The Ship of Theseus

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, May 27, 2026

 

Count me among those who believe that the conventional wisdom about last night’s Texas Senate Republican runoff has the cause and effect backward.

 

It wasn’t the president’s endorsement that propelled state Attorney General Ken Paxton to a landslide over four-term incumbent John Cornyn. It was the likelihood of a landslide that propelled the president to endorse Paxton.

 

Donald Trump’s support is worth a lot in a Republican primary, but it ain’t worth 27.6 points. No one knows how much narrower the margin would have been had he followed through on his initial plan to endorse Cornyn, but I suspect Paxton would have won even in that scenario. Trump has always understood the right-wing brain better than movement conservatives do; he saw a freight train bearing down on Cornyn, it seems, and opted not to join him on the tracks.

 

If you’re committed to blaming the president for Tuesday’s outcome, though, there are better ways to do so than to obsess over his endorsement.

 

Regular readers know my theory about why Republican voters are suddenly hellbent on purging incumbents in primaries: They’re in their Jonestown phase. Disappointed in Trump’s economic failures yet psychologically unable to hold him (or themselves) accountable, they’re coping by turning more radically cultish and flogging heretics like Cornyn, Thomas Massie, and Bill Cassidy instead.

 

Surely things in America will improve if the president faces even less resistance inside the GOP.

 

Trump’s moral influence on the right after a decade of degradation was also obvious in the result. Ask Paxton voters to name something Cornyn did to alienate them, and I’d be surprised if more than two out of 10 could answer with specificity. Those two would likely point to the compromise he struck with Democrats on a gun bill in 2022—but I’d be even more surprised if either could explain in any detail what that bill did.

 

The truth is that Republican voters preferred Paxton because he’s a bad guy. Trumpism is a depraved anti-morality that treats sociopathy as a political virtue inasmuch as it’s defined by ruthless amoral determination in pursuing one’s interests. The challenger in this race fit that description to a T. The incumbent, a more dignified figure, plainly did not.

 

They liked Paxton because he’s a bad guy, not in spite of it. Which made it baffling that Cornyn chose to campaign on … what a bad guy Paxton is.

 

As late as yesterday afternoon, with Texas Republicans at the polls, the senator complained to CNN that his opponent has “gotten away with so much for so long and not been held accountable for it, but I think he is an embarrassment, his misbehavior. And he’s completely unrepentant. … It’s just emboldened him to the point of recklessness, and now to the point of self-destructiveness, especially with regard to his own family.”

 

All true, but I can’t imagine a less effective way to appeal to a group as degenerate as Republican primary voters. Watching Cornyn inveigh against Paxton, my sense was that he was blinded strategically by his own moral outrage: He was so mortified by the thought of a candidate being rewarded for flamboyant corruption that he couldn’t resist venting about it despite knowing how unpersuasive it would be to an electorate that adores Donald Trump.

 

“Does this guy know which party he’s in?” I wondered.

 

I wondered the same thing a few hours later as I watched his concession. “Tonight we’ve come up short in this primary runoff,” Cornyn told reporters after the race was called. But then he added this: “I’ve always supported the Republican ticket, and I intend to do so again in this general election.”

 

He intends to support a ticket led by someone he spent the last year rightly calling a scumbag?

 

Once more, with feeling: Does this guy know which party he’s in?

 

Character test.

 

Some might find John Cornyn’s affirmation of partisan devotion amid intense humiliation by his party affecting. I find it pitiful.

 

He’s a voyager on a ship of Theseus. The modern Republican Party bears the same name as the vessel Cornyn boarded decades ago, but nearly all of its components—including the senator himself as of last night—have been replaced. Morally and ideologically, the ship must be unrecognizable to a crewman like him who enlisted to join the small-government “character counts” Reaganite armada.

 

Now that he’s been fired, why doesn’t he disembark already, for cripes’ sake?

 

“As a moderate Republican, I have no place in this party anymore,” a Texas Republican staffer lamented to a reporter after Cornyn’s defeat. “There is no middle ground. No room for moderates. Only far right or far left.” That’s correct, but it should not have taken 10 farking years for the right’s dwindling population of non-lunatics to realize they’re on a ship of Theseus. And that realization should not have depended on whether a four-term incumbent might barely survive a primary runoff against a goblin like Ken Paxton.

 

But at least this person did realize it, however belatedly. Why hasn’t Cornyn?

 

I could understand him affirming his commitment to the GOP if he had spent the campaign hashing out his policy differences with Paxton. It makes sense for a defeated primary candidate to put aside those differences and back the nominee in the general election, knowing that the nominee’s policy preferences will resemble their own more closely than the other party’s will. It’s elementary “lesser of two evils” logic.

 

But Cornyn’s objection to Paxton wasn’t that his policy ideas were bad. It’s that he’s morally repellent, untrustworthy, and unfit to represent the people in Texas. How do you back a guy as the lesser of two evils after you’ve decided that he’s actually evil?

 

Why not just wash your hands of the general election instead?

 

Consider what Ken Paxton’s political success says about the right. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not quite true that his victory derives straightforwardly from Republican voters’ appetite for Trumpism. In an important way, Paxton’s rise is worse.

