The Accountability Gap

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, February 11, 2026

 

Chauvinism toward Europe is so fundamental to American identity that one can’t envy European culture without feeling a bit unpatriotic.

 

I’m not much of a patriot anymore, though, so I’ll cop to it. I envy the hell out of a country where an honest-to-goodness king feels obliged to cooperate with police as they investigate his own brother for corruption involving Jeffrey Epstein.

 

Try to imagine it happening here. Our own king doled out full pardons to his co-conspirators in a plot to overthrow the government and is presently at work turning the Justice Department into the legal arm of his mafia syndicate. No “made man” in the Trump family will ever pay for federal crimes they’ve committed or might commit, no matter how compelling the evidence might be. Every one of us knows it.

 

Get this, though: The “corruption involving Jeffrey Epstein” for which (the former) Prince Andrew is being investigated in the U.K. isn’t even what you think.

 

It’s not sex crimes that are the subject of the probe this time; it’s the fact that Andrew violated his duty of confidentiality as a British trade envoy by passing information about investment opportunities to Epstein in 2010. It’s an insider trading scandal, essentially, a form of sleaze that seems quaint—genteel, even—compared to the comically lavish corruption to which Americans have grown accustomed.

 

Andrew’s investment chatter was revealed in the latest tranche of the Epstein files released by the DOJ. So were many other communications between the late pedophile and prominent Europeans, which detonated like a series of bombs on the continent. Per ABC News: “Former UK Ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson was fired and could go to prison. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces a leadership crisis over the Mandelson appointment. Senior figures have fallen in Norway, Sweden, and Slovakia.” The governments of Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania have also launched probes based on the files.

 

Remarkably, not one of the foreign officials who have been pushed out so far due to their contacts with Epstein was accused of sex crimes. (At least one chatted with him suggestively about women, however.) “They have been toppled for maintaining friendly relationships with Epstein after he became a convicted sex offender” in 2008, ABC News notes.

 

That’s strange, no? Various people in and around the current U.S. government also maintained friendly relationships with Epstein after 2008, per the latest files, and not one of them has been toppled—or, to all appearances, been even mildly inconvenienced.

 

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick claimed last year that he cut ties to Epstein in 2005 after being creeped out by him. That was a lie, it turns out. The newly released files prove that Lutnick was still arranging get-togethers with the notorious pervert in 2012 and even joined him in a business venture.

 

Former DOGE supremo and GOP bankroller Elon Musk was also in touch with Epstein in 2012. Four years after the financier went to prison for procuring a child for prostitution, Musk emailed him on behalf of himself and his wife to ask “what day/night will be the wildest party on your island.”

 

Lutnick and Musk were pikers, though, compared to Trump flunky and potential 2028 presidential candidate Steve Bannon, who remained a loyal Epstein buddy to the end. Not only did the two plot a documentary aimed at rehabilitating Epstein’s image, they were in contact about it on the very day that the latter was arrested for the second time in 2019.

 

Europeans are punishing those who saw nothing wrong with socializing with a known child predator. Americans are not. Why?

 

Expectations and structure.

 

You can guess how a guy who writes a newsletter called Boiling Frogs is inclined to answer that. But for the sake of not being completely predictable, I think there are other differences between the U.S. and EU besides our national experiment with postliberalism that have contributed to the accountability gap on Epstein.

 

One is expectations. To Europeans, learning that some “respectable” local bigwig was chitchatting cheerfully with the world’s most notorious pedophile might come as a jolt. But in America, the fact that Jeffrey Epstein was a well-connected member of the global elite is old news. The current president of the United States and a former president of the United States were known associates of his for years, for cripes’ sake.

 

“Every rich, powerful scumbag in the country was chummy with Epstein” isn’t a revelation in the USA. It’s the foundational fact on which the real suspicions about Epstein’s activities are based—that some of the scumbags in question joined Epstein in preying on children and may have been blackmailed by him with evidence he possessed of their crimes.

 

But the files released by the Justice Department haven’t proved that. What they’ve proved conclusively is that many celebrated figures in politics and business had no moral objection to befriending a child molester with mountains of money and an impressive Rolodex. In Europe, that’s a scandal; in America, where it was already understood, it’s a letdown. If there’s no cabal then there’s no story. (Stay tuned!)

 

The way Europeans structure their governments might also make them more sensitive to Epstein-related tremors than America is.

 

In parliamentary systems, power is fragile. Frequently the governing majority is composed of a coalition of parties in uneasy alliance with each other; if one grows disenchanted and withdraws its support, the government could fall at any time. Parliamentary systems are also led by prime ministers elected by their party rather than presidents elected directly by voters. When a prime minister grows unpopular, the party can and often will move to protect itself by replacing that person expeditiously. (Ask Liz Truss.)

 

And of course, parliamentary systems typically have more than two parties competing for power. Even in the U.K., which has been dominated by two parties for ages, no fewer than five are currently polling in double digits. A governing party that happens to enjoy a sizable majority in Parliament, as Keir Starmer’s Labour Party does at the moment, has to worry about its support being cannibalized by rival left-leaning factions if it governs poorly.

