The Institutional Rot of the Right’s Youth Politics

By Jay Sophalkalyan

Monday, March 30, 2026

 

Over the past decade, the woke left insisted that everything was taboo. The Founding Fathers were recast as villains. The Constitution was treated as a relic of oppression. Even ordinary civic rituals—the Fourth of July, patriotism, the language of merit—fell under suspicion. Eventually, many Americans grew weary of the constant denunciations, and a backlash was inevitable.

 

Backlash movements, however, rarely stop at restoring balance. In the vacuum created by the waning of the woke moment, some voices on the right have embraced the opposite impulse. If the left once declared that everything was forbidden, the right now behaves as if nothing is. Words once understood as plainly degrading are deployed for shock value. Historical horrors become material for irony or provocation. Even ideas that once sat far outside respectable political discourse—Holocaust revisionism, racial nationalism, open misogyny—are occasionally waved around as if transgression itself were a virtue. It is a pendulum swing into another form of cultural decay.

 

The most troubling place where this shift is visible is within the ecosystem of right-wing youth political organizations, which are increasingly shaped by online subcommunities—part meme factory, part grievance forum. The language, humor, and sensibilities emerging from these spaces were never designed for persuasion or governance. They thrive on provocation, irony, and the thrill of violating social norms.

 

Consider this, for instance. On March 8, the College Republicans at my alma mater, New York University, posted the following message for International Women’s Day:

 

Happy International Women’s Day to all the right wing foids and e-girls out there! Obviously women being involved in politics has kinda been a disaster for us. You guys reallyyyy like voting Democrat. But shoutout to the real ones holding it down for us, love u.

 

The term foid, a crude contraction of “female humanoid,” originates in the lexicon of incel forums on platforms such as 4chan and Reddit, where it is deployed explicitly as a way of stripping women of personhood. The irony is that the post tries to flatter conservative women while speaking in a dialect borrowed from communities that openly demean the entire female sex.

 

This is not an isolated incident. About a month ago, the president of NYU College Republicans, Ryan Leonard, met up with Clavicular, the online alias of Braden Eric Peters. Clavicular is an influencer who rose to prominence through the “looksmaxxing” manosphere community on platforms like Kick and TikTok. In his content, women are frequently described as “targets,” or “slayables”—terms drawn from the same corners of the internet that treat relationships as a competitive game rather than a human bond. In September 2025, Leonard also hosted Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy—better known online as Sneako—as part of an official NYU College Republicans event. Among other things, Sneako has promoted conspiracy theories about Jewish influence in politics and media, and has flirted with rhetoric praising figures such as Hitler or treating Nazism as a subject for provocative commentary.

 

The point is not that a student political club must limit itself to speakers who fit comfortably within polite, mainstream consensus. Political organizations should—and often do—host controversial figures. Yet controversy alone does not confer seriousness. There remains a meaningful distinction between inviting thinkers who challenge prevailing orthodoxies and elevating personalities whose primary currency is provocation.

 

What these choices reveal is that the cultural reference points of the American right no longer lie in conservative intellectual traditions or political theory grounded in argument and debate. Instead, they stem from a loose constellation of streamers, influencers, and online commentators whose audiences are predominantly young men navigating an internet grievance culture organized around attention—earned through spectacle and the continual escalation of rhetorical transgression.

 

Furthermore, figures from these spaces are increasingly finding their way into positions of influence within youth political organizations themselves. A recent example is Kai Schwemmer, who was appointed political director of College Republicans of America in early March. The organization serves as a national umbrella group that charters and supports College Republican chapters on campuses across the country.

 

Schwemmer developed an online following as a streamer who was once closely tied to the “America First” and groyper movement associated with white nationalist provocateur Nick Fuentes. Schwemmer appeared in a 2021 video promoting Fuentes’ “White Boy Summer” tour and was later featured as a “special guest” at Fuentes’ 2022 America First Political Action Conference. Schwemmer’s appointment immediately drew criticism from observers across the political spectrum—including many within the broader conservative movement—who raised concerns about the message his elevation sends about the direction of right-wing youth politics.

 

To be fair, the controversy surrounding Schwemmer’s comments and affiliations dates back to when he was 18 and 19 years old. In response to the criticism, he wrote on X: “My comments in high school and as a teenager should not be taken to accurately reflect my views or demeanor now. I condemn all forms of hatred, including antisemitism, obviously. I’m not a groyper. … In the past, I’ve spoken in ways that were unnecessarily crass or demeaning. I’m conscious of that fact, and since returning from my service as a missionary, I have made adjustments to become a better disciple of Christ.”

 

That explanation may very well be sincere. People do mature, and political movements should allow space for personal growth. However, the issue here is not merely one individual’s past statements. The real question is why the pipeline of youth conservative politics so often draws from these digital fringe circles in the first place.

 

When the pool of rising leaders is molded chiefly by internet notoriety rather than intellectual rigor and institutional judgment, the result is performative transgression, conspiratorial thinking, and a constant appetite for outrage. In that sense, the Schwemmer controversy is less a scandal than a symptom of currents that have begun to surface with unsettling regularity across right-wing youth political organizations.

 

In October 2025, Politico reported on a cache of private text messages from leaders of the Young Republicans, an organization for Republican Party members between the ages of 18 and 40. The messages, exchanged over seven months, revealed a torrent of racist and hateful remarks circulating in a group chat of roughly a dozen Gen Z and millennial Republicans.

 

Defenders of the Young Republicans were quick to frame the scandal as little more than youthful mischief. The vice president of the United States, J.D. Vance, struck such a note while appearing on the Charlie Kirk Show. “The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys,” he remarked. “They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke—a very offensive, stupid joke—is cause to ruin their lives.”

 

But many of the individuals involved were not teenagers testing the boundaries of humor. They were adults—some in their late 20s or 30s—holding leadership positions in Republican politics. Peter Giunta, the former president of the New York State Young Republicans and a vocal supporter of Donald Trump, was among the most active participants in the group chat. At the time the messages were sent, he was serving as chief of staff to New York Assemblyman Mike Reilly. In the thread, Giunta wrote, “I Love Hitler,” and in another message remarked, “If your pilot is a she and she looks ten shades darker than someone from Sicily, just end it there. Scream the no no word.”

 

Other participants contributed similar remarks. William Hendrix, the vice chair of the Kansas Young Republicans, used variations of a racial slur more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, who at the time held the position of vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans, referred to rape as “epic.”

 

What makes this episode significant is that the behavior occurred among individuals entrusted with leadership positions in organizations tasked with cultivating the next generation of conservative activists. A great number of figures on the right tend to dismiss campus political organizations as frivolous sideshows. Yet historically, they have been training grounds for future leadership.

