The President Is an Idiot

By Luther Ray Abel

Sunday, August 16, 2026

 

Donald J. Trump is a vainglorious fool.

 

That can be the only explanation for this truckling praise of North Korea at South Korea’s expense:

 

 

Good mercy, man.

 

 

Vance on How Republicans Can Fight Socialism

By Ramesh Ponnuru

Friday, August 14, 2026

 

Fox News host Will Cain asked the vice president about socialism’s appeal to young people. Vance replied, in part:

 

My warning to my fellow Republicans, Will, would be if we don’t get this right, don’t blame young people for being sympathetic to socialism. We’ve got to blame ourselves. And I think what is so unique and refreshing about Donald Trump’s economic policies is that it’s not the same old economic ideas that you would have heard 30, 40 years ago.

 

He’s talking about rebuilding our industrial base, rebuilding the heartland, making our streets safer, making it possible for young people to afford to buy a home. This is how you stop socialism. You don’t stop socialism by throwing slogans at people about the free market. As much as I love the free market, you stop socialism by making people’s lives better. And that’s what we’re trying to do every single day.

 

I think Vance gets a number of important things right in this response. Young people have legitimate reasons to be dissatisfied with the economy; Republicans have to meet them where they are rather than criticizing them for being lazy and entitled (a point on which Vance is in accord with National Review’s editorial the other day); delivering good results — especially when you’re the party in power — will do more to win over voters than free-market sloganeering. And while I imagine some people who love the free market even more than Vance loves it see the line about “throwing slogans at people” as a strawman, I think Republicans have sometimes been guilty of what he charges.

 

Earlier in his remarks, Vance said that “while these things sometimes take a little bit of time, we are already seeing the positive results come from the president’s economic policies.”

 

Trump has, however, been “talking about rebuilding the industrial base” for more than a decade now as the dominant figure in U.S. politics. And particularly during the last two years, he has been implementing many of what Vance calls his “unique and refreshing” policies too. So far, neither young people nor voters at large are happy with the results. Young people have been turning to socialism more rapidly during this period than in prior eras of Republican free-market sloganeering.

 

All of this could change. It would have been a mistake to judge Reaganomics in August 1982, when the country was in a deep recession (at the time, the deepest since World War II) and Republicans were about to lose a lot of House seats. But the results of Trumponomics so far hold a warning for Republicans, too.

How Does Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ Work?

By Daniel Sipes

Monday, August 17, 2026

 

It’s a scenario every American is familiar with, especially lately: You go to the store looking for a particular item and find that it’s more expensive than usual. Maybe you’re back-to-school shopping for your children and you notice that the price of a box of pencils has increased by a dollar or two. You might not buy as many boxes as you were planning to, or maybe you purchase pens instead. You probably don’t spend much time speculating about what might have caused the price of pencils to increase. Unexplained price changes like this happen all the time, and for most of us they’re objects of mild annoyance rather than wonder.

 

And yet an increase in the price of pencils involves a series of coordinated responses to market signals spanning industries, continents, and hundreds of thousands of people—a group of which you, without realizing it, are part. None of the individuals and companies involved fully understand the process they are a part of, because it’s larger than any one person could fathom. That immense organizing property of the free market was most famously described by Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith, who called it an “invisible hand.”

 

His book The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, an auspicious year for all things revolutionary, explored for the first time ideas of specialization and self-interest that would become foundational in the field of economics. Smith used the term “invisible hand” only once in the book’s 900-odd pages, but economists say the underlying concept is vital to his work.

 

“If you read [Smith’s] work … it’s all about what we would now call the invisible hand,” Eamonn Butler, director of the Adam Smith Institute, a policy think tank, told The Dispatch. “In other words, how does our individual action affect society?”

