Apocalypse Adjourned

By Abe Greenwald

Monday, May 11, 2026

 

In 2022, a geography professor named Matthew T. Huber published a book titled Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet. In another age, it might have been strange for an actual scientist to write a book about exploiting his field of study to foment a global socialist revolution. But this is the age we live in. 

 

On Saturday, Huber published an essay in the New York Times arguing that campaigning Democrats should drop the whole climate-change issue after all. He recognizes that it’s not at the top of most Americans’ list of concerns and that working-class voters, in particular, really don’t care about it. In other words, climate panic has turned out to be a poor catalyst for socialist mobilization. 

 

And socialism is clearly more important to Huber than is the prospect of a warming planet. “Democrats will surely continue to propose policies calling for jobs and public investment,” he writes, “but it’s not clear why climate should be at the center.” 

 

That’s interesting, isn’t it? After 20 years of telling us that climate change is the most important crisis facing all of humanity, the doom-mongers now say they just don’t get what the big deal is.

 

This is all amusing as a tale of raw political opportunism. But there’s more to the story. 

 

On April 29, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came out with its latest round of projected climate scenarios. The leading global authority on climate change now says that, owing to changes in climate policy, lower emissions, and the availability of renewable energy sources, the most extreme global-warming scenarios “have become implausible.”  

 

Which is to say that the actual “inconvenient truth” has been revealed at last. The dominant climate models were garbage, and the horror story that we’ve been fed for decades is kaput. So if the conventional wisdom on the left suddenly dictates a pivot away from climate change, the pivoters might know more than they’re letting on. 

 

Not that you’d know this from outlets like the New York Times. The paper hasn’t said a word about our having avoided the climate apocalypse. In fact, today, two days after Huber’s piece on the political liability of climate change, the Times published an opinion article stating: “Ecologists warn that in just 25 years, more than 70 percent of the Southwestern needle leaf evergreen forests, which include ponderosa pines, may be replaced by grass in what might qualify as the first significant post-climate change landscape in America.” Without the shade provided by all these doomed trees, snow will supposedly evaporate instead of feeding rivers and streams. The author calls this “a sign of a catastrophic feedback loop beginning to form.” 

 

So left-liberal candidates should avoid discussing climate change while left-liberal news consumers should continue to be fed climate catastrophe? This makes more sense than one might realize. Democratic candidates are freed up to focus on issues that Americans care about, while the media supply their constituents with the left-wing doom-porn they desperately crave. That’s what you call a good model.

Journalism Succumbs To Its Wounds

By Seth Mandel

Monday, May 11, 2026

 

The famous saying attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre holds that “the anti-Semite doesn’t accuse the Jew of stealing because he actually believes he stole. He accuses the Jew of stealing because he enjoys watching the Jew empty his pockets to prove his innocence.”

 

That is no doubt as true today as ever, regardless of the quote’s origins. And it immediately comes to mind when watching, in real time, the evolution in the latest in a long line of accusations about the nefarious trained militarism of Zionist animals. Whereas many of these rumors—my favorite being the griffin vulture that Arab governments claimed had been trained as a Mossad spy—had an air of levity about them, the new one most certainly does not. And that is the idea that Zionist dogs are trained to rape Arabs.

 

The anti-Zionist activists who started or popularized the rumors have made clear that there is no evidence in their favor. That didn’t stop the sick-minded anti-Israel protesters from adopting the talking point, as demonstrators did in London. From there, however, it has moved to the pages of the New York Times, where Nicholas Kristof repeats it.

 

I watched other sensational “reports” of Israeli perfidy circulate among people who treated them as fact recently and thought about how the question of whether Western journalism will ever recover from its alliance with the machinery of Hamas propaganda appears to have been answered. No.

                                                                        

I saw a video of a woman wearing a “PRESS” vest in Southern Lebanon, (though her bio lists no affiliation) and proceed to read a list of talking points off of a card and then say “I just received a heartbreaking report”—please note the wording—of an Israeli drone following a girl riding a scooter and shooting at her until she was mortally wounded.

 

Usually the reporter reports. But when it comes to Israel, activists costumed as journalists “receive” reports and then continue the game of telephone. “Somebody told me” is not reporting, but you can report out what somebody told you. Reporters know the difference, or should.

 

Anyway I only saw this because Leighton Woodhouse, the conservative activist and filmmaker, repeated it, ironically calling it “real life” despite there being no claims of corroboration even by the activists pushing the story.

 

Perhaps because I spent formative years of my career as a real reporter I’m just over-sensitive about this stuff. Perhaps if you “identify” as a reporter then that’s what you are.

 

But then we get to another aspect of the same set-piece scandal. In March, Salo Aizenberg, a board member at HonestReporting and among the most meticulous researchers on the conflict, wrote an article about 10 Gaza “journalists” who turned out to be combatants from Hamas and other local terrorist groups. Aizenberg noted that there were 35 such cases so far, and that independent analysis has found that “60% of those described as ‘journalists’ or ‘media personnel’ had documented ties to militant organizations.” In other words, the majority.

 

Aizenberg began his list with Yacoup Al-Borsh, a Hamas figure that the Committee to Protect Journalists listed as a journalist slain by Israel during the conflict. After publication of Aizenberg’s article, CPJ removed Borsh from its list, apparently with no explanation.

