We Are America, and We Play Rock ’n’ Roll

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, April 17, 2026

 

“We are Motörhead, and we play rock ’n’ roll.”

 

That was for many years the habitual introduction offered by rock icon Lemmy as his band ripped the skin off its opening number. Lemmy (conventionally called by only his first name) was a very English Englishman—born in Stoke-on-Trent, stiff upper lip, strong opinions about the Great War—who, like any proper Englishman with the means and the opportunity, lived most of his adult life in Los Angeles.

 

But there was a lot of American in Lemmy—it wasn’t just the cavalry Stetson. In one famous interview—one that I assume inspired his introduction—he was asked about his life fronting a “heavy-metal band.” Lemmy heaped scorn on the premise of the question: “We have long hair, so you call us a heavy-metal band,” he said. “If we had short hair, you’d call us a punk-rock band. As a matter of fact, we play rock ’n’ roll.” The singer and writer Henry Rollins, a longtime friend of Lemmy’s, makes it clear that Lemmy’s hell-bent-for-leather stage persona was no persona at all: “He did not own sweatpants, nor did he own sandals. That look wasn’t a stage get-up. He was in the hat and boots all the time. Those were the only kind of clothes he owned.”

 

If you wanted to meet Lemmy, it wasn’t hard to do. He loved the Rainbow Bar & Grill in Hollywood—he lived most of his life in a tiny, memorabilia-crowded apartment just around the corner from it—where he would drink Jack-and-Coke and smoke and play video poker and, if it came to that, shake hands and take pictures with those who sought him out there. It wasn’t hard to spot the people who were there to see Lemmy. His gruffness wasn’t a put-on, either—but he knew his people.

 

Rollins relates another telling conversation with Lemmy: “He said, ‘I remember a time before there was rock ’n’ roll, when you only had your mother’s Rosemary Clooney records.’” Before rock—that blew Rollins’s mind. “I asked him, ‘What happened?’”

 

Lemmy’s answer:

 

“We all heard Elvis Presley. And we never looked back.”

 

***

 

Draining the last of his chota peg—literally, a “small drink” but in this context a euphemism for a not-small drink—the Indian politician, a member of the ultra-nationalist BJP, summarized the theme of our conversation that evening: “Thank God for the British Empire, anyway.”

 

This was the late 1990s, when I was working in Delhi, and the gentleman in question was clear-eyed about what worked and what did not work in his country, including the value of its British legacy in law and civil service, and the foreseeable economic benefits of having a professional class largely fluent in English. Other than the 13-day premiership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Indian nationalists at that point had never been in power in New Delhi, and it is easier to be critical of the government when your entire political identity is that of an opposition party. Another observation from the same sage: “We Indians are poor, but we will figure out how to make money. There are no poor Indians in America. The only poor Indians are in India.” That last part wasn’t and isn’t exactly true, but I got his meaning. But he also saw the downsides to the libertarian American ethos: “What would destroy us would be adopting American attitudes about family.” (I am relating this from memory, no doubt inexactly.) “That would turn us into Somalia.”

 

In vino veritas, though in this case the truth serum was Old Monk rum.

 

Even back then, I knew India was going to be okay. I watched small armies of laborers digging trenches with hand tools and laughed as their coworkers followed up with big yellow spools—laying fiber-optic cable, in hand-dug trenches, in a country where most people had still never touched a computer, much less used the internet. I saw teenage boys who sold tea and cigarettes in my newspaper office sneaking into the art department to use internet-connected computers they were not supposed to touch, and not for what you’re thinking about when you read the words “teenage boys” and “sneaking” and “internet”—they wanted to know about online stock-trading. My older colleagues were Anglophiles who lived like Upper West Side college professors, to the extent that they could afford it, while young colleagues were like Cold War Muscovites in their desire for American things: American clothes, American cigarettes (I can’t believe that smoking in Delhi was much worse than just breathing the air), American music, even American books. (Someone has to buy American books.) One of the most popular restaurants in town was a kind of ersatz American diner that served pretty bad fake American food. There was a Tex-Mex place around the corner where the miserable waiters were made to wear ridiculous plastic cowboy hats and draw Colt-shaped drinks menus out of holsters on their hips. It was called Rodeo.

 

It was not exactly right. But you could see what they were going for. And it was packed.

 

Foreigners may at times have some lacunae regarding the realities of American culture. Another Indian friend, a dark-skinned man from the southern state of Kerala who was a very prominent journalist, was planning to visit the United States for the first time and worried that his complexion might make him unwelcome—that his South and our South had different views about color. He remained skeptical when I tried to explain to him that he had two things Americans care about a great deal: a big public profile and a big paycheck. “You’re going to get harassed, possibly, by people who want you to marry their daughters.” American racists as a rule hate poor black Americans (and rich black Americans who attempt to exercise social power, or run for office on the wrong party’s platform, or complain), though anti-Indian sentiment has grown, predictably, with the success of the Indian diaspora in the United States. American racism is something that non-Americans often misunderstand.

 

But, for the most part, foreigners tend to have a pretty good grip on American culture, and there is a good reason for that: They have been swimming in it for the better part of a century, and American culture is a major component of local cultures around the world, particularly pop cultures. Punjabi hip-hop is a thing. K-pop is genuinely Korean, to be sure, but built on an American musical architecture. A whole generation of Indians grew up watching desi (“local,” approximately) films that were shot-for-shot remakes of mass-market American dreck such as (this one sticks out in memory for some reason) Unlawful Entry.

 

This American ubiquity is not an unmixed blessing to the world, to be sure, especially to the extent that certain forms of youth-worship—the invention of the teenager, the basic concepts of “youth culture” and “youth politics”—are of distinctly American origin. But then you think about Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, the would-be Maggie Thatcher of the Land of the Rising Sun, who played drums in a metal band while she was figuring out that free markets and a strong national defense policy are the way to go. You think about 1989, when German rock bands were composing schmaltzy power ballads about their fellow citizens tearing down that ghastly wall, the same year Chinese kids singing a rock anthem, “Nothing to My Name,” were gunned down or run down by tanks in Tiananmen Square.

 

I wish I could write, “They heard Elvis, and they never looked back,” but it is not that simple.

