The Cascade of Dysfunction That Helped Doom Jason Arday

By Jesse Singal

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

 

There’s an exceptionally annoying thing writers do in the internet age: We type something like “I really didn’t want to talk about this,” and then we talk about it anyway, at length.

 

I’m going to do that here, but I can explain.

 

You’re probably familiar with the Jason Arday case by now. In 2023, when he was 37, Arday was appointed the youngest black professor in the storied history of the University of Cambridge, quickly becoming a minor celebrity in the process. As I summarized in the New York Times last week, drafting off the impressive investigatory work of a group of dogged scholars and journalists, it soon became apparent that Cambridge may have made a mistake in hiring him.

 

To make a long story short, Cambridge knew since at least 2023 that Arday appeared to have plagiarized some of his work and to have fabricated some of his interviews but refused to engage in anything like a full investigation. This led to some disgruntlement within Cambridge; someone there leaked his or her concerns to Nathan Cofnas, an American academic with controversial views on race and IQ, and he published a Substack post in July that went viral, spelling the beginning of the end of Arday’s career.

 

As Cofnas wrote, in addition to the other allegations, Arday appeared to have plagiarized significant portions of the Ph.D. thesis he completed at Liverpool John Moores University. Cofnas also shined a spotlight on a number of questionable claims from Arday’s inspiring life story, including that he had run 30 marathons in 35 days, 600 miles in six days, that he had been nonverbal until age 11, and that he had been unable to read or write until 18. Those claims, alongside the Cambridge appointment, helped Arday gain far more media attention than the average academic, including segments and interviews on top outlets like the BBC.

 

None of the four institutions involved in the academic facet of this scandal—Cambridge, LJMU, and the two journals notified of apparently plagiarized material—responded in a sufficient manner. Rather, all four seemed to prefer to cover for Arday—in July Cambridge sent me and other inquiring journalists a statement describing the accusations as a “vile campaign” to undermine him. But Arday had no meaningful track record in academia; he hadn’t produced anything of note and openly stated that due to his autism, when he was at work, “90% of the time I don’t know what is going on but I am having to pretend I know what is going on.” Despite that, he had been appointed to an “established chair at Cambridge,” as the New York Times later explained, which is “a permanently funded position that comes with prestige and research support [and] is among the academic world’s most sought-after jobs.” The scrutiny mounted shortly before the release date of his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, a major title published by Simon & Schuster on August 11 for which Arday claimed to have received a 1.4 million advance, according to the Guardian, though he didn’t specify whether he meant dollars or pounds.

 

Eventually Cambridge folded, announcing an investigation last week. Arday announced his resignation just hours later. Then, this past Friday, he was found dead in London’s Battersea neighborhood after an apparent suicide.

 

What I mean about not actually wanting to write about this: If I somehow controlled the internet, I would have enforced some sort of 72-hour cooldown period. Everyone go for a walk, hug your loved ones, reflect on life’s preciousness. No insta-takes in response to a man’s tragic death; no using a corpse that hasn’t yet been laid to rest to promote your own politics. But we live in 2026, so that wasn’t what happened. Instead, there was an instant explosion of outrage directed at racists, the media, and racist media. This explosion is so misguided, so driven by misunderstandings about what actually happened, and so censorious that it warrants a robust response.

 

I’m not nutpicking here. The MacArthur-winning American race scholar and activist Ibram X. Kendi described what happened to Arday as a “lynching.” The co-host of PBS NewsHour, Geoff Bennett, derided a fair and important New York Times postmortem of the scandal as “ghoulish.” In the U.K., Labour MP Dawn Butler published a letter to the head of the Independent Press Standards Organisation, an independent regulatory body, arguing that “Jason would still be alive today if not for the relentless and pernicious coverage by the Times, Telegraph, Mail and Spectator, to name a few,” and calling for (unspecified) “decisive action” in response to his death. The British journalist and broadcaster Will Self took things even further, posting a lengthy open letter to Prime Minister Andy Burnham calling for a crackdown that sounds far more Moscow than London. Self argued that the Crown Prosecution Service “should be examining the matter, and the police should be impounding computers” before claiming that “This is not an attack upon a free press—it is a necessarily immediate defence of one.” An open letter arguing that “Self-regulation of the press has comprehensively failed” was signed by a number of British academics and politicians, including Green Party leader Zack Polanski.  

 

As far as fighting over a corpse was concerned, I admittedly became part of the problem: In the hours immediately after Arday’s death, I was back on X, arguing like everyone else. I couldn’t help it; I found the outrage following this tragedy particularly deranging because of the almost perfect, 180-degree extent to which it misses the point.

