Non-MAGA Mutiny

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, July 31, 2026

 

A useful way to separate the men from the boys in punditry is to note who obsesses about political polling and who doesn’t. Rarely will you catch Jonah Goldberg or Kevin Williamson drilling down on survey data, and for good reason: Polls, as they say, are just snapshots in time. Even when they’re accurate (which isn’t always, or even often), they can change quickly. And once they do, all of the lessons they supposedly contained are up in smoke.

 

Serious thinkers don’t trifle with polls. Only the hacks do that.

 

So let’s talk about polls.

 

Eleven days ago I wrote about a surprising downturn in Democrats’ polling on the generic congressional ballot. In May the party had a 7-point lead, and the two months since have been arguably the worst of Donald Trump’s five-plus years in office—yet the Democratic margin shrank over that period. My guess was that disaffected “soft Republicans” had begun to drift back toward the president as their anxiety grew about socialism consuming the left.

 

A fine theory. But since that newsletter was published, despite socialist candidates continuing to gain steam even in high-profile Midwestern battlegrounds, the GOP has lost 1.5 points on the generic ballot. Democrats now lead by an average of 6, considerably better than where they stood on the day the war in Iran began. The alleged “red scare” appears to be over already, or at least on hold.

 

Consider it a reminder that interpreting polls is usually a fool’s errand, especially when they involve generic candidates instead of actual ones. But from time to time there’s a shift in the data that’s so striking, and that does involve an honest-to-God real politician, that it qualifies as Real News. And so here we are again, forced to dive in.

 

It’s not unusual for Trump to dip below 40 percent in job approval, but it is—or was—very unusual for him to fall as low as 35 percent. He’s done it three times in the last nine national surveys tracked by RealClearPolitics, though: 35 percent in CNN’s poll, 33 percent in the Associated Press’ survey, and 32 percent in Quinnipiac University’s poll. “That, my friends, is the Bush line,” The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell said of the last of those three, referring to George W. Bush’s catastrophic decline in support near the end of his second term.

 

Trump stands at 38.2 percent approval today in Nate Silver’s polling tracker versus 58.8 percent disapproval. Not only is that the worst net rating of his second term, it’s lower than any number he’s seen since becoming president in 2017. Yes, really: lower than after January 6.

 

Some meaningful segment of his base appears to have left him. Who is that segment?

 

Fox News knows who it is. Its polling arm regularly asks Republican respondents whether they identify as “MAGA” or “non-MAGA,” and that distinction turns out to be crucial in views of the president. In a national survey published earlier this month, approval of Trump’s performance split 98-3 among MAGA Republicans. Among non-MAGA, it was … 51-49.

 

The split was even more pronounced on individual issues. Approval of the president’s handling of the economy? It was 83-17 for MAGA, 38-62 for non-MAGA. Inflation? Try 72-26 for MAGA, 28-72 for non-MAGA. Iran? That went 83-16 for MAGA, 37-63 for non-MAGA.

 

Trump isn’t on the ballot in November, of course, so none of this matters to his electoral chances. But it does matter—a lot—to his party’s. As CNN’s Aaron Blake noted this morning, the MAGA/non-MAGA divide is also showing up in Fox’s polling of key Senate contests. And it’s pronounced enough that it could tip those races to Democrats.

 

In Texas, Fox has Democrat James Talarico ahead of Republican Ken Paxton by 3 points. No less than 24 percent of non-MAGA Republicans favor Talarico. Ditto in North Carolina, where Democrat Roy Cooper leads by 9 with help from 21 percent of non-MAGA Republicans. Democrat Josh Turek led by 4 in a Fox poll of Iowa taken in late June thanks to support from 23 percent of the non-MAGA right. That’s the same share of non-MAGA Republicans who backed Democrat Jon Ossoff in a late-June Fox poll of Georgia, where he’s currently cruising toward a 13-point landslide.

 

Whether the mutiny among non-MAGA Republicans will last until November is anyone’s guess, but there is a mutiny underway, it appears. And so we arrive at the question made famous by the philosopher Jerry Seinfeld: Who are these people?

 

Reaganites and Roganites.

 

I’m tempted to speculate that the mutineers are “Dispatch Republicans,” Reaganite conservatives whose tribal tether to the GOP has been snapping, strand by strand, over the past 10 years as the weight of their disgust at the state of the right has grown. At last, perhaps, the final atavistic strand has broken.

 

But I dislike that terminology, as I choose to pretend that everyone who reads this site was persuaded long ago to abandon the unsalvageable postliberal freak show known as the Republican Party. More likely, I think, is that the non-MAGA wing contains many *non*-Dispatch Reaganites, the sort of partisan conservatives who spent the last decade resenting RINOs like me for turning against Trump and the GOP—and who now, sheepishly and belatedly, have at last begun to wonder if we had a point.

 

There’s circumstantial evidence for it in the Fox data. I would have guessed that the share of self-described “conservatives” supporting Democrats for Senate in Texas and North Carolina would be almost as tiny as the share of MAGA Republicans who do so. But I would have been wrong: 18 percent of conservatives prefer Talarico and 21 percent prefer Cooper, which in both cases closely resembles the share of non-MAGA Republicans who (for now) intend to cross the aisle this fall. It ain’t just the RINOs who are tilting Democratic this time.

 

GOP operatives are worried about it too. Internal data shared with the Washington Post last week revealed a “lack of enthusiasm [that’s] reaching deep into Republicans’ loyal base, spreading to the party’s most consistent voters—who have shown up to vote in all of the past four primaries and general elections.” One director of an outside right-wing group estimated that around 1 in 5 “reliable Republican base voters” in battleground states are considering staying home in November or voting for a Democrat. Which, coincidentally, is right in line with the “non-MAGA Republican” share that’s defecting in Fox’s polling.

 

So it seems that a sizable share of conservatives is disgruntled. But what sort of Republican is still describing themselves as “conservative” in 2026?

 

I’m sure there are some Reaganites in that cohort who have finally reached their breaking point after feeling pressured to make embarrassingly untenable excuses for Trump every day since 2016. Belief in his greatness on the right has always had an uncanny “emperor’s new clothes” aspect to it: No one wants to step out of line by admitting that he’s naked, but once someone does—and many people are doing so now, per the polling—then the quieter doubters at last find their voices.