 

China is still under the grossest form of tyranny. Japan is an affluent liberal democracy, but it is not a happy place. Germany is reunified but still, after all these years, dysfunctional. It is not the case that “All You Need Is Love,” or rock ’n’ roll, or even our much-revered Constitution: Many countries around the world adopted constitutions modeled on ours—Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia—and they did not get the desired results. Constitutions, as Americans are just now starting to learn the hard way, are not self-executing.

 

Americans are experiencing a great deal of social and political trouble right now because we do not know what we want, cannot agree about what we should want, and know only that what the other side wants must be the wrong thing. But if you travel around the rest of the world, it is easy to see what they want. The éminences grises of Western Europe, the Boomer welfare-staters,  want to be Portland, “the place where people in their 20s go to retire,” or, even better, to be Austin in the 1990s, where young people went to retire for a bit and then start tech companies that would make them billionaires. (The Europeans are really feeling the great missed opportunity of the turn of the century.) The elderly men who run China want to take over the American role as the world’s big dog. A bunch of graybeards in the Muslim world dream of a new caliphate or maybe some form of state-capitalist techno-monarchy that will give the Gulf states the dynamism and energy to finally do something interesting with all that oil money instead of building the seventh Louis Vuitton boutique in Dubai. But the young and the hungry around the world, from India to Ukraine, want something different: They want choices and agency and fun and freedom that may not look exactly like our version of it but that is freedom nonetheless. They want to rock.

 

***

 

And rock, as Johnny Rotten knows, is both a product of affluence and a route to it. It is not exactly a swindle, as the Sex Pistols insisted, but there is a kind of swindle at the heart of it: Rock is a rebellious pose for the rich kids of the world. It is not a product of rebellion, nor is it, in the American context, an instrument of rebellion. It costs a little money to rock. The Gibson Custom Shop will sell you a nanometer-by-nanometer copy of Greeny, the famous 1959 Les Paul Standard owned by Peter Green, Gary Moore, and currently by Kirk Hammett, a guitar that has been played on everything from Fleetwood Mac records to Metallica anthems. It’s great. And it’s 30 grand. That’s high-end stuff, but, at a certain level, rock and capitalism are the same thing: The post-punk band Fugazi was famous for refusing to sell T-shirts and other merchandise and for trying to keep ticket prices at five bucks or less (adjust for inflation), but the band’s most famous member, Ian MacKaye, was, and is, a businessman, one who started an influential record label as a way to do the things he wanted to do in the world the way he wanted to do them. That’s where the rock thing really intersects the bigger American thing: Freedom is about having choices, and, unromantic and adultified and boring and Protestant and old-fashioned Republican as this particular piece of wisdom might be, money gives you choices. Private-plane money gives you a lot of choices, but even punk-rock, DIY-type money—the kind of money that allows you to make music or art or whatever without having to hold down a soul-sucking hourly job to pay the rent and keep ramen in the pot—that gives you choices, too. People in rich countries have a lot more leeway when it comes to choosing their own course in life—or in history. 

 

The world wants what we’ve got. That is because the world has been paying attention to America—whether the world wants to or not.

 

Jay Nordlinger tells a funny story about running into the Indian superstar Amitabh Bachchan, very possibly the most famous man in India for many years, flying coach like a regular person—but not in India, where his face and name recognition were practically 100 percent. I don’t know that we have a comparable celebrity, but imagine that John Wayne and Elvis were the same person, and imagine that mega-celebrity traveling economy-class at the height of his career, anywhere in the world: It would have been a mob scene. The world knows America. Quick: Who’s the president of Switzerland? How many of you could pick a German celebrity such as Helene Fischer out of a police lineup? Is there anybody in the world who doesn’t know the American president or Taylor Swift by sight? Sure, someone dwelling in a remote mountain forest somewhere. Maybe a monk or two in the Himalayas.

 

No, the world knows America, and what the world knows is that life as lived by ordinary people is awfully good here. Whatever our national convulsions may be, and whatever self-inflicted torments the entrepreneurial-homicidal American soul is dreaming up for this generation, life here is, more than anything else, comfortable.

 

There’s a woman at my gym who wears a T-shirt that reads: “Comfort Is a Lie.”

 

But she looks pretty comfortable. (And fit!) Almost everybody at my gym looks pretty comfortable: Many of them are college students and faculty, at least one is a trust-funder, one is a roofer, one is a Christian minister. There’s a middle-aged couple with an adult son who has a mental disability that does not seem to keep him from doing his regular laps on the indoor track, and, while I very much doubt that their lives are easy, I also very much doubt that there is a better place to live lives that include those kinds of challenges. I think it would be a hell of a lot harder in Indonesia or in Switzerland or in Panama. And I think that one of the things that people in Indonesia and Switzerland and Panama really understand about the United States—better than many Americans do—is how profoundly true that is.

 

Comfort is not a lie. Comfort is a fact of American life—usually for the better, though not always.

 

Various totalitarian regimes have found out the hard way how appealing that American comfort is. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union was quietly infiltrated ... by bootlegged copies of the American nighttime soap opera Dallas. Some of the Soviet bosses apparently turned a blind eye to this on the theory that the unsavory doings of the corrupt oilman J.R. Ewing and his clan of schemers and sexual misadventurers would provide a salubrious lesson on the wickedness of American capitalism. What the poor shivering Muscovites actually saw was that the gardeners and other servants in the Ewings’ orbit in Texas enjoyed a higher standard of living than did the typical Soviet college professor or senior manager. The Russkies should have known better: In 1948, Joseph Stalin allowed showings of the Henry Fonda film version of The Grapes of Wrath, also on the theory that it would provide a useful lesson on Western wickedness. But Uncle Joe had been up in the dacha too long and had lost touch with the real-life situation of that poor bastard known as New Soviet Man. The Russians were, in fact, very powerfully affected by The Grapes of Wrath—but not in the way Stalin had expected: These are the poorest people in America, and they have ... their own car? Are you kidding me? These poor peasants can just pack up and go look for work and a better life when local economic conditions do not suit them? How come nobody is demanding that they show their papers?

 

America is not only comfortable for the rich and the soft. I am writing this from a Holiday Inn Express about halfway between Dallas and Wichita Falls, and, as I have written before, one of the great glories of American life is the business-traveler hotel. No, it isn’t Villa d’Este or the Palace hotel in Montreux or any of my other happy places, but, for just over a hundred bucks a night, you get a clean room with a comfortable bed and a breakfast that is, I have it on good authority, nutritionally adequate to see you through to lunch, with pretty good coffee to boot.

