Something Like Sabotage

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

 

One way to understand the home stretch of the midterm campaign is as an experiment to see how much s--t Reaganite conservatives are willing to eat in the name of partisanship.

 

For example: The core conviction of anti-anti-Trump Republicans who’ve hung on through 10 years of postliberal depravity is that the party is bigger than the man. Politics is about the team, they’ll tell you, echoing the soon-to-be former Mrs. Ken Paxton. Whatever qualms one might have about the guy with the 37.5 percent approval rating, it’s the team that’s on the ballot this fall, not Donald Trump.

 

Meanwhile, the president is on the campaign trail telling everyone who’ll listen to behave as though he’s on the ballot.

 

And he’s right. Trump is the team, as anti-anti-Trumpers well understand but refuse to admit. From its leadership to its populist base, the GOP has become a party that admires and aspires to autocracy. With occasional exceptions, congressional Republicans are a “team” the way, say, Vladimir Putin’s party in Russia is a “team.”

 

Another example: Last week the vice president was asked how he defines socialism. “Socialism is about prioritizing workers” in theory, J.D. Vance replied, but “I don’t know what the term means anymore [to the American left]. I think in reality, what it actually means in the American context, is that you want to replace American workers with foreign workers, and you want boys to play in girls’ sports.”

 

There’s a reason Vance didn’t want to delve too deeply into what socialism is and isn’t. Marxists traditionally define it as the people, in the form of the state, gaining ownership of the means of production from capital. Can you guess why the vice president might be reluctant to define it that way?

 

A more colloquial notion of socialism treats it as a byword for welfare entitlements. If the state is redistributing taxpayer revenue to politically favored constituencies in the form of financial benefits, that’s socialism. Care to theorize why Vance might not like that definition either?

 

Even his point about “replacing” American workers with foreign workers contradicts libertarian-flavored Reaganite orthodoxy about the virtues of legal immigration. A bigger U.S. population means more businesses started, more job opportunities created, and more prosperity for all. Vance and his postliberal cohort are willing to sacrifice some unspecified share of that prosperity to guarantee the social preeminence of America’s white majority.

 

Put it all together and what the Trump administration is offering is what we might call, uh, nationalist socialism, a tasty turd sandwich for partisan conservatives with Election Day less than three weeks away. And so many members of the GOP “team” have already swallowed it that, when you ask Americans whether the government should be able to take a stake in U.S. companies at the president’s discretion, Republicans are now more likely than Democrats to agree.

 

Even the socially conservative voters who’ve formed the “values” pillar of the Reaganite coalition for the past 50 years have gotten the shaft recently. At a rally on Monday, Trump spent a few moments rhapsodizing about Ohio Sen. Jon Husted’s large hands and powerful manly glutes. Of all the ways in which the president has disappointed the right since January 2025, who could have guessed that he’d also eventually come out as bi?

 

Reaganites have a lot to feel demoralized about. But they should feel enraged about what’s happening in Ukraine.

 

Without warning.

 

Kyiv is in the midst of a blow-up with the White House over its attacks on Russian oil refineries.

 

The president wants American voters to believe that those strikes, not his idiotic war in Iran, are principally responsible for expensive fuel and rising inflation. So he’s demanding that Ukraine stop targeting the refineries immediately—while not demanding that Russia stop targeting Ukrainian energy facilities like power plants in return.

 

Instead the White House has proposed a ceasefire in which only refineries are off-limits to the two sides, a convenient compromise for Moscow given that Ukraine has exactly one refinery and it hasn’t functioned since 2022. Trump is doing what he usually does when he feels anxious about his power slipping, in other words: He’s picking on an ally whom he feels comfortable bullying rather than confronting a major power over whom he has less leverage.

 

On that note, two curious things have happened to the Ukrainian war effort in the past 48 hours. Kyiv has suddenly stopped receiving intelligence from its “partners” alerting it when Russian missiles are inbound. And the Starlink satellite system on which its military heavily relies for operations has begun to fail above certain speeds needed for drone operations.

 

Coincidentally, Trump envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff allegedly warned the Ukrainians last week that the U.S. might stop sharing intelligence if they didn’t stop bombing Russia’s refineries. Also coincidentally, Starlink is a subsidiary of SpaceX, the company led by Trump crony and GOP mega-mega-mega donor Elon Musk. Musk said a few days ago that, by continuing to hit Russian refineries, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “has gone too far.”

 

Could this be as bad as it looks? Have America’s two most powerful postliberals spitefully conspired to sabotage Ukraine’s defense, knowing how much needless death will result?

 

Maybe not. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that it’s not unheard of for U.S. intelligence to fail to detect the launch of some types of Russian missiles. Ukraine’s own foreign minister said information is still being shared between our country and theirs and attributed the lack of warnings about inbound missiles to “a special type of weaponry which was used by the Russian side.” Trump himself claimed yesterday that cooperation on intelligence is going.

 

However: Both men have motives to lie about this, the president because he doesn’t want Americans to know what he’s up to and the foreign minister because he doesn’t want to further antagonize the White House. (Team Trump changed its mind after cutting off intelligence to Kyiv once before, you might recall.) And the Times notes that, while it’s not unusual for the U.S. to fail to spot a Russian missile launch, it is unusual for it to happen two nights in a row—as was the case on Monday and Tuesday.

 

That suggests the intelligence was deliberately withheld. Zelensky himself seems to think so, tweeting repeatedly over the past few days about the lack of missile warnings from allies in order to call global attention to what’s going on.

 

Throttling Starlink.

 

The Ukrainians also see foul play in Starlink’s conveniently timed “glitch” and they aren’t being coy about it. “Obviously, this action cannot be a coincidence and is associated with the current political situation,” one Zelensky adviser observed. Another former adviser to the defense ministry speculated that “SpaceX likely took these measures at the request of the Trump administration.” Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, tweeted directly at Musk: “Are you playing politics with your products again? As your European customers, we are watching you.”