 

I mean that in two senses. First, the call for more scrutiny of media, or even outright censorship of it, is astonishing in light of the facts of this case. It was because of the U.K.’s lack of press protections that this story took so long to come out, which, in the end, increased the damage done to Arday. Times Higher Education had a story in the works last year, but Arday sicced an infamous British law firm, Carter-Ruck, on the outlet, killing it. That would not have happened in the United States, because our defamation laws are much more media-friendly (as strange as that might sound during the Trump era).

 

Arday abused not only the civil system but the criminal one, too. In 2023, mere months after Arday’s hiring, the first academic to notice oddities in his work emailed him to ask about those oddities. Arday responded by reporting him to the police. Last year he also reported a member of the Times Higher Education team, Jack Grove, to the police on similar grounds. Here in the United States, cops would likely respond to such a complaint with the American version of “bugger off”—in the U.K., while both criminal complaints were eventually dropped, they were apparently taken seriously by police at first. A cop even told Grove that while he wouldn’t be investigated further, he shouldn’t email Arday again. That’s direct law enforcement interference with the press in what is supposed to be one of the freest countries in the world.

 

These are all signs that in British society, it’s very easy to weaponize the law against good-faith media or academic inquiries. To come out the other side of this horrible story wanting to give more power to those who would crack down on journalistic inquiry beggars belief. To be sure, none of this is to deny that there are elements of British tabloid culture that are a bit bloodthirsty, but as my examples have hopefully made clear, anger at the media has gone well beyond those outlets. (And while it’s ill-advised to pin suicide on any one cause, anyway—a point to which I’ll return shortly—does anyone actually think the excesses of the right-wing tabloids are more likely contributors to Arday’s death than his entire life and career falling apart in a short period?)

 

The complaints of racism—that “Jason Arday was hounded by a society that demands different standards for young Black men than white guys,” as the academic Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz put it—constitute an even more extreme example of point-missing. Look: In much the same way some of the media coverage was excessive, of course, amid the broader online circus, there has been racist commentary. There always is when a person of color is the subject of public scrutiny and shaming, especially in a situation like this where the story really does involve a dispute about diversity, equity, and inclusion.

 

But to claim that Arday was unfairly singled out on account of his race is to ignore the very important other half of the ledger: He was elevated to an untenable position because of his race! You don’t need to take my word on that. Just read the very end of the Times of London’s contemporaneous article about his hiring, if you can stomach it:

 

Professor Hilary Cremin, head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge, said hiring Arday was proof of the university’s commitment to tackling existing inequalities.

 

She told The Times: “Not only is Jason Arday a world-class scholar, he also brings a wealth of experience that can help us to take forward our efforts to widen participation at all levels.

 

“Hopefully it is becoming increasingly clear that with concerted effort and a genuine commitment to change, those barriers that still exist either to working or studying at top universities can be overcome.

 

“To any students or prospective colleagues who are wondering if Cambridge is a place where they can belong, the answer is, emphatically, yes.”

 

Even more dyspepsia-inducing is a BBC segment from that same period that, to me at least, gets harder to watch every day. In it, Cremin approaches Arday and takes his hand as though he is some sort of messianic figure. A bit later, during a strange sit-down centered on her complimenting him, she explains, “The Board of Electors on your interview, they were absolutely unanimous. We are so lucky to have you.” Then she looks him dead in the eyes and lies to his face: “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”

 

In the article that the NewsHour co-anchor would later describe as “ghoulish,” the New York Times revealed damning details about that hiring process: “A review of internal Cambridge documents and interviews with former colleagues and associates shows that, in addition to passing over more experienced candidates for the job, administrators gushed publicly about Dr. Arday’s scholarship and privately disregarded complaints about his work,” the Times reported. A bit later: “Dr. Arday’s claims about not speaking were false, a former classmate and a speech professional who worked with him [said]. His supposedly remarkable trajectory from nonverbal preteen to Ph.D. had no precedent in medical literature, experts in developmental and speech delays say. That should have set off alarm bells for the Cambridge hiring committee, which included a child psychiatrist who had done research on autism, experts said.”

 

There’s a word for what Cremin and her colleagues did here: racism. It is racist to respond to someone’s skin color by pretending they are something they are not. It’s not racism in the way lynchings or slavery are racism. But it’s racism nonetheless. And anyone with a passing familiarity with this story knows that Arday was appointed to his post precisely because of how Cambridge thought the color of his skin would reflect back on the university itself—precisely because of what the current crop of censors might call systemic problems within that university.

 

***

 

To be clear, Jason Arday is not dead “because of” Cambridge University’s social-justice-coded racism. Suicide is multicausal and we should strongly resist the urge to blame it on any one factor, whether Cambridge or “the media.” But it’s clear that Jason Arday never should have been within miles of such a prestigious academic appointment. His fall was inevitable from the first day he arrived at Cambridge. As my friend Sarah Ditum put it, “I do not regret writing about Arday, but I am sorry for him and for all of us that he was ever put in a position where he was somebody I would have cause to write about.” That’s exactly right.