 

In America, by comparison, power is sturdy. The president gets four years to govern no matter how unpopular he becomes. Ditto for the governing party in the House and Senate, albeit for two years. There are no coalitions to worry about in our two-party system either: The only way the majority can lose control of the chamber mid-term is if some critical mass of members in its own ranks defect to the other side, which is vanishingly rare.

 

Add it all up and you see why Keir Starmer needs to worry more about employing Peter Mandelson than Donald Trump needs to worry about employing Howard Lutnick. Left-wing Brits scandalized by Mandelson might consider switching to the Liberal Democrats or Green Party; Labour MPs worried about losing those voters might consider dumping Starmer in hopes of placating them.

 

Whereas here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, Trump faces no risk of losing support to some rival right-wing party and no threat of being ousted by congressional Republicans. That reality inevitably influences Americans’ expectations of political accountability, just as the mechanics of parliamentary systems influence Europeans’ expectations.

 

So when the same scandal hits both continents, we should expect one to be more responsive to it than the other. And it has been.

 

Culture.

 

But yes, needless to say, the dismal, decadent political culture of the United States also contributes immensely to the accountability gap. Boiled frogs won’t suddenly leap out of the pot in shock upon discovering a dubious email from Howard Lutnick to Jeffrey Epstein.

 

The whole point of boiling them, from postliberals’ perspective, was to desensitize them to moral outrage. Why would anyone be surprised to find that modern Americans are, in fact, less sensitive than Europeans?

 

Here comes the “to be sure” paragraph: To be sure, the postliberal right isn’t solely to blame for that. Convincing Americans not to hold influential leftists accountable for their moral disasters has been a cherished Democratic Party priority for ages. The Kennedys and Bill Clinton are notorious examples, but even the brief reckoning inspired by the #MeToo movement ended in recriminations.

 

The most sainted Democratic politician of the last 100 years, Franklin Roosevelt, was the proprietor of concentration camps for a disfavored racial minority. Frog-boiling didn’t start with Trump.

 

What’s different and innovative about postliberalism, though, is that it’s a moral system unto itself. It doesn’t accept conventional morality while insisting that occasional deviations should be overlooked in the name of some greater policy goal, as Democrats routinely do for their sleazebags. Postliberalism has its own moral code. Ruthlessness towards opponents is the supreme virtue; the law should protect friends and harass enemies; prioritizing an abstract moral or civic good over your or your tribe’s self-interest is “weak;” loyalty to one’s leader is absolute.

 

Postliberalism is designed to make voters un-scandalizable. And it’s awfully good at it, if not quite perfect.

 

The right-wing majority that’s adopted it as a moral system won’t be meaningfully scandalized by anything the president and his lackeys do because it can’t be, having abandoned conventional morality as the proper yardstick in judging its own side. But the rest of us, inured by now to the right’s indifference, struggle with indifference too: It’s hard to feel scandalized at the majority party in Washington for doing nothing to hold Republicans like Lutnick, Bannon, Musk, and Trump accountable when we’ve spent 10 long years learning to expect nothing less.

 

That’s the reason we all know and, on some level, accept that no Trump ally will do time for a federal crime during the president’s term. The morality of postliberalism to which we’ve all grown numb forbids it. As if to prove the point, at a moment when Bannon’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein are all over the news, the Justice Department chose yesterday to announce that it’s dropping a criminal case against him stemming from his refusal to testify about January 6 before Congress. The timing felt deliberate, as if to flaunt the extent of legal impunity that Trump cronies now enjoy. Not only will Bannon pay no price for Epstein, the DOJ seemed to say, but his toadying to Trump will shield him from paying any price for completely unrelated crimes.

 

For a grassroots example of the phenomenon, look at the late Charlie Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA. Kirk advocated for marriage, children, and family values, the backbone of conventional morality. But on Sunday, to counterprogram anti-ICE Puerto Rican star Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show (which featured a bona fide wedding), Turning Point handed its microphone to Kid “Balls in Your Mouth” Rock. The next day it weighed in on Texas’ Senate primary by endorsing Ken Paxton, an adulterer who was impeached and very nearly removed as state attorney general for corruption, over Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Wesley Hunt. That’s postliberalism in action, forever cynically paying lip service to mom and apple pie while elevating the grubbiest amoral avatars of right-wing ruthlessness it can find.

 

Many Americans support all of this, many more are by now numb to it. A country conditioned to be un-scandalizable will need a lot more than Howard Lutnick having lunch with Epstein after the latter went to prison for soliciting a minor to feel shocked.

 

Partisanship.

 

There’s one more ingredient to the Epstein accountability gap between our two continents. Americans have become extreme tribal partisans to a degree that Europeans haven’t.

 

I think. Making sweeping pronouncements on partisan dynamics across the ocean should be above my pay grade, but I can read the results of the last U.K. election as well as you can. The sort of landslide Starmer’s Labour Party won due to public disaffection with the Tories is unthinkable in modern America, where only one presidential election this century was decided by more than 5 points. And in that case, it took the Iraq war and a global financial crisis to crack the ceiling.