 

A Ukrainian official told the Financial Times that “logistics at the frontline and middle strikes are badly limited” due to the issues with Starlink and that, once again, Ukraine received no warning of what was coming. Bear in mind that Starlink doesn’t operate above Russia, so throttling the service isn’t designed to hobble Ukraine’s ability to target sites inside the country like refineries. It’s designed to hobble operations inside Ukraine itself—that is, Ukrainians’ ability to defend their own territory.

 

In a tweet on Wednesday, Musk appeared to blame Trump and the Pentagon for any problem with the system.

 

The icing on the cake is that Ukraine has actually honored Trump’s moronic, lopsided “energy ceasefire” over the last two days. It hasn’t struck any Russian refineries even though Moscow has continued targeting Ukrainian electrical power, blacking out the capital last night. “Russia has never before shown such ostentatious disrespect toward the United States,” Zelensky tweeted of Moscow’s defiance, appealing to Trump’s vanity as Putin makes a mockery of his ceasefire. “Peace can only come through strength, and we ask America to remember this principle of Reagan’s,” he pleaded.

 

To all appearances, the United States is punishing Ukraine for refusing to participate in a Trumpist pre-midterm PR stunt about why gas is expensive by kneecapping its ability to resist the Russian war machine. Which, in a way, means this relationship has come full circle: The president’s most notorious encounter with Zelensky during his first term also involved withholding U.S. military aid if Ukraine didn’t help him win an election, after all.

 

“If Trump had been running [the] United States back in 1939, I think he would have been Hitler’s ally,” an intelligence source told The Economist about the state of play in Kyiv. “And on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto, Witkoff and Kushner would have built a posh hotel complex.” That’s the team that Reaganite partisan conservatives, the cheapest dates and biggest suckers in politics, have chosen to remain part of.

 

Trumpism: A case study.

 

One thing to say about this national disgrace is how it ties together so many different strands of Trumpism.

 

There’s the president’s undying postliberal favoritism toward Russia, of course, immune as ever from any information that might challenge it. When critics reminded him this week that our friends in Moscow (and Beijing) are on the other side of America’s war with Iran, he shrugged. “I see so many comments from the Radical Left Morons and Lunatics that China and Russia are helping the ‘wonderful’ Islamic Republic of Iran,” he wrote. “If they are, it’s at a very low level, but I don’t believe they are at all. They have too much to lose, and we would know about it, and know about it very fast!”

 

They have nothing to lose by helping Iran. The president will never confront Russia. “Some of Trump’s closest outside advisers have privately wondered what Putin has done to so thoroughly enthrall the president,” The Atlantic reported this week. “Trump’s respect for the Russian leader appears undiminished despite the humiliating struggles Putin has faced during the Ukraine invasion.” For Putin, aiding Iran—and flouting the “energy ceasefire” that the White House demanded in Ukraine—are costless exercises.

 

Sabotaging Ukraine’s defense also puts the White House on the wrong side of U.S. popular opinion, another Trumpist specialty in his second term. A new YouGov survey asked Americans whether they sympathize more with Ukraine or with Russia; the split went 57-4, with the president’s own party at 46-6. Other polling from earlier this year showed just a third of the American public felt confident that Trump will make good decisions about the war versus two-thirds who doubt it. Many Republicans have also lost faith in him on this subject, in other words.

 

On any given issue, if there’s a position that’s likely to piss off a majority, trust the White House to find it. Ukraine is no exception. That’s another little gift to the “team” from its leader as the election approaches.

 

There’s corruption afoot in the betrayal of Ukraine as well, as there is in virtually all elements of Trumpist foreign policy. And of course there’s the customary cronyism from tech oligarchs in the person of Musk, reflecting the president’s preference for granting power over policy to wealthy interests personally beholden to him rather than to law and institutions.

 

One would think that the richest man in history might insist on letting market forces, not political interests, dictate how Starlink is used; if Ukraine and its European patrons are willing to pay for the service, that’s all Elon should need to know. Instead the system appears to have been throttled to punish Ukraine for its military strategy, signaling to every potential Starlink customer on Earth that some American might wield veto power over how they use the product if they’re foolish enough to buy it.

 

The same goes for the U.S. defense industry writ large, in fact, as the White House has also allegedly threatened to stop selling weapons to Europe for Ukraine’s use if Kyiv doesn’t stop attacking Russian refineries. All of this is quintessential Trumpism, strong-arming foreign partners with no thought whatsoever for how doing so might steer them away from cooperating or transacting with the United States long-term.

 

Oh, and sabotaging the Ukrainians is also strategically stupid, the calling card of Trumpist foreign policy. Ukraine has stopped targeting Russia’s refineries—yet it’s still being punished by the White House. Russia continues to pummel the country with missile strikes, daring Ukraine to resume its attacks on the refineries—yet the White House has done nothing to discourage Moscow. The same geniuses who thought Iran would surrender in a day and wouldn’t dare close the Strait of Hormuz have concluded that the One Neat Trick that might end the Ukraine war is pressuring the victim, not the catalyst, to lay off.

 

All told, I’d say this episode reflects postliberal foreign policy perversions better than any other chapter of Trump’s presidency, including the aberrantly neoconservative-ish Iran war. Postliberalism’s admiration for authoritarians and disdain for Western liberals boils down to a moral preference for the bad guys. That’s what we’re seeing this week in Ukraine (although not just in Ukraine). We’re the bad guys.

 

Zelensky’s dilemma.

 

And so Zelensky and his team have a new strategic dilemma: What should they do about America’s treachery?

 

One option is to write Trump off once and for all. Start blasting Russia’s refineries again and keep using social media and other outlets to shame the White House for sabotaging Ukrainian self-defense. It’s an opportune moment politically to do so, with millions of Americans paying attention to the news as they make up their minds on how to vote. A well-timed groundswell of public outrage egged on by Democrats in the campaign’s final weeks might spook a White House that’s already nervous about the midterms into hastily reversing its new policy.

 

Defiance would amount to Ukraine declaring political war on Trump. It’s risky, but the risk come January is likely to be considerably smaller than it was for the past two years. Kyiv will probably have a new ally in the U.S. government in the form of a Democratic House and possibly another in the form of a Democratic Senate. The next time Trump tries to bully Ukrainians, Congress won’t merely have some leverage to try to stop him, it’ll have the nerve.

