The Attention Whore Dilemma

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, May 22, 2026

 

I’m just gonna start typing and see where this takes us.

 

One of the reasons I think my brain is defective—it’s a long list—is I’ve always been mildly obsessed with homonyms. I think maybe it’s because in third grade we were all asked to make a list of words that sound identical but are spelled differently and I beat everybody. I mean I had the most words, not that I went around and bludgeoned my classmates. That came later. I don’t know if it was the rare moment of praise for academic distinction that made me interested in homonyms or if my interest occasioned the moment. Causality can be hard.

 

Regardless, I will often listen to the news and wander off like Joe Biden at a photo op thinking up homonymic phrases for what I just heard and then converting that into synonymous rephrasing. You probably need an example. What do you call heterosexuals dedicated to the bovine exhortations of prostitutes? The Straights of Whore Moos. 

 

Okay, enough of that.

 

Massie exodus.

 

But speaking of whores, attention whores that is, Rep. Thomas Massie lost his primary this week, which I consider an unalloyed good thing. Massie is a Jew-baiting troll. He’s good at it. In his concession speech he joked with his coprophagic grin that he had a hard time getting his opponent on the phone because he had to track him down in Tel Aviv. Get it? His opponent, Ed Gallrein, a Kentucky farmer and retired Navy SEAL, is a tool of the hummus-gobblers!

 

Last night I lost my temper at Carrie Prejean Boller, a former beauty pageant contestant who recently converted to Catholicism. Remember the Seinfeld episode when Tim Whatley converted to Judaism “for the jokes”? Apparently, Boller thinks that if you convert to Catholicism you get to spew and defend antisemitic crazy talk (she’s a huge Candace Owens fan).

 

Erika Kirk praised Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt’s campaign ads—which are pretty great—and Boller responded:

 

Why didn’t you say the same thing about your late husband’s favorite congressman? I’m starting to see now why they took Charlie out. They wanted to take out his voice and his influence. Charlie would have undoubtedly campaigned alongside Thomas Massie publicly and unapologetically. Your silence speaks volumes Erika. The more people watch this, the more obvious it becomes why Charlie had to be removed from the equation. Charlie would have been boldly campaigning alongside @RepThomasMassie against billionaire donor Miriam Adelson.

 

“They took Charlie out,” “Charlie had to be removed from the equation.”  The “they” here, of course, is the Joooooz.

 

Jean-Paul Sartre is often believed to have said, “the anti-Semite doesn’t accuse the Jew of stealing because he actually believes he stole. He accuses the Jew of stealing because he enjoys watching the Jew empty his pockets to prove his innocence.” I can’t find any evidence he actually said this, but he did say in his essay “Anti-Semite and Jew”:

 

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

 

Look, I get that some of the anti-Israel conspiracy stuff is sincere. But a lot of it isn’t. I am sure Massie knows he was lying when he told Tucker Carlson that “everybody” in Congress—except for him—has an “AIPAC babysitter managing their votes.” I am also sure that Tucker knew this was a lie.

 

The point of these kinds of comments isn’t just to dogwhistle to antisemites and “anti-Zionists.” It’s to force Jews to complain about the obvious antisemitism, which is the rhetorical equivalent of asking them to turn out their pockets.

 

In response to my criticism of Boller, a bunch of folks (some surely bots) insisted that it’s not antisemitic to criticize Israel. Um, okay. But maybe it’s antisemitic to insinuate—without any evidence, I mean literally none—that Israel murdered Charlie Kirk to keep him from campaigning for Massie (it’s also incredibly, seismically, stupid). To be clear, the outlandish claims aren’t necessarily antisemitic, but the desired result—make the Jews squirm, complain, and deny—is rooted in antisemitism. If I went around claiming that Ireland is a nation of drunk, bog-dwelling pederasts, I am sure that Irish-Americans would be rightly offended. If I dismissed their complaints by insisting that being critical of Ireland isn’t anti-Hibernian, few people would buy it.

 

A lot of people said, reasonably, that I shouldn’t give Boller the attention she craves. The dilemma that the attention whores present is that if you don’t complain, the lies don’t merely take deeper root, the whores are encouraged to say ever grosser nonsense to get the reactions they want.

 

Before Israel was founded, and for a few decades after, it was commonplace to insinuate—or declare!—that Catholics couldn’t be trusted because they had “dual loyalties.” The platform of the Know Nothing “American Party” proclaimed that “Americans must rule America,” and that no one should hold office if they have “any allegiance or obligation of any description to any foreign prince, potentate or power.” You can defend that text all you like, but everyone knew they meant the insidious forces of Popery. In 1960, Norman Vincent Peale convened a conference of fellow Protestant clergy at which Peale warned that “Our American culture is at stake. I don’t say it won’t survive, but it won’t be what it was.” What, specifically, was the threat to our culture? A Catholic president. “It is inconceivable that a Roman Catholic president would not be under extreme pressure by the hierarchy of his church to accede to its policies with respect to foreign interests,” he said. At Peale’s conference, the executive editor of Christianity Today warned that Catholicism was akin to communism. Another pastor, Harold J. Ockenga, said that John F. Kennedy was to Catholicism what Nikita Khrushchev was to communism. Each was “a captive of a system.”

 

That was gross. And I’m glad that Christians—even of the Christian-lite variety of Peale’s prosperity gospel—have largely shed that nonsense. But the animating passion that drove that garbage has been sublimated to Israel and Jews.

 

Back on the whores.

 

Donald Trump endorsed Ken Paxton for Senate this week. Senate Republicans are furious. They spent $90 million in the GOP primary in support of the incumbent, Sen. John Cornyn, who would have almost surely defeated Democrat James Talarico. Now, in order to save a safe seat, Republicans will have to spend at least that much all over again on a guy none of them want to serve with, never mind defend. But Trump doesn’t like Cornyn and he apparently thinks Paxton would win the primary, and he loves to endorse winners in primaries.

