Unsafe at Any TSA Checkpoint

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, April 17, 2026

 

Ralph Nader is pissed.

 

I’ll let him tell the story. Last week he posted on social media:

 

Today, the notoriously picky TSA at Bradley Airport in Connecticut confiscated a container of fresh hummus. “Hummus?! Why?” asked the traveler. “Hummus is not a mysterious liquid. It’s a nutritious popular vegetable!”

 

“Doesn’t matter,” was the rejoinder. “Either leave the line with it or it goes into the garbage.”

 

So now add hummus to the list of national security perils. Maybe ground broccoli will be next. Absurdity reigns! -R

 

Now, I should say, I think this was a well-written, quality tweet. It told a story with drama and panache. And, frankly, I think Nader signing off with his first initial was quaintly charming.

 

I’ll also say that I have some sympathy for his complaint. Our airport security system (which has gotten better, in my experience, under Trump, shutdowns notwithstanding) can be infuriating. That’s because we turned it over to a public sector bureaucracy with the instructions that it has to work at scale. That requires clear rules with little room for individual judgment. I am sure the Transportation Security Administration worker didn’t think the 92-year-old Nader was smuggling pasty plastic explosives in that hummus container. But a huge bureaucratic system that processes millions of passengers a week can’t leave such matters up to the discretion of each agent. Moreover, now that everything is videotaped and recorded, if the agent let Nader go through and it turned out that the hummus was an explosive or some kind of poison paste capable of being aerosolized, everyone would know that it was Ted, or Sue, at Bradley International Airport who bent the rules for this unlikely terrorist.

 

But here’s the thing. Ralph Nader, perhaps more than any other single individual in American history, has dedicated his life to empowering government functionaries to slow down government processes, inconvenience consumers, and ruthlessly enforce regulations in the name of public safety.

 

And I think it’s hilarious that he’s angry about such things when they inconvenience him.

 

I’ll skip a long dive into Nader, Naderism, Naderites, and the generations of trial lawyers and other disciples who worship all three. Instead, I want to illustrate the point by talking about John Nestor.

 

Nestoring resentments.

 

Nestor was most famous—or infamous—for his driving practices. Specifically, what he loved to do is get in the passing lane on D.C.’s highways and switch on cruise control at the 55 mph speed limit. He infuriated Beltway drivers. They’d flash their headlights at him, honk their horns, tailgate, and make all the usual gestures. You could be trying to get to the hospital because of a medical emergency or to your kid’s school for a play. He didn’t know, and he didn’t care.

 

Here’s how he put it in a letter to the Washington Post:

 

On divided highways I drive in the left lane with my cruise control set at the speed limit of 55 miles per hour because it is usually the smoothest lane. I avoid slower traffic coming in and out from the right, and I avoid resetting the cruise control with every lane change.

 

Why should I inconvenience myself for someone who wants to speed?

 

What he didn’t say in his letter, but comes across quietly clearly in this sympathetic Post profile, is that one of his primary motivations was simply that he enjoyed arousing anger in truckers and others stacked up behind him. Their anger was a feature, not a bug. And he was disappointed when he didn’t piss people off.

 

Nestor’s fans called themselves Nestorians, but everyone else used his name pejoratively, as a verb, “Nestoring.”

 

My wife and I have a term for the people who oppose all economic development or any other kind of loosening of the rules to make life more enjoyable, efficient, or entertaining in the nation’s capital: “The Coalition Against Everything.” A neighborhood restaurant wants outside seating? We can’t have that. Some kids want to sell lemonade on the sidewalk? Without a permit? Are you kidding me? How about live music on Saturday nights at the local bar? What? Without years of hearings and impact statements?

 

Nestor was a hero of the Coalition Against Everything, a paladin of precaution, a knight of “No!” He hassled developers in his neighborhood, he harassed public officials to require extensive medical screenings of fast-food employees unnecessarily. Unmarried and childless, he had lots of time to do that in his off hours.

 

But that was also his job. He worked as a regulator at the Food and Drug Administration. He worked in the cardio-renal-pulmonary unit, and on his watch his department approved no new drugs from 1968 to 1972. The FDA transferred him, because while on the road to work he would lock in at 55 mph, but when he got to the office he put everything in park.

 

That made him a hero to Ralph Nader and the Naderites. They helped him sue to get his position back. Nader’s Public Citizen Health Research Group wanted him back on the job because he “had an unassailable record of protecting the public from harmful drugs.” One HRG doctor called him "sort of the ideal public servant.” At the time, the Naderites  left out the fact that Nestor spent his days leaking FDA reports to them, so they kind of owed him (the Washington Post profile quoted him bragging about leaking to the Nader people, Congress, and the media. It also had him describing the American public as “sheep.”).

