The Right to Remain Silent

By Abe Greenwald

Thursday, February 26, 2026

 

There’s been a lot of data published in recent years about Americans increasingly breaking off social relationships because of political differences. That’s a sad reality of our over-politicized and polarized culture. A new Pew study, however, gets at a different but related trend. A majority of Americans have stopped talking politics with at least someone. From the poll: “A rising share of Americans (56%) say they have stopped talking to someone about political or election news, whether in person or online, because of something they said. This is up from 45% who said the same in 2024.”

 

I’m sure many will disagree, but this strikes me as a good sign.

 

Instead of severing friendships with people who don’t share your politics, just talk to them about other things. Remember other things?

 

It would be nice, in fact, if the whole country took a big step back from recreational punditry and activism. The development that Pew reports is hopefully a move in that direction.

 

To willingly stop talking about politics with someone, you have to reduce your investment in being right or changing minds. Unless you’re a professional ideologue or an elected official, that’s healthy. For years, too many people have been willing to die on too many hills.

 

It could, of course, be the case that Americans are eliding political conversations with certain people because they fear being judged or ostracized for their opinions. But I’m encouraged by the reasons that those polled gave for abandoning political discussion with particular individuals. “Nearly equal shares of U.S. adults say concern about making things uncomfortable (58%), a lack of knowledge about the news (57%) or a lack of interest in talking about the news (57%) has kept them from discussing it with others.”

 

Let’s hear it for all three reasons. The first indicates an acknowledgement of social considerations. The second shows a degree of modesty about one’s knowledge. And the third, perhaps most important, reflects the long-buried secret that there’s more to life—and even sometimes more interesting things to discuss—than politics.

 

We’ve all encountered those Americans who want to talk about nothing but the latest political outrage. They’ve become obsessed with the notion that political awareness and debate are now a matter of life and death. Sometimes they claim that what they’re worked up over has transcended the political realm altogether: “This is bigger than politics,” they say, and then they blabber on about politics.

 

It’s revealing that such people are overwhelmingly on the opposite side of the political spectrum from whomever is serving as president at the time. In other words, they’re not driven by a fascination with ideas or policies but rather by their animus for who’s in power. And when their candidate gets into the White House, they become the ones who don’t want to be bothered by feverish political obsessives in the minority.

 

We’ve survived Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden, and we’re surviving Trump once again. Maybe it’s beginning to dawn on at least some Americans, both right and left, that there is no final political battle to be won and that constantly living as if there is can be exhausting.

Continental Drift: The EU and the Fate of the Atlantic Alliance

By Andrew Stuttaford

Thursday, February 19, 2026

 

When images of JD Vance and his wife waving American flags appeared on a large screen at the Winter Olympics’ opening ceremony, some in the crowd booed. Asked about this, Kaja Kallas, the former Estonian prime minister who is now the European Union’s top diplomat, replied, “We have heard a lot of not-so-nice words from the United States regarding Europe. . . . Our public also has a pride, a European pride.” Vance’s boss is indeed extremely unpopular across the Atlantic — and a conflict over an ICE unit’s presence in Milan did not help. No matter that the unit, Homeland Security Investigations, has nothing to do with deportations and regularly sends officers to international events for security purposes.

 

On the brighter side, the U.S. Olympic team was well received. And Vance is hardly the only American politician to be at the wrong end of European jeering. In 1985, the 40th anniversary of the Allies’ victory in Europe — a victory, if I recall correctly, in which the U.S. played a part — President Reagan spoke to the European Parliament — and was heckled and booed by a noisy minority of its members.

 

Reagan understood what the U.S. needed to do with respect to Europe back then. Trump and Vance show far fewer signs of knowing how to deal with Europe now. That said, whether or not one agreed with all of it, Marco Rubio’s well-crafted speech to the Munich Security Conference on Valentine’s Day, above all in tone, pointed to a future in which Europe and the U.S. could work with each other in a new geopolitical era.

 

With Ukraine in flames and China on the prowl, that had better be right.

 

Trump, a fierce critic of Reagan’s approach in the 1980s, seems to have little grasp of Cold War realities, but the current contests are more than a sequel. The United States faces a wider range of adversaries than we did back then — one of which, China, may prove to be the most formidable we have ever seen. That must mean a change in focus for the U.S., as Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz evidently realizes, given his observation in Munich that the U.S. is “adapting . . . at a rapid pace” to the new geopolitical landscape. But the U.S. has to confront these challenges at a time of deepening fiscal woes. Our debt-to-GDP ratio in the 1980s peaked at around 50 percent: It’s now approximately 125 percent.

 

Trump was correct to press far harder than his predecessors to “encourage” European NATO to start paying its way. His tactics have been rough, but they’ve been working. However, a good bit of what he has done, from trade wars to the Greenland adventure to seeming too cozy with Putin, has seriously undermined European perceptions of American benignity, trustworthiness, and, by extension, the reliability of its nuclear umbrella. This will weaken NATO, an alliance that has served the U.S. well for the better part of a century, but Europe’s response may make the damage even worse than it was already bound to be.

 

***

 

The reason, as so often over there, is the EU. To understand why, go back to its ancestral history. The initial premise that eventually led to the creation of the EU’s forerunners (a premise with which the U.S. agreed) was that binding Western Europeans closer together would reduce the chance that they would either resume fighting or succumb to Soviet attempts to divide and conquer. Additionally, there were one or two in Paris who dreamt about a united Western Europe regaining the great-power status that its old empires had thrown away. With Britain content to watch from outside, France could take the helm.

 

The formation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951 established a “common market” in coal and steel by France and West Germany as well as Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg (“the Six”). This was governed, supervised, and policed by transnational institutions, the predecessors of the EU’s Commission (executive branch), court, intergovernmental council, and parliament. It was hoped that putting coal and steel — key resources in waging war — under a single transnational authority would be a giant obstacle to any renewed hostilities between its members.