 

The problem is that while his endorsements in primaries are very powerful, they can be an albatross, or simply ineffective, in general elections (see Mike Warren’s excellent piece on this point). Just ask Sen. Herschel Walker. The people for whom Trump’s endorsement matters a great deal are a shrinking minority in the broader electorate. Actually, I should rephrase that. The people for whom Trump’s endorsement matters as a positive thing is a shrinking minority. It’s quite possible that the number of people who think his endorsement is a negative thing is growing.

 

Paxton is easily one of the most obviously corrupt politicians not currently residing in the White House. If he gets the nomination, the corruption narrative already deservedly plaguing the White House will metastasize to the broader GOP. Trump doesn’t seem to care much, and any concerns in that regard are outweighed by the satisfaction he derives from treating the GOP like the chained up “gimp” from Pulp Fiction. Speaking of Caligulan excess, it’s probably not true that Caligula appointed his horse to the Roman senate, but he probably did threaten to do it because he loved to mock the aristocratic pretensions of the senate. Paxton is a different kind of attention whore, but he’s the kind Trump appreciates, because they share a disdain for anything that might pass for republican virtue. You do whatever you can get away with that serves your own purposes and rejoice at watching normies turn out their pockets to defend it. That’s part of the point of Trump’s slush fund scheme. It’s not the main point, but one of the joys of his brazenness is watching Republicans eat the sh-t sandwiches he serves them.

 

And most of them do it, with big bites. South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman said yesterday that the January 6 riot was a “made up issue,” and “a staged, uh, thing from day 1.” Back on January 6, 2021, he had different things to say about the rioters who chanted “hang Mike Pence.” But that’s before Trump added heaping bowls of fecal fare to the menu.

 

The overriding political lesson, for me at least, of the last decade is that civilization is more fragile than I once took for granted. That was the point of my last book, after all. I’m not a catastrophist; indeed I think the greatest threat to civilization is, ironically, catastrophism. But when I see people like Norman embrace lies for political convenience, when I see hordes of whores play these games with conspiracies and bigotry for fun and profit, I appreciate the fragility of decency and the institutions that depend on a decent respect for the truth.

 

It almost makes me think Sartre was right.

 

I am not a fan of Jean-Paul Sartre’s. He was wrong about so many things: communism, Maoism, anticolonial violence, the Munich massacre, even metaphysics. Sartre was an existentialist, believing that “being precedes essence.” This is the idea that there is no objective moral truth outside us. There’s no metaphysical, theological, or moral backstop that will prevent us from going off the rails. He famously said, “Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to establish Fascism, and the others may be so cowardly or so slack as to let them do so. If so, Fascism will then be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be such as men have decided they shall be.”

 

I don’t think we’re about to embrace fascism, because say what you will about the tenets of fascism, at least it’s an ethos. But I do think we’re flirting with the idea that having an ethos at all is for suckers.

Hyperextended

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, May 22, 2026

 

I’m excited about our new regime-change operation in Cuba, mostly as a matter of morbid curiosity.

 

Specifically, I’m intrigued to see what happens to an unpopular president’s support when he starts an unpopular war that no one saw coming while struggling to resolve another unpopular war he started that no one saw coming.

 

Having grown bored with the stalemate in Iran, a “frustrated” Donald Trump reportedly complained to advisers this month that the White House’s plan to squeeze Havana into submission is progressing too slowly. He and his team have decided to move things along by dusting off the Venezuela playbook—indicting the enemy’s leader on federal criminal charges as a pretext to remove him, positioning naval assets off its coast to warn its leaders against resisting, and asking everyone to believe that a banana republic that can’t feed its people is a threat to the United States grave enough to warrant immediate military action.

 

That’s going to take a lot of persuasion. Per YouGov, Americans currently split 15-64 on whether the U.S. should go to war with Cuba, with 21 percent undecided. (Among those who take a view one way or the other, 81 percent are opposed.) Meanwhile, disapproval of the Iran War stands at 60 percent, and disapproval of Trump’s job performance is knocking on the door of 60.

 

Rarely, if ever, has America had a president whose own policy priorities have diverged so sharply from those of his constituents, and it’s certainly never had one who cared less about that divergence. That’s why I’m excited: The Cuba takeover will amount to a novel political experiment to gauge how voters react to a democratic leader all but formally notifying them that their opinion no longer matters to him.

 

Although, now that I think about it, I suppose he’s already given that notice.

 

I’m also excited to see the president and his deputies try to explain the dire risk that Cuba allegedly poses to the U.S. That wasn’t hard with Iran given the regime’s nuclear ambitions and decades of menacing its American-allied neighbors; it will be more challenging with respect to the desiccated corpse of Castroism. Stephen Miller tried in an interview this week, warning Fox News viewers that “Cuba, positioned just a 45-minute flight from American shores, has been a staging ground for America's adversaries for decades.” But which adversaries?

 

Russia and China? I’m sorry to have to tell you, but postliberals don’t feel adversarial toward either. And even if the president does, his willingness to accommodate them on their own expansionist priorities should ensure that they’ll make no trouble for him in Cuba.

 

That’s what a “spheres of influence” worldview is all about.

 

There’s one more interesting facet to Trump starting a war with Havana before our war with Tehran is done. It’s the latest confirmation that no matter how much political trouble he encounters from overextending himself, he continues to do it.

 

Battle royal.

 

You would think he might have learned after last year’s “Liberation Day” debacle.

 

Moving forward with tariffs amid an affordability crisis continues to be the biggest mistake of his presidency, but the public might have tolerated levies imposed specifically on nations that have gobbled up American manufacturing (i.e., China). That’s not what Trump did. He tariffed everyone—well, almost everyone—and then had to hit “pause” just a week later after bond markets began to wobble.