 

Trump’s ascendance in 2016 was tied to a particular policy agenda focused on ridding America of people whom his base found undesirable, either by removing them or by preventing them from entering in the first place. Build the wall, ban the Muslims, deport the illegals: All of that was very politically incorrect, far beyond what the average squishy Beltway Republican could stomach. Right-wingers seemed to intuit that only a person who’s unusually immune to moral pressure could be trusted to see a program like that through.

 

That was Trump. The “anti-morality” he espoused and embodied implicitly guaranteed that he would be ruthless about carrying out specific policies that the right supported. His sociopathy was a means to a political end.

 

Paxton’s victory on Tuesday suggests that the means have become the end. There’s no innovative suite of policies he proposed that only a scumbag would be capable of implementing; his agenda is no more creative or complicated than “whatever Trump wants.” His immorality itself, not anything useful that it’s supposed to accomplish, made him compelling to Republican voters. They’re now looking for the most ruthless, anti-moral performance artists they can find and pronouncing them ipso facto the sort of people America badly needs to “shake up” Washington or whatever.

 

That’s a new frontier in degeneracy, a kakistocracy’s bizarro-world version of a character test in which the familiar preference for the lesser of two evils becomes a preference for evil itself. John Cornyn failed that test, which is commendable—and then, incredibly, he turned around during his concession speech and validated it by confirming that he’ll support the party anyway in November. He spent the entire primary insisting that good character should matter, only to immediately decide that it shouldn’t if there’s a Democrat on the other side of the ballot.

 

That’s 10 years of Republican politics in one soundbite.

 

Why conservatives failed.

 

Another way to frame all of that is to say that Tuesday night was the ol’ Republican hostage crisis in microcosm.

 

Since 2015, postliberals have been far more willing than conservatives to act in ways that increase their leverage over the right even if doing so improves Democrats’ chances of winning general elections. That asymmetry has created a hostage standoff in which conservatives are forever reconciling themselves to postliberal candidates so that the party doesn’t end up dead.

 

Everyone but everyone understands that nominating Ken Paxton is risky business in a political environment like the current one. Democrats are far ahead on the generic ballot; Hispanics, of whom there are many in Texas, have trended sharply against Trump; James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate, is raking in money; and Paxton is buried under tons of ethical baggage. At best, Republicans will hold Cornyn’s seat only by diverting tens of millions of dollars to Texas that they had hoped to spend in battleground states. At worst, Paxton will lose.

 

A primary electorate that prioritized holding the Senate would have considered all of that and renominated the “safe” incumbent Cornyn, reluctantly or not. An electorate that cares more about elevating anti-moral postliberals within the GOP would have done exactly what Texas Republicans did, despite the fact that they made a Democratic Senate takeover more likely as a result. They’d rather court disaster with Paxton than win with Cornyn.

 

Reaganites, moderates, anti-anti-Trumpers, and other normies could have deterred that sort of perverse prioritization by ensuring that their party lost in years past whenever it nominated someone unfit. They refused. Forced to choose between boycotting a general election to show postliberals that the normie vote can’t be taken for granted and reluctantly supporting sociopaths for the sake of keeping the left out of power, they’ve reliably defaulted to their ship-of-Theseus partisan conviction that it’s still better to be governed by the worst Republican than the best Democrat.

 

The people who voted for Paxton in yesterday’s runoff did so because they believed millions of other Texas Republicans who know better will dutifully turn out for him in November despite their misgivings. They are correct. And so the GOP will keep nominating garbage.

 

John Cornyn could have done something about that in defeat. The great advantage of losing his office is that the senator has nothing more to lose by catering to the right’s most loathsome impulses. No one’s asking him to endorse Talarico, which would contradict his policy preferences and could actually be counterproductive by antagonizing the sort of disgruntled Paxton-hating Republican partisan who might skip the general election.

 

But he surely could have declined to say anything Pavlovian about supporting the Republican ticket in November. His party’s voters made a morally inexcusable choice in choosing Paxton—yet there he was during his concession speech, unable to refrain from excusing them at literally the first opportunity despite being perfectly positioned to make them pay for it by withholding his support.

 

It’s preposterous. Doubly preposterous, in fact, when you consider what comes next.

 

Long term and short term.

 

A Paxton victory this fall will convince the president and his fans that there’s no downside to trying to purge other so-called RINOs from the party in 2028.

 

If they can win in this national environment with a moral derelict like him, they can surely win with other derelicts during a presidential election year, when Republican turnout will be robust. I assume John Cornyn believes his party will benefit more from being represented by figures like Lisa Murkowski and Todd Young than by some dissolute fascist Trump might pull from a trash can somewhere in Alaska or Indiana. Yet by calling for party unity last night, the senator made the trash-can option more viable.

 

Texas Republicans who are considering supporting Paxton reluctantly should also consider what they’re signing up for, short term and long term.