 

On the other hand.

 

Trump will be president until 2029. If I understand him like I think I understand him, he won’t be chastened by a Democratic blowout at the polls. To the contrary, if he comes to believe that Ukraine’s defiance contributed to a blue wave—and remember, he talks himself into believing all sorts of things—he’ll want revenge during the time in office he has left. And he’ll have ways to exact it: Even a hostile Congress can do only so much to limit his authority as president over the executive branch and over the military as commander-in-chief.

 

Again, no matter what cowardly anti-anti-Trumpers might tell you, there is no GOP “team.” There’s only Trump. And so if the president decides to cut all U.S. aid to Ukraine next year and the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate pass a bill to extend it, have no doubt that there’ll be more than enough Republican votes in both chambers to defeat any attempt to override his inevitable veto. Some of those votes might even come from Republicans who quietly agree with Democrats on the merits of the issue, but oh well. There is no team.

 

Perhaps, then, the better play for Zelensky is to cooperate with Trump instead of defying him. As painful as it will be for Ukraine to hold its fire against the enemy’s refineries while Russia pounds Ukrainian energy infrastructure, doing so will put immense political pressure on the president domestically and internationally. The moral inequity will become ever more glaring and inexplicable: Why isn’t America punishing Russia for making a joke of Trump’s ceasefire? Why is Trump so pitifully weak when it comes to Putin?

 

That is to say, if Ukraine’s goal is to maximize public outrage in the United States toward Trump before Election Day, it might do better by continuing to play its part as the dutiful, obedient client than by repositioning itself as an angry critic of America’s government. Ongoing obedience would deny Trump any pretext to punish the Ukrainians during his two years of lame-duckery (which, I concede, isn’t to say that he won’t try anyway). And it might boost Democrats’ election chances by exposing the president’s lie that the Ukraine war, not the Iran war, is supposedly to blame for high gas prices. What will be left of that claim if the Ukrainians stop targeting Russia’s refineries over the next three weeks and diesel is still sky-high on Election Day?

 

The Ukrainians have spent the better part of five years outwitting the authoritarian leader of an illiberal major power. Now they’re going to need to outwit another. The good news for them is that this one is a lot dumber than the other.

Why Hamas Cheered Navi Pillay’s Nobel Peace Prize

By Hillel C. Neuer

Thursday, October 15, 2026

 

It’s not every day that an Islamist death cult celebrates the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, but that is exactly what happened on Friday evening when Hamas welcomed the selection of Navi Pillay as “an important step toward international justice.” Why is Oslo’s humanitarian hero winning applause from an Iranian-backed terror proxy that massacred families and kidnapped children?

 

I have dealt with Pillay in Geneva since she arrived here in 2008 as the United Nations high commissioner for human rights. Over 18 years, I watched her turn the language of universal rights into a weapon aimed relentlessly at the Jewish state.

 

It began with a welcome. In September 2008, my team at U.N. Watch publicly saluted her struggle against South African apartheid. Her story deserved respect. But already then, her first act as U.N. human rights chief was to champion Durban II, the planned Geneva follow-up to the notorious 2001 conference in South Africa, where an ostensible campaign against racism became a festival of antisemitism.

 

At Durban I, thousands of radical activists marched against Israel and Jews, some carrying signs praising Adolf Hitler. Jewish students were threatened. The Arab Lawyers Union handed out cartoons of hook-nosed Jews. Copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious antisemitic forgery, were openly distributed. At the NGO Forum, Israel was declared a “racist apartheid state” and accused of “genocide.” In the Durban outcome document, the Jewish state alone was singled out as a perpetrator of racism. Rep. Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, called it “the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews” he had witnessed since the Nazi era.

 

Pillay wanted to rehabilitate Durban. We wanted to prevent a repeat. Alarm bells started ringing when Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan regime was appointed chair of the preparatory committee, and Iran the vice chair.

 

Months before the April 2009 conference, Pillay was already rebuking the U.S., Canada, and Israel for threatening to boycott, dismissing their “all or nothing” approach, and warning against “pretexts for inaction.” In the end, Canada, Italy, the U.S., Germany, Australia, and the Netherlands were among 10 countries that boycotted.

 

When Durban II finally opened, Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then president of Iran, was the first head of state to speak. He used the Geneva podium to denounce Israel’s existence. France, along with many other European delegations, walked out of the room in protest. Pillay defended Ahmadinejad’s right to speak, and urged against more countries pulling out of the conference.

 

That same year, after Hamas and Israel fought a three-week war, the U.N. Human Rights Council condemned Israel and created a commission of inquiry. Pillay recruited Richard Goldstone to serve as chair, with her staff doing most of the work. The inquiry’s September 2009 report was a bombshell, accusing Israel’s political and military leaders of a “deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.” It called for action by the International Criminal Court, and for criminal proceedings in foreign courts under universal jurisdiction.

 

The report was a travesty of justice. A year and a half later, in a Washington Post op-ed, Goldstone himself retracted the core charge.

 

It later emerged that Pillay’s office had hired Grietje Baars, a radical Marxist law professor, to write key sections of the report. Before joining the investigation, Baars had already described Israel’s operation as a “massacre.” While working on it, Baars signed a declaration denouncing Israel’s “apartheid regime.” The next year, in 2010, Baars joined the Hamas-backed Gaza flotilla campaign as a European spokesman.

 

Under Pillay’s leadership, this is what passed for fact-finding at the U.N. I later submitted a legal complaint to the secretary-general about Pillay’s hiring of Baars. I received no reply.

 

Pillay herself “strongly condemned” Israel’s use of force as “disproportionate” as soon as the fighting began. Her verdict preceded the examination. By contrast, joining the U.S. and Canada, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated that Israel had a right to self-defense and that responsibility for the conflict lay “clearly and exclusively” with Hamas. Even U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes spoke out against “the reckless and cynical use of civilian installations by Hamas.” Not Pillay.