 

Smith used the metaphor in a section about why a rich man might choose to invest in his own community. “By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”

 

The idea that self-interested behavior could contribute to the common good went against the prevailing economic wisdom of Smith’s time, particularly on the subject of trade. The prevailing economic system in the 18^th century was mercantilism, under which nations aimed to increase their wealth through a favorable balance of trade, aided by import quotas and tariffs. Thus, only the side that increased its stock of gold and silver—usually the exporter—was viewed as benefiting from a trade agreement. To build wealth, the great powers of the 18^th century waged wars of conquest and heavily restricted the economic freedom of their subjects, as Britain did in preventing the American colonies from trading with other countries.

 

But Smith, after traveling across Europe and noting the ways in which the Industrial Revolution had transformed every nation’s economy, came to the conclusion that trade was more than just an exchange of wealth—it actually created wealth. “Smith completely demolished the mercantilist idea that in international trade there’s a winner and a loser,” Butler said. “Adam Smith said, ‘No, that’s not true. Both sides can benefit from the exchange.’”

 

As such, Smith was instrumental in bringing about our modern era of free trade. But since his time, the ideas in The Wealth of Nations, and in particular the invisible hand, have become synonymous with capitalism more generally. Free market economists like Milton Friedman referred to the concept as “cooperation without coercion” and made the invisible hand a foundational piece of economic theory.

 

Meanwhile, critics attacked the idea that the invisible hand organized the market in the best possible way. Karl Marx facetiously compared the invisible hand to “the fate of the ancients”: an outdated, capricious system without concern for human welfare. He and many of the Marxian economists  who came after him, such as Oskar Lange and Abba Lerner, argued that the government could more effectively  control the market and steer it toward what was best for the people.

 

It was in this context of renewed distrust in the free market that economists like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek mounted a new defense of Adam Smith’s theories. Most notably, in a 1945 essay called “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” Hayek illustrated how the invisible hand works in modern, complex, and decentralized markets.

 

To understand Hayek’s idea, it’s helpful to have an example. Economist Russ Roberts uses a scenario involving the market for graphite, a raw material supplied only by companies that mine it and purchased only by makers of pencils and tennis rackets. Suddenly, a new use of graphite is discovered: Graphite powder stabilizes friction and reduces heat buildup in brake pads. Now car manufacturers want graphite, and a lot of it. They enter the market, but the mining companies have only enough raw material to supply the pencil and racket manufacturers.

 

Socialists viewed the answer from here as simple—appoint someone, a hypothetical “graphite commissioner,” to decide which allocation of graphite best benefits everyone. But Hayek pointed out that anyone in such a position would need a huge amount of information on which to base his decisions.

 

For example, could he direct the pencil manufacturers to invent a thinner pencil design, or the car manufacturers to make do with an alloy? Could schools reduce writing tasks, or mining companies locate more graphite-rich deposits? And what about the end-line consumer, the thousands and thousands of people who use pencils, tennis rackets, and cars—how easy is it for them to change their behavior in such a way that demand for graphite decreases? These questions are enough for a lifetime of research, but the graphite commissioner is tasked with making the market function for everyone right away.

 

“This is what Hayek identified as the fatal conceit—the belief that somehow we could be these all-knowing, omniscient beings that could control the economy,” George Mason University economics professor Peter J. Boettke told The Dispatch. “And instead, what happens is all of the knowledge … is created within the interaction of the market process itself.”

 

In a free market with no graphite commissioner, graphite prices would increase, sending a signal to the mining companies that graphite is more valuable and driving them to seek ways to extract more of it. The price increase could also lead pencil manufacturers to make thinner pencils, car manufacturers to change brake pad designs, and tennis racket manufacturers to switch to carbon fiber. Even the back-to-school shopper mentioned above participates in this process without realizing it; whatever decision the shopper makes based on the higher price of pencils sends a signal to the market about the demand for graphite.

 

“The marvel,” Hayek wrote, “is that in a case like that of a scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation, are made to use the material or its products more sparingly; i.e., they move in the right direction.”