 

Now, I am sure Nestor stopped some bad things from happening. In that sense, you can say his record of “protecting the public from harmful drugs” was, indeed, unassailable. But maybe, just maybe, he also “protected” the public from drugs that might have saved lives. 

 

Given his driving habits, he might also have prevented some car accidents caused by speeders. But he also may have created traffic that delayed an ambulance’s arrival at the hospital or caused someone to speed even more once they got past the Nestoring-induced traffic jams.

 

Nestor and the Naderites undoubtedly did some things that saved lives. Seatbelts, all in all, are a good innovation. It is just as obvious to me that some of the things they did cost lives. The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Sam Kazman made this point (about drugs and about Nestor) a long time ago. We see the victims of bad drug approvals, but “victims of incorrect FDA delays or denials are practically invisible.”

 

I’ve heard Nader boast about how his groups helped stop the construction of nuclear power plants in the United States for decades. He thought he was stopping more Three Mile Islands—though it’s worth noting that the reactor’s partial meltdown killed no one and scientists are still debating whether there were any notable health effects at all. What that mishap did do is set back nuclear power in this country for a generation, because it gave political ammunition to the anti-nuke branch of the Coalition Against Everything.

 

If you take seriously everything the Naderites, or public health experts generally, say about the dangers of burning coal—air pollution, asthma, lost life expectancy, and, of course, climate change—it seems entirely plausible that the blanket opposition to nuclear power harmed a lot more people, and the planet, than judicious support of nuclear power would have.

 

Until now, I’ve avoided invoking Frédéric Bastiat’s essay “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.” He wrote: “There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.” In his famous parable of the broken window, he tells the story of the onlooker who sees a broken window and says (I’m paraphrasing), that’s too bad, but such things keep the window makers in business. Bastiat notes that that’s true, but the money used to replace the window could have been spent on something more productive. The only place I might quibble with Bastiat is that some effects cannot be foreseen. The invention that is never invented lies outside our imagination.

 

This is a “news”letter about Nestors and Naderites, but it’s at least worth noting that the failure to appreciate the unseen is not solely a failure of the left. As Kevin Williamson and John McCormack have detailed, the victims of Trump’s tariffs aren’t just the people who pay them.  They also include the people who don’t get hired because businesses can’t risk expansion. The costs are heaped on the vendors they don’t use because it’s too risky when revenues are shrinking. They fall on the people who don’t get bonuses or raises, or on the parents who have to work extra hours to cover higher prices and their children who see their parents less.

 

Anyway, back to the Nestors. The Trial Lawyer Industrial Project, whether well-intentioned or not, has deterred economic growth by impeding innovation and business formation. They make hiring harder because they make firing riskier. They make starting new factories more expensive by larding on rules and regulations that make suing easier and economic productivity harder.  My friend David Bahnsen estimates that the legal headwinds against business formation and economic development amount to a full percentage point of economic growth. That’s trillions of dollars over the last two decades—or the next two—we leave on the table because we focus on the seen rather than bet on the unseen.

 

It’s a shame that Ralph Nader was denied the simple pleasure of eating hummus on a plane by an inflexible bureaucrat’s dedication to rules based on fear about a very real threat to public safety. That was Nestor’s rationale for saying no to everything. You can’t have a bad new drug if you don’t approve any new drugs. But Nader was asked to pay a very small price in service to the common good, at least compared to the prices he’s helped inflict on the entire country. More’s the pita he can’t see it.

The Return of ‘We Missed the Story’

By Becket Adams

Sunday, April 19, 2026

 

You have to give CNN’s Brian Stelter this much: Nobody is as reliably wrong as he is.

 

That counts for something, right?

 

On April 13, the self-appointed public relations agent for the legacy press gave the news business a metaphorical pat on the back, crediting investigative journalists with forcing disgraced Representative Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.) to scuttle his gubernatorial campaign and resign from the House of Representatives after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment and assault.

 

“Eric Swalwell ending his bid for California governor is, among other things, a testament to the power of investigative reporting,” Stelter boasted.

 

It is not. No one comes away from this story looking good, least of all members of the press.

 

The allegations against Swalwell are as serious as they get. The alleged predation, which Swalwell denies, spans more than a decade, stretching back to at least his first term in Congress in 2012. Worst of all, journalists and insiders in Washington, D.C., and California now say they first heard rumors about the congressman’s secret life years earlier.

