes spread lies. History supplies plenty of examples. But those episodes don’t vindicate conspiracy thinking as a method. The fact that some suspicions are vindicated doesn’t mean suspicion is self-justifying. Real conspiracies are usually uncovered through disciplined investigation, corroborated evidence, and a willingness to abandon weak hypotheses — not through a habit of treating every anomaly as proof of hidden design.

 

The same pattern appears in another intellectual virtue that conspiracy thinking has appropriated and distorted: independent thinking. “Think for yourself” was once a warning against blind deference to authority. In its distorted modern form, it often becomes a license to reject any conclusion reached by established institutions. The goal is no longer careful evaluation of evidence but reflexive contrarianism. Agreement with mainstream sources is treated as a cognitive failure rather than a possible outcome of shared standards of inquiry.

 

“Do your own research” captures this shift neatly. In principle, this phrase suggests intellectual responsibility. In practice, this type of “research” means assembling selected materials that confirm an already chosen conclusion — often through superficial or tendentious searches. The research comes after the belief, not before it. What looks like inquiry is often just curation of agreement, with dissenting evidence filtered out as untrustworthy by definition.

 

The appeal of conspiracy thinking, however, isn’t primarily methodological. It’s psychological. Large, disruptive events create pressure for large-scale explanations that match their emotional weight. Randomness feels insufficient when the consequences are enormous. A pandemic, a war, or a financial collapse seems to demand a cause commensurate with its magnitude. Conspiracy theories supply that cause by replacing contingency with design.

 

They also supply a sense of control. If events are caused by identifiable bad actors rather than blind forces or accumulated error, then at least the world is decipherable. It’s both sinister and understandable. “I don’t know what’s happening” becomes “I know what’s being done to us.” That shift is often experienced as empowerment, even when it rests on fragile assumptions.

 

Equally important is the social function. Conspiracy thinking offers belonging wrapped in the conviction that one sees what others miss. Participants aren’t merely members of a group; they’re members of an enlightened minority who see through deception. That combination — community plus superiority — is unusually stable. It satisfies both the need to belong and the desire to feel intellectually distinct from the surrounding world.

 

None of this is new. Societies have always produced conspiracy narratives: witches, secret societies, hidden cabals, and  political plots. The psychology is constant. What’s changed isn’t the impulse but the environment that now rewards it. Traditional media systems, for all their flaws, imposed friction. Editors, publishers, and broadcasters filtered fringe theories not because these gatekeepers were always right but because they operated under constraints of space, reputation, and scrutiny. That didn’t eliminate conspiratorial thinking, but it slowed its path to mass belief.

 

Today, that friction is mostly gone. Distribution is automatic, and attention has replaced judgment as the main constraint. Algorithms don’t evaluate truth; they optimize engagement. And what holds attention isn’t careful reasoning but certitude — fear, outrage, and revelation posing as insight. At the same time, audience fragmentation means people who once would have stayed isolated can now find one another instantly. Once connected, they stabilize each other’s convictions, treating agreement inside the group as proof and outside disagreement as suppression.

 

The result isn’t just faster spread of conspiratorial claims. It’s an ecosystem that systematically favors the appearance of insight over the discipline of inquiry. What looks like a marketplace of ideas is increasingly a sorting machine for the most sensational story, not the most reliable one.

 

That brings us back to the professor and his empty saltshaker. The story was funny because the explanation was wildly disproportionate to the event. No rational observer would posit a geopolitical conspiracy to account for a kitchen annoyance. Yet the underlying reflex — refusing to accept ordinary explanations when they feel insufficient — is no longer confined to obvious eccentrics. It now operates at scale, embedded in the systems through which people consume information and assign meaning.

 

Conspiracy thinking isn’t going away. It’s too deeply rooted in how human beings respond to uncertainty, scale, and loss of control. The real question isn’t whether it will persist but what conditions we might normalize around it. A society that mistakes suspicion for sophistication, and disbelief for intelligence, may feel more critical, but it’s actually becoming easier to persuade with less and less evidence.

Iran’s Tests of Trump Will Keep Coming, and They’re Going to Get Worse

By Noah Rothman

Friday, June 26, 2026

 

It was Iran’s terrorist cat’s-paws in Hezbollah who were the first to test Trump’s commitment to his supposedly war-ending memorandum of understanding with the Islamic Republic.