 

All of us have participated in processes like this thousands of times; our preferences have been factored into systems so complex that nobody understands them fully. Grocery stores stock more high-protein foods to account for the widespread use of GLP-1 drugs, the development of AI leads to a new type of “superconducting” electrical cable, and turkey farmers plan their hatching cycles around the Thanksgiving holiday. Each individual acts according to his own self-interest and, guided by the invisible hand, promotes an end that is no part of his intention: the coordination of the free market as a whole.

 

As Adam Smith himself put it, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”

Deterring Russia’s Threat to the Baltics

National Review Online

Monday, August 17, 2026

 

For years now, Russia has waged a shadow war against the West. It has used methods from sabotage to jamming airplanes’ GPS that fall within the “gray zone,” or below the threshold that would trigger an armed response, if only, in some cases, because it has been impossible to identify or catch up with the culprits. In recent months, the pace and the intensity of this campaign have been ratcheted up, as shown by the failed drone attack at Germany’s Leipzig airport last week.

 

Russian gray zone aggression has become more visible, partly to intimidate, but also to test. Moscow wants to see how far it can go without retaliation, but also to gain what intelligence it can from the shape and the speed of any retaliation. And there is something else. By accustoming NATO to gray zone assaults, Russia might be able to buy itself some valuable minutes (or more) of uncertainty in the event that Moscow launches an attack that goes beyond the gray zone. After years of relatively minor incidents, NATO’s defenders may initially be inclined to regard a larger drone incursion or cyberattack as yet another chapter in the history of Russian provocation. After all, on the night of September 10 last year, nineteen Russian drones flew into Poland.

 

It is worth paying attention to the ever-louder warnings from Western security services and elsewhere that a sterner test is on the way. There is growing concern that Russia might move out of the gray zone soon, perhaps by seizing — and retaining — a sliver of NATO territory. Such a move would be a powerful demonstration of Western weakness and, in particular, evidence that the collective defense arrangements set out in Article 5 of the NATO treaty are at best unreliable and at worst useless; Article 5, and the U.S. backing contained within it, form the glue that holds NATO together. If its deterrent power were to be significantly eroded, the result would be a blow to the cohesion of the Western coalition backing Ukraine. It would also bring Russia closer to its goals of reestablishing its sway over Eastern Europe and disrupting the Western European relationship with the U.S. Such a change would not make us any safer.

 

There are a number of candidates for a Russan landgrab. The two most likely, Narva and Daugavpils, are in the Baltic states, countries that are vulnerable because of their geographical position, small size and (unwanted) historical connections with Russia. Narva, Estonia’s third largest city, has an overwhelmingly ethnically Russian population and is located just across a river from Russia. Daugavpils, Latvia’s second largest city, also has a large ethnic Russian majority. It is only about fifteen miles from Belarus, a Russian ally, and is less than a hundred miles from the Russian border. Looking on the brighter side, Narva and Daugavpils are much better defended than in the past and their populations would be unlikely to welcome “liberation” by Russia.

 

There has been speculation about Russian operations against Narva, Daugavpils or both for years, but the reasons to think that they might come under attack in the near future go beyond Russia’s increasingly aggressive gray zone operations. The most important may be the way that transatlantic tensions, stoked by President Trump’s foolhardy campaign to grab Greenland and attacks on our NATO allies, have already weakened Article 5’s deterrent effect. On top of that, however paradoxical it may seem, Russia’s struggles in Ukraine and the increasing cost to it of Ukrainian counterstrikes may tempt the Kremlin to open a potentially useful “second front” in the West. Putin may also sense a window of opportunity. The U.S. is entangled in the Iran war, and stocks of some of our key munitions are running low. Meanwhile, although Western Europe is rearming, that process has a long way to go. It should be said that the Baltic states already spend 5 percent of GDP on defense, a total that is set to rise.

