Importing the Third World

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, September 28, 2026

 

“Import the third world, become the third world” is a slogan popular with postliberals who, for whatever reason, are reluctant to say the 14 words. Publicly, anyway.

 

Like “Great Replacement theory,” it’s wormed its way into semi-“respectable” right-wing discourse to a degree that out-and-out racism still hasn’t quite managed. I doubt, for instance, that we’ll ever see the president deliver a fascist salute while shouting “white power.”

 

But “import the third world, become the third world”? Not only might Donald Trump plausibly say it, in 2024 his campaign did say it. And the visuals it chose to illustrate the point were as subtle as you’d expect.

 

“Import the third world, become the third world” is the conclusion you reach when you’ve despaired of America’s formidable ability to assimilate immigrants, as postliberals certainly have. It implies a second conclusion: To avoid becoming the third world, all you need to do is to stop importing the third world.

 

But that’s as false as false can be, in case you missed the previous thousand editions of this newsletter. Under Trump, America’s government did stop importing the third world—and immediately set about adopting every civic pathology for which third-world regimes are known and despised.

 

American postliberals have no objection to third-world government. What they want, and have always wanted, is a third-world government that works for them, privileging their own racial, religious, and ideological tribe while penalizing rival ones.

 

Which brings us to the president’s—or is it the American people’s?—new ads.

 

Three times in the past week, the White House has released videos that are indistinguishable from campaign spots. The first, which aired on Fox News and other right-wing outlets, features audio of UFC honcho Dana White celebrating Trump as “the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met.” Heroic images of the president flash onscreen, intercut with the words “America will never be a communist country.” A chorus sings “love me,” if you can believe it, in the background.

 

The second ad, more subdued, features Trump speaking about America’s future while romantic images of Mount Rushmore, fireworks, and crowds with flags float by. But the third is a return to form—the man in his element, glowering at the camera in black-and-white while audio plays from one of the most third-world speeches he’s ever given: “This is the final battle…. We will demolish the deep state, we will expel the warmongers…. We will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country…. We will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”

 

That one aired this weekend during Saturday Night Live, Fox News Sunday, and various football games. Not only does it look like a campaign ad, it was a campaign ad. It repurposes footage that Trump posted to Truth Social as a candidate in 2024—footage that, per the New York Times, his team spent upward of $60,000 to boost online in the final days of that year’s presidential race

 

Why is any of this newsworthy? Because: All three spots released this week are captioned “Paid for by the U.S. government.” That is, by you and me.

 

The White House addressed the outcry on Friday with a press release titled “Presidential Public Service Announcements Are Nothing New,” but it’s unclear what the alleged “public service” in this case is supposed to be. The historic examples the press releases cites—public health announcements, entitlement enrollment information, morale boosters during war—all had a policy rationale. The new Trump ads don’t.

 

According to the White House, the rationale is “patriotism.” What could be more patriotic than a fascist demagogue seething about cleansing America of internal enemies?

 

What’s the real purpose of these ads?

 

Because he can.

 

I’m open to the theory that there is no “purpose” per se.

 

What was the purpose of putting the president’s face on the currency? For that matter, what was the purpose of last week’s summit with Xi Jinping?

 

There’s no “purpose,” only vanity and prestige.

 

Earlier this month Axios reported that the people around Trump have largely given up on discouraging his worst impulses, particularly when those impulses involve his self-glorification. (And when don’t they?) “Many aides and confidants have been worn down,” the outlet reported. “They know they can’t stop him, and they don’t even try. More and more, they humor his whims.”

 

Perhaps the taxpayer-funded campaign ads are just the latest perk of the imperial presidency for a term-limited egomaniac, no different in substance from minting a coin in his honor. He’ll never be on the ballot again; the right’s emotional investment in him is declining and will soon enough shift to some younger successor. He intends to cling selfishly to the national spotlight for as long as he can, and the new ads are one way to do it.

 

But I think that’s too simple. If you’ve paid any attention to the president’s campaign rhetoric over the past month, you know that there is a purpose to these spots and it ain’t patriotism. Before, during, and after the spotlight-clinging convention he held a few weeks ago, Trump has begged fans to “pretend I’m on the ballot” in November. (He did it again this morning.) MAGA diehards reliably turn out for their hero in presidential elections, but much less reliably in midterm campaigns, when he’s on the sidelines. He needs them at the polls this fall to hold down congressional losses.

 

The three new ads are all designed to impress upon them the sense that the president himself is on the ballot, reminding the red cap-wearing wing of the right why they put those caps on in the first place. Trump’s own political fate might not be at stake, the commercials seem to say, but the fate of Trumpism is.

 

If you wouldn’t call ads that amplify a party’s core election message “campaign ads,” what would you call them?

 

Of course they’re campaign ads, never mind that federal law prohibits using money appropriated by Congress for political propaganda. The question is why a guy whose PAC was sitting on more than $400 million as of the end of August connived to have the U.S. government pay to air them instead of picking up the tab himself, or leaning on some private-sector crony to do so. Sticking the taxpayers with the bill feels gratuitous, seeking out controversy when it could easily have been avoided. Why would Trump do that?

 

Because he can.

 

The caption “Paid for by the U.S. government” is a sort of advertisement within an advertisement. As I said, the dream of postliberals is to be governed by a third-world regime that favors them and disfavors their enemies. The three ads are Trump’s way of reinvigorating his unenthused base by showing them the extent to which he’s achieved that. I’ve weaponized the federal government so ruthlessly against the left, he’s suggesting, that I’m going to have the U.S. Treasury pay for Republican campaign ads.

 

He might not have made groceries cheaper or weakened China or ended “forever wars” in the Middle East. But to the sort of anti-American cretin who believes that saving the country requires abusing federal power toward the goal of right-wing autocracy, he’s delivered in spades. That’s the sort of voter he needs at the polls in November and whose excitement he’s hoping to rekindle. “Forget the price of diesel,” the ads imply. “Remember the big picture here.”

 

It reminds me of Pete Hegseth commandeering Apache helicopters for him and Kid Rock to joyride around in, another memorable “because I can” postliberal moment that mimics the most loathsome aspects of third-world government. The ruling party makes no distinction between its personal interests and the national interest; high officials arrogantly flaunt their corruption, knowing that cronyism will guarantee their impunity; and the public, demoralized by the spectacle, loses confidence in liberalism’s ability to deter that corruption, which ironically feeds the opposition’s appetite for postliberal remedies.

 

All of that was true of the helicopter episode, and all of it is true of Trump’s government-funded ads. Even the “love me” chorus in the first spot turns out to have been obtained improperly, lifted from a song by an artist who didn’t authorize its use by the White House. The logic of choosing that music was “in for a penny, in for a pound,” I suppose: If the president was going to steal money from the U.S. Treasury to pay for the ads, he might as well steal intellectual property to make them to his liking too.

 

Americans imported a third-world political movement into the federal government in 2024 and now here we are. Import the third world, become the third world.