 

In a saner, fairer world, Jason Arday would have lived out a happy and healthy life somewhere else, gainfully employed, loved by friends and family. Maybe his chronic tendency toward fabulism would have elicited rolled eyes at the local pub, but it never should have caused more harm than that.

 

Instead, thanks to a cascade of institutional dysfunction that will go down in history as uniquely bizarre and condescending—even by the considerable standards of higher ed misadministration—Jason Arday found himself in an environment where no one would say no to him, where no one would ask follow-up questions (at least out loud), and where people covered for him rather than holding him accountable. As a result, he did significant harm—to the scholars he plagiarized, the peers he wrongly beat out for a prestigious position, and (everyone keeps forgetting this) to the parents of nonverbal kids with autism, who are frequently victimized by false and suspicious claims of miracle cures like Arday’s.

 

None of this means he deserved to die—of course he didn’t deserve to die. But it does mean that, if we want to prevent such scandals from recurring in the future, it is imperative to learn from this rather than to use Arday’s death as an excuse to rewrite history.

Shame on the "Genocide Scholars"

By Andrew Fox

Friday, August 14, 2026

 

I recently described genocide on X as a deliberate attempt to exterminate a group simply for belonging to that group. The self-appointed genocide class pounced. Alonso Gurmendi announced that the Convention says “destroy”. Martin Shaw declared that I had plainly never read it. Kevin Jon Heller called the exchange an “idiotic gotcha”. They behaved as though one corrected verb had settled the Gaza case.

 

There is nothing improper about paraphrasing a legal instrument on social media. A paraphrase translates substance into ordinary language; it does not reproduce treaty text. Although I’ll grant them, “exterminate” is narrower than “destroy”, so the correction is textually fair. However, my post captured the central accusation against Israel: that it set out to bring about the physical disappearance of Gaza’s Palestinians. Demanding the precision of treaty drafting from an X post while treating an unfinished court case as settled is semantic nitpicking performed in bad faith.

 

The Genocide Convention requires intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group as such, through one or more of five specified acts. The special intent is indispensable. Gurmendi replied that subjecting a group to destructive conditions suffices. He is wrong: it is only when those conditions are deliberately calculated to destroy the group. Heller protested that Gurmendi has written extensively about intent. I accept that he has. Neither supplied evidence that Israel possessed it.

 

This is the manoeuvre. Isolate a piece of shorthand, inflate it into proof of ignorance, then use the supposed ignorance to evade the evidence. Once Article II is quoted back, academic status replaces argument. We are told that these men have studied genocide for years, as though a bibliography can deliver a judgment from The Hague.

 

Omer Bartov is a distinguished historian of the Holocaust and German military history. His scholarship does not make him an international criminal lawyer. His New York Times headline, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It”, captured the conceit perfectly. “I know it when I see it” is the language of intuition masquerading as adjudication. Genocide is a defined crime with a demanding mental element. Bartov’s historical expertise in a completely different conflict and era gives him no personal warrant or primary evidentiary base to pronounce that element proved in a live case of an ongoing modern conflict.

 

Lee Mordechai is even further out of his lane. He is a historian of the Byzantine Empire, working on ancient Greek history and the Justinianic plague. He produced a Gaza dossier declaring that Israel is committing genocide, as if Byzantium confers mastery of modern targeting or international criminal law. It is activist propaganda from a man operating grossly beyond his professional competence.

 

Martin Shaw is a sociologist. He uses a sociological definition of genocide far broader than Article II, then slides between that concept and the legal crime whenever useful. He has also misstated the ICJ’s provisional order as recognising a plausible risk of genocide. Joan Donoghue, who presided over the order, corrected that claim. The court recognised plausible rights under the Convention and made no finding that the allegation of genocide itself was plausible. Shaw answered scrutiny with an insult.

 

None of these academics sits on the ICJ, although it must be noted that some of their fellow Israel-haters do. Their public biographies reveal no qualification to adjudicate international criminal law or the law of armed conflict, no understanding of targeting, and no expertise in Hamas and its tactics. They may, of course, offer historical parallels or sociological theories within the very narrow bounds of their expertise. However, they have instead issued verdicts, wrapped those verdicts in academic prestige and watched journalists cite the prestige as proof. Shaw’s latest book is called The New Age of Genocide: Intellectual and Political Challenges after Gaza. The accusation produces headlines and speaking invitations. It also sells books. The blood libel has acquired peer review and a publicity department.

 

That description is earned. The modern version of the mediaeval libel says that the Jewish state deliberately kills Palestinians as a people, with dead children serving as its most potent imagery. Once repeated as settled fact by decorated academics, the charge escapes Gaza and attaches itself to Jews everywhere. The consequences have names. Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were murdered outside Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum. The accused gunman allegedly said, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza”. Weeks earlier, an attacker shouting “Free Palestine” threw Molotov cocktails at a Jewish hostage walk in Boulder. Karen Diamond died from her injuries. Bondi, Manchester, the list of Jews murdered over the Gaza blood libel goes on.