 

If Russia attempts an incursion into the Baltic states or anywhere else in NATO, the Western response should be broad and robust (Ukraine is one obvious pressure point). To accept even the loss of a small amount of territory would set a terrible precedent. It would be an invitation to far greater disaster, and not just in Europe.

 

But the U.S. should do everything it can to deter any such Russian adventurism before it is even attempted. That will be best achieved by unambiguously reaffirming our commitment to the Atlantic alliance. Any planned withdrawals of American military personnel or materiel from Europe should be stopped. Boosting our presence and that of other NATO states in the Baltic area would be prudent. We should maintain or increase our support for Ukraine.

 

NATO should also toughen its defenses against gray zone operations, operations that can, incidentally, take place in this country too. Picking nonsensical fights with our European allies (Greenland comes to mind) obviously should be avoided. We should continue to “encourage” the Europeans to take more responsibility for their own defense. That they are starting to do so (something for which Trump can take considerable credit) is overdue and welcome.

 

And both the U.S. and the EU should accept that a tough battle over trade should not be allowed to undermine our joint struggle against a dangerous enemy at a very dangerous time.

Investigating China’s Role in the Global Intifada

By Seth Mandel

Friday, August 14, 2026

 

The closest thing to a scandal faced by Darializa Avila Chevalier, the unimpressive socialist Zohran Mamdani used to knock off a high-profile Democratic congressman in the primaries, was that she had attended a rally celebrating Hamas’s October 7 massacre a day after the attack began.

 

When this came to light during the campaign, it exposed Chevalier as an extremist among extremists: Mamdani had actually criticized the rally when it happened, as did influential progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The rally was deemed monstrous by many of those who normally associate with the DSA.

 

Still, Mamdani backed Chevalier and installed her as the Democratic nominee in New York’s 13th Congressional District.

 

Yet from an organizing standpoint, the People’s Forum arguably played a more important role in the hate rally than DSA did. The People’s Forum, a pro-Chinese Communist Party propaganda outfit, was a key player in the pro-Hamas astroturf campaign across the U.S. and Western Europe after October 7, 2023.

 

And it now finds itself under increased congressional scrutiny for its role in the China-Russia-Iran bid to destabilize the West.

 

The People’s Forum has been largely funded by Neville Roy Singham, according to public records. Singham is a tech multimillionaire and China booster. He is married to Jodie Evans, founder of the anti-American pressure group Code Pink.

 

Now, according to the Telegraph, a U.S. congressional committee is investigating “alleged payments to a company linked to Code Pink in the UK from firms connected to Neville Roy Singham.” The upshot of the investigation so far is that the Beijing propagandists have reportedly been funding attempts to destabilize not only the U.S. but also the UK, where the Hamas-aligned activist movement has helped create a culture of violence and fear since the war started.

 

Singham’s connection to the Gaza left is no secret. In 2024, Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib headlined a conference in Detroit affiliated with member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a longtime designated terrorist organization. Its web presence was hosted by the People’s Forum. At the conference, the director of the People’s Forum delivered an anti-American tirade

 

Two months before the October 7 attacks, the New York Times published a bombshell investigation into Singham’s network and his China ties, titled “A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul.” After the Palestinian attacks touched off the war in Gaza, some of Singham’s properties appeared to seamlessly pivot in the same direction that the Chinese Communist Party’s media censors pivoted—to a sturdy old Soviet anti-Zionism that had never really gone away on the global left.

 

Rep. Jason Smith, the Republican spearheading the inquiry, told the Telegraph: “It’s clear from the ways and means committee investigation that Singham’s money and influence does not stop at America’s borders. The committee is well aware that Singham’s funding is supporting pro-Hamas and pro-communist causes not only in the United States, but also overseas, including in the United Kingdom.”

 

The alleged Singham payments to Code Pink have gone through front groups to Code Pink to be handled by an activist the investigation names as Suzie Gilbert, who has been involved in pro-Iran activism during the U.S.-Iran war as well as a China-specific messaging campaign.