 

The remnants of the Iranian regime had telegraphed their understanding that the first clause of the document was designed to constrain Israel’s defensive actions in southern Lebanon. Perhaps Tehran wanted to see if Hezbollah’s aggression would convince Washington to abandon its efforts to tighten the reins on Israel. It didn’t.

 

The whole point of provocations like these in an environment in which neither war nor peace prevails is that they test and, therefore, redefine the parameters in which the enemy can act freely. The next test — and there’s always another test — will attempt to expand those parameters further.

 

And that’s precisely what happened on Thursday.

 

“Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps attacked a Singapore-flagged cargo ship Thursday in the Strait of Hormuz,” the Wall Street Journal reported, in what officials believe was a “deliberate” drone strike on commercial shipping. “The incident took place near the coast of Oman hours after the Iranian paramilitary’s navy warned ships not to use routes through the waterway that the regime hadn’t sanctioned.”

 

This represents a direct Iranian attack not just on America’s erstwhile role as guarantor of free maritime navigation rights, but the MOU itself. That document compels Iran “upon signing” to make “its best efforts” to ensure the “safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge,” albeit “for 60 days only.” It’s certainly a betrayal of the trust America placed in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — a U.S.-designated terrorist group, the representatives of which have been dispatched to “hang out” with American CENTCOM officials in Doha, according to the vice president.

 

Perhaps the American side of this equation will treat their IRGC counterparts to a gentle scolding in between air hockey matches at the SMP lounge.

 

Trump has reserved for himself the right to enforce the MOU’s terms by force, but his threats are hollow. He issues them regularly but hasn’t acted on any in a way that would convey resolve since Operation Epic Fury ended in early April.

 

When Iran’s provocations did prompt an American kinetic response, it was calibrated and proportionate. The effect of those actions was only to communicate the president’s reluctance to return to war — an impression likely confirmed by Trump’s willingness to halt those strikes mid-sortie at the request of Iran’s duplicitous diplomats.

 

Throughout the two-month cease-fire, the president demonstrated a willingness to endure humiliation after humiliation, all while bombastically warning that his patience was about to come to an end. But it never did. The Iranians are therefore unlikely to believe Trump is serious until and unless the bombs start falling again.

 

Iran wants to make this MOU as painful as possible for the president, maximizing every opportunity to cement the impression that they won and he lost. Why anyone in the president’s circles believes that the Iranians will be quiet enough to allow the GOP to salvage its  political prospects in the midterms is anyone’s guess. That is a delusion fueled by motivated reasoning. And it is a delusion that could be dispelled if the appeasers in Trump’s orbit would internalize one obvious truth: Iran wants Trump and America to lose.

 

Since April 8, Iran’s bayonets have encountered only mush. As the axiom dictates, we can expect that the Islamic Republic will keep pushing.

It’s Just Another Isolated Incident

By Noah Rothman

Friday, June 26, 2026

 

Melat Kiros, a Democratic candidate for Congress in Colorado’s first congressional district, is a dyed-in-the-wool Democratic Socialist. At least, that’s what the Democratic Socialists of America claim.

 

Kiros enjoys the endorsement of both the Denver-area DSA and the national DSA. And Kiros herself has returned the favor. “Kiros placed her campaign in the context of the broader effort to elect democratic socialists across the country,” the DSA’s national press organ observed recently, “specifically citing fellow DSA National endorsees.”

 

Like whom? Like Pennsylvania’s Chris Rabb, who recently claimed that the 2025 Bondi Beach massacre of Jews was the work of “Zionists,” as well as “Hasan Piker’s favorite candidate,” Florida’s Oliver Larkin.

 

Kiros certainly belongs in that company:

 

 

In an interview that must be seen to be believed, Kiros made a variety of incendiary remarks in which she defended murderous, terroristic violence directed against — well, you know — the “Zionists.” But she also seemed to grudgingly comprehend the logic that leads to terrorist violence against the United States.

 

When asked by interviewer Kyle Clark whether America brought 9/11 on itself, just as Israel invited the October 7 massacre in her view, Kiros did not reject the premise. The September 11 attack was “inevitable in the sense that we destabilized a lot of the Middle East,” she said, “that forced people to believe that another act of violence was the only response.”