 

He overextended himself. Instead of picking a fight whose damage he might have been able to contain, he started a battle royal and was caught off guard by the backlash.

 

The same thing happened recently with Congress.

 

Republicans have narrow majorities in each chamber—53-47 in the Senate and 218-215 in the House, tricky business even for a man who wields cultlike control over his party. Moving legislation with majorities as thin as those requires a deft touch politically. That means not attacking lawmakers whose support you need and not making their lives harder by thrusting them into needless new political controversies.

 

Trump did the opposite. He turned Bill Cassidy into a lame duck who no longer owes him anything, then promptly did the same to John Cornyn. (Assuming Cornyn loses next week’s primary runoff in Texas, that is, which is likely.) And then, with Senate Republicans already seething, he dropped two flaming bags of dog sh-t on their porch, launching a new taxpayer-funded slush fund for his criminal cronies and demanding that lawmakers give him $1 billion for a ballroom while voters are screaming about the cost of living.

 

He overextended himself. He might have gotten away with any one of those provocations, but insisting on a battle royal came back to bite him again. The ballroom funding now appears to be dead, and the slush fund is in deep trouble, with one senator whispering to Punchbowl News, “Our majority is melting down before our eyes.” Things are so bad in the House that GOP leaders had to cancel a war powers vote on the Iran conflict yesterday because Democrats were poised to win it with help from disgruntled moderate Republicans.

 

Now here we are with the president about to overextend himself again, starting a new war before the last one has finished. Although, to be fair, he’s trying hard to wrap things up in Iran before throwing a punch at Cuba.

 

Maybe too hard, it turns out.

 

An overextended military.

 

On Wednesday Axios reported on a phone call between Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu that allegedly left the Israeli prime minister with his “hair on fire.”

 

Details are thin, but the gist of the disagreement is clear. The president wants to sign a deal with the regime that would end the war and “launch a 30-day period of negotiations on issues like Iran's nuclear program and opening of the Strait of Hormuz,” according to the outlet. Netanyahu “wants to resume the war to further degrade Iran's military capabilities and weaken the regime by destroying its critical infrastructure.”

 

Israel’s leader sees what’s coming. The United States is poised to accept a strategic defeat by walking away from the conflict, Robert Kagan explains in a new piece for The Atlantic, and that strategic defeat will empower Iran while isolating Israel.

 

As usual, it comes down to oil. The White House continues to say that Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz is unacceptable, but the rest of the world is moving on: Iran and Oman are apparently discussing new “fees” they intend to extract from tankers transiting the strait and, per Kagan, several nations that import oil through the channel are negotiating with the Iranians to allow safe passage for their fleets. As Tehran cements its control over global oil commerce, nations large and small will be forced to make nice with its leadership; sanctions on the regime will inevitably be lifted, and further Israeli attempts to dislodge it will be angrily opposed.

 

If a deal to end the war causes a rift between the U.S. and Israel, the Jewish state might come out of this with no friends left at all.

 

The president might answer all that by claiming that he’s trying to end the war because America can’t afford to let it continue—and, for once, he might be right. It’s not just a matter of oil shocks causing economic pain for Americans and political pain for him, either.

 

It’s that he’s overextended himself militarily.

 

Yesterday the Washington Post reported that “the U.S. military has depleted much of its inventory of advanced missile-defense interceptors after expending far more high-end munitions defending Israel amid hostilities with Iran than Israeli forces used themselves.” That problem will get worse if the war resumes, allegedly, because some of Israel’s interceptor batteries are currently down for maintenance. America would need to pick up the slack until they’re back online.

 

The U.S. had already spent down its supply of all sorts of air munitions in this war, as noted here recently, and that deficit will take defense manufacturers “years” to erase. Not only has that affected our ability to fight on effectively against Iran, it’s affecting our ability to deter China: The acting secretary of the Navy, Hung Cao, told senators Thursday that the Pentagon is pausing arms sales to Taiwan “to make sure we have the munitions we need for [Operation] Epic Fury.” That could be a lie manufactured to conceal some sort of corrupt bargain with Beijing—but given how worried America’s allies in the Far East have been about the U.S. diverting assets to the Middle East to battle the Iranians, it could also be the painful truth.

 

The president overextended the armed forces by starting a war that he assumed would be a cakewalk and for which he had no contingency plan if it wasn’t. He’s at risk of overextending them further by starting a new war with Cuba before peace with Tehran has been nailed down. We’re on the brink of another battle royal. And don’t look now, but Greenland also might be about to rejoin the fray.

 

Why does Trump do it?

 

The great man.

 

I don’t think there’s any mystery to it. Almost the opposite: When, throughout history, have megalomaniacs trusted with immense power not eagerly bitten off more than they can chew?

 

Last month, citing those in a position to know, The Atlantic alleged that Trump was no longer comparing himself to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in private conversation as often as he used to. Being one of America’s greatest presidents has become too modest for his ambition, it turns out; he’s begun to view himself as a world-historical figure in the mold of Napoleon, Julius Caesar, and Alexander the Great.

 

All of whom were emperors and whose word was law, coincidentally.

 

“He’s been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live,” a source told the magazine. “He wants to be remembered as the one who did things that other people couldn’t do, because of his sheer power and force of will.” His deputies and allies in Congress might worry about where that leads, “but for Trump, the costs have been outweighed by what he views as the opportunity before him, a chance to transform the world in a manner that few historical figures have ever even approached.”

 

He’s in an “I don’t give a f—” mood, another source explained to The Atlantic for the piece, titled “The YOLO Presidency.” Which sounds familiar.