 

One lingering question is whether patriotism or tribal partisanship will prevail in the wake of such allegations. In America, the latter is more likely, especially with the DSA racking up wins and scaring the sense out of so many establishment Democrats.

 

But in the UK, there are encouraging signs. Along with the expected Tory denunciations of Code Pink and the CCP, a Labour member of parliament named Sarah Champion offered strong words against foreign-backed domestic extremism tied to China: “The UK needs to work with the US to investigate the payments, their influence and who is ultimately responsible. We need to present a united front with the US and show zero tolerance.”

 

As investigations like this continue, we’ll get a look at who feels the same way—and who knew exactly what they were involved with all along.

Will the Pentagon’s Latest UFO Files Satisfy the Alien Theorists?

By Andrew Follett

Monday, August 17, 2026

 

A newly released fifth tranche of UFO files held by the Department of War offers quite a few examples of strange lights in the sky, but nothing close to credible evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Still, the files had much to say about recent, widely publicized incidents involving UFOs — and the U.S. government’s engagement with them.

 

The most interesting report in this tranche was a 2021 Gulf of Oman incident involving an AC-130 gunship firing on small, fast-moving objects that appeared to evade the American aircraft’s shots. Similar reports often turn out to be balloons, drones, birds, flares, or optical illusions that sometimes manifest under combat conditions where there is limited resolution.

 

Another highlight was a February 2024 incident in Ukraine that involved a reconnaissance drone observing what was apparently an enormous disk (that was previously reported). But estimating range by staring at something on a screen is exactly how parallax errors happen. Such a math error seems more probable in this case.

 

The final interesting incident was sworn testimony from “a senior U.S. intelligence officer” investigating an area where loud noises had been heard and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena spotted on radar in a remote mountain range near a government-owned weapons test range. While in a helicopter, the intelligence officer and a crew observed “countless orange orbs swarming in all directions” that “match the speed and flight path” of nearby fighter jets and “chase” them. Though this case may sound compelling, the fact that it occurred on a test range while fighter aircraft were actively training in the same airspace points to a likely source: simple flares bouncing and moving via wind effects.

 

No photos were taken by the senior officer, and most recording of the object seems to have fallen outside the helicopter’s FLIR field of view. The facts of the case, therefore, are dependent on human description, which is exactly how many prosaic events remain “unresolved.” Similar Western military reports have been attributed to military flares.

 

The Department of War has said that, due to limited data, it cannot make a definitive determination on the provenance of any of the 41 files, 12 videos, 22 documents, and 3 images released in the fifth tranche. The released materials consist primarily of sensor footage of anomalous lights and objects, pilot and agent reports, and historical film analysis. There were no recovered materials, communications, biological samples, or other physical evidence that would demonstrate non-human technology or extraterrestrial intelligence in this or any of the other released tranches.

 

The lack of definitive insight into the question of potential extraterrestrial life and the genesis of recent UFO incidents is not surprising; the Pentagon usually releases files on unidentified phenomena for transparency and aviation or military-safety reasons. For the military, “unidentified” means that there was insufficient data to resolve the object’s origin, not that it was necessarily “alien.” Indeed, decades of official investigation have produced no physical evidence of alien life, recovered alien craft, or verified non-human technology — only a continuing stream of ambiguous sensor and eyewitness data.

 

The department began releasing the file tranches in February after President Trump directed federal agencies to “begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.”

 

The result of this new release has been very similar to the first tranche: All hype, no aliens.

 

UFO-believers like Representative Tim Burchett (R., Tenn.) downplayed the first release, moving the goalposts by writing on X that “the 1st drop will be big but in comparison to what is coming they will be a drop in the bucket. I would say ‘Holy Crap’ is coming.”

