How Progressives Stole Our Schools, and How to Take Them Back

By Stanley Kurtz

Thursday, April 16, 2026

 

The most powerful steps we could take to wrest public schools from the hands of the woke would be for states to move school board elections “on-cycle” (to federal Election Day) and allow political parties to nominate the candidates.

 

A few states do this now, yet by far most school board elections remain off-cycle and “nonpartisan.” The result is that a great many conservative districts are run by progressive Democratic school boards. That’s because low-turnout, low-information, off-cycle school board elections are dominated by highly organized and self-interested teachers’ unions.

 

The current system also deprives the conservative half of the country of a farm team of education experts, administrators, and higher-office-holders-in-the-making, who could counterbalance products of the monolithically progressive ed schools. That ed school–produced progressive education establishment now dominates local, state, and national education bureaucracies, even in red districts and states.

 

You may have heard something about moving school board elections on-cycle and listing party affiliation, when the pushback against woke schooling began to catalyze several years ago. Yet even that tiny blip of publicity has by now fallen off the radar screen. The discrepancy between the significance of this proposed electoral shift and its near complete absence from public discussion is striking.

 

A big reason for the silence is that proposed changes to the structure of school board elections are easily lost track of when dispersed across 50 states and thousands of local districts. Yet there are plenty of issues — abortion, gun control, health care, immigration, climate/energy — where interest groups track, publicize, and discuss trends and developments at the state and local levels. When it comes to proposals to change our way of electing school boards, no one — at least on the conservative side — seems to be systematically following the issue.

 

The good news is that despite some setbacks, several red states have now successfully moved, or are moving, toward on-cycle school board elections, with party affiliations listed. The bad news is that the movement is far too slow and, as noted, public awareness remains virtually nonexistent.

 

Were the national Republican Party — perhaps even President Trump — to make the school board election system a point of discussion, we could see an electoral shift with huge cultural consequences. The education field is so massively tilted toward the left that if only conservative states and districts were to elect school boards that actually represented their point of view, it would set off a cultural sea change. Sadly, however, the school board election system as currently constituted is designed to confuse and discourage voters.

 

The supposed depoliticization of school board elections was instituted during the progressive era (circa 1890–1920). Over time, unfortunately, that effort has backfired spectacularly. Nonpartisan, off-cycle school board elections were supposed to curb corruption by breaking the power of political machines, thereby ensuring that schools would be governed by professionally trained and politically disinterested experts. What’s happened instead is that machine politics, corruption, and ideological partisanship have all returned — sometimes in more disturbing forms than the abuses that drove the original progressive era reforms.

 

The lingering illusion that school board elections as currently structured are benignly “nonpartisan” may be the greatest barrier to reform. To understand how supposedly disinterested nonpartisanship is actually the opposite, we need to trace the origin and fate of progressive era school board election reforms.

 

Those late-19th- and early-20th-century reforms were an attack on the urban political machines that dominated immigrant neighborhoods. In those days, members of big-city school boards were elected by ward. They served on boards yet equally acted as cogs in a larger party apparatus. Back then, teachers were hired based on political pull. Instead of “what do you know,” “how do you teach,” and “have you been trained,” the political bosses who controlled teacher hiring wanted to know “what are your connections,” and “how many votes can you and your circle control for me when I run for mayor.” As a result, a hefty share of the teacher corps was incompetent.

 

The problems went beyond teachers. Massive purchases of textbooks and other supplies, school construction and repair, and the hiring of janitors and administrators opened plentiful opportunities for graft, patronage, and favoritism. In one notorious case, textbook salesmen deployed alluring women to blackmail school officials. Corrupt school board members sometimes ended up in jail.

 

When progressive reformers said they wanted to “take the schools out of politics,” they chiefly meant killing off this system. Their goal was to shrink and centralize school boards, electing members at large instead of by ward — all as a way of undercutting control of schools by locally dominant ethnic immigrant minorities loyal to party bosses. Off-cycle and formally nonpartisan school board elections were another part of this program.

 

Progressive reformers saw their proposals as steps toward curbing corruption and promoting the Americanization of immigrants. Yet there was an antidemocratic undertone to the goal of low-turnout, off-cycle elections, with no listed party affiliations. The drive to lower urban vote totals and deprive voters of key information sometimes shaded into open anti-Catholic bias. Many progressive education reformers outright admired the mechanisms for disenfranchising black voters employed in the South. Although corruption was a serious problem, and Americanization a necessity, representation for the new immigrant communities was hardly the outrage some progressives made it out to be. As David Tyack, author of a classic history of urban education, put it: “The slogan ‘get the schools out of politics’ could disguise effective disenfranchisement of dissenters.”

 

What the progressive reformers wanted to put in place of the machine-dominated system was more or less what we have today. Instead of politically controlled hiring, teachers and administrators would develop expertise at university-based schools of education, with professional licensure recognizing that expertise. Accordingly, university presidents soon took up leadership roles in the school board election reform movement.