 

A game of horseshoes.

 

The most preposterous soundbite in the three ads is the audio of Trump grumbling about “expelling warmongers,” a bit of 2024 verbiage that’s aged post-Iran like milk left out on a windowsill at Mar-a-Lago. But I was also struck by how large anti-communism loomed in his message, given the fact that one of his own diplomats went on television yesterday and claimed that the president offered last week to sell weapons to … China.

 

That feels like a gag someone like me would write to satirize his infatuations with dictators and “deals,” but it’s no joke. “President Trump continues to say, ‘Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world,’” David Perdue, the U.S. ambassador to China, told Fox News Sunday. “He actually asked President Xi, would he like to buy some at one point.”

 

Selling weapons to an enemy regime that might plausibly use them someday to kill American soldiers feels like the logical endpoint of the Trump era, which began with bluster about getting tough on China and now seems to be steering toward some sort of illiberal “grand bargain” involving joint global hegemony via the two countries’ “spheres of influence.” Never mind what the ad says: In what way is the president’s administration still meaningfully anti-communist?

 

There are two notorious communist leaders on planet Earth, Xi and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and Trump’s desire for better relations with both is so effusive that it borders on personal affection. He also appears to have been sincerely charmed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, America’s most influential next-gen socialist, and does nothing to hide it.

 

I’m not exaggerating for effect when I say that not only does Trump appear more comfortable with illiberal left-wing leaders than any modern Democratic president has been, he’s practiced socialist economics more aggressively than any modern Democratic president has. If Barack Obama or Joe Biden had sought government ownership stakes in 31 companies and counting, many grassroots right-wingers would have skipped the calls for impeachment and proceeded straight to egging on a military coup.

 

It all amounts to a second way in which Trump has “imported” the third world. Between his affinity for communist dictators, his cultivation of Arab client states, his abiding interest in rapprochement with Vladimir Putin and Russia, and his comparative hostility toward liberal powers in Europe and Canada, never before has American foreign policy held third-world forms of government in as high regard as it does now. At best, the president seems to view them as no worse than their Western counterparts. At worst, he actively prefers them.

 

It’s not his fault—or not entirely—that more than 40 percent of Americans now rate “socialism” positively, the highest share ever tracked by Gallup. That surge is a combination, I suspect, of years of loose talk on the right that foolishly made “socialism” synonymous with the welfare state (Americans love the welfare state!) and the cost of living having driven some desperate voters to give radical redistribution a second look. Trump is partly responsible for the latter, of course.

 

But I wonder if his presidency will end up durably destigmatizing third-world modes of government for younger generations. He’s governed largely by decree, has normalized Xi and Kim, has legitimized government meddling in the private sector, and is poised to reorient welfare programs around right-wing social engineering; as young Americans absorb all of it, this week’s new ads might seem even more ironically vacuous in hindsight than they already do. How could Republicans seriously campaign in 2026 on promising that “America will never be a communist country” while doing more than any other modern party to condition the public to tolerate statist autocracy?

 

The answer, I suppose, is that they’re not “seriously” campaigning on it. Terms like “communist” are substantively meaningless to the president and his fans, essentially just slurs that translate loosely to “domestic left-wing antagonist.” (That’s why, in the audio for the third ad, “communist” and “Marxist” are placed alongside “fascist” and “villains.” They’re all just empty swear words aimed at the president’s enemies.) When you hear “America will never be a communist country,” you’re not supposed to picture it being overrun by the Chinese army or under the yoke of some U.S. version of the Supreme Soviet. You’re supposed to imagine it being run by a Congress of “woke” twentysomething progressives with blue hair. Or President Jon Ossoff.

 

The essential disagreement in “horseshoe politics” doesn’t have to do with how government should operate, on which the far left and far right largely agree. It has to do with which side gets to be in charge. And, unintentionally, the three new ads illustrate that too: Insofar as their goal is to persuade Republican voters to turn out to vote and keep Congress in the GOP’s hands, they’re a plea to protect Trump’s quasi-autocratic powers by extending one-party rule in Washington. Normally the president doesn’t get to govern like a Chinese emperor just because his side happens to control the House and Senate, but in third-world America, the stakes in the midterms really are a choice between democracy and whatever the hell one might call the last 20 months.

 

You can have a communist country, i.e., one in which Democrats get to govern sometimes, or you can have the other thing, in which the attorney general mutters menacingly about media bias as a “national security issue” that Americans shouldn’t have to put up with. Having imported the third world into the government in 2024, voters will decide in November how much more of it they’d like to import.

Make American Democracy Great Again

By Jianli Yang

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

 

The world watched last week’s Trump-Xi summit with the familiar expectation that the leaders of the world’s two most powerful countries might finally unveil a “grand deal.” The same expectation surrounded their Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Busan, South Korea, last November and President Trump’s state visit to China in May. Each time, observers were disappointed: no historic reconciliation, no decisive confrontation, no grand bargain. This week’s summit, with its extraordinary pomp and ceremony, was therefore widely dismissed as a made-for-TV event with few deliverables. I think this misses what actually happened: The grand deal is already taking shape. It is simply not the kind people have been looking for.

 

There is a line in an old Chinese poem: One searches for her a thousand times in the crowd, only suddenly to turn around and find her standing where the lights are dim. We have been searching for a grand deal in communiqués, tariff schedules, and dramatic concessions. But the real deal is emerging through the increasingly frequent interactions between Trump and Xi themselves: a tacit understanding about the nature of their competition and, above all, that neither side currently wants to overturn the table.

 

After seven years of trade conflict, the Busan summit crystallized an uncomfortable reality. Each country possesses tools capable of inflicting serious economic damage on the other. Neither can easily force the other to capitulate, and both would pay dearly for unrestricted economic warfare. The resulting trade truce bought something more important than tariff relief: time.

 

What has followed has been extraordinary diplomatic choreography. Trump visited China in May; four months later, Xi came to Washington. Both received unusually elaborate treatment. More meetings are planned. Behind the pageantry is recognition of a strategic fact: G-2 has become a reality. But it is a realist G-2.

 

Realism begins not with what we wish the other country to be but with what it is: an opponent with the power, interests, ambitions, and capacity to hurt us. Trump and Xi are, in different ways, masters of transactional politics. Neither expects the other to convert. The emerging framework rests on mutual recognition of power and calculations of national interest.

 

That does not make the framework stable. The Chinese saying is blunt: “One mountain cannot accommodate two tigers.” International-relations scholars call the corresponding danger the Thucydides Trap: When a rising power challenges an established one, structural pressures can push them toward war. But Xi has repeatedly insisted that the Thucydides Trap can be overcome.