 

President Calvin Coolidge, for example, was an active member of the College Republican Club while attending Amherst College from 1891 to 1895. Former House Speaker Paul Ryan was likewise deeply involved in College Republican politics during his time at Miami University in Ohio, and his early political engagement included working as an intern with the College Republican National Committee and later working as an aide to a U.S. senator. Even former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton began her political life within the Republican fold. During her freshman year at Wellesley College in 1965, she served as president of the Wellesley Young Republicans, though she later changed her political affiliation. Correlation is not causation. Many members of the College Republicans and Young Republicans never enter public life. But these organizations have long functioned as launchpads for those who do.

 

Seen in this light, what may appear today as juvenile behavior should not be dismissed so easily. The cultural norms that take root within youth political organizations often become the habits and assumptions later carried into positions of real political influence within the governing class.

 

According to the conservative writer Rod Dreher, a Washington insider—speaking anecdotally—estimated that “between 30 and 40 percent” of Gen Z staffers working in official Republican circles are admirers of Nick Fuentes. There is no hard data to substantiate the claim, but Dreher noted that this impression surfaced repeatedly among young conservatives living inside that world. Not every Zoomer who identifies with Fuentes agrees with all of his views, or even with the way he expresses them. What draws them, Dreher suggests, is his anger, his theatrical defiance, and his willingness to violate taboos.

 

When one perceptive young conservative was asked what the groyper movement actually wants, his answer was telling: “They don’t have any demands. They just want to tear everything down.”

 

Whatever many on the left may wish to believe, this phenomenon cannot be reduced to white supremacy or sexism alone. Some of the ideology’s most visible agitators do not even fit those categories. Among them are figures such as Kanye West—whose song “Heil Hitler” has circulated within this coalition—alongside Myron Gaines, a Sudanese-American podcast host who has engaged in Holocaust denial and Nazi apologetics, and Amy Dangerfield, a female cultural commentator who has argued for repealing the 19^th Amendment.

 

The deeper question, then, is why these circles hold such appeal for young Americans in the first place. In earlier generations, young conservatives often found community in churches, local associations, and civic organizations. Today, by contrast, many encounter politics for the first time through digital communities, where identity tends to form around shared grievances and a style of adversarial humor.

 

For a number of young men, the surrounding cultural landscape has felt inhospitable from the very beginning. Their formative years unfolded alongside the rise of a highly moralized strain of identity politics that permeated schools, media, and online discourse. Frequently, they encountered slogans declaring that “men are trash,” heard ordinary male competitiveness described as “toxic masculinity,” and absorbed the message that masculinity itself was implicated in society’s injustices. Women have unquestionably faced real disadvantages, yet 16-year-old boys can hardly be expected to accept being cast as inheritors of guilt for problems they neither caused nor had any meaningful role in sustaining.

 

At the same time, traditional markers of masculine success—stable careers, marriage, family formation—have grown more difficult to attain. Online culture magnifies these pressures by turning social life into a constant ranking system of attention, attractiveness, and dominance. In such an environment, grievance-oriented communities offer something emotionally potent: a narrative that explains humiliation while promising the restoration of dignity and status.

 

Meanwhile, for some women disillusioned with modern dating culture or frustrated with progressive gender politics, that narrative can carry its own appeal. It offers the reassurance of clearly defined roles and social order—an image of stability that can feel comforting amid a cultural atmosphere many experience as confusing.

 

That search for belonging intersects with another, quieter development: the fading of historical memory. As British podcaster Konstantin Kisin has observed, “Every generation … only really learns what to do, how to think and which pitfalls to avoid from the two preceding generations with which it has direct contact. We don’t learn lessons from history so much as we learn them from our parents and grandparents.”

 

For many younger Americans, the defining political traumas of the 20^th century exist only as distant abstractions. The catastrophes that once gave words like fascism their moral gravity—world war, genocide, and the fall of democratic societies—no longer occupy the cultural imagination with the same immediacy. Without deeply ingrained taboos, the allure of strongman politics can take on a strangely novel quality: an aesthetic of defiance that promises order, purpose, and decisive action in a political world many experience as chaotic and humiliating.

 

Many observers hope that the American right’s intellectual class—its think tanks, public intellectuals, and political leaders—will eventually correct the movement’s trajectory before its fringe elements consume it from within.

 

In an ideal world, a figure like J.D. Vance could have played that role. A millennial conservative, Vance’s own story suggests a model of personal discipline and moral seriousness. As he recounts in Hillbilly Elegy, he grew up amid the social decay of a fractured family and a struggling Appalachian community. He might easily have succumbed to the same nihilism that overtook many of this rising generation on the right were it not for the stabilizing influence of his grandmother, the discipline instilled by the United States Marine Corps, the intellectual formation he received in law school, and the personal grounding provided by his wife, Usha Vance, as well as his religious faith.

 

Vance could have decisively repudiated the groyper-adjacent corners of the movement. He could have drawn a clear boundary, the way Barry Goldwater rejected the excesses of the religious right associated with the Moral Majority, or Ronald Reagan repeatedly dismissed the conspiratorial politics of the John Birch Society.

 

But Vance appears too focused on his political future to risk alienating a considerable segment of the young Republican base. And while commentators like Ben Shapiro have recently become more vocal in criticizing these radical tendencies, the traditional gatekeeping structures that once constrained those tendencies have eroded. Think tanks and allied media organizations that once disciplined fringe behavior before it could metastasize into the mainstream no longer play that role with the same consistency.

 

In some cases, they have even shown a troubling degree of tolerance for—if not outright sympathy toward—these more extreme factions. The extent of that shift was underscored when Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, publicly defended Tucker Carlson after he effectively sanitized and elevated Nick Fuentes’ ideas for a mass audience rather than subjecting them to sustained scrutiny. Roberts described Carlson as a “close friend” of Heritage and suggested that engaging Fuentes in this way should not be treated as beyond the pale.

 

That breakdown in the traditional gatekeeping structures has only accelerated the emergence of alternative prestige systems on social media, in which notoriety itself becomes currency. A young activist can build a substantial following online and then convert that visibility into a measure of institutional authority. In other words, even if figures like Vance and Shapiro were to speak out forcefully against the radical right, there is little reason to believe their words would meaningfully rein it in.

 

Nevertheless, the story of conservatism in America has never been written solely by its loudest voices. Beneath the noise of TikTok outrage exists a far larger constituency. They are parents, churchgoers, small business owners, students, and professionals who gravitate toward conservatism because they believe it offers a philosophy of stability, responsibility, and ordered liberty. This is the self-silencing majority.