 

While the idea of off-cycle municipal elections was at the core of the reform platform, it was by no means a novelty. Throughout the 19th century, as control of state legislatures shifted, urban political parties allied with the new state majority would prevail on legislatures to shift elections on or off the federal cycle, whichever way would be to their advantage. The Minnesota legislature, for example, shifted the election timing of St. Paul three times in four years. Typically, weaker parties would shift local elections off-cycle as a way of undercutting the dominant machine’s ability to turn out votes. (The machine in power tended to be of the party that won presidential elections.) Few claimed these shifts were rooted in good-government principles. Everyone knew that switching election timing was a way of jockeying for electoral advantage, even if often at the cost of voter participation and information.

 

Progressives, on the other hand, did claim to be following good government principles. First, they argued that national party positions had nothing to do with local education issues. Then they warned that on-cycle voters would be tempted to decide based on party loyalty, rather than on a disinterested search for the most honest and competent candidates. Yet there was an unspoken reason as well, the same one that drove the long-standing 19th-century election-timing wars: the progressive reformers (often organized as local third parties) knew they couldn’t beat the machines without moving elections off-cycle to suppress voter turnout.

 

Sometimes it worked, but in many cases off-cycle elections actually helped the machines. New York’s Tammany Hall, for example, had so many electoral foot soldiers that off-cycle elections actually cemented its power. Although Tammany did lose many of its voters in off-cycle elections, low voter turnout also gives highly organized competitors an advantage. When few show up to vote, well-oiled and committed political machines can win, as Tammany did, even off-cycle. In fact, it was the relative failure of their off-cycle election tactic that led progressives to propose suppressing information on candidate party affiliation as well.

 

But why, after a 19th century characterized by constant on/off-cycle local election-switching for political advantage, has the current system of electing school board members off-cycle and without listed party affiliation remained so stable and widespread? The answer is persuasively provided by UC Berkeley political scientist Sarah Anzia, who points to several factors.

 

Progressives prevailed at the right time. Throughout the 19th century, legislatures shifted election timing in urban centers through “special legislation” applying only to particular cities. State constitutional changes later in the 19th century, however, forced legislatures to pass only general laws applying to every municipality in the state. Around the same time, many states locked progressive-backed election timing rules into their constitutions. Beyond the schools, moreover, progressives succeeded in killing off the broader spoils system, and most urban political machines along with it. With city jobs now distributed (at least in theory) by merit rather than party loyalty, national parties lost interest in local elections as a source of political power. Thus, much of the motive and opportunity for election timing shifts disappeared.

 

Anzia adds that interest groups — especially teachers’ unions — filled the vacuum left by defunct political machines. Teachers’ unions, you might say, are the new Tammany Hall. Their superior organization and intense self-interest allow them to dominate off-cycle school board elections. Their organized activism also gives teachers’ unions disproportionate influence in the state legislatures that control the timing and nature of school board elections. Few, if any, state legislators can propose a change without running into a brick wall of teachers’ union opposition. And there are no comparably organized conservative groups to balance the unions.

 

I think there are additional reasons why the structure of local school board elections has remained stable for a century, until only very recently. The original progressives could plausibly argue that national party differences had little to do with education. That was true at the time because “getting politics out of the schools” was far less about ideology than about favoritism, graft, and patronage. True, Democrats in big cities were more likely to allow the teaching of German or Polish as a second language, or the inclusion of ethnic heroes in textbooks. Yet the national parties were ultimately not very far apart on the need for assimilation, and that remained true for some time.

 

Particularly over the last decade, however, the ever-growing post-1960s divide between our political parties over cultural issues like sexuality, patriotism, and assimilation has widened. Nowadays, on issues like critical race theory and transgenderism, school boards are forced to make choices. In that context, a candidate’s party is essential information.

 

In more ways than one, the progressive era school board election reforms have boomeranged. Certifying teachers after nonpartisan training at schools of education run on business principles was supposed to depoliticize K–12. For decades, however, schools of education have been the most politicized — and antibusiness — places on campus, no-dissent zones where the most commonly assigned author is an out-and-out Marxist opponent of politically neutral teaching.

 

Off-cycle, “nonpartisan” elections were supposed to break the power of political machines. But just as this backfired with Tammany Hall, modern, organized, and motivated teachers’ unions now dominate low turnout, low information, off-cycle school board contests. And teachers’ unions are more than just a self-interested group filling the power vacuum left by defunct political machines. The teachers’ unions actually are the modern Democratic Party’s political machine. At least in the 19th century, local control frequently flipped between competing party machines. Now, because of a distorted and petrified local electoral system, such flips are relatively rare.

 

But at least we’re rid of corruption, right? Well, was the Biden administration’s policy on Covid and the schools a purely medical decision made in the best interests of children, or a concession to the selfish interests of the Democrats’ de facto political machine? Modern conservatives (following FDR) often note that public-sector unions create conflicts of interest by effectively negotiating against the very politicians who rely on them for electoral organization and votes. Sure enough, Anzia found that teacher pay raises are substantially higher in districts with off-cycle elections, where teachers’ unions dominate. Conservative critics also argue that teachers’ unions make it too tough to fire incompetent teachers, whose prevalence was the original reason for the progressive era reforms. Perhaps the political corruption of old hasn’t so much been banished as institutionalized.