 

We can blame that to a degree on our two-party system, which forces Americans into the sort of binary mindset that turns every election into a cultural death match. Europeans aren’t so burdened. For the same reason, we can safely assume that U.S. political media is more binary, and therefore more tribal, in its allegiances than the typical offerings abroad. If, for instance, America had a center-right party to complement the MAGA GOP, that party’s media organs would have a strong electoral incentive to publicize dirt on Lutnick, Musk, and Bannon. Instead right-wing media has an incentive to suppress it: If they’re reporting on Epstein news that hurts the White House, only the left stands to benefit—and no one wants to be accused of helping the left.

 

Needless to say, the cult of personality around a charismatic authoritarian like Trump has also made hyperpolarization and the perverse political incentives it creates worse. No offense to Keir Starmer, but I don’t get the sense that many British Labour voters would feel they’d committed an unthinkable national betrayal if they supported his ouster. Republicans do feel that way about Trump, however, even knowing that he’d be replaced by the like-minded J.D. Vance. So naturally they’re less inclined to desert him or demand that he punish anyone for being buddy-buddy with Epstein.

 

And of course the right’s cultishness over the president has always flowed upward to its representatives in Congress, functionally nullifying the impeachment process and reducing the House and Senate little more than a glorified Duma. To ask why there isn’t more accountability for connections to Epstein in a country that couldn’t produce accountability for a g-ddamned coup is to succumb to absurdity. Who, precisely, is supposed to extract this accountability? Who in our morally numb country expects accountability enough to seriously demand it at this point?

 

The frogs in Europe might not be boiled, but the ones in America are. Which is a relief, I suppose, for those of us here who aren’t so patriotic anymore: At least there’ll be someplace to go once postliberalism becomes intolerable.

A Requiem for Communist Cuba’s Apologists

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, February 10, 2026

 

Sure, communist Cuba has been on the “brink of collapse” before. Who would begrudge prudent observers who hold their passion in reserve as they await further evidence that Havana’s grip on power is starting to loosen? But conditions on the island have deteriorated rapidly following the ouster of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro.

 

If Cuba had a geopolitical project in this century that it pursued with anything like the vigor it displayed in its efforts to export Soviet-style communism around the world throughout the Cold War, it was Havana’s efforts to establish a loyal benefactor in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuelan regime. It’s not clear precisely how much of Venezuela’s sanctioned oil exports are no longer making their way to Cuba, but America’s efforts to interdict illicit energy shipments are clearly biting. That and Washington’s successful lobbying of other oil-producing nations, including Mexico, to cut Cuba off have thrown the communist regime into crisis.

 

In late January, the Financial Times reported that Cuba had less than a single month’s worth of oil in reserve. Already, the country’s energy stockpiles appear to be dwindling. Havana informed international air carriers this week, for example, that it will no longer be able to refuel commercial jets on Cuban tarmacs.

 

That’s hardly the only crisis facing Cuba’s tourism-dependent economy. The country’s GDP is collapsing. Inflation-related price hikes are rampant and contributing to shortages. Rolling power blackouts have become a feature of daily life. All these conditions have exacerbated what was already a catastrophic level of emigration from Cuba. By some estimates, the island has seen a 25 percent decline in its population in the space of just four years.

 

It is difficult to judge from our vantage just how fragile the Cuban regime has become as the “polycrisis” that the country’s leaders have been contending with for years deepens. But to hear the regime’s American admirers tell it — or, at least, to gauge from their garment-rending protests over the fate to which the Trump administration is consigning the junta in Havana — things are getting quite serious.

 

The socialist-friendly left in the United States seems beside itself over a report published by the left-aligned media venue Drop Site News alleging that Secretary of State Marco Rubio deliberately misled President Donald Trump into believing that “high-level” negotiations between Washington and Havana were ongoing. In reality, there have been no such talks.

 

“This is what we’ve seen with Gaza, right?” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in a mystifyingly ponderous reflection on the dispatch’s claims. “This is the — a new kind of era of depravity opened up where there used to be — or, there was this stated commitment on human rights — that innocent civilians were almost exempted from the rules of war, from blockades.” Today, the congresswoman contended, the “entire Western world” looks away as the U.S. and its partners “starve and deprive a people.”

 

The Nation’s Katrina Vanden Heuvel published a similar lament. She mourned the “loss of Venezuela’s sovereignty,” which is now “in the hostile hands of Donald Trump” — effectively cutting Cuba off from a country whose resources it once pilfered. In her view, Washington is preparing for a regime-change operation, but Vanden Heuvel makes no meaningful distinction between regime change at the hands of the U.S. military or the sort brought about by the captive peoples under Havana’s boot. Either outcome is something to be feared.

 

Havana’s collapse would result in “an influx of uncontrolled migration,” Vanden Heuvel warned, “the agitation of the Miami exile community,” and growing calls for a direct U.S. military presence on the island. Trump cannot want that, the author infers. That makes Rubio’s betrayal all the more seditious.

 

“Marco Rubio is deliberating LYING to [Trump] about talks with Cuba,” declared David Adler, the co–general coordinator for something calling itself the “Progressive International.” “There are no such talks — only the strangulation policy that Marco Rubio pushed to fulfill his lifelong fantasy of regime change on the island. Where’s MAGA?”

 

Indeed. Where is MAGA? Watching eagerly, we must assume, popcorn in hand.