 

This well-documented phenomenon of supposed “civilians” actually being part of Gaza’s various armed forces—in other words, the invading army—goes well beyond journalists. For example, the New York Post just revealed that USAID has found four more employees of the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency who were involved in the grisly crimes of October 7. “The recent investigation by the USAID IG confirms that the UN is deficient in vetting its own staff for ties to terrorist organizations,” an official told the Post.

 

I wrote about this in 2024 in a post titled “Gaza, Land of Make-Believe,” describing the enclave as a place where doctors who aren’t actually doctors work in hospitals that aren’t really hospitals, where journalists aren’t journalists and aid workers aren’t aid workers and teachers aren’t teachers. The problem is that it’s easy for an organization like CPJ to quietly delete someone’s page from a false list well after the fighting stops and the hoax has outlived its usefulness. So that’s what they do.

 

And “reporters” do the same, and continue to do so, as recent events show. I used to ask if there were any journalists at all in Gaza, but Gazans might ask the same about the rest of the world.

The Road to Perdition

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, May 11, 2026

 

Liberalism cares about process, postliberalism cares only about results. That creates an asymmetry.

 

In a liberal system, postliberal factions can get their way by following the prescribed rules for changing policy. Win elections, pass laws, stay within the bounds of the Constitution, and they’re free to implement the mass-deportation program of their dreams.

 

In a postliberal system, the ruling regime writes the rules so that liberal factions can’t get their way. In some cases, like China, that means Tiananmen Square and gulags for dissenters. In less extreme examples, like Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, it meant stacking the electoral deck against opponents—converting the media into house organs for the government, for instance, and turning economic and bureaucratic institutions into arms of the ruling party.

 

The dilemma for liberals in a country that’s slouching toward postliberalism is deciding how long they should tolerate that asymmetry before it places them at an irreversible disadvantage. If postliberals are rewriting the rules to give themselves a permanent structural hold on power, when should liberals abandon their commitment to procedural norms and switch to a more ruthless results-oriented politics of their own to thwart their enemy?

 

I ask because I suspect last week’s court ruling in Virginia has finally pushed the left past that point with respect to the judiciary.

 

On Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court invalidated the state’s ballot referendum authorizing the Democratic-controlled General Assembly to redraw House maps. The old map gave the ruling party a 6-5 advantage; the new one would have expanded it to 10-1. Mid-decade redistricting is very much a violation of traditional norms, but Virginia’s left-leaning electorate was merely fighting fire with fire. After all, Republicans in Texas had already crossed the Rubicon last year when they gerrymandered their own state to try to maximize the number of GOP-held House seats.

 

Insofar as it rewrote procedural rules to favor the ruling party, the Virginia referendum was an exercise in postliberalism. But it had a vaguely liberal justification: As long as both parties are free to favor themselves in states they dominate, neither is creating a permanent structural disadvantage for the other at the national level. The rules apply equally, and each side is capitalizing. There’s no unfairness.

 

The Virginia ruling will detonate that belief. Which is ironic.

 

It’s ironic because the decision itself is a textbook example of liberal reasoning, prioritizing process over results, yet the outrage it’s caused on the left will create a biblical disaster for liberalism in the United States in the long run. Court packing is the single stupidest idea that Democrats have, but if there was anything still holding them back from it before Friday, I doubt there is now.

 

Context is everything.

 

Outcomes are fair if and only if they’re reached via the process codified in law: That’s liberalism, and that’s why the Virginia Supreme Court invalidated the referendum.

 

Virginia law specifies that if the General Assembly wants to amend the state constitution, it must approve the amendment at two separate legislative sessions with an election in between. The first approval for the new redistricting initiative passed last fall, shortly before Election Day—but after early voting had begun. That was too late, the state Supreme Court held. Early voting counts as part of an election, so there was no election “in between” the first and second approvals.

 

Virginia Democrats failed to follow proper process, so the outcome they wanted doesn’t count.

 

In fact, the majority noted in its opinion, Democrats argued repeatedly during litigation that the court should wait to rule on whether the referendum was legal until after the vote was held. Their bet, obviously, was that the judiciary wouldn’t dare overturn the will of the people once Virginians had voted to approve the new House map. Forced to choose between rubber-stamping a questionable legislative process and nullifying an outcome with unimpeachable democratic legitimacy, surely the court would contrive a way to uphold the outcome by interpreting the law that governed the process flexibly.

 

Except it didn’t. Invalidating a successful ballot initiative with national political implications because the state’s ruling party cut a procedural corner in advancing it is one of the nerviest examples of classically liberal jurisprudence that I can imagine.

 

But that’s not the way anyone to the left of, say, Susan Collins will see it.

 

All they’ll see is that, in a national environment that was already ghastly for Republicans and is getting worse by the day, the GOP’s chances of holding onto the House somehow improved over the past month. That context is everything in understanding the Democratic backlash to the Virginia ruling.

 

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling on the Voting Rights Act greenlighting redistricting of majority-minority districts could flip more than a dozen Southern congressional districts from blue to red, depending upon how redistricting in those states proceeds. That includes Florida, where there’s a chance that the state Supreme Court will okay a new, redder map despite the fact that the state constitution clearly forbids partisan gerrymandering. Combine that with the Virginia Supreme Court nuking four red-to-blue seats due to the vagaries of when an “election” officially begins, and the left finds its electoral prospects declining at a moment when its lead in the generic ballot is … growing.