 

In short, the aura of hallowed tradition that surrounds supposedly nonpartisan off-cycle school board elections is a joke. Yes, this system has dominated for a century, but only because it’s a self-interested, self-perpetuating monstrosity. Our currently dominant way of electing school boards mocks and defeats the very purposes for which the system was instituted. Locked in by a combination of entrenched interests and fortuitous state constitutional changes, the school board election system is tried and false, not tried and true.

 

Yet this problem can be fixed. Last year, for example, Indiana allowed school board candidates to list their party affiliations. States could follow up now by passing Ohio Senate Bill 107, sponsored by Senator Andrew Brenner, and Missouri Senate Bills 1002 and 839, sponsored by Senators Adam Schnelting and Mike Cierpiot, respectively. If Michigan House Bill 4588, sponsored by Representative Jason Woolford, clears the house, it will likely have a tough time in the Michigan Senate, currently controlled by Democrats. Yet laying down a marker by passing such a bill through the house now is exactly what Michigan’s Republicans ought to be doing.

 

Conservatives — and the national Republican Party — ought to be paying more attention to this battle. Again, the education establishment is so one-sided right now that simply putting conservatives on an equal footing could provoke a huge cultural shift. A raft of new conservative school board members could serve as a culturally and politically savvy farm team for the education world, and the nation as a whole. Rhetorical attention to this issue by President Trump might even launch a flotilla of red state bills moving school board elections on-cycle, with party affiliation listed. There may be no single step we could take that would do more to bring America’s public schools back to sanity. Now that would be true “progress.”

The Male Feminism Con Job

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, April 16, 2026

 

In an early 2017 Saturday Night Live short video, cast member Cecily Strong takes a seat by herself at a busy bar. A man, played by Beck Bennett, sidles up next to Strong and promises her he’s not a creep trying to hit on her. In fact, he’s a male feminist. He proves his progressive bona fides by calling Donald Trump a “skeezy guy” and showing her his “The Future is Female” T-shirt.

 

But the interaction takes a turn when Strong rejects Bennett’s offer to go on a date. When it is clear his liberal peacocking doesn’t work, he gets angry and calls her a “bitch.” He is then removed by another man who tries more feminist pickup lines, with the same result. Then comes another. And another. (In the spirit of escalation, the final suitor is wearing a knitted pink hat.)

 

In the pre–Me Too era, women had already coined a term for this behavior: “macktivism.” (Mercifully, it never caught on.) That is, men playing up their feminist “allyship” only as a prelude to making advances, welcome or otherwise.

 

Enter Democratic California Congressman Eric Swalwell, who in the last week has been accused by numerous women, including a former staffer, of sexual assault. For a decade, Swalwell has been a pompous windbag willing to shout his feminism wide and far, using hashtags like #BelieveSurvivors and proclaiming that “every sexual assault victim” deserves equal “respect.” (National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke compiled some of Swalwell’s greatest hits, including his contention that then–Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh simply had to be guilty because there were numerous accusers.)

 

Initially, Swalwell claimed that the tornado of accusations was “absolutely false,” and his attorneys sent at least two cease-and-desist letters to the alleged victims. But earlier this week, he pulled out of the California governor’s race, then resigned from Congress, saying he was “deeply sorry to my family, staff, and constituents for mistakes in judgement [sic] I’ve made in my past.”

 

Of course, some men genuinely consider themselves feminists and behave appropriately. But there are also Democratic men who theatrically proclaim their deep understanding of Simone de Beauvoir because it actually works.

 

Famously, after President Bill Clinton’s Oval Office sex scandal, Clinton’s team mercilessly attacked Monica Lewinsky. Yet Patricia Ireland of the National Organization for Women offered fulsome praise for Clinton because he was on the correct side of her preferred issues.

 

“On balance women have had an ally in the White House,” Ireland said in 1998, claiming that if the campaign to impeach Clinton succeeded, “the unfinished agenda of women on equality, in Social Security, pay equity, child care, anti-poverty remedies, minimum wage, Medicare, real campaign finance reform . . . will continue to languish in Congress.”

 

This is why even society’s most loathsome cretins have attempted to play the progressive card when they are caught. In October 2017, Harvey Weinstein tried to wriggle out of sexual assault allegations by vowing to redouble his efforts against the National Rifle Association and to work to remove Donald Trump from office. Weinstein noted that he had established a $5 million foundation to award scholarships to female directors at USC. (Missing from his statement was any apology to potted plants.)

 

But even the most ardent feminists are fed up with the allyship act. In one 2025 song (the name of which cannot be relayed on a family website), British feminist punk rockers Lambrini Girls mock men who repost articles about women in music, then expect ladies to have sex with them in return. “Mate, that white knight act is getting pretty f***ing irritating, considering it’s nothing but performative,” growls lead singer Phoebe Lunny.

 

There’s a plainly obvious reason why famous men like Clinton and Trump survive plausible allegations of sexual misconduct: they never claimed to be anything but inveterate horndogs. In 1994, for instance, the public had been flooded with news about Clinton’s sexual adventurism and still handed him the presidency over a once-popular incumbent.

 

And, of course, what more can be said about Trump’s predilections? The guy didn’t troll beauty pageants because he was looking for teeth-whitening tips.

