The Party of Strength

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, August 14, 2026

 

Yesterday the president ordered the Navy to ditch the electromagnetic catapult system it uses to propel fighter jets off the decks of aircraft carriers. America is returning to the good ol’ days of steam catapults, he declared.

 

Experts were baffled. “Replacing the electromagnetic catapults with steam will be a complex endeavor that will likely cost billions of dollars,” the Wall Street Journal noted. The old system used more mechanical parts and required more money and technicians to maintain; modern U.S. carriers will need to be retrofitted with new (meaning: old) infrastructure to support them.

 

Installation of an electromagnetic system is already nearly half-finished on a supercarrier that’s under construction in Virginia. That will now need to be reworked to accommodate the executive order at “significant cost, schedule, and integration risk,” the contractor told the paper.

 

What gives?

 

Dispatch contributor Jesse Singal had a theory. “This means either some random aide thinks the old system is cool, and told Trump about it at a moment when [the president] was particularly lucid, or Trump has some sort of financial stake in a steam-catapult company, but it’s 99.9 percent one or the other.”

 

I would have put the odds slightly lower, at around 90 percent. In a movement as besotted with nostalgia as Trumpism, there’s always a chance that the president prefers doing something the old way simply because that’s how it used to be done. American greatness was at its zenith in his youth, and in his youth carriers used steam. QED.

 

But certainly, if you had to bet, you’d bet on Singal being right. And he is right, it appears. Per the Wall Street Journal, “Trump is making good on a promise he made almost 10 years ago to go back to the steam system after hearing a sailor praise it while visiting a ship during his first term.” Some random person told him steam catapults were cool, and the alleged coolness of steam catapults became an idée fixe.

 

Plant a seed in Donald Trump’s head and you never know what poisonous fruit might grow.

 

As it happens, the steam-catapult idiocy isn’t the only fiasco in the news this week that involves the world’s greatest military.

 

Fiascos.

 

The most sordid has to do with conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, where morale has allegedly deteriorated after nine months at sea. “Family members and sailors say the roughly 5,000 service members aboard Lincoln have endured food and water shortages, disrupted mail service, and long workdays with little time off,” Stars and Stripes reported. Some crew members are said to have complained of suicidal thoughts. More than one has tried to go overboard.

 

A different kind of fiasco that came to light recently took place earlier this year in Germany. In April and May, U.S. infantry from Fort Hood held military exercises against a Ukrainian drone unit. Despite the Pentagon having had many months to learn from Russia’s battlefield misery and adapt its tactics accordingly, the Americans were defeated “easily.” The armored vehicles they used were spotted and “killed” so quickly, in fact, that U.S. units had to “re-spawn” simply to keep the exercise going, one official told the Wall Street Journal.

 

The third fiasco has to do with Iran. Everyone knows that America has burned through an outsized share of its missile stockpile during the war, but only lately has it become clear how outsized it is. Some experts estimated that half the supply of high-tech THAAD interceptors was gone; the truth, according to sources who spoke to CNN, is more like 80 percent. (Half of all Patriot missiles have been spent as well.) Amid the predictable finger-pointing and scapegoating at the top, the Pentagon has issued an urgent memo to defense contractors begging them to start cranking out weapons “significantly faster.”

 

Joint Chiefs chairman Dan Caine is reportedly so spooked that he’s urged Trump to find an off-ramp from the war before our “dangerously low” remaining supply of munitions runs out. The president is now resigned to “low-keying it” in Iran, opting for economic pressure over military escalation because escalating might be too perilous for … us.

 

There’s a fourth, less visible but momentously important, fiasco in motion. Even before the president returned to office, the United States passed the grim milestone of spending more on debt servicing than it does on defense. But under Trump, the problem has worsened considerably: In an age of high interest rates, America nonetheless borrowed more in the first 10 months of this fiscal year than it did in all of fiscal year 2025. Last month’s budget deficit was the steepest since March 2021, putting us on track for an annual deficit of no less than $2 trillion.

 

As more of our money goes toward servicing our debt, less of our money will necessarily go toward national defense. That would be bad enough if we weren’t spending big bucks on certain foolish and wasteful vanity projects, but we are. The president doesn’t seem to care a whit.

 

Amid all of that, the Trump administration now appears doomed to a strategic defeat in Iran. America’s Gulf allies are already coming to terms with Iranian ownership of the Strait of Hormuz, preferring to pay a “fee” to their Shiite enemies so that tankers can safely transit the strait than suffer through another pointless U.S. escalation. If the Pentagon can no longer defend Saudi oil fields from Iranian retaliation due to munitions shortages, the Saudis are better off letting themselves be extorted. That’s the state of confidence in America overseas now.

 

All in all, there’s a solid case to be made that this presidency will end with U.S. military power at its weakest point since the Carter years. And we’re still not even halfway through it: Trump being Trump, there’s a decent chance that he’ll treat the Pentagon’s overextension as an excuse to live out his dream of abandoning NATO before he leaves office. Having done major damage to American prestige by behaving too hawkishly in the first 19 months of his term, he’s fully capable of doing major damage by behaving too dovishly over the remaining 29.

 

All of this has to matter politically, no?

 

Traditional advantages.

 

Since Vietnam, Republicans have been the party of strength abroad. The Cold War, the Gulf War, the war on terror, now the war with Iran: The GOP is forever eager to throw roundhouses at foreign villains while the hippie Democratic base cries, “There has to be a better way!” If you’re a hawk who believes in hard-power projection, choosing between blue and red has been a no-brainer since 1980.

 

Will that still be true in 2028, though? How many more military-related fiascos will it take from the Trump administration before the traditional Republican advantage on national security among voters ends up as depleted as the Pentagon’s missile stockpile?