 

Isn’t that what all of this hyperextension boils down to? The president’s hubris about his own alleged invincibility is so overweening that not even hard experience has been able to contain it. Anger at home and abroad over his trade war failed to put him off using tariffs as coercive leverage to settle petty grudges. Thin congressional majorities and terrible midterm polling failed to deter him from declaring jihad on GOP Senate incumbents and saddling them with grotesque excesses like the ballroom and the slush fund.

 

When you regard yourself as the most powerful person to ever live, when you imagine the only obstacle to getting your way is your own restraint in insisting upon it, the idea of being “overextended” must be unfathomable. You won’t learn your lesson about it because you literally can’t.

 

That’s how we ended up in this Strait of Hormuz mess, not surprisingly. Despite being warned that Iran was no Venezuela, “Trump believed that the U.S. military was unstoppable, and that he had a chance to topple Tehran’s theocracy, a prize that had eluded his predecessors,” another piece in The Atlantic recently recounted. “He was redrawing the world’s maps and expected a victory to come in days, a week or two at most.” He didn’t need a strategy, or so he thought. He had dominance instead.

 

I won’t insult the intelligence of learned Dispatch subscribers by explaining why it’s dangerous that the United States is led by someone with messianic delusions of grandeur, who believes there’s no prize he can’t have if he’s ruthless enough about claiming it. But I will say this, to return to a point I made at the start: For probably the first time in its history, this country is now under the authority of someone whose interests are completely divorced from the interests of the people he ostensibly serves.

 

That’s not to say those interests don’t overlap. They do in some cases: The president wants to limit illegal immigration at the border, for instance, and so do most of his constituents. When I say that they’re divorced, what I mean is that how Trump governs is no longer being influenced in any meaningful way by what Americans want. From petty matters like the ballroom and the slush fund to grand initiatives like attacking Iran and subjugating Cuba, everything he’s doing—and will do going forward—is aimed at enhancing his own sense of historical stature, not accomplishing popular priorities.

 

The United States is still nominally a democracy in the sense that it continues to hold elections. (I think.) But insofar as democracy is a mechanism to ensure that elected representatives strive to implement the will of their constituents, it no longer is. The most powerful official in the country could not make it any clearer, especially after this week, that he’s using his power to serve his own interests, not Americans’. If that means that the United States ends up overextended in all sorts of ruinous ways as he chases his dreams, that’s your problem, not his.

 

It was always going to end this way. Nothing was clearer when the president ran again for office in 2024 that his second term would fundamentally be about him, not about “making America great” or whatever jingo right-wingers are using now to reconcile themselves to fascism. He was candid about it on the trail, too: The name of the game in Trump 2.0 would be “retribution,” he warned us, and he’s kept his word. The abiding horror of his second term is that the con he pulled during his first about being a “public servant” was completely exposed by how that term ended—and Americans reelected him anyway. They opted for a president whom they had every reason to know would put his interests above their own, always. They chose overextension.

 

And so, while I hate to end two newsletters in a row on the same point about what Americans deserve, sometimes it can’t be avoided. Enjoy the billions of dollars in new debt we’re about to be saddled with to fund Cuba’s transformation into some sort of Trumpist Riviera for rich Floridians. I know I will.

I, Obama: Our Insufferable Ex-President

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, May 14, 2026

 

When Barack Obama was elected president for the first time, I was still living in England. Had I been in the United States, and eligible to vote, I would not have voted for him. But I remember thinking nevertheless that it was a remarkable — even a beautiful — thing that, just over four decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the people of the United States had elevated a black citizen to the highest office in the land. Martin Luther King spoke of the Declaration of Independence as a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. That an African American could now be chosen to lead the federal government struck me as a solid indication that, at long last, that initial vow had been substantiated.

 

I still think that. Which is one reason, among many, why I regret that I cannot stand the man. Periodically, we are treated to a reasonable stretch of silence, and I begin to wonder whether I was unfair to him while he was in office. And then he comes back, says something profoundly irritating, and reminds me exactly why I was so irked by him in the first instance. Now, as then, when Obama speaks, I am left looking around in astonishment at other people, trying to determine whether they, too, can see that the whole edifice is a ball of hype and gamesmanship. You know what I’m talking about: that Apollonian affect — that studied, above-it-all mien, which, even when he was president, allowed him to engage in bare-knuckle politics while pretending that he was a detached, innocent bystander whose only concern was for the forgotten middle.

 

People often say that the primary problem with Barack Obama was that he was racially divisive. I’m not sure this is true. Certainly, he had his moments — the “acted stupidly” (about the police involved in the Henry Louis Gates incident) and “if I had a son” (about the Trayvon Martin shooting) mistakes among them — but, overall, I was never especially bothered by his record in that realm. Indeed, insofar as Obama discussed race, he did so in the same manner as do other elite progressives with whom I disagree. Sure, I don’t like it. But that isn’t a problem with him so much as a problem with the movement to which he belongs. America was not a racial paradise before Barack Obama came into office, and it is not a racial paradise now that he’s been out for a decade. If I were to compile an audit of the reasons why that is the case, the presidency of Barack Obama wouldn’t make the list.

 

No, the problem with Obama was that he was politically divisive — and in ways that were rendered particularly infuriating by the insistence of his acolytes that he was just a plucky technocratic moderate who wished devoutly to find compromise with the other side. Barack Obama was — and, indeed, Barack Obama is — no such thing. On the contrary: He is a committed ideologue and a partisan brawler who, by dint of his considerable talents, has worked out how to hide both of those traits from the average member of the public. Where Bill Clinton was a moderate (at least after 1994), Barack Obama merely played one on TV. He would posit “the one hand,” and then posit the “other,” and then, however objectively ludicrous the spatial characterization might be, place himself right in the middle of the dispute. When he meant “Democrats,” he’d say “democracy.” When he meant progressivism, he’d say “common sense.” Even when he was doing something self-evidently grotesque — suing nuns for declining to provide contraception, for example, or supporting abortion up to the moment of birth — he’d coat his position in six tubs of treacle. If you could see it, it was infuriating.