 

Yet in sexual matters, Trump wasn’t a hypocrite — no one would ever accuse him of being a feminist ally. And the public, it turns out, would rather their candidates be genuinely awful than performatively noble.

 

And this is why, before Trump, Republicans never had the luxury of surviving sex scandals: for years, its members had pitched it as the party of family values and the religious right. When a Republican got caught cheating or worse, the humiliation of his double life took over. There is a chasm between public moralizing and Bryon Noem’s chat room.

 

But in the post–Me Too era, Democrats like Swalwell are no longer granted a progressive carapace. That’s because the betrayal from a self-described feminist ally stings just as much as the hypocrisy of a religious conservative who lives his life in the shadows.

 

In fact, Trump’s rebrand of the Republican Party in his image has made the GOP a safe landing spot for former liberals looking to shed their unsavory pasts. For instance, at the Republican convention in 2024, I happened to walk by British comedian Russell Brand, who at that point had become MAGA-adjacent after having been accused of sexual assault by numerous women.

 

Brand, of course, rose to fame with a reputation of being a bad boy — between 2006 and 2012, he won the U.K. Sun newspaper’s “shagger of the year” award three times. But in 2014, he claimed to have shed his scandalous ways, declaring himself a full-blown feminist because he had found the “love of a good woman.”

 

In 2025, Brand was charged with multiple counts of rape and sexual assault that allegedly took place between 1999 and 2005, which explains his move to the right, where he could lend a famous name to the cause in exchange for leniency. In the words of the Republican Party’s leader, “When you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.”

 

Of course, part of the reason Democrats are so willing to suddenly pass Swalwell like an electoral kidney stone is because they have other options in the California governor’s race. Democrats can read polls, too, and they are less likely to defenestrate candidates who are the only game in town.

 

That is how Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren ends up endorsing Nazi tattoo-bearer Graham Platner in his race for U.S. Senate in Maine. Polls say Platner has the most realistic chance of beating Republican incumbent Susan Collins. But Platner has a past in which he has, for instance, suggested that women worried about being raped should “not get so f***ed up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to.”

 

These past comments have not swayed Warren, who continues to endorse him. (Of course, if Warren were to give her endorsement, then take it away, we all know what that would make her.)

 

There are plenty of men who respect women, treat them as equals, and even watch the WNBA without performatively beating their chests. They do these things not because they expect sex in return but because it wouldn’t occur to them not to.

 

But some Democratic men have convinced themselves that their progressivism gives them a sort of cloak of invisibility, as if the sheer force of their wokeness can hide any amount of sin underneath. At the same time, weirdos in the right-wing manosphere have convinced themselves that the best way to attract a mate is to hit themselves in the face with hammers. It is not a golden age for the timeless rituals of courtship.

 

So, in the end, Swalwell doesn’t end well at all. The man who built his career on shouting about believing women is now the one the women can’t believe. The universe has a sense of irony, after all.

JD Vance’s Post-Liberal Populism Reaches the Point of Diminishing Returns

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, April 15, 2026

 

JD Vance may not worry about the political capital he wagered on Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose party suffered a catastrophic defeat at the polls this week. Perhaps the vice president believes there will be few lasting costs associated with his failed effort to boost Orbán’s “post-liberal” project, but nothing was gained from it. Indeed, Vance’s investment in that enterprise never made much practical sense.

 

Orbán was never overtly warm to American national interests. Rather, his government advanced the objectives of Vladimir Putin’s regime inside the European Union in ways that were often at odds with Donald Trump’s policy goals. In the wake of the Israeli pager attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon, according to the Washington Post’s reporting, Orbán’s foreign minister floated an intelligence-sharing relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Orbán might be a “great guy” in Vance’s estimation, but he was hardly a friend to the United States.

 

What’s more, Orbán’s successor, Péter Magyar, is no left-winger. He was not opposed to the European Union as a supranational institution, but he is hostile to its lax immigration policies. Magyar is similarly vocal in his opposition to culturally progressive social politics, leading the Western left to fret that Hungary has merely traded one reactionary authoritarian for another. But Magyar is an Atlanticist who supports the NATO alliance. At present, so, too, is Donald Trump. The president’s effort to drag the Atlantic Alliance into the U.S.-Israeli campaign aimed at bringing Iran to heel betrays his interest preserving a nimble, united NATO capable of sustained power projection. Maybe that’s why Trump has so far expressed only support for Orbán’s replacement.

 

Of course, Vance’s enthusiasm for Orbán-style “illiberal democracy” is an ideological pursuit, not a practical one. But it’s increasingly difficult to identify any political advantages in the vice president’s crusade. Conversely, the downsides are becoming increasingly hard to ignore.

 

At a recent right-wing confab populated disproportionately by the unrepresentative and radicalized consumers of political infotainment, for example, Vance yoked a political millstone around his own neck.

 

In his response to one wide-eyed interlocutor, Vance recalled a story in which he was confronted over his opposition to Ukraine’s defensive war against Russian invaders by a Ukrainian American. Vance praised his own steadfast refusal to countenance criticism. “This person got really agitated at me because I was saying that we should stop funding the Ukraine war,” the vice president related. “And I still believe that, obviously. And it’s one of the proudest things I’ve done in this administration is we’ve told Europe that, if you want to buy weapons, you can, but we’re not buying weapons and sending them to Ukraine anymore.”