 

That’s a trick question, actually. According to some polls, that advantage is already gone.

 

As noted elsewhere by CNN reporter Aaron Blake, two recent surveys found the parties statistically tied on questions about “strength.” A Reuters poll saw Democrats ahead, 37–36, when it asked which side will do a better job handling “war, foreign conflicts, and terrorism.” That’s a 12-point swing away from Republicans since Trump was reelected in late 2024.

 

A Fox News poll had the GOP still ahead on national security but by a narrow margin of 50–48, within the margin of error. That too reflects a 12-point turnaround dating back to before the Iran war.

 

Not everyone who’s moving from right to left on questions related to national security is a disappointed hawk, needless to say. Some are swing voters who bought Trump’s hype in 2024 about “ending endless wars” and now feel bait-and-switched. Others are Tuckerite isolationists who dream of making the world safe for postliberalism. But there are surely people who favored the president in 2024 because they believed even a war-skeptical Republican would project military power more competently and responsibly than the liberal weenie alternative—and have learned otherwise the hard way.

 

Those hawkish voters now face having to watch the tough guy they supported forced to acquiesce in Iranian control of Hormuz because he’s maneuvered himself into having no other option. Their humiliation will be ineffable. How loyal will they remain to a party whose biggest foreign policy accomplishment over these four years is likely to be vastly increasing Iran’s regional prestige?

 

What’s the pitch to them post-Iran to keep loyally turning out for a party led by J.D. Vance?

 

Before you answer, bear in mind that the current war might not be the worst strategic defeat America suffers before Trump leaves office. The president’s ineptitude and the Pentagon’s munitions shortfall are bound to influence China’s calculations about Taiwan and Russia’s about Europe. Trump has never been likely to intervene to defend U.S. allies in either scenario, but between the current strain on the military and the heat he’s taken from “America First-ers” for being too bellicose, he’s really unlikely to intervene now.

 

In fact, having just watched China flex its muscle over oil markets, he might not even consider doing so. A man who’s afraid of being remembered as Herbert Hoover won’t risk challenging an enemy who can plausibly threaten him with a global recession simply by boosting its oil consumption.

 

If the president’s bluff is called and he declines to fight, what’s left for right-wing hawks then? What does American paralysis in years three and four of Trump 2.0 do to perceptions of “the party of strength”?

 

I can understand feeling skeptical that the GOP might lose its traditional advantage on national security, which has been a fact of political life for the better part of 50 years. It’s unthinkable! But as it turns out, it’s not the only issue right now on which the party is seeing a longtime advantage evaporate.

 

As Blake notes, perceptions of Republican economic stewardship have also collapsed under the weight of tariffs and gas-price hikes driven by the war. The same Fox News poll that I mentioned earlier has Democrats ahead 54–45 on which side would better handle the economy, giving the left its biggest lead since 2006. Reuters has the margin at a more modest 37–36, but not since May 2017 had Republicans trailed on the question (which was asked slightly differently at the time). Unthinkable! Yet here we are.

 

Come 2028, if the GOP is no longer the party of “strength” and no longer the party of prosperity, what will it be the party of, exactly?

 

The paths ahead.

 

My cynical answer is that it’ll become the National Front. Eighty percent of its agenda will be about expelling swarthy undesirables, 10 percent will be about learning to love Russia and China, and the rest will involve snorting various progressive and protectionist economic policies. Stop fighting illiberals abroad and start fighting liberals within. The J.D. Vance program, in other words. Right-wing hawks will wander off into the wilderness.

 

My more cynical answer is that it’ll become the National Front but will still command the votes of most traditional Republicans, including hawks, because hyperpartisanship always trumps hard experience. No matter how humiliating the rest of the president’s term becomes militarily or economically, right-wingers will anxiously reassure themselves that any Democrat would be worse. Better a belligerent dope who makes decisions about aircraft carrier technology based on word of mouth than a tax-and-spend technocrat beholden to hippies.

 

“The National Front plus a big group of willfully delusional conservatives” is a pretty good description of the Republican coalition right now, no? Why wouldn’t it continue?

 

Democrats will make it easy in some ways for the GOP. For instance, the left is vastly less likely to support war with Iran than the Trump-led GOP is and, with the notable exceptions of Ukraine and NATO, isn’t meaningfully more likely to favor other foreign interventions. If you’re a Mark Levin-style conservative hawk who thinks the big problem with the current conflict is that we haven’t dropped enough bombs, why would you think President Mark Kelly will be more likely to scratch your itch than President Vance would?

 

The left’s hard tilt against Israel is another huge red flag for hawks. Even if the broader right comes to see the Iran war as a mistake and proof of the president’s incompetence, most Republicans outside the “young chud” Tucker Carlson niche will view it as having been directionally correct on clash-of-civilizations grounds: Trump understood the Muslim threat. A Democratic Party that’s now pro-Palestinian writ large, pro-Hamas out on its fringe, and captivated by politicians named Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed is not an obvious home for those Republicans.

 

Then again, no one knows how big the Tucker Carlson niche might get by 2028. If the GOP turns into a party in which terms like “goyslop” become common parlance, in which the supposed “real” clash of civilizations is with Israel specifically and global Jewry more generally, one would hope Republican hawks would take that as their cue to pull up stakes and declare independence. Or even—gasp—consider supporting a Democrat like Kelly who seems not obviously crazy and not very interested in the various sinister tentacles of the Jewish octopus.

 

Another way of saying all that is that Trump’s various military fiascos, Iran most prominently, might be just the thing needed to accelerate horseshoe-ification. “The party of strength” in the future might be an uneasy coalition of left- and right-leaning liberals who lean toward projecting America military power against illiberal regimes—when the goals are feasible and the people giving orders are capable, neither of which is true in the present war.