 

These academics did not commit those attacks. They have positioned themselves, however, as part of the international anti-Israel machine. Along with activists posing as journalists, maniacal Israel-haters posing as UN officials, and a whole industry of fellow travellers, they helped dignify the mythology in which Jews anywhere can be treated as accessories to an imaginary extermination campaign. Professors who lend their authority to that mythology cannot retreat into innocent scholarship when its slogans arrive outside Jewish museums with guns, or at Jewish gatherings with petrol bombs. Bartov, Mordechai, Shaw, Mehdi Hassan, Owen Jones, DropSite, Max Blumenthal, and all the rest: they all have blood on their hands as much as any of the IDF soldiers they accuse so viciously.

 

The evidential problem remains untouched. Under Croatia v Serbia, group destruction must be the only reasonable inference when intent is deduced from conduct. My earlier pieces have covered Gaza’s wartime births and Israel’s facilitation of mass polio vaccination, facts the genocide campaign simply wishes away. A brutal war against Hamas remains an obvious alternative explanation.

 

The genocide allegation survives only by declaring every piece of exculpatory evidence meaningless. Births supposedly tell us nothing. Vaccinations tell us nothing. Food deliveries tell us nothing. Humanitarian pauses tell us nothing. Failed famine predictions tell us nothing. The absence of measured famine mortality tells us nothing.

 

These academics have strayed wildly beyond their lanes and converted moral vanity into counterfeit legal authority. They profit in attention and publication from a blood libel whose human cost is paid by Jews they will never meet. Shame on them. They are shameless.

Hamas Disarmament Is the Only Sticking Point

By Seth Mandel

Monday, August 17, 2026

 

The collective future of the Palestinians is entirely dependent on disarming Hamas. This has been the case for over two decades now, and it will continue to be the case two decades from now if nothing changes. Jared Kushner appears to understand this.

 

The president’s son-in-law, an important figure in the signing of the region-shifting Abraham Accords, has met with Hamas leaders over the disarmament question. He is now in Israel, meeting with leaders over the Hamas disarmament question. Kushner has also been in contact with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi; the two discussed the Hamas disarmament question.

 

It is the only question, at the moment, that matters.

 

“Hamas leaders reaffirmed their commitment to disarm and demilitarize Gaza in a meeting with President Trump’s adviser Jared Kushner in Egypt on Sunday, according to a source with direct knowledge,” reports Axios.

 

Of course, if Hamas were truly committed to disarming, this meeting could have been a quick WhatsApp text. Kushner doesn’t need the jetlag just for empty words. And there is evidence Kushner’s impervious-to-carbonation demeanor is starting to give way to annoyance.

 

“Kushner used the rare direct meeting to press Hamas for tangible steps on disarmament, warning that Israel doesn’t trust the group to follow through,” according to Axios.

 

In this case, however, je suis Israel—not in the solidarity sense but in the plain fact that no one trusts Hamas to follow through on disarmament. That is also key to this whole series of negotiations, because participants and observers of the conflict fall into one of only two categories: those who don’t trust Hamas but are OK with the terror group retaining its fascist grip on power, and those who also don’t trust Hamas and would like Hamas to be disarmed.

 

No one thinks Hamas is committed to peace. No one. Not even Steve Witkoff. But people are impatient. And—this part’s important—most observers don’t really care what happens to the Israelis and the Gazans. So they would rather Hamas make promises and Israel compromise its security than have a frozen conflict that keeps coming up at dinner parties.

 

Kushner, however, does care whether this plan fails or succeeds. And so there is really no way around the fact that Hamas needs to actually disarm for the region to move forward. As a source close to Kushner told Axios: “We thanked them for the commitment, but we want to see real efforts and not just words.”

 

More: “Kushner stressed to Hamas leaders that the bar is high because the Israeli side doesn’t trust them to actually disarm. Kushner told them there is no room for negotiations on the disarmament, but if they show real steps the U.S. will do its best to make sure Israel takes steps of its own.”

 

What would those Israeli steps consist of? Here, there is some room for speculation. Axios is probably right that the steps Israel would agree to would focus on humanitarian aid. That is the more realistic path. After all, the IDF cannot hand over territory to a non-Hamas body if there is no non-Hamas body to which territory can be handed.

 

The New York Times suggests otherwise: “For the deal with Hamas to go ahead, Israel would also most likely have to agree to a phased timeline for withdrawing its forces from the Gaza Strip in parallel with Hamas gradually handing over its weapons.”