 

What a ponderous thing to say. By Vance’s own admission, his own preferred policy, which he advocated repeatedly and plainly — cutting off Ukraine — is not the policy of the administration in which he serves. Arguably, Kyiv is more globally integrated today than at any point in its history as a sovereign entity, and Ukraine’s soldiers are making gains on the battlefield — victories due, in part, to U.S. initiatives.

 

To whom is a line like this supposed to appeal? Maybe Vance presumes that he’s channeling the unarticulated zeitgeist that secretly prevails among Republican primary voters, but evidence of that is hard to find. Recent surveys indicate that most Republicans sympathize more with Ukraine than Russia, and providing arms to Ukraine remains a plurality proposition among those who identify with the GOP.

 

Perhaps Vance is pushing his chips in on the notion that dyspeptic populist podcasters and their listeners will form the nucleus around which a broader right-wing coalition will accrete.

 

At that same conference, Vance identified the comedian and broadcaster Theo Von as someone he would recommend young people listen to as they embark on their path to political maturity. Vance himself sparred with Von last year over the degree to which the podcaster had become beholden to a variety of conspiratorially antisemitic shibboleths. Vance’s intervention was unsuccessful. Von continues to peddle the anti-Jewish paranoia that is currency online but remains deeply antisocial almost everywhere that interpersonal engagement is practiced.

 

It’s not clear what wisdom young conservatives are supposed to glean from a depressive polemicist whose political philosophy is closer to that of self-described socialists like Senator Bernie Sanders. Indeed, it’s hard to see what immediate political advantages Vance believes he will draw from ingratiating himself with a contingent of broadcasters who seem to have no constituency among self-described Republicans — at least, not when it comes to the biggest questions in public life.

 

The podcasters have spent every waking moment since the outbreak of the war against the Islamic Republic of Iran condemning that enterprise in a most vitriolic and uncompromising fashion. But six straight weeks of monotonous anti-war advocacy has had no measurable effect on how Republican voters view this war.

 

A CBS News/YouGov poll from March 2-3 found that 85 percent of Republicans backed “military action against Iran.” Two weeks later, the same pollster found that 84 percent of Republicans still supported the war. Two weeks after that, 81 percent of Republicans still approved of the president’s performance in relation to Iran. In addition, about seven in ten Republicans said the war makes GOP voters feel safe, proud, and confident, and just 12 percent of Republicans wanted to see Congress circumscribe the president’s ability to further prosecute the war.

 

Take any poll you like. None indicate that the anti-war posture assumed by the podcasters — and Vance himself, as his Fox News confession attests — enjoys the support of a majority of GOP voters. Surely, Republican voters hear what these supposedly popular political commentators are saying about what is right now the most salient issue in American public life. They’re just not listening to them.

 

Any prudent investor would recognize the point at which throwing good money after bad reaches the point of diminishing returns. Vance has committed great sums of his own political capital in advancing the “post-liberal” cause with which he once associated himself. He has little to show for the effort, save his own losses. It’s time to cut bait.

Canada’s Anti-American Defense Industrial Strategy

By Jamie Tronnes & Daniel Dorman

Thursday, April 16, 2026

 

There is something unprincipled and backward about Canada’s new Defense Industrial Strategy (DIS). Namely, its protectionism and not-so-subtle anti-Americanism.

 

As highlighted in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s press release, a core tenet of the strategy is to “raise the share of defense acquisitions awarded to Canadian firms to 70%” or, as Carney said elsewhere, to significantly reduce “dependency” on the U.S.

 

This buy-Canadian defense industrial strategy fails in two distinct ways. First, it takes advantage of the U.S. at a time of already strained relations and a forthcoming review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. And second, as our colleague at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute Richard Shimooka explains, it is backward. Instead of starting by defining Canada’s defense needs (the actual requirements of Canada’s military and the capabilities needed to support our allies) and then building an industrial strategy to meet those needs, Canada started with an industrial strategy apparently designed to extract economic benefit from defense investment and which largely fails to consider the actual military needs of the Canadian Armed Forces.

 

In fairness, the DIS states, “Canada has a long history of working closely with the United States and looks forward to a continued strong Canada-U.S. defence relationship” but this strikes us as lip service — a half-hearted reassurance for American readers — against the broader messaging of “reducing reliance” on the U.S. that Carney highlighted as the strategy was released, and against the actual substance of the policy that Canada “will focus first on building in Canada.”

 

Citizens on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border may be surprised to learn that when the American Department of Defense (DOD) “buys American,” Canadian companies are allowed to compete on equal footing with American firms. The Canada-U.S. Defense Production Sharing Agreement (DPSA), in place since 1956, and supporting legislation allow Canadian firms to sell to the world’s largest military spender as if they were domestic American companies. This allows Canadian companies to export more than $2 billion a year directly to the DOD.

 

Additionally, under the Defense Production Act’s Title III, the DOD can invest and source rare earths and critical minerals, as well as other key inputs to defense, directly from Canadian companies, treating them as if they are American. This is a major positive for both countries and further demonstrates the preferential treatment Canada receives from the DOD in procurement and defense supply chains.