 

Not all self-identified “conservatives” are Reaganites, though. Members of Tucker Carlson’s postliberal anti-war faction would also describe themselves that way (more so than “liberal” or “moderate,” anyway), I expect, yet many have presumably begun to reject the “MAGA” label to protest the president’s betrayal in attacking Iran. They’re in the mix here too, perhaps favoring figures like Talarico and Cooper because they want a Senate next year that will be more likely to end aid to Israel.

 

And forget Reaganites: What about Roganites?

 

One of Trump’s core constituencies in 2024 was the Joe Rogan demographic: young men who aren’t staunchly ideological but who shared populist suspicions about the political establishment, resented what Biden-era inflation did to their quality of life, and despised the “woke” pieties that leftists are forever demanding that they swallow. Many of them voted Republican in the last election, and some surely identify as “conservative” now because of their animosity toward the progressive cultural agenda.

 

But that doesn’t mean they’re MAGA. My sense of them is that they don’t worship Trump, aren’t hell-bent on cleansing America of immigrants, aren’t enthused about White House warmongering, and haven’t written off voting Democratic ever again. They thought the president was the better option in 2024, but in 2026 they might think differently. (And might be adjusting their media diet for similar reasons.) They’re “non-MAGA Republicans” too—or at least a considerable chunk of them are.

 

Rounding things off are Hispanics, another group with whom the president famously overperformed the last time he was on the ballot. A Republican vowing to bring down prices and impose “law and order” sounded good to many members of a mostly working-class and culturally conservative demographic like Latinos. So they took a chance on Trump—and got continued inflation, tariffs that made life more expensive, and an ICE crackdown enabled by racial profiling that’s gone way beyond targeting violent criminals and started affecting Hispanic-owned businesses.

 

Plenty of Hispanics who voted to reelect the president still identify as Republican and conservative, no doubt. But if they thought of themselves as “MAGA” before, boy, they sure don’t anymore. Like the Roganites, they’re back to being free agents this cycle, as Talarico might tell you.

 

So much for the various strains of non-MAGA Republicanism. As for why they’ve collectively begun turning against Trump and the GOP, there’s one glaringly obvious reason and one more debatable one.

 

War and corruption.

 

At the risk of ignoring my own advice about not overinterpreting poll data: It’s the war, stupid.

 

Trump has lost control of events in Iran, to the point that the Iranians are now initiating exchanges of fire instead of waiting to respond to new U.S. attacks. The president promised Americans a four- to six-week conflict, and failed. Then, last month, he trumpeted a peace agreement that would supposedly end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz—and that failed too, almost before the ink was dry. Fighting has resumed and there’s no apparent way out.

 

The Pentagon is burning through its supply of defensive weapons, imperiling U.S. power projection in other theaters. Trump’s team can’t agree on a strategy, unwilling to absorb the mass casualties and political pain of a ground invasion and unable to forcibly reopen the strait through other means. We might be approaching the point where conceding Iranian dominion over Hormuz and acquiescing to the Islamic Republic’s extortionate “toll” scheme is the least costly option available to the White House, however catastrophic it might be for American prestige.

 

It’s a fiasco, easily the biggest policy blunder in either of Trump’s terms in office. And practically every voter in America, left or right, understands that it’s hurting their personal bottom line by driving up gas prices and inflation more broadly.

 

Only a MAGA fanatic could look past all of that and maintain confidence in the president, and non-MAGA Republicans by definition aren’t fanatics. So it can’t be a coincidence that his job approval began tanking and his disapproval took off a week or so after he declared the peace deal “over.” The Iran albatross is weighing him down. The heavier it gets, the lower his numbers will sink.

 

That’s the obvious explanation for the non-MAGA Republican mutiny. The more debatable theory is that Trump’s corruption has at last grown so promiscuous and degenerate that even elements of the lowly American right have begun to feel sick about it.

 

I’m inclined to dismiss that theory, having been conditioned by the last 10 years to believe there’s literally no behavior so diseased that Republicans won’t overlook or excuse it to preserve a partisan advantage. As I write this, for instance, major newspapers are running stories about GOP Rep. Max Miller having allegedly abused his wife and their 2-year-old child; his now ex-wife happens to be the daughter of Sen. Bernie Moreno, another Republican. Not only hasn’t the party mobilized to demand Miller’s withdrawal from the race, though, as Democrats did with Graham Platner, Moreno himself hasn’t done it.

 

In an alternate morality like postliberalism, the only sin is weakening the movement’s hold on power. What Miller is accused of doing isn’t sinful; calling public attention to it and seeding disunion on the right by challenging him on it would be.

 

It’s hard to believe that any element of a party that functions that way could reach a moral breaking point over the president’s misconduct. Yet, just as not every “conservative” is a Reaganite, not every Republican is a postliberal. I concede the possibility that the “soft” situational Trump supporters of the non-MAGA cohort—Roganites, Hispanics, possibly a few partisan conservatives who still retain a modicum of conscience after 10 years of disuse—have reached their limit.

 

The breaking point.

 

There’s evidence for this too. An Echelon Insights survey published this month found that, when Americans were asked what the biggest issue facing the country is, “political corruption” was the most common answer apart from the cost of living. When respondents were invited to elaborate, a plurality named corruption related to Trump or his administration as what they had in mind.

 

I suspect the obscene “cash for MAGA criminals” slush fund that the president and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche cooked up is the prime driver of the backlash, as it drew more media attention than most Trump scandals and continues to make headlines today. But there must be a “straw that broke the camel’s back” element to that: News of the president’s corruption is now so common, multifarious, and gory in its details that you can open up virtually any major non-populist news site and find some astonishing story of malfeasance to gawk at.

 

For instance: On Wednesday, MS Now published a report about the Secret Service secretly accessing former FBI director James Comey’s phone to track his location. Some supervisors feared that doing so would be illegal without a warrant; the agency did so anyway, resorting to emergency authority by pretending, preposterously, that Comey was an active threat to Trump’s life. “At the time we did not believe anyone’s life was in danger and legally it was a bad idea,” one supervisor noted, but an unnamed “top Justice Department official” ordered the surveillance to proceed anyway.