 

He’s still doing it. Having spent years opposing gerrymandering on the grounds that it had led to a status quo in which “our parties have moved further and further apart, and it’s harder and harder to find common ground,” Obama went all in on Virginia’s recent attempt to turn a 51–46 state into a state with ten Democratic representatives and one Republican representative. By trying to overturn the state’s constitutional prohibition on gerrymandering, he said in one of the many TV ads, radio spots, and mailers in which he appeared, Democrats in Virginia were simply trying to “stand up for our democracy.” And who couldn’t be for that?

 

A few days later, Obama weighed in on the news that an armed left-wing extremist had been prevented from killing people inside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — including the president, the vice president, and members of his cabinet — by playing the humble observer. “Although we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner,” Obama wrote on X, “it’s incumbent upon all us to reject the idea that violence has any place in our democracy.”

 

Which sounds nice, unless you understand that, by the time that post appeared, the would-be shooter’s manifesto had been published in its entirety by every news outlet in the country, and that it was abundantly, irrefutably, inescapably clear that the perpetrator had been engaged in political terrorism. The target, the manifesto confirmed, was “administration officials,” along with the “Secret Service,” “Hotel Security,” and “Capital Police” and “most everyone” else if they got in the way. Why? Because in his view, the administration is full of “criminals” and the president is a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor.” In some circumstances, “although we don’t yet have the details” is a virtuous and necessary prefatory statement. Here, it was hardball politics at its most cynical. Obama understood that, rightly or wrongly, his “side” would be blamed for the actions of the perpetrator. So he hastened to muddy the waters and to replace the specific actions of a specific man with the abstract concept of “violence.” It was irritating. And typical.

 

Much has been made in the press of the supposedly dramatic break between the Obama presidency and the Trump presidencies, but I don’t consider the two men to be as far apart as many others seem to. Often in American history, the voting public swings sharply away from the style of the exiting president and consciously chooses his polar opposite to replace him. Thus, at various points, have we moved from Woodrow Wilson to Warren Harding, from Richard Nixon to Jimmy Carter, from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan, from George H. W. Bush to Bill Clinton, and so forth. One might be tempted to include Obama and Trump in this list. But how different are they, really?

 

Both men were treated as celebrities by the public and the press, and as messianic figures by their boosters. Both men offered the country an us-vs.-them politics (Obama, famously, said that Mitt Romney was “not one of us”). Both men consciously centered attention on the executive branch, with Obama vowing that “where Congress won’t act, I will” and Trump suggesting that “I alone can fix it.” Both men were extraordinarily partisan, reflexively tribal, and wont to cast their opponents as an existential threat to the country. Both men relied on the tactic of “stray voltage” to distract the media from the administration’s core issues. Both men had a conception of what a “real American” looks like — in Obama’s case, the problem was people who “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment”; in Trump’s, the problem is literally anyone who doesn’t like him — and they focused on those people to the exclusion of everybody else. The biggest difference I can detect is that Trump likes to display his ego, whereas Obama liked to disguise his. But badly disguised egomania is still egomania. Had it wished to, the American electorate could have responded to Barack Obama’s two terms by selecting Scott Walker or Martin O’Malley as his successor. They didn’t though, did they?

 

Which, ultimately, makes Barack Obama something of a tragic figure in American life. Without doubt, he has a lot going for him. He is intelligent. He is tall. He is attractive, albeit in an easily caricaturable sort of way. He has a lilting voice. Unlike Bill Clinton, he did not embarrass the country by carrying on with the interns; unlike Trump, he did not behave like a narcissistic lunatic while performing his official duties; and unlike Joe Biden, he did not spend half of his time in the White House decaying before the cameras. As a classically liberal conservative, I was never destined to approve of Obama’s politics. But I could plausibly have liked the guy.

 

I don’t. Meet the old boss. Same as the new boss.

Before His Murder, a Rabbi Addressed the Danger of Hatred

By Rabbi Eli Schlanger & Nikki Goldstein

Saturday, May 23, 2026

 

Note: The following is an excerpt of Rabbi Eli Schlanger and Nikki Goldstein’s Conversations with My Rabbi: Timeless Teachings for a Fractured World. The book reads as a conversation between Rabbi Schlanger and Goldstein, a secular writer. Shortly before the book’s completion, Schlanger was killed during the Bondi Beach mass shooting in Australia in December 2025. In this excerpt, Rabbi Schlanger and Goldstein discuss the Third Noahide Law, “Do not murder.”

 

RABBI ELI: Let’s start simple. In Judaism, life is not just sacred — it is divine. Every human being, regardless of background, belief, or behavior, carries a spark of the divine. We say that every person is created b’tzelem Elokim, in the image of God. That’s not just poetic. That’s law. That’s foundation.

 

Murder, therefore, is not only an act of violence against a human being. It is an act of violence against God Himself.

 

So “Do not murder” isn’t just about avoiding bloodshed. It’s about learning to see the infinite potential inside every human being. It’s about reverence. It’s about the love of God, and by extension, the love of humanity.

 

It’s not just a legal line in the sand — it’s a worldview. We’re not allowed to devalue life in any form. That’s why Jewish ethics are so strong around the unborn, around end-of-life decisions, and even around how we speak about people. Because murder starts with dehumanization. The Torah makes it very clear — we’re made in God’s image. Once you forget that, that every individual is an embodiment of God in the world, dreadful things become possible. That’s when societies fall.

 

NIKKI: But how do we value human life — even in war?