 

The long-term political risk of letting your party be led by cretins should be evident from the president’s polling. He’s already chased away many of the young and nonwhite voters who tilted right in 2024 out of frustration with Joe Biden’s economy, saddling them with a higher cost of living as he chased personal glory with a stupid trade war and stupider Iran war. The backlash that’s building to that and to his flagrant just-try-to-stop-me corruption could put some formerly persuadable voters off of Republicans for years.

 

And Trump at least has charisma. Paxton gets you all of the same moral downside with none of the retail upside. He’d be a horrendous advertisement for the party in the Senate, especially once the scandals begin piling up.

 

The short-term risk in supporting him is this: I all but guarantee that Paxton, Trump, and Texas’ Republican government will connive to try to overturn the result if Talarico ends up winning a tight race.

 

Character is destiny. For the president, seeing his anointed crony fumble America’s most ostentatiously red state will be almost as unacceptable as his 2020 defeat was. His enemies will blame him for not having endorsed Cornyn, and he won’t like it. For Paxton, the sitting attorney general, it’ll be a business-as-usual matter of abusing his power to attempt to benefit himself. He dipped a toe into overturning elections six years ago when he tried to get Joe Biden’s victory tossed out, remember, but was batted aside by the Supreme Court. He and his allies in Texas’ government will have more levers to pull this time.

 

The right will struggle mightily to understand how a guy like Talarico, whose masculinity they’ve gleefully impugned, possibly could have won in cowboy country. In the end, true to form, and despite the fact that Texas’ electoral administration is under Republican control, they’ll decide that he couldn’t have. Especially if control of the Senate hangs on the result.

 

That’s what reluctant Republican voters are signing up to enable by turning out for Paxton this fall—another wrenching, country-destroying, self-serving “rigged election” fairy tale. There is no bottom to this candidacy or to this party and it’s long past time for well-meaning people to stop pretending otherwise, even if John Cornyn can’t. (Yet.) You’re on a ship of Theseus. The lifeboat is waiting.

Government: Now Solving Problems You Didn’t Know You Had

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, May 28, 2026

 

On the night socialist Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, he expressed his vision of a wildly more expansive government.

 

“We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about,” Mamdani told supporters in his victory speech. “For years, those in City Hall have only helped those who can help them. But on January 1, we will usher in a city government that helps everyone.”

 

Clearly, some people think “everyone” includes people who desire vegan cream cheese on their bagels. Over the weekend, “tech journalist” Taylor Lorenz expressed disappointment that more New York City bagel shops didn’t offer a vegan cream cheese option, adding that in Los Angeles, the bagel shops “at least use cashew-based vegan cream cheese” rather than soy-based Tofutti.

 

“I hope Zohran can remedy this,” she said.

 

Perhaps Lorenz’s desire for Mamdani to step in and require bagel shops to offer vegan schmear is just the latest rambling of a lunatic. (She has spent the past few years cheering on Luigi Mangione for killing health care executive Brian Thompson, called Joe Biden a “war criminal,” and accused citizens of “raw-dogging the air,” by refusing to wear surgical masks in public.)

 

But Mamdani’s quest to make sure there is no problem too small for government to tackle has spread to the ostensibly sane. For instance, the mayor is already 100 days into planning a network of five city-owned grocery stores across New York City’s boroughs, at a cost of $30 million for the first location alone — a store in East Harlem that won’t open until the end of 2027.

 

There are, incidentally, roughly 45 grocery stores already within a 35-minute walk of the proposed site, a detail the mayor has not found relevant in his planning. In order to justify spending taxpayer money on grocery stores, Mamdani claimed that food prices in New York had increased 66 percent, a completely bogus statistic that measures spending on groceries but says nothing about prices.

 

The owner of grocery store chain Gristedes compared Mamdani’s scheme to “the bread lines of the old Soviet Union.” Even Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul, who is not exactly a Rand Paul acolyte, felt compelled to announce, “I favor free enterprise.”

 

This is the pattern Mamdani and his ideological allies have established: Private industry creates something, people come to regard it as a necessity, and government then declares it a human right and inserts itself into the provision of the thing — often at extraordinary expense and inevitably with worse results.

 

Grocery stores are just the latest iteration. Before that, it was health care, childcare, and broadband internet. The progression is always the same: Someone builds something useful, enough people use it that it becomes expected, and then a politician announces that the market has failed and only government can be trusted to manage it. The fact that private grocery stores managed to stock their shelves for decades without mayoral supervision is treated as beside the point.

 

Yet the award for using the power of government to solve a nonexistent problem goes to Democratic U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, who is using federal power to ensure that the people of her state can watch professional football for free.

 

Recently, Netflix announced that this fall it would broadcast the Green Bay Packers’ game against the Los Angeles Rams on Thanksgiving Eve, meaning that viewers would need access to the streaming service to watch it. Baldwin’s proposed “For the Fans Act” would mandate that professional leagues provide every local fan a way to watch every game played by every team in their state — no streaming blackouts, no platform exclusivity — or face legal consequences. The bill covers baseball, basketball, football, hockey, and soccer.

 

Per a press release, Baldwin boasted that her bill was drawing “national attention.” The national attention it appears to have drawn is this column, in which I am using it as an example of the most asinine piece of legislation Congress could possibly consider. So mission accomplished!