 

Democrats will look at all of that and conclude that America is transitioning from a liberal system to a postliberal one, in which right-wing judges rewrite (or reinterpret) the rules to place the ruling party at a permanent structural advantage. “Republicans Don’t Need to Win Elections Anymore. They Just Need Their Judges,” Mother Jones’ Ari Berman declared after Friday’s Virginia ruling, and while that’s not technically true, it’s truer than it was a month ago. According to multiple election analysts, the events set in motion by SCOTUS’s ruling could see the GOP hold its House majority this fall even if it loses the overall popular vote—provided that it does so by less than 4 points.

 

A certain kind of conservative will roll their eyes and intone pedantically that there’s no such thing as a national popular vote in congressional races, which is true but entirely too glib about the consequences of all of this for public faith in liberalism. The less capable our system is of producing outcomes that the losing side will see as “fair,” the greater that side’s appetite for postliberalism will be. If a process-oriented politics can’t deliver fair results, its frustrated subjects will conclude that a results-oriented system is the only alternative.

 

To many, a court overturning a vote of millions of Virginians that went in Democrats’ favor on a debatable procedural technicality will seem unfair. A second court dominated by Republican appointees choosing to end majority-minority redistricting coincidentally at the moment the GOP faces an electoral debacle will seem very unfair. The fact that Donald Trump and his party have broken norm after norm over the last 10 years, yet have plainly strengthened their hold on power over the same period, seems especially unfair, making traditional civic norms feel like a sucker’s game and a path to perpetual minority status.

 

To paraphrase Anton Chigurh: If the rules liberals followed brought them to this, of what use were the rules?

 

On Friday, after the Virginia Supreme Court’s opinion was published, even center-left normies were baying for judicial reform. The Democratic court-packing push is coming, beginning—but perhaps not ending—with SCOTUS.

 

The stupidity of court packing.

 

It’s already here, you might respond. It’s been here for a while.

 

True, and that’s a big hole in their commitment to liberalism. Some lefties were kicking around the idea after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020, and there was enough Democratic support for the concept in 2024 that Joe Biden proposed reforms to the Supreme Court as a campaign gimmick. (Although he preferred 18-year term limits for the justices to expanding the court.) Unquestionably, modern Democrats have been more gung-ho for court packing than Republicans have been.

 

But why would it be otherwise? Republicans don’t need to pack: They’ve dominated the Supreme Court for decades. Adding justices would cost the right more by delegitimizing the court’s rulings than it would benefit them by padding their majority. Democrats are in a different position, and so their calculus is different as well.

 

That calculus has gotten more radical in the weeks since SCOTUS’s decision on the Voting Rights Act. “Some folks are thinking [court] expansion, some folks are thinking [court] term limits or a rotation. I’m open to whatever—but I do know that there’s some real reform that needs to take place,” former Democratic Party leader Jaime Harrison told The Bulwark recently. He predicted that court packing will become a litmus test in party primaries, particularly in states like South Carolina with large black minorities who will resent being redrawn into red districts.

 

I understand the impulse, but I’m still flabbergasted that anyone would entertain it. Court packing is so foolish, and so pernicious, that I’m inclined to say it would be worse for America than anything Donald Trump has done in politics. The president has tried, and will continue to try, to destroy the constitutional order. Court packing would actually do it.

 

Even as a demonstration of partisan ruthlessness, I don’t see the point. What’s to be gained?

 

Any sentient human who lived through the tit-for-tat over filibustering judicial nominees during the last decade and the current tit-for-tat over redistricting will grasp that court packing would lead to the ne plus ultra of partisan reprisal cycles. Each time a party gained a trifecta in Washington, job one would be adding a few more justices to the court to offset the advantage gained by the other party after it added a few more justices the last time it had a trifecta.

 

Election cycles would revolve around court packing. If Democrats took power and added two liberals to the court in 2029, Republicans would campaign aggressively in 2032 on “rebalancing” SCOTUS by adding two picks of their own. If they won and followed through, the newly rebalanced Republican court would presumably overturn any liberal-ish rulings rendered prior to rebalancing. Democrats would have set off a judicial arms race for nothing more valuable than a few years of decisions that favored their side temporarily.

 

Meanwhile, the quality of Supreme Court nominees would collapse. Democrats would argue that it already has, but Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett delivered a big loss to the president on tariffs this year and are likely to deliver another on birthright citizenship, as Trump well understands. There are such things as principled conservative judges, although I grant that they’re rarer than they used to be.

 

Once the seal is broken on court packing, converting the judiciary into a mini-legislature, principle will become a liability. No longer will Republican presidents be able to take a chance on a first-rate but unpredictable jurist like Gorsuch, impressive as he may be; dependable outcomes will completely replace judicial philosophy as a measure of qualification, leading to Supreme Court shortlists populated by nothing but Aileen Cannons and Emil Boves.

 

The United States will have a significantly worse federal judiciary for it, and the public will notice. As much faith as Americans have already lost in the court, wait until the parties are locked in a race to the bottom to find the biggest hacks possible on their side to fill vacancies. Any sense that the Constitution means something apart from what the court’s partisan majority at a given moment wants it to mean will evaporate. Cynicism about liberalism as a system that follows the rule of law will explode.