 

The DIS acknowledges the strength of Canada’s defense exports generally and to the United States specifically: “Not only is the Canadian defence sector a major supplier to the Canadian Armed Forces, it is also an export powerhouse. Virtually half (49 per cent) of the defence-related products and services produced by Canadian firms are sold abroad. Of these, the majority (69 per cent) go to the United States.” But the DIS fails to acknowledge that this strength in our exports is because of the DPSA and America’s preferential treatment of Canadian firms. Put differently, the DIS implicitly celebrates the result of America’s preferential treatment of Canadian industry while failing to extend the same treatment to U.S. firms. This is fundamentally unfair to the U.S. and, should Trump take notice, will presumably become a further trade irritant in the lead-up to USMCA renegotiations in June of this year.

 

There is no doubt that Trump’s protectionism, tariffs, and “51st State” rhetoric toward Canada have been unsettling, but Canada shouldn’t respond to American protectionism with protectionism of its own. Canada arguably benefits a great deal more from the DPSA than the U.S. The entirety of the DIS represents $6.6 billion in investment from the Canadian government into the defense industry, but it may threaten at least $2 billion of exports to the United States. A $6.6 billion investment strategy that risks $2 billion of business hardly seems a wise move for Canadian industry.

 

In his comments around the release of the DIS, Carney qualified the strategy, noting that: “Our first responsibility as government is to defend Canadians. . . . We will always be choosing the best supplier for those defense needs.” This is absolutely the right sentiment, but it is hard to square that circle with the buy Canadian provisions of the strategy. In some cases Canada may be able to build the best equipment for its military, but generally speaking, Canada should seek to work within areas of comparative advantage, and this means working with allies more, not less. The arbitrary increase to buying 70 percent Canadian-made equipment is simply not compatible with the urgent need to rearm Canada’s military effectively and for a feasible cost. Decades of cuts to Canadian defense spending has atrophied Canada’s domestic military production capabilities so much so that it’s virtually impossible for Canada to buy Canadian. While Canada is increasing its defense spending, it’s not nearly enough to stand up the multilaterally borne costs of developing significant war-fighting capabilities such as war-fighters, kinetic interceptors, or long-range missiles.

 

Canadian-made does not necessarily mean best fit for warfare. The highest procurement consideration should be to procure the best and most advanced technologies that can contribute to North American lethality and, thereby, the deterrence of conflict. A diversified and integrated supply chain, spread across geopolitically linked neighbors and allies, benefits both.

 

Canada is finally stepping back up to the plate on defense, rearming the military and aiming to meeting its NATO spending commitment. You don’t need to be a warmonger to see that, in an increasingly dangerous world, Canada keeping its commitments to allies and providing a level of deterrence for those who intend to harm the West is a good thing. But, the buy-Canadian DIS is not necessarily a step in the right direction.

 

Canada’s DIS is too protectionist, contains too much anti-American political rhetoric, and is not enough about actual defense.

Reauthorize FISA Section 702 — Again

National Review Online

Wednesday, April 15, 2025

 

Here we go again: Congress is voting imminently on whether to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which President Trump supports. Without reauthorization, the program would expire on April 20, placing a key anti-terrorism tool in legal limbo. Congress should vote to keep it in place.

 

We have supported the executive branch surveillance powers that are governed by Section 702 since its enactment in 2008. Before that, we supported the predecessor surveillance programs since their origins after September 11 — powers with roots dating back to the dawn of the Republic. Section 702 surveillance is also used for counterintelligence and interdiction of drug trafficking and human trafficking. The threat of international terrorism may not be as visible and visceral to the public as it was 25 years ago, but with the United States currently at war with the leading state sponsor of terrorism, this would be an especially inopportune time to let the legal authority for this crucial function lapse.

 

To recap: Surveillance targeting Americans, or targeting foreign civilians within the United States, is covered by the protections of the Fourth Amendment. (This may not be the case for foreign diplomats, spies, and other foreign government agents.) It therefore requires either a warrant or the availability of a judicially recognized exception to the warrant requirement. Nothing in Section 702 deals with those areas of surveillance — it addresses only surveillance targeting foreigners outside the United States, who have no rights protected by our Constitution.

 

Prior to 2008, such surveillance was conducted — largely by the National Security Agency — on the basis of the president’s Article II national security powers. Section 702 did not create those powers, but it subjected them to periodic judicial review and other legal strictures.

 

Where Section 702 and its predecessors become controversial is that surveillance of the communications of foreigners abroad may sweep in their conversations with Americans. Of course, this has a parallel in domestic law enforcement, where even searches or surveillance with a proper warrant can sweep in communications with people other than the target of the warrant.

 

There are two related concerns with Section 702 surveillance. One, given the relative ease of surveilling foreigners, is that such powers can be used pretextually to spy on Americans on the other end of the phone, text, or email. The other is that once surveillance agencies have collected so much data, they can be mined in a targeted way — especially by the FBI — for information whose original collection may have been honestly incidental. That latter concern is elevated in an age when artificial intelligence can process vast reams of information that previously would have gone unexamined. Say farewell to “security through obscurity.”