 

In January 2009, after years of rocket attacks from Gaza, Israel imposed a naval blockade to prevent weapons reaching Hamas by sea. In May 2010, Turkey’s terrorist-linked IHH organized a flotilla which set out to breach it. When Israeli commandos boarded its lead ship, the Mavi Marmara, they were attacked by militants wielding iron bars, clubs, chains, and slingshots.

 

Within hours, Pillay declared that Israel treated international law with “perpetual disdain,” denouncing the blockade as “inhumane and illegal.” Yet the subsequent Palmer inquiry appointed by the U.N. secretary-general concluded that the naval blockade was lawful—a legitimate security measure to prevent weapons from entering Gaza by sea. Again, Pillay’s verdict came before she examined the facts—or the law.

 

By 2014, Pillay had endorsed the charge that when Palestinian men beat their wives, it’s Israel’s fault. “Women with husbands explained that the dire economic situation and the pressures of the occupation have made men more violent because they have lost their ability to provide and protect — two essential elements of manhood in a traditional patriarchal society,” Special Rapporteur Yakin Ertürk wrote in 2005, following her visit to Palestinian territories. “As men become stripped of their manhood, women become the shock absorbers of the crises as targets of domestic violence.” Nine years later, Pillay reported to the U.N. that this analysis “remains valid.”

 

After leaving the U.N. human rights office in 2014, Pillay dropped any pretense of distance. In 2020, she signed a campaign titled “Sanction Apartheid Israel!” In June 2021, she joined a letter blaming Israeli “domination and oppression” for the previous month’s war, which began with Hamas firing rockets at Jerusalem and other Israeli cities.

 

A month later, the president of the Human Rights Council—Nazhat Shameem Khan, now a deputy prosecutor of the International Criminal Court—appointed Pillay to chair an inquiry into the very conflict for which she had already blamed Israel. But its mandate went even further: a permanent investigation of alleged violations before and after the 2021 clash, reaching into the conflict’s “underlying root causes,” with no end date. The campaigner became the investigator, and Pillay’s verdict came with her appointment.

 

In February 2022, U.N. Watch submitted a detailed legal brief requesting Pillay’s recusal. We cited her statements and the U.N.’s own impartiality standards. We received no reply.

 

That June, I walked up to Pillay at the Human Rights Council and handed her a copy. She acknowledged having seen our motion.

 

“We never received a reply,” I said.

 

“We can’t respond to everything,” she answered.

 

Everything? This was a core challenge to her fitness to preside. A few days ago, Pillay claimed that her inquiry “essentially worked like a court.” Yet a judge cannot dismiss a recusal motion as unwanted correspondence.

 

Later, in July 2022, her fellow commissioner Miloon Kothari railed against “the Jewish lobby” and questioned Israel’s U.N. membership. Pillay defended him, claiming his remarks had been taken out of context. In the end, Kothari retracted his comments after numerous democracies condemned him for antisemitism, as did the Human Rights Council chair himself. Pillay never recanted.

 

In September 2025, the Pillay inquiry fulfilled its purpose: It accused Israel of genocide. The report was built on selective quotations used to infer genocidal intent, and a complete sidelining of Hamas’ military infrastructure and use of civilian sites. According to the Pillay report’s chronology, it was Israel that attacked on October 7.

 

Pillay’s accusation of genocide against Israel appears to be what prompted the Nobel. Her earlier achievements—as a judge in South Africa and on the U.N.’s Rwanda tribunal—were known for decades. That record deserves recognition. But it also makes her disregard for impartiality harder to excuse.

 

She knew the standards. A reputation earned in one courtroom cannot exempt its owner from scrutiny in another. Nor can past courage transform a partisan investigation into justice simply because its findings carry the United Nations seal.

 

Pillay was named to the inquiry for her authority as a judge, but she acted on the commitments of a campaigner. The Nobel Committee is now seeking to magnify her imprimatur.

 

Hamas understands the benefit perfectly. Its war against Israel gains a prestigious legal vocabulary, and its victims recede behind an indictment of the state that defended them. That is why Hamas cheered. The Nobel Committee should now tell the world whether this is its desired outcome.

El-Sayed’s Troubling Ties

National Review Online

Thursday, October 15, 2026

 

‘We all have fathers, don’t we?” John F. Kennedy once quipped after being told disparaging information about Martin Luther King Jr.’s father.

 

True enough, but not all of us have family members connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.

 

Mike Rogers hammered Abdul El-Sayed in last week’s Michigan Senate debate over the Democratic candidate’s family ties to the terror group, and Meet the Press host Kristen Welker followed up in a subsequent interview with the Democratic candidate, asking if it was true.

 

“No,” El-Sayed twice insisted. As the Washington Free Beacon reports, that is not accurate. At least, not according to El-Sayed’s half sister, who proudly noted their mother’s radicalism.

 

“My family has long been MB,” Eman Abdelhadi, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago who would go on to celebrate the October 7 massacre, wrote of the Muslim Brotherhood in the summer of 2012. “I have had family jailed for being a part of it,” she added a year later. “Praying for all my family that supports the #MB in Egypt. Lie low, stay safe.”

 

(Abdelhadi’s 2012 post coincided with the accession of Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood ally, to Egypt’s presidency after the 2011 Arab Spring ousted Hosni Mubarak. That November, El-Sayed himself signed an open letter affirming his support for Morsi and calling on the new regime to “purge the media and police.”)

 

Their mother, Fatten Elkomy, also worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency — an organization the U.S. Treasury accused of supporting outfits like Hamas and al-Qaeda in 2004. “An exhibit list filed in court referenced Elkomy more than a dozen times,” CBS News reported of the Justice Department’s 2007 indictment of the organization, “documenting participation in wire transfers and recorded phone calls between 1999 and 2002, as well as an IARA-USA transfer request form for over $24,000 to its Iraq office.”

 

This isn’t the only family connection to an extremist group. The candidate’s father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, a prolific contributor to a pro-El-Sayed super PAC, has similar ties. The Beacon revealed in July that Jukaku has served on the Islamic Society of North America’s founding committee for nearly 20 years. ISNA was cited by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the famous 2007 prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, in which its founders were convicted of funneling $12 million to Hamas. Jukaku also served as president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Michigan chapter in the second half of the aughts, when the group, too, was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case.