 

RABBI ELI: There’s no glorification of violence in Judaism. War is not desirable. It’s necessary in certain circumstances, but always with limits. We’re told not to needlessly destroy trees in war. Think about that — if a tree matters, how much more a human being?

 

And we don’t celebrate death. Not even the death of our enemies. When the angels wanted to sing after the Egyptians drowned in the sea, God said no — “My handiwork is drowning.” That’s the Jewish heart. Even in conflict, we don’t lose our compassion.

 

NIKKI: I had always thought the Third Noahide Law — “Do not murder” — was the easiest to accept. Of course we shouldn’t kill each other. But the more I sat with it, especially in the wake of rising antisemitism, rhetoric of extermination, and the way people casually degrade each other online, the more I understood this law was about sacred compassion and universal love. The Jewish worldview does not see life merely as a biological fact, but as a spiritual charge — a divine spark that comes with responsibility. And suddenly, I have questions. What about emotional cruelty? Is assisted dying murder? What about those who do seem irredeemably terrible?

 

RABBI ELI: To take emotional cruelty first, when we embarrass someone publicly, for example, the Talmud says it’s like spilling blood. When we speak cruelly, degrade, or isolate others, we’re participating in a kind of spiritual violence. It may not show up in court, but it registers in heaven.

 

NIKKI: So hurtful words — especially when we dehumanize or vilify others — can carry that same moral weight?

 

RABBI ELI: Yes. Our words can kill spirit, hope, and connection.

 

NIKKI: Or ideas? Or reputations, or a child’s sense of safety?

 

RABBI ELI: Absolutely. The Torah speaks directly to that. There’s a concept in Judaism called halbanat panim — literally, “whitening someone’s face” — and it refers to public humiliation. Our sages say that if you publicly embarrass someone, it is as if you spilled their blood. That’s not a metaphor. That’s spiritual anatomy.

 

Speech, too, can kill. Words have the power to create or destroy. The entire universe was created with speech — “And God said, let there be light.”

 

When we speak cruelly, especially about others, we commit lashon hara — evil speech. And the Talmud says that this harms three people: the one who says it, the one who hears it, and the one it’s about. Even if they never know. Even if they never hear.

 

NIKKI: That makes social media a spiritual minefield.

 

RABBI ELI: Exactly. People think gossip is harmless. But in Jewish thought, gossip is a terrible sin. It can destroy lives without a single weapon. It spreads like wildfire. And it desensitizes us to the sacredness of each other.

 

NIKKI: So how do Jews stay moral when surrounded by antisemitism or threats?

 

RABBI ELI: This is personal. Right now, we’re seeing an explosion of hate. And the Jewish people are hurting.

 

But Torah doesn’t say, “Be holy when life is easy.” It says Kedoshim tihiyu — you shall be holy — always. Even under pressure. Even when the world turns its back on you.

 

NIKKI: That feels impossible sometimes.

 

RABBI ELI: And yet, we must. Because if we lose our morality, we lose our mission.

 

The challenge is not to become what we fight. The challenge is to stay human, stay holy, even when others aren’t. Our ancestors knew pogroms. The Shoah. Crusades. And yet we kept lighting candles. We kept teaching our children. We didn’t curse the world. We blessed it.

 

We’ve had thousands of years of practice. We’re not new to this. From Egypt to the Spanish Inquisition to the Nazis — we’ve faced hatred. But we’ve always clung to life. We cling to light. That’s why Shabbat is such a powerful act. It’s a declaration that life is worth celebrating.

 

And we also educate. We teach our kids that just because someone hates us, we don’t hate back. That’s hard. But it’s holy. That’s what makes us different.

Hunting the Terrorists of October 7

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, May 21, 2026

 

Noa Marciano, an IDF lookout attached to the military’s base at Nahal Oz, was captured alive by terrorists on October 7, 2023. Hamas claimed she was killed in an Israeli airstrike, but it turned out that she was taken to a Gaza hospital where a “doctor” injected air into her veins and killed her.

 

Eventually, the IDF learned that Muhammed Issam Hassan al-Habil was responsible for Marciano’s killing. On February 4 of this year, Habil was riding in a car in northwest Gaza when, according to the Wall Street Journal, a drone fired a missile at the terrorist, ending his life.

 

But what happened right before that is crucial: “Early on Feb. 4, Israeli troops came under fire while patrolling the yellow line that divides them from Hamas-controlled territory—an action in violation of the cease-fire.”

 

Israel’s campaign of targeted assassination is remarkable not only for its effectiveness and accuracy but for its steadfast adherence to its legal and diplomatic obligations.

 

The Journal story describes Israel’s terrorist-hunt after the attacks of October 7, in which a list of “thousands of names” of targets is “kept by an Israeli task force created for one job—to kill or capture all who planned or joined in the Oct. 7 attack.” It is, the Journal says, “one of the most personal and highly technical targeting campaigns in the history of warfare” in which Israel takes out participants from “the man who drove a tractor through a border fence that day” to top Hamas figure Saleh al-Arouri.

 

It is deliberately reminiscent of previous shadow campaigns. The name, NILI, is an acronym that was also given to a World War I Jewish spy network, though for most readers the article will likely call to mind the retributive campaign against the participants of the Munich massacre at the Olympics in 1972.

 

Putting names on the list and then finding and eliminating the terrorists is extremely difficult work. It can sometimes take years to get IDF approval for a single target. That’s because the campaign is meticulous in its adherence to legal rules that govern such considerations. Even if the campaign “feels retributive” to the average person, former U.S. Air Force judge advocate Rachel VanLandingham told the Journal, “the law doesn’t disallow that.”

 

As the aforementioned case demonstrates, Israel is even careful to abide by the rules of the cease-fire deal, in which it can respond to attacks but refrains from initiating them.