 

Perhaps. But Xi cannot know that. Trump cannot know it. Nobody can. That uncertainty explains the emphasis on “strategic stability.” What Trump and Xi appear to be constructing is neither friendship nor surrender. Competition continues. Conflicts continue. Each side still seeks advantage. But both have concluded that now is not the time to flip the table. If a showdown can be avoided, avoid it. If it cannot be avoided, postpone it. Meanwhile, accumulate strength. That, I believe, is the Trump-Xi grand deal. It is not a treaty. It is an understanding about how to compete.

 

Xi gave it its most audacious formulation during this visit: The “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and making America great again can “go hand in hand” and even reinforce each other. Let’s call Xi’s objective MCGA — Make China Great Again.

 

Can MAGA and MCGA really reinforce each other? Taken literally, the proposition strains credibility. America wants to restore manufacturing, maintain technological primacy, strengthen its military, and preserve global influence. China wants technological self-sufficiency, industrial dominance, military modernization, greater global influence, and national “rejuvenation.” Their ambitions collide precisely where each matters most.

 

MAGA-plus-MCGA is therefore less geopolitical reality than useful strategic fiction. Both leaders nevertheless have reasons to behave as though it might be true.

 

Trump places American reindustrialization at the center of MAGA. The new U.S.–China Boards of Trade and Investment could allow selected Chinese capital and technology to contribute to American manufacturing.

 

Taiwan presents the harder test. For Xi, “reunification” is inseparable from national rejuvenation. Beijing says Xi urged Washington to adopt the “correct position of opposing ‘Taiwan independence.’” Trump has not publicly accepted that formulation. America traditionally says it does not support Taiwan independence, not that it opposes it. Yet the White House summit account conspicuously omitted Taiwan, while a roughly $14 billion Taiwan arms package has remained unsigned for months.

 

More strikingly, the White House shared that the “United States and China were allies in World War II and fought side by side to win the war” against Japan. This version of history is errant. America’s formal Chinese ally was the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek, not the People’s Republic, which did not exist until 1949. That wartime ROC survives today on Taiwan.

 

Why emphasize such deliberately broad historical language now? One possible interpretation, perhaps the only logical one, is that strategic ambiguity is becoming even more ambiguous — about who are friends and who are adversaries, extending beyond whether America would defend Taiwan toward how Washington places Taiwan, and perhaps Japan, within its larger accommodation with Beijing. This does not prove that the U.S.’s Taiwan policy has changed. But this new friend-or-foe ambiguity has strategic consequences, which help explain the unease in Taipei and Tokyo.

 

There is another foundation beneath the new G-2. Trump and Xi increasingly acknowledge and praise each other’s civilizations. Trump invoked Confucius during his China visit; at the National Archives, he contrasted America’s 250 years with China’s thousands. Xi, in turn, praised America’s distinctive founding spirit.

 

Admirable diplomacy. But something is missing. The leaders can celebrate each other’s civilizations while avoiding the enormous difference between their political systems. And here an apparently unrelated event during Xi’s visit becomes important.

 

The White House had barred CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House grounds. The organizations sued. Other major media organizations stood with them. Then U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, appointed by Trump himself, ordered their access restored. The administration complied.

 

Consider how strange this must appear from Beijing. A president appoints a judge. The judge later rules against the president. The president is angry. The ruling nevertheless takes effect.

 

That is constitutional government. But in Xi’s China, the media must “bear the Party’s surname.” In America, the media does not bear Trump’s surname, the Republican Party’s surname, or the Democratic Party’s surname. Presidents can attack journalists; journalists can attack presidents; courts can restrain presidents; and presidents remain presidents.

 

This is not peripheral to the competition with China. It is part of what America is competing with. Talking about competition. Nowhere is that more consequential than in artificial intelligence.

 

Trump and Xi deserve credit for establishing a dialogue on “super intelligence” and a bilateral communication channel for AI incidents. Advanced AI can enable cyberattacks, manipulate information, affect weapons and critical infrastructure, and increasingly act with degrees of autonomy its creators may not fully anticipate. Its benefits will not respect national borders. Neither will its dangers.

 

Yet Washington and Beijing remain obsessed with one question: Who will win? The harder question is: What does winning mean?

 

Suppose America develops the world’s most powerful AI and dominates compute and robotics but concludes along the way that defeating China requires adopting China’s methods of surveillance, information control, centralized data collection, and political management. Would that constitute an American victory? If America must become more like China to defeat China, China has achieved something remarkable without firing a shot.

 

This is why freedom should not be the sentimental appendix to American strategy. It is part of the strategy. And it points to the weakness of the Trump-Xi grand deal: It is highly personalized. Particularly on the American side, it is difficult to imagine this arrangement emerging so rapidly and dramatically under another president.

 

But Trump and Xi will eventually leave the stage. What survives them?

 

Realism is indispensable. America should recognize Chinese power, negotiate where interests overlap, deter where they conflict, and avoid turning every disagreement into an ideological crusade. But realism works until it does not. Leaders change. Interests change. Relative power changes. Miscalculations happen. America therefore needs something beneath realism, not instead of it, but underneath it.

 

American democracy itself is unquestionably troubled. The information revolution has amplified polarization, rewarded outrage, fragmented the public sphere, and weakened institutional trust. AI may intensify these problems. No serious defender of democracy should pretend otherwise.

 

But the answer to malfunctioning democracy is not less constitutionalism. It is better constitutionalism. This is where a third acronym belongs beside MAGA and MCGA: MADGA — Make American Democracy Great Again.

 

I do not mean another crusade to remake China in America’s image. MADGA means something more conservative: repairing and preserving the constitutional inheritance that made American power possible, independent courts, a free press, political competition, peaceful transfers of power, federalism, private enterprise, protection for dissent, and the capacity to discover mistakes and correct them.

 

Authoritarian systems can move faster because they suppress friction. Democracies often appear disorderly because they institutionalize it. But friction is not necessarily weakness. In engineering, friction prevents machines from spinning out of control. In politics, constitutional friction can prevent a powerful country from making an enormous mistake that nobody is permitted to identify.

 

That becomes more important in the age of AI. A superintelligent authoritarian state may become extraordinarily efficient. It may also become extraordinarily efficient at being wrong.

 

America’s advantage should therefore not consist merely of better chips, larger data centers, stronger armies, or more capable AI. It should include a system in which enormous power remains subject to law, competing institutions, independent scrutiny, and citizens who retain the right to say no.

 

That is not idealism. It is national strategy. MAGA and MCGA may coexist for a time. The realist G-2 Trump and Xi are constructing may even help prevent two nuclear superpowers from stumbling into catastrophe. But America should enter it knowing what it seeks to preserve.

 

Something happened during Xi’s visit that was much smaller than a G-2 summit and, in another sense, much larger. A president tried to exclude journalists he despised. Other journalists stood with them. They went to court. A judge appointed by that president ruled against him. And the journalists walked back through the White House gates. Xi may regard that as evidence of American disorder. Americans should recognize it as evidence of American strength.

 

Trump and Xi may be right that MAGA and MCGA need not lead to war. But America should add one condition to its grand bargain, a condition imposed not on China, but on itself: In competing with China, America must remain America. MAGA needs to be committed to the democratic ideals that are at the core of what the country is all about.