 

The anti-interventionist left has long mistaken Donald Trump’s commandeering of growing skepticism on the right toward the Iraq War as an expression of its own hostility toward America’s extroverted presence on the world stage. Nothing — not Trump’s intervention against Bashar al-Assad in Syria, his strikes on Iranian regime targets, or his decapitation of the Venezuelan regime — has led them to reconsider their own misconception. The Cuban expatriate community in South Florida, for example, knew precisely what the president’s outlook toward Havana was when two-thirds of them told pollsters in 2024 that they viewed Trump favorably.

 

The Cuban regime has long served as an anti-American totem for the revolutionary left. Even more than the Eastern Bloc and the People’s Republic of China, the Cuban revolution was admired for its unique and enduring hostility toward Washington even when the watchwords were “détente,” “glasnost,” and “perestroika.” The international Marxian left admired it for its capacity to engineer the collapse of a regime even in the absence of a mass proletarian consciousness — the sine qua non of the socialist revolution, according to Marx himself. When the revolutionary left transitioned to small-cell terrorist activity, their doctrines shifted with them. Suddenly, it was Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and the Brazilian Leninist Carlos Marighella (whose Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla operationalized the Cuban revolution’s unique conditions) who captured the imaginations of the international left.

 

For some in the global Marxist diaspora, Havana’s implosion would be more painful than even the collapse of Soviet communism. Long before 1991, Moscow had lost the stomach for the fight against capitalism. The Chinese Communist Party, too, has made its own accommodations with the market. Although Havana’s 2021 experiment with legalized private industry (on a small scale) shook their faith, the far-left faithful never abandoned their admiration for the anti-Western regime on America’s doorstep.

 

The economic precarity Cuba is experiencing right now is a direct result of decades of U.S. government policy. It’s a wonder that the far left is surprised that this policy, which was never a state secret, is bearing fruit. The collapse of Cuban communism would liberate a people who will tell anyone willing to listen that the regime compels them to live like “robots,” and that’s valuable enough. But it would also drive a stake through the heart of the notion that collectivism is popular or even desirable. It can’t come soon enough.

What Did You Expect, Starmer?

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, February 10, 2026

 

The British political establishment is shocked, shocked, that Palestine Action activists would be acquitted by a jury on the grounds that although they admitted to breaking into an Israeli company’s factory and destroying property while injuring police, their cause was righteous.

 

As I wrote last week, six Gaza leftists were apparently found not guilty under the principle of “jury equity,” in which Brits were told that jurors may acquit the accused because of the virtue of their intentions. It was a remarkable moment, one that overnight put the British legal system in disarray. Hating Jews was now a legitimate legal defense even for violence—one Palestine activist smashed a cop’s spine with a sledgehammer. Because it was a jury trial, the problem cannot be fixed institutionally: courts can give jurors direction but they cannot guarantee it will be followed. A populist outpouring of Jew-hatred threatens to undo generations of liberal democracy.

 

Prosecutors are reportedly seeking a retrial, though the “precise basis” is unclear. There will be a hearing on the matter February 18.

 

The British establishment is without doubt correct that this trial is a catastrophe for the legitimacy of the country’s legal system. I don’t blame them for trying, within legal bounds of course, to find a way to put this rancid toothpaste back in the tube.

 

But I have to ask: What did they expect?

 

You can yell “Criticism of Israel isn’t anti-Semitism” until you are blue in the face, but if you force on your population the lie that the Jewish state is guilty of exceptional evils, they are going to see a green light for exceptional resistance.

 

Though Israel not only never had a policy of starvation in Gaza but also never caused the oft-predicted “famines,” Hamas’s own policies made food scarcity in the enclave a regular concern. Hamas hoarded food supplies, stole from civilians, killed civilians trying to get food, and hijacked aid convoys. Nonetheless, Prime Minister Keir Starmer blamed Israel. “The suffering and starvation unfolding in Gaza is unspeakable and indefensible,” he’d said, adding that his government was searching for ways to get Israel to “change course.”

 

It was much the same when Starmer would seek to be evenhanded. In one statement, he made clear which side is responsible for which outrages: “The appalling scenes in Gaza are unrelenting. The continued captivity of hostages, the starvation and denial of humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people, the increasing violence from extremist settler groups, and Israel’s disproportionate military escalation in Gaza are all indefensible.”

 

Unrelenting and appalling—and aside from the hostages, all Israel’s fault in Starmer’s mind.

 

When Israel instituted an aid system that cut Hamas out of the loop and got food directly to Gazans, Hamas routinely tried to undercut that new system with attacks and propaganda. Yet Foreign Minister David Lammy’s characterization of this system was certifiably insane. Rather than criticize the limits of the new system and reinforce the need for it to scale up operations to feed more Gazans, Lammy said: “The new Israeli aid system is inhumane, dangerous, and it is depriving Gazans of human dignity. It is a grotesque spectacle, wreaking a terrible human cost.”

 

It was, in fact, none of those things. But calling food distribution “inhumane” and a “grotesque spectacle” reinforced the libel that Israel was using those food distribution sites to streamline its killing of defenseless Gazan civilians.

 

Again, one can see suffering and call for its alleviation. That is not what Starmer or Lammy were doing. They were painting Israeli troops as demonic enemies of humanity.

 

They were convincing the British public that anything done in opposition to Israel’s actions could be considered righteous resistance against a global menace. It’s a wonder that David Lammy didn’t ransack Elbit Systems himself.