 

I knew checking in that this was going to be a quiet hotel, because it was a Tuesday night and the parking lot was full of working trucks, and there were well-used boot brushes at the door for the convenience of men who drive working trucks and do the kind of jobs that leave their work boots muddy enough that they’ll want to scrape them off a bit before going into the Holiday Inn Express to crash. I won’t speak to Friday night or Saturday, but guys who stay at hotels like this in places like this on Tuesdays are there to work, and they sleep at night. They aren’t here for beer drinking and hell-raising. The rooms have blackout blinds to keep out the morning sun, but they aren’t needed. I’m an early riser, and in the part of the morning where the first number on the clock is a 4, there’s me and one other guy downstairs looking for coffee. He is one of those guys for whom tattoos are a real big part of his life—he wears a black tank top that helps to show off his ink and that carries the logo of his favorite tattoo parlor—and he has complicated facial piercings and all that stuff. There are two kinds of guys who are getting coffee at 4:42 a.m.—the ones who are up late and the ones who are, like this guy, up early. He is a heavy-haul trucker on his way to Colorado and then back to the Carolinas, and the work he does involves real responsibility and pretty good money. He’s not some poor feckless Joad trying to scrape out a living as an Okie exile in Depression-era Bakersfield. He likes what he does. Getting up at 4 a.m. is just part of the deal.

 

By the time the sun is up, the parking lot is almost entirely empty, all those working pickups (no platinum editions here!) having been driven off to job sites. The only people in the breakfast room when your favorite correspondent goes to fetch his fourth coffee on the way to checking out are a few Spanish-speaking women in a knot around one table. Go to a hotel like this in the oil patch or some other place where the economy is booming, and you’ll see the same thing: There are basically no men to be seen in restaurants or coffee shops or hotels—as workers or as customers—in daylight hours. They’re out working. It’s real work, and it isn’t easy, but it’s a good life, too, driving your truck and brushing off your boots and putting $2,000 or maybe $2,500 a week in your pocket when there’s a lot of work to be done, sleeping that good sleep you get when you’re 33 years old and physically tired and you went to bed sober because that Holiday Inn Express breakfast is going to be way in the rearview mirror by 7 a.m. You hear pop-tops popping here and it’s all big cans of Monster Energy.

 

The soundtrack they’re working to is mostly a mix of hip-hop and what passes for country music in anno Domini 2026. But it’s still rock. You know it when you hear it.

 

It is the soundtrack you want when you do cool stuff and invent things and make things and pile up insane stacks of money, and there are a lot of billionaires who started off sleeping on someone’s floor and a few billionaires who will go back to it before the end. It all goes together: the Sony tech-bro nerd who served as vice president of technical standards responsible for “interoperability norms” of products such as the Blu-ray disc? That guy, James Williamson (no relation), was the guitarist in the Stooges. Not some weekends-and-summers dad-rock cover band—the Stooges, with Iggy Pop, playing on Raw Power, no less. How did that happen? “My sister was bringing home Elvis records,” he told Clash magazine, “and so I thought, ‘I gotta have a guitar.’” He heard Elvis, and he never looked back. Or how about a tugboat captain, of all unlikely things, who got a doctorate in medieval literature at the University of Texas at Austin, writing a dissertation on the poems of Cynewulf? Sterling Morrison had a job before all that: He was a guitarist in the Velvet Underground. My friend Charles C.W. Cooke, the erudite, Oxford-educated National Review writer and all-purpose Florida man? A touring rock musician as a youngster, and a pretty good one. Charlie is as English an Englishman as Lemmy was—he lived for a time in a house that had once belonged to Oliver Cromwell—but he will tell you that he has always been, for as long as he can remember, a kind of American-in-waiting. The world is full of them. It is a big glorious mess, as freedom must be—even well-ordered freedom of the Anglo-Protestant variety that we have goaded into so many mutations over the past 250 years.

 

“We are America, and we play rock ’n’ roll.”

 

 

On Big-Tent Antisemitism

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, April 15, 2026

 

The other day Jon Favreau of Pod Save America interviewed Hasan Piker, the it boy of the radical Marxist pro-Hamas left.

 

Favreau threw Hasan a kind of lifeline. He asked:

 

“So my question is, when you say Hamas is a thousand times better, do you actually mean that? Or is that a rhetorical move or like a solidarity signal?”

 

Piker responded: “Like what, I mean, it’s all of the above. I do mean it. I think it’s a rhetorical move because it frustrates a lot of people. I’ve also said I’m a harm reduction voter. I’m a lesser evil voter. And therefore I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time.”

 

The good news for Piker is that he’d never have to vote for Hamas more than once, because once they get elected, they never hold another election and happily torture and murder any Gazan who objects to their rule.

 

I’m not going to dwell on Piker’s lengthy and deceitful nonsense justifying his support for Hamas. I can tolerate a lot of criticism of Israel that I disagree with. But there is simply no defensible case for Hamas, and once you start trying to make one, I know who you are.

 

A lot of Democrats and progressives are eager to get some of that sweet, sweet, right-wing edgelord social media influencer energy they envy. As a result they like to pretend—to others and/or themselves—that Piker is a much more serious person, raising serious issues and bringing serious rizz to the left (Did I use rizz correctly? Answer: I don’t care). I honestly have seen no evidence for this, but then again, I mostly just see really stupid and evil things he says posted to social media. Like when he recently told an audience at Yale that the fall of the Soviet Union was one of the worst catastrophes of the 20^th century. Or the various clips where he abuses his dog. (Say what you will about Tucker Carlson, he does love his dogs.)

 

Now, if you want to argue he’s not as horrible a person as Nick Fuentes or as crazy as Candace Owens, that’s fine. I mean, it’s fine if you want to argue that with somebody who cares about such arguments. I don’t, because this is not how I judge people. As I often say, if you want to argue that Stalin was worse than Hitler, or vice versa, there are good arguments on both sides of that. But just because you’re “better” than Hitler, that doesn’t make you good. Some serial killers murder lots of people, some only kill a few. But once you qualify as a serial killer, you qualify as a bad person. The rest is just point-scoring. Piker is not a murderer, and neither are Owens and Fuentes. But they’re all horrible people, and making the other side’s horrible people the standard for whether or not you welcome (allegedly) slightly less horrible people into your “big tent” is not an indicator of moral or political sophistication. It’s a sign of your own moral rot.