 

The hackification of SCOTUS will also affect how the president behaves, and not for the better. Once the high court is dominated by toadies who’ll rule however their party likes, the White House will be emboldened to press its luck on executive power grabs that even Trump (so far) hasn’t pursued. If you want a more authoritarian America, normalizing court expansion whenever a party has a trifecta in government is the surest way.

 

Even the virtue of a comparatively modest reform like term limits for justices largely eludes me. Assuming that it’s constitutional, how do Democrats expect to benefit from it? Sure, they wouldn’t have Clarence Thomases on the court for 35 years in the future, but they wouldn’t have Elena Kagans potentially on the court for 35 years, either. And once Supreme Court vacancies become predictable, we’ll run into the same problem I described earlier about elections revolving around them. Presidential candidates will feel pressure to announce their nominee before the election, which will incentivize them to choose hacks.

 

We actually had a presidential election not long ago during which a vacancy on the court hung in the balance. A lot of conservative voters who didn’t care for Donald Trump decided that having him fill Antonin Scalia’s seat was nonetheless preferable to letting Hillary Clinton do it. How’d that work out for Democrats? In a world in which there was no vacancy in 2016, does Trump still win?

 

Think hard on that question. Because it’s distressingly easy to imagine Republican voters weighing a similar conundrum in 2032, with a figure even more loathsome than Trump atop the party, and letting a new Supreme Court court-packing arms race erode whatever few remaining qualms they have about being led by abject cretins.

 

The burning village.

 

All of this is to say that, if you wish for a more classically liberal America, trying to beat the postliberals at their own game is a funny way to go about it. It might solve the asymmetry that I described at the start of this piece, but only by conceding the debate with Trumpists over which system of government the United States should follow.

 

I understand why Democrats feel obliged to do that with redistricting, having had a prisoner’s dilemma foisted on them by Republicans in Texas and left with no choice but to keep pace in the race to maximize House seats. But redistricting proves my point: At the end of this, even if Democrats “win” by gerrymandering a few more seats than the GOP does, we’ll have a country in which all but a handful of congressional races each cycle are uncompetitive.

 

That means more partisan performance artists in Washington, more perverse incentives against legislative compromise, and more public nihilism about American democracy. Postliberalism is a civic cancer regardless of which party benefits in a particular theater of political combat. It always amounts to burning the village to save it.

 

It would be nice if Democrats realized that well enough to avoid crossing lines that the GOP hasn’t yet crossed, like court packing. They don’t need to cross it: With three Republican appointees on the current Supreme Court over 70, it’s possible that the next Democratic president will get to fill a seat held by a conservative. Maybe Clarence Thomas will hang on too long, as Ginsburg did, or maybe John Roberts will decide that he’s not so eager to have a Republican president name his successor given the state of right-wing politics nowadays. All the left needs to regain power on the high court is a few election victories and a little luck.

 

But you know what they’ll say to that: We’ve been patient. We’re in a crisis. There’s no more time. The political energy in the party is where it is. They’re probably going to try to expand the court in 2029 if they gain a trifecta, and if they succeed there’ll be nothing left standing between America and banana republicanism. If you’ve had your eye on any foreign real estate, I suggest buying soon.

This Is What It Looks Like When a Great Power Is Losing a War

By Noah Rothman

Monday, May 11, 2026

 

In the war against the Islamic Republic of Iran, the United States is “losing.” In fact, the president may have already “lost” his “disastrous and irrational war” with the theocrats in Tehran. Trump is reportedly chastened by his failures, and the far-reaching consequences that America will suffer as a result of this epochal setback are only beginning to come into view.

 

At least, that’s what we’re hearing from the highest echelons of American public life. Yet, as military historian John Spencer recently observed, these are subjective appraisals. Wars are not won or lost in the comments section, and victors are not determined by vibes alone. Rather, they should be “judged through military capability, economic endurance, political cohesion, freedom of action, strategic leverage, and the ability to sustain power while degrading an opponent’s.”

 

Those who want to know what it looks like when a great power is losing a war should look to Russia.

 

The “symbolism” of this year’s “diminished” Victory Day parade in Moscow is “hard to overstate,” read The Economist’s coverage of Vladimir Putin’s comprehensive embarrassment this week. Indeed, the downscale event, which featured none of the heavy equipment that typically lumber through Red Square, occurred without incident because Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (or, as Putin now refers to the head of the supposedly Nazi menace in Kyiv, “Mr. Zelensky”) pledged not to rain Ukraine’s long-range drones down on it.

 

Moscow’s downcast parade, The Economist added, was a metaphor for Russia’s increasingly frustrating battlefield setbacks. The Kremlin’s spring offensive inside Ukraine has already failed, the report contended. Last month, Russian forces experienced a net loss of territory they controlled inside Ukraine for the first time in nearly two years. Kyiv’s drone armada is striking ever deeper inside Russia. Moscow is now losing a staggering 35,000 soldiers per month to combat with Ukraine’s forces, contributing to the roughly 1.4 million total number of Russians killed or wounded by Ukrainian forces. Meanwhile, Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy infrastructure are putting pressure on its exports, which fell by 7 percent in April even as revenues generated from oil and gas sales climbed due to Iran war-related supply constraints.