 

By “destabilized the Middle East,” maybe she means that the U.S. maintained a presence in Saudi Arabia by invitation after the U.S. military ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991. If so, Kiros is endorsing Osama bin Laden’s logic for declaring war on America.

 

Or perhaps she means the Beirut embassy and barracks bombings of 1983 — acts of Iran-backed terrorism that led to America’s pullout from the region. But that wouldn’t make much sense. So, maybe what she really means is that the United States contributed to Israel’s defense against a combined Arab onslaught in 1973, helping to prevent the collapse of the Jewish State and the second historic massacre of Jews within a generation.

 

Or maybe Kiros doesn’t know what she means. Maybe her anti-Westernism is so pronounced that she is just trying to retrofit a rationale onto what is, in essence, a blinding hatred for her home and the Israelis who benefit from America’s Western orientation.

 

“What tethers these candidates is not their shared hatred of the Jews or the banks or the moneyed and propertied classes,” I wrote of the DSA on Wednesday. “They hate America and the West.” Kiros has helped prove my point. Hopefully, that will be her only lasting contribution to the national  political discourse.

The Unsettled ‘End’ of the Iran War

By Judson Berger

Friday, June 26, 2026

 

To adapt Reagan, are you better off today than you were one  war ago? Unless the “you” in that sentence is the Iranian government, the answer increasingly looks to be no.

 

The longer the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding is exposed to the harsh desert light, however, the brittler it starts to look. Seth Cropsey, putting the lamentable developments of the past couple weeks in context, emphasizes that despite the fanfare surrounding the pact, it is not a final status agreement — and that a return to conflict is all but inevitable. (As of Friday, this is already happening.)

 

“It is, rather, an extension of the April cease-fire,” he writes, “and includes no changes to the underlying realities that catalyzed the U.S.-Israel-Iran war in the first place.” The clock merely resets to 60 days.

 

For now, the terms are . . . disadvantageous. A “prompt and utter humiliation” for President Trump is how Philip Klein describes them. As Jim Geraghty puts it: “I suppose you can’t call it a wholesale surrender, in part because the U.S. government is paying retail prices in its concessions.”

 

Jim laments that Iran, at least on paper, is slated to receive $300 billion (from where is not entirely clear) for “reconstruction” and “development” while three key points of America’s economic leverage go away: a naval blockade, sanctions, and restrictions on the export of Iranian oil products. The regime might be better off financially than before the war, while having extracted U.S. commitments not to deploy additional forces in the region for now or interfere in the country’s internal affairs. Trump has pivoted from urging the Iranian people to “take over your government” to saying he never cared about regime change.

 

In exchange, the Strait of Hormuz is ostensibly reopening, but it remains hazardous, as an attack on a cargo ship Thursday plainly demonstrated, while Iran cooks up new ways to reap billions from control over the passageway.

 

It’s not all dismal on America’s side of the ledger. Dozens of Iranian aircraft, naval ships, and missile launchers were taken out over the course of the war. As Noah Rothman writes, America’s enemies witnessed the “rapid dismantling of the Iranian navy” and the establishment of air superiority over the country, among several aspects of the war that “must be taken into account by any great power that would directly challenge the U.S. military.” He adds, “That’s what makes Trump’s MOU so maddening. The weakness it projects will tempt America’s enemies, and the precedents it sets are likely to outlast the memory of America’s victories on the battlefield.” The Obama administration’s mistakes are being repeated, Noah writes.

 

And yet, this may not be the end. As violations of the MOU terms already begin, Jim notes that it’s only a matter of time before Iran further reneges, making space for the U.S. to do the same. Seth Cropsey questions how the purported reconstruction fund could be mustered and how concrete or achievable the sanctions-lifting provisions are. He advises that, as things progress, Lebanon will be key:

 

As more Lebanon crises occur, Iran’s roll of the dice will eventually force an Israeli response — even without U.S. consent — that will raise the odds of a return to war.

 

Trump wanted a deal principally because he hates being cornered. Thus, he refused to authorize an operation against southern Iran or a resumption of strikes after early April. However, there is no reason to expect he will allow a vague, unenforceable piece of paper to constrain his decision-making. The question for U.S. policy is how to generate the flexibility Trump will require when Iran inevitably pushes the region to the brink once again.