Trump Won’t Let the GOP Go Its Own Way So Easily

By Noah Rothman

Monday, September 28, 2026

 

Last Friday, Jim chronicled what seemed like a coordinated breakout among the GOP’s office seekers as one Republican after another sought to establish their independence from Donald Trump. All that movement at the same time, and in one direction, struck Jim as too conspicuous to be attributable to individual candidates’ calculations. Well, he was right.

 

That same day, Politico revealed that the president had grudgingly come to terms with his unpopularity. He understood the imperative Republican candidates are observing as they sidle out from under Trump’s shadow. At least, that’s what the president’s aides told Politico’s reporters.

 

Trump has “recently swallowed dissent so long as candidates criticize his policies and not him personally,” the outlet reported. Discerning readers might wonder how Republicans can express that dissent if they cannot speak out against the policy preferences with which they disagree or highlight the president’s manifest characterological defects. Nevertheless, Trump is supposedly open to some friendly criticism — in theory, at least. There’s even an informal process in place for registering that dissent with the president’s gatekeepers.

 

“More often times than not, a candidate or an elected official will call the White House and ask how to do it, because they are not interested in going against the president,” one unnamed “person familiar with the White House’s thinking” told Politico. Another source, a White House staffer, outlined the “safe” ways for Republican candidates to establish their independence from the president. “They criticize staff. They criticize implementation,” the individual said. “It hasn’t been ‘Trump failed’ or ‘Trump’s wrong.’”

 

It’s starting to sound like the president himself isn’t convinced that he needs to let Republican candidates go their own way. And when it comes to the Republicans in his Floridian backyard, Trump has made it clear that he will brook no dissent.

 

It’s not just Republican Representative Maria Salazar who is feeling Trump’s wrath. The South Florida representative, whose district is 70 percent Hispanic, enraged the White House after she produced an advertisement criticizing the president’s deportation program. “Trump reposted more than a dozen messages criticizing Salazar on Truth Social, the president’s social media platform,” Politico subsequently reported over the weekend, “including one user’s post that read: ‘So we need a NEW Republican to Replace Salazar.’” Rather, the entire Florida Republican Party is being brought “to heel.”

 

“Earlier Saturday, Trump lashed out at a Miami Herald story that reported how GOP gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds had removed references to the president from his campaign website,” Politico’s Playbook newsletter read Monday. The outlet’s reporters note that some Republicans, including outgoing Governor Ron DeSantis, plan to keep their distance from Vice President JD Vance when he campaigns in the state later this week. It may be coincidental, but these maneuvers are also consistent with a worsening political environment for the incumbent party. “The nonpartisan Cook Political Report has shifted 15 House races nationwide toward Democrats, including three seats in Florida,” the report observed.

 

Trump has been doing a lot of “lashing out” lately, and his foremost sources of irritation seem to be his fellow Republicans, but the president’s agitation only confirms the depths of his party’s troubles. Between that and where the president is choosing to spend the final weeks of the 2026 midterm election cycle — Florida, Ohio, Oklahoma, Alabama, etc. — suggests that the political landscape is as bad for Republicans as the polls indicate.

 

Republican candidates can be forgiven for observing that the GOP outperforms the president’s job approval rating in the generic ballot test. Moreover, they are justified in sensing an opportunity in the polls of individual battleground districts, where the average Democratic lead, according to the Cook Political Report’s survey earlier this month, is just two points, not ten points. If the GOP’s candidates could establish their own independent bona fides with their voters ahead of November, the thinking goes, Republicans might be able to stave off the worst-case scenario for their party.

 

If only the president would let them.

Unstatesmanlike Statesmen

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, September 28, 2026

 

A few years ago in Switzerland, to which then I was giving some serious thought to relocating, a local asked me about my view of Swiss politics. I said that when it comes to Switzerland, I am a conservative. He asked if this meant I thought well of the Swiss People’s Party, the Swiss vessel for the kind of rightist populism currently resurgent elsewhere in Europe. I replied that what I meant was not that I favor the political right in Switzerland but that I am conservative in the sense that I like Switzerland the way it is, and, more to the point, that I am conscious of the fact that Switzerland got the way it is with very little input from slightly disreputable American journalists over the course of its now nearly seven and one-half centuries of existence. Schweiz für die Schweizer may be a right-wing slogan (and everything sounds more right-wing in German, even Swiss German), but the underlying sentiment—that Switzerland is for the Swiss—is one that Swiss people of many different political persuasions will voice, from time to time, usually politely.

 

I think a little about the story about how Secretary of State George Shultz would direct newly appointed ambassadors to a globe and say, “Show me your country,” at which point the freshly elevated diplomats would invariably point out the country to which they were being dispatched. “No,” Schultz would say, tapping his finger on the United States: “This is your country.” I could live happily in Switzerland or Italy or France, but none of those is my country.

 

In the United States, the au courant expression on the right is “America First!”—never mind the ugly history of that particular phrase. (“Switzerland for the Swiss” also echoes antisemitic campaigns from the 20^th century.) But the notion that America is for Americans, first and foremost, ought not be controversial—for whom else should it be? I would think that a reasonably intelligent right-wing populist and a reasonably intelligent democratic socialist (a double dose of question-begging there, I know) could agree in a general way that U.S. policy regarding immigration or military deployments ought to be conducted with an eye to U.S. interests—even the few genuine advocates of an open-borders immigration policy typically argue that this policy would be good for the United States rather than argue that the United States has some kind of moral duty to present itself to the world as a kind of global public resource. Nationalist ideology is not a prerequisite for a policy oriented toward national interest.

 

Nor is nationalism per se necessary for understanding that relations between citizens of the same country are different from relations between those citizens and foreigners—and it should be understood that different is a value-neutral term: I feel differently about Americans than I do about Canadians or Mexicans or Japanese, and that is not exclusively in a positive way. We have different countries for a reason, and we have different kinds of interpersonal relationships for a reason, too.

 

Which brings me, first, to Benjamin Netanyahu.

 

I do not follow internal Israeli politics closely, but I would say that I am better disposed toward Netanyahu than most of my friends and colleagues. I have friends who follow Israeli politics very closely and who are dauntless and long-standing friends of Israel who believe that, whatever his merits and whatever good he may have done in the past, Netanyahu has overstayed his time. These are questions for history, but what I am interested in here rises barely, if at all, past the level of etiquette: I did not care for Netanyahu’s coming to New York City to lecture the mayor of that city, Zohran Mamdani, about his political views. Yes, Mayor Mamdani has imbecilic and morally unsound views when it comes to Israel, and, yes, the United Nations is notionally outside of the United States under the extraterritoriality agreement attached to its founding, but as anyone who ever has sat through a traffic jam caused by a meeting of the General Assembly could tell you, the United Nations is in New York City, whatever some piece of paper somewhere says. The Israeli prime minister is a guest when he visits New York City, and he should act like one. The U.N. is a forum for diplomatic exchange, but that is not what Netanyahu was offering. Netanyahu was campaigning.