 

Silence, though, carries consequences of its own, and history offers ample testimony to this fact. The revolutionary fervor of the woke left began to exhaust itself because movements animated mainly by denunciation and disruption rarely survive contact with the practical demands of governing. The groyper subculture that is now gaining visibility on the right may well follow a similar trajectory. But even if it ultimately collapses beneath the weight of its own contradictions, the damage it leaves behind could linger for years.

 

That danger is why silence from the broader conservative public cannot be the default response. If we allow conservative youth institutions to fall captive to internet nihilism, we will gradually forfeit the credibility required to lead anything beyond an online audience. At their best, these institutions function as crucibles of civic responsibility. They connect politics to the everyday work of community life: organizing volunteer efforts, supporting local charities, strengthening churches and civic associations, and helping young people navigate the practical challenges of adulthood. These works provide moral and social foundations far more promising than authoritarian aesthetics, racial grievance politics, or the theatrical cruelty that has become fashionable in certain darker precincts of the internet.

 

That is because conservatism has never been a creed of destruction. It has been a tradition devoted to preserving the institutions that make freedom possible: the rule of law, constitutional government, civil society. Its greatest thinkers—from Edmund Burke to Russell Kirk—understood that liberty endures only when citizens exercise discipline over their passions and humility before the lessons of history.

 

If this generation of conservatives intends to carry this inheritance forward, we must decide whether we want to build institutions or merely burn them for entertainment.

How Pete Hegseth Is Putting Americans—Soldiers and Civilians—at Risk

By Kevin Carroll

Monday, March 30, 2026

 

The U.S. Navy’s accidental killing of as many as 170 Iranian schoolgirls last month and the apparent war crime in the Caribbean last year against shipwrecked suspected drug traffickers both took place under the leadership and responsibility of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. And they did not take place in a vacuum.

 

I served in Iraq in 2006-07 as a CIA case officer. One of my sources reported from an area within the territory of the 101^st Airborne Division. Then-Lt. Pete Hegseth served with that division at that time, as a mobilized National Guardsman performing civil affairs duties. In the widening gyre of Iraq back then, the CIA needed assistance from military units, and the 101^st regularly provided support during my source meetings: They kept a unit on standby in case something went wrong during an operation. I appreciated that backup, and I preface what I’m about to say by emphasizing how much I respect that unit. But another aspect of that division’s legacy from its 2005-06 tour was two infamous war crimes.              

 

On March 12, 2006, soldiers from the 2^nd Brigade of the 101^st kidnapped and gang-raped a 14-year-old girl near Mahmoudiyah and murdered her, her parents, and her 6-year-old sister to cover up the crime. Four soldiers, one of whom faced the death penalty, received sentences of up to 110 years for this crime.

 

That’s terrible enough. But al-Qaeda in Iraq seized upon this atrocity to curry favor with the local populace. In direct retaliation, al-Qaeda attacked three enlisted soldiers from the same company—good men, innocent of any crime—killing one on the spot and kidnapping two others.

 

The military’s declaration that the service members were “duty status—whereabouts unknown” set off an immediate nationwide search for missing Americans. My trainee desk officer at headquarters begged me to do all I could to find these fine young men in time. I shared her urgency, but we were all too late. The soldiers were found, but not before al-Qaeda tortured and murdered them.  

 

In a separate incident, two soldiers from 3^rd Battalion, 187^th Infantry Regiment executed three detainees on May 9, 2006. During Operation Iron Triangle, soldiers misunderstood their brigade commander, Col. Michael Steele (of Blackhawk Down fame), to have given a “no-quarter” order to kill all military-aged males when they raided a Lake Tharthar island known to be occupied by al-Qaeda. Those soldiers received prison sentences, and Steele’s promising career came to an end. Hegseth was assigned to the 3-187^th, and undoubtedly knew about both the kidnapped American soldiers and the fallout from Operation Iron Triangle. He knows as well as anyone that war crimes against foreign civilians, evil acts in and of themselves, endanger American service members, too.

 

The 101^st Airborne’s 2005-06 tour in Iraq wasn’t unique in that war crimes took place; e.g., a rifle squad from 3^rd Battalion, 1^st Marine Regiment in Anbar killed 25 Iraqi civilians in Haditha on November 19, 2005. Iraq at that time was something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting of Hell; the depravity of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq organization is something I still find difficult to communicate to civilians.     

 

Hegseth took different lessons from the experience. He used his platform as a Fox News weekend morning personality to defend service members convicted of war crimes. In one of his first acts as secretary, he fired the judge advocates general of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. He reassigned 600 judge advocates (whom he immaturely refers to as “jagoffs”) to civilian immigration law duties. As such, the current crisis over bombing a girls’ school, and the earlier crisis over the Caribbean “double-tap” strike on September 2, 2025, were foreseeable to those who knew Hegseth’s record.

 

Per military regulation, shipwrecked sailors—“helpless persons in distress at sea”—“must be respected and protected at all times,” and “not be knowingly attacked.” The “shipwrecked shall be treated humanely” and “all possible measures shall be taken, without delay, to search for and collect” them. Hegseth claimed that subordinates acted within orders the secretary gave when they killed the survivors of an airstrike clinging to a capsized boat suspected of facilitating narcotics trafficking.

 

Any order allowing the military to kill shipwrecked sailors violated U.S. and international laws against either murder or related war crimes. After World War II the Allies convicted, imprisoned, and even executed Axis officers accused of killing shipwrecked seamen. For example, on March 13, 1944, German submarine U-852, under Capt.-Lt. Heinz Eck, sank a Greek cargo steamer, Peleus, in the Atlantic. Eck’s crew machine-gunned and threw grenades at life rafts containing Peleus’ survivors, as well as wreckage that might have supported other sailors. Four Peleus crewmen, including British sailors, survived and were rescued on April 20. On May 2, 1944, the Allies sank U-852 in the Indian Ocean, with Eck among the captured survivors. After conviction at trial on October 20, 1945, British authorities executed Eck and two of his officers. In another example, the commander of a Japanese submarine pleaded guilty to an American court martial and was sentenced to eight years of hard labor after his crew sank three U.K.-flagged merchant ships and killed shipwrecked seamen.

 

Despite the clear illegality of the strike on shipwrecked sailors, there is no reported discipline of any involved in the September 2 incident. The U.S. now holds itself to a lower law-of-war standard than the Allies held Hitler’s Kriegsmarine. To his credit, Adm. Alvin Holsey of U.S. Southern Command, responsible for Latin America, announced his early retirement after the strike, less than a year into his command, rather than further participate in unlawful operations, which have thus far killed 163 sailors.