 

Certain unidentified VIPs on Air Force One were reportedly keeping tabs on the matter, keenly interested in updates on whether the president’s hated political enemy was being properly harassed.

 

If that’s not gross enough, yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran an exposé of how Trump and his top fundraiser routinely shake down U.S. corporations for gigantic donations—sometimes for his vanity projects, like the White House ballroom or presidential library, sometimes for his political PACs, but rarely if ever for anything that might help the country or his party. (“The boss wants this money,” the fundraiser has been known to say with Corleone-esque overtones.) “The president closely tracks who gives,” aides whispered to the paper, with generous donors being rewarded with access to him.

 

One Wall Street analyst framed the ultra vires extortion as a “Trump Transaction Tax,” observing that “we’re replacing the free market with the market for Trump’s affections.”

 

As I write this on Friday, the top political story in Washington is the president threatening to pull Blanche’s nomination to be attorney general because of resistance from Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis. (Whom this would threaten is unclear.) As a condition of supporting Blanche, the two want something in writing from the Justice Department that will modify the “cash for MAGA criminals” slush fund I mentioned as well as the ludicrous deal Blanche signed granting Trump de facto immunity for any tax cheating he may have committed in the past.

 

The president won’t allow it. Forced to choose between getting his nominee confirmed and protecting an indefensibly corrupt abuse of power that places him beyond legal accountability for financial crimes, he’s prioritizing corruption. Cornyn and Tillis aren’t even asking him to scrap the arrangement altogether; they’re seeking to modify it, not repeal it. And they’re not ruling out supporting Blanche despite his role in facilitating that abuse of power. All they want from Trump and his deputy is a written promise that he won’t proceed with it if they vote yes.

 

And still, he won’t do it.

 

There is no public interest that he values more highly than his venal and vindictive personal interests, and the evidence of that has grown so overwhelming lately that even some Republican voters might be struggling to cope.

 

I continue to believe that they’re fine with letting Trump behave as corruptly as he likes, as that’s part of the unstated price of admission in this rotten coalition. But I’m open to the idea that some Republicans—the non-MAGA group, whose loyalty was always conditional on cheaper groceries and who never rationalized their support with claptrap about conservative judges—have grown embarrassed by the president being so open about it. He’s flaunting the impunity they’ve granted him, almost daring them to do something about it. Maybe they will.

 

I’ll end with the most obvious possible point, that the last thing Democrats should do when a group like non-MAGA Republicans is suddenly in play is nominate leftist radicals in major races. That’s the sort of thing that might plausibly scare those voters back toward concluding that Trumpism, for all its flaws, remains the lesser of two evils. But Democrats aren’t going to take that advice, so let’s plan on being back here in a week or two for another hacky poll-obsessed newsletter after Abdul El-Sayed wins the Michigan primary and the generic ballot begins to shift right again.

Ceuta, or the Democratic Party’s Fantasy

By Abigail Anthony

Friday, July 321, 2026

 

Chaos is erupting in Ceuta, a small Spanish autonomous city and exclave on the northern coast of Africa. Ceuta had a population of about 85,000 — until yesterday, when an estimated 60,000 “migrants” (read: invaders) from Morocco stormed the coast. The Spanish Supreme Court decided earlier this month that migrants arriving by sea in Ceuta (and another Spanish exclave, Melilla) cannot be immediately kicked out without due process. In other words, people saw a loophole and exploited it.

 

I have exactly zero expertise in Spanish politics and law. I also lack any “insider” knowledge; I don’t have a single source in Spain, and certainly not someone witnessing the events unfold in Ceuta. I won’t pretend to know something that I don’t know; I’m at the mercy of what has been presented in the media and social platforms.

 

Still, I want to share a few observations — and fears.

 

First, I noticed that almost all the newcomers in the images and footage I’ve seen are fit and able men. The sole exception I’ve seen is one video that shows a handful of women in hijabs walking casually; I haven’t seen any young children, although some of the males might be teenagers. This demographic detail, coupled with the sheer number of them, means that three army divisions — nearly the size of the residing population, and more than the adult population — arrived in Ceuta without warning.

 

Second, those who have spoken to media outlets have explained that they are not fleeing persecution. They are motivated by the riches of Europe, and they just couldn’t be bothered to seek relocation through legal routes because they conceive of access to Europe as some natural human right. “I don’t want to live in Morocco, I want to live in Europe,” Zakaria Lahmer, 23, told the New York Times. He added, “I want a job, I want happiness.” A 33-year-old man, Ahmed Karim, told ABC News that “many people want to go to Europe, America, but they don’t have the opportunity.”

 

Third, the newcomers immediately proved exactly why they should not be welcomed: They trashed the shore, torched vehicles, looted stores, destroyed property, broke into homes, threw stones at authorities, and assaulted locals. You can distinguish the invaders from the locals because the former are walking around with katanas.

 

Fourth, this is exactly what right-wingers warned would happen under lenient immigration laws and accommodating “asylum” or “refugee” policies. But our concerns and arguments were summarily dismissed as “racist,” “xenophobic,” and “white supremacist.”

 

Fifth, I’m not sure we would have heard about this catastrophe without Musk-owned Twitter/X. I suspect, somewhat conspiratorially, that the right-wing outrage about the invasion prompted large outlets to cover it. In an alternative hypothetical world where Musk’s Twitter/X doesn’t exist, it is possible that the mainstream Western media would have eventually mentioned the story, but I suspect the journalists would have sanitized the details, in part because they are currently describing the events as delicately as possible. Consider this Associated Press headline: “60,000 migrants crossed into Spanish territory of Ceuta, but many soon left voluntarily.” If you scroll through the stories in major outlets, you’ll see images of the migrants standing around or swimming with floats, rather than causing destruction. (Some articles don’t have any images whatsoever.) The media’s photographic strategy is to focus on the migrants arriving and entering without any regard to what they’re doing on land. Put simply, mainstream outlets are talking about Ceuta because they have to, and they’re attempting to placate the public with underwhelming photos of people swimming.