 

“The stoicism and fatalism of Russian soldiers must be wearing thin,” King’s College professor Sir Lawrence Freedman told The Economist. “If the Russians have nothing to show for their efforts, I would not be surprised if in some places things start crumbling.” Yet, if Russia’s soldiers remain stolid, the Russian people are beginning to buckle.

 

“Something in the air has changed in Russia,” the Carnegie Endowment’s Alexander Baunov ascertained last week. “Now even loyalists complain about the mounting restrictions and repression, and once-upbeat businesspeople are now despondent.”

 

The Russian people, Baunov contends, increasingly chafe at the restrictions on their liberties imposed on them in pursuit of a battlefield victory that now appears to be unattainable. “Military growth no longer means increased income and opportunities,” he noted, “negative growth in the first months of 2026, judging by the commander-in-chief’s somber tone, amounts to a retreat.”

 

The outbreak of war proper in 2022 forced the various elite groups to unite in order to survive. Now the uncertainty over the war’s outcome is causing cracks in the regime’s foundation and ceiling, and the entire edifice is subsiding. Even if it survives, it will no longer look like it used to.

 

Looking back at Spencer’s criteria, they appear far more applicable to Putin’s Russia than Trump’s USA. Moscow does not have “freedom of action” on the battlefield. It has lost the ability to dictate the tempo of events. Its economy is shrinking now following several years of war-driven growth. If Baunov is right, the regime’s “political cohesion” is visibly eroding. Russia does not have the requisite “strategic leverage” over Ukraine’s foreign partners necessary to force them to sacrifice Kyiv. And Moscow’s ability to “sustain power” while degrading Ukraine’s is in doubt. Given Kyiv’s growing global prestige as the world leader in indigenous defensive drone technology, Ukraine has arguably eclipsed the Kremlin’s geopolitical influence.

 

Even those who are certain that Donald Trump has lost the Iran war would struggle to convince dispassionate observers that Iran is in anything resembling the position Ukraine presently occupies. Until they can, all the talk of how the president has led America into defeat should be taken with a grain of salt.

The Empire of Baloney

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, May 11, 2026

 

An item from NBC News: “U.S. and Iran exchange fire near the Strait of Hormuz; Trump says ceasefire still holds.” Wha? “The attacks highlighted the fragility of the ceasefire in the area around the Strait of Hormuz ....”

 

An item from the Wall Street Journal: “Muted U.S. Response to Iranian Attacks Deepens Gulf Fears About Cease-Fire.” Fears about what? More WSJ:“The efforts to play down the attacks came as the Trump administration tried to protect a fragile cease-fire and keep peace talks moving forward.”

 

In the words of that great philosopher Jules Winnfield: “English, m----------r! Do you speak it?”

 

A ceasefire is what you have when the firing has ceased. There is no fragile ceasefire that “still holds” between the United States and Iran—we are in a shooting war. There’s no ceasefire—there is firing. A good deal of it. Donald Trump may no longer be threatening (let’s not forget!) war crimes and genocide, but it’s only Monday, and no one knows what the week will bring. I don’t think there probably is much of a market for media apologia from your favorite correspondent, so I’ll try to keep this part brief: There is a real challenge for reporters and editors, opinion columnists, and the poorly trained monkeys who evidently write the headlines over at nbcnews.com when it comes to covering Donald Trump and his grim, grubby little band of slavering sycophants, which is that it is difficult to write about people who simply lie about everything all the time, from the minor to the major, changing their story from moment to moment, saying the first thing that comes into their minds or whatever it is they think will get them through the next two minutes. The difficulty is in striking a balance between implicitly adopting the assumptions of the people who are lying to you (who you know are lying to you, and who know that you know are lying to you, and you know that they know that you know, etc. ad literal nauseam) and writing as though you were always performing a real-time fact-check in the background of whatever reporting it is you are trying to do or whatever argument it is you are trying to make.

 

And so we end up with reporters writing about the possibility that a ceasefire that does not exist will cease to exist, with legal reporters and analysts tugging at the nuances of the administration’s superficial and entirely thoughtless legal pretexts without acknowledging that they are pretextual, carefully considering the “qualifications” of nominees to high office who are reality-television grotesques and dancing bears from cable “news” programs, economic writers who studiously ignore the fact that National Economic Council director and ghoul-Muppet Kevin Hassett has been transmogrified into the intellectual version of whatever kind of lobotomized “—doodle” it is you get when the non-poodle part is Walther Funk.

 

It ain’t easy, I know.

 

Every now and then, I have a podcast conversation or a panel talk with a straight-news reporter who isn’t supposed to share his opinions about the stuff he covers, exemplifying a long and proud tradition of journalistic hypocrisy, and I’ll say something that is obviously true, e.g., “J.D. Vance is a throne-sniffing Luciferian gargoyle who would sell his beloved Mawmaw into white slavery if he thought it would move him a quarter-inch closer to the presidency,” and the reporter will do that thing where someone nods and says “No” at the same time and can’t help but laughing a little bit and says, “Well, I don’t know that I would put it exactly like that. ....” Or, less colorfully (if I must), when I characterize something the president or one of his toadies has said as a “lie,” and the reporter puts on his best Very Serious Man of Washington face and goes off slightly diagonally, insisting that the statement was offered “without evidence” or that it was “bluster” or “hyperbole” or whatnot.

 

But a lie is a lie is a lie is a lie is a lie.