 

In 1957, the Six signed the Treaty of Rome, under which the ECSC was supplemented by Euratom (nuclear power) and the European Economic Community (EEC). The latter was given the task of developing a customs union and a far broader common market in goods and services. Both shared a parliament and court with the ECSC, but each had its own councils and commissions. Some of the Six had been wary of ceding more power (plans for a European Defense Community were dropped), and the reach of the EEC was broad but shallow — until the European Court of Justice stepped in. In two cases in the early 1960s, the court’s creative judges interpreted the Treaty of Rome in a fashion and with consequences that must have surprised most of those who signed it. Those judgments paved the way for the young bloc’s march toward the “ever closer union” referred to in the treaty’s preamble. It is a march that, despite recurrent dramas and many slowdowns, has, with the qualified exception of Brexit, never broken Brussels’s greatest taboo, which would be to go into reverse, however rational, convenient, or popular doing so might be.

 

Jean Monnet, the most influential of the EU’s founding fathers, would have been frustrated by the frequently sluggish pace of that march, but he would have been delighted by the commitment to its irreversibility. After two world wars, Monnet believed that Europeans could not be trusted with their own countries, but he also recognized the depth of their attachment to them. The project to subordinate the national to the supranational would have to be top-down, step-by-step, often opaque, and implemented, as Monnet once put it, by “zig and by zag.”

 

“We decide on something, leave it lying around, and wait and see what happens,” commented Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s prime minister, in 1999. “If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don’t understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.” Juncker later became president of the EU’s Commission. One reason the single currency was established was to bind the states that signed up for it even closer together — forever. No provision is made for a country to abandon the euro: “There is no turning back.”

 

The fundamental flaws in the euro’s construction, most of which arose out of the fact that its primary rationale was political rather than economic, were widely predicted to lead to a crisis, and so they did. But, according to the teleology of ever closer union, that was not necessarily a bad thing. “I have always believed,” Monnet wrote in his memoirs (1976), that “Europe would be built through crises, and that it would be the sum of their solutions.” To borrow a phrase widely attributed to Jacques Delors, one of the wilier Commission presidents, a “beneficial crisis” could speed up the EU’s integration. Speaking in 2010, in the middle of efforts to save the euro, one of Delors’s successors, José Manuel Barroso, declared, “A crisis can accelerate decision-making when it crystallizes political will. Solutions that seemed out of reach only a few years or even months ago are now possible.”

 

Some crises are so grave that they overwhelm the reluctance of even the less enthusiastically “European” (to use the EU’s preferred adjective) member states to hand over even more power to Brussels. That was the case during the eurozone crisis, after the pandemic, and again after the “full” Russian invasion of Ukraine.

 

***

 

Could Donald Trump, an unlikely deus ex machina, be triggering the next beneficial crisis? Despite decades of propaganda from Brussels and its evangelists, any shared European identity felt by the EU’s citizens is dwarfed by their national loyalties, which are regarded with some suspicion by many EU leaders today. This is why they embrace the EU’s essentially post-democratic structure and advocate censorship; it’s why they attack Euroskepticism with hysterical shrillness (without the euro, there will be war and so on), and why they’re keen to take advantage of the opportunity that Trump has given them to portray him, MAGA, and, to a degree, even America as a foe of “Europe.” There’s not much substance to the “Europeanism” that Brussels likes to peddle. It’s an ahistorical, artificial construction, filled with platitudes. By contrast, anti-Americanism adds something spicier to the mix. Nothing unites like an enemy.

 

The idea that a united Europe should rival the U.S. has been around since before the Treaty of Rome, as alluded to above, but the failure to achieve that ambition led to envy. Arguing for a single currency in 1965, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, France’s finance minister (and future president) grumbled about the “exorbitant privilege,” a telling choice of words, that the dollar’s reserve status gave the United States.

 

That envy, souring not infrequently into animosity, lives on, as demonstrated by Brussels’s repeated looting — lightly disguised as fines for alleged breaches of this regulation or that law — of American high-tech companies. But most of it revolved around issues that resonate primarily with the Brussels elite, not those who live under their rule. Unfortunately and understandably, some of Trump’s actions have angered “ordinary” Europeans, even, in cases such as Greenland, supporters of parties normally sympathetic to him.

 

As Kallas’s forced-sounding references to “Europe” suggest, Brussels and its allies will do everything they can to use Trump to scare its citizens — “subjects” would be a better word — into greater loyalty to the EU at a time when there is the prospect of severe turbulence ahead. The outlook for the bloc’s economy, long burdened by overregulation, is bleak, and its industrial sector, ground down by Brussels’s green zeal, might be on the edge of disaster, with even higher levels of Chinese imports poised to add another twist of the knife. The heavy indebtedness of several large eurozone countries only makes matters worse. France’s debt-to-GDP ratio is 117 percent; Italy’s is 137 percent. For some extraordinary reason, France’s President Emmanuel Macron is leading the charge to have the EU borrow more money.

 

Meanwhile, a good number of European leaders have concluded that the country that elected Donald Trump twice cannot be relied on as their ultimate military guarantor (they would have done well to think about that during the Biden and Obama presidencies, too), and that they will have to do more to provide for Europe’s defense than hike spending to meet Trump’s demand du jour. The manner in which Trump has provoked this change of sentiment has been reckless, graceless, and unnecessarily counterproductive. Ironically, if the result is a more equal, and therefore intrinsically healthier (if probably trickier to manage) partnership between the U.S. and a Europe that is, short of a massive nuclear attack, able to defend itself (there is talk of expanding the European nuclear umbrella, but that can go only so far), that will be something to be celebrated.