 

In November, six lawmakers who are all military or CIA veterans released a video simply reminding armed service and intelligence community members of their obligation to disobey unlawful orders. Hegseth responded by threatening to recall Sen. Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain, to active duty to court-martial him, while Trump reposted messages calling for these elected officials to be executed. Republican-appointed U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon later stopped Hegseth’s efforts to go after Kelly, and a Washington grand jury unanimously rejected U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s effort to prosecute these senators and congressmen for making an obviously correct statement of law. This “no true bill” was a deserved humiliation for the Justice Department.

 

The double-tap boat strike and the attempt to punish the veteran legislators set the stage for what came next. On February 28, the first day of the Iran War, Hegseth trumpeted that U.S. forces would not follow “stupid rules of engagement.” That same day, a Navy warship launched a Tomahawk cruise missile that destroyed a girls’ school, easily identified as such through imagery of the adjacent pink-and-blue children’s playground, and other available intelligence collection techniques.

 

Reporting suggests that the actual cause of this disaster was the Defense Intelligence Agency’s failure to update its targeting package on an Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force naval facility with new imagery from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Center, which would have shown that the building was now a school. We don’t yet know which intelligence officer nominated, which commander approved, and which warship actioned the target. The Pentagon claims that its investigation into this disaster is purportedly still open, but its proximate cause, as lawyers say, is Hegseth’s previous public dismissal of rules of engagement.

 

Even after killing scores of schoolgirls, Hegseth continues to double down with calls to show “no mercy,” in plain contradiction of the Christian ethics to which he loudly claims fidelity. He wears tattoos of Crusaders’ crosses and mottos, but defies principles of chivalry to which medieval knights gallantly subscribed. (Unfortunately, Crusaders often didn’t live up to these ethics.) Hegseth calls for giving “no quarter” to our enemies, contradicting international laws to which America has subscribed, an order of the exact type that resulted in the murder of detainees, the imprisonment of his colleagues, and the ruin of his commander on Operation Iron Triangle.

 

There’s a reason no previous defense secretary, 10 of whom saw combat themselves, talked like this. Veterans know that war kills the good and the innocent along with the bad, which leads all I’ve known to express humility and respect about combat losses. Instead, Hegseth’s Pentagon and this White House release juvenile videos conflating real-world combat with movies and video games. The so-called “Department of War” even allowed an image of the dignified transfer of a fallen soldier at Dover Air Force Base to be misappropriated for use in a campaign fundraising solicitation.

 

Worse, Hegseth’s criminal policies and puerile rhetoric now endanger both his subordinates and American civilians, for four reasons.

 

First, consider the moral injuries suffered by analysts, targeteers, planners, and sailors who have now killed little girls. Good service members, poorly led by Hegseth, will live with this emotional and spiritual burden for the rest of their lives, with ill effects on them and their families.

 

Second, the U.S. has lost 13 servicemembers and five aircraft in this Iran campaign so far, and foreign-flagged merchant ships are ablaze in the Gulf. We don’t want shipwrecked American sailors or downed airmen treated the way Captains Eck or Nakagawa treated shipwrecked seamen—nor the way Hegseth treated suspected drug traffickers.

 

Third, years of counterterrorism experience tell me that the Quds Force and its proxy Lebanese Hezbollah are looking to retaliate for the February 28 strike, probably against American schools in Navy communities. The attacks on a Hebrew school in Michigan by a Hezbollah member’s relative and a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps class at a Virginia university by an Islamic State supporter recently released from prison, are flashing red warnings.

 

Fourth, Hegseth is hurting our armed forces’ institutional cultures. An organization’s tone is set at the top. Our youngest service members cannot help but imbibe the unlawful orders and toxic rhetoric coming from the secretary as he grapples with unresolved personal demons regarding his Iraq tour. The Joint Chiefs sadly stand mute in response to Hegseth’s illegality, vulgarity, and disrespect of the dead, both Iranian and American.

 

Back in the 1990s, when I was a lieutenant, Army soldiers used to cheerfully holler “WHOA” as a sort of general affirmative sentiment. My understanding was that this obscure acronym meant “With the honor of America.” Killing shipwrecked sailors and schoolgirls doesn’t reflect America’s honor. The image that Hegseth presents to our fellow citizens and the world, of the glorification of cruelty and undisciplined violence for violence’s sake, doesn’t represent what our military ought to be, nor what our troops—fine young men and women—still are.

Progressives Give Wealth Confiscation Another Go

National Review Online

Monday, March 30, 2026

 

It’s the 2020 Democratic primaries all over again. Just as they were then, progressives are trying to one-up each other with increasingly outlandish fiscal proposals. One of the worst ideas from that year’s frenzied contest — a direct tax on household wealth — is back in fashion.

 

The same characters are back to reheat old redistribution. Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) got the ball rolling, outlining a 5 percent annual tax on all billionaires’ net worths. Not to be outdone, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) is more ambitious. Her plan is to tax all household wealth above $50 million at 2 percent each year, with a 1 percent surtax on fortunes over $1 billion. Both senators would use the proceeds not to trim the gaping deficit, of course, but to fund a laundry list of new entitlements.

 

Although Warren’s wealth tax would be slightly kinder to billionaires, it would apply to far more Americans than Sanders’s plan. Targeting what she calls “ultra-millionaires,” it would hit an estimated 260,000 households. Sanders limits his confiscatory scheme to the 900 or so billionaires in the country, though it would surely discourage more entrepreneurs and investors from joining their ranks.

 

Like today’s wealth-tax proposals, the federal income tax was originally intended to target only the richest Americans. Less than 1 percent of people paid the income tax when it was enacted in 1913, at a rate of just 1 percent of net earnings. Once the government identifies a revenue source, however, it inevitably expands: Three-fifths of households now owe income tax at marginal rates up to 37 percent.

 

Warren is expanding the wealth tax before it has even been enacted, but it could swell further. One of the senator’s top influences, the inequality-obsessed economist Thomas Piketty, once floated the idea of taxing household wealth above a threshold as low as $260,000.

 

One reason lawmakers may broaden a wealth tax is that it would raise much less revenue than advocates project. Determining the value of every asset owned by every rich household has proven an administrative nightmare for the countries that have tried. That is largely why many European governments have abolished their wealth taxes. The rich avoid assessments by shifting their money into hard-to-value assets, such as private companies, or simply by leaving the country. Admittedly, the latter risk is far smaller in the case of the United States because, after allowing for certain “breaks,” the federal government taxes its citizens and permanent residents wherever they live.

 

The United States also imposes an “expatriation tax” (to oversimplify, taxing any unrealized capital gains above a certain limit) on people renouncing their citizenship or, subject to certain time requirements, their permanent residence status. This is not enough for Warren, who would like to see a draconian 40 percent “exit tax” on those who would otherwise be subject to her tax if they renounced their citizenship.