 

That’s important for people in the journalism business, of course—if you can’t write or say that a lie is a lie, or if you feel compelled to treat an obvious lie as though it were something other than an obvious lie, then you really can’t do the work of journalism, whether you are an opinion-and-commentary guy or a straight-news reporter—but, more than that, it is important for us as free men and women in our roles as citizens in a self-governing republic. You can run a fiefdom on deceit, a kingdom on lies, and an empire on baloney, but you cannot long maintain a free society under the rule of law without a reasonably high baseline of honesty in the public conversation. Right now, we have a situation in which federal judges have decided that they can no longer assume that the lawyers serving the executive branch are not simply lying to the courts in their filings and statements. (The legal mumbo-jumbo for this is the “presumption of regularity.”) Once you lose that, you don’t get it back. Trump right now is trying to transfer $10 billion from the federal government to his personal bank account, and much of the commentary treats with strange respect the fiction that this is a lawsuit in which the president is, in effect, suing himself, if you take that “unitary executive” stuff seriously.

 

(Where is William Gaddis when we need him?)

 

The governments of free societies are based on consent, and there is no consent without trust. Trump is, of course, a pathological liar in his own right, but what is arguably worse is that he makes telling the most risible, shameful, and obvious lies a condition of serving in his administration, which is easy enough for a soulless wretch such as J.D. Vance, who already has lowered himself below the possibility of degradation, but consider how thoroughly association with Trump has corrupted—or revealed the corruption in—figures such as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Thune, and Tom Cotton. 

 

Words matter. Some words take the form of arguments. Some take the form of promises. Some take the form of lies. And some take the form of equivocation. It is better to be direct.

 

English: Do you speak it?

 

Words About Words

 

Note to the former Department of Defense: I will cut you.

 

The U.S. Department of War (Except When It’s in Iran or When We Need Some Legal Ass-Coverage In Which Case It Certainly Is NOT a War) is winning one arms race, i.e., the weaponization of irritatingly stupid acronyms. Behold the “Presidential Unseal and Reporting System for UAP Encounters,” or PURSUE.

 

Seriously: I will cut you.

 

In Other Wordiness ...

 

Slate: “Does John Roberts’ Whites-Only Childhood Home Explain the Supreme Court’s Callais Ruling?”

 

Clowns. Shameful stuff.

 

And Furthermore ...

 

Mrs. W. is a highly educated and literate woman but not one typically given to literary flourishes of the sort for which her husband has a weakness. So when I texted to ask for an update on the children the other day and her answer contained both the words “shenanigans” and “antics,” I knew it was time for an in-person appearance.

 

Economics for English Majors

 

When we talk about competition in economics, we tend to talk mainly about competition among producers and among sellers: We talk about how firms such as Amazon and Walmart work to maintain competitive prices, we wonder how American companies are supposed to compete with subsidized or protected competitors in China or the European Union, and we celebrate the role of competition in achieving economic efficiency and providing consumers with lower prices and more choices.

 

And that’s all true. But we also compete—often in a much more significant way—as consumers.

 

One of the stress-inducing aspects of what we call, for lack of a better word, globalization is that Americans (and local consumers everywhere) compete more directly with buyers from around the world than they did a generation ago. You can see this most dramatically illustrated in the case of limited-edition products or goods that are by nature produced in relatively small numbers.

 

Thirty years ago, a guy looking to buy a Rolex in Dallas was mostly competing with consumers who lived within easy driving distance of the local Rolex dealer, which typically would have a selection of most models in stock and for sale at the authorized-dealer price. But the rise of Internet-enabled global commerce means that the same guy in Dallas is now competing with every potential buyer everywhere in the world who wants that same watch, which produces some perverse results: absence of stock at authorized dealers and prices on the secondary market that far exceed authorized-dealer prices, meaning that buyers are left to pay two or three times the notional dealer price for secondhand goods. (There is an Audemars Piguet watch boutique that I have popped my head into a few times over the years that is fully staffed up and that has never, as far as I have seen, had any inventory in stock for sale.) It’s the same with limited-edition sneakers or Ferraris and things like that—but it also is the case with non-exotic goods such as jet fuel and houses and workers.

 

The increase in home prices, owing in no small part to barriers to construction in the markets where the jobs and opportunities are most abundant, has led to a growth in investor-owned rental properties, with private-equity funds and financial firms buying up single-family homes and operating lucrative rental businesses. This has produced a great deal of angst and rage among would-be homebuyers and the politicians who are sensitive to them, but, so far, no one seems to be listening very carefully to the market, which is saying: We need to build more houses in Austin, Boston, Silicon Valley, and other places where people want to live. The same firms that are investing in rental businesses presumably would invest in building new houses and selling them if it were as lucrative, but it isn’t—at least in many markets at this time. If you want to make housing more abundant, then the thing to do is to make housing more abundant. More is more.

 

The same holds true with firms that complain about a lack of workers in fields such as construction trades and other skilled blue-collar work. There isn’t a shortage of would-be workers in these fields, any more than there is a shortage of would-be agricultural workers or would-be hotel-room cleaners: The problem is that would-be employers are not offering sufficiently high wages for these jobs. “Americans just won’t do these jobs!” comes the cry from the farm lobby or the hotel industry, but that is not quite right—Americans won’t do those jobs at the wages the farmers and hoteliers wish to pay. The economic arguments for turning a blind eye to illegal immigration are particularly vexing: If you cannot run a profitable business without systematically breaking the law, then you don’t have a business at all, properly speaking—you have a criminal enterprise. If a hotel cannot operate profitably while paying market wages, then the problem isn’t maids and porters who do not wish to work for sub-market pay—the problem is to be found in economic conditions peculiar to that industry.