 

Whereas the opposition party of the future might be a similarly uneasy coalition of left- and right-leaning illiberals who lean against American military imperialism, especially when practiced against illiberal regimes and especially especially against illiberal regimes that are waging war on Israel. That octopus isn’t going to slay itself, you know.

 

If you had to bet on political trends, though, you’d always bet on inertia, particularly in an age of turbo-charged tribalism. “Strength” has been part of the right’s tribal identity since the Reagan era; even Trump, who won two elections by questioning GOP-led wars, reinforced that identity with boorish alpha-male bravado and a lust for dominance. Asking Republicans to relinquish it, even after the Iran fiasco, is asking a lot.

 

And asking Democrats, whose base led the opposition to Vietnam, Iraq, and Iran, and whose anti-American socialist wing is ascendant, to claim it is asking just as much.

 

So we will likely forge on into 2028 with both parties in their familiar roles, with Republican candidates halfheartedly promising strength and Democratic candidates half-heartedly demanding restraint. No one on either side will feel very convinced by the posturing, but longtime partisans will relish the reassurance that their tribal identity is, more or less, still what it’s always been. The president isn’t the only American besotted by nostalgia.

Jason Arday Should Never Have Been Allowed High Enough to Fall as He Did

By Jeffrey Blehar

Saturday, August 15, 2026

 

Former Cambridge University professor Jason Arday – who was revealed over the past two weeks to have largely fabricated his life story while plagiarizing other scholars almost constantly throughout his career — is dead, apparently by his own hand. (Details are as yet unclear, but he is reported to have been found dead in his flat by London police under circumstances that are officially described as “unexpected, but not suspicious,” a delicate way of stating the obvious.) Before all else, I sincerely ask you to pray for the man’s soul. Suicide is indescribably sad, and his was a needless death. It is impossible not to feel melancholy about the outcome.

 

I hesitate, however, to call it a “tragedy,” as I see others have done. I reserve that term for the innocent victims of events on the order of force majeure. (As for school shootings and terrorist attacks, these are not tragedies; they are atrocities.) I have no doubt that Arday’s sense of despair was acute indeed; the act of self-abnegation speaks for itself.

 

Yet I will not pretend he is innocent in his own doom. For one thing, suicide is a choice, and I don’t have to respect the decision of a man to end his life out of shame, even as I pity it intensely. That becomes even more difficult to do when I remember the positively malicious acts Arday committed against other innocents when he was still trying to conceal his wrongdoing.

 

Those who noticed that Jason Arday was an academic fraud are not to blame for his death. Those who insisted Cambridge live up to its scholarly standards and investigate the legitimacy of Arday’s work are not the ones who should feel shame. The most obvious person to blame for Jason Arday’s suicide is Jason Arday himself — and yet he is no longer around to account for this sin, or any other.

 

But I can think of some people who are.

 

I think, for example, that Arday’s professional colleagues — the men and women who passed him up through the scholarly ranks at warp speed — ought to account for putting him in the position to fail, despite such obvious lack of merit and so many strange red flags. We don’t have to speculate about whether they doubted his credentials, scholarship, or intellectual capacities: In The Guardian, Afua Hirsch reveals that black studies academics in the U.K. had quietly pegged him as a fraud long ago:

 

The fact is that many of Arday’s black peers in academic sociology have been voicing concerns about him for a while. He seemed, to them, to have come out of nowhere. His performance at high-profile academic events did not match the credentials that were being touted. I have had various conversations with sociology professors in which this has been the main topic of conversation, and their questions began to mount into a list. They did not voice them publicly because we all know that whatever the truth or the outcome, he would be unlikely to be treated fairly and we would all be damaged in the process.

 

What a damning confession — and published in a national newspaper, no less. Did any of Arday’s “black peers” ever think to quietly go to their department heads for a frank discussion? Maybe if one of Arday’s “peers” had taken him aside, man-to-man, and called BS on his impossible tales (“no way did you run 600 miles in six days, friend”) he wouldn’t have felt emboldened to make up so many spectacular lies about his life — and put them in a memoir, no less. After all, he’d gotten away with the entire grand fable until then! Arday wouldn’t have been able to bring such a truly catastrophic amount of shame crashing down upon his head had he not been coddled, excused, and even encouraged at times.

 

What did these people’s reflexive tribalism get them? A man whose obvious lies about himself, whose track record of grievous academic misconduct, and whose frank inability to actually do the work on any level found himself promoted, on a fast-moving conveyor belt, to the place where his many lies could no longer be concealed. His peers claim they knew all this — and they stayed quiet even as white administrators promoted him into a position where he was destined to flame out.

 

A responsible scholarly culture would have immediately red-flagged Arday as unfit for academia — perhaps around the time he submitted a graduate thesis transparently plagiarized from other scholars. Instead his university “cleared” his work, and a string of higher educational institutions lined up to fast-track a fraud to the top of academia, where his impostures finally became too ridiculous and repellent to avoid notice from skeptics.

 

Make no mistake: Whether or not you believe Jason Arday to have been a stunningly naïve autistic plagiarist or a cynically smooth-talking fabulist, he was the primary author of his own downfall. But let us not simply close the book on this private calamity without pointing a finger directly at the entire institutional complex that allowed Jason Arday to destroy himself. They let him down even as they were letting themselves and their students down. Humpty Dumpty made his own decision to sit on the wall; but who led him there, and invited him to get comfortable? On this sad day, focus your true contempt on them.