 

To be successful, such a transition will take time and therefore patience — not a quality for which the Trump administration is well known — as well as money. In many cases, finding the latter may involve painful budget cuts elsewhere, a task that will be even harder if the economy turns down. Poland and the Baltic states have dramatically boosted their defense spending, and Germany seems set to join them, but other countries are dragging their heels. One suggestion, inevitably, is that the EU itself should turn to the bond markets specifically to help finance the increased spending, but Germany and other members of the EU’s “frugal” group do not agree.

 

This process would become yet more difficult in the event of a significant populist breakthrough somewhere in the bloc, starting, maybe, with France. Macron’s term ends next year, and there is a reasonable chance that his successor will come from the populist-right National Rally, a party that has been too close to Russia in the past, and perhaps not only then.

 

***

 

There is also a clear danger that, in trying to turn this geopolitical moment into a beneficial crisis, the EU will put its “ever closer union” ahead of broader Western interests. It’s no surprise that Ursula von der Leyen, the Commission’s president, has been taking the opportunity to push for further reductions in the number of areas of EU decision-making where a national veto has survived. That is bad enough, but her call for the EU to “activate” its mutual-defense clause is worse. It risks a possibly chaotic overlap with NATO’s Article 5 and, even more worrying, could be the opening shot in a campaign to insert the EU into NATO. Von der Leyen has also proposed that the EU enter into closer security collaboration with the U.K., Norway, Iceland, and, eh, Canada — all non-EU NATO members. Germany’s Merz argues that this would not be a replacement for NATO but “a self-supporting, strong pillar within the alliance.”

 

We’ll see, but even setting up a separate bloc (let’s dispense with that benign-sounding “pillar”) within NATO at a very testy time looks uncomfortably like the preamble to a divorce, especially as organizations based in the EU are looking to declare “independence” from the U.S. in other areas, from payment systems to digital infrastructure, lest they be weaponized against them. Before Greenland, such fears would have sounded nuts; now they merely come across as overwrought. Sadly, the effect of these and other measures, such as a possible “Buy European” policy, described as necessary to protect against dangerous dependencies, could operate against the improved efficiency and deregulation that, it is widely agreed, even in Brussels, are urgently required if the EU is to build the competitive economy it will need to be more than just a regulatory superpower.

 

And how credible is a deregulation campaign spearheaded by an institution that gets so much of its clout, within Europe and beyond, from regulation? It’s no coincidence that the EU’s prescriptions for making it easier to do business within its realm tend to be more integration — more Brussels — not less. It’s akin to handing matches to an arsonist. And then there’s the small matter of the EU’s climatist “green deal,” an economic, political, and geopolitical catastrophe. It has been trimmed here and there, but if the EU is to flourish, it must be shredded. There are few signs that it will be.

 

As von der Leyen continually makes clear by word and by deed, “ever closer union” remains sacrosanct. Giving fresh life to the idea of a multispeed EU in certain circumstances, the Commission plans to allow member states to proceed at their own pace, but only toward ever closer union. There is still no reverse gear.

 

And without a reverse gear, a major crisis, whether external or internal or both, is coming. To assume that it will be beneficial is to make a very big bet.

J.D. Vance’s Doomed Quest to Balance the Budget

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, February 27, 2026

 

In the recent State of the Union, Donald Trump boasted that no illegal immigrants have entered the United States during the past nine months. This is, like most of what Donald Trump says, untrue.

 

There are places all along the border where you can go first thing in the morning, as I have, and sit in your car nursing a cup of gas station coffee while watching illegal immigrants enter the United States. Some of them go straight to the Border Patrol to get arrested and make asylum claims, and some do not. The Border Patrol arrested about 6,000 at the southern border in January—but that does not mean that they got them all, which they almost certainly did not. What the Trump administration apparently meant to say was that, of the illegals arrested, the Border Patrol did not voluntarily allow any to proceed into the country, as they sometimes have in the past. But even that is misleading: Illegals arrested and detained at federal facilities are, from time to time, released for a variety of reasons: pending asylum claims, overcrowded lockups, etc.

 

It simply is not true that there are no new illegal immigrants entering the United States. There most assuredly are: Some crossing the border, while others are entering legally and overstaying their visas. Some of them are Central American construction workers, some of them are aspiring fashion models working without permits, some of them are Irish bartenders, and some of them are—whatever. It’s a crowd.

 

I do not think that the cretins and malefactors who compose the Trump administration stay up at night worried about questions of epistemology, but it is worth asking: If it really were the case that there were absolutely no new illegals coming into the United States—how would we know?

 

Trump’s incoherent State of the Union address on Tuesday featured his usual stroke-victim diction and his patented blend of stupidity and dishonesty. Fact-checking his claims is laborious, because he speaks almost exclusively in simpleton’s superlatives, and it also is pointless, inasmuch as the people who most need to know the facts are not much inclined to listen to them, being, as they are, members of an especially tawdry and shameful cult. Suffice it to say that inflation was not at record levels when Trump assumed office this time around, and it is not plummeting today—it was high when he came in and remains elevated. Foreign direct investment in the United States is in fact down, not soaring by trillions of dollars. There is no such thing as a “second lady,” with apologies to Usha Vance, who probably could have married a doctor. Some of the speech could have used some context: I admire Michael Dell and his generosity, and it is true that he made computers in his dorm room at the University of Texas—but mainly he has made them in China, a fact of corporate history that ought to be of some interest to the Trump gang.

 

The competition is considerable, but it may be that the dumbest and most dishonest claim of the night was that J.D. Vance’s newly announced fraud commission will, if it does its job, produce a “balanced budget overnight.” Vance is as contemptible a specimen as American public life currently has to offer, but he is relatively new to the cult game, and he has here foolishly taken on a high-profile task that can be evaluated quantitatively. The projected deficit for 2026 is $1.9 trillion on its way toward more than $3 trillion per annum over the coming decade. For scale, this year’s projected deficit will amount to about 5.8 percent of GDP. Which is to say, to balance the budget by means of fraud prevention, fraud in federal programs would have to amount to an industry right around five times the combined global size of all those AI-enabling data centers we hear so much about.