 

Sixth, Democrats will enable and encourage exactly this type of invasion the moment they next seize power. We know this because of what occurred — and was celebrated — under Joe Biden; the more recent anti-ICE demonstrations are further confirmation. This is among the many reasons why they should never win again.

When Following the Rules Leads to Disaster

By Graeme Wood

Saturday, August 01, 2026

 

On July 8, Spain’s supreme court issued a seemingly reasonable decision, unaware that by the end of the month, it would contribute to the deaths of at least 57 people, many by drowning. The court ruled that people who had migrated illegally could be sent back summarily only if they’d circumvented a physical barrier at the border. If no barrier exists—if they’d walked across open ground, say, or swum—then the government must go through a much more complicated process to deport them.

 

And if you’re trying to swim to Europe from Africa, there may be no better destination than Ceuta, a speck of Spanish territory in North Africa, surrounded by Morocco on its western edge and the Mediterranean elsewhere. Every year, some migrants try to swim to Ceuta, especially in the summer, when the waters are relatively calm. Ceuta has a facility that can process about 500 people at a time. But Thursday, 100 times that number—an estimated 50,000 people—made an amphibious attempt to swarm Ceuta and emigrate illegally from Morocco.

 

This was evidently a coordinated attempt, assisted by social media. One Facebook group, the now-defunct “Hraga Ceuta,” reportedly featured exact maps of the three-hour maritime journey from the Moroccan town of Fnideq, which bypassed the land border with Ceuta and ensured that anyone who arrived alive would break no barriers and would land on sand or rocks rather than at a fence or turnstile. People showed up with fins, wet suits, and floaties. They discussed going in together on kayaks and coordinating their departures. Their conditions on arrival were not all dire. An El País reporter in Ceuta met an unaccompanied 16-year-old girl, still wet from the sea, her mascara runny, wearing earrings and a gold necklace, “as if just back from clubbing.”

 

Europe will probably spend weeks trying to figure out exactly what led to Thursday’s catastrophe. (Danish and Italian leaders have called for suspending Spain from Schengen, the free-movement zone that allows someone to travel from Córdoba to Copenhagen without passing through border control.) But one contributing factor is that the supreme court effectively directed migrants to choose life-threatening routes. People saw their shot, and took it. Spain has alleged that human traffickers were among these opportunists. Morocco has been blamed for encouraging the migrants, to cause trouble for Spain. However, the Moroccan king happened to be giving his Throne Day speech nearby in M’diq, and it would have been an odd choice to spring a disaster of this magnitude so close by.

 

Another possible factor is socioeconomic: the long-term trends in Morocco that make life there miserable and send young people into the sea in search of opportunity. The youth-unemployment rate in Morocco is roughly one-third, and years of drought have led to a farming bust.

 

This second factor needs scrutiny, however. The past 25 years have been, droughts aside, good for Morocco’s economy. Indeed, its shift away from agriculture and mining and toward modern industry has powered consistent growth, led by such sectors as automotive manufacturing and phosphate processing. Youth unemployment is high, but it’s not much better in Spain, where it is currently about 25 percent, down from a high of 55 percent in 2013. So the migration is from a poor country without jobs to a rich one without jobs. I, too, would prefer a rich one, but the faster-growing economy of Morocco and the not-exactly-healthy labor sector of Spain complicate the picture.

 

In none of the accounts I have read from journalists in Ceuta do the migrants claim to be refugees—that is, people who fear persecution if they return to their home country. Some Moroccans have protested government policies, and according to reports, at least some of the migrants are sub-Saharan; some of them may have a legitimate asylum claim. But most of the Moroccans seem to be economic migrants, moving away from a country with economic problems but no economic catastrophe. In that sense, they are rational people seeking a better life, as anyone would. Because Spain has officially given swimmers a pass, it is also rational for them to have chosen that route, if they thought they could make it.

 

Far-right Spanish leaders are calling the incident an “invasion,” and even Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has described it as an “attack.” What I think perturbs Spaniards, and not just those on the right, is the combination of so many migrants’ awareness of the rules—knowing exactly how they work, and acting upon that knowledge for personal advantage—and their brazen unwillingness to submit to those rules when they prove disadvantageous. The name of the Facebook group that coordinated migrants used the Arabic-dialect word hraga. It means “burners,” and refers to the common practice of destroying one’s identity documents upon arrival in the intended country, to thwart even lawful efforts to detain, track, and deport their bearer. This combination of being a stickler for the rules and trying to evade them will leave a bitter taste for many Europeans.

 

The strongest case for mass immigration has always been that some people have no home to go back to, and need help. But the events in Ceuta seem very far from this category. They will empower right-wing parties that see Ceuta and say: Not a millimeter closer.

Okay, But What Do You Want to Actually Do

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Saturday, August 01, 2026

 

There’s a lot of debate here at the moment about the meaning (and desirability) of so called “common good conservatism.” At the risk of bringing down the tone — and, perhaps, of sounding rather simple — I’d like to suggest that we ought to be a lot less interested in the terminological question (i.e. what does the “common good” mean?), and a lot more interested in the practical aims of those who are advancing it as a political option (i.e. the matter of what those who use it actually want to do with the government).

 

Dan writes that:

 

If you spend any time listening to the people most fond of invoking the common good, you will swiftly notice that they don’t all use the same one of these definitions.

 

I agree with that. But I also think that it is true in this argument. Which suggests to me that, ultimately, it’s a bit pointless to focus on it too intensely. If none of us can agree on what “common good” means — or, perhaps, if we all agree that it’s important, but we have wildly different interpretations of its substance — then shouldn’t we just dispense with it as a useful marker, and instead demand that its advocates explain what they mean to achieve with the power of the state?