Properties Aren’t Property in New York City

By John R. Puri

Saturday, August 15, 2026

 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made no secret of what he thinks about his city’s housing supply: He should be in charge. For the benefit of all New Yorkers, of course.

 

Though just 7 percent of rental units are public housing (still too many), Mamdani speaks of the entire market as a public utility to be managed and allocated from Gracie Mansion. He decides how much rents should rise — by zero. He decides which residents owe more in property taxes than the rest. He decides what kinds of developments are built and in what quantities.

 

Seldom mentioned, except as cartoonish scoundrels, are those who ostensibly own the housing stock. To Mamdani, landlords’ preferences for their buildings’ use are simply nefarious plots to be trumped by the will of tenants, embodied by their mayor. His five-year plan for housing occasionally refers to rent-controlled landlords as “property owners.” Neither of those words is an accurate descriptor.

 

John Locke identified the moral basis of property as improvement upon the state of nature, forged by human labor. The essence of property, he wrote, is “Dominion.” Renowned microeconomist Armen Alchian defined this dominion as “the exclusive authority to determine how a resource is used.”

 

The modifier in private property makes it a thicker concept. Alchian reduced it to three elements: “(1) exclusivity of rights to choose the use of a resource, (2) exclusivity of rights to the services of a resource, and (3) rights to exchange the resource at mutually agreeable terms” — the legal ability to control, profit from, and dispose of one’s property. In New York City, buildings subject to rent control or “stabilization,” a euphemism for milder rent control, or all those constructed before 1974, have been drained of every aspect of private ownership.

 

The practical purpose of property rights, Alchian notes, is to allocate scarce resources in a civilized manner. The pre-modern distribution of New York’s regulated properties is evidence that they are no such thing. Accurate prices are replaced by hours spent waiting in line. The wealthiest residents receive the deepest discounts. Turnover is minimal by design, so outsiders are squeezed into the bursting unregulated market.

 

Once an initial lease is signed, landlords lose control of who may or may not occupy their rent-regulated units. If tenants stay put, as nearly all do, managers are required to renew their leases indefinitely. Tenants may also pass on apartments they do not own to any family member, or “family-like” individual with an “emotional and financial commitment” to them, who has lived in the unit for one or two years.

 

For the services they render, landlords may charge only what the city permits, no matter their expenses. The New York City Rent Guidelines Board voted in June to fulfill Mamdani’s rent freeze, despite knowing that operating costs for rent-stabilized buildings had risen by 5.3 percent. A tenth of units are unprofitable by fiat. Last year, 57,000 dilapidated “zombie” apartments sat vacant because they would cost more to fix up than the government would allow them to earn. (The mayor might seize a landlord’s building if they rent without repairs.) And if a tenant does not pay rent, it can take months to more than a year to evict them.

 

Lastly, managers are not free even to dispose of their buildings. Suppose a landlord wants to convert their units into condominiums. They must either convince 51 percent of tenants to agree, or commit to preserving a portion of the building as rent-stabilized apartments. Conversion plans must be reviewed by the New York Attorney General’s office. Also, no existing tenant can be removed so long as they wish to keep renting.

 

What if a landlord wants to move into a unit themselves? They must prove that they plan to use the apartment as their primary residence. They must demonstrate an “immediate and compelling necessity” as to why they require the apartment. And they cannot displace any tenant who is over 62, disabled, or has lived in the unit for more than 15 years, unless the landlord provides them with an “equivalent or superior” apartment at the “same or lower regulated rent” in a “closely proximate area.”

 

All these rules are presented as regulations, not the undisguised “takings” that are prohibited by the Constitution. After the latest round of tightened restrictions was enacted, however, the value of rent-stabilized units plummeted by 40 to 50 percent — destruction without physical contact. If this is not the kind of property abridgment that, in the Supreme Court’s words, “goes too far,” what is?

El-Sayed Shouldn’t Blame Muslim America for His Radical-Islam-Curious Views

By Noah Rothman

Friday, August 14, 2026

 

The thrill America’s Muslims supposedly experienced when Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan Democratic Senate primary was short-lived, according to the Associated Press. Their “elation” was soon “tempered by awareness of persisting and widespread anti-Muslim sentiment across much of the nation.”

 

The evidence the AP marshals for this assertion of bias ranges from the plausible to the absurd. Outgoing Congresswoman Nancy Mace’s allegation that “every single Muslim holding public office in America is a Trojan horse” is certainly ugly. But using the candidate’s full name, as Donald Trump did, is not.

 

El-Sayed himself is hardly shy about accusing his critics of harboring anti-Muslim animus in their hearts. But both the candidate and his defenders seem to imply that El-Sayed’s views and statements are uncontroversial among his fellow Muslims. That assumption deserves to be challenged.

 

For example, most Muslim Americans, like most Americans generally, do not express any sympathy for the terrorist group Hamas. Even though Israel’s favorability among all American adults has declined, the public’s contempt for Hamas has remained static. Yet, while a majority of Americans, including the minorities for whom El-Sayed presumes to speak, can distinguish between Israel and its terrorist enemies, the candidate cannot.

 

“Yes. Killing tens of thousands of people makes you pretty damn evil,” El-Sayed said on the debate stage in April when asked if Israel is “as evil” as Hamas. “It’s not how evil is this one versus that one: Hamas, evil. Israeli government, evil. You can say both.”

 

El-Sayed wasn’t just staking out a rhetorical position. In a candidate questionnaire, the Senate nominee outlined the steps he wants the American government to take to isolate Israel on the world stage, including withdrawing aid. “That’s why I support immediate re-investment in foreign aid, including to UNRWA,” he wrote.