 

I have written many times about the fundamental corruption of J.D. Vance’s or the Heritage Foundation’s double standard when it comes to building a big tent on the right. They don’t want “purity tests” when it comes to Nazi cosplayers, but they’re perfectly comfortable expelling anti-Trump, “RINO,” or “neocon” conservatives. In other words, they’ve got a purity test, it’s just that their definition of purity includes Tucker Carlson and apologists for Nick Fuentes, but not those with a different—higher—standard.

 

The Bulwark had a good piece on the centrist Democratic group Third Way’s efforts to expel Piker from their own big tent efforts. Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for Justice Democrats, a hard left outfit, told the Bulwark’s reporter that, “The tent already includes [Piker],” adding “I think the question is actually whether our tent should continue to be big enough for a very vocal minority of corporatists and right-wing hawks who are still trying to keep this party under the grips of corporate interests and war-hawk lobbies like AIPAC.”

 

Points for honesty.

 

Which brings me to Rep. Ilhan Omar, who also got very friendly treatment from Pod Save America. I happened to catch a segment on Morning Joe a couple hours ago in which they played clips from the interview. Tommy Vietor asked Omar what she thinks about the various MAGA types breaking with Trump over the Iran war. “How do you think Democrats respond? … Do we work with these disaffected MAGA voices? … Do we build a bigger tent to try to win in November?”

 

Omar answered, “I think as Americans, it is really important for us to work together for the preservation of everything that is good in our country.” She added: “And I believe the thing that has been very fascinating, especially about Marjorie and Candace, is that they are not just coming out … saying this action is wrong. They’re saying, ‘I am done with you.’”

 

Vietor chimes in, marveling how they’re making a moral statement about Trump: “This guy is bad. Not like, this policy is bad.”

 

The weird thing about the conversation on Morning Joe was how nobody bothered to address Omar’s embrace of Candace Owens, who is not merely opposed to the Iran war, not merely anti-Israel, but is a full-blown Jew-hating whack job. Instead, they all talked about the maturity and seriousness of Democrats giving Greene the benefit of the doubt.

 

Look, I think the strange new respect for Marjorie Taylor Greene from the mainstream media and the Democrats is pathetic and ridiculous. But at least Greene has made some effort to condemn antisemitism and offer something that looks like introspection. But for most of that crowd, the dynamic has to do with Trump obsession. Indeed, that’s part of Omar’s argument. If you can accept that Trump is bad, we can overlook our other disagreements. It’s a sign of how much the Democrats don’t really know what they stand for except that they stand against Trump. Their “big tent” has one giant pole at the center, and it’s Trump hatred.

 

In a two-party system, particularly one as broken as ours, opposing the president of another party is always going to be an invitation to talk. The GOP welcomed lots of people disaffected by Carter, Clinton, and Obama. Democrats gobbled up people who hated Nixon and George W. Bush.

 

But that’s not Omar’s project (nor Piker’s). Omar despises Israel, which is why she includes Candace Owens as someone the Democrats should put their arms around. Politics is always about forming coalitions, and forming coalitions is always a line-drawing project. What are you willing to tolerate on your team and what is unacceptable?

 

If Omar has ever said that the Democrats should try to embrace Mitt Romney or Jeff Flake or any number of conventional conservative critics of Trump, I don’t remember it. After all, they said Trump was a bad guy when it took real courage and came at a real price. I can search my email for a note from Omar saying, “Let’s talk.” But I don’t think I’ll find it. 

 

The “disaffected MAGA voices” Omar finds compelling aren’t disaffected because of Trump’s character, which has not changed in a decade. They’re not disaffected because he made the GOP a pro-choice party, racked up over $7 trillion in debt, or pardoned the January 6 mob. These people are disaffected because they don’t like Israel and float antisemitic theories about it. And that’s why Omar thinks they’re suddenly worth embracing.

 

(You can say I’m being unfair to some of these disaffected voices because they espouse some broader argument about foreign policy and imperialism or something. But none of these suddenly disaffected doves had any problems with the Venezuela operation or Trump’s Greenland threats. They, like Omar, have bought into the conspiracy theory that the “Zionists” control our government. And if you can meet Omar and the Piker crowd on that point, the tent flap opens.)

 

We hear a lot about “horseshoe theory” these days, and I won’t rehash all of that. But when it comes to the very online bases of both parties, hatred of Israel is a jump ball, and both sides are competing for market share.

Mamdani’s Socialist Delusion

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, April 16, 2026

 

In an appearance on CBS Mornings on Thursday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani articulated a Marxian version of dialectical materialism in which democratic socialism finally crushes its capitalist detractors.

 

Mamdani scoffed at those who told him that, “You could only be a democratic socialist in northwest Queens.” But when he won a bare majority of the general election vote in one of America’s bluest cities to become mayor, Mamdani claimed that his critics changed their tune. “Now,” he said, “the next question is the state, then it’ll be — the next question will be the country.”

 

“I think that this is a politics that can flourish anywhere because, frankly, there is only one majority in this country — that’s the working class,” the Big Apple’s collectivist mayor forecast.

 

Where would a socialist be without his undying faith in his movement’s inevitable historical triumph?

 

The mayor seems to have succumbed to the classic Leninist fantasy that socialism is broadly popular, but its ascendancy is thwarted by nefarious structural impediments. In reality, Mamdani-style quasi-socialistic progressivism has been the flavor of the decade on the American left, and it has not enjoyed broad appeal.

 

The far left’s inevitable ascendancy was supposed to begin in 2018, but voters had other plans. Arizona’s great progressive hope, David Garcia, lost his bid to unseat Governor Doug Ducey by nearly 18 points. Onetime NAACP chief Ben Jealous, too, underperformed against Maryland Governor Larry Hogan. In Texas, Beto O’Rourke’s narrow defeat in his bid to unseat Senator Ted Cruz was said to represent a sea change in Texas politics. It wasn’t.