 

In the last decade, CAIR sued the federal government twice in its effort to get El-Sayed’s sister-in-law, Mariam Jukaku, removed from the Department of Homeland Security’s terrorism watchlist. Neither suit succeeded, and the federal government will not explain why she was on that list or even whether she remains on it today.

 

Even if we discount all of this as simply unfortunate family relations, El-Sayed has similar political associations. From the radical activist Linda Sarsour to the noxious streamer Hasan Piker to allies of the antisemitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, El-Sayed has cultivated relationships with agitators whose hatred of Israel and its allies is matched only by their affinity for Islamist street action.

 

Those who notice the many disquieting relationships in El-Sayed’s background are often accused of racism, bigotry, and general anti-Muslim bias. Indeed, that is how the candidate himself deflects when he is charged, as he frequently and understandably is, with displaying a suspect level of sympathy for terrorists and their causes.

 

Among other things, he pointedly declined to celebrate the death of the blood-soaked Iranian despot Ayatollah Ali Khamenei because there were “a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad,” and says he wants to zero out all U.S. support for Israel and redirect those funds to UNRWA, a U.N. agency that admits a number of its employees participated in the October 7 slaughter.

 

This demonstrates, by the way, that his policy preferences have really nothing to do with keeping “our money here.”

 

Voters can perhaps forgive a few embarrassing family ties. They should not, however, extend any charity to a candidate who lies on their behalf and who apparently does so only to obscure his own similarly suspect sympathies.

 

As senator, El-Sayed could serve on committees that would give him access to sensitive national security information. Given his litany of troubling associations, his family ties to radical Islamist organizations, and his own statements, he should not be put in a position that requires such trust.

El-Sayed Goes Viral in All the Worst Ways

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, October 15, 2026

 

According to the unreliable narrators who populate the online environment, Abdul El-Sayed easily dispatched Mike Rogers in last week’s debate. If you needed another reason to ignore the conventional wisdom that is forged in the internet’s crucibles, that’s only the latest.

 

While El-Sayed clearly bested Rogers on style, it seemed obvious to me that the Republican Senate candidate did precisely what he had to do. With a level of gratuitous repetition that amounted to neurolinguistic programming, Rogers hammered El-Sayed on his family connections to and sympathies for a variety of Islamist terrorist enterprises. Those allegations proved sticky.

 

Today, one week later, there’s no ambiguity about who performed more adroitly on that stage. No one is writing articles about Rogers’s Florida home or his boats. Instead, they are reporting, editorializing, and commenting on El-Sayed’s sordid associations. What’s more, reporters cannot get off that story because El-Sayed will not let them:

 

 

After he delivered what appears to have been a mendacious performance in his interview with NBC News’ Kirsten Welker, the outlet cornered El-Sayed once again this week. There, reporter Tom Llamas gave El-Sayed every opportunity to walk back his dubious claim that his family had no ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, but El-Sayed refused the offer. Beyond that, when pressed to revise his morally and intellectually bankrupt conviction that Israel and Iran are equal threats to U.S. security, El-Sayed declined with all of Colonel Nathan Jessup’s self-restraint. “Yes!” he insisted in a fit of theatrical exasperation.

 

Not only is the story Rogers goaded El-Sayed into creating for himself not going away, it’s taking on a life of it own:

 

 

Why do we think Pete Buttigieg, a former cabinet secretary with a Michigan address and presidential ambitions, would answer that question as directly and forthrightly as he did? He has every political incentive to be a team player, to obfuscate on El-Sayed’s behalf. Buttigieg pivoted to cost-of-living talking points pretty quickly after summarily dismissing the central premise of El-Sayed’s worldview, so why didn’t he start there?

 

Perhaps the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., knows that El-Sayed doesn’t play in Peoria. Maybe he has enough political horse sense to know that the remarks he makes today on the Senate candidate’s behalf will haunt him in an election in which national security matters. What if expending political capital to boost El-Sayed is the electoral equivalent of throwing good money after bad?

 

Yes, it’s only Fox News that is now asking other Democratic Party luminaries to weigh in on one candidate’s gaffe, but that is how snowballs start rolling. Clearly, NBC News isn’t afraid to move this story forward. The rest of the legacy media may follow suit. Indeed, they may feel obligated to press El-Sayed further, if only in the pursuit of what they understand is the right answer to questions in which the unstated premise is whether the West and its allies deserve terroristic violence. And if El-Sayed cannot say the right words, maybe the rest of the party will be smart enough to inoculate itself against the political pathogen he’s set on spreading.

A Recipe for Greta Thunberg

By Daniel Foster

Thursday, October 15, 2026

 

The cause Greta Thunberg most believes in, I suspect, is causes. Those of us subjected to her for a decade now have seen her graduate through every Current Thing from climate change to Palestinian liberation, and now she has turned up in France to support students (allegedly) protesting dilapidated school buildings. It’s easy to see in this a kind of popular-front leftism whose target is the Western project writ large. Favoring everything that could be over everything that is, in the only civilization in the world that rewards that sort of thing.

 

But while I certainly believe that ideas have consequences, I’m increasingly interested in the way those ideas interact with biography to create incentives. And Thunberg’s biography certainly supports her remarkable ideological versatility.

 

At age eleven, Thunberg by all accounts descended into a severe depression, stopped eating, mostly stopped speaking (“selective muteness”), and generally withdrew from ordinary childhood activities. She also experienced bullying and social ostracism. Eventually, she was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (which, research suggests and common sense confirms, made her all the more susceptible to the foregoing), along with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Her younger sister had significant developmental and psychological difficulties of her own. The family’s domestic life became largely organized around accommodating both children — rather than, and this is the critical bit I think, acclimating them to the world.

 

Thunberg’s mother’s account of this period is revealing. Greta became preoccupied with environmental catastrophe and was seemingly unable to understand how anyone could behave normally in the face of the impending apocalypse. It started with her watching a documentary about plastic pollution in grade school, after which most of her peers presumably turned their attention to the cafeteria menu. But Greta could not let it go.