 

At least twelve employees of that U.N. agency in Gaza took part in the October 7 massacre. Indeed, according to the U.N.’s own audit, which “horrified” its leaders in 2024, the agency employed thousands of Gazans who were tied to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad — findings that compelled the U.S. State Department to withdraw America’s financial support for UNRWA. None of this seems to bother El-Sayed.

 

Similarly, when El-Sayed refused to say that the neutralization of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was a good thing, he attributed his reticence to his deep well of compassion for his fellow Muslims. “There are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad,” he said of the death of a brutal dictator with American blood on his hands.

 

It’s improbable that the majority of American Muslims — even those who observe Sharia-compliant practices, as El-Sayed sometimes does — feel the same. Only 12 percent of American Muslims are Arab, the demographic that dominates Dearborn. The Iranian diaspora, which makes up a healthy portion of the American Muslim population, was hardly given to lamenting the death of the Persian people’s erstwhile tormentor. And that is to say nothing of the majority of American Muslims who were born in the United States and have deep roots in a nation that has been at war with the Islamic Republic for nearly a half century.

 

It’s unsurprising, therefore, that most American Muslims are as fearful of radical Islamist terrorism as anyone else. Indeed, they feared it long before Israel bought up all the real estate in activist progressive heads. So, when El-Sayed refused to unequivocally condemn a terrorist attack on a synagogue with 140 preschool children under its roof without condemning Israel in the same breath — reasoning that “hurt people do hurt people” — he wasn’t deferring to the consensus among American Muslims. He was speaking for himself.

 

Nor is it so much that El-Sayed lacks discretion when associating with unsavory elements in the American political landscape. He’s extremely discerning, in fact, because he seems to select for those unsavory elements.

 

El-Sayed is a longtime associate of the activist Linda Sarsour — a figure who called for a “jihad” against Donald Trump, and who contributed to the dissolution of the Women’s March amid a series of investigations into the activist network’s antisemitism. He surrounded himself with Nation of Islam leaders, including “two lieutenants of the group’s leader, Louis Farrakhan, who themselves have railed against ‘the Jews,’” the Washington Free Beacon reported. Then there is Hasan Piker, the Maoist streamer who became a fixture at El-Sayed campaign events and who has said that America deserved 9/11, described Hamas as morally superior to Israel, and called for the outright murder of Republican elected officials.

 

“Of course I don’t think 9/11 was justified,” El-Sayed said of that particularly “dumb statement” from his unofficial campaign surrogate. At the same time, El-Sayed steadfastly refused to criticize his associate, calling it a “gotcha game” and contending that ostracizing figures like Piker is “exactly why Democrats too often fail to get our message out to everybody.”

 

Michigan’s voters will have to draw their own conclusions about where El-Sayed’s reticence comes from, just as they will have to consider the candidate’s support for the sequence of events that briefly brought the Muslim Brotherhood, subsequently a U.S.-designated terrorist group, to power in Egypt. They’ll have to parse El-Sayed’s apparent comfort with the $115,000 his campaign raised from individuals associated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an organization named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing scandal.

 

To the extent that Democrat-friendly media outlets have confronted any of this, it is only to allege that the public’s possible discomfort is due entirely to America’s latent “Islamophobia.” And some Republicans have made the press’s job easier by playing to the cheap seats. But even journalists’ defenses of El-Sayed contribute to the indictment of his judgment.

 

“Today, there are more than 230 elected Muslim officials,” the New York Times reported, “including four Muslim Americans in Congress, the highest number ever.” If this candidate stands out among them, it is no mystery as to why.

Growing Pains for the Democratic Socialists

By John R. Puri

Friday, August 14, 2026

 

All was sunshine and rainbows for the Democratic Party’s insurgent socialist wing about a week ago. Their man in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, won his Senate primary against an opponent as establishment as one can get — by a smaller margin than expected, but no matter. DSA-branded House candidates in metro centers had been romping incumbents throughout the summer. Graham Platner may have gone down in flames, but his popularity forced the party to choose a replacement just as radical.

 

It seemed that seizing wealth, blowing out the budget on new entitlements, dismantling “systems of power,” and — above all else — absolutely despising Israel was the wave of the future in Democratic politics. The DSA, backed by an army of disgruntled young degree-holders, could not stumble.

 

That is, until Francesca Hong opened her mouth in public.

 

It’s hard to imagine a candidate more preposterously unsuited for a high-profile campaign — let alone the job she was running for — than Hong. A land acknowledgment come to life, she thoughtlessly parroted every bizarre luxury belief under the ceiling of UW-Madison’s sociology department. National Review’s editors recounted Hong’s greatest hits:

 

It is difficult to convey just how robotically Hong publicly committed herself to her ideology over the years — the most obvious example being her recent inability to decide whether or not she still wanted to “Cancel Thanksgiving,” because settler-colonialism is still “very painful for many people in our communities.” Throughout her elected career, Hong made her views on crime well-known: “Police exist to uphold white supremacy. Defund then abolish. Reform can’t be an option.”

 

Every poll had Hong cruising past her establishmentarian opponents in the Democratic primary for Wisconsin’s governorship. The field was simply too divided, and college towns were poised to push a comical socialist over the top. With the nomination, Hong would have put what ought to be a safe victory in this environment at risk.

 

That’s when Tony Evers, the Badger State’s retiring 74-year-old governor, saved the day. He dragged a candidate who had already dropped out, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, back into the race and rallied old-school Democrats behind him. Christian Schneider has the story:

 

Hong was coasting on a socialist momentum within the Democratic Party that had birthed U.S. Senate candidates including Graham Platner in Maine and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. And in the past few weeks, Hong’s nomination seemed inevitable.