 

Good luck with that.

 

I, for one, will be very surprised if the annual deficit or the projected 10-year deficit is $1 smaller when Trump leaves office than it is today. Rising spending is a good bet (ask that guy who bet his life savings against DOGE) and so are rising deficits. If Vance manages to balance the budget by means of policing fraud, then I will eat my favorite J.W. Brooks hat and post the video on The Dispatch for your entertainment.

 

But I am confident that millinery work is safe.

 

Like the administration’s immigration claims, its fiscal claims are preposterous—obviously so, if you take a second to think about them.

 

The administration’s current strategy for policing Medicaid fraud (which is a real thing) in Minnesota is withholding some federal reimbursement payments, amounting to $259 million—not billion, certainly not trillion. That’s back-office monkey business, not a fraud investigation. If you have good reason to believe that you have, say, $1 billion worth of Medicaid fraud, then what you need to have next is a federal fraud indictment and a trial in which $1 billion worth of Medicaid fraud is documented in the course of putting the fraudsters in prison for a long time. That, and not political showmanship, is how you do the actual work of policing fraud.

 

There have been fraud prosecutions and there will be more—as there should be—but the dollar numbers involved do not amount even to a rounding error on the federal deficit: We are right now talking about cases involving millions, not billions or trillions of dollars. Perhaps they will add up to a few billion. We are not balancing the budget on a few billion dollars, or a few hundred billion—and the balanced budget is Trump’s stated metric of success, not mine.

 

Undertaking those fraud investigations and prosecutions is hard and generally thankless work, which is one of the reasons the feds do not do as much of it as they should. But the Trump administration can, without very much effort, inflict economic damage on Democrat-leaning states such as Minnesota and California while forgoing the hard work of investigating and prosecuting most of the alleged fraud, at least some of which is imaginary. If we are to be so cruel as to pretend that J.D. Vance is numbskull enough to believe the baloney that comes out of his own mouth or Trump’s, then we should have fraud cases amounting to just about 5.8 percent of GDP, give or take. The notion is, of course, absurd.

 

But, then, so is the fact that Donald Trump is president of these United States.

The Disgraceful Ravings of Candace Owens

By Rich Lowry

Friday, February 27, 2026

 

Joe McCarthy was famously undone by the rhetorical questions at a 1954 congressional hearing, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

 

If the same queries were directed to Candace Owens at such a forum, she’d sail on unperturbed — since she has no idea what “decency” means.

 

The conspiratorial podcaster has embarked on an investigative series on Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk. In this context, “investigative series” means a loosely stitched together collection of sewerish falsehoods and innuendo smearing Erika Kirk.

 

Perhaps Owens can follow up with a franchise devoted to sullying the reputations of the widows of assassinated husbands throughout U.S. history. Are we sure that Mary Todd Lincoln was as innocent as she seemed? Didn’t Jackie Kennedy act kind of weird in Dallas? What did Ida Saxton McKinley know, and when did she know it?

 

The narrative and commercial logic always suggested that this is where Owens was headed. It didn’t make any sense to libel Turning Point USA as being connected to the murder of its leader and founder — as Owens has for months now — without implicating its new leader, Erika Kirk. And, as the shock value of her anti-TPUSA campaign wore off, Owens had to stoke outrage and interest anew with something even more perverse.

 

And what is more demented than portraying the wife of the victim of a shocking assassination as a black widow?

 

Whereas most have seen in Erika Kirk a Christian woman bearing up under an intolerable burden and stunningly forgiving the alleged murderer of her husband, Owens purports to see Clytemnestra, the mythical Greek figure who betrayed her husband, Agamemnon, upon his return from the Trojan War.

 

The title of her series is “Bride of Charlie.” Get it? Like the “Bride of Frankenstein.”

 

As a so-called investigator, Candace Owens is like Perry Mason if the fictional attorney had been a schizophrenic high on crack. Her method is to pile will-o’-the-wisp connections one on top of another, often buttressed by flagrant factual mistakes, and insist that if she’s debunked, it just shows how she must be on the right track.

 

Her mantra is that “we don’t know-know, but we know” — in other words, her malicious, irrational intuitions are superior to actual knowledge backed by facts.

 

She now says that “Erika Kirk should be dragged into a police precinct for questioning,” and anyone who disagrees is “a full-blown fraud.” According to Owens, “the amount of evidence that is now piling up I would say, against Erika Kirk, is almost akin to an NBC Dateline episode.”

 

Usually, conspiracy theories spring up around assassinations that are hard to fathom or have some ambiguity about them. It is clear that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing JFK, but it’s understandable that there have been questions about the event. It is the depraved achievement of Candace Owens to make a bonkers true-crime drama, with all sorts of mysteries and twists, out of an open-and-shut murder case. Kirk’s accused killer, Tyler Robinson, had a motive, left a trail of damning evidence, and confessed to multiple people. To dismiss all this and call for Erika Kirk to be frog-marched into a police station is so mad that it makes Owens’s conviction that both the moon landing and dinosaurs are fake look well-grounded by comparison.

 

It is a symptom of our time that such malevolent buffoonery is rewarded with a huge audience. It is impossible to discredit Owens because she is not in the credibility business to begin with. In the attention economy, denunciations are just as useful as praise, especially if a media figure is posing as a brave truth-teller — so brave that, in this case, she’s willing to drag through the mud a mother of two who saw her beloved husband murdered less than six months ago.

 

It’s not just that decency is not necessary in the Candace Owens business model; it would be an obstacle.

Are the Rich Good for Democracy?