 

Her parents’ response was determinative. Rather than help their daughter cope with her distress, they reorganized their lives around the convictions causing it. Her mother, an internationally famed opera singer, abandoned flying and effectively ended her career. The family changed its diet and consumption habits. In their memoir, her parents describe Greta’s environmental preoccupations not as the fixation of an underdeveloped cortex but as an unusually penetrating moral insight. The familiarly disastrous assignment of arcane wisdom to tweens.

 

And in doing this, what did they teach her? A distressed child discovered that acting out could reorder the behavior of adults, including that of her own parents. More important, as she began acting on those convictions, she felt better. (I’ll only note here the familiar echo of other extreme measures taken by a desperate generation of progressive parents to authenticate their children’s self-destructive monomanias).

 

Then came the school “strike.” In August 2018, at age 15, Thunberg began skipping classes to sit outside the Swedish parliament with a handmade sign demanding action on climate change. She stayed there during school hours for three weeks, then subsequently continued her protest on Fridays. After initial reluctance, her parents came to support the idea. And almost overnight, a socially isolated teenager found herself internationally celebrated for cutting school.

 

I’m not suggesting that Thunberg’s beliefs are insincere per se (though I think the human mind, whether neurotypical or neurodivergent, is such that she wouldn’t be the most reliable witness on this question). But if the climate apocalypse were really so nigh when she was 15, it’s only nigher now. The relevant difference appears to be that she now finds it less stimulating than she once did. The way she might be over Taylor Swift and on to Olivia Rodrigo. This is not the nature of civilization-threatening catastrophes. But it is the nature of youth.

 

Like a lot of dads of young children, I’ve read a lot about the correlates of good and bad childhood outcomes. The gist seems to be that most of it is genetics, a good deal of it is social and cultural milieu, and a surprisingly small amount is the daily grind of parenting. But when dysfunctional incentives in all three of those realms interact in vicious ways, you end up with one of the most annoying young women on the planet.

Will Anyone Stop America’s Creeping Socialism?

By Scott Lincicome

Thursday, October 15, 2026

 

When I first checked in last year on the Trump administration’s unprecedented ownership stakes in private U.S. companies, I warned that the 10 equity deals—and “the year America went (kinda) socialist”—gave us plenty to worry about. Ten months later, Uncle Sam’s equity portfolio has now grown to cover 35 deals across the steel, critical minerals, semiconductors, quantum computing, nuclear power, rocket motor, and crude oil industries, using a variety of laws and agencies to acquire the stakes. Even more deals are likely on the way—including ones, such as the new Andruil submarine arrangement announced last week, that give Washington a stake in certain projects instead of entire companies.

 

Given the radical and opaque nature of the Trump administration’s moves—recall that Washington hadn’t taken a non-crisis stake in a healthy company in decades—Cato this week launched our Restoring Free Enterprise project to document, analyze, and counter the trend.  As I wrote in the project’s introductory essay and in an August piece for the Washington Post, the government’s ownership stakes raise serious problems that have already begun to materialize: capital misallocation, politicized business decisions, preferential treatment, state coercion, corruption, and more.

 

Yet the biggest problem of all might be the simplest: Nobody—not even the Trump administration’s own lawyers—can point to a single U.S. law that expressly authorizes the executive branch to do any of this. That omission is glaring, and it matters for the stakes themselves, for how they might get unwound, and for whether anything stops the next president, of either party, from doing more of the same.

 

What the law actually says.

 

It’s been 16 months since the government took its first stake (last June’s U.S. Steel “golden share”), yet the Trump administration still hasn’t offered a clear and detailed legal justification for that deal or any other equity-based transaction. When Sens. Jack Reed and Roger Wicker asked about the legality of the Defense Department’s equity deals at a Senate Armed Services hearing in March, the Pentagon’s top industrial-base official said government lawyers would soon submit something to Congress on the issue. You’ll be shocked to learn that we’re still waiting for the memo. Other agencies have been similarly circumspect, offering little more than a press release with a statutory citation and no elaboration. Sometimes, we don’t even get that.

 

 

The Trump administration’s silence is notable—and troubling. Without a clear and official paper trail for all these equity deals, the public is left to guess as to how these expansive new powers—influencing or even controlling private companies!—are permissible under the law. The table below, constructed from press releases, SEC filings, and third-party reporting, is one such guess (and it’s admittedly incomplete). As the final column shows, none of the laws implicated by these deals expressly authorizes the federal agency at issue to take an ownership stake in a private, U.S.-based company:

 

 

In court, a Justice Department lawyer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently argued that the CHIPS Act expressly authorizes the government’s Intel stake, but this is clearly false. Instead, these laws say the government can offer grants, loans, and other subsidies to target companies, and some of them contain broad language—e.g., “mitigation agreements” for transactions reviewed by the  Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) or “payments” and “other transactions” under the CHIPS Act—into which one could argue that equity arrangements fall. Yet none of these laws is new—the Defense Production Act that created CFIUS dates back decades; the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) loan program program started in 2008; the Industrial Base Fund began in 2011; CHIPS was enacted in 2021; and the Office of Strategic Capital in 2022—and no president has ever used them to acquire direct ownership interests like the ones Trump keeps taking. (A single ATVM loan to Tesla in 2010 gave the government the right to eventually exercise warrants to buy Tesla stock between 2018 and 2023, but the warrants were terminated when Tesla repaid the loan in 2013.)

 

In other words, numerous presidents of both parties did not read these laws as a broad license to indefinitely hold stock in numerous private companies. Only Trump did.

 

As Georgetown’s Peter Harrell explained last year, the administration’s best legal argument here is simply that the language of these laws is vague and does not expressly forbid taking a golden share, equity stake, or other slice of the corporate pie, and a target firm could always just walk away if it didn’t like the government’s terms. Yet this argument fails for several reasons.

 

For starters, this is Washington we’re talking about, and there’s already evidence in several cases that these companies couldn’t just walk away from the equity deals (i.e., demands) they were presented. As I noted in the Post, in fact, the Intel deal and others appear to have been coerced by the Trump administration or “conditioned on the granting of a permit, subsidy or other government privilege.” When the federal government wants a slice of a company whose business depends on something Uncle Sam has, saying no isn’t really an option. And it’s foolish (at best) to pretend otherwise.