 

Here there is some need to dive into the details. The Israelis have installed the so-called yellow line to divide IDF-held territory from the rest of Gaza. The line has been adjusted as necessary, giving the IDF oversight of more territory. Israel would likely be willing to negotiate phased withdrawals between the yellow line’s current placement and its original spot if Hamas truly makes real progress on disarmament. But the IDF cannot disengage from Gaza entirely until Hamas is out of power and all of its weapons are gone.

 

The source close to Kushner told Axios that that was the message he wanted Hamas to take from the meeting: “There can be no ambiguity: Hamas must relinquish governing authority and all weapons and military infrastructure. And Gaza can never again be a source of terror for Israel.”

 

All means all. Remember that the next time Israel’s government is accused of being the reason for the holdup or of “rejecting” the deal. Israel’s only opposition is to the modification of the agreed-upon terms for ending the conflict. Which is to say: Israel wants the conflict to actually end. It just needs everyone else to want the same.

‘Affordability’ and the Problem With Populist Pandering

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

 

Remember “affordability” mania?

 

The time was 2025. A young charismatic democratic socialist candidate for New York City mayor named Zohran Mamdani became a viral sensation. His secret? “Affordability.”  Ask him about almost anything, and he would turn the conversation to affordability. When a reporter asked Mamdani to respond to President Trump’s claim that he was the better-looking politician, Mamdani responded, “My focus is on the cost-of-living crisis, bro.” Queried about whether Hamas, the terrorist organization, should disarm, he began with “I believe that any future here in New York City is one that we have to make sure that’s affordable for all.”

 

Mamdani won the election, and pretty much everyone agreed that “affordability” was the key that unlocked City Hall.

 

“Affordability” was “the mantra that carried” Mamdani to victory, proclaimed Vox. Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and political strategists like David Axelrod, James Carville, and Waleed Shahid all agreed. As Shahid put it, “Zohran cracked the code so many Democrats are searching for: laser-focus on affordability … this is a playbook.”

 

All this annoyed Trump, who’d campaigned on lowering prices in 2024. Affordability was a “con job by the Democrats,” he told reporters. “Affordability is a lie when used by the Dems. … We are the Party of Affordability!” he declared on Truth Social.

 

One of Mamdani’s first priorities as mayor was to impose a partial rent freeze on more than 1 million apartments, about 40 percent of NYC’s rental stock. That was temporary good news for people in those apartments, but good luck finding an economist who doesn’t think this will make housing less affordable over the long term.

 

More recently, Mamdani endorsed a plan to require Amazon and other companies to stop using third-party contractors to deliver packages to New Yorkers. It’s a naked sop to the Teamsters, who’ve long wanted unionized drivers to have a monopoly on deliveries.

 

If passed, the Delivery Protection Act will create some jobs for drivers, while killing more jobs for gig workers. More important, it would surely make deliveries slower and more expensive. The only study estimating the costs—sponsored by its opponents—found that it would add $664 in delivery fees per household annually.

 

Take that with a grain of salt if you like, but it’s telling that the affordability-obsessed Mamdani administration didn’t even bother to study the question of how this plan would affect affordability. If they’re so laser-focused on the issue, you’d think this would be the first question they’d ask. Mamdani hasn’t even mentioned improving affordability when touting the plan. It’s almost like Trump was right about affordability being a con job.

 

Speaking of Trump, let’s take a gander at what he’s done of late. For starters, his tariffs—by design—make goods more expensive. We don’t need to belabor that, but to pick just one example, his recent 50 percent tariff hike on Canadian lumber, scheduled to go into effect this week, will make housing construction—a key component of affordability—more expensive, adding more than $10,000 to the cost of building the average home.

 

Trump’s immigration crackdown has made food costs rise, according to his own Department of Labor.   

 

And of course there’s the Iran war. Even Trump admits it’s causing gas prices to go up. We hear less about how the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is also pushing up the costs for fertilizer, plastics, and jet fuel, among other things.

 

There are defenses for Trump’s immigration and Iran policies (his blunderbuss approach to tariffs is simply indefensible). There are also defenses of Mamdani’s plan to make home deliveries more expensive (his rent freeze is economically indefensible). But, it needs to be said, none of those defenses have anything to do with affordability.

 

You might think my point is that our political leaders are lying hypocrites when they say their top or only priority is affordability. I won’t argue against the claim, but that’s not my point.

 

Rather it’s that populist appeals are always simplistic. They blame sinister forces for deliberately standing in the way of simple fixes that are good for everybody, save perhaps for the evil elites, special interests or millionaires and billionaires conspiring against the common good.

 

The reality is that populist promises of easy fixes are easy to make, but governing is hard and complicated. Elected officials have to balance any number of priorities and considerations—good, bad and ugly—that undermine simplistic slogans. The problem with populist pandering is that it always leads to disappointment with leaders who fail to deliver, which only invites more populist ire and more pandering.