 

Gee, fellas. A decade-plus is a long time to not do anything with an allegation stretching from the nation’s capital to the Golden State.

 

“Rumors about Eric Swalwell’s sexual misconduct have swirled in D.C. for years,” said former Axios reporter Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian. “I first heard these rumors in 2020, in the course of my other reporting about Swalwell. I was neither a politics reporter nor a women’s issues reporter, so I could not chase them down.”

 

She added, “I very much wanted to report it out myself. But #MeToo stories on the Hill aren’t related to my beat, as much as I personally wish I could report them out. I passed the tip along to colleagues on the Hill beat.”

 

For the record, there is no rule in journalism preventing a reporter from pursuing a tip simply because it drifts slightly outside his or her beat, though some newsrooms are stricter than others in this respect. Allen-Ebrahimian’s explanation is especially puzzling when you remember that, in her role covering China, she was one of the Axios reporters who broke the story of Swalwell’s relationship with a Chinese spy.

 

California politics insider Steven Tavares offered a similar account: “I’ve covered Eric [Swalwell] since he was a member of the Dublin City Council. Shortly after being elected to Congress in 2013, his behavior towards women was known by all levels of our local government and the Alameda County Democratic Party.”

 

Then there’s this curious 2017 tidbit from CNN: During the height of the #MeToo movement, the network reported that “more than half a dozen interviewees independently named one California congressman for pursuing female staffers.” CNN chose not to name the lawmaker or pursue the claims further, citing a lack of verification.

 

Five women have now accused Swalwell of sexual misconduct. One allegation involves strangulation and rape. Three women describe “blackout” experiences.

 

It’s difficult to square the caution that the press exercised for Swalwell with the recklessness with which it pursued the thin and obviously dubious allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

 

We all remember the confirmation hearings, when newsrooms such as CNN eagerly platformed even the most outlandish claims of sexual misconduct.

 

Our media has  a two-tied system of standards. It had no problem legitimizing even anonymous allegations against Kavanaugh but passed on reporting the far more credible allegations against Swalwell, claiming a lack of corroborating evidence (they also didn’t have corroborating evidence in Kavanaugh’s case, but no matter!).

 

It’s really as simple as selective caution, and one can’t help but notice to whom the courtesy is extended.

 

Lastly, as far as crediting investigative journalists with Swalwell’s downfall goes: Be serious.

 

We recognize an opposition-research dump when we see one.

 

The press didn’t suddenly crack the Swalwell story; it languished for years despite being what reporters themselves called an open secret. The information surfaced only when Swalwell complicated the Democratic Party’s odds in the California gubernatorial race.

 

We can venture a pretty good guess as to what happened: Democratic operatives fed reporters the dirt.

 

Party strategist Michael Trujillo claimed as much:

 

One note on the Swalwell stuff — (this isn’t confirmed) but a reporter with Politico was working on verifying the rumors on Swalwell when he was running for President. (He’s no longer with the publication.) Two days before he was scheduled to sit down with this reporter Swalwell dropped out of the race. The energy disappeared to potentially take him out, the victims if they were even willing to go on the record never did. He slithered back to his safe house seat. December 2025 was too early to take down Swalwell we had to wait til his paperwork was ALL IN running for governor March 2026, so the head of the snake could be chopped off and he had no safe house seat to slither back to this time. Hate the strategy fine, but for folks unsure if this would work, we had to make sure he couldn’t get away like he did in 2020.

 

Naturally, take Trujillo’s account with a grain of salt; strategists lie for a living. Yet nothing he said is hard to believe given the pattern.

 

Reporters claim they had heard rumors of Swalwell’s misconduct for years, yet they did nothing. Suddenly, when the party needed Swalwell gone, the story materialized.

 

We’ve seen this sort of thing before, most recently with the White House press corps pretending not to notice that former President Joe Biden’s brains had turned to mush.

 

It’s a stutter! Those are cheap fakes! He’s as sharp as a tack!

 

Then Biden himself removed all doubt as to his mental acuity, or lack thereof, and the same press decided all at once that the truth of Biden’s decline could no longer be ignored. Never mind that the about-face coincided exactly with Democratic power brokers reaching the same conclusion.

 

From dismissing concerning videos as “cheap fakes” to hawking books about how everyone knew Biden was a dotard, and the only thing that changed in that time was the opinion of Democratic leadership.

 

Similarly, the press simply couldn’t report on this