 

I want the Supreme Court to interpret the words in the Constitution in line with their public meaning at the time of ratification. If that’s “common good jurisprudence,” then great. If it’s not, then I’m against it. If “common good economics” means low taxes, limited spending, and a respect for markets, then great. If it doesn’t, I’m against it. The same goes everywhere else: speech, federalism, foreign policy, whatever. Certainly, I could spend my life arguing that the way in which the term “common good” is currently being used is incorrect or undesirable or anachronistic. But why would I, when I can immediately get to the material matter by demanding an audit of the specifics? It’s not as if I wrote in blood at some point in my past that I promise to support all policies that are labeled “common good,” and am thus obliged to litigate the term ad nauseam. My politics are my politics. If they line up with the people who call themselves “common good” conservatives, then that’s nice. I guess I’m one of them. And if they don’t, then . . . well, I’m not.

Another Media Freak-Out over Another Non-Scandal at CBS

By Becket Adams

Sunday, August 02, 2026

 

One takeaway from the Very Online right’s weird crusade against Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is this: We have become a dangerously incurious people.

 

All of us have grown so accustomed to assuming the worst of others that we leap into panic and rage without asking questions.

 

Had the weird right bothered to ask questions or simply waited to see the film, they would have found, instead of “woke” politics, a three-hour story that upholds these values as necessary to civilization: family, law and order, duty, honor, service, chastity, respect for private property, free trade, tradition, and the examined life.

 

In Christopher Nolan’s movie, Odysseus bemoans the loss of trust.

 

In real life, we should bemoan our loss of curiosity.

 

You see it everywhere, most notably in politics. We saw it just last week when CBS News announced that it had hired longtime New York Times columnist Ross Douthat as a 60 Minutes contributor.

 

Douthat is a conservative. Besides his work at the Times, he is also a contributing editor and film critic for National Review.

 

He is also one of the most fair-minded people working in media today, his evenhandedness the secret of his thoughtful and insightful commentary.

 

But rather than asking what his specific duties at CBS will entail, the too-online types jumped immediately into anger. Rather than wait to see whether he fits the role at 60 Minutes, they embraced indignation.

 

“Making Ross Douthat a 60 Minutes correspondent is the least self-aware thing an opinion journalist hired to run a TV news network could do,” complained former Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer.

 

This is harsher than anything he has ever said about the networks handing out news and opinion shows to former government mouthpieces, including George Stephanopoulos and Jen Psaki.

 

A headline in the Daily Beast read: “Right-Wing Religious Zealot Unveiled as New Star of ‘60 Minutes.’”

 

It’s little wonder that People Inc. is once again looking for someone to take the Daily Beast off its hands.

 

“What will Ross Douthat report upon at ‘60 Minutes’? How, very secretly, Netanyahu spends minutes of each day not killing Gaza children?” complained columnist Ted Rall.

 

As a bit of fun context: Rall once wrote an article predicting that former President Joe Biden would resign halfway through his term and turn the reins over to Vice President Kamala Harris. This obviously didn’t happen. Biden had to be dragged from the spotlight, staying in office even as he handed off the nomination.

 

The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last contributed only by mocking Douthat’s appearance.

 

“Say what you will about Ross Douthat, but I’ve always maintained that he’s a tremendous reporter with a face for TV,” he remarked, his hands no doubt tired from the Graham Platner hagiographies of earlier this year. “CBS News is in good hands.”

 

Yes, yes. We’ve heard this all before.

 

This is something like the fifth or sixth CBS News-related outrage cycle since October 2025, when Bari Weiss took over as the network’s editor in chief.

 

We had a freak-out over a story being held until it was better sourced and more thoroughly reported, a meltdown over CBS laying off a 69-year-old fossil of the big-three network era because of his hostility toward executive producer Nick Bilton, and even a baby outrage cycle over Weiss having the nerve to ask CBS News employees what they do during their work hours.

 

Douthat is a fair person. He conducts thoughtful and fair interviews. He is not a firebrand. He is not a carnival barker.

 

He is also one of the more intellectually honest and consistently correct writers in the Times’ recent pool of columnists, his political prognostications hitting the mark more often than not.

 

Recall that ahead of the 2024 presidential election he correctly predicted that Donald Trump would receive around 312 electoral votes and Harris around 226.

 

The same people complaining today were then beside themselves with offense.

 

“What’s funny about Ross isn’t that he’s almost always wrong,” said Last, presumably shouting at his phone, “but that he’s almost always wrong in the same direction. It’s almost like he’s trying to make the people who read him dumber. But great job, NYT. Keep publishing Ross. He’s adding tons of value for your subscribers. Somehow.”

 

Trump went on to receive exactly 312 electoral votes; Harris received exactly 226.

 

I can’t say how Douthat’s tenure at 60 Minutes will go, or how long it will last. His work at the Times would indicate he’ll do well.

 

But let’s find out.

 

Let’s be curious.

The West Bank, Bibi, Iran, and Vance

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, July 31, 2026

 

A week ago, July 24, a clash in Tal (sometimes spelled Tell), a village near Nablus in the West Bank, killed six people — four Palestinians and two Israelis. The Palestinian version of events, shared with Human Rights Watch, is that the Israelis just marched into a Palestinian village and started the fight:

 

Human Rights Watch interviewed two witnesses to the attacks and a local activist, and verified six videos of the incidents posted to social media platforms and shared directly with researchers.

 

Between 6:10 and 6:45 a.m. on July 24, 40 to 50 settlers, including children, approached Tal from the east, attacked four or five Palestinian homes with stones, and tried to break in, witnesses said. A confrontation between the settlers and Palestinians erupted, during which an armed settler shot and wounded a Palestinian man, the witnesses said. More Palestinians then arrived to assist the family, and the settlers fled.

 

About 30 minutes later, the same group of settlers reentered Tal from the southwest, where they were joined by Israeli soldiers, said Mujahid Waleed, a local resident who witnessed both incidents.

 

The Israeli version of events, as you would imagine, is dramatically different:

 

The Israeli army said the settlers had been on a “hike” in the area when clashes broke out with Palestinian residents.

 

It said the settlers fired warning shots before troops arrived and attempted to disperse the confrontation.

 

Now, if you’re an Israeli, is a spot near a Palestinian village really the best place to go hiking? And if you feel like you must go armed on your hike, are you sure there weren’t any other trails that looked appealing that day?