 

All of the photos of events recorded in the latest tranche have plausible alien-free explanations. Furthermore, in an era in which 91 percent of Americans nearly always carry a high-definition camera through their smartphone, we should demand higher standards of evidence for claims of extraterrestrial contact.

 

Importantly, the Department of War’s releases expand the public record of anomalous aerial observations by credible observers such as military personnel, pilots, and intelligence agents. They document interesting, sometimes multi-witness or multi-sensor events going back decades that resist easy prosaic explanations in the released material.

 

Skeptics and the government’s own framing treat reported UFOs as ambiguous phenomena that could still involve drones, balloons, sensor artifacts, optical effects, classified terrestrial systems, or incomplete data. But successive drops continue the pattern of transparency on unresolved cases without delivering anything even approaching a decisive ‘smoking gun.’

 

And that’s extremely telling, because, as I’ve been saying for years, there exists enormous media pressure to publish attention-grabbing headlines when anything supposedly “alien” emerges. But the best explanation for strange lights in the sky around the world is never aliens. I’ve been digging into these releases for months, and I’ve found no evidence of space invaders — but plenty of highly obvious cases of lens flare, bad lighting, color-correction flaws, and barracks ghost tales.

 

The heavy pre-release hype promising historic revelations has, so far, delivered little more than scanned paperwork that serves to merely fuel public curiosity further. UFO believers have for decades claimed that “disclosure” — i.e., government declassification of secret contact with extraterrestrial aliens — is imminent. The first major UFO book pushing “disclosure” was retired Marine Corps Major Donald Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucers Are Real, which was first published in 1950 and claimed that alien crafts are real and far beyond human technology, but that this alleged fact was suppressed by the U.S. government to avoid public panic. In the intermediate 70 years, UFO books have been making identical claims that have simply never come to pass.

 

Every generation rediscovers the same pattern. Lights in the sky, radar blips, pilot reports, and grainy videos generate excitement; better data, triangulation, or simple trigonometry almost always reveal balloons, drones, flares, aircraft, birds, atmospheric effects, optical illusions, or classified conventional technology. No verified physical evidence (e.g., materials, biologics, or clear multi-sensor records) has ever been produced, and governments have strong incentives to keep ordinary black projects secret while letting UFO lore serve as a convenient cover or distraction.

 

The military also may wish to let the media frenzy continue to obscure real government secrets. After all, the U.S. government has a long track record of using alleged aliens as an explanation for programs it would rather not reveal — and to request budget expansions. In the 1950s and 60s, the Air Force and the CIA often intentionally called sightings of highly secret U-2 spy planes “UFOs” to hide the true nature of the aircraft. A CIA official who worked on spy plane projects later attributed over half of all UFO reports during that time to the U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird projects.

 

This latest file release from the Department of War only underscores the notion that the default explanation for any unidentified object should remain the mundane explanation, unless and until extraordinary, independently verifiable evidence forces a different conclusion. And, after many decades of modern UFO claims, that threshold has never been crossed.

Enes Kanter Freedom Obviously Doesn’t Belong in the WNBA

By Helen Lewis

Sunday, August 16, 2026

 

Why shouldn’t Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White play women’s basketball? The answer is simple: They’re not female. By all evidence, the two former NBA players have XY chromosomes—White has fathered children—and have been through male puberty. They have significant athletic advantages over female athletes and should not be eligible for the WNBA. To reach this conclusion, I don’t need to peer into the pair’s souls to see whether they’re pink or blue, nor do I need to decide whether they are sincerely applying for the WNBA draft or just trolling.

 

Although, let’s be clear, they are trolling. On August 6, Freedom sent a letter to the WNBA’s commissioner that might as well have read: Hello—I would like some attention. The 34-year-old, whose NBA profile lists him at 6 foot 10 and 250 pounds, played pro basketball for 11 seasons. Now he wants to register for the women’s draft. He argued on X that he is “simply asking that the current rules be applied equally to everyone—the rules that represent the very values many WNBA players and coaches have publicly advocated for.” In an interview on Friday, he imagined catching a pass from the Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark, dunking the ball, and then bumping chests with her—“which I’m allowed to do,” he said, “because I’m now a woman.”