 

The episode illustrates a strange aspect of politics in our time: A generation ago, the proverbial wisdom was that all politics is local; for a minute or two, it appeared to be the case that all politics was national; and now, all politics—or at least a lot of politics—is global. In spite of the fact that New York City has no meaningful foreign policy to speak of (the mayor of New York City does not even have jurisdiction over the No. 6 train), Mamdani has made Israel and Gaza central to his political message, and his positions are championed by his fellow Democratic Socialists of America and increasingly common among progressives and mainstream Democrats at large. In Slate, Aymann Ismail writes:

 

Since 2024, Democratic voters have moved substantially further away from Israel. Candidates attacking unconditional support for the Israeli government have won Democratic primaries. More than 100 House Democrats recently voted to eliminate billions in military assistance to Israel. And several of the people who spent the 2024 convention trying to convince Democrats that they were attempting to save the party, not sabotage it, have spent the intervening years burrowing further into Democratic politics.

 

That tendency is not limited to Democrats seeking national offices where they might expect to have some influence on foreign affairs. Gaza is a factor in the politics of, e.g., the Oakland school board, as the Wall Street Journal reports:

 

The board had scarcely embarked on its agenda, which included school-site improvements and enrollment issues, when a pro-Palestinian speaker’s microphone was cut off after his two minutes expired. When the man continued to talk, Mike Hutchinson, Oakland school-board president, announced a five-minute recess.

 

While Hutchinson and his colleagues remained seated, demonstrators chanted “Free Palestine!” and “Shame!” The school-board president then adjourned the meeting before the measure was formally introduced, as dozens of people were still waiting to speak.

 

In the largely progressive San Francisco Bay Area, other local governments and political organizations have already taken steps to condemn Israel’s actions, drawing praise from Palestinian supporters and accusations of antisemitism from Jewish groups—along with questions about why they are taking positions on a war on the other side of the world.

 

Oakland’s public schools are such that only one-third of students are proficient in reading at their grade level, while only one-quarter are proficient at math, in both cases underperforming the California average, which is not great. The evidence suggests that the people who run the schools in Oakland probably should not be allowed to adopt kittens from animal shelters, much less be empowered to manage the education of the children of a city with more than 400,000 residents—and how much less ought we to care what they think about a conflict that has been raging either for about 80 years or (if you take the long view) about 14 centuries? Similarly, the thinking person probably will discount Mamdani’s views on complex geopolitical questions until after the sage of Astoria figures out how to get the trash picked up on Bruckner Boulevard.

 

Netanyahu and his party have reciprocated Mamdani’s unseemly interest, leading to the bizarre fact that the name and likeness of the mayor of New York City can be seen on billboards and in campaign literature in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. And that is fair enough, I suppose, if strange: Mamdani has invited the attention, and his equivocation (and worse) between Israeli self-defense and the Palestinian campaign of (among other things) raping and murdering civilians at music festivals is grotesque, illiterate, and—yes—profoundly antisemitic, in that (and not only in that) the idiotic claim that Israel is engaged in genocide against the Arabs is categorically antisemitic, an anti-Jewish smear applied to Jews because of the Jewish experience as the targets of a campaign of genuine genocide. Netanyahu has a right to be steamed. But a statesman should be statesmanlike, which entails moderating one’s speech and behavior when one is outside one’s own country. And Netanyahu probably should forgo presenting himself as the tribune of Jewish Americans, many of whom do not wish to enjoy the very slight honor of being used as the prime minister’s political props.

 

Likewise, a statesmanlike statesman ought to tailor his behavior when dealing with foreign nationals—especially foreign heads of state. Donald Trump’s simpering courtship of Chinese autocrat Xi Jinping would be difficult to bear under any circumstances, but the American president’s gleeful denigration of his predecessor in the office as president for the amusement of a foreign despot was intolerably shameful. There is almost nothing that Trump could do that would surprise me—nothing short of an act of courage or generosity—and the business with the autopen “portrait” of Joe Biden is textbook Trump stuff: petty, corrosive, dumb. I do wonder how Trump’s sycophantic circle, the members of which are obsessed with the notion that they and the man they love are “alpha males,” received Trump’s display of subordination to Xi. Presumably, they will do what they usually do and try to convince themselves that it is part of some brilliant tactical ploy. One can safely bet what Xi is thinking: “Here’s a couple of pandas, boy, and I’m taking Taiwan.”

 

If it means anything, then “America First” means Americans first, even Americans as dotty and useless as Joe Biden, a contemptible and grubby little grasper who did not have much of a working brain back when he had something of a working brain. If you are a nationalist in any genuine sense, then your people are your people. But, of course, Trump is not a nationalist in any meaningful sense, for the same reason he isn’t really much of a patriot or a racist or a Christian—Trump is his own god, and he recognizes no loyalty at odds with his interests and no good that is not in accord with his appetites and desires. Trump may say that he cares about “America First,” but naturally he will wait and see what Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin or some Qatari potentate has to offer to him, too. Trump has on a hundred occasions sold out genuine American interests in the service of his own vanity and greed, and he’ll probably do it a hundred more times before he leaves office, however he leaves office.

 

The president of the United States is not the United States. The president is not the country. But in one-on-one dealings with Xi or any other head of state, the president represents the United States, and while he does so he is clothed with vast symbolic and actual power. Batting his eyelashes at Xi and putting on a sophomoric mean-girls act to ingratiate himself with the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party? That is a funny kind of nationalist, indeed, and a desperate one.

 

Economics for English Majors

 

By request: How is it that the proposed ban on diesel exports could actually raise diesel prices in the United States?

 

To be sure, a diesel export ban likely wouldn’t have the exclusive effect of raising diesel prices. The bad news: A diesel export ban likely would have the effect of raising the prices of diesel, gasoline, jet fuel, and other refined-petroleum products.

 

A little background:

 

Because of the way oil is refined into usable petroleum products, it is not the case that refiners say: “Well, we need this much diesel, this much gasoline, and this much jet fuel, so we’ll turn x barrels of crude into diesel, y into gasoline, and z into jet fuel.” Rather, it is the case that each barrel of crude simultaneously produces a variety of petroleum products in more or less fixed amounts. Typically, a 42-gallon barrel of oil will give you around 20 gallons of gasoline, 12 or 13 gallons of diesel and heating oil, around 5 gallons of jet fuel, and a quantity of other stuff (asphalt, lubrication oil, petrochemicals) that accounts for the rest. (N.B.: 42 gallons of petroleum produces more than 42 gallons of refined product.) In the United States, the total amount of oil that gets refined into fuels and other products is determined mainly by demand for gasoline. Producing enough gasoline to supply the U.S. market means producing more diesel than Americans consume. Happily, the world is full of people who want to buy American petroleum products, and so surplus U.S. diesel helps to deliver food to shops in the United Kingdom and powers buses in Brazil and runs backup hospital generators hither and yon. It also provides Americans with something Americans absolutely love: corporate profits, which, beyond making sure that some oil barons get a new yacht every couple of years, shore up various tax bases and pay dividends into retirement accounts and fatten up paychecks with profit-sharing programs, etc. Hooray for profit!