 

The same politicians who tax and regulate the crap out of every business from cosmetologists (2,100 hours of education required in Iowa) to plumbers (in many states, becoming a master plumber involves more years of education than going law school) rarely if ever stop to think about how these costs could put downward pressure on wages, to such an extent that otherwise law-abiding businessmen become habitual criminals when it comes to labor and immigration law. But we pile up costs on businesses and then talk as though the problem with the hotel industry is that people who clean rooms are getting paid too much.

 

On both sides of the transaction, we tend to talk as though the other party had all the power: The argument for minimum-wage laws and mandatory employer-provided benefits is based on the assumption that workers don’t really have much choice and have to take whatever the bosses are offering them, which not only isn’t true for highly skilled and in-demand workers but also is true for less-skilled workers, as anybody who has ever tried to hire a babysitter (ahem) can tell you: The minimum wage where I live is $12.77, but good luck finding childcare at that rate unless you want to leave your children in the care of hobos. Similarly, we often talk about producers and retailers as though they had unilateral price-setting power, e.g., the old saw about companies “simply passing on costs” to consumers, which is far from a simple thing when consumers have choices, especially in highly price-sensitive markets such as fast food or inexpensive clothing.

 

Global shipping has become much more efficient over the course of several decades. That means that consumers have a lot more choices and, in many cases, enjoy lower prices for manufactured goods. It also means that it is a lot easier to redirect a gallon of jet fuel or gasoline from North American consumers to Asian or African consumers if that’s what the market wants. That’s why even with our splendidly productive domestic energy industry, Americans are not sheltered from shocks to the petroleum markets—which is only fair, since the current big ugly shock was caused by Americans, who are really smart and creative as entrepreneurs and absolute blockheads as voters.

 

In 2024, a rare Star Wars doll sold for more than $1.3 million. It wasn’t a one-of-a-kind, but pretty rare: About 25 are thought to exist. But scarcity is a real thing, and, from that point of view, everything from a gallon of gasoline to a pair of socks is a limited edition—and, at some margin, the economics are going to reflect that. If you want more, then think twice before you vote for politicians who get in the way of more.

 

In Closing

 

I don’t think I would have liked the late Ted Turner, though I did once spend a few happy hours wandering around one of his vast properties in Montana. Turner may have had some silly political views but, God bless him, he put his money where his big ol’ mouth was when it came to land conservation. And I suppose somebody was going to create the 24-hour news cycle if he hadn’t got to it first. Turner was the best friend the American bison has had since Charlie Goodnight, with 51,000 shaggies roaming more than 2 million acres. As legacies go, that is magnificent.

The Left Suddenly Cares Very Little About Misinformation

By Noah Rothman

Monday, May 11, 2026

 

‘There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy,” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz once insisted. That was hardly a marginal outlook within the Democratic Party. “Misinformation can erode people’s confidence in elections,” Connecticut’s deputy secretary of state, Scott Bates, agreed, “and we view that as a critical threat to the democratic process.” He and his fellow Democratic officials warned that false political narratives are often promoted by hostile foreign powers, and they can lead the unstable to violently lash out at their surroundings. In their report on the “crisis of disinformation and misinformation” in America, Joe Biden’s advisers pledged to “counter the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories that can provide a gateway to terrorist violence.”

 

These and other Democrats were wrong to contend that Americans’ civil rights were contingent, but they had reason to worry that those who are susceptible to suggestion are liable to act on their delusions. Today, however, that urgent mission has fallen out of fashion on the left. The self-appointed disinformation police have disbanded, and the mechanisms that were once devoted to countering false but popular narratives have sputtered to a halt. It’s no coincidence that this sudden outbreak of lethargy coincides with the growing appeal of misinformation among Americans on the left.

 

It was not surprising that Donald Trump’s third attempted assassin was, by his own admission, inspired by some of the many spurious but trendy allegations of misconduct that orbit around him. What was surprising was that CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell thought the president had to respond to his would-be killer’s deranged ramblings.

 

“What’s your reaction to that?” O’Donnell asked Trump after she read from a portion of the accused’s manifesto alleging that Trump is a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor.” In an earlier age, the alleged gunman’s actions would have sufficiently discredited him. Perhaps O’Donnell wanted Trump to address the charges against him because they are common currency in the forums in which the activist left cocoon themselves. Popular or not, though, the conclusions to which Trump’s latest attacker was wedded are unsubstantiated.

 

The notion that that the president is a “pedophile” is a faith-based assertion predicated on the presumption that Trump just had to have a more sordid relationship with Jeffrey Epstein than all publicly available evidence indicates. ABC News agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle a defamation claim after anchor George Stephanopoulos falsely claimed that a civil court had found the president liable for rape when the jury in that case concluded the opposite. The accusations of treason, we must assume, stem from the left’s attachment to the assertion that Trump colluded with Moscow to get himself installed in the presidency, the extensive and unproductive investigations into those allegations apparently notwithstanding.