 

The backdrop to this stunt is the controversy over the Fever guard Sophie Cunningham, who told ESPN last month, “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” and has been mocked as “MAGA Barbie” because of her views. The players’ union put out a statement condemning the “hate, abuse, and demonization of any person or group of people, including transgender people.”

 

As it stands, the WNBA’s collective-bargaining agreement restricts entry to “players who are women” but does not define women. The league has so far waved away Freedom and White. “There are no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA,” it declared in a statement Wednesday, “and we strongly denounce the bad-faith efforts to use these topics to demean or marginalize others.”

 

No one—not even White and Freedom—seriously believes that the WNBA will let the two trollish men play as women. But the league apparently hopes to reject them without ever grudgingly coughing out an agreement with Cunningham’s view that biological males don’t belong in women’s sports. Five years ago, the WNBA’s official Twitter account celebrated Andraya Yearwood and Terry Miller, biologically male athletes whose female competitors in Connecticut sued to keep them out of girls’ races in high-school athletics. The ACLU defended the trans girls’ right to compete. Above a picture of Yearwood and Miller, the WNBA expressed its own support: “We support you and all of the other trans athletes just trying to compete in the sports they love.” (Six years on, there has been no ruling in the case.)

 

The WNBA has become an appealing target for culture-war politicking, in part because the successes of Clark and a handful of other exceptional players have significantly raised the league’s profile in the past few years. As its prominence grows, its ability to sidestep controversy shrinks.

 

Not long after Freedom’s declaration, White also announced plans to enter the draft. After a short, lackluster career in the NBA, he is now a conservative activist who has run for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota, and he is currently under a no-contact order with his ex-wife because of alleged threats against her and their teenage son. (He has disputed the accusations.) White has declared that he is indeed a woman, if only for basketball purposes. “I’ve always trusted the science and I thought I was a man my entire life, but after further review, a strong look at my personal preferences, it would appear that I am indeed sometimes identifying as a transgender woman,” he said on Fox News. He has since bought a long wig and accused a television network that canceled an interview with him of “not giving Black women a voice.”

 

When the WNBA uses the words bad faith, the only reasonable interpretation is that league officials do not believe that White and Freedom are women, despite their self-declarations. Funny story: I’m still on the advocacy group GLAAD’s enemies list for saying the same thing in 2017, in a column headlined “A Man Can’t Just Say He Has Turned Into a Woman.” At the time, Britain’s government was debating whether to loosen requirements for a person to legally change their gender. Many feminists feared that without any gatekeeping, nothing would stop male creeps and predators from using a new identity to victimize women (as the rapist Karen White did in a women’s prison). Although my article acknowledges the existence of transgender identities, it also argues that legal protections for trans people should rest on a medical diagnosis, or at least a formal bureaucratic procedure, rather than a simple verbal declaration.

 

Now, it seems, the WNBA agrees with me—White has not magically turned into a woman because he says so. You are allowed to dispute people’s self-identification. But only if they are a Republican.

 

***

 

In the United States, many progressive organizations, including the ACLU, maintain that the female category belongs to anyone who (sincerely) identifies into it. The underlying argument is that trans people should not have to seek medical treatment or alter their physical presentation to have their inner identities respected.

 

Freedom and White have elicited much less deference. Pod Save America’s Jon Lovett recently declared, “If they would like to play in the WNBA, they better fucking transition. Let’s get them on some fucking hormones.” The left-wing satirist Walter Masterson demanded that the two men “commit to the bit” and “chemically transition, or STFU.” But this is not a demand that is applied, say, to male sex offenders who ask to be housed in women’s prisons in California. Several years ago, the ACLU and other groups successfully lobbied for a law directing prison authorities to house trans women in a women’s facility if they request it, regardless of whether they have physically transitioned at all.