 

Meanwhile, Starmer and Lammy’s Labour Party conference adopted a motion holding that Israel was indeed guilty of committing genocide. Starmer’s cabinet rejected the specific “genocide” accusation, but the nation’s governing party had made clear where it stood as a collective.

 

These are but a few of the examples of such rhetorical extremism on the part of Starmer, his government, and his party over the course of the war. The one time that Starmer chose to sound Churchillian about something, Israel was cast in the role of the Nazis.

 

So spare me. Spare me the gasps and the tut-tutting and lips-pursing about the British public internalizing the raging propaganda fed to them by their government over the course of two years. In their minds the Palestine Action verdict was nothing less than the fulfillment of their patriotic duty. More important than whether they will be retried in a court of law is whether Starmer and the Labour leadership can make it possible for that court of law to deliver justice. I won’t hold my breath.

Sorry, Bad Bunny — the USA Is Indeed ‘America’

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, February 10, 2026

 

It might be the first time that Bad Bunny has been suspected of cribbing from Irving Berlin.

 

Near the end of his Super Bowl half-time show, the Puerto Rican rapper said “God bless America.” For many Americans, they were the only words that they could understand and ones that they, presumably, appreciated.

 

We’ve come a long way, though, from Irving Berlin’s World War I–era song that asks for God’s blessings on America and invokes the geographic majesty of our vast nation “from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam.”

 

Bad Bunny didn’t mean America the country but America the continents. He name-checked the United States only in a list of other countries in the Western Hemisphere, and only toward the end, lest anyone get the idea that there’s something special about this place.

 

With apologies to Lee Greenwood, Bad Bunny is proud to be an American — just not an “American” as most people in the United States think of it.

 

The NFL made history with the show in two ways. For the first time, it had a performer who sang in a language that about 85 percent of the U.S. population doesn’t speak, a victory for gratuitous inscrutability. (Were none of the stars who sing in English available?)

 

Also, for the first time ever, the NFL gave its stage to a performer who sought to put the country in its place and undermine its claim to be called “America.” To think that, once upon a time, the likes of Prince and Katy Perry simply aimed to put on a good show.

 

In an echo of singer Billie Eilish inveighing at the Grammys against America stealing land, Bad Bunny said of his language proficiency in a pre–Super Bowl press conference, “English is not my first language. But it’s okay; it’s not America’s first language either.”

 

This sounds clever until you give it a moment’s thought. Bad Bunny’s first language, Spanish, was a colonial imposition in the Western Hemisphere beginning in 1492. If the rapper wanted to associate himself with languages prior to this wave of European settlement, he’d have to sing in, say, Nahuatl or Algonquian.

 

It’s true that the Spanish language got a head start over English in what’s now the United States, when Ponce de Leon showed up on the Florida peninsula in 1513. But so what? English speakers forged a permanent presence at Jamestown in 1607. They then populated the Eastern Seaboard, won their independence, stood up enduring institutions of representative government, and made English the most important and widely spoken language in the world.

 

That the country they founded goes by “America” is an affront to elements in Latin America and on the left. They consider it insulting to everyone else living in North America or South America. Aren’t they Americans, too?

 

Certainly not everyone feels this way. The Canadians have as little interest in being called “Americans” as they do in becoming the 51st state. It is people hypersensitive to any Yanqui imperialism, including “linguistic imperialism,” who complain about us hogging the name “America.”

 

Sad to say, they are late to the game. Americans began calling themselves Americans in the 1700s to set them themselves apart from the British. An anonymous writer in the Virginia Gazette in March 1776 referred to “the united states of America,” and Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence said it was a statement of “the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” (subsequently changed to “the thirteen united States of America”).

 

Once we were the U.S.A., the question became how to refer to our people. As “United States men and women”? Various solutions were tried out before we settled on “American,” which now denotes not just our country but a set of clearly defined cultural traits.

 

It’s bizarre that the NFL had a half-time show that questioned this understanding, although in the league’s defense, surely, few people picked up on it — or understood anything else said.

Voter ID Is Reasonable. It’s Also Popular.

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

 

President Trump says that “Republicans” should “nationalize the election” or at least take over voting in up to 15 places where he says voting is corrupt. His evidence of fraudulent voting is that he lost in such places in 2020, and since it is axiomatic that he won everywhere, the reported results are proof of the fraud.

 

This is all delusional, narcissistic nonsense. But at this point, if you still claim it’s an open question whether Trump actually lost the 2020 election (he did), you’re immune to the facts or just lying—either about not having made up your mind or about what actually happened. So, I don’t see much point in relitigating an issue that was literally litigated in more than 60 courtrooms.

 

But Republicans’ inability simply to tell the truth about Trump’s lies makes talking about elections and election integrity infuriatingly difficult. One tactic is to assert that Trump didn’t say what he plainly said. “What I assume he meant by it is that we ought to pass—Congress ought to pass the SAVE Act, which I’m co-sponsor of,” is how Sen. Josh Hawley responded to questions about Trump’s remarks.

 

Before later correcting himself, Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy insisted the president never said he wanted to “nationalize” the elections. “Those are your words, not his,” he told reporters.