 

Deliberate abuse is best addressed by executive and congressional oversight rather than by killing the program. Significant reforms, however, have already been enacted on “minimization” — i.e., when the FBI can search the data that have already been collected. During the debates leading to the reauthorization of Section 702 in 2024, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray argued that the bureau had significantly reduced abuses by mandating new internal procedures. These included requiring supervisory approval, maintaining a paper trail of searches, notifying Congress of searches related to its members, preventing the FBI from storing searched data except in connection with a legitimate investigation, requiring the FBI to discipline personnel who misuse the system, and mandating annual reporting to Congress on the volume of queries about U.S. persons. Rules for submissions to the FISA court were also strengthened, including — of particular concern to Trump — explicitly requiring warrant applications that include information derived from political campaigns and sources to fully disclose those sources and what steps have been taken to corroborate them.

 

Prudently not trusting that the FBI would remain on its good behavior solely on its own initiative, Congress in 2024 codified these reforms directly into the statute. Skeptics may argue that Congress shouldn’t just keep rubber-stamping approval of a program it created 18 years ago and bum-rushing members into votes on the eve of expiration, but Congress already put in the work two years ago to revise the program. There’s no sign that these reforms haven’t worked — we did not get a reprise of Russiagate in the 2024 election even amidst that season’s riot of lawfare. That explains why longtime critics such as Trump, Jim Jordan, and Darrell Issa are now backing reauthorization.

 

Jordan, for example, notes that a 2023 report found 278,000 improper queries of the database, but mandated reporting to Congress found that searches on U.S. persons dropped from 2.9 million in 2022 to just 9,000 in the past year. This has happened while the use of Section 702 surveillance of foreign targets has expanded: Per official reports, targets increased from 246,000 in 2022 to 349,823 in 2025, and enough actionable intelligence was unearthed that, in 2023, 60 percent of the items in the President’s Daily Brief incorporated the fruits of Section 702 surveillance. Surveillance of foreign communications was, among other things, a crucial link in the intelligence chain that led to locating Osama bin Laden.

 

If Section 702 is not reauthorized, the executive branch will be back in the legal no-man’s-land it inhabited before 2008. No responsible president would simply stop doing surveillance of foreign threats, but the legal safeguards would lapse, and rank-and-file members of the intelligence and law enforcement community could face uncertainty about whether they would face legal jeopardy for doing their jobs.

 

It’s a curious situation that Congress has to keep revisiting this issue on increasingly compressed timelines — this is two years since the last reauthorization, and Congress is currently considering only an 18-month extension — when so many other laws, programs, and powers of the executive branch are authorized in perpetuity no matter how unpopular or obsolete they grow. Ideally, we’d like to see Section 702 put on the same footing as the rest of federal law — and still better, we’d like that to include periodic sunsets that force Congress to reconsider everything it has authorized. But in the meantime, one thing the federal government shouldn’t stop doing is watching out for foreign terrorist threats.

Trump as the Guardrail

By Abe Greenwald

Wednesday, April 15, 2026

 

For a decade, we’ve understood Donald Trump as an almost revolutionary figure in American politics. His election in 2016 and his outrageous conduct in office were seen as a break with all sorts of historic norms. In many ways, this remains correct. Not a day passes without Trump delivering at least one earthquake.

 

Yet I’m also starting to think, paradoxically, that we may in time look back on Trump as the last remnant of a sensible, even moderate, political tradition that’s soon to become history.

 

Here’s what I mean. Last night, Turning Point USA held an event at the University of Georgia. At the 11th hour, TPUSA CEO Erika Kirk decided against appearing on stage, citing credible security threats. An organization spokesman explained, “It’s a terrible reflection on the state of reality and the state of the country” that some people have made “part-time jobs out of attacking Erika.”

 

The vicious attacks on Charlie Kirk’s widow have come overwhelmingly from figures on the lunatic right who believe that she somehow conspired with Israel to have her husband assassinated. Vice President JD Vance, the MAGA heir apparent, wants to secure the support of the anti-Israel conspiracy theorists should he run for president in 2028. So Vance appeared at the TPUSA event, and when heckled by them, did what he could to offer them an olive branch. “I recognize that young voters do not love the policy we have in the Middle East, OK. I understand,” he said. “Don’t get disengaged because you disagree with the administration on one topic. Get more involved, make your voice heard even more. That is how we ultimately take the country back.”   

 

From whom, exactly, is Vance encouraging the hecklers to “take the country back”? Isn’t Donald Trump the president? Isn’t he the VP?

 

From, well, the Jews. That’s who the young dissident right blames for everything—especially American policy in the Middle East. And Vance wants these Jew-haters to “get more involved.” When asked what political influencers young people should listen to, he took the opportunity to demonstrate his anti-Israel bona fides once again. “I think if you want a good laugh, I love Theo Von,” he said. “I think Theo has a good heart, and that’s one of the reasons why I really like listening to his show.”

 

Von is a podcaster who has described Israel’s government as a “satanic regime” and said that the IDF is committing “genocide” in Gaza, which he called "one of the sickest events ever observed."