 

At the congressional level, the far-left candidate Scott Wallace lost a winnable race in a suburban Pennsylvania district. Despite glowing coverage of his candidacy, Ammar Campa-Najjar went down to defeat in San Diego against a Republican incumbent facing a criminal indictment. Liz Watson raised $2 million on the back of her endorsements by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but she lost her Indiana race by 13 points.

 

What was billed as a progressive moment in American politics did not live up to expectations. Still, progressives comforted themselves with victories like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s election in the Bronx, Ilhan Omar’s succession to fill Keith Ellison’s seat, and the disgraced John Conyers replacement by Rashida Tlaib. But these were all overwhelmingly Democratic districts.

 

Democrats learned all the wrong lessons from 2018 and embraced the most radical version of the left’s philosophy. The Green New Deal, free college, free housing, a universal basic income, Medicare for all, defunding ICE, tearing down the border wall, and so on — almost all the Democratic Party’s presidential aspirants ahead of the 2020 cycle endorsed some or all these policy prescriptions. But the candidate who didn’t, Joe Biden, won the nomination.

 

The far left’s march toward victory has encountered plenty of bumps in the road in this decade, too. The so-called “Squad” lost members in 2024, and not because counterrevolutionary conservatives succumbed to a false consciousness and voted against their economic interests. Their fellow Democrats turned on the likes of Cori Bush in Missouri and Jamaal Bowman in New York, throwing them out on their ears in favor of more establishmentarian figures.

 

Before that, left-wing darling Jessica Cisneros tried and failed (twice) to represent a Texas border district, but she never lived up to the hype around her candidacy in progressive media outlets. Despite many attempts, Ohio’s Nina Turner never managed to translate her electoral successes at the state and city levels into a national political career. San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin was perhaps the most famous progressive prosecutor to be defenestrated by his constituents, but he was hardly the only far-left reformer in that role to suffer the voters’ wrath.

 

Progressives have managed to avoid reckoning with these and many more electoral setbacks. For that, they can thank their willfully blind allies, none of whom are inclined to dwell on their philosophy’s shortcomings or its toxic advocates. In the last several years, self-described Democratic Socialists have engaged in anti-social activism and violence with such regularity that, if their politics were different, Democrats would recognize them as a run-of-the-mill hate group.

 

In the last two years, municipal-level socialists won victories in many (though not nearly all) of the campaigns they waged, taking the reins in places like Seattle; Burlington, Vt.; and, yes, New York City. But theirs is still a philosophy with niche appeal, and its reach is still limited to a handful of urban enclaves.

 

If victory is your destiny, you don’t have to compromise with your adversaries or calibrate your message to persuade the persuadable. It’s not hard to see the appeal in that outlook. But the kind of socialism Mamdani insists is welcome everywhere dismisses offhandedly the fact that it has been attempted almost everywhere, and it has gone down to defeat more often than not. Absent successes at the ballot box, Mamdani’s bravado sounds less like confidence and more like delusion — the ineluctable arc of history notwithstanding.

Yes, Of Course War Settles Things

By Rich Lowry

Friday, April 17, 2026

 

Countless protest signs have informed us over the years that “war is not the answer.”

 

We hear this message, with varying levels of sophistication and differing underlying worldviews, from institutions and people ranging from Code Pink to Pope Leo.

 

“War does not solve problems,” the pontiff said in an Angelus address last year. “On the contrary, it amplifies them and causes deep wounds in the history of peoples — wounds that take generations to heal.”

 

Now, there are many things that can be said about the tragedy of warfare without crediting the blatantly ahistorical cliché that it is never the answer, or doesn’t solve disputed questions, often with a terrible finality.

 

Warfare can determine international boundaries and the nature of governments. It can decide who will rule and who will not. The relative power of states, the extent of religious faiths, and the status of a culture can depend on it.

 

Wars might be pointless, or fought for prestige, revenge, or territorial aggrandizement. That’s all true, but it doesn’t change the fact that military conflict is, at times, necessary and highly consequential; it can achieve beneficent ends, as well as awful ones.

 

It mattered for the spread of Christianity, for instance, that Constantine, who would become the first Christian emperor of Rome, won the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312. Later, Christendom benefited from Ferdinand and Isabella taking back Granada from its Muslim rulers in 1492, and from the Holy Roman Emperor defeating the Ottoman besiegers of Vienna in 1683.

 

Certainly, it would have been better if all this could have been amiably worked out among the relevant parties, but that’s not how the world usually works.

 

In the early 19th century, Europe had a Napoleon problem — a world-historical military genius determined to bend the continent to his will through force of arms. After serial failures, the Allies finally solved this problem in the War of the Seventh Coalition. The ensuing diplomatic settlement at the Congress of Vienna forged a peace that lasted nearly a century but wouldn’t have been possible without victory at Waterloo.

 

In the early 20th century, Europe had a Hitler problem — a fanatical, race-obsessed militarist who wanted his Third Reich to dominate Europe. This problem, too, was solved by force and led to a lasting peace, although a very tense one during the Cold War. If it’s true that war should usually be the last resort, the Allies would have been better off if it had been the first resort against Hitler, checking him when he was relatively weak.

 

More parochially, the United States wouldn’t be what it is today absent two existential wars. When the colonies began agitating for independence, the British weren’t simply going to cede what they considered sovereign territories, especially given their economic and strategic value. The American cause — and all the good that has flowed from it — depended on prevailing in a grinding eight-year war.

 

About a hundred years later, it all could have collapsed had the United States not prevailed in the Civil War, an appallingly bloody conflict that extinguished American slavery and preserved the foundation for the nation’s gathering greatness.

 

None of this is a warrant for heedless warmongering, or a reason to dismiss, say, the sheer cynical brutishness of the Roman destruction of Carthage in the Third Punic War, or the horrors of Passchendaele. That war is terrible, however, doesn’t mean that it’s ineffective.

 

In our times, Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 in the erroneous, but not crazy, belief that a sharp, decisive military campaign would topple the Western-oriented government in Kyiv and force the creation of a regime more to the Kremlin’s liking. This was a war that never should have been launched, yet Ukraine had no alternative but to fight it.

 

If Kyiv wants to protect its sovereign territory and eventually get a tolerable diplomatic outcome, war is the answer — as, sadly, it has been so often throughout human history.