 

Of course, the NFL and streaming services arrive at their arrangements through contracts freely negotiated between consenting parties. That this has made it expensive and confusing to follow professional sports is genuinely irritating. It is not, however, a civil rights emergency. American culture produces many entertainment options, few of which require the federal government to step in and provide them for free. It costs money to create an entertainment product, and asking people to pay for something they badly want to watch is not too much to ask.

 

Further, Baldwin is evidently unaware of the famous lengths that Packer fans will go to in order to see their team play. She thinks fans tough enough to sit in below-zero temperatures for hours on end will be unable to figure out how to watch their favorite team on television. Perhaps she has never heard of “sports bars” festooned with “televisions” that show the games. Getting Wisconsinites to drink at a local tavern is, famously, not a difficult endeavor.

 

This isn’t even the most outrageous sports-related government action in Wisconsin this year. Republicans and Democrats alike recently enacted a bill that allows taxpayer funds to help pay name, image, and likeness (NIL) funds to athletes at the University of Wisconsin. If you are an alumnus or fan of another school in America but live in Wisconsin, your tax money is now being spent to help give the Badgers a competitive advantage over your preferred school. State politicians rammed this scam through the legislature in the time it takes a running back to run the length of a football field.

 

This is what happens when government establishes the precedent that it will solve everyone’s problems. Once you’ve accepted that the mayor of New York City should ensure grocery availability, it’s a small step to insisting that a U.S. senator should ensure football availability, or that taxpayers should pay salaries for a favored college quarterback. Once you’ve established that “access” to a thing is the government’s obligation to provide, the word “access” expands to cover whatever the constituent currently wants and cannot easily obtain. Today, it’s vegan cream cheese and Packers games. Tomorrow, it will be something else that is already available but perhaps inconvenient.

 

The Mamdani model — no concern is too small for the government to care about — brings about learned helplessness, teaching people to rely on their elected leaders to solve their problems. It, for example, leads people distressed by the changing face of the news media to start demanding that the government begin funding newspapers to keep them alive. (Of course, a newspaper reliant on the government for its existence would be loath to criticize the government, making many even more biased than they are now, which is why some are withering away to begin with.)

 

What Mamdani’s philosophy actually produces is a government large enough to mandate what goes on your bagel and who carries your football games, staffed by people who are constitutionally convinced that private citizens cannot be trusted to locate a grocery store or a streaming service on their own. The market built the NFL. The market built Whole Foods. The market built the internet that Taylor Lorenz used to complain about her cream cheese options in the first place.

 

Government wasn’t there at the creation. It just shows up at the end, declares itself essential, and sends you the bill.

Zionism, After the Fact

By Abe Greenwald

Wednesday, May 27, 2026

 

A number of Israel-supporters have noted that the terms “Zionism” and “Zionist” are, from a present-day perspective, confusing or even insulting. As Zionism refers to a belief and a movement that sought to establish a modern Jewish homeland, does it make sense still to speak of Zionists when that homeland has existed for more than 75 years?

 

Coleman Hughes remarked in a recent episode of his podcast that it makes as much sense to declare oneself a Zionist today as it would to self-describe as an abolitionist. The State of Israel is a long-established fact, and American slavery has long been abolished. In this reading, perhaps the term Zionism is an anachronism that’s intended to cast a shadow of impermanence or erasure over the Jewish state.

 

I think Hughes makes a powerful point in comparing the relevance of Zionism and abolitionism. But it’s equally illuminating to contrast the two.

 

There is, after all, a reason that self-proclaimed abolitionists no longer exist while Zionists do: While there is no active anti-abolition movement, there’s a massive, coordinated, and armed anti-Zionist campaign looking to undo history and destroy Israel.

 

Now, let’s keep the contrast going with a little thought experiment. What if a modern anti-abolitionist movement suddenly arose? How would elite opinion respond to those actively fighting to repeal the 13th Amendment and reinstate slavery?

 

With fury, of course. Western liberals would be disgusted and outraged by the political organization of retrograde racists.

 

“Wait,” let’s imagine the anti-abolitionists saying in response. “Why do you call us racists? We have nothing against black people. In fact, they were dealt a terrible injustice by the United States. They were forced to integrate into a hostile country that had previously stripped them of every means of integrating. The result has been misery for them and the rest of us. Isn’t that what liberals are always going on about? The gross inequities in opportunity, wealth, health, and so on? You want to perpetuate that? We’re not talking about black people around the world. We’re talking about a historical injustice that was committed by this country. We want to solve the problem, and now you have the nerve to equate anti-abolitionism with anti-blackness?” 

 

Would anyone deeply consider the merits of this elision? Would the potential virtues of anti-abolitionism become an acceptable topic for debate—so acceptable that one would have to declare oneself as a pro- or anti-abolitionist?

 

Of course not. The fringe nobodies who hold these kinds of ideas—and often justify them on “humanitarian” grounds—are considered lunatics.

 

But left-liberal opinion has determined that anti-Zionists—who openly call for the destruction of Israel, support jihadist terrorism, and claim to have nothing against Jews—are well-meaning progressives on the right side of history. Their justification for wanting to eradicate the one Jewish state checks out.