 

It was, until Evers stepped in and reversed the race in a way that may never have been seen in modern politics. In order to stop Hong and face down the socialist wing of his party, Evers convinced Crowley, who had dropped out of the race weeks before, to reenter the contest and become the “establishment” candidate. And for weeks, it looked as if the effort was going to fall short, given Hong’s huge polling lead. And yet, on Election Day, it appears that Democrats all over the state decided to side with Evers in preventing Wisconsin from becoming a national laughingstock.

 

In the end, Hong lost the race by the narrowest of margins, all but ensuring that a Democrat will move into Evers’s office next year. Score one, at last, for the party establishment over the DSA.

 

To keep the good times rolling into 2028, some democratic socialists have also felt the need to admit past mistakes that drove voters away in the first place. Charlie Cooke writes on how Bernie Sanders’s handpicked heir is all too casually trying to moderate her image:

 

Seeking to dismiss the record of one of the many kooky political candidates with whom she is now reflexively associated, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laughed aloud as if she had been told that she had a speck of mustard on her lip. “I have a local city councilman that has this saying, ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’” she submitted. “And I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.”

 

Is it? Do we? Why? “Woke 1” was, indeed, “crazy.” But Ocasio-Cortez’s implication is that that “crazy” moment was something that happened to her and her ideological compatriots — like an earthquake or an invasion from the sea — rather than something that was contrived, dispersed, and enforced by her and her ideological compatriots. In this, Ocasio-Cortez seems confused once again by the appropriate pronouns. It wasn’t “crazy.” They were crazy. And that “they” includes her.

 

John Fund is also unconvinced by socialist candidates’ professed revelations:

 

The problem with all of these rhetorical retreats is that over at the DSA mother ship, no one is retreating from the group’s national platform. It calls for defunding the Pentagon, abolishing police and prisons, giving asylum to illegal immigrants, and getting rid of the Senate and of public ownership of corporations. . . .

 

A major question for the upcoming midterm elections will be a simple one: Who will independents and non-leftist Democrats believe — moderate Democrats who warn that the DSA is a Trojan horse for radicalism, or the DSA’s star candidates, who claim there’s nothing dangerous to see here?

 

The answer to that question may determine whether the DSA remains a one-trick pony, winning only seats in deep-blue urban enclaves, or a serious movement with actual capacity to govern. With newfound prominence comes scrutiny, and Michigan’s Senate race is shaping up to be the faction’s big test. Either a dyed-in-the-wool radical proves he can win in a swing state typically known for electing moderates, or traditional Democrats get to tell the naïve insurgents, “We told you so.”

 

The former outcome would seed new dangers. If El-Sayed wins over the Rust Belt on a tide of anti-Trump backlash, the congresswoman from New York may think she can do the same in two short years.

Rotting in August

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, August 14, 2026

 

These are the dog days of summer. Though, to be honest, they’re all dog days for me. Don’t worry, I’m not going to write a G-File about my dogs. Nor am I going to hype the apparently false, or at least very exaggerated claim that Abdul El-Sayed ran a canine “slaughterhouse.”  I had high hopes for that story as a column topic, but while it turns out that the outrageous slaughterhouse claims are true, the abuses largely happened before El-Sayed was appointed to the job overseeing animal control in Detroit.

 

It’s sort of a convention to refer to the “dog days of summer” in columns written during the dog days of summer, especially August. It’s also a strange convention to claim that nothing important happens during the summer. Not to go all conspiratorial or anything, but I think some of this cliché is driven in part by columnists and reporters to justify writing evergreen columns and fluffy articles in advance so that they can go on vacation. At least in the old days, the number of political columns with few, if any, news pegs seemed to skyrocket in August, as big-name columnists cleared the decks for vacations in Maine or Europe. A bigger contributor to the myth of the August doldrums probably stems from the fact that members of Congress need to justify leaving town for pretty much the whole month.

 

The problem: Some of the most important news stories break during the dog days of summer. Indeed, one reason events blindside Washington is that nobody is here to be on the lookout for trouble. As Tevi Troy and others have noted, August screws Washington the way tainted lettuce stews the bowels. The Guns of August wasn’t about August Wilson’s firearms collection.

 

Notable things that happened in August: President Warren Harding had a heart attack, Japan surrendered after we dropped the big ones, the Gulf of Tonkin business started the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr. marched on Washington, Watts rioted and so did Democrats at their convention, Richard Nixon resigned, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Soviet hardliners tried to force out Mikhail Gorbachev, Bill Clinton admitted to a dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the tiki-torch peckerwoods marched in Charlottesville, Kabul fell to the Taliban and mortally wounded Joe Biden’s presidency, and the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, boosting Donald Trump’s presidential comeback aspirations.

 

Something else worth pointing out: The phrase “dog days of summer” has little to do with dogs, though some did believe that dogs went crazy during the dog days. The saying comes from the ancient Greeks and Romans to designate when Sirius, the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major (the big dog!), sidled up next to the sun, like a basset hound moving on a dude eating a meatball sub. “Meatballs sometimes just ‘fall,’ sir,” his eyes explained. “No one has to know.”

 

I think the Swedes and Finns have a better term for this time of year: “rot month” (rötmånaden in Swedish, mätäkuu in Finnish). During the “month of rot” food goes rancid and wounds go putrid. And given how D.C. in August goes, I think it’s best to leave the dogs out of it. It’s not their fault that D.C. this time of year feels—and often smells—like the interior of an unmaintained porta potty next to a Louisiana bayou meth lab and brothel.

 

Listing the time away.

 

Still, I feel obliged to honor this venerable D.C. tradition by mailing in an epistle (it is a “news”letter, after all) completely untethered to the news of the day or month. I wrote a very long G-File on Wednesday, and I feel like I checked a bunch of boxes with that one, so I invite you to read that one, even if you aren’t a paid subscriber, because I think it’s worth reading. So here’s a gift link).