 

If a wealth tax could somehow raise the trillions in revenue that Sanders and Warren anticipate, it would be an enormous tax on productive investment. The tax would apply to all assets regardless of when they are sold or whether they yield income. On top of regular taxes on capital gains and dividends, even a seemingly modest rate could wipe out yearly returns. Rather than reinvesting in new ventures, billionaires and millionaires would be incentivized to spend down their wealth as quickly as possible before the government nabs it. Reduced investment would dampen growth, leaving a smaller economy and lower wages for everyone.

 

Even if Congress passed a wealth tax, it could very well be blocked by the courts. The Constitution prohibits the government from levying direct taxes — including on property — without apportioning them among the states. Income taxes are allowed under the 16th Amendment, but even the most sympathetic judge would have difficulty defining unsold assets as earnings.

 

Above all, a wealth tax would be unjust because it aims to perpetrate the very expropriation that republican government exists to prevent. The purpose of the tax code is to pay for legitimate state functions, not to seize money from one set of citizens and dole it out to another. Contrary to popular belief, the richest households already contribute the bulk of federal revenue and pay higher effective tax rates than anyone else. Any leftover wealth is rightfully theirs to spend as they see fit.

 

Absent a compelling message on affordability, progressives are attempting to channel voters’ economic discontent into class resentment. But a punitive tax on the rich would do no one any good, while risking U.S. investment and competitiveness. Sober-minded Democrats should mark the wealth tax down as a liability.

Crowned by Protest

By Abe Greenwald

Friday, March 27, 2026

 

The soldiers of the anti-Trump resistance don’t understand something fundamental about the man they detest. Donald Trump loves the “No Kings” rallies, at least a little bit. He gets to watch millions of people gather across the country and describe him as a king—a dream come true. Tomorrow—when the next round of No Kings demonstrations is planned—I suspect he’ll turn on his wall of TVs, order some burgers, and enjoy.

 

Without these protests, Trump must make do with cosmetic gestures of self-coronation. He has decked out the White House with faux-regal gilt fixtures, renamed institutions after himself, added his signature to U.S. currency, and is reportedly pushing to mint one-dollar coins bearing his image.

 

None of these superficial bids for royal status have prevented him from being hemmed in by the usual checks and balances and democratic forces that limit executive power in the United States. As Trump said ahead of an earlier No Kings event last June, “I don’t feel like a king, I have to go through hell to get stuff approved.”

 

More often, he has to go through hell only to have his initiatives shot down. His administration has faced nearly 700 lawsuits so far and lost more than 70 percent of them. That’s literally a new record for an American president—never mind a monarch.

 

He’s lost on immigration and deportation, emergency powers, deregulation, and more. And political winds have also forced him to back down and change course, as we saw in the aftermath of the tragic ICE disasters in Minnesota.

 

Trump is such an oppressive emperor that Americans have felt completely secure in coming out to publicly protest him and his administrations more than they have any previous president. His suppression machine is clearly on the fritz.

 

No one believes in Trump’s absolute rule more than the resistance. That’s why it’s got to give him a bit of a thrill every time they take to the streets to reaffirm this imaginary status. That they disapprove of King Trump only reinforces the idea’s reality. For Trump, making enemies is the definition of power. And it’s also good fun. Last June, the White House shared on social media a fake Time magazine cover showing a crowned Trump above the caption “Long live the king.” In October, after another day of No Kings rallies, he posted an AI-generated video on Truth Social portraying him as the crowned pilot of a military jet named King Trump. The president takes off, flies the plane over the protests, and drops garbage on the crowds. No, I don’t approve—the point is, he loves this stuff. If not an actual king, Trump is the undisputed King of Trolling. He lives to get under the skin of the resistance.

 

What do No Kings protesters think they’re achieving? What do they want? The truth is, they have no specific goals. Because, in the end, their objective—like the media’s—is aligned with Trump’s: to ensure that he maintains full dominion over the American psyche. He clearly appreciates it.

Childhood Can Yet Be Rescued from Social Media

By Christine Rosen

Thursday, March 19, 2026

 

In the past few years, the United States has witnessed a significant shift in public opinion and policymaking about children’s use of social media platforms. Thanks in large part to the well-deserved popularity of Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book, The Anxious Generation, which gathered reams of social science data about the harms of a screen-based childhood, the national conversation about children’s use of social media has entered a new and more productive phase.

 

Uncritical techno-enthusiasm is giving way to a robust skepticism, long overdue, about the technology companies that, through deliberate design choices and a failure to confirm the age of users, encourage ever-younger children to spend hours every day on these platforms. The advent of more-sophisticated artificial intelligence tools, notably chatbots that draw users into intimate conversations about their lives and often dispense questionable mental health advice, has added urgency to the debate over regulating technology use for children. New risks posed by these platforms have been highlighted by recent episodes, such as when users of Grok, the X platform’s AI chatbot, generated millions of nonconsensual, sexual, deepfake images of real people, including children.

 

Internationally and in the U.S., this has ushered in a flurry of proposed and enacted legislation; new lawsuits against social media companies alleging that they knowingly hosted young children on platforms they knew to be harmful to them; and a range of civic efforts by parents, schools, and researchers to limit children’s use of social media and smartphones.

 

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The most sweeping piece of legislation took effect in late 2025, not in the U.S. but in Australia; it enacted the first nationwide age limit for social media use by children. Australians must be 16 years old to open a social media account, and the law places the responsibility on platforms to enforce this age limit or face significant penalties. Australia’s eSafety commissioner reported that in the first month of the law’s enactment, more than 4 million accounts were deactivated because they did not comply with the age-limit requirement.

 

One of my American Enterprise Institute colleagues, Bronwyn Howell, a thoughtful critic of the Australia legislation, notes that, not surprisingly, many teenagers have found work-arounds by using VPNs (virtual private networks), or they’ve moved their attention to alternative platforms not included in the social media ban. She argues for fewer sweeping bans and “a new paradigm for social media safety with shared, not unilateral, responsibility.” Yet the public seems largely enthusiastic about age limits such as the one Australia enacted. Other countries have also passed strict age limits for social media, including France (age 15), Brazil (16), Indonesia (16), Malaysia (16), the United Arab Emirates (13), and Vietnam (16). Many more countries have laws currently under consideration.

 

In the United States, the only federal law regulating social media use by children stems from the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which prohibits personal data-harvesting from children younger than 13 without a parent’s consent. Passed long before the creation of social media platforms, COPPA does not require age verification, so platforms can rely on users’ self-declaration of age, which is why platforms such as Instagram, since their inception, have knowingly hosted millions of underage users. The Federal Trade Commission recently issued guidance about COPPA, announcing its intention to review the COPPA Rule “to address age verification mechanisms.” There are many new tools available: temporary “token” technology that can confirm age without storing private information or disclosing an individual’s identity, and selfie-technology that can accurately assess a user’s age via photo analysis, among many others.