The Tragedy of U.S. Debt

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

 

“Borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry,” wrote the 16^th-century economist William Shakespeare, who went on to advise: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”

 

Americans, who like to talk about their Christian faith more than study it (“The wicked person borrows and does not repay, but the righteous one is gracious and giving”) have twice elected the self-proclaimed “king of debt,” an infamous deadbeat and serial bankrupt, as president of the United States, while entrusting the national purse strings to the control of his self-abasing toadies in Congress.

 

That’s going about as well as you would imagine.

 

In 1941, the United States was drafting men into the military and preparing for World War II, spending billions of dollars to help build the “arsenal of democracy” around the world through Lend-Lease, and the federal deficit was ... 3.82 percent of GDP. Today, the United States is trying to punt on all that “arsenal of democracy stuff,” complaining mightily about how that heavy lifting should be done by the Belgians or someone, and foundering while trying—unsuccessfully—to beat into submission the third-rate power that is Iran. And the federal deficit in 2026 is going to be something on the order of ... 5.8 percent of GDP, as the Congressional Budget Office runs the numbers. It was 5.8 percent of GDP in 2025, too.

 

Republican president, Republican Congress, Republican policies—all important factors, sure, but let us not shortchange the influence of Republican stupidity and Republican cowardice.

 

High levels of spending put upward pressure on interest rates (there is only so much money to go around, and borrowers have to compete against one another) and upward pressure on inflation (flood the economy with stupid money and prices will go up, because consumers have to compete against one another). But there are other factors that matter, factors that Donald Trump does not understand because—and this cannot be overemphasized—he is a genuine moron and an astounding ignoramus, and because nobody is willing to do the hard and thankless work of trying to explain things to him. He isn’t going to listen to me, but I’ll give it a try.

 

The Iran war is putting upward pressure on prices by disrupting the energy industry and hampering non-energy trade through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s genuinely imbecilic trade war is doing the same and making the overall global economy less efficient in the process, which imposes real costs.

 

High inflation rates also put upward pressure on interest rates because you don’t really want to lend borrowers money at 2 percent if inflation is at 3 percent—in real terms, you lose money on that loan, so you might as well spend that ready cash on strippers and cocaine and Corvettes rather than lend it to Uncle Stupid at money-losing rates.

 

How do you get inflation down? Traditionally, one tool in the toolbox is even higher interest rates on the private sector, achieved via Fed policy. That makes it harder for businesses and consumers to borrow money and thus taps the brakes on consumption, which is hard on the overall economy and really hard if you happen to be the single largest debtor in the history of the human race, which our federal government is. But jacking up rates also tends to bring down inflation—and it will absolutely suck while you are doing it. But once inflation is down, you at least don’t have the high inflation rate putting upward pressure on your borrowing costs.

 

Threatening to “bomb the s—t out of” Oman, a U.S. ally involved in the Iran negotiations, does not help, but, then, there is no avoiding the fact that Donald Trump is profoundly stupid. I don’t write that because it is fun: Donald Trump’s stupidity is one of the world’s most important geopolitical variables right now. It is a problem.

 

But there’s more!

 

Worldwide, there is a great deal of competition among borrowers and would-be borrowers just now. The U.S. government is not the only national government that has been running irresponsibly large deficits, and much of that government debt is being refinanced right now—by one estimate, about 80 percent of gross borrowing worldwide right now is just governments refinancing existing debt, often moving their obligations away from long-term bonds (because rates on long-term debt have been going up) to short-term instruments, which may provide some short-term interest-rate relief but increases governments’ vulnerability to interest-rate shocks since that short-term debt will have to be refinanced soon, possibly at higher rates.

 

On top of all that government borrowing, corporate borrowing is way up, too, with much of that corporate debt financing the AI data-center buildout. Those investments may turn out to be excellent long-term propositions, but $1 lent to Bubba’s Data Centers Inc. is $1 that is not available to Washington to buy missiles to shoot at random Spanish-speaking sailors in the Caribbean or to write checks to affluent old people in Florida.

 

The U.S. government could improve its finances by means of obvious policy reforms, but all of these—entitlement reform and other meaningful spending cuts, broad tax increases that will irritate the middle class, etc.—are off the table by Republican edict. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune—two leading candidates for the Mount Rushmore of political cowardice—would rather roll over for belly rubs from the president than do any hard work or take any real risk.

 

Republicans talk about freedom. They also talk about the Bible, but maybe somehow missed Proverbs 22:7: “The borrower is a slave to the lender.” Maybe they will listen to the Bloomberg headlines: “Global Bond Rout Sends Long-Term Borrowing Costs to Highest in Decades.”

 

It already is getting Shakespearean out there in the bond markets. Pray it doesn’t get biblical.

Picking His Fights

By Michael Warren

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

 

When I sat down with Brian Kemp at the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta earlier this week, I had no expectations that the outgoing two-term Republican governor was going to announce a presidential run (he didn’t) or declare some major break with his party’s leader (he and Donald Trump are on good terms these days).