 

But Democrats are wrong to suggest that all of the difficulty is generated by Trump’s lies and the Republicans’ inability to reject them.

 

On Sunday, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl asked Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff, since “the Republicans have undermined confidence in elections and the integrity of elections,” why not have a photo ID requirement for voting?

 

Schiff scoffed at the idea that Democrats should cave to “the distrust [Republicans] created in order to enact a voter suppression law, which is the SAVE Act.”

 

Now there are reasonable objections to proof-of-citizenship requirements in the SAVE Act, but the framing of both the question and the answer is flawed.

 

Americans—including large majorities of Democrats—have favored voter ID for decades. Since long before anyone dreamed Donald Trump would run for president, never mind get elected, the idea has been wildly popular. In 2006, 80 percent of Americans favored showing proof of ID when voting. The lowest support over the last two decades, according to Pew, was in 2012 when a mere 77 percent of Americans, including 61 percent of Democrats, favored voter ID. Last August, Pew found that 95 percent of Republicans and 71 percent of Democrats favored having to provide government-issued ID when voting.

 

Two things have bothered me about Democratic opposition to voter ID. First is the claim that millions upon millions of Americans lack adequate ID. While it’s true that the SAVE Act’s provisions for providing proof of citizenship creates novel challenges—lots of people don’t have their birth certificates, and many forms of ID don’t specify citizenship—Democrats were making this argument years before the citizenship issue ripened. (To be clear, evidence of noncitizens voting in significant numbers is scant to nonexistent.)

 

Regardless, if the problem is that huge numbers of “marginalized” people don’t have sufficient  ID to vote, that also means they don’t have good enough ID for all manner of things. Indeed, I can think of few things more likely to marginalize someone than not having ID. You can’t get a credit card, buy or rent a home, apply for welfare benefits, travel by plane, or open a bank account without identification. That’s some serious marginalization.

 

Second, if you want people to trust the integrity of elections and the sanctity of “our democracy,” waxing indignant over the idea of presenting ID when democratic majorities favor it is an odd choice. It arouses the suspicion that there’s a reason for opposing such measures. Mostly thanks to Democratic initiatives, America has made it wildly easier to vote over the last three decades. Why is it so preposterous that new safeguards be put in place amid all of the mail-in and early voting?

 

My theory is that at some deep level there is a dysfunctional bipartisan consensus that lax voting rules benefit Democrats. That’s why Republicans want to tighten the rules and Democrats favor loosening them. The funny thing is, I think both sides have always been wrong. Indeed, as the demographics of parties’ coalitions have changed, the assumption has gotten sillier. Over the last decade, the GOP traded “high propensity” college-educated suburban voters for non-college low propensity voters.

 

Yet both parties have intensified their delusions. Voter ID is not voter suppression, and requiring voter ID will not guarantee Republican victories. It’s just a reasonable idea, albeit in an unreasonable time.

Tulsi Gabbard’s Dangerous Game

By Kevin Carroll

Tuesday, February 10, 2026

 

In 1820, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Congressman John Holmes that the Missouri Compromise over slavery was “a fire bell in the night” that “awakened and filled” the former president “with terror” as he “considered it at once as the knell of the Union.”

 

I am no Thomas Jefferson. But last month’s federal seizure of 2020 voting records in Fulton County, Georgia, with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard personally present for the execution of the search warrant, filled me with a similar foreboding.

 

The 2020 presidential election was litigated in more than 60 court cases. Biden won.  There is no evidence of foreign interference with vote counting in 2020, nor of any criminal conspiracy. Even if there had been a conspiracy, such misconduct would now lie outside the statute of limitations under federal criminal law. The clock cannot be rewound to elect Donald Trump president in 2020.

 

It was appropriate for the intelligence community (IC) to analyze its reporting on Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election and publicize its findings. But the KGB’s successors did not manipulate vote counts. Trump won in 2016 fair and square, as much as Biden did in 2020, and as much as Trump won again in 2024.

 

Gabbard and Deputy FBI Director Andrew Bailey’s personal presence during the service of a warrant to seize Georgia voter records was both unprecedented and extraordinary. The day the warrant was executed, President Trump republished a post improbably claiming that Italian military space satellites somehow manipulated American voting tabulation machines in 2020. Asked about the rationale for Gabbard’s visit to Georgia, a senior administration official said: “Director Gabbard has a pivotal role in election security and protecting the integrity of our elections against interference, including operations targeting voting systems, databases, and election infrastructure.”  None of this makes good sense.

 

The National Security Act of 1947, which established the Central Intelligence Agency, declared that the agency “shall have no police, subpoena, or law enforcement powers or internal security functions”—an amendment that was required to get the bill through a reluctant Congress. The entire intelligence community is prohibited from collecting information on U.S. persons solely to monitor First Amendment-protected activity—such as voting. The executive order on U.S. intelligence activities, issued by Ronald Reagan and updated by George W. Bush, prohibits IC elements (other than the FBI) from “acquiring information concerning the domestic activities” of U.S. persons. Simply put, absent narrow exceptions related to serious crimes such as espionage or terrorism, the IC is forbidden to spy on its fellow Americans.