 

Bombarded with pro-trans commentators insisting that he medically transition, White has gleefully thrown progressive talking points back at them. “Don’t tell me how to be a Black woman! Taking hormones are optional,” he wrote in one X post. In another, he added, “Genitalia doesn’t determine gender.” Royce’s clapbacks are near-verbatim rehashings of popular activist slogans.

 

Over the past decade, many sports have wrestled with the question of how trans and nonbinary athletes can be accommodated fairly and safely. In some cases, such inclusion has presented no problems—biological females have competed in sports for both sex categories because they have no unfair advantage in either. (The WNBA accommodated the player Layshia Clarendon, who came out as trans and nonbinary, until their retirement in 2024.) Admitting biological males to women’s sports presents a more difficult question. Almost everyone agrees that men are on average stronger and faster than women, but how much of that advantage can be mitigated by testosterone suppression? Various sporting bodies have tried different approaches in the past decade, although many—including the International Olympic Committee and the Women’s Tennis Association—have now concluded that the women’s category cannot admit males, no matter how comprehensive their physical transition has been.

 

Having belatedly realized that the majority of Americans do not agree with their enthusiasm for male inclusion in women’s sports, the response of the left has often been to say: Why are we even talking about this nonstory? The columnist Candace Buckner of The Athletic criticized Cunningham for “choosing to weigh in on the divisive topic of transgender athletes in women’s sports, a grossly exaggerated ‘issue,’ and opening the door for a flood of agitators to defile the discussion.” But surely, athletes are allowed to have an opinion about competitive eligibility for their own league? For a long time, the right told stars such as Colin Kaepernick, who wanted to make political points about racism and injustice, that they should “stick to sports.” Some on the left now think that female athletes should not even have that grace.

 

***

 

What Freedom and White’s trolling has exposed is a widespread refusal to defend gender-self-identification policies on their own merits. One can argue that there is no such thing as male athletic advantage, or that inclusion for trans people is more important than fairness and safety for women. Both of these arguments are wrong, in my view, but at least they are internally coherent. What we get instead is a squeamish refusal to own the consequences of the approach that liberals endorse: White and Freedom are cynical operators, and that’s all anyone needs to know.

 

My counterpoint would be that cynical operators will always be with us. Any regulations that can’t deal with that fact are, by definition, bad regulations. Self-identification is unworkable in practice for the same reason that prison abolition isn’t viable: Bad actors will ruthlessly further their own interests at other people’s expense. For more examples, see how rich students are asking for disability accommodations to secure an advantage in college exams. How some air travelers are using wheelchair services to skip lines—at the expense of genuinely disabled people. How the service-animal exemption for airplanes was stretched so far that someone eventually tried to take a peacock into the cabin. Wherever there is an unpoliced boundary, some individuals will cross it.

 

Why would gender be exempt from this phenomenon? In 2024, soon after Germany passed a gender-self-ID law, a neo-Nazi named Sven Liebich declared that he was now Marla-Svenja Liebich and would therefore require accommodation in a women’s prison. (Marla-Svenja kept Sven’s handlebar mustache, however.) After a public backlash, Liebich was sent to a men’s jail, although it is unclear what legal basis the German state had for declaring this one particular case of self-identification fraudulent.

 

The WNBA appears to be following the same playbook—gearing up to make an arbitrary decision because of bad publicity, rather than engaging with the fact that its policies have created an exploitable loophole. Keeping out Freedom and White is not a hard problem to solve: Just say that you respect people’s identities, but sports are segregated by sex.

 

Progressives are losing the fight over gender identity in women’s sports. It’s time to concede and move on. They should save their energy to fight some of the truly egregious discrimination imposed against trans people by red states and Donald Trump’s executive orders. No one’s interest is served by refusing to articulate why Freedom and White don’t belong in the WNBA.