The YOLO Phase

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, April 16, 2026

 

This sounds like a rhetorical question but I swear it isn’t: Is it just me or is the White House getting nuttier?

 

“It’s you” is a defensible answer. As I write this, for instance, one of the top stories on the New York Post’s website has to do with our Secretary of Health and Human Services interrupting a family road trip many years ago to sever and collect a dead raccoon’s penis for “study.”

 

Which, as others have noted, isn’t the most disturbing encounter he’s had with dead animals. Or the second-most.

 

To ask whether an administration that includes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is getting nuttier is to invite the response, “Nuttier than harvesting raccoon junk?”

 

The same goes for the president’s spat with the pope. Flaming the Vicar of Christ felt like an unhinged new low for Donald Trump, proof that a man who’s barely tethered to propriety on his best days had at last completely detached. But this wasn’t the first time he’s squabbled with a pontiff. In 2016 he called Pope Francis “disgraceful” and a “pawn” for Mexico after Francis opined that a person can’t truly be Christian if they think only of building walls, not bridges.

 

Beefing with the Vatican repeatedly is nutty enough that it feels absurd to debate the relative nuttiness of each episode.

 

All of which is to say that, if by “nuttier” we mean weirder, there’s a good case to be made that the White House isn’t getting nuttier. Arguably the opposite, as Trump just rid himself of a (married) Homeland Security secretary who was allegedly having a very public affair with her (married) top adviser and whose husband was recently exposed for having a “bimbo fetish.”

 

And not the sort of bimbo fetish we tend to associate with randy middle-aged men.

 

But if by “nuttier” we mean more fanatic about making the president happy, either by carrying out his vendettas more aggressively or by aping his worst impulses more doggedly, then yeah, I think there’s an equally strong case that the administration is getting nuttier. And not by coincidence.

 

There are reasons to believe we might be entering the YOLO phase of this presidency, which was already waaaay too YOLO-minded to begin with.

 

Retribution.

 

The easiest prediction in politics was that whoever followed the execrable Pam Bondi as attorney general would be worse than she was.

 

That’s because the president reportedly resented Bondi’s “inability to prosecute the people he hates” and made that resentment known to confidants, clarifying expectations for her successor. If the next AG wanted to avoid her fate, he or she would need to behave more execrably in harassing Trump’s political enemies.

 

So that’s what acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, a former defense lawyer for the president, has done.

 

With Blanche now at the helm, the Justice Department has launched an investigation of Cassidy Hutchinson, the former White House staffer who testified against Trump before the House’s January 6 Committee. Days later, the DOJ moved to vacate the convictions of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who were found guilty of seditious conspiracy for plotting the insurrection. Their sentences had already been commuted by the president last year; vacating the convictions now is a symbolic statement that there’s no crime in trying to overthrow the U.S. government as long as you’re doing so on behalf of Donald Trump.

 

To all appearances, Blanche’s Justice Department will follow the friends/enemies ethos of this squalid postliberal kakistocracy even more ruthlessly than Bondi’s did. To signal his emphatic lack of independence, he mewled to reporters this month that if the president opted not to nominate him as AG and instead offered him some other position, he would respond, “Thank you very much, I love you, sir.” Say what you want about Todd Blanche, he understands the assignment.

 

So does Tulsi Gabbard. Apart from J.D. Vance, the director of national intelligence is the most tragicomic figure in the Cabinet, an ardent dove who finds herself now having to grudgingly defend Bush-on-steroids interventions in Venezuela and Iran. The president’s surprising turn toward hawkishness placed her at a crossroads, forcing her to choose between resigning on dubious principle à la Joe Kent or biting her tongue while figuring out novel ways to stay in her boss’ good graces.

 

She chose door number two, as the power-worshipers around Trump nearly always do.

 

Gabbard’s strategy for proving her value to the White House is the same as Blanche’s, pursuing grievances that the president has nursed since his first term to demonstrate the depth of her loyalty. She was on scene in Fulton County, Georgia, in January when the FBI confiscated ballots from a storage facility as part of a probe into Joe Biden’s supposedly suspicious victory there in 2020. And yesterday her office confirmed that she’s issued a criminal referral to the DOJ for the whistleblower who exposed Trump’s 2019 “quid pro quo” phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, which led to his first impeachment.

 

Retribution is the name of the game in Trump 2.0 and Blanche and Gabbard—two of the most powerful figures in national security—are now conspicuously going all-in on it. Seems ominous!

 

Blind loyalty.

 

Also ominous is the reaction of certain presidential cronies to Trump sparring with Pope Leo XIV, which came packaged with a blasphemous image of himself as Jesus healing the sick. (The commander in chief de-escalated on Wednesday, publishing a new image of himself with Jesus instead.)

 

Not only did the first image offend some MAGA deplorables, a group previously deaf to their hero’s moral outrages, it caused a few to wonder whether the president might be the antichrist—which I doubt, for what it’s worth, and not just because I’m a nonbeliever. If Donald Trump has a divinely ordained mission, it’s surely the destruction of the American experiment and immolation of American global prestige, not ushering in the end times.

 

The (mild) right-wing backlash to the president’s blasphemy was important, though, insofar as it turned the episode with the pope into a litmus test for Republicans reminiscent of the 2016 Access Hollywood fiasco. Now, as then, Trump’s boorishness led him to do something so abhorrent that even members of his own party felt obliged to lash him for it; at such moments, when he’s besieged, the degree of us-versus-them loyalty he expects of his personality cult goes from “high” to “absolutely blind.”

 

Bad enough that a right-winger should join a pile-on of the president when he doesn’t deserve it. Much worse is joining a pile-on when he does.

 

There was only so much his toadies could say to spin his blasphemy, though. The best the highest-ranking Catholic in the administration could do was lolz, which was actually more dignified than the embarrassing lie evangelist Franklin Graham spun for his followers. So instead, Trump courtiers focused on the spat with Leo and dutifully took the president’s side in that. J.D. Vance, a recent convert to Catholicism, presumed to lecture the pope about grounding his theological pronouncements in truth. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who isn’t Catholic, babbled at reporters about the church’s doctrine on “just wars.” (Which the Iran war is not.)

 

But most obsequious was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, unsurprisingly, who marched out to the podium at the Pentagon this morning with a prepared rant likening American media’s skepticism of the Iran conflict to … the Pharisees’ hostility to Jesus.