 

But I was intrigued during our hour-long conversation to hear the 62-year-old governor draw some distinctions between his own brand of Republican politics and those of the current leader and his presumptive heir, J.D. Vance—perhaps the kind of thing you might expect from someone with ambitions to run for higher office.

 

“Is the Republican Party still a party of free markets?” I asked.

 

“Well, some of us are,” Kemp replied.

 

We had been discussing whether Republican thinking is changing on issues involving economics, government intervention, and free markets. “I think there’s a lot of debate out there on that right now with kind of the whole new populism and other things,” Kemp said. When it comes to economic policy, he is a conventional conservative, preferring fewer regulations on business, less public spending, and lower taxes. For four of the last five years, most Georgia taxpayers have qualified for a small tax refund thanks to a budget surplus. The governor has also suspended the state’s gas tax at various times and signed into law caps on property tax increases.

 

Kemp’s economic approach is conventional, almost boring, and it’s clear from our conversation (the full video is here) he thinks it’s the right way forward for Republicans searching for an answer to the dissatisfaction with the Trump administration’s economic record as well as responding to the rise in popularity of democratic socialism among young Americans.

 

“We can’t just say the other side’s bad, they’re socialist or they’re communist or whatever. You know, we’ll do plenty of that,” Kemp said. “But we’ve also got to say, but this is why you need to vote for us because this is what we did in the past, and this is what we’re going to do in the future.”

 

Kemp was talking about his own record in Georgia, where he remains relatively popular, but the governor was more circumspect in his assessment of how Republican leaders in Washington are approaching economic policy.

 

Since last year, the federal government under Trump’s leadership has purchased equity stakes in more than two dozen companies, most notably computer component manufacturer Intel. When I asked about this, Kemp said that he didn’t know enough about the decision-making behind the deals, so he was wary of drawing conclusions.

 

“It’s not what my first blush would be,” he said of the administration’s moves. “I’m more of a keep-the-government-out-of-the-private-sector [person].”

 

Vance, meanwhile, said this month on a podcast (where else?) he thinks it’s a “good thing” that Trump has helped reorient Republican economic thinking away from free marketeer Milton Friedman and toward the more interventionist approach of Alexander Hamilton. The veep also recently said Republicans should stop the popularity of socialism not by “throwing slogans at people about the free market” but instead by “making people’s lives better.”

 

To Kemp, the way to make people’s lives better is to recommit to more limited government.

 

“Well, I’ve seen great benefit from government getting out of the way and letting entrepreneurs and small-business people thrive,” he said when I asked him about Vance’s comments. “We should create an environment for them to be able to do that. And I don’t think, you know, government being involved every step of the way is a way to make that happen.”

 

Kemp didn’t take the bait when I asked him which Republicans are not on the side of free markets, and the governor was not eager to directly criticize Trump or Vance. Even as he has occasionally and famously found himself at odds with Trump on matters of principle, Kemp has skillfully avoided being dragged into needless spats with the president.

 

But on a few other subjects he put some distance between the current administration and his own views.

 

The Iran War? “Well, I’m personally supportive of not letting Iran have a nuclear weapon,” Kemp said. “But there’s not a, I think, a clear vision for where we need to go and what we need to do. I do think that’s one thing that the president and his team could try to do a better job of, is just laying out and being honest with the American people and going, ‘Look, this is what we’re up against. This is what we’re trying to keep from happening. You know, we’re just going to have to be tough to get through this.’”

 

What about the government taking a stake of some kind in the major artificial intelligence companies, an idea that both Trump and Bernie Sanders have separately expressed interest in? “Well, anything that Bernie Sanders would want to take a stake in would give me great pause,” Kemp said. Even if the president supports the idea, too? “I’ll just leave it at that,” Kemp replied, grinning.

 

Although Kemp is perhaps best known for his willingness to stand firm while Trump unsuccessfully pressured him and other Georgia officials to change the outcome of the 2020 presidential results in his state, he remains aligned with Trump and mainstream Republican views on many policy goals related to “election integrity.” He seemed open to the idea, expressed in the Trump-backed SAVE America election bill, of a national photo ID requirement for voting. “I mean, if we got to have … ID to get on an airplane, you know, I’m not opposed to us doing that when we vote,” he said. He also shrugged off the Trump administration’s investigation into Fulton County’s voting system.

 

“If they want to look into Fulton County, you know, five, six years later, have at it,” Kemp said. “So if they want to go back and double check that, or if they got more information and want to do something, I don’t have a problem with that. But that’s not something that I’m dwelling on right now. I’m trying to stay forward-thinking, and I think Republicans should do that. And if we don’t, it’s going to be a rough 2026.”