 

The Telegram statement on the clash from the Israel Defense Forces:

 

Following the report regarding a shooting attack in the area near Havat Gilad, earlier today (Friday), IDF soldiers were dispatched to the area of Tal following a report regarding an attack on Israeli civilians who were hiking in the area.

 

Subsequently, terrorists stole the weapon of a security personnel who had arrived at the scene and opened fire toward the Israeli civilians. As a result, several Israeli civilians were injured and evacuated to receive medical treatment at the hospital.

 

Additional IDF soldiers were dispatched to the scene and are currently pursuing the terrorists while establishing security roadblocks in the area.

 

Tal/Tell is a Palestinian village, in the West Bank, and is part of the territory that Israel captured from Jordan during the Six-Day War. The village is in “Area B,” where the Palestinian Authority exercises administrative control but shares security control with Israeli authorities.

 

As of July 19, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported 68 Palestinians killed in the West Bank in 2026, at least 13 by settlers. OCHA reported that as of July 15, 20 Israelis had been injured in 2026 in the West Bank. The position of the Israeli government is that there is pervasive anti-Israeli bias in OCHA and throughout all the U.N.’s agencies.

 

The official position of the Israeli government is that they oppose settlers running around in the West Bank, picking fights with the Palestinians, or being “vigilantes.” Earlier this month, before the Tal clash, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu appeared on NBC News’ Meet the Press and said:

 

We’re a country of laws, and people who break the law, we take them to court. The- in the West Bank, in Judea and Samaria, we’ve had thousands, thousands of attempted attacks and warning against terrorist activities, against innocent Israelis, families, mother with her children driving along the road. They’re stopped by terrorists and they kill them. And this has happened again, and again, and again. There is a vigilante effort not by the settler community. They’re 99.9%, you know, law-abiding citizens. They work, they serve in the army, and so on. There are 150 juvenile delinquents that are not part of that community. They come from the other parts of Israel. We are- I don’t want vigilantes of any kind. And we are working to put them under the law. But I think if we put things in perspective, we should see that we have thousands of attacks. And some, few, but obvious breaking of the law, then we apply the full measure of the law against them. Israel, unlike our neighbors, is a democracy and a country of laws, and we act against those who break the law.

 

The Palestinians and other critics of Israel dismiss that entirely, contending that if the Israeli government wanted to stop violent settlers or “vigilantes,” they would and could do so.

 

The Israeli non-governmental organization Yesh Din documented offenses committed by Israeli civilians — settlers and others — against Palestinians or their property in the West Bank. In January 2025, their data indicated that from 2005 to 2024, roughly 94 percent of cases ended without an indictment, and just 3 percent of investigations ended with a conviction. Figures like that don’t help the Israeli argument that it is “a country of laws” or “we act against those who break the law.” Law enforcement and incarceration are forms of deterrence.

 

Nothing these Israeli settlers do justifies the terrorism and raw military aggression of Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran. Those terrorist organizations and regimes say, in their charters and rhetoric, that they aren’t fighting merely Israeli settler violence; they want to destroy Israel and drive the Jews into the sea.

 

But if we wanted tensions to calm down in the Middle East, it might be helpful for Israeli settlers to stop going on hikes near Palestinian villages while carrying guns, you know? And maybe prosecute and convict some folks for committing crimes against Palestinians in the West Bank? Is a conviction rate in double digits too much to ask?

 

Why Replacing Netanyahu Isn’t Likely to Change Much

 

Israel’s next election is scheduled for October 27, a vote for the 26th Knesset, and it will be the first national election since the 10/7 Hamas attack, as well as the resulting wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and against Iran. Note that Israel has a parliamentary system, with 120 seats in the Knesset and 61 seats needed for a majority.

 

There is likely to be a crowded field; the 76-year-old Netanyahu will run for another term. Because no party is expected to win 61 seats, the big question is which parties will be able to form a coalition government to reach that threshold.

 

Either this coming October or some point thereafter, Israel will have a different prime minister than Netanyahu. I suspect that there are a considerable number of Jews and supporters of Israel who believe that Netanyahu and his actions are the driving force behind the surge in public antisemitism over the past three years, and that when Netanyahu departs, things will get better.

 

Unfortunately, I suspect the change in world sentiment will be negligible. Most of the people who vehemently oppose Netanyahu do so because they hate Israel; most of the people who vehemently oppose Israel do so because they hate Jews. An unnerving number of people claim they oppose Israeli policies, and then attack synagogues and Jewish worshippers and menorahs. Their words say they hate Israel, but their actions say they hate Jews.

 

Vance’s Claims of Israeli Payola Sabotaging the Iran Deal

 

Vice President JD Vance, in his interview with Joe Rogan:

 

You know, there’s a lot of talk about how much is the Israeli government influencing American politics, and there are certainly certain people within the Israeli government who hate the deal. And we see exact evidence. There was a Time story that came out yesterday, that basically there are certain influencers in America who are being paid in order to attack the deal.

 

I definitely think you have seen this very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign to try to derail the negotiation and try to derail the deal. And you know, there was again there’s this Time article that came out yesterday. A friend sent it to me. It’s like worth reading because it lists a bunch of people who have quite literally been paid by a former Trump campaign person who was himself paid by certain elements within the Israeli government. And those people are attacking me viciously for quite literally trying to accomplish the negotiation objective that the president set for the country.

 

That interview was July 15, so I presume Vance is talking about this Time article from July 14:

 

The [Trump administration] official began collecting screenshots and came to believe it wasn’t a coincidence. Tracing tweets by prominent members of the online right, the official came to believe there was an unlikely figure at the center of all this criticism: Trump’s former presidential campaign manager and digital guru, Brad Parscale.

 

Last September, the global ad agency Havas hired Parscale’s firm, Clock Tower X, to conduct a digital campaign on behalf of the State of Israel, according to Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings reviewed by TIME. Under the agreement, Parscale’s operation would produce 100 original pieces of content each month, with at least 80% aimed at Gen Z audiences across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and podcasts. In a Services Agreement draft included in the filing, Parscale also pledged to amplify the campaign across social media and through “integration of narrative messaging into Salem Media Network properties and aligned distribution channels,” referring to the Christian conservative broadcasting and publishing company where he serves as Chief Strategy Officer. Parscale vowed the effort would produce at least 50 million digital impressions per month, as well as influence how AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini characterized Israel and the war. For all this, Israel agreed to pay Clock Tower X $1.5 million per month. . . .