 

That seemed to be a gesture of defiance toward Leo, as the pope’s own outspokenness about the war was motivated in part by Hegseth’s Christian justifications for it. “Woe to those who bend religions and the very name of God to their own military, economic, and political objectives, dragging what is holy into what is most filthy and dark,” the pontiff declared this morning in Cameroon. For Hegseth, there could be no Trumpier response than extending a rhetorical middle finger by comparing naysayers about the war to those who persecuted Christ.

 

Except, I guess, lifting a fake Bible verse from Pulp Fiction instead of the Bible itself, which Hegseth apparently also did this week. That’s Trumpier.

 

“For the would-be Great Man of History, the final boss is always the pope,” New York Times columnist Ross Douthat quipped earlier this week. That sums up the present moment nicely. For a megalomaniac like Trump, there can be no greater test of loyalty for devout Christians who support him than asking them to take his side in a moral dispute with the most authoritative Christian on Earth.

 

And, with no exceptions, the most powerful Christians in his orbit have. Seems ominous!

 

Why now?

 

If I’m right that the administration is getting nuttier—that is, more ruthless about abusing power and more fanatic about signaling allegiance to Trump—why is it happening now?

 

One would think it’d be the opposite. The president’s job approval dropped below 40 percent in March in Nate Silver’s poll aggregator and has been stuck there all month. Unpopular wars and high gas prices during a second term are usually cause for people in and around the White House to start peeling off, not to burrow in.

 

Answering the question “why now?” begins with a practical reason. After a full year of denying the media a “scalp” by firing underperforming Cabinet members, Trump axed two in the span of a month when he canned Kristi Noem and Bondi. He’s clearly gotten more comfortable lately with the prospect of future Senate confirmation fights, perhaps expecting that the chamber’s Republican majority will be more willing to rubber-stamp his nominees as the odds of a Democratic takeover grow. It can’t be long before the next axe falls.

 

It also can’t be a coincidence that the people around him who are straining the hardest to demonstrate loyalty lately are all on thin ice and facing the axe themselves. Blanche is a temp, reportedly at risk of being pushed aside as attorney general for Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin. Gabbard continues to run afoul of Trump for her ambivalence about his foreign policy. Mike Johnson is the speaker in name only, with his hold on the job entirely contingent on sucking up to the president.

 

And Hegseth? You can see the terror in his eyes at his press conferences about potentially being scapegoated for a less-than-total victory over Iran. He’s allegedly paranoid about being replaced by Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and probably has reason to be. My sense is that he’d do anything to retain the president’s favor, as being a buffoon with an impressive title whom no one takes seriously is preferable to being a buffoon to whom no one any longer pays any attention.

 

Shaky job security is a terrific incentive for an employee to work harder. Working harder in the Trump administration means being even more of a servile henchman and bootlicker than you were before.

 

A second reason that the administration is burrowing in is the decline in Trump’s political fortunes. It becomes plainer by the day that the political damage he’s caused himself is irreparable, something that might be mitigated by November (or might not!) but assuredly not undone. Per Politico, numerous White House allies are resigned to losing the House and now worry about saving the Senate, an outcome that seemed off the board six months ago given the difficulty of this fall’s map for Democrats.

 

Trump himself is reacting to the air of politician doom by behaving a little, well, nuttier than usual. Twice in the past week the Times has considered the question of the president’s mental health as the pressure of the war and his declining popularity weigh on him. When he jabs at the pope, threatens to end Iran’s civilization, and depicts himself as Jesus, is that just him being him—or is it a fragile mind straining to cope with a degree of psychological stress to which it’s never been exposed? (Since January 6, at least.)

 

As I’ve said, normally this would be the rats-off-the-ship stage of a presidency. Yet, paradoxically, the worse things get for Trump, the more tightly bound to him his cronies are apt to become. The cultish dynamic of strongman authoritarianism will encourage a siege mentality among many of his deputies at moments of political turmoil. And the command the president continues to wield over grassroots Republican opinion makes breaking with him politically risky for GOP apparatchiks even when the rest of the country is howling for change.

 

If you’re the sort who worries about crossing him during good times, how much more should you worry when his back is against the wall and he’s looking for ways to reassert his authority by making examples of enemies?

 

Turning Point, USA?

 

The final accelerant of the administration’s anxiety is of course the electoral fate of Viktor Orbán, the ur-Trump, in Hungary last weekend.

 

Orbán was the avatar of ascendant Western postliberalism, a man who wielded state power to bend public and private institutions in his country to his will in precisely the manner our president strives to. He became a test case for what we might call autocracy without autocracy: Rather than cancel or rig elections, Orbán pulled every lever of government available to him to advantage himself and disadvantage his opponents.

 

He failed spectacularly. Not only was he routed at the polls, but incoming Prime Minister Péter Magyar has undertaken this week to warn Orbán’s toadies—to their faces—that they’ll pay for their roles in turning Hungarian public life into an arm of his predecessor’s political machine.

 

Trump and his deputies are watching intently, no doubt.

 

The president has already reportedly “joked” with aides that he plans to pardon everyone who comes within 200 feet of the Oval Office before his term ends. Watching Orbán go down in flames and Magyar promise a reckoning for those who enabled him can only have made the administration that much more nervous about consequences down the line from America’s own retribution-minded opposition. If the backlash to Western postliberalism has arrived, the future suddenly looks quite frightening for Trump collaborators.

 

The obvious lesson they’ll take from Magyar’s victory is that autocracy without autocracy isn’t enough. They suspected as much already—that’s why meddling with the vote in November is such a priority for Republicans—but it seems clear from Hungary’s example that the president isn’t going to overcome a blue wave by, say, pressuring broadcast networks not to air interviews with Democrats or getting the DOJ to harass left-wing nonprofits that are working to get out the vote.

 

To protect their hold on power, he and his menagerie will need to be considerably more ruthless about challenges to it than Viktor Orbán was.

 

Put it all together and you can see how we might be about to embark on a YOLO phase of this presidency that puts what we’ve seen already to shame. As Trump and his aides become convinced that a Democratic midterm wipeout is a fait accompli, they may surmise that there’s nothing left to lose by leaning all the way in on unpopular autocratic gambits.