 

The DNI's basic responsibility is to provide the president, department and agency heads, senior military commanders, and Congress with intelligence that is “objective” and “independent of political considerations.” Gabbard’s only authority related to voting is her supervision of the Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC), which houses the Election Threat Executive (ETE). The ETE, founded in 2019, is tasked with providing recommendations for potential responses to attempts to influence or interfere with U.S. elections by countries such as Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.

 

It is unclear how the DNI helping the FBI seize a county’s voting records from 2020 fits into the mission of the FMIC or the Office of the DNI (ODNI) more broadly, especially as those records were already under seal, per a state court order.

 

Also worrisome is ODNI’s involvement in the Interagency Weaponization Working Group (IWWG), until recently led by former interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin, whose nomination to that post failed to even clear the Republican-led Senate judiciary committee. Martin’s brief tenure at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. featured a purge of experienced prosecutors who worked on cases related to January 6, 2021.

 

Martin spent his career in Missouri state politics. It is not likely coincidental that the current criminal investigation into the 2020 election is being run by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Missouri, led by Republican former assistant state attorney general Thomas Albus, nor that the deputy FBI director, a post traditionally occupied by a career bureau agent, is Andrew Bailey, a former Missouri state AG with no federal law enforcement experience. It was Albus who requested the warrant, which cited alleged crimes involving voter registration and the retention of voting records.

 

In his time as IWWG head, Martin met with Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who lost a nearly $1 billion defamation lawsuit to the parents of the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre victims, and who was also a prominent figure in the 2020 Stop the Steal movement.

 

Martin celebrated the seizure of Atlanta’s voting information by posting a picture of himself with Sidney Powell, a member of Trump’s legal team in 2020 who pleaded guilty to six counts of conspiracy to intentionally interfere with the performance of duties related to the 2020 election. (Trump later pardoned her.) Powell featured in a November 19, 2020, press conference in which she claimed that antifa, deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, China, Cuba, the Clinton Foundation, and billionaire George Soros conspired with Dominion Voting Systems to falsify election results. (Fox News settled with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million in damages for republishing similar allegations.) Powell, along with retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, also advocated for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law to empower the military to seize voting machines in 2020, a suggestion the president recently said he regretted not taking.

 

Even CIA officers are involved in the IWWG, in violation of the prohibition on the agency having any internal security functions. The CIA narrowly survived being disestablished in the mid-1970s after it was revealed that the agency spied on civil rights and Vietnam War protests in an unsuccessful attempt to prove that these movements were catspaws of the KGB. The agency would certainly not have survived if Director Richard Helms and Deputy Director Vernon Walters had acceded to the Nixon administration’s illegal requests that they obstruct justice and falsely cite national security to deflect the FBI from investigating the Watergate break-in. As it was, President Gerald Ford spent enormous political capital defending the CIA from Congress’ Church and Pike committee investigations. In the first decade of this century, revelations of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation methods and the National Security Agency’s expanded signals intelligence collection programs after 9/11 yet again caused bipartisan congressional concern.

 

Gabbard, a reserve lieutenant colonel, had a commendable war record in Iraq, but her subsequent public service has been marred by her indulgence of conspiracy theories that, wittingly or not, advanced the interests of Russia and the former Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. She also lacked any previous experience with intelligence work.  During her confirmation hearing, she refused to denounce turncoat Edward Snowden, an intelligence contractor who defected to Moscow with top secrets, as a “traitor.”  (Gabbard was correct, legally speaking, only because the U.S. is not at war with Russia.) Gabbard cleared the Senate Intelligence Committee on a party-line 9-8 vote, and was confirmed on a 52-48 vote, with former GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell joining the Democrats. In contrast, the Senate unanimously confirmed previous nominees to her post such as Adms. Michael McConnell and Dennis Blair and Lt. Gen. James Clapper.

 

Gabbard’s judgment regarding conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 election seems suspect at best. The IC is playing with fire if it allows Gabbard to drag it into a dubious investigation led by Republican politicians and begun by Martin (who has since been removed from the IWWG for accumulated missteps, including improper and failed prosecutions of former FBI Director James Comey and New York state Attorney General Letitia James), who in turn is influenced by conspiracy theorists Jones and Powell. America will always need foreign intelligence services, but they will not exist in their present form if the community follows its director down the rabbit hole of 2020 election denialism. And God forbid the country is attacked by surprise as at Pearl Harbor while the IC is looking inward and backward at 2020, instead out outward and forward at foreign threats.

 

The biggest threat here is not to intelligence agencies as institutions, however, but to the republic.

 

On January 21, speaking to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump claimed that “everybody now knows that” the 2020 election was rigged and that “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did.” On January 28, Trump posted that Barack Obama is guilty of treason and reposted a demand that the former president be arrested now.  The ill-advised Supreme Court decision that established presidential immunity for official acts (unless preceded by impeachment, conviction, and removal) would, of course, protect Obama from prosecution just as it prevented Trump from being prosecuted for January 6. On February 2 and 3, Trump demanded that the federal government “nationalize” and that Republicans “take over” elections, in contravention of the Constitution.