 

In Congress, Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) announced on March 12 that he will advance several key pieces of legislation to protect children online: a COPPA 2.0 bill; the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which includes a “duty of care” that places the burden on platforms to prevent foreseeable harms to children; and the Kids Off Social Media Act (KOSMA), which would ban anyone younger than 13 from social media and limit algorithmic recommendations for those younger than 17, among other features.

 

Similar efforts are underway nationwide. At the end of 2025, more than 300 bills related to social media and technology use by children were pending in state legislatures. Eight states now have some form of ban for minors on social media or require parental consent; many more states are considering such laws. Pending a case in federal appeals court, Florida is moving forward with bipartisan legislation that Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law in 2024 that would ban anyone younger than 14 from having a social media account, and Virginia passed a law limiting social media use to one hour per day for anyone younger than 16, although a federal judge recently blocked its implementation.

 

Nebraska has one of the strictest laws, which requires parental consent for any minor to open a social media account. And the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Texas law requiring websites with a significant amount of sexual content to verify the age of users. Other states, including California and New York, have proposed legislation to target addictive design features of social media platforms; several states have also passed laws requiring social media warning labels.

 

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The biggest challenges to these laws are on First Amendment grounds. Federal courts have been sympathetic to the argument that it’s a violation of children’s speech and expression rights to restrict access to social media platforms; courts permanently blocked state laws in Ohio and Arkansas on these grounds. In Georgia, Florida, and California, courts have temporarily blocked state laws while litigation continues.

 

The industry’s failure to take seriously the harms they know their platforms enable is why popular support is increasing for these kinds of legal protections. It’s notable that during a time of extreme political partisanship, many of these bills are exemplars of bipartisan agreement: A version of KOSA passed in the Senate in 2024 by a vote of 91–3, for example, though it remains stalled in the House. Critics of these laws and well-funded lobbyists for technology companies like to argue that denying children access to social media platforms will drive them toward even more questionable, unregulated places on the internet, so why not just continue to trust the platforms to regulate themselves, since they claim to offer effective “parental controls”? This is like the Wolf, dressed as Grandmother, telling Little Red Riding Hood that it’s much safer to snuggle up with him, within reach of his fangs, than to walk back into the woods.

 

Such half measures and public relations palaver come only after these companies have faced years of scrutiny by Congress and regulatory agencies and amid a proliferation of lawsuits about the serious damage done to children, undermining their attempts to paint themselves as proactive protectors of children.

 

New research also challenges technology companies’ claims that the tools they make available do enough to protect children from harm. Consider the design choices of these platforms, which effectively hijack children’s attention. Researchers Daniel Frost, Sarah Coyne, and Jane Shawcroft, writing on Haidt’s After Babel Substack, note how “features like infinite scroll, autoplay, incessant notifications,” and the like are “intentional design choices” that “keep kids online much longer than is healthy.” They continue targeting children because they make a lot of money doing so: A 2023 study from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health discovered that social media companies made $11 billion in 2022 just from advertising aimed at children.

 

As the researchers note, parental controls “place a heavy burden on parents” to master and monitor them, which “would be difficult even if the tech companies wanted wholeheartedly to help parents place reasonable limits on their children’s media consumption, which they do not.” They argue, persuasively, that the burden should be on the companies “to build safety features into the products so the digital environment is not so dangerous and addictive in the first place.”

 

Shifting the burden from individual parents to the companies that design these platforms is also at the heart of the many lawsuits making their way through the legal system. A multistate lawsuit against Meta in federal court in California alleges that the company, while having access to age-verification tools, “chooses not to use” them, even though it knows that children are on its platforms. As an internal company memo acknowledged, age verification would “impact growth” among under-13 users (who are, by law, barred from being on the platforms at all).

 

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The most interesting activity related to social media, smartphone, and technology use and children — and the most appealing if one is a conservative — is at the level of civic engagement. New nonprofit and research organizations are springing up to meet the need for rigorous research about the long-term effects of technology use on children. Public and private schools are enacting “bell-to-bell” smartphone bans during the school day. Parents continue to sign “Wait Until 8th” (meaning eighth grade) and other pledges to delay their children’s use of social media technology, and local community groups are promoting “analog experiences” to lure children and young adults away from screens and out into the real world.

 

All of this will be crucial for combating harm from the newest technologies, notably AI chatbots used by children. We need basic guardrails such as age limits, risk-based audits, and privacy protections for these tools, since they are already in widespread use by children. As Amina Fazlullah of Common Sense Media told Tech Policy Press recently, “We found 70% of teens are already using what we’ve described as [an]AI companion. . . . About 50% of them were regular users and 30% were already preferring conversations with the chatbot over, or similarly to, other humans.” Last year, Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) introduced the bipartisan Guidelines for User Age-Verification and Responsible Dialogue (GUARD) Act to address concerns about AI chatbots. The bill would ban AI companions for children and require AI chatbots to disclose their nonhuman status to users, among other provisions.

 

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What these federal and state laws, lawsuits, and civic efforts all suggest is a pushback on the idea that, when it comes to children, adoption of these technologies is a welcome inevitability and that the responsibility to deal with the impact these have on children lies entirely with parents. Many Americans understand that, when it comes to safety, the burden of proof should be on the companies making these platforms and tools and on the school districts uncritically adopting them.

 

Why is this important? Because children still come to know the world by living in it, in physical bodies. Haidt and other researchers have given us a portrait of a childhood spent staring at screens. Many recent lawsuits have been brought by heartbroken parents whose children died by suicide after being blackmailed by other social media users or emotionally manipulated by an AI “companion.”

 

But we should also consider the depletion of physical reality for children who spend most of their time in mediated environments.

 

In a recent post on his Substack, critic Ted Gioia compiled some startling facts about modern childhood. A few highlights: The average child today plays outside only four to seven minutes every day. (As Gioia noted, “Even inmates in top security prisons get more outdoor time than this.”) During the past decade, children have spent half the time with their friends that they used to. Children are “entering school with autism-like symptoms due to the use of devices,” including lack of emotional expression and speech delays. Their bodies show evidence of excessive screen use and lack of physical activity, with poor fine motor skills, higher rates of obesity, and too little “strength in their fingers to hold a pencil or even a knife or fork.” Many students cannot read or do math at a basic level, they lack core knowledge such as the name of the state they live in, and they cannot read a clock. Test scores are in steep decline, and kids’ social media use has been linked to lower reading and memory scores.