By Timothy Sandefur

Thursday, February 26, 2026

 

Hating the rich has been a popular pastime since democracy was invented. The ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes even played on this fact in his comedy Ecclesiazusae, written four centuries before Christ, in which the idealistic Praxagora proposes building a utopian community in which “there will no longer be either rich or poor,” but “all property [will] be in common.”  When a friend asks her “But who will till the soil?” Praxagora unselfconsciously replies: “The slaves.”

 

The rhetoric hasn’t improved much since. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani declared on Meet the Press last summer that he doesn’t think “we should have billionaires,” echoing Sen. Bernie Sanders—who has often said that “billionaires should not exist”—and Southern California looters who in 2020 stormed through Beverly Hills chanting “eat the rich.” Indeed, the one exception to the left’s professed concern about “erasure” seems to be that it is fine with eliminating the economically successful.

 

Stepping up to defend the wealthy is Northwestern University law professor John O. McGinnis, whose new book Why Democracy Needs the Rich argues that economic elites are uniquely positioned to “infuse democracy with fresh perspectives” and “reinvigorate community life” at a time when the values of discourse seem especially threatened. The wealthy, he argues, are able to fund the cultural and community resources that help build a healthy democracy, and their philanthropy helps ensure that voters are better informed than they otherwise would be. 

 

Better still, McGinnis argues, the rich are particularly likely to bring a pro-freedom perspective to democratic debates. Citing examples from the Koch Brothers to Elon Musk, McGinnis argues that the wealthy “have incentives and the self-image to put the virtues of the market system before the public,” and turn it in a more libertarian direction.

 

That’s certainly a pleasant thought. Economic freedom is an essential value of American democracy (which, after all, was basically established by small businessmen fed up with being over-taxed).  Libertarians and conservatives have often longed for a world in which business owners can stand up for their rights against demagogic politicians who seek to raid the pockets of the productive to buy political power for themselves. In her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand even envisioned the world’s industrial titans leading a revolution to vindicate every person’s right to personal and economic liberty.

 

But the reality is quite far from Rand’s—or McGinnis’—fantasy. Historically speaking, the wealthy have not tended to be vigilant champions of liberty, but a mix of idealists and opportunists, of brilliant and foolhardy, of malevolent and benign, just like the rest of mankind. And while, like everyone else, they have something to contribute to democratic society, there’s no evidence that the rich as a whole are more likely to secure the liberal values McGinnis seeks to defend.

 

On the contrary, even Adam Smith observed in The Wealth of Nations that business leaders “seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” What he meant was that such leaders are driven by rational self-interest to seek ways to protect their market share against potential competition from outsiders—at the expense of liberty. This can take the form of anything from tariffs to occupational licensing laws, all of which make it harder for new startups to enter the market. This is not because they’re uniquely sinister—on the contrary, they’re nearly always sincere in thinking their pet schemes are somehow good for the public. But economic success is so hard to attain and easy to lose that those who rise to the top tend to desire stability. And stability is anathema to the free market, which is by definition dynamic. 

 

In an unhindered market, consumer desires can shift on a whim, transforming yesterday’s behemoth into tomorrow’s bankrupt. Just ask Blockbuster or Woolworth’s or A&P. That’s why big business is typically an enemy of laissez-faire, and is often the loudest voice in favor of regulations and restrictions which, although couched in consumer-protection language, actually “stabilize” the market in favor of themselves by blocking new competition. And even if that weren’t so—even if, as McGinnis naively claims, “today’s wealthy individuals” are “likely to have interests that align with innovation and disruption”—they’re legally obligated as corporate managers to preserve corporate advantages—which are not served by free market “disruption.”

 

Take the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA)—a federal law that empowered the nation’s largest companies to impose “codes of fair competition” on entire industries, setting minimum prices and imposing unnecessarily demanding quality standards. NIRA was deadly for small businesses. In the tire industry, for example, large companies like Firestone and Goodyear adopted a “tire code,” enforced by the federal government, that barred tire manufacturers from charging low prices. Given their domination of the market, the code had little effect on Firestone and Goodyear, but it wrecked smaller companies whose only hope of competing lay in charging less. The same thing happened to every industry in the country, as corporate lobbyists proceeded to create cartels governing everything from the production of chickens to the prices that mom-and-pop laundries could charge for pressing suits. Nearly all the nation’s industrial and agricultural leaders supported this cartelization precisely because arming themselves with the state’s power to exclude competition enabled them to improve their bottom lines. And with the notable exception of Henry Ford, none of America’s tycoons resisted NIRA in the name of “innovation and disruption.” Instead, they got on the bandwagon.

 

Or consider a more recent example: the International Interior Design Association (IIAD), a trade organization that lobbies for licensing requirements for interior designers—that is, state laws that require you to get government permission before you can advise someone on what color drapes to put in their living room. It’s hard to imagine a more harmless business, yet the IIAD—funded by influential interior-design businesses—has managed to persuade itself (and several states) that these licensing requirements somehow protect public safety. In truth, they only protect existing designers against potential competition, who can thereby raise their prices. 

 

Such examples give little confidence that the wealthy in general are supporters of free markets. But while McGinnis considers this objection, he dismisses it in a few blithe sentences that reflect a startling combination of overconfidence and fallacious thinking. “Such suppression of competition is unlikely in the context of a dynamic commercial republic that thrives on innovation,” he writes, because “a commercial republic naturally generates diverse interests—different factions—that do not align on policy. This diversity of interests helps prevent any single group, including the wealthy, from monopolizing power and stifling competition.”  Maybe so, but that begs the question, because “diversity” and “innovation” are exactly what existing business owners often try to destroy by colluding with government to impose legal restrictions so that they can “monopolize power.” It’s true, as McGinnis writes, that “the constant threat of market disruption disciplines corporate bureaucracies”—that’s just why corporate bureaucracies try so hard to persuade government to halt that very disruption, by stifling liberty. His sole argument to the contrary brings to mind the old joke about the man who, told a crime has just taken place, refuses to believe it because “that would be illegal.”