 

Trump’s posts demonstrate the state of his mind and that of his administration. Last month alone, the Justice Department launched seemingly retaliatory criminal probes into six sitting senators and representatives, as well as Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, searched the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, and arrested former CNN journalist Don Lemon. The Department of Homeland Security gunned down demonstrators in separate incidents in Minneapolis, on camera and in broad daylight. DHS and the White House slandered the victims as domestic terrorists, falsely claimed that their officers wield “absolute immunity,” initially refused to investigate the killings, and continue to block state and local probes. As protests grew, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a remarkable intervention into domestic affairs, tweeted, “Thank God for the patriots of @ICEgov — we have your back 100%. You are SAVING the country. Shame on the leadership of Minnesota — and the lunatics in the street. ICE > MN.”

 

I am proud to have served as a human intelligence case officer in the Army and CIA, but I know that the IC makes mistakes and sometimes even breaks the law; I am presently litigating cases for former officials against the ODNI, CIA, and IWWG. It is bad enough that federal law enforcement is now being misused for partisan ends. In this environment, the intelligence community involving itself in 2020 election disputes threatens to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

 

Intelligence agencies are powerful tools and do great things for our country. They are technologically advanced, filled with highly capable personnel, opaque to and often misunderstood by the public—and are feared by civil libertarians on the left and right for those reasons. Given the intense partisan divide at present and the irresponsibility of some actors involved here, the IC seeming to influence or even somehow interfere to prevent the midterm elections could ignite widespread civil unrest and political violence. Only the involvement of the military pursuant to the Insurrection Act could be worse.

 

The January 31 opinion of U.S. District Judge Fred Biery granting writs of habeas corpus to 5-year-old Minnesotan Liam Conejo Ramos and his father cited Thomas Jefferson’s bill of particulars against George III in the Declaration of Independence.  Biery specifically cited Jefferson’s complaints about the British Army ignoring American civilian authority and abusing colonists’ rights. The Founding Fathers would certainly look askance at the intelligence community inappropriately inserting itself into the bedrock of the United States’ democracy, the resolution of her free and fair elections.

 

Congress, the inspectors general of the IC and its subordinate agencies, state attorneys general, city and county law departments, public interest groups, academia and think tanks, the bar and the press—in short, civil society—have a responsibility to act now, and with urgency, to investigate and prevent further illegal activities by the intelligence community related to elections. Former President Jefferson concluded his letter to Congressman Holmes by lamenting that he feared “the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons.” Let us do our best to prove Jefferson wrong.

Unfortunately, Peggy Noonan’s Idealized Journalism Doesn’t Exist

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, February 09, 2026

 

Last week, in the course of what she described as “a lament,” Peggy Noonan wrote the following about the firings at the Washington Post:

 

I fear sometimes that few people really care about journalism, but we are dead without it. Someday something bad will happen, something terrible on a national scale, and the thing we’ll need most, literally to survive, is information. Reliable information—a way to get it, and then to get it to the public. That is what journalism is, getting the information.

 

I love Peggy Noonan. I love her writing. I love the speeches she wrote for Ronald Reagan and others. I met her once — she won’t remember! — and she was lovely in person, too. But I’m going to have to disagree with her on this one. “Something bad” has already happened. Lots of something bads, in fact. In the last decade alone, we have had the Brett Kavanaugh witch hunt, Russiagate, Covid, the insanity of the summer of George Floyd, and the coverup of President Biden’s senility, and in each of those cases, the media — including the Washington Post  — have disgraced themselves.

 

Noonan gestures at this early on, writing:

 

I feel it damaged itself when, under the pressure of the pandemic, George Floyd and huge technological and journalistic changes, it wobbled—and not in the opinion section but on the news side. But I kept my subscription because that is a way of trusting, of giving a great paper time to steady itself.

 

This, precisely, is where I dissent. The press — and the Post specifically — did not “wobble” during Covid or George Floyd. It proved itself completely unfit for purpose. It did not provide “reliable information”; it became an organ of propaganda. It did not check the hysterics among us; it amplified them. It did not question the transient judgments of the establishment; it set them on a pedestal and declared them to be synonymous with Science and Democracy. If journalism is “getting the information,” then, during those crucial episodes at least, the Washington Post was not journalism.

 

Later, Noonan waxes lyrical about the press in general:

 

You have to think of it as part of your country’s survival system. Maybe the government will or won’t tell you the truth about what’s going on, maybe the Pentagon will or won’t, but if you know you’ve got this fabulous island of broken toys, professional journalists working for a reputable news organization, you’ve got a real chance of learning what’s true.

 

That sounds nice in theory. But, in practice, I don’t think of the press as a particularly useful part of my country’s “survival system,” I don’t think that most journalists can be described as “professional,” I don’t consider that most news organizations can be characterized as “reputable,” and I don’t believe that, when I open the newspapers, I have “a real chance of learning what’s true.” I, too, love the idea of such an indispensable institution, much as I, too, love the idea of the open-minded university or the idea of the sincere union boss. Trouble is, they rarely exist in the modern world. As is true of academia and labor unions, journalism these days is mostly a front for progressivism and its preferred political vehicle, the Democratic Party, and most journalists are impressionable, excitable, venal, partisan types who are susceptible to the worst forms of groupthink and conformity. I would genuinely love it if journalism were not like that, and if, instead, it were to play the role that Peggy Noonan earnestly believes it should. But it doesn’t, and it hasn’t, and until that changes I will remain deaf to the encomia and the cheers.