 

That is one element of the moral framework of this campaign. Another is the message: Jewish blood comes at a cost. Those who kill Israelis will be hunted down and given earthly justice. No one is allowed to get away with doing what these Palestinians did on October 7. “Agents run the images through facial recognition programs to sift for names, the officials said, and comb through intercepted phone calls. They view location data from cell tower logs and interrogate Gazan detainees to uncover who did what.”

 

Hamas itself has helped the process because so many terrorists videotaped and broadcast their demonic campaign of slaughter and torture. That makes it easier to find them. To my mind, it also makes it more important to find them and deliver justice.

 

That the Gazans’ crimes of that day were on par with those of the Nazis and of the pogromists of the Russian empire is indisputable. That the perpetrators were so proud of their work, and that they (incorrectly) assumed it would inspire Arabs within Israel to do the same, is civilizational poison, and must be treated as such. And that Israel is dispensing justice while so carefully hewing to laws, norms, and agreements is a reminder that this battle can be won.

Lionel Jospin and the Dismantling of French Education

By M.D. Aeschliman

Saturday, May 23, 2026

 

When left-wing French politician Lionel Jospin died in March, major obituaries in French and English-language papers covered in great detail his long and eventful career, which included leadership of the French Socialist Party, membership in the Chamber of Deputies, and stints as national minister of education, prime minister, and a candidate for president of France. His shocking third-place showing in the 2002 presidential election marked the ascent of the far-right in France: The National Front’s Jean-Marie Le Pen defeated him in the first round, before being defeated himself by incumbent president Jacques Chirac in the second round.

 

But even Jospin’s obituary in the authoritative, center-left Paris Le Monde fails to dwell on one of his most notable accomplishments, and his most damaging one: his role in dismantling the once-outstanding French national primary- and secondary-education system.

 

The career of Lionel Jospin himself presents a revealing intellectual and moral trajectory. Born in 1937, he was the son of a domineering, idealistic Social-Gospel Protestant educator who taught in and then directed an institution for delinquent youths. The son rebelled against the father’s religion — he later called himself a Protestant atheist — but retained his left-wing politics while surreptitiously moving even further left by becoming a secret Trotskyite operative over a 30-year period.

 

A highly educated economist and inheritor of France’s high-rationalist, Cartesian intellectual tradition and institutions, Jospin — as well as his friends and allies on the left — proved enthusiastically open to policies that helped rapidly weaken and dismantle the educational system of which they were themselves beneficiaries. As a high school student in Paris, Jospin himself competed successfully in the competitive, exam-based national system, meriting entry into two of France’s elite schools of higher education, the Institute of Political Studies and, after failing on his first try and doing military service, the National School of Administration (ENA).

 

By the 1980s, France had the best large school system in Europe — perhaps in the world. But that changed with a new slate of educational policies passed by a temporary parliamentary majority of Socialists and Communists under the presidency of socialist François Mitterrand. Demanding national linguistic standards were eliminated as invidious, replaced by radically diminished expectations for correct French grammar, spelling, and vocabulary, in the service of a low-egalitarian standard for poor and minority students. The pursuit of an illusory “equality of outcome” destroyed the achievement of actual linguistic competence.

 

This new system of so-called student-centered learning meant, in effect, the rejection of a common “liberal arts” curriculum for all elementary school students, which was mocked as irrelevant “encyclopédisme.” No core of knowledge and competence was required of students, a subtle but sinister way of denying to students with a poor or minority-language background the inherited achievements of the national high culture.

 

Coming from a much more modest, southern-French agricultural background compared with Jospin, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was the principal author of a government-sponsored report in 1989 that critiqued the existing French system as merely reinforcing inequality in the country, benefiting the privileged since they possessed the “cultural capital” — for example, habits and manners of speaking — to succeed in school. A joke that circulated in the decades of decline that followed the Jospin revolution was that Bourdieu’s “reforms” made certain that the kind of upward academic mobility from which he benefitted to become famous and influential would no longer be possible: The Bourdieu reforms made sure there would be no more Bourdieus.

 

And indeed, that’s just what their chosen new system accomplished. This new measure of “equalization” — disinheriting the unfairly privileged — redefined and redirected all instruction downward into banalities and novelties that scorned the traditional didactic modes and academic contents of elementary education that had been so strong in France for more than a hundred years. The story of this wrecking enterprise has been told in many French books over the past 20 years, but in English with outstanding lucidity, insight, detail, and documentation — and relevance to the U.S. as well as France — in E. D. Hirsch’s Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children from Failed Educational Theories (2016). The book prominently features what he calls “the educational fall of France,” echoing the catastrophic, rapid defeat of the French by the Germans in May–June 1940 — as the surrender of common sense and high cultural achievement to the sweet poisons of modern low egalitarianism: demanding, and providing, very little content or rigor in early schooling so that no child feels pressure or competition. As Hirsch documents, Jospin’s reforms resulted in a profound decline in the literacy of the common national culture in France.

 

Hirsch would be very much in sympathy with Jean-Paul Brighelli, a French high school teacher who taught for 46 years, most of that time to poor and immigrant students. Brighelli’s 2022 bestselling book on French schooling, La fabrique du crétin (the cretin factory), documents, deplores, and derides the vocabulary of “pédadémagogie institutionnalisée” (institutionalized pedagogy-demagogy), its policies, and the effects it has had throughout the French national elementary and secondary school world. Inevitably more of a practitioner than a theorist, Brighelli nevertheless makes the same case that Hirsch has made against the ideas, sentiments, and forces that are rooted in the Romantic tradition deriving from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and that found full expression under Jospin. Though a man of the moderate left, Brighelli protests what he identifies as a 30-year “infiltration” by teacher-trainers in teachers’ colleges in “manufacturing ‘new men’ (and women) . . . who will reject ‘bourgeois’ culture,” that is, the educated culture of the existing society. The rejection is just what inspired Jospin’s reforms and spelled the downfall of the French education system.