 

Given that refiners export that diesel because doing so is profitable, what do you think they will do if Uncle Stupid tells them that they cannot export it anymore? Do you think that taking away one source of profit is likely to get them to cut prices in the United States? No. That would be what the economists call stupid wishful thinking. Exxon did not get to be Exxon by being blasé about profit.

 

At first, the refiners probably will divert diesel into storage. Diesel doesn’t last forever, but neither do stupid export bans. Once the storage facilities are full, then refiners probably would begin reducing their output—remember, they already produce all the diesel U.S. consumers use plus a bit of what the rest of the world uses, too. Producing less diesel would not mean only that refiners were no longer producing the diesel they used to export—it would also mean that they would no longer be producing the gasoline, jet fuel, etc., that they produced in the course of producing that exported diesel. That probably would lead to higher prices for all of those fuels, lubricants, and chemicals, because less is … less. Reduce supply, keep demand steady, and prices can be expected to go up.

 

Higher prices for fuels, lubricants, and chemicals mean upward price pressure on … pretty much everything. Not great for a country already dealing with persistent inflation.

 

An export ban would also create business opportunities for overseas competitors to U.S. producers legally prevented from serving export markets. That would not be great news for those producers’ shareholders and employees.

 

Now, presenting the Trump administration with a dumb and destructive economic policy is like presenting a kid with a cookie—or a marshmallow, as in the famous Stanford experiment. If a thing is dumb, it is a safe bet these dummies are going to do the thing. That’s what dummies do. It’s a dumb marshmallow, and they are going to eat it pretty much every time.

The Bottom Begins to Drop Out

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

 

Speaking of amusement-park rides, did you ever have that sick swoony feeling that comes once you’ve hit the top of a roller coaster’s precipice and know that the bottom is about to fall out? (“It’s all downhill from here,” and not in a good way.) It’s the reason why, unlike some of my more deranged colleagues, I am not a fan of the strangely planned horror of roller coasters. In fact, that methodical click-clack-CHUNK sound that you hear in the front cab as you approach the summit of one has been a frequent nightmare of mine since adolescence. Perhaps because that’s when I first began to relate it to the inevitable onrushing beats of real life.

 

And here we are, days away from October in a midterm year. This is beginning to feel a bit like a nightmare as well, a familiar one where all the inexorable beats are hit and we all go plummeting downwards — to wake up on the other end, not dead but brutally scarred. My historically minded colleague Dan McLaughlin once observed that parties facing electoral doom in a November election rarely turn their fortunes around after September — but the bottom sure can fall out from underneath them after that, as time takes its toll and opinions get baked in. So here we go.

 

With the Wall Street Journal’s newest opinion poll, putting the president at a miserable 37 percent approval rating, I think it’s fair to say that the cake is baked, like it or not. This is the impression of the Republican Party that most (not all) voters will take into the booth with them: the impression of Trump and his unanswerable minions pretending to party it up at state dinners with our (actual, not merely ideological) sworn geographic enemies in China to celebrate their rank privilege.

 

I have held out my hopes for the GOP’s prospects in November: Partisan gerrymandering (like it or not) has decreased the elasticity of House districts, so that the Republican wipeout in the lower chamber will be mediated by hard geographic (and demographic) realities. In the upper chamber? Abdul El-Sayed is a grotesque parody of woke antisemitism. Troy Jackson has literally spawned two children with his second cousin. But statewide overall, in Senate and governor’s races? We’re getting to Katy-bar-the-door levels here as the winds pick up (ideally not high enough to lead to a flattening in Kansas). And if you wonder why the GOP is facing brutal headwinds in Iowa’s governor’s race (CLICK) or why Trump is fighting off his own once-hardcore representatives in Florida Latino districts (CLACK) then get ready for the RUUUUMBLE as we tumble down and around to our destination.

 

All of the familiar beats that signal a GOP reckoning are being heard — and delivered to us with such “Let them eat cake” sass, too. Americans currently suffer under tariffs, obscenely inflated gas prices, and inexplicable trade wars against our geographic neighbors, while Xi Jinping gets a personal tour of Trump’s unfinished vanity ballroom and his personal insult wall of former presidents. But he’s doing this for America, right?

 

Meanwhile, Trump’s close-held allies grotesquely fatten and enrich themselves, feeding upon an open economic wound that looks, for all the world, as if Trump tore it open on purpose, specifically to give himself and his chosen people a chance to feed upon America’s gushing bloodline. It’s not a popular position to revel in, but Trump’s people genuinely don’t seem to care; we’re testing the far outer bounds of human decency in this administration now, as if daring the public to see how much they can take. Good luck in November.

 

Trump Bans Media, Then Complains About the Empty Room

 

The reason I really worry? I can read the tea leaves from those who are purportedly “in charge” of this whole mess. Namely, Donald Trump himself — who knows full well he’s doomed at this point, if you trust the media briefings. (He just isn’t handling it all that well.) So this weekend, Trump flipped out at the mainstream media — who, recall, forswore pool coverage of the president’s public events until he rescinded his random “fight-me-please” ban on some networks and outlets — for not giving his big China bash the due it properly deserved:

 

CNN and MSDNC’s Ratings have dropped considerably. The primary reason is NO CREDIBILITY! They only write badly about a man who won the Election IN A GIANT LANDSLIDE, winning all 7 Swing States, the Popular Vote, and 86% of the Counties, etc., and whose Popularity has grown because of the unprecedented SUCCESS our Country is having on both the World Stage, and at home. CNN and MSDNC, to show you how fake they are, today refused to cover one of the Biggest and Most Beautiful Events to take place in many years, the arrival at the White House of the Highly Respected President of China, Xi Jinping, and his beautiful wife, Madam Peng. The event was magnificent — Actually made for Television but, because they’re Fake News, and because they knew how good it would be, they didn’t want credit to be given to “TRUMP,” they refused to be there. That’s why they have such poor Ratings. Tonight’s State Dinner at the White House, for President Xi, will be spectacular! The Media will be in attendance. President DONALD J. TRUMP

 

Imagine that! Selectively banning certain media outlets, provoking outrage from all the rest, and timing all of this just before a major state visit! But of course, Trump wasn’t thinking that far ahead enough in the future. So now, instead of rescinding his fruitless ban, Trump is frustratedly poking the media with a stick, muttering, “Do something!”

 

But he’s weak now, and the media clearly seem to finally realize it – they haven’t buckled. And Trump is clearly cracking. He used coverage of his recent U.N. speech to brag about how he had circumvented the networks’ coverage withdrawal, and went on to personally insult Kaitlin Collins, trying to provoke her on-air. She didn’t react, infuriating Trump even more. (Again, the logic of a frustrated bully: “Do something! Take the bait!”)