 

McGinnis’ argument therefore ends up in a “motte and bailey” fallacy. That term describes an argument in which someone argues for point A (a sensible and easy to prove point) and then claims that it establishes point B—a more dubious proposition which doesn’t actually follow.  Point A is McGinnis’ argument that the rich have something to contribute to democratic debate.  True enough; so do we all. But far harder to prove is point B: that the rich are likely to be committed to substantive liberal values like economic liberty, constitutional government, or freedom of speech. Some surely are; Charles Koch, for example, has long drawn the curses of the left due to his support for economic freedom and private property. But for every such example, there are a dozen counterexamples. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller helped fund the Prohibition movement and the Comstock Act. Millionaires and Hollywood stars fawned over Benito Mussolini. The Astors and Vanderbilts underwrote socialist journals such as The New Masses. And the Roosevelt and Kennedy families—wealthy champions of big government for generations—aren’t exactly known for supporting free markets.

 

There’s an old legend that F. Scott Fitzgerald once told Ernest Hemingway, “The rich are different from you and me”—to which Hemingway replied, “Yes, Scott: They have more money.” Hemingway was right. The wealthy, en masse, are still just people, with the same strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices, as the rest of mankind. Do they play a role in democracy? Obviously. Are they likely to defend freedom? No more, and no less, than the rest of us.

The Alito Vacancy

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, February 26, 2026

 

Of all the “big if true” garbage that floats around online on a given day, the hot rumor in legal circles that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is about to call it a career is among the biggest. Yuge, as the president might say.

 

It’s the “if true” part that’s a little sticky. Isn’t it always?

 

The logic behind the rumor is compelling and clear, enough so that even casual political observers will intuit it without needing further explanation. But the evidence that supports it is a slender reed even by the typical dismal standards of “big if true.”

 

The case that Alito is about to pull the ripcord rests almost entirely on the fact that his new book is set to be published on October 6. That happens to be one day after the court begins its fall term, which will greatly complicate any promotional tour that the justice might be planning.

 

Unless, of course, he intends to no longer be on the bench in October. Aha.

 

Before we pronounce this case cracked, though, consider a few things. One: Justices often release their books at moments that are less than optimal for publicity. Amy Coney Barrett’s book was published last September, just a few weeks before her day job would draw her away from promoting it. Ketanji Brown Jackson’s memoir was published in September a year earlier. Sonia Sotomayor’s 2014 memoir was released in early January, the middle of the term. All are still on the court, of course.

 

Two: For reasons of temperament and circumstance, Alito might not want an extensive book tour. The justice is “famously introverted,” David Lat writes at Bloomberg Law, and won’t relish having to gladhand hundreds of attendees at promotional events. Nor would he relish the security that a tour would require, I’d guess. Having authored the decision that overruled Roe v. Wade and stoked left-wing suspicions of political bias with his choice of, er, flags, his appearances are destined to attract protests—and threats.

 

Three: Nothing sells books like relevance. A sitting justice who doesn’t do PR might very well outperform an ex-justice who’s willing to barnstorm, as Lat notes that Barrett’s and Jackson’s works were both bestsellers while former Justice Anthony Kennedy’s was not. If Alito wants to move merchandise, clinging to the gavel is probably the canniest thing he can do.

 

Four: Per our own Sarah Isgur, he’s already hired clerks for several terms to come.

 

All told, the timing of his book release is thin gruel for retirement rumors. But combined with the fact that we’re eight months out from a midterm election in which Democrats’ chances of winning a Senate majority seem to grow by the day?

 

That makes things a little more interesting.

 

The case for retirement.

 

If not for Alito’s book, Clarence Thomas would be the more obvious target for retirement rumors. He’s a few years older than his colleague, has served on the court for much longer (14 years longer!), and has faced occasional health hiccups from which Alito has been spared. As the two most reliably right-wing votes on the court, it’s unthinkable that either man would want Democrats to be in a position to exert some power over their replacement.

 

But Thomas is less than three months away from becoming the second-longest serving justice in U.S. history and slightly more than two years away from becoming the longest-serving. It’s assumed that he’ll stick it out and go for the record, which makes Alito the only game in town for scenarios involving a pre-midterm court vacancy.

 

So let’s play along. The case for Alito retiring now is straightforward: If he waits, he risks making it difficult-to-impossible for Republicans to fill his seat with a conservative for the near- and possibly medium-term future.

 

It’s likely that Democrats will gain seats in the Senate this fall, and conceivable that they’ll gain control of the chamber. If Chuck Schumer ends up with a veto over Trump’s Supreme Court appointees, he and his caucus will likely refuse to fill any vacancy on the court before 2029. “Revenge for Gorsuch!” liberals will cry, remembering how Republicans held open Antonin Scalia’s seat in 2016 after Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to fill it.

 

Even if the Senate doesn’t flip in November, Republicans losing two seats and ending up with a 51-49 advantage next year will make confirming judicial nominees risky business for the GOP with Lisa Murkowski and (maybe) Susan Collins as the deciding votes. If Alito doesn’t retire now, in other words, he’s potentially stuck on the court until 2029.

 

But that seems optimistic, as no one would bet heavily at this moment on Republicans controlling the White House and the Senate after the 2028 election. Should Democrats retake the presidency, Alito would need to slog it out for four more years—and then potentially four more on top of that, as incumbent presidents usually win reelection.

 

Bottom line: If he’s determined to keep his seat in conservative hands, he can either quit in 2026 or he might need to serve until … 2037, when he’ll be 86 years old. (And there are no guarantees of Republican control in Washington then either!) Democrats learned a hard lesson a few years ago about elderly justices hanging on too long instead of stepping down when a like-minded president could successfully appoint their successor. Alito surely doesn’t want to replicate the Ruth Bader Ginsburg disaster.