 

While Parscale acknowledges that the operation was intended to prevent young conservatives from drifting away from Israel, he says neither he nor his firms played any role in turning opinion against Trump’s objectives. “I have never funded, organized, or participated in any effort to undermine President Trump — ever — including his MOU or ceasefire proposal,” Parscale tells TIME. “The claim that I am coordinating an effort to prolong the war is completely false. The only people manufacturing a conflict between President Trump, Israel, and me are anonymous officials using background quotes to make me the bogeyman.”

 

Now, you can be justifiably angry with a social media influencer for taking money from a foreign government and not disclosing it to their audiences. It has happened before, and you see how much taking money from Russia through Tenet Media damaged the careers of Benny Johnson and Tim Pool — that is, not at all. (Johnson and Pool insisted they were victims of the foreign influence scheme . . . extremely well-compensated victims.)

 

Here’s the problem with Vance’s argument: How much of the criticism of the memorandum of understanding do you think was driven by Parscale’s firm and its payments, and how much criticism of the MOU was driven by the fact that it required the United States to trust the Iranian regime? How much trust of the Iranian mullahs do you think existed on the right side of the aisle before Vance went to Pakistan to negotiate the deal? Do you think that the fact that the Iranians, right out of the gate, declared that they were shutting down the Strait of Hormuz and violating the deal had anything to do with that extremely negative response to the MOU on the American right?

 

Vance has every right to be irked about influencers on the right taking money through Parscale’s firm and not disclosing it to their audiences. But secret sinister Israeli money is not why just 18 percent of Americans believed the MOU would lead to lasting peace, according to a June 23 Ipsos-Reuters poll.

 

Vice President Vance, speaking about the Iran deal, to CNN’s Jake Tapper, June 15: “The coolest thing about the progress we’ve made over the last few weeks is that you see people within the Iranian system, senior leadership, even IRGC officials say, you know what, we may have some animosity, we may have some mistrust, but we recognize the way that we’ve done business with the United States for 47 years is a mistake, let’s try something else.”

 

Hey, how’s that “coolest thing” working out lately?

 

As for the notion that Vance has some secret affinity for, or alliance with, the antisemitic groyper types on the right’s fringes, let us give Vance the benefit of the doubt and believe that he meant it when he said Nick Fuentes “can eat s***.” Let us also give Vance the benefit of the doubt and believe that he has no desire to politically court the kind of knuckle-dragging evolutionary U-turns who hate his wife and kids for being Indian or Hindu.

 

By the way, it isn’t just snot-nosed punks on the right who believe hateful nonsense like that. Here’s Abdul el-Sayed, the man who is likely to be the Democrats’ nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, in a podcast interview in April:

 

JD Vance has brown kids who he thinks are less American than everyone else. Like that’s wild to look at your own kids and be like you don’t actually belong as much in this country that I brought you into. . . . And honestly, like, JD Vance’s kids? I love you. Like, Usha, like, get out. Okay? Still got time.

 

After el-Sayed said that, the host, Brian Allen, turned to the camera and said, jokingly, “Vance if — I know you’re going to see this. Do not sue me. All right? I didn’t know he was going to talk about you like this. I had no idea.”

Morocco Tests Spanish Sovereignty

By Joshua S. Treviño

Saturday, August 01, 2026

 

The seemingly abrupt crisis in the Spanish city of Ceuta, perched on the North African littoral athwart the Straits of Gibraltar, is at once both alarming in the moment and portentous for the future. That future involves not just Spain, but the entirety of the West — of which the United States is an intrinsic part.

 

At this writing, the fast-moving invasion of Ceuta — we should call it what it is — has seen an estimated sixty thousand young men erupt into the city of approximately eighty thousand residents. They are, for the most part, coming in via a low-lying entry near the Mediterranean shore, poorly secured and now wholly breached. Fifty-seven individuals have died, presumably claimed by the sea or exposure; the number will probably climb. Within Ceuta itself, there are scattered reports of confrontations between Spanish residents and the new neighbors who may shortly outnumber them. Whatever the state of the streets, and even if all sixty thousand migrants are shortly expelled, the message is sent: this Spanish city, populated by Spanish citizens and part of Spanish sovereign territory for the past four and a half centuries, is no longer fully defended and possessed by Spain.

 

As you read this, perhaps the immediate crisis is ended — but all this remains true.

 

The question arises as to who, exactly, possesses the power to override Spanish sovereignty in this fashion we have just witnessed. It is not “the migrants” who have arrived in a flood, and who possess no political identity unto themselves. It is those who positively directed them — that is to say, agents of the Moroccan state. This is empirically confirmed by various media outlets, including the New York Times, which reports that the invaders could have been transported and directed by those agents. Deniability here is a feature: There is no directive nor policy from Rabat encouraging illegal migration into Spain, yet the apparatus of the state, in its police and functionaries, all tend toward the same end.

 

What Morocco has done is comparable to what Americans saw in late 2021, when several thousand Haitians suddenly appeared on the north bank of the Rio Grande at Del Rio, Texas. There too we saw reports of local officialdom urging and even moving Haitians from points within Mexico to crossings into the United States. Whether achieved through quiet direction by the state’s own hierarchy, like Henry II asking to be rid of a troublesome priest, or by human-trafficking cartels that function as state proxies, the fundamental responsible party is the state. A state that cannot account for the rapid assembly and movement of sixty thousand people is not a state. Morocco is a state in full. The question now is whether Spain is as well.