 

Social media platforms, smartphones, and the internet are not entirely to blame for these transformations, but they’re implicated in nearly all of them. For more than a decade, technology companies insisted that users should trust them as they “move fast and break things.”  It’s becoming increasingly evident that they are breaking childhood, and it’s time to slow them down.

Jimmy Kimmel’s Unearned Snobbery

By Dan McLaughlin

Sunday, March 29, 2026

 

Rich and the rest of The Editors podcast crew had a good, well-deserved kick at Jimmy Kimmel for mocking Markwayne Mullin on the grounds that Mullin used to run a plumbing business and didn’t graduate college. I don’t have anything to add to their defense of plumbers, but let me just pile on with one further thought: Who is Jimmy Kimmel to be any sort of intellectual snob? Leave aside the fact that Kimmel himself didn’t finish college and has only an honorary degree awarded after he became famous on television. Kimmel’s an entertainer. He works in the most prominent field (other than sports) in America in which an educational credential of any kind is unnecessary. Sure, a comedian who does highbrow material (i.e., not Kimmel’s material) can get something out of being well-educated, but plenty of comics make it just on being funny people with very little education. (In fact, lots of comedians are precisely the sorts of can’t-sit-still types who are ill-suited to the classroom.) And Kimmel doesn’t even write his own jokes. Back when he was doing comedy that didn’t depend on a late-night writing staff, he was known for The Man Show, which was not exactly Masterpiece Theater.

 

Kimmel regularly welcomes to his show actors and musicians who never had much schooling, or if they did, put little or none of it to use in their careers. Bruce Springsteen, who is more sophisticated as a lyricist than your median rock star, used to introduce his piano player Roy Bittan as “the Professor” because he was the only guy in the band with a high school diploma. Bob Dylan, who literally won a Nobel Prize for Literature for his lyrics, is a college dropout. And those guys are practically brain surgeons and rocket scientists compared to a lot of others in their field. (Not that Kimmel has gone easier on Trump appointees such as Ben Carson, an actual brain surgeon, or Elon Musk, an actual rocket scientist).

 

Elitism isn’t always a bad thing. There are jobs in the government, such as Supreme Court justices or the Surgeon General, in which we want people with elite training and skills. But even when some stringency in job requirements is warranted, I fail to see what Jimmy Kimmel, of all people, has done in his life to be condescending to anybody. Smugness is not a credential, much less an accomplishment.

 

 

The First Post-Reality Political Campaign

By Anne Applebaum

Friday, March 27, 2026

 

Flick through pro-government Hungarian accounts on TikTok, and you might see an AI-generated version of Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, sitting on a golden toilet, counting his money, snorting cocaine, and barking orders at a Hungarian soldier. You might also find an AI-generated Péter Magyar, the leader of the Hungarian opposition, appearing to say he’s fine with handing Hungarian factories over to foreigners, as long as he’s the one in charge of the country. Keep going, and you will find images of war, violence, and a SpongeBob look-alike declaring that Magyar “wipes up cocaine with me after he accidentally sneezed and it all fell to the floor.”

 

You won’t find much about Hungary itself, which is not an accident. In recent years political parties around the world have produced surrealist campaigns, comic campaigns, conspiratorial campaigns, even beer-drinking campaigns. But on any list of strange elections, the 2026 parliamentary election in Hungary will stand out—this may be the world’s first post-reality campaign.

 

In actual reality, the news for Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, is not good. After 16 years in office, plus an earlier three-year term, Orbán has made his country the most corrupt in the European Union, one of the poorest, and certainly the least free. His political party, Fidesz, now controls most universities, the civil service, the high courts, and, through a network of oligarchs, almost all newspapers and broadcasters, as well as about a fifth of the economy, according to independent economists. General paranoia about Fidesz spies means that Budapest, once again, has become a city where people lower their voices when talking about politics in public.

 

With that kind of influence, Fidesz, which is well behind in most polls, cannot evade responsibility for Hungarian stagnation, and so neither the party nor its leader is talking much about Hungary, its falling industrial production, or its shrinking population. Instead—backed by Russian propagandists, the European far right, and now the Trump administration (about which more in a minute)—the party is directing a small fortune’s worth of posters and social-media videos toward a different goal: convincing Hungarians to fear sabotage, thievery, or even a military attack from … Ukraine.

 

This is an entirely false, even ludicrous threat. The Ukrainians have enough to do without starting a second war in Hungary. But Orbán, his government, his party, and many outsiders are now focused on making this threat seem true. Pay attention, because this may be the future of electoral politics: Multiple politicians from several countries are shoveling propaganda at an electorate in order to build terror of an enemy that doesn’t exist at all.

 

The campaign is not subtle. In Budapest last week, Orbán’s face was almost nowhere to be seen. But posters featuring Zelensky were ubiquitous. Sometimes the Ukrainian president is seen glowering alongside the slogan “Don’t let Zelensky have the last laugh.” Sometimes Zelensky appears with Magyar and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European commission, along with the slogan “They are the risk. Fidesz is the safe choice.” Peter Kreko, who runs a Budapest think tank, told me that this is unprecedented. In 2022, Orbán campaigned on keeping Hungary out of the war. Now he’s telling Hungarians that, as Kreko put it, “we are under imminent threat of attack.”

 

The same threats reach Hungarians on their phones. On TikTok, where new pro-Fidesz accounts appear every day, AI-created videos of Magyar seem to show him slandering his country—“I stay silent because my masters in Brussels have forbidden me from defending the homeland”—or else singing the Ukrainian national anthem. Another genre of video shows war violence: a Hungarian girl crying as her blindfolded father, wearing a Hungarian uniform, is executed, apparently in Ukraine. Multiple videos also smear Magyar, making personal, sexual, and financial allegations against him, but the fear-Ukrainian-invasion narrative dominates. During a Fidesz march on March 15, a group in the front of the crowd carried a banner declaring We won’t be a Ukrainian colony!

 

This language and these images have been backed up by the actions of the Hungarian state, each one designed to reinforce Fidesz propaganda. In February, Orbán sent Hungarian soldiers to guard the country’s oil and gas infrastructure, allegedly to prevent a Ukrainian attack, for which there was no evidence. In March, Hungarian counterterrorism authorities seized two trucks, owned by a Ukrainian bank, that were passing through the country on a routine cash-transport run from Vienna. They arrested seven bank employees, one of whom lost consciousness after they injected him with what may have been truth serum. Later they were all released because, again, there was no evidence against them.