 

There’s also clear evidence that Congress knows how to say “equity” when it wants equity, just like it knows how to say—and does say—“grants” or “loans” in these very same laws. In CHIPS, for example, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren proposed an amendment forcing subsidy recipients to hand over equity, but it never passed. This year, Republican-led committees in the House and Senate have advanced legislation to authorize the Pentagon to make government equity investments with certain limitations, but those aren’t yet law, either. On the other hand, the Troubled Asset Relief Program expressly required the Treasury Department to obtain warrants (or senior debt) from the institutions it bought assets from, and the CARES Act barred Treasury from lending to eligible large businesses without receiving warrants or equity. (Both laws were also enacted during crises, of course.)

 

In a forthcoming essay for the Restoring Free Enterprise project, Cato legal expert Molly Nixon examines this statutory language in detail, finding that none of the laws behind today's equity stakes contain anything like it. That matters—or, at least, it should.

 

The Trump administration also knows about equity authority—until it doesn’t. When Trump’s Venezuela oil deal was announced, for example, a spokesman for the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital initially said that the office doesn’t take equity stakes in private companies. A few days later, another U.S. official claimed, without evidence, that Congress had given OSC exactly that power. Semafor, meanwhile, reports that Congress previously had declined Pentagon requests for equity authority, and over at Lawfare, Benjamin Press elaborates on the administration’s selective memory in this case (emphasis mine):

 

At the outset of the second Trump administration, the executive branch evidently believed that the department lacked clear authority to take equity stakes, and the Office of Management and Budget requested language in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2026 that would have granted the Defense Department the authority to do so. Nevertheless, no such language was added to the NDAA—or any other law. In other words, the only thing that could have changed between the beginning of the Trump administration, when the White House evidently believed that the Defense Department lacked clear authority, and mid-2025, when the department began making its investments, is its interpretation of existing authorities.

 

The administration’s new “interpretation,” meanwhile, appears to be distressingly thin. As Semafor reported last month, a June 2025 memo from the Office of Management and Budget claimed that a $400 million investment in MP Minerals was legal simply because it was “necessary to avoid an imminent threat to human life and government property.” The opinion also cited the Defense Production Act, a 2017 defense authorization, Article II of the Constitution, and—I kid you not—the “venerable tradition of presidential obligations in advance of appropriation” stretching back to 1792. (None of these things, of course, actually authorize equity stakes.) Former Pentagon officials briefed by Semafor said they were “skeptical” of OMB’s legal reasoning. “[I’m] surprised that the current team has discovered the authority to do this under the Defense Production Act,” one former OSC official told the outlet, adding that “laws can be elastic, but elasticity snaps at some point.” Sigh.

 

These justifications, by the way, are the best of the bunch. Some, such as the Commerce Department’s “participation interest” deal with Westinghouse or the government’s cut of Nvidia and AMD chip sales to China, don’t even bother with a statute. (Nvidia is now getting sued in Delaware on the grounds that the government is “constitutionally barred from imposing duties or taxes on exports.”) Trump’s Venezuela oil deal is even sketchier.

 

Finally, there are the obvious and troubling implications of an executive branch declaring sweeping and unprecedented new powers simply because Congress didn’t expressly bar such actions. As I explained in a new podcast accompanying the Restoring Free Enterprise project rollout, that’s an argument for unlimited executive power, not just for equity stakes, and it directly contradicts our constitutional system of government and enumerated powers. Even folks who are decidedly not from my libertarian side of the law, such as Georgetown’s Harrell and Biden-era Assistant Secretary of Defense Laura Taylor-Kale, are uncomfortable with where this is all heading.

 

So, how do we stop it?

 

That leads us to what might be the worst part of it all: Without any clear legal framework for doing this stuff, there’s no clear way to undo it or to stop more transactions in the future. As already noted, the pace of these deals has accelerated in 2026, and Trump has literally said that his standard for taking government equity stakes is simply “when people need something.” Trump and his team will surely announce more deals this year and next (another one popped up while I was typing this). And whoever wins in 2028, Republican or Democrat, will inherit both the portfolio and the unbridled power to expand it. The economic and political consequences—private capital increasingly flowing to the connected, a government with a direct financial interest in a growing set of firms, crony losers flocking to D.C, for an equity bailout, a president who increasingly uses stock deals to reward and punish American companies, and plenty more—could be enormous.

 

Congress could pass a law to force divestment and dismantle these (implied) powers, but that’s easier said than done. Some Democrats are uncomfortable with the equity deals, but many others—and not just Bernie Sanders and his fellow travelers—simply want more transparency and structure around them. Meanwhile, the party campaigning against “socialism” this fall is ironically the one advancing bills to authorize equity investments rather than terminate them. There are welcome exceptions—Sen. Jon Husted introduced a bill requiring covered stakes to be liquidated, and Sens. Thom Tillis and Mike Rounds have criticized the deals—but they probably won’t be the rule as long as Trump’s in office. Thus, securing a veto-proof majority for broad divestment legislation will likely be a serious challenge for the foreseeable future.

 

That leaves the courts, but the path here is also difficult and murky. Most companies with government equity stakes have little incentive to challenge a deal that inflates their stock prices, and the same goes for their shareholders. Any such challenge, moreover, would risk upsetting an all-powerful federal government and its, ahem, temperamental president. The same risk applies to federal contractors who might challenge government contracts awarded to state-backed firms on conflict-of-interest grounds.

 

These incentives likely explain why there’s been just one shareholder lawsuit to the equity deals so far. There, plaintiffs have challenged the Intel deal as a breach of its directors’ fiduciary duties (because they gave the government shares in exchange for nothing). Many legal experts think it’ll be a tough case to win, and, even if it is eventually successful, there are dozens of other deals that would also need to be challenged.

 

Finally, Congress could sue the Trump administration, similar to how the House of Representatives challenged—successfully in part, and unsuccessfully in others—President Obama’s implementation of the Affordable Care Act. That case required only a House majority, which Democrats will likely have next year. But here, too, there are major uncertainties surrounding whether Democrats will actually want to trim these new powers and whether a federal court would rule in their favor, given courts’ deference and these laws’ ambiguities.