 

Further informing the picture of likely Moroccan-state aggression is the record of coercive Moroccan irredentism since its 1956 independence. The following year saw Moroccan forces invade and besiege Spanish possessions at both Ifni and in the Spanish Sahara, resulting, by 1958, in a Spanish retreat that resulted in the full cession of a strip of the Sahara, and all of Ifni, by 1969. Morocco then invaded neighboring Algeria between 1963 and 1964 in a futile effort to annex some of its bordering territory — an effort that eventually drew in Cuban forces in one of their first combat deployments to Africa. Morocco then invaded the remaining Spanish Sahara in the so-called Green March of 1975, resulting in a wholesale Spanish handover of the territory and the inception of a low-grade war with many of the Sahrawis that continues to this day.

 

From the outset of all this, Morocco laid claim to the Spanish Plazas de Soberanía on the North African coast, including the populated cities of Ceuta and Melilla. In other words, the Moroccan political project has from the start been focused on what it perceives to be the completion of its full territorial control over Africa’s northwestern corner.

 

It was not until Moroccan forces attempted in 2002 to forcibly occupy one of the Plazas de Soberanía, the uninhabited Isla Perejil, not far off Ceuta, that Spain decisively pushed back against the thus-far one-way ratchet of Moroccan territorial acquisition from Spain. That seven-day episode was resolved bloodlessly when Spanish forces retook the island from its minuscule Moroccan garrison; however, Morocco has not relinquished any of its claims. Since then, the tactics have shifted, away from the naked-aggression approaches at Ifni in 1957, Tindouf in 1963, or Perejil in 2002 and toward the Green March model of 1975, in which unarmed populations with state backing and direction are mobilized to deluge the territory of competing sovereigns, and render that sovereignty null by their entry and presence. Prior to the ongoing Ceuta crisis, the most-recent example came in the 2021 crisis in the same city, in which the Moroccan state facilitated the entry of approximately eight thousand migrants. That, of course, was a minor prelude to what we see now.

 

Those familiar with hybrid warfare and its manifestations will recognize this situation for what it is: a form of warfare, in which the population as such is weaponized, and an invasion as certain as if it were carried out by a uniformed army. This characterization is not hyperbole. In the American context, and specifically in Article I, Section 10 of the United States Constitution, invasion is classically understood as requiring two elements: entry into a sovereign and enmity toward that sovereign. It is on this basis, for example, that various U.S. state governments, including Texas, have declared that the border crisis of the Biden years constituted an invasion. The federal government in President Trump’s second term has also characterized the same crisis as an invasion. The involvement of the sending state — in the U.S. case, the Mexican regime with its robust cartel ties, and in the Spanish case, the Kingdom of Morocco’s direct engagement — is central to the characterization. The Spanish legal and constitutional context is obviously different, but the principles of governance are fundamentally the same. The goal of the individual migrant may be a better life, enrichment, or something else, but the goal of the state sending him is the weakening of sovereignty and, in the Moroccan case, sovereignty’s eventual transfer.

 

To that end, the Moroccan state has been strategically consistent, directionally engaged, and operationally savvy for generations. The same cannot be said for Spanish political leadership, which has veered wildly from the sagacious to the positively malign across the past fifty years. To the extent that the wounded and theatrical regime of Pedro Sánchez, enmeshed in scandal and reliant upon separatists elsewhere in Spain for his own tenuous fingernail’s grasp upon power, represents an opportunity to press a weakened Spanish state for territorial concession, the Moroccans will take it. They see the political moment within Spain, and they also see the broader currents afflicting Europe. It is improbable that they are not aware that the European left, not least under Britain’s Labour regime, is presently eager to find overseas territories to concede. To that end, Spanish leadership ought to expect that this Ceuta crisis will be followed by offers, putatively friendly and constructive, to assist in the administration of Ceuta’s borders, and perhaps beyond. The concession here, which may solve a temporary budget or administrative problem for the Spanish government, will be merely the end of a wedge: In the fullness of time, de facto will become de jure.

 

Sánchez’s government, having succeeded in plunging Spain into diplomatic isolation — at this writing, the French are sending forces to the Pyrenees crossings, the Italians are suspending visa-free movement from Spain, and the communicative apparatus of both the United States and Israel are mostly jeering — cannot be counted upon to refuse such a gesture. Having failed to defend Spain’s national territory in a moment of profound crisis, it is unlikely to secure its integrity across the long run. This is the tragedy of Ceuta and Melilla, Spanish cities of nearly half a millennium, in that they may be lost by a government that is both unpopular and fleeting to one that is iron in its vision and its pursuit.

 

A competent Spanish regime would impose costs. We know the working template because we see it at work in the United States. Borders must be militarily secured, and internal defense must be a well-funded priority. Remittances to sending states, whether Mexico or Morocco, must be placed under direct threat. Visas, especially by governing elites and their families, must be visibly curtailed. Market access must be predicated upon security cooperation. Deportations must be prioritized, and sending states compelled to accept them. These are realities in the United States now, to a greater or lesser degree. They will not be in Spain so long as a government of the left persists (though a general election is coming within the year). More broadly, if the European project is to mean anything, the European Union ought to be imposing exactly the same costs upon an external power mounting an invasion of member-state territory. “The terrible ifs accumulate,” wrote Churchill, but they point toward sound policy if it is desired.

 

The European powers, including but not limited to Spain, are going to have to decide what precisely their non-European geographic possessions are, and what they are for. These enclaves are broadly regarded as colonial relics, but this is inaccurate and frequently unjust to their citizenry. Mayotte is French, the Falklands are British, Greenland is Danish, and Ceuta is Spanish: This being so, each of those states has a positive responsibility to retain the adequate defense by arms for their people and possessions. It is a choice as to which side of the Melian Dialogue a nation wishes to occupy. Spain has for the moment failed in this duty. The failure is not fatal, but it will be in time. It need not continue to fail. The Spanish government is unequal to its task: Spain the nation is not.

 

Finally, in this moment, statecraft comes to the fore beyond mere material calculus. In the great House of Commons debate of September 1939 on war or peace, Leo Amery exhorted his parliamentary colleague to “Speak for England!” Someone must speak for Spain, a kingdom of equal dignity, now. Spain’s prime minister will not. The king, who properly ought to fly to Ceuta to share in the suffering of his people, has at this writing yet to move.

 

Spain, immersed in over a thousand years of champions, needs another. The question is who.