 

Trump Breaks Bread with Man About to End the World

 

Amid all the chaos, a pause for a moment: Donald Trump sat down for a dinner with one of America’s top five most awkward human beings (non-Musk category) on Sunday, as he broke bread with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei — whose AI product, remember, we are handily warned every other day, can end the world. We can only imagine how it went, given that Amodei is notoriously odd yet also incalculably influential.

 

Amodei, for those not keeping score in our recent AI doomstakes, is firmly on the side of doom despite benefiting from it: This thing, which I profit from developing to its utmost, will kill all mankind — unless the government forces everyone else to stop, so that we can. (You’ve hopefully seen the SNL parody of Amodei already, played to agonizing perfection by Jane Wickline.)

 

I must emphasize that I am an extreme AI skeptic. But SNL does a decent enough job of explaining what I believe to be the rotten core of Amodei’s industry flex. “I’m just crazy enough to pull this trigger unless you force everyone around me to help solidify my profitable industry position” is the sort of negotiating stance taken by either an egotistical madman or an Effective Altruist (and I dare you to explain to me the difference, in detail) but not by anyone serious about the threat of AI.

 

A plea to restrain all competitors — except those with entrenched positions in the AI (and thus presumably national security) world — is nothing less than a plea for the federal government to permanently hook the money hose up to several (but select) inscrutable Silicon Valley companies in perpetuity, to the exclusion of all others. I have refrained thus far from commenting on our current cycle of AI panic, simply because the hands pushing the desired outcomes are now far more discernable than they were before. But now that their profit-taking motives are becoming clearer, I am forced to conclude that however skeptical I may be of AI, I am far more skeptical of the companies pushing its seeming omnipresent future — for their own ends.

Against the Hollywood Bailout

National Review Online

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

 

Hollywood has been in decline for years as studios cut spending and shift production overseas. Now the companies and unions that run the town are seeking a bailout from federal taxpayers in the form of a costly “incentive,” and their friends in Congress are happy to oblige.

 

Last week, lawmakers released the Motion Picture, Television, and Entertainment Revitalization Act — a gilded name for an open-ended subsidy to the film industry. The bill would create a federal tax credit for movies and television shows produced predominantly in the United States, covering 20 percent of nearly all their labor costs. Bonuses for special conditions could raise a project’s subsidy rate up to 30 percent. One such bonus is for filming in declared disaster areas, which — because of last year’s wildfires — includes all of Los Angeles County until 2030.

 

Proponents in Hollywood say the credit is needed to rebalance the playing field after other countries developed their own subsidies. In the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, government programs can rebate nearly half of film-production costs. Projects are highly mobile, the argument goes, so America must match these incentives if it wants to compete. Since 2021, a third of U.S. motion-picture jobs have disappeared while employment has risen abroad.

 

Yet foreign subsidies can’t explain why domestic filming collapsed in the past few years, as most have existed for decades and U.S. employment peaked as recently as 2022. The story of Hollywood’s fall is more complicated. Though the box office has rebounded, total industry spending has stalled since the post-pandemic streaming surge. Releases are down, meaning workers have fewer productions to join worldwide.

 

The greatest job decline after Covid was in 2023, before Hollywood’s chief competitor, the U.K., expanded its film subsidies. That was the year of the industry’s “double strike,” when actors and writers simultaneously walked off studio lots for months. Hundreds of projects were delayed or outright canceled as filming rolled to a halt, costing the entertainment industry billions of dollars. When studios finally signed contracts to end the strikes, they had to accept unions’ core demands, ballooning their compensation in perpetuity. Is it any wonder they have looked to film elsewhere?

 

The proposed federal tax credit would bail out the union workers who bargained for more than they were worth. It would subsidize almost all labor costs — for employees and contractors, both pre-production and post-production — of film crews, animators, special-effects artists, writers, actors, and even producers and directors. There are no limits on eligible compensation, so taxpayers would pick up a good chunk of the salaries of Christopher Nolan and Tom Cruise.

 

Advocates suggest that all Americans would benefit from the subsidy spurring economic activity across the nation. It’s rich that Hollywood, which usually slanders “trickle-down” economics, is calling for a tax cut to boost supply. But, as opposed to broad rate reductions, targeted tax incentives don’t have a strong record of goosing economic growth. Dozens of states already have film subsidies to woo studios away from one another, costing taxpayers billions with no discernible effect on employment or wages. Why would another giveaway stacked on top perform any better?

 

Unlike most state incentives, the federal tax credit would be entirely uncapped. It would therefore cost the federal government billions of dollars each year at a minimum, with the fiscal burden rising with industry spending. Congress needs to be shrinking the gap between federal revenues and outlays, not widening it.

 

Sadly, it is not just California Democrats who want to increase the deficit by giving Hollywood a special break. Many Republicans, including President Trump, have also endorsed the subsidy. The bill’s sponsor in the Senate is Tim Scott (R., S.C.), whose history of using the tax code for industrial policy is instructive. Scott was the author of Opportunity Zones, a tax exemption for low-income areas that was recently expanded at a ten-year cost of $41 billion. Studies find that the zones seem to create jobs but in fact merely reallocate them from nearby communities.

 

This evidence reflects the theory of the “broken window” fallacy, in which policymakers point to the visible benefits of an intervention — like the repairman hired to fix a broken window, or an investment made in response to a subsidy — while ignoring the unseen production that had to be redirected. To the extent a federal credit would result in more projects filmed in America, it would shift jobs and resources away from more valuable uses.

 

Of course, the true purpose of the tax credit is probably not to foster prosperity but to help Hollywood pay off the unions that wrecked its labor market. Either way, Congress should leave this handout on the cutting-room floor.

Anti-Zionism: An Anti-Jewish History

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

 

A common story told to Jewish schoolchildren is about a town that commissions a cover for its Torah scroll. When it finally arrives, the cover is stunning, but it’s clearly too short to cover the whole scroll. The townsfolk come up with a fix: They’ll just trim the Torah.

 

This story is told to children because the absurdity of the “solution” is obvious even to the young. Yet I fear that Benjamin Moser took the wrong lesson from it.

 

Moser’s new book Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History is the presentation of a worldview so narrow that Judaism has to be pared down considerably in order to fit inside it. Moser begins by declaring that the Jews are not a people, a nation, a civilization, or a society. They are adherents of a religion, strictly in the modern sense. They are Protestants with bagels and lox.

 

This ahistorical and narrow presentation of Judaism is the core problem faced by anti-Zionists. The Jews are an ancient people who have survived into the present. Modern terminology doesn’t have a category for them. That can be confusing, even threatening, to those who need everyone to fit into a modern framework. Therefore, “religion” is the least threatening box to put them in: If Judaism is “just” a religion, the Jews are just like everyone else.