 

In short, the same government that took these unprecedented equity stakes without clear statutory permission has no clear path for getting out. To restore both free enterprise and the rule of law, however, it’s imperative that we chart one.

The Left’s Performative Misunderstanding

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, October 15, 2026

 

Dan Levy is disappointed in you, America.

 

The Canadian comedian and self-appointed humor policeman has expressed his disgust with Shane Gillis’s recent Saturday Night Live monologue, in which Gillis joked that some women now “just dress like whores” at the gym.

 

“Women wearing short shorts at the gym does not make them whores,” Levy said on Instagram. “It makes the men calling them whores misogynists.”

 

After saying he was “speechless” that such a thing could be broadcast on national television, Levy bravely overcame his speechlessness to complain that “more men need to be standing up in opposition to it because it’s complacency that has created the environment in which women are sexually assaulted and it’s a ‘conversation’ as opposed to a ‘crime.’”

 

You have heard of Levy, whose comedy is so nuanced that he gave his hit show the cryptic name Schitt’s Creek, only because he is the son of comedy royalty — effectively the Don Jr. of Canada. His father, Eugene Levy, was a founding member of SCTV, a show that trafficked in unfortunate racial, ethnic, and sexual stereotypes in much the same way that SNL has over the years. Eugene Levy is perhaps best known to American audiences for his role in a movie where a teenage boy copulates with a hot apple pie.

 

Nonetheless, despite his comedic DNA, Levy appears to have joined the hordes of people who don’t know what a “joke,” a “comedian,” or a “sketch comedy show” is. SNL has been the home of offensive comedy for 52 years. In October 2020, comedian Bill Burr gave a monologue in which he mocked white women for making the “woke” movement about them, referring to them as “b*tches.” Levy was so outraged, he accepted an invitation to host nine episodes later. All principles are negotiable when your career could use a boost.

 

But the performative whiners on the left simply can’t leave Gillis alone. After being named as a cast member and “canceled” before his first episode for making crude jokes about gays and Asians on a podcast before his SNL hiring, Gillis became one of America’s biggest comedians and has hosted the show three times. Every time, his appearances have been followed by theatrical bellyaching from progressives, angry that their inner sanctum has been breached by someone unwilling to adhere to their cultural dictums. (Gillis is no conservative; a month ago he mused about the need for “free” health care.)

 

So what was Gillis’s crime? First, a bit of semantics: Gillis never called any women “whores,” as Levy alleges. He joked that women at the gym dress like whores, which is a different accusation. If I walked down the street wearing a Milwaukee Brewers baseball uniform, people would say I was dressed like a Milwaukee Brewer, but nobody would think I played Major League baseball.

 

Second, it may surprise some people that, to make a joke, comedians occasionally say things they don’t believe or that aren’t true. In Burr’s 2020 monologue, delivered during the Covid-19 pandemic, he joked that people shouldn’t wear masks because the world has too many people and you should be able to take out your grandma and grandpa if you want. He also made light of former SCTV cast member Rick Moranis being cold-cocked in the streets of New York, using that assault to cheerfully declare that New York City was back.

 

Did Burr really want you to kill your relatives? Was he happy Moranis got decked? Those who know what stand-up comedy is — namely, everyone who hadn’t accidentally ingested Tide Pods — understood that this was simply Burr’s sardonic style. The best laughs come when you laugh at something you know you’re not supposed to, and comedians like Burr, Louis C.K., and Gillis are technicians at this style: setting a controversial rhetorical trap and letting you watch them escape it.

 

Similarly, Gillis’s critique of modern gym fashion wasn’t to get a laugh at his bravery for using the word “whore.” In fact, the first half of his bit sets up a joke where he is the punchline, musing that he is now in the background of a bunch of TikTok videos leering at women in tiny shorts. Ultimately, he is the creep in the story he’s telling.

 

All of this matters because, ultimately, none of it matters. In the attention economy, consequential events fly by unnoticed while internet barkers take faux umbrage at the most inoffensive remarks. Social media exists for people to performatively and proudly misunderstand things to create a synthetic reality where only they have the moral high ground. If it isn’t Shane Gillis, it’s a new Sydney Sweeney ad or Sophie Cunningham expressing an opinion on biological males in women’s sports. It’s all just grist for the content mill.

 

And, of course, Gillis’s critics don’t much care for the cause of women’s rights. The Venn diagram of people yapping at Gillis yet savaging Susan Dell’s looks after she pledged over $6.2 billion to help kids start savings accounts is a single circle. Whether you’re allowed to age in public depends on your associations with the White House.

 

Yet progressives refuse to learn any lessons from their phony hysterics. They are blind to the ways their woke one-upmanship backfires. For one, Gillis’s monologue has prompted thousands of women across the country to post photos of themselves working out in very little clothing. The men come out way ahead on that transaction.

 

Further, any time they overreact to Gillis, it simply exposes their absurdity and makes him stronger. Gillis’s career exists because they don’t want it to — every complaint brings him more viewers and broadens his appeal.

 

Is there nobody on the left who can explain these things to their own kind? Are there any old-school Democrats who can note, for instance, that SNL, a show with a profoundly liberal sensibility, used to regularly mock different races, poke fun at gays and disabled people, and feature monologues where malodorous women were told to “wash their ass” properly? And yet, while this all may be tasteless, society has survived and, in many ways, gotten much better.

 

More than 60 years ago, the historian Daniel Boorstin warned that America was filling up with “pseudo-events,” happenings staged for no purpose other than to be reported on. He also defined the celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.”

 

Boorstin didn’t live to see Instagram, but he would have recognized Dan Levy on sight: a man famous mostly for his last name, manufacturing a scandal out of a joke in which the comedian was self-deprecating. None of this was ever about women, or gym shorts, or even Shane Gillis. It was about being seen being offended.

 

Society has survived controversial comedians before, and we will survive Shane Gillis, too, as long as we preserve the quaint notion that sometimes a joke is just a joke.