 

And so Israel-supporters have been boxed into an anachronistic category. We are called Zionists because the so-called civilized world has decided to pretend that the legitimacy of a Jewish state is an open question. The truth is that I don’t fret about the semantics as much as others because, in reality, the modern State of Israel closed the debate 78 years ago. And if its enemies are offended by Zionism, I’m a Zionist for life.

Pigeons and Pickle Jars

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, May 27, 2026

 

A long time ago, I read The Africans by veteran foreign correspondent David Lamb. He recounted a tendency for African drivers to draw suboptimal conclusions from near misses. He wrote:

 

It is difficult to find a satisfactory explanation for the Africans’ propensity to pass on blind curves and drive at out-of-control speeds. The best one, I suppose, is that an African does not conceptualize a potential problem the way a Westerner does. The Westerner says, If I do this, that might happen. The uneducated African does A without reasoning that it could lead to B. If an oncoming car has to swerve off the road to avoid his vehicle, and there is no collision and no injuries, the African does not say, Next time I’d better not do that. He will do exactly the same thing because he has, after all, accomplished his objective of getting from one point to another without major mishap. He does not deal with the unexpected on a sophisticated level because to do so is, again, a quality of education and training, and the automobile is a new device to most Africans.

 

I’ve heard similar observations about drivers in South America and parts of Asia. I’ve had conversations about this phenomenon for years, but I’ve grown uncomfortable with it. Lamb’s sweeping generalization about a vast, diverse, continent—not to mention throwing in an even bigger chunk of the global population—is part of my discomfort. But the bigger portion is that I don’t think the tendency he identifies is limited to the uneducated, never mind the nonwhite uneducated.

 

One of the greatest, and most human, of mistakes is to think if an idea worked, it was a good idea.  Intellectuals, including intellectuals of the whitest shades of pale, make this mistake all of the time. 

 

Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko succeeded at germinating seeds with extra moisture and cold to produce earlier flowering and assumed this strategy would work in every conceivable context, including engineering superior humans. His crackpottery ended up getting a lot of people killed.

 

Henry Heimlich invented the Heimlich maneuver, which really worked and saved countless lives. But he didn’t think it should be reserved for choking victims. He and his supporters advocated for it to be used on drowning victims, asthma sufferers, and even people having heart attacks. This was a near perfect example of thinking that a good idea in one context must have applicability in very different ones.

 

The history of war is often the history of thinking past successes are predictive of future victories. Napoleon thought Russia was just the next trophy. Hitler had similar delusions. The Japanese had used surprise attacks or “decisive” early battles to great effect against Russia and China, so why wouldn’t it work with America at Pearl Harbor? This folly was dubbed “victory disease.”

 

I am barely scratching the surface of the myriad ways our brains trick us like this. Indeed, our brains’ bags of tricks are so full that psychologists, economists, statisticians, and of course gamblers have scads of terms to describe these kinds of errors, starting of course with post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Here are a few examples of such cognitive legerdemain: “Superstitious learning,” “winner’s bias,” “selection bias,” “resulting,” “omitted variable bias,” “base rate neglect,” “hindsight bias,” and the “hot hand fallacy.”

 

One of my favorites is the “Texas sharpshooter fallacy,” which can be neatly described as taking a bunch of bullet holes in the side of a barn and drawing bullseyes around them. This is a favorite technique of conspiracy theorists who impose conclusions retroactively on events—or Jews—to “prove” a theory.

 

So, it’s fine to dunk on bad drivers in Africa for their superstitious learning, but superstitious learning is also a term applied to CEOs who shepherd a merger at the beginning of an economic boom and conclude that their surging profits are the result of the merger, so they double down on the strategy. The voters who thought they’d be getting the pre-COVID economy of Donald Trump’s first term made the same error, thinking the president wills a good economy into existence. K Street is full of self-styled rainmakers who got rich by dancing when the first droplet hit the pavement so they could take credit for the downpour.

 

By the way, the term “superstitious learning” is rooted in the work of B.F. Skinner, who used the word “superstition” to describe how pigeons that bobbed their head before a pellet appeared assumed that the pellet resulted from their head bob. 

 

I’ve long argued that such biases are key to understanding Trump. He’s the millionth monkey banging on a type writer, or perhaps the one throwing darts at the stock pages. He ignores valuable and important rules and when things work out for him, he thinks the rules are B.S. His narcissism transmogrifies failure as the downpayment on success, and you can’t wholly blame him for it. But one proof that he’s an exception that proves the rule is that superstitious learners who imitate him tend to fail (unless he pardons them). This gives Trump’s luck too much credit, of course. He couldn’t run casinos for a profit. Casinos—the institutions that have most successfully monetized nearly all of the fallacies I’ve listed above.

 

But the guy was elected president twice (not three times) breaking all manner of rules. And that’s still pretty lucky.

 

Indeed, his war on Iran is a perfect example of how he is not immune to the rules, but thinks he is. He thought he had a hot hand after Venezuela and could do it again in Iran. But he couldn’t and now he’s trying to figure out how to say, “Never mind.” The Heimlich maneuver on Maduro yielded contrary results with the mullahs.