 

Actually, I like weird lists. Some that immediately come to mind:

 

Lists of weird collective nouns for animals: A clowder of cats, a skulk of foxes, a mob of kangaroos, a parade of elephants, a troop of monkeys, a murder of crows, a dazzle (or zeal) of zebras, a raft of ducks (when on water), a flamboyance of flamingos, a parliament of owls, a murmuration of starlings, a knot of toads, an army of frogs, etc. I am annoyed that a group of alligators is a congregation and a group of crocodiles is a float. Alliteration demands a congregation of crocs, and I’d vote for an assembly of alligators (“Alligators, assemble!”).

 

Ever the logophile, I am particularly keen on lists of words. (Indeed, there’s probably no obscure site I’ve spent more time on than this one. I fear that once Kevin Williamson sees it, we will lose him to years of spelunking).

 

Already I can feel my editors wishing they had the power to kill this “news”letter. Fortunately, I’m the editor-in-chief, bwahahaha. So rather than kill this, I offer you a very  abbreviated list of killing words:

 

·         amicicide (the killing or murder of a friend)

·         avicide (the killing of birds, or an agent used to kill them)

·         bovicide (the killing of cattle, especially a cow; also, one who kills cattle)

·         ceticide (the killing of whales or other cetaceans or a killer of whales)

·         deicide (the killing of a god or divine being; also, one who kills a god)

·         episcopicide (the killing of a bishop)

·         famicide (obsolete: a slanderer or destroyer of another’s reputation)

·         felicide (the killing of a cat)

·         femicide (killing of a woman or girl)

·         feticide (the causing of the death of a fetus)

·         filicide (the killing of one’s own child)

·          floricide (the killing or destruction of a flower; also, historically, one who destroys flowers)

·          formicide (an agent that kills ants)

·          fratricide (the killing of one’s brother)

·         giganticide (the killing of a giant; also, one who kills a giant)

·         gynaecide (rare: the systematic killing of women)

·         hereticide (the killing of a heretic or heretics)

·         liberticide (the destruction of liberty; also, a destroyer of liberty)

·         lupicide (the killing of a wolf)

·         mariticide (the killing of one’s spouse, especially one’s husband; also, historically the killer)

·         matricide (the killing of one’s mother)

·         menticide (the systematic and intentional undermining or destruction of a person’s mind, beliefs, or personality; brainwashing)

·         parricide (the killing of one’s father, mother, or another close relative; also, one who commits it)

·         patricide (the killing of one’s father)

·         regicide (the killing of a monarch; also, one who kills a monarch)

·         senicide (the killing of elderly people—useful for movie reviewers if they ever remake Logan’s Run)

·         siblicide (the killing of one sibling by another)

·         silvicide (an agent or practice that kills or destroys trees or forests)

·         sororicide (the killing of one’s sister)

·         speciocide (the elimination or destruction of an entire species)

·         tauricide (the killing of a bull; also a bull-killer)

·         tyrannicide (the killing of a tyrant; also one who kills a tyrant)

·         urbicide (the deliberate destruction or “killing” of a city or urban environment)

·         ursicide (the killing of a bear; also, a bear-killer)

·         vaticide (the killing of a prophet; also, one who kills a prophet)

·         verbicide (the destruction, corruption, or distortion of a word’s meaning)

·         vulpicide (the killing of a fox).

 

My favorite among these might be “verbicide.” There are linguists who think we should have no remorse over words that lose their original meaning. I disagree. The evolution of language is unavoidable, of course. But sometimes we lose words that we need. Don’t get me started on “literally,” a word we literally need.

 

C.S. Lewis wasn’t just a great wordsmith, he was a great friend of words, trying to keep them upright like wounded comrades on the battlefield. In his Study in Words, he writes:

 

Verbicide, the murder of a word, happens in many ways. Inflation is one of the commonest; those who taught us to say awfully for ‘very’, tremendous for ‘great’, sadism for ‘cruelty’, and unthinkable for ‘undesirable’ were verbicides. Another way is verbiage, by which I here mean the use of a word as a promise to pay which is never going to be kept. The use of significant as if it were an absolute, and with no intention of ever telling us what the thing is significant of, is an example. So is diametrically when it is used merely to put opposite into the superlative. Men often commit verbicide because they want to snatch a word as a party banner, to appropriate its ‘selling quality’. Verbicide was committed when we exchanged Whig and Tory for Liberal and Conservative. But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words to become less descriptive and more evaluative; then to become evaluative, while still retaining some hint of the sort of goodness or badness implied; and to end up by being purely evaluative—useless synonyms for good or for bad. We shall see this happening to the word villain in a later chapter. Rotten, paradoxically has become so completely a synonym for ‘bad’ that we now have to say bad when we mean ‘rotten’.

 

Words on my list of verbicide victims include: nonplussed, bemused, disinterested, factoid, fulsome, enormity, fortuitous, reticent, travesty, dilemma, infer, imply, and evacuate.

 

Nonplussed properly means bewildered or at a loss, but is now often used to mean its near opposite, unperturbed. Bemused means confused or preoccupied. Now people use it as if someone has been ensorcelled into a state of amusement. Disinterested is a great word that’s supposed to mean impartial or lacking a personal stake. We live in an age where people are uninterested in the possibility of disinterestedness. Indeed,  factoid, coined by Norman Mailer for something that merely has the appearance of a fact, has been reduced to meaning a small or entertaining fact. Fulsome once conveyed offensive excess, especially insincere or cloying praise, of the sort we might associate with some Trump Cabinet meetings. Now the fulsome deployment of Maileresque factoids about Trump’s greatness is supposed to be taken literally.