 

So enough about the current administration, philosophical debates, and 2026—what about 2028? In the burgeoning discourse about potential Republican candidates, Kemp undoubtedly takes a back seat to Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, if for no other reason than that the conversation seems to be driven by the question of who will receive the all-important endorsement of Donald Trump.

 

But strip away the current GOP incentive structure, and on paper, Kemp looks exactly like the kind of person who would consider a White House run. He’s a successful two-term governor of a large swing state. He has gained a big national profile, not just for his fights with Trump over the 2020 election but because of controversial bills he signed into law, such as a six-week abortion restriction that sparked some brief boycotts from Hollywood and a voting law that prompted Major League Baseball to move its 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta. (Kemp can feel vindicated, since Georgia’s entertainment production industry remains robust and MLB brought the game back to Atlanta in 2025.) He leaves office in January, freeing him up to campaign in the early primary states. Kemp has survived and thrived during the Trump era, carving out his own identity, governing as an old-school conservative and being a good partisan soldier for the GOP. What’s for Republican primary voters not to like?

 

When I asked him what he says to people who suggest he should run for the big job, he demurred. “Well, I tell them that they should stay focused on 2026,” Kemp said. It’s not a denial that he’s interested, and there are other signs he’s at least thinking about it. I was not surprised, for example, to see Kemp’s wife, Marty, in the room for our interview; she’s known among Georgia Republicans for taking a more active role in her husband’s political strategy than is typical for political spouses. Another sign was his answer to my question about what would be better for the GOP in 2028: a top-down selection and coronation of the next presidential nominee, or a serious debate among multiple candidates for the nomination?

 

“Well, it depends on what happens in 2026,” Kemp said. “I think the verdict’s still out on that. But I also think that you’re going to have robust debate always in a presidential race, no matter what the situation.”

 

My translation: A disastrous or even merely disappointing midterm election for the GOP could inspire the party to widen its search beyond the Trump administration for a potential standard-bearer. In that scenario, why wouldn’t Kemp at least get a look-see—from donors and from primary voters?

 

Here’s one final thing: Kemp noted that while most Republicans would probably declare themselves pro-free market, some really are embracing the idea of bigger government to answer America’s economic concerns. But Kemp is not worried about “people that are saying things like that,” he said. “I’ll put our record up against anybody’s.

No Passes

By Abe Greenwald

 Monday, August 17, 2026

 

There are still many people on the right who get mad when one of their own calls out Donald Trump for anything. It’s not that the diehard Trump supporters continue to believe that he can do no wrong. Everyone has finally been disabused of that notion. Rather, it’s that they can’t imagine why someone on the right wouldn’t simply be thankful for the good he’s done and shut up about the rest.  

 

I know this firsthand: Whenever I criticize Trump, readers fire off emails and social media messages reminding me that he secured the border, rolled back woke initiatives, cracked down on campus anti-Semitism, and took action against the Iranian regime. Just imagine, they usually add, where we’d be if Kamala Harris had won.   

 

Yeah, I get it. You really don’t need to remind me. I remain grateful for the same achievements. But if you think that means Trump deserves a pass for his excesses and outright failures, don’t be surprised when those achievements start to break down. Standing up to the regime in Iran, for example, is laudable only if you intend to defeat it. According to a report in today’s Wall Street Journal, Iranian leaders have used Trump’s misbegotten cease-fire to extensively rebuild, rearm, and reorganize for a larger, deadlier war against the U.S.—a showdown that they want. To cite another example, the tragic theatrics of ICE seem to have diminished the public’s sense of vigilance around immigration, illegals, and border enforcement. Gallup reports that Americans are once again immigration squishes.

 

Sometimes it seems as if Trump has a need to risk or gamble away his wins. There’s no sense in the right encouraging him to blow it all. If you shudder to think of what the country would look like under a Harris administration, don’t summon one.  

 

But there’s a more important reason to hold Trump accountable for his mistakes. We know what it looks like when politicians get a pass on their most egregious transgressions, when their constituents so appreciate having their pet concerns addressed that they’ll let everything else slide. It looks like the left.

 

In Democratic circles, you can be a sociopath, a Communist, a Nazi, an Islamist, or any combination of these. A candidate or politician can do his best to turn the country into an unrecognizable dystopia, and his supporters won’t say a word against him so long as he vows to take on Donald Trump.   

 

But if you’re so grateful for Trump’s accomplishments that you want to give him a pass on his many errors, you can’t honestly be stunned by liberals’ failure to address the dangerous extremism on their side. In fact, you’re contributing to the kind of politics that you simultaneously consider to be a national emergency. No, Trump isn’t the right-wing equivalent of Abdul El-Sayed or Zohran Mamdani. But there are figures waiting in the wings who just might be. Which means that this would be an especially bad time to adopt the left’s penchant for selective accountability.

 

And now, I’ll wait for the emails.