 

Why not ignore an adverse Supreme Court ruling on birthright citizenship? Why not fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell? Why not plan a new war with Cuba while the current war with Iran is still wreaking havoc on markets? Why not manufacture some sort of domestic crisis and declare that the emergency prevents the next election from being held as scheduled?

 

The Iran war looks to be a turning point for all sorts of things—Trump’s political support, U.S. alliances in Europe and the Persian Gulf, the long-term viability of our relationship with Israel, potentially even Chinese dominance of the Far East. That it might also be a turning point for how ruthlessly this lousy administration conducts itself seems only logical.

The Federal Reserve Standoff

National Review Online

Friday, April 17, 2026

 

There is a crisis brewing at the Federal Reserve, and a completely unnecessary one.

 

President Trump wants the current chairman, Jerome Powell, whose term expires in a few weeks, to be gone. The Republican-led Senate wants to replace Powell with Kevin Warsh, but only if Trump agrees to end the absurd criminal probe into Powell that he launched earlier this year. Powell also wants Trump to end that probe and has threatened to stay in place, pro tempore, until his successor is approved. Trump neither wishes to end the probe nor leave Powell in place, and he has thus threatened to fire Powell if he stays on after his term is up. If Trump were to follow through, we would enter uncharted waters, with potentially significant economic consequences.

 

The easiest way out of the thicket would be for the DOJ to stop the legal harassment of Powell. He is yet another example of a person on Trump’s bad list who we are supposed to believe — very conveniently for Trump’s purposes — just happened to engage in suspected criminal behavior worthy of investigation and perhaps prosecution. Powell’s underlying offense, of course, is not cutting interest rates on a timetable to Trump’s liking. This almost certainly makes him the first monetary official in the history of the United States to be criminally investigated over his worries that core inflation might still be too high.

 

The probe is supposedly over Powell potentially misleading Congress about the expensive renovation of the Fed’s headquarters, a topic that Trump has banged on about. The DOJ has already seen a federal judge take the unusual step of squashing subpoenas in the clearly pretextual investigation. Showing persistence, if nothing else, the department sent a team of prosecutors and a federal investigator to the construction site the other day, only to get turned away.

 

Senator Thom Tillis, who sits on the banking committee, is vowing to block Warsh’s nomination until the DOJ probe ends.

 

As a legal matter, all of this, for now at least, involves questions of “ought” rather than “is.” Legally, President Trump can bring criminal probes — even frivolous ones. He should not have brought this one.

 

Legally, the Senate can decline to move expeditiously to confirm a new executive official. In this case, it should do the opposite. And, yes, there is a serious argument that under Article II, Trump can fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve. But, understanding that the United States (and his administration) has a great deal to gain from the separation of transient politics and stable monetary policy, he should not wish to do any such thing. Ultimately, then, this is a matter of prudence.

 

If things continue along the current path, consequential legal questions will come into play.

 

Because the Federal Reserve is so important, and its ostensible independence is so useful, the desired aim here should be to bring about a resolution that will prevent the president from summarily firing its leader and putting the constitutional basis of the Fed to the test.

‘Winning’ Is a Strange Word for What Iran Just Experienced

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, April 16, 2026

 

If the Islamic Republic’s leadership — or what remains of it — had been consuming Western media coverage of the 40-day conflict with the United States and Israel, they could be forgiven for concluding that they won the war.

 

Both Iran and the U.S. have used the cease-fire to rearm, retool, reposition, and, most important, perform a battle-damage assessment of the blows they dealt out and those they absorbed. America and its allies in the Middle East took plenty of hits, but they are nothing compared with the destruction meted out against Iran. And as Iran’s decision-makers emerge from their bunkers, the harsh light of day is forcing them to critically reevaluate their ability to sustain the fight if the cease-fire ends without a durable negotiated settlement.

 

“The U.S. and Israel hit at least 17,000 targets over five weeks of war, including factories; rail, road, and port infrastructure; government buildings; and military facilities,” the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Reconstruction costs will be measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, not that the Iranians could muster either the cash or the resources necessary to rebuild their shattered economic instruments. “The air campaign not only hit infrastructure but the facilities producing material such as steel that is needed to repair it and operations such as petrochemicals that bring in the foreign currency to pay for the work,” the Journal continued.

 

The Strait of Hormuz remains a sticking point, but the U.S. blockade has cut Tehran off from meaningful sources of revenue-generation abroad. As Iranians conduct a sober evaluation of their predicament, its leaders are reportedly coming to terms with the gravity of their situation.

 

“Iran insiders are rumbling about the looming economic catastrophe if Washington does not grant sanctions relief that would unlock prospects for economic recovery,” said Burcu Ozcelik, senior research fellow with the London-based Royal United Services Institute think tank. “Without the prospect of economic recovery, regime survival beyond the short term will face sustained structural and popular pressure.”

 

“My sense is that the scale of the destruction now is much worse than the Iran-Iraq war,” said DePaul University associate professor Kaveh Ehsani. Dealing out in just six weeks the amount of damage Iran absorbed over the course of an eight-year war would leave anyone depressed — even, apparently, the millenarian theocrats in Tehran.

 

Moreover, if Iran cannot satisfy Trump at the negotiating table, not only will Iran’s export revenue collapse, but it will also run out of room to store the oil it produces within weeks. That condition is likely to force Iran to shut down its fields and risk damage to its facilities that would further truncate its export capacity. The inherently unsustainable “toll booth” strategy collapsed following the imposition of the American blockade of the strait, and Iran appears to know that. Already, the remnants of the regime are making conciliatory noises that signal a lack of resolve to maintain its posture for much longer.

 

For all the thoroughly reported political pressure on the president to see this war through to a speedy and durable conclusion, little attention has been paid to the existential cataclysm the Islamic Republic just endured. That reality is only just dawning on Iran’s leadership in much the same way that the Western press is finally coming to terms with the conditions on the ground inside the Islamic Republic.

 

It’s one thing to recognize defeat. It’s another to acknowledge it. The Iranian regime would never give the West the satisfaction, but that doesn’t mean Tehran will not agree to terms that will render this war an unambiguous geopolitical success story. If it does not, three U.S. carrier battle groups and thousands of American soldiers will be ready to further impress upon the Iranian leadership that they do not, in fact, have the “upper hand.”