 

Likewise, enormity traditionally denoted monstrous wickedness, not merely enormous size. Fortuitous means accidental, not fortunate, while reticent specifically describes reluctance to speak, not reluctance in general. A travesty is a grotesque distortion or parody, not simply a tragedy or outrage, and a dilemma is properly a predicament involving two competing alternatives—hence the “di-” prefix—not just any difficult problem. I think fewer and less are different terms, and infer and imply mean different things. But most people see no dilemma in using them interchangeably.

 

We use evacuate to mean getting someone to safety, but evacuate means to empty out. So an evacuated person is someone who might have eaten too much of that tainted lettuce. Attendees at the burrito brunch had to be evacuated from the cafeteria because they were evacuating themselves.

The Great Divergence: Why America Keeps Pulling Away from Europe

By James Carter

Friday, August 14, 2026

 

Recent growth figures from the European Union’s statistical agency confirm the continent’s economic malaise. The headline touted resilience: Euro-area GDP rose by 0.4 percent, beating expectations. But Germany, France, and Italy — the eurozone’s three largest economies — barely grew. That is not prosperity. It is institutional sclerosis disguised as stability.

 

In 2008, the European Union’s GDP per capita was 76.5 percent of the United States’. By 2023, it had fallen to just 50 percent. France, which in 2000 had GDP per capita comparable to that of the 36th-wealthiest U.S. state, had fallen below Arkansas.

 

Europeans may not appreciate how far their economies have fallen relative to America. Britons dramatically underestimate the gap. Asked where the UK ranks among U.S. states in per-capita income, they guessed seventh. The reality? 51st, below Arkansas and Mississippi. More than a quarter said they were “shocked.”

 

The explanation is not that Europeans work less. The employment rate among working-age adults is nearly identical on both sides of the Atlantic: 76 percent in the European Union and 75 percent in the United States. Among employed workers, Europeans also average longer workweeks — 36 versus 34 hours in the United States. Yet America’s GDP-per-capita advantage has widened. The difference is productivity, or how much economies produce per hour worked.

 

Between 1995 and 2025, American productivity grew by 88 percent while the eurozone’s grew by just 30 percent. The divergence is accelerating: U.S. productivity in market services grew by 12.4 percent from late 2019 to early 2024, while the eurozone’s grew by 3.8 percent.

 

America and Europe made different choices about change. As the former embraced creative destruction, the latter sought to protect against it. Fifty years ago, the Dow Jones Industrial Average included General Motors, IBM, Kodak, Sears, and AT&T. Most have been replaced, unlike the largest firms in Europe over the past five decades. America’s defining companies today were unimaginable then. That is creative destruction at work.

 

Most importantly, America has preserved the freedom to fail. Economists Steven Davis and John Haltiwanger document high rates of firm entry, exit, and job turnover in the U.S. when compared with Europe. In the United States, roughly one in five firms is under five years old. In Germany, one in eight. When firms fail, workers find new jobs and capital shifts to more productive uses.

 

Europe’s largest economies chose differently. They shielded workers through employment laws that make firing expensive and worker councils that give labor substantial influence over corporate decisions. Because firms face higher costs and greater constraints in adjusting their workforce, they are more likely to retain excess labor when demand falls. Such employment protections benefit insiders — permanent workers with secure jobs — while making it harder for outsiders, young workers, and those trying to enter protected labor markets. Europe also embraced precautionary technology regulation that made commercialization more difficult, allowing America to capture markets first. This pattern repeats across emerging technologies: Regulation is imposed before European companies can scale, creating compliance burdens that suppress nascent ventures while solidifying incumbent platforms.

 

The European Commission asked Mario Draghi — the former president of the European Central Bank and prime minister of Italy — to diagnose Europe’s competitiveness crisis. His 2024 report clearly identified the problem: insufficient innovation and dynamism. Yet the political obstacles he identified remain.

 

Some European policymakers understand what must change. Others — like former Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton — are doubling down on the very regulations that slow commercialization. The problem is political: Free-market reforms impose concentrated losses on protected groups — unions, incumbent firms, and sheltered workers — while producing diffuse gains over years. Those who bear immediate costs have the power to block change; those who benefit are dispersed and unorganized. Europe’s political institutions predictably reward the former.

 

Prosperity requires continual disruption. Europe’s bet was that it could maximize both prosperity and protection. It couldn’t.

 

America generated extraordinary growth but distributed it unevenly. Europe pursued greater equality through protection—and accepted slower productivity growth as the price. America’s challenge is distributing growth; Europe’s is generating it. Unequal growth creates more prosperity than equal stagnation. For example, U.S. private AI investment reached roughly $286 billion in 2025, whereas no European country managed even $6 billion.

 

Europe increasingly depends on foreign technology, manufacturing, and capital in some of the industries that will define the next generation of growth. The result is more than lost market share. It is strategic dependence.

 

The United States’ advantage is not a fact of nature, however. Our labor markets remain relatively flexible, but the political terrain is shifting. Mandatory worker representation on corporate boards, restrictions on corporate restructuring, and sectoral bargaining that fixes wage standards across industries — ideas once considered fringe — are entering mainstream policy debate.

 

These are not just theoretical proposals. ESG imposed corporatist structures on American companies for years. Today’s restrictions on foreign investment in data centers and infrastructure reflect the same impulse: government deciding which companies deserve capital based on political criteria rather than returns. This is how Europe’s market inflexibility began.

 

American economic strength has historically rested on free markets, private property, and limited government. Rather than abandon those principles now, let’s not make Europe’s mistake our own.