 

The Jospin legislation of 1989 made, Hirsch argues, its “most decisive change . . . in the curriculum and pedagogy of the elementary school.” Yet the French debacle of the 1990s was in fact preceded by the American debacle largely brought about from the 1920s on by the philosopher and psychologist John Dewey, heavily indebted to the Romantic pantheism of Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Hegel. Dewey’s Hegelian, immanentist faith in historical progress became the established ideology of teacher training in the U.S. over the past century, his disciples gradually establishing themselves in the teachers’ colleges, schools of education, departments of education, and credentialing bodies.

 

The language of this approach will be quite familiar to modern ears: Who could be against “student-centered education,” “learning how to learn,” “competencies” instead of “subjects,” the “natural” as against the “artificial,” “individualized instruction” as opposed to “lockstep” whole-class instruction, student-initiated “orality” and “critical-thinking skills” against traditional literacy, writing, and books, “discovery learning” as against phonics and memorization, “social studies” instead of history, the promise of equality of outcome or result as opposed to “mere” equality of opportunity (and thus real access to public and private goods by means of effective education)? To doubt any of these virtue-signaling, “progressive” preferences is assumed or alleged to be ignorant, self-interested, or reactionary. Today, the disciples of John Dewey remain utterly in charge of U.S. teacher-training institutions and credentialing agencies, and the only organized, plausible opposition to their domination has come from E. D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge elementary school curriculum and the related popularization of phonics for literacy at the elementary school level.

 

For an American reader, one of Brighelli’s most revealing and poignant recommendations for reversing or mitigating the French educational “apocalypse” he documents is decentralization and regionalization of the top-down (“dirigiste”) French system. While the American system gives power over K–12 education to the states, France remains a centralized, top-down educational system that has proven sadly vulnerable to educational evisceration and decline. The educational reforms ushered in by Lionel Jospin delivered a lethal blow to the world’s most effective and equitable large, public elementary and secondary school system, the fruit not only of a century of institutionalization but of hundreds of years of literacy, rationality, culture, and civilization. The sophistical Romantic primitivism — the true “childishness” — of Rousseau and his descendants triumphed over the modesty, urbanity, and brilliance of many generations of French sages and savants who knew, with the great moderate Michel de Montaigne, that “these two things I have always seen together — super-celestial talk and subterranean morals.” Jospin did his work well, and France and the world are the poorer for it.

An Autopsy as Malpractice

By Rich Lowry

Friday, May 22, 2026

 

The Democrats couldn’t complete their term paper, but handed it in anyway because too many people were wondering what had become of it.

 

Under pressure, the DNC finally released its autopsy of the 2024 election, after rampant speculation about what it contained and why it hadn’t yet been made public. Did it include references to Gaza or didn’t it? Why or why not? What explosive revelations were being kept from us?

 

It turns out that the autopsy is a thoroughly unimpressive, unfinished document that, in the sheer incompetence of its drafting and handling, says more about the low state of the current Democratic Party than any of its analysis does.

 

The DNC chairman, Ken Martin, maintains that he delayed so long because he didn’t want to create a distraction by releasing a poorly done report, which sounds like a typical Washington excuse for hiding something.

 

Except it wasn’t. Once everyone saw the report, they realized Martin was right about the embarrassingly poor handiwork of his own outfit.

 

At the start, the autopsy contains a disclaimer that “the DNC was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented.”

 

Then, throughout the document, there are hostile annotations casting doubt on its claims.

 

And the report doesn’t have a conclusion.

 

The Democrats would have been better off going with ChatGPT.

 

That said, the report acknowledges that Democrats are out of touch and too dependent on the Republicans’ making poor candidate choices (something the GOP may be about to do again in its Texas Senate primary with the Trump-endorsed, scandal-plagued attorney general, Ken Paxton).

 

It notes how Trump’s they/them ad hitting Kamala Harris on trans issues was devastating and unanswerable.

 

It recognizes that Harris didn’t do enough to separate from Biden and make an affirmative case for herself rather than relying on voters’ supposedly considering Trump unacceptable.

 

On the other hand, it fails to grapple with the issues of inflation and immigration (except to complain about Harris being given a role with some responsibility over the border). These were the two biggest substantive issues in the election, while the autopsy also whiffs on Biden’s age and his catastrophic poor judgment in trying to run for reelection.

 

(It also doesn’t mention Gaza, bitterly disappointing the anti-Israel left.)

 

Yet, our expectations for such documents shouldn’t be very high. What was the report going to say? That Democrats disgraced themselves by pretending that Biden was fit for a second term, and only shifted course when he got exposed in the first debate, and they then had no alternative but to turn to a charmless nonentity as a last-minute substitute?

 

The history of party retrospectives like this isn’t good. Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 by taking the recommendations of the GOP autopsy after its 2012 election defeat and often doing the opposite in substance and tone.

 

Democrats may be rudderless and increasingly extreme, but that doesn’t mean they won’t have a good Election Night this coming November. Usually, a party that has just lost the White House rises or falls in the midterms based on the incumbent president’s job-approval rating, rather than its own political creativity or inherent appeal.

 

As for retaking the White House, that typically depends on nominating someone who is charismatic and fresh, who has an unexpected approach to politics, and who develops a new coalition — think Barack Obama in 2008 or Donald Trump in 2016.

 

None of this comes about by having a political strategist talk to a bunch of people about the immediate past election and write a long report about it. Needless to say, Democrats should be grateful that the stakes of their autopsy are so low — otherwise, they would have had to endeavor to actually finish it, and grapple with truths about the 2024 election conveniently passed over in the just-released document.