 

When being right is necessary but insufficient.

 

This was going to be the point of this “newsletter,” but I want to talk about a different kind of bias.

 

Kevin Williamson, as is his wont, said something interesting on the most recent episode of The Dispatch Podcast that got me thinking.

 

We were discussing the latest non-developments with the Iran war. Steve Hayes asked about the split on the right about to interpret how it’s been going. Part of Kevin’s explanation for why some Iran hawks were too quick to declare a kind of premature glide path to victory—if not outright victory—has to do with human nature.

 

“When you’re really, really dedicated to a particular policy, and you’re dedicated to it for a long time,” he said, you get “so used to talking about it in terms of [how] the benefits are really, really, big” and the “potential deficiencies and setbacks are and tradeoffs are really, really low because you’re used to being argumentative about it and that it’s hard to be analytic about it.”

 

Kevin admitted that he’d been thinking along these lines in the context of drug liberalization which—give some points to the anarchist-adjacent Kevin for honesty—hasn’t been going as great as some libertarians predicted.

 

This hit home for me in part because of all the policy disagreements I’ve had with friends I respect on the right—both conservatives and libertarians—drug legalization has probably been the most heated. I don’t want to debate the actual disagreement here, I want to discuss the tendency among champions of legalization and countless other policies to think that because they have won—by their lights—the theoretical debate that their policy preference is not merely right but the downsides are all negligible or even fictitious.

 

I remember arguing with a very respected libertarian intellectual about drug legalization. I warned that legalizing heroin would produce more heroin addicts. He responded, in part, by quoting Thomas Jefferson: “No nation is drunken where wine is cheap; and none sober, where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage.” His point was that in a world where all drugs are legal, people will tend toward ones that they can live productively using. It was a version of an argument I made in college about how it was dumb to ban kegs in dorms, because that will encourage students to sneak in hard liquor and drink behind closed doors. Beer drinking in public is safer than Jim Beam shots in secret.

 

But, again, that’s not the relevant part. It was my libertarian friend’s profound, preemptive, ennui with my objections, which he’d heard a million times. He thought his answer was so obviously right and dispositive, it was almost an imposition for him to swat it away—to his satisfaction, not mine.

 

The truth remains that any effort to fully legalize heroin will create heroin addicts. We can debate whether it will create more or fewer addicts, but it won’t be zero. And I think a lot of libertarians, who extol human agency and freedom more than any other ideological group, are often smugly dismissive of the provable fact that drug addiction is evil precisely because it steals human agency and freedom for some fraction of humans. It’s a vampire problem they don’t want to fully acknowledge is a problem.

 

But this is only one potent example of this tendency. Socialists, of course, are a prime example of a group that lives in perpetual error but liberated from all doubt. And the history of undemocratic systems is in some respects the history of dumb ideas blowing up in the rulers’ faces—from Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture, to Mao’s Great Leap Forward, etc. But such errors in totalitarian systems are a different species of error.

 

In democracies the problem is different.

 

No, I have in mind serious people making serious arguments for good ideas. This, I think, explains why some Iran hawks misread Operation Epic Fury. I agree with them that regime change is the only real solution to the Iran problem. That doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be unintended consequences and Day 2 challenges. But the problem with Iran isn’t its nuclear program or ballistic missiles or its asymmetric leverage over the Strait of Hormuz. It’s the fanatics and thugs in power. When was the last time you worried about France’s nuclear weapons or Britain’s ballistic missiles?

 

I agree with those who’ve made arguments about the threat from the Iranian regime for decades. But winning debates about an idea in theory is, at best, half the job. 

 

When you think you’ve put the arguments to bed but haven’t gotten the policy you want, the energy of the cause moves toward someone with the will to implement your idea. We know what to do, we just need someone with the courage to do it. And because you’ve convinced yourself you’ve thought everything through, the executive’s ability to execute gets trimmed down to just a decision rather than a complicated project. After all, we’ve anticipated and defeated all the contrary arguments, so all we need is someone to make the decision and do it. It will be so easy.

 

Progressives are hardly immune to this problem, because it’s a problem endemic to intellectuals, to democracies, to politics, and to humans generally. How many progressives thought the “hard part” was getting California’s high-speed rail approved? It turns out that the hard part was building high-speed rail in a geographically bumpy, union-controlled, regulatory hellscape. It might have been hard to get the Affordable Care Act passed, but that difficulty pales in comparison to making healthcare, you know, affordable. But if you debated proponents of these programs before they were launched, the thing you probably remember most are the smug grins and eyerolls of policy geniuses who knew they were right.

 

I think we saw a similar dynamic with regard to Iran, because we’ve seen this throughout the Trump presidency, as Kevin noted. The immigration hawks, the government “efficiency” zealots, even the nationalist “intellectuals” felt that they handled the hard part by winning the argument to their own satisfaction. Indeed, often in the political realm, proof that they won the argument is that Trump got elected paying lip service to it. They loosened the jar of pickles. All that was left was the slightest effort to make it happen. So, when Trump picked up their respective pickle jars, they assumed they’d hear that thhhhffft of the vacuum seal breaking, a prelude to the sound of popping champagne corks and high fives.