 

It would be inaccurate to say that these uncharitable assumptions about the president are exclusive to the left’s unrepresentative fringes. They are not. Indeed, rank-and-file Democrats are increasingly receptive toward paranoid conspiracism. That phenomenon was illustrated by a recent poll in which one in three self-identified Democrats said that they don’t even believe that the president was singled out once again for assassination at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at all. What’s more, that same survey found that a staggering 42 percent of Democratic respondents believed the bullet that grazed Trump’s ear in Butler, Pa., was a carefully orchestrated act of political theater.

 

Perhaps Democratic institutionalists gave up on the fight against false narratives because that campaign had become inconvenient. After all, misinformation is what the base craved. There may be no better example of that tendency than the degree to which the left has become susceptible to any claim that implicates Israel in a misdeed.

 

In a New York Times op-ed over the weekend, Democratic Representative Josh Gottheimer accused his fellow Democrats of knowingly subordinating their scruples to their need to curry favor with a “small but vocal and growing segment of the political left making opposition to support for Israel a new litmus test.” Conveniently for Gottheimer, the Times proved the truth of his accusation the following day when it published an op-ed accusing Israel of training dogs to rape Palestinian detainees.

 

That’s an extraordinary claim that needed more evidentiary support in the paper of record than a handful of links to outside publications and social media posts. But for a certain cohort, perhaps the very activist class of which Gottheimer warned, no evidence is needed to publicize the notion that Israel is engaged in genocide, either by slaughtering the Palestinian population wholesale or by starving it into submission. The lack of evidence in support of these claims or the marshaling of obvious fabrications designed to advance the left’s preferred fictions about Israel never seem to generate much pushback from those who once policed the malicious untruths that came from the right. Why?

 

We all know why. The initiatives designed to anathematize right-wing myths had nothing to do with civic hygiene. They were political operations aimed not at contributing to the sum of human knowledge but, rather, advancing the interests of one political party. Now that it is that very political party that is beholden to its own preferred falsehoods, the threat posed by misinformation has suddenly become far less acute.

 

The Democrats may have forgotten just how committed they were as a party to policing the dangerous spread of misinformation. If they were ever honest about the motives fueling that crusade, if it wasn’t merely a cudgel they used to bludgeon the American right, then Democrats have an obligation to crack down on their own purveyors of disinformation. Until then, average Democrats will have to navigate a blinding fog of misinformation on their own.

Ignoring the Debt Won’t Make It Go Away

National Review Online

Tuesday, May 12, 2026

 

Fifteen years ago this week, John Boehner, the new Republican House speaker at the time, laid down a gauntlet in the pitched battle over raising the debt ceiling.

 

“To increase the debt limit without simultaneously addressing the drivers of our debt — in defiance of the will of our people — would be monumentally arrogant and massively irresponsible,” he told the Economic Club of New York on May 9, 2011. “It would send a signal to investors and entrepreneurs everywhere that America still is not serious about dealing with our spending addiction.”

 

Boehner’s demand in the same speech that any spending cuts be in the “trillions, not just billions” set the stage for a standoff that consumed Washington for months and rattled financial markets around the world.

 

Today, by any objective measure, the nation’s debt challenges are far more daunting than they were back in 2011, when the Tea Party generation of Republicans swept into power. In that year, in the wake of a major recession and President Obama’s costly response to it, the value of the debt held by the public had grown beyond $10 trillion for the first time ever. As of the end of this March, it has more than tripled to over $31 trillion. In 2011, debt reached 66 percent of economic output (significantly higher than the 39 percent in 2008). It has now exceeded 100 percent of gross domestic product for the first time since World War II. But there is really no parallel between the fiscal situation then and now.

 

In the 1940s, the U.S. was facing the temporary costs of responding to a short-term world-historical event. Once the war was over, the economy boomed and military spending retreated to peacetime levels. As a result, the debt was cut in half within a decade and continued to decline into the 1970s. In contrast, the U.S. now has a growing retirement-age population that is living longer and absorbing more benefits than ever before. On top of this, instead of returning to pre-Covid levels once the pandemic subsided, bloated spending has simply become baked into the budget. Thus, unlike the post-war period, the U.S. is on track to maintain massive and growing deficits for as far as the eye can see. For all the publicity surrounding them, Elon Musk’s DOGE efforts did nothing to change this trajectory.

 

What is particularly worrisome is that even though the debt crisis is much worse than it was in 2011 by any objective measure, the issue of containing the federal debt is barely detectable on the nation’s political radar. News of the latest dismal milestone of debt reaching World War II levels barely garnered attention. A combination of the progressive pull in Democratic politics and the populist transformation of Republican politics has put us in a situation in which neither major party is interested in even discussing containing the debt — let alone doing the heavy policy lifting required to address it. These days, talk about reforming entitlements — by far the biggest driver of our national debt — is likely to be greeted with as little enthusiasm on the right as it is on the left. Radical proposals from Democrats like the “wealth tax” would come nowhere near closing the fiscal gap if directed solely toward that purpose, but are being pitched as a way to fund vast expansions of the welfare state anyway.

 

For this reason, the problem is only going to grow worse. At some point in the next several years, debt will exceed the World War II record. By the time today’s newborns graduate college, it will reach 150 percent of GDP. The current elevated levels of inflation and interest rates will pale in comparison to what Americans of that generation are likely to experience.

 

Unfortunately, ignoring the problem won’t make it go away.