 

Complicating this picture greatly is the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in the historic Jewish homeland with the establishment of the state of Israel. The movement that brought this to fruition was Zionism, which can most accurately be defined as the Jewish right of self-determination. Today, Jewish anti-Zionists are a fringe group fighting a long-finished conflict, like Hiroo Onoda hiding out on some remote island in the Philippines.

 

Fringe, but dangerous: Post-1948, anti-Zionism seeks the dismantling of the state of Israel. To establish this undoing as a legitimate goal, anti-Zionists must argue that Jewish sovereignty is itself illegitimate, because there’s no such thing as “the Jewish people.”

 

Thus we have Moser stating the following about Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism’s political program, and his famous book The Jewish State: “Der Judenstaat is short. It defines the Jews as a ‘people—one people,’ ein Volk. In the nineteenth century, this word’s associations were political and above all racial, and therefore clashed with the traditional definition of the Jews as a community of religious believers.”

 

Moser clings to this idea like a life raft. After an introduction in which Moser calls Herzl “thoughtless,” “childish,” and likely mentally ill, and in which the author expresses resentment toward his parents for not telling him that this Herzl guy was a madman, Moser introduces us to the first of his 12 subjects: Aaron Samuel Tamares. A small-town rabbi in modern-day Poland but a prominent figure in the Jewish intellectual world as the 19^th century turned into the 20^th, Tamares was known for his pacifism. This put him in conflict with some of his fellow Zionists and estranged him from the wider movement.

 

Tamares is a compelling figure, but Moser uses him as a tool to shame the Zionists for being impious. The desire for a national home was “undignified and irreligious, Tamares insisted: Judaism was ‘independent of land, kings, and lords,’” Moser writes.

 

Moser returns to this theme in his chapter on Dutch poet Jacob Israël de Haan, who, like Moser and Tamares, began as a Zionist but became deeply disillusioned and joined the anti-Zionists. “Without the laws that had kept the Jews together through the centuries, Zionism would become just another vulgar chauvinism,” Moser writes of de Haan’s views.

 

Yet it turns out that Moser considers the Orthodox to be dispensable too. Moser celebrates the anti-Zionist rabbi Hyman Judah Schachtel, who became the spiritual leader of an infamously anti-Zionist synagogue in Houston in the 1940s. Schachtel “rejected the Zionist idea ‘that we are Jews by race and nationality.’” But he also enforced a bizarre synagogue policy: Zionists and observant Jews could only be nonvoting members. Moser says that Schachtel and his congregants understood how “Superstitious abracadabra, the thousands of petty directives governing diet and dress … was getting in the way of a universal message.” They therefore put strict limits on their congregation’s tolerance of traditional Judaism.

 

By the end of Anti-Zionism, the People of the Book aren’t a people and have no book.

 

Believe it or not, this isn’t the only problem with Moser’s work. There’s a reason Anti-Zionism has received harshly negative reviews from the New York Times and The New Yorker, outlets that regularly defend the concept of anti-Zionism, and that reason is Moser’s fundamental dishonesty. The New Yorker, in particular, picks apart Moser’s chapter on Hannah Arendt, which Moser uses to portray Zionism and Nazism as enthusiastic and like-minded allies. The New Yorker’s review uncovers a slew of falsehoods and factual errors in this chapter.

 

The Arendt chapter focuses on her controversial 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, and it may be where Moser is at his sloppiest. He quotes the following passage from a contemporary review by then-Commentary editor-in-chief Norman Podhoretz: “In the place of the monstrous Nazi, she gives us the ‘banal’ Nazi; in the place of the Jew as a virtuous martyr, she gives us the Jew as accomplice in evil; and in the place of the confrontation of guilt and innocence, she gives us the ‘collaboration’ of criminal and victim.”

 

Moser cites this as an example of how, to Zionists, “the only permissible lesson of the Holocaust was Jewish moral spotlessness.” But Podhoretz was making a passing stylistic contrast between Arendt’s and civil rights activist James Baldwin’s approaches to writing about victimhood, not arguing for moral spotlessness. The point of Podhoretz’s review was to debunk Arendt’s claim that, without Jewish collaboration, “there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.” Arendt’s own past scholarship on totalitarianism, Podhoretz pointed out, shows that it is society-wide collaboration, not piecemeal administrative grunt work by a small group of prisoners, that makes such mass murder possible. Moser pretends such substantive engagement with Arendt by her critics didn’t exist at all.

 

This cheap deceit is a perfect distillation of Moser’s writing throughout Anti-Zionism. And it explains why publications that are so critical of Israel and Zionism, like the New York Times and The New Yorker, were so clearly disappointed: Moser’s book does more to discredit anti-Zionism than to revive it.

 

Another form of Moser’s dishonesty is his refusal to give agency to anyone except his story’s villains. In the chapter on Ahmad Sadiq Saad, an Egyptian Jewish communist who opposed Zionism, Moser writes the following about the conflict that followed Israel’s declaration of statehood: “Egypt found itself at war with the new State of Israel.” By “found itself at war with,” he means “invaded.”

 

Moser makes a habit of skipping over how a conflict or an incident began so he can avoid uncomfortable truths. Regarding the 1921 Arab Jaffa riots, for example, Moser is beyond parody: “The degree of mutual enmity, the bizarre conspiracy theories doing the rounds, made it hard to ascertain the reasons for the outbreak. The Arabs whispered that twelve hundred Arabs had been killed by airplanes. The Jews whispered that the Arabs had poisoned all the milk.”

 

But the 1921 riots are no mystery: They began when there was a street fight between two Jewish groups, during which the Arabs of the area took advantage of the commotion to go on a murder spree. Moser eventually throws up his hands: “Whatever the origins of the unrest …”

 

There is surely an interesting history to be written about Jewish anti-Zionism. But the operative word there is “history.” In the bloody chaos of the first half of the 20^th century, a debate raged over whether fighting for statehood in the Holy Land was the best way to secure the Jewish future. That debate ended the day the state of Israel was born.

 

Schachtel, leader of the most famous anti-Zionist synagogue of its day, had a change of heart after 1948. It was “futile to argue with history,” he said. In a letter that Moser quotes, the rabbi wrote: “Anti-Semitism is being defeated by the courage of Israel. The name Jew is now associated with courage, stamina, heroism, fighting power—the anti-Semites have been confounded.” Schachtel would from then on be among Israel’s loudest cheerleaders.

 

As for Tamares, he died in 1931 at the age of 62, leaving behind his wife and six children. Four of those children immigrated to Mandatory Palestine. His wife and the other two children stayed behind. They died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1942.

 

Then there’s Saad. After his fellow communists barred Jews from the movement, Saad and his wife converted to Islam.

 

All those stories are in Moser’s book too. And that is the final irony of his feeble attempt to claim vindication for an idea that belongs squarely in the dustbin of history: Moser intended to praise anti-Zionism, but instead he buried it.