 

The problem with the pickle jar analogy can be illustrated by changing it to almost any complicated problem where you still know you’re right. I can be absolutely sure that someone needs a heart transplant. Finding someone willing to do the operation isn’t nearly as important as finding someone capable of doing it.

 

It turned out that regime change, reinventing government with tech bro efficiency, removing illegal immigrants, or ushering in a nationalist restoration of the American Volksgemeinschaft requires more skill than opening a pickle jar.

Democrats Need to Learn How to Fight Each Other

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, May 27, 2026

 

Donald Trump is a mysterious figure in political life. It has become a cliché to say that in 2015 he launched a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. He questioned its commitment to free trade, to muscular military intervention abroad, and to its embarrassing tolerance of mass illegal immigration. It was broadly believable that he could win the nomination, so long as there were multiple “Republicanism is just fine, thanks” candidates dividing the anti-Trump vote. The more shocking thing was that he could then swiftly win the loyalty of most of the party that he had been beating up for nine months (including its donor class) and defeat a candidate the opposition party had sheltered and consolidated around as early as was practicable.

 

But sometimes families are at their strongest precisely because they’ve just come through a knock-down, drag-out argument over the Thanksgiving table. There’s energy, passion, and even a renewed affection among those tilting at each other, a feeling that what you said, even if it didn’t triumph, mattered.

 

There are long-term structural reasons related to globalization that caused Republicans to enter into a state of civil war then. They are the same reasons why populism has divided right-wing parties across the West in the past decade. In fact, this fight for the soul of the party is ongoing. One hears the battle cries among those who are already partisans for Marco Rubio or JD Vance as a successor to Trump.

 

This civil war within the GOP has, of course, hampered Trump in setting his own agenda. He has often settled for passing the priorities of his party adversaries. But it has also helped to keep him “the main character” in American politics even as his poll numbers dip.

 

The Democrats, meanwhile, have a serious brand problem that hasn’t been solved by Trump’s foray into Iran or the unpopularity of his tariffs. A 2025 CNN poll found that only 16 percent of Americans said Democrats had stronger leaders than Republicans. Even then, more respondents saw incumbent Republicans as the party of change. Maybe Democrats lost their brand as the party of America’s future because they’ve stopped debating about how that future will look. They’ve lost the mantle of the party of change because the party is so settled in its identity.

 

Right now, the Republican Party uneasily, but noisily, accommodates people with differing views on how the global economy should be engaged. Can Democrats even accommodate voters who think girls should compete only on the girls’ team? It’s not clear.

 

What are the Democratic ideas about America’s role in the global economy or as a geostrategic actor? Well, you can have every flavor of globalism offered by the Kennedy School of Government.

 

Sometimes it seems like Democrats have a more progressive and less progressive wing. Sure, AOC and Abigail Spanberger have different priorities. But, for the most part, Democrats revert to a hive mind. In 2020, during the Covid emergency and in the weeks after the death of George Floyd, that meant everyone in the party shifted dramatically to the left and started sharing their pronouns.

 

I think if Democrats want to fix their current brand, when 70 percent of voters view them as “out of touch,” they need to start having big, public fights with each other that give more voters a stake in the party and its future. One of the downsides of the progressive faith that the arc of the universe bends their way is that it gives incumbents the sense that their triumph is assured by capital-H History. Anyone who thinks differently feels left behind.

When Not to Hedge on ‘Antisemitism’

By Judson Berger

Wednesday, May 27, 2026

 

The editor’s impulse to properly attribute accusations in print is understandable for legal and ethical reasons. I’m fastidious about this myself.

 

But it was startling to read so many headlines last night reporting that Democratic candidate Maureen Galindo lost the Texas primary runoff for a House seat following mere “accusations” of antisemitism.

 

The Hill: Garcia beats Texas Democrat accused of antisemitism in House primary runoff

 

The New York Times: Democrats Pick a Moderate in a Texas Race Roiled by Antisemitism Accusations

 

CBS: Maureen Galindo projected to lose Texas Democratic House runoff after antisemitism accusations

 

Calling for “American Zionists” to be imprisoned and also probably castrated — as she did — meets any working definition of antisemitism.

 

In the bizarro Instagram post that brought Galindo into national disrepute, her campaign account described Zionism itself as antisemitic and accused her opponent of wanting to put Jews in camps, while at the same time vowing to send American Zionists to a converted ICE detention facility. She added with a flourish, “It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles which will probably be most of the Zionists.”

 

The post was logically and morally unintelligible. National Democrats probably were concerned they might soon host an MTG-style loon at the Capitol and got to work nuking her chances before the runoff. Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the remarks “bigoted garbage.”

 

Galindo later argued that she only wants “billionaire zionists,” even Christian ones, imprisoned and that her words had been twisted. They were twisted, all right, just not in the way she contends.

 

Editors don’t need to hedge here. For the record, CNN and the Washington Post didn’t. And the WaPo showed you can accurately describe the race’s outcome — Texas Democrats reject House candidate who called for imprisoning Zionists — in the same amount of headline space.