 

While Vance works to ingratiate himself with the delusional right, Trump has cut them off decisively. Theo Von is just about the only one of them whom Trump hasn’t gotten around to attacking. In essence, Trump left Vance with one Israel-basher to endorse, and Vance took the opportunity to endorse him.

 

Trump, for all his outlandishness, retains some longstanding bedrock presumptions about the world and America’s place in it. He possesses a certain clarity that’s nearly gone extinct in everyone else. Trump knows who’s right and who’s wrong in the Middle East. He knows who our friends and enemies are. He knows that sometimes there’s no substitute for American hard power. And he knows when to cut ties.

 

Compare that to the next generation of so-called conservatives, with their death threats to a widow, conspiracy theories, Jew-hatred, and a calm institutional voice to legitimize it all.    

 

And don’t even mention the left. The liberal media and the Democratic Party are embracing socialists, Islamists, and those who combine both. Yesterday, their darling of the moment, Hasan Piker, was at Yale defending an "End the American Empire" resolution.

 

All of which is why Donald Trump looks more and more, however improbable, like the last sane man standing.

Who Is Holocaust Education For?

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, April 14, 2026

 

Today is Yom Hashoah, which means speeches and conversations and debates about the lessons of the Holocaust. Yet we often pay much more attention to the content of those lessons than to whom the lessons are addressed. Who is listening, and who, specifically, cares? These, too, are questions that should be asked more often.

 

A couple of recent news stories shows us why these questions are so important in this day and age.

 

The Times of Israel interviews the leading publisher of Holocaust memoirs in Europe, revealing a disturbing irony of October 7: That day was the deadliest for Jews since the Holocaust, with the attacks themselves closely mimicked Holocaust-era Nazi violence, and yet the anti-Semitism unleashed in their wake has made the world less willing to talk about the Holocaust at all.

 

It does make a twisted kind of sense. Supporters of October 7 surely see the attacks, at least to some degree, as an extension of the campaign to extinguish world Jewry. In 1948, the failure to achieve that was termed the “nakba.” Now pro-Palestinians have appropriated the word “Holocaust” itself. Why would they recognize its unique connection to Jewry when they are clearly practicing a form of supersessionism that seeks to erase Jews from history?

 

As the profile of Liesbeth Heenk, the non-Jewish head of Amsterdam Publishing, notes: “Since then, the entire narrative has changed…. Sales are down since the war. Bookshops and cultural venues that once welcomed Holocaust memoir authors are increasingly saying no. Readers, Heenk suspects, are increasingly reluctant to engage with Holocaust material openly under the growing threat of antisemitic backlash.”

 

Heenk tracks sales and readership numbers well beyond her own company, so she is an authoritative voice on Holocaust-book statistics. Heenk also faces harassment and is under police protection just because she publishes books on the Holocaust. “It’s insane that I’m trying to help people learn from the lessons of history, and now, I’m being told, as a publisher, that I’m on the wrong side of history.”

 

That’s because, in the modern West, learning the right lessons from history is itself what puts one on the supposed “wrong side of history.” History, to the enemies of the Jews, is incomplete, even a failure. They want a manual, not a memoir.

 

And so, “People riding public transport or walking the streets do not want to be seen reading a book about the Holocaust. There’s a stigma related to everything about being Jewish, and the Holocaust, as a term, is being abused in a major way.”

 

So who’s still reading the books that tell us what actually happened, and which has no modern parallel? Jews, obviously, but also Germans: “I publish a lot of books in German, because they read these stories more than in the English-speaking world.”

 

Now, you might think that if the descendants of the victims and the perpetrators of the same crime are reading the same books about it, they probably know what they’re doing. And that’s true. Which raises the uncomfortable point of fact that Holocaust literature is for people who want to prevent another Holocaust, and such people are a dwindling portion of the marketplace in the enlightened West.

 

Which brings us to the other recent story on this topic that caught my attention. Politico published a story claiming the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is self-censoring to make Donald Trump happy:

 

“In the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington quietly removed from its website educational resources about American racism and canceled a workshop about the ‘fragility of democracy.’”

 

That’s not all! Although the museum kept up one page about racism and the Holocaust, it took down another. The article admits that there is no evidence Trump has ever asked the museum to change its programming.

 

I couldn’t help but find it humorous that these changes are considered scandalous. We are told that this summer, a page called “Teaching Materials on Nazism and Jim Crow” was removed from the museum’s website. In other words, a Holocaust museum is focusing its resources on teaching, rather than diluting, the Holocaust itself. That seems reasonable.

 

Meanwhile, a workshop for college students had its title changed from “Fragility of Democracy and the Rise of the Nazis” to “Before the Holocaust: German Society and the Nazi Rise to Power.” According to Politico, the museum staff had “concerns regarding how the term fragility may be perceived or interpreted in the current climate.”

 

So the Holocaust museum sought to prevent the politicizing of the Holocaust. Good. Perhaps this is part of a general course correction in which Diaspora Jewry will stop watering down Jewish history to make it palatable to people who wouldn’t otherwise be interested.

 

Holocaust education is only valuable when it’s true. And it is a shame, but not a shock, that there are fewer people who want to know the truth.