 

“But what about election turnout?” you might say. “If he retires this summer and Republicans ram through a successor before the election, as they did in replacing Ginsburg with Barrett in 2020, Democratic voters will go ballistic. The expected blue wave might become a blue tsunami.”

 

In theory, sure, but I’m not sold. For one thing, Republicans did quite well in congressional races in 2020 after rubber-stamping Barrett and very nearly held onto the presidency. For another, Democrats’ enthusiasm to vote in November is already sky high such that there probably isn’t much room realistically for it to climb further. What sort of liberal has spent the past 13 months on the fence about Trumpist fascism but will tip over into apoplexy if the president gets to fill Sam Alito’s seat with another Alito-esque figure?

 

If anything, Alito not retiring after months of rumors to the contrary might be better turnout fuel for the left than a retirement would. It would remind Democratic voters that control of the Senate over the next two years isn’t just a matter of getting to investigate Trump, it’s a matter of getting to tie his hands when a court vacancy eventually opens.

 

There’s even a scenario in which Alito retiring this summer could boost Republicans’ enthusiasm to vote in November more so than Democrats’. Ed Kilgore recently recalled the so-called “Kavanaugh effect” that may or may not have helped the GOP to overperform in Senate races in the 2018: Democrats were so vicious in impugning Brett Kavanaugh during his own hearings, the argument goes, that outraged Republican voters showed up to the polls en masse to take revenge.

 

That theory is somewhat complicated, shall we say, by the fact that Democrats spanked Republicans in House races that year. But if you’re looking for reasons why Alito should exit stage right immediately, there you go.

 

The case against retirement.

 

Why might he want to stay on the court? Let us count the ways.

 

He’s not very old by SCOTUS standards, for starters. He’s also part of a right-wing majority that will likely persist until he does eventually retire, ensuring that he’ll continue to wield real influence over American jurisprudence for the rest of his career. It might frustrate him that he doesn’t exert the same leverage over outcomes that the court’s “swing voters,” Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts, do. But Alito retains enough sway to have written the majority opinion in the most momentous culture-war decision of the past 50 years.

 

That’s a pretty good reason to hang on, no?

 

There’s also a ruthless political case for him to stick around related to the turnout discussion above. If the GOP wants to use a court vacancy to goose voter turnout, an Alito retirement in 2028 makes more sense than an Alito retirement in 2026.

 

Sure, turning the next presidential election into a referendum on who should get to fill an empty conservative seat would be the highest of high-stakes wagers for Republicans. But it worked out well for them the last time it happened, in 2016. And the trajectory of Trump’s presidency and likelihood of an underwhelming J.D. Vance candidacy two years from now could leave the right desperate for ways to get the base excited to vote in the next cycle. “A red seat on the court will turn blue if you don’t” is a good one.

 

Although I suppose Alito retiring this year and Thomas retiring in 2028 would cover all bases.

 

The argument against Alito retiring now that interests me most is this, though: As an ideological matter, he might not want Trump to have a completely free hand in appointing his replacement. He’s a conservative, last time I checked, and his successor is unlikely to share his philosophy.

 

Recently when the prospect of a court vacancy was raised, a lawyer I know floated appellate judge Andrew Oldham as a potential nominee. Oldham is whip-smart, under 50, and earned a valentine last year from George Will for an opinion that refused to let the FCC, an executive agency, impose a fee on phone users on grounds that the power to tax rightly belongs to the legislature.

 

A stickler on separation of powers: Sounds good to me. But is that what the president wants, or expects, from a “Trump judge”?

 

Ditto for Oldham’s professional affiliations. Not only is he a member of the Federalist Society, he delivered the keynote address at the group’s 2025 National Lawyers Convention. For most of the last 45 years, that would have been a top-flight credential for a Republican SCOTUS nominee.

 

Not anymore. “I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations,” Trump whined last year after a lower federal court blocked his tariff authority. He went on to describe Leonard Leo, the organization’s longtime adviser to the White House on judicial nominees, as a “sleazebag.” If the president felt that way then, imagine how he feels now that FedSoc luminaries Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett have helped blow up his tariffs once and for all. Or how he’ll feel if and when they nuke his executive order purporting to deny birthright citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants, which is more likely than not.

 

It’s true that Trump has continued to nominate Federalist Society members for lower-court vacancies but I suspect that has to do with his comparative disinterest in those positions and the fact that there simply aren’t enough MAGA zombies in right-wing legal circles to fill every opening on the bench. He’ll react differently to a seat on the Supreme Court. The president doesn’t care a whit about originalism or credentials or, lord knows, impartiality. He cares about outcomes, and will undertake to find a nominee in his second term whom he believes will deliver the outcomes he desires.

 

He won’t want Oldham. He’ll want Aileen Cannon or Emil Bove.

 

Is that whom Justice Alito wants to be replaced by?

 

Maybe he does! He voted with the minority last week to uphold the president’s egregiously lawless tariff regime, after all. “Does anyone believe Thomas, Alito, or Kavanaugh would have voted to uphold unilateral Clinton, Obama, or Biden tariffs—of this magnitude?” pundit Matt Lewis asked afterward. The question answers itself.

 

If Alito wants a reliable Republican vote to succeed him on the court, the time to quit is now. It’s hard to imagine the GOP majority in the Senate saying no to the president, even if his nominee is unfit, with a national election mere months away. Trump momentarily has carte blanche to appoint the most reliable Republican vote he can find, which means the odds for a Justice Cannon or Justice Bove will never be higher than they are right now.

 

But if Alito wants to boost his chances of having a reliable conservative vote succeed him on the court, the time to quit is … later.

 

The gang of four. Or two. Or one.

 

The only way Trump will choose a conservative over a crony for a SCOTUS vacancy is if a majority in the Senate forces him to.