Final Thoughts on the Texas Senate: I Don’t Have to Like Either Paxton or Talarico

By Jeffrey Blehar

Wednesday, May 27, 2026

 

Ken Paxton has defeated incumbent John Cornyn for the GOP nomination in the Texas Senate race, and of course the real tragedy is personal: My many written thoughts about the matter, both here and on Twitter/X, have made me intensely unpopular on all sides. (Special thanks to Jon Favreau and all the boys over on Bluesky.) Since it’s been relatively light sledding so far, let me offer you a few more thoughts, and we’ll see how far I can push my luck.

 

Pity John Cornyn

 

(There — I’ve already alienated a significant portion of my audience.) In retrospect it becomes clear that Cornyn never could have won this race, even if he had chosen to run it as recklessly as possible. Texas Republicans were transparently tired of him as an old “insider” and saw their opening for change — that impulse overrode any other consideration. Did he bring it on himself by being an uncertain champion of MAGA? Perhaps so, in the sense that Cornyn has always been an institutionalist, and we live in an era when the most ardent activists on both sides express unleavened contempt toward political institutions and would not mind seeing them torn down — so long as the “good team” won. (The worst on both sides are vocally eager to get at the demolition work.)

 

In many ways Cornyn’s doom was determined by structural factors: A primary is low turnout enough as it is; runoffs are but a fraction of that and thus confined mostly to motivated partisans. Guess which section of the base was far more motivated to turn out in a runoff? The sweepingly large margin of victory is less surprising when you consider what kind of voter was voting. Cornyn clearly lost those people long ago, and if ever given a second-chance bite at the apple, they were always going to swamp him.

 

And Cornyn was caught in a pincer: The national issue Paxton leveraged the most during the campaign was the “SAVE Act,” Trump’s “election federalizing” bill that was nowhere near having enough votes to break a filibuster. The one election-focused move he might have made was to throw his lot early and loudly in with the passage of the SAVE Act. It wouldn’t have gotten it passed at all — a Senate in clear danger of heading into minority status after 2026 wasn’t about to destroy the balance of the republic as well as its own future leverage by nuking the filibuster for Trump’s dubious and likely unconstitutional fantasy legislation.

 

But it might have made the margin closer. Yet even though Cornyn publicly backed “filibuster reform,” it was clear enough that his heart was not in it. He understood the stakes, and he wasn’t going to destroy the Senate’s reason for existence over a fantasy. Cornyn is an immensely popular senator among his colleagues — again, the sort of thing that no doubt instinctively makes populist types dislike him more — and is going to be missed as one of GOP conference’s strongest fundraisers.

 

Last night, following his concession to Paxton, Senator Cornyn tweeted out a single line from the Second Epistle to Timothy — a Pauline letter widely believed to be the last work Saint Paul wrote before he died: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” That he has.

 

I Don’t Have to Like James Talarico Nearly as Much as You Seem to Think I Do

 

A kiss-off to end, because the headline more or less speaks for itself. But since I’m currently being denounced by all the better-thinking people in the American commentariat (sometimes in truly remarkable, creative ways), I will emphasize: Just because I find Ken Paxton to be a truly sleazy and disreputable man does not mean that I have to like James Talarico any better. I don’t like either candidate, and I don’t have to pretend that James Talarico is now a haloed angel because his “superior virtue” somehow obviates his repulsive politics. I in fact believe them both to be equally deficient in different ways, I’m glad I’ll never have to vote for either of them, and what’s more, I already explained all of this to readers of National Review at extended length months ago:

 

Mind you, I have no problem damning Ken Paxton’s moral character, having done so enthusiastically several times here at NR. (The man both morally and personally resembles Jabba the Hutt in cowboy boots. Vote Cornyn.) But speaking as a Christian myself, I see nothing particularly praiseworthy about James Talarico’s moral character at all, and in fact much that suggests either intellectual cowardice or dishonesty: a failure to accept the demands that Christ places on man and society. In fact, I see a strange kinship he has with Ken Paxton: Both are, in their own way, politicians who found the simple rigors of Christianity inimical to their politics and appetites, and they therefore decided to sacrifice the demands of Christ for the desires of man.

 

Christianity is not merely a system of manners; it’s a system of divinely commanded morals. Those morals are not socially negotiated among activists. As an unrelated aside, it’s worth remembering that Jesus warned against false prophets.

 

The fact that Paxton is an obvious sinner does not make Talarico a saint, and anybody who thinks that the sorts of progressive evils he represents are immaterial (“he’s just a meek-sounding dweeb!” I hear people say) simply doesn’t understand the worldview I come from — no matter how many times I explain it.

 

You might be impressed by Talarico’s predictably fashionable ultra-progressivism. You might be impressed with his cynically instrumental deployment of his faith — which veers into the heretical in any serious Christian sense — always and only to bolster his political views. You might be erotically stirred by the idea of Turning Texas Blue. I am not interested in any of these things. I don’t have to shill for Ken Paxton, but I’ll be good and goddamned if I cut James Talarico even an inch of slack on his miserable progressive politics.