 

The Hungarian government nevertheless confiscated $82 million in gold and cash, which it has not returned. The online publication Direkt36, one of a tiny number of outlets still doing investigative reporting in Hungary, wrote that Fidesz reckons this ham-handed operation a success: It provoked Zelensky to half-jokingly threaten Orbán, which gave the Hungarian leader another few days’ worth of material.

 

Hungarian state institutions are not the only government bodies seeking to shape Hungarian perceptions of reality. Although Orbán likes to use the word sovereignty, he now functions, in practice, as the most important Russian puppet in Europe. According to a Washington Post investigation published last week, Orbán’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, regularly calls his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, to keep the Russians informed following European Union meetings, and sometimes to ask for favors. During a 2020 call between the two men, according to a transcript published by a Hungarian journalist, Szijjártó asked Lavrov to arrange a meeting in Moscow for a pro-Russian Slovak politician, to help him win an election. The meeting did later take place. Other European leaders long ago stopped discussing any security issues in the presence of Orbán himself, who has repeatedly used his veto to block European sanctions on Russia and European aid for Ukraine.

 

Concerned that a key asset might lose power, the Russians have sent a team of propagandists to Budapest to ensure that Orbán wins. The Financial Times has identified the influence group as the Social Design Agency, a Kremlin-backed IT company whose activities are well known. In 2023, back when the American government was still interested in unmasking Russian propaganda, the State Department’s now-dismantled Global Engagement Center exposed the agency’s role in creating a series of seemingly native pro-Russian websites in Latin America. In Budapest, they were tasked with creating AI videos and using their existing network of trolls and bots to pass them on. One Russian network has circulated doctored screenshots of the English-language website Euronews, with fake quotes attributed to Magyar. The Washington Post investigation revealed that the Russians even proposed to stage a fake assassination of Orbán, in order to build more sympathy for him. They called this strategy “Gamechanger.”

 

Tisza, Magyar’s opposition party, is expecting more. Several people close to Tisza told me that they feared a false-flag operation, perhaps an explosion at a Hungarian pipeline or another energy site. I was also told that Tisza has been preparing for a major hack of their internal communications infrastructure, and has built an analog backup system, just in case. Last week, that seemed prudent, since the party’s membership database had already been hacked, with names and private information of members dumped online. Now it seems prescient: This week, Direkt36 published an article, based partly on material from a whistleblower, claiming that this was indeed the Hungarian government’s plan. In response, the Hungarian government said some of the individuals involved were linked to Ukrainian intelligence, and separately accused a Direkt36 journalist of espionage. The story continues to twist and turn.

 

Not long ago, the U.S. government would have vocally defended the democratic process in Hungary, and might have sought to downplay wild claims about fictional Ukrainian invasions. Instead, the Trump administration is doing its best to amplify them. Strange though it sounds, Hungary, although a tiny country in Central Europe, plays an outsize role in the imagination of the American and European far right: MAGA and its international wing understand that the Hungarian election, the most important in Europe this year, could mark a turning point in the war of ideas that has convulsed the democratic world for the past decade.

 

Orbán has been actively engaged in this battle, fighting against liberal democracy and the rule of law, advocating for authoritarian populism and one-party rule. He became a beacon for other leaders who seek to alter their own democratic political systems, who also want to twist the rules in order to ensure that they never lose. Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, once said Orbán’s Hungary was not just “a model for modern statecraft, but the model.” Orbán pioneered a form of campaigning too, spending years convincing Hungarians that existential threats—from migrants, from so-called decadence, from the European Union—required the radical institutional changes that have kept his party in power. Americans will be familiar with these tactics, which have been adopted, and adapted, by Trump and Vance.

 

Now the political leaders who have long admired Orbán’s methods are gathering to help him. Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to Budapest in February to endorse Orbán, even seeming to offer financial support “if you face things that threaten the stability of your country.” Vice President J. D. Vance is set to visit Budapest, probably after Easter. President Trump himself appeared on video at the Budapest meeting last Saturday of CPAC, the formerly mainstream-conservative organization that now organizes pop-up rallies on behalf of the international radical right. In his message, Trump offered his “complete and total endorsement” for Orbán, Russia’s closest European ally.

 

Other members of the European far right showed up in person. Alice Weidel, head of the far-right Alternative for Germany, made a speech attacking the European Union for allegedly sending billions of euros to Ukraine, “the most corrupt regime on Earth,” as if she were not speaking on a podium inside the most corrupt state in the EU, and were not echoing the rhetoric of Russia, which might authentically be the most corrupt regime on Earth. She was followed by Santiago Abascal, the leader of the Spanish far right, who said that Orbán’s Hungary—repressed and impoverished after years of ersatz populism—is a “shining beam of light in the darkness.” Marine Le Pen of France, Karol Nawrocki of Poland, and Geert Wilders of the Netherlands have also made appearances. Benjamin Netanyahu endorsed Orbán by video. Even the libertarian president of Argentina, Javier Milei, came all the way from South America to laud Orbán, a man who has built one of Europe’s most centralized and repressive societies.

 

All of them have their own motives. Maybe Weidel is trying to help out the Russians, who fund some of her party members and amplify her own online campaigns. Milei may reckon it prudent to back an ally of Trump, who gave him $20 billion to shore up his country’s currency just before his own recent election. Perhaps Abascal or LePen hope for a boost in their campaigns too. But mostly they were there because the return of a different government in Hungary would invalidate the claim that the far right represents Europe’s future.

 

In Budapest, Orban’s language and tactics already feel like they belong to the past. His old threats aren’t working anymore, perhaps because reality is reasserting itself. There is, in fact, no wave of migration challenging the survival of the Hungarian nation. Brussels doesn’t pose an actual threat to Hungarian health and happiness, but the poor state of the nation’s hospitals very well might. And, of course, Ukraine is not going to invade, but Russia might. Hungary was actually invaded, after all, in living memory—by tanks sent in by Moscow, not Kyiv: In 1956, the Soviet army came to Budapest to crush the anti-Communist Hungarian revolution.

 

To counter Orbán’s post-reality campaign, Tisza has focused on building a grassroots campaign that reaches actual people in the three-dimensional world. Magyar gives no interviews but instead makes campaign speeches in several different towns and villages every day, mostly on topics people understand: the economy, health, corruption. Usually he stays away from the geopolitical themes Orbán much prefers. But at a large rally in Budapest earlier this month, Magyar did start chanting “Russians go home.”

 

That chant, and the historical memory behind it, also helps explain why Budapest feels so feverish, and why Orbán’s post-reality campaign is so fraught. To win, Orbán has to corrupt that searing national memory, and to substitute fear of Ukraine. That means waging cognitive warfare on a scale no one else has tried before. Emotions are high because the stakes are high. If he succeeds, he will once again blaze a path that others will follow. And if he loses, an era comes to an end.