 

It could, in theory, happen even if Alito retires this summer. A “gang of four” composed of Lisa Murkowski, Thom Tillis, Mitch McConnell, and Susan Collins could hand the president a menu of potential court nominees whom they find acceptable and demand that he order from it if he wants their support. Oldham and other originalists would be on the menu, Cannon and Bove wouldn’t.

 

But, as I’ve said, I doubt that that’s realistic months out from a midterm. Murkowski and Tillis might be willing, as the latter is retiring and the former has gone full “maverick,” but it’s hard to imagine McConnell risking his legacy of painting the federal bench red by roadblocking a Republican Supreme Court nominee. And Collins, who’s on the ballot in November, would face a revolt at home in Maine among her right-wing base if she dared thwart god-emperor Trump on a matter as consequential as a SCOTUS seat.

 

If Alito wants a conservative to replace him, he might actually be better off waiting until the Senate is slightly less red. Next year, if the chamber is 51-49 in favor of Republicans, Murkowski and a partner to be named later—if one can be found—would be in the same position as the gang of four I described. (Collins is an obvious candidate if she’s still in office.) The “gang of two” could dictate terms to the White House on replacing Alito.

 

But what if Democrats reclaim control of the Senate this fall? Wouldn’t that kill any attempt to replace Alito over the last two years of Trump’s term?

 

Maybe. Probably. But not definitely.

 

If it’s 51-49 in favor of Chuck Schumer’s caucus, John Fetterman would have veto power over any Trump nominee. By voting with his party, he could keep Alito’s seat open for two years; by voting with the GOP, he could create a 50-50 tie for J.D. Vance to break. In that scenario Fetterman would be a “gang of one” with leverage to demand an ideological compromise on Alito’s replacement. No Cannons, no Boves, maybe no strict conservatives like Oldham either—but he might be open to supporting someone who resembles a traditional Republican nominee more so than the type of henchmen who tickle the president’s fancy.

 

That’s a good outcome for Justice Alito if he’d prefer to have his seat filled by someone like Brett Kavanaugh rather than Aileen Cannon, no?

 

And yes, I realize that Democratic voters would want to tar and feather Fetterman if he spoiled the party’s bid to keep Alito’s seat open by agreeing to a SCOTUS compromise with Trump. Guess what, though: Democratic voters already want to tar and feather him. The odds of him winning his party’s Senate primary in 2028 are about the same now, I’d guess, as Liz Cheney’s odds were of winning her House primary in Wyoming after January 6. Fetterman is either going to retire after this term or he’s going to switch parties and run as a Republican.

 

Either way, he’ll have the opportunity in a 51-49 Senate to become a “gang of one” next year if he wants to be.

 

The fascinating and potentially ominous thing about an Alito retirement is that it will reveal to what extent there remains any meaningful constituency for conservative jurisprudence among the president (giggle), Republican (and would-be Republican) members of Congress, and Alito himself. Each of the three has influence they can use to improve the odds that whoever lands in the justice’s seat is someone in the Scalia mold. Given how far the right has fallen civically, I’ll be surprised if any of them ends up using it.

Yet Another Transgender Shooting Suspect

National Review online

Friday, February 27, 2026

 

In 2023, Audrey Hale, a 28-year-old female who identified as male, shot and killed three children and three adults at the Covenant School in Nashville before being killed by police. A 2019 shooting at a Denver STEM school involved a transgender-identifying individual. The would-be assassin of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh identifies as transgender.

 

On February 10, Jesse Van Rootselaar, 19, killed a parent and half-brother before going to the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia, Canada, killing eight more people, injuring 27 others, and committing suicide. On February 16, Robert Dorgan, 56, who underwent gender-reassignment surgery in 2020, opened fire on family members, killing an ex-wife, an adult son, and a third victim before committing suicide. Now authorities are investigating links between a trans-identifying person who shot at a New Hampshire Border Patrol agent over the weekend and an attack last year on Border Patrol agents in Vermont; the latest incident may also be part of a campaign of violence from the so-called “Zizian cult,” several members of which identify as “transgender” and are currently on trial for violent crime. Despite efforts to hush up discussion about this topic, some crime researchers have found that trans-identifying individuals are responsible for active shootings at a rate twelve times their share of the larger population.

 

This phenomenon of trans violence should no longer be cabined from polite discussion by the pretense that discussing the sociological facts puts trans-identifying people in danger. Similarly, we must bury the unstated assumption of liberal media that trans-identifying individuals are members of a victim group, and so all transgressions committed by them should be seen as morally understandable, perhaps non-culpable reactions to oppression. Investigators must be able to do their work without fear of political censorship.

 

The phenomenon of trans violence requires careful study in order to disentangle causes from correlations. Transgender identification itself may be correlated strongly, in males, with acutely depressive and violent tendencies. It may also be that violent people are especially vulnerable to modern society’s reigning egregores, the collective insanities that travel around, licensing aberrant behavior. It may simply be that transgenderism is overdiagnosed in order to deal with a cluster of other mental problems that then go under-addressed, only to fester while the patient tries to fix everything by changing genders.

 

It also may be that violence is planted deep in transgender ideology itself. The ideology makes a promise it cannot keep, that people can become something other than what they were created to be. It tries to make good on this promise through drugs and surgeries, which can render the patients infertile and incontinent, and condemn them to a lifetime of further surgeries to prevent deadly infection. Most sinister of all, advocates of transgender ideology tend to justify and valorize suicide. Teens are taught by ideologues to coerce unwilling parents and guardians into accepting transgenderism with the threat of suicide. Or worse, those who do commit suicide are venerated as heroic martyrs to intolerance, allowing the inwardly depressed to use self-murder to afflict their imagined enemies and be honored in death. It became a cliché of the gender-ideology movement to spread the inflammatory claim that anyone questioning its metaphysics or consequences “wants trans kids dead.”

 

Whatever the case, we won’t learn more if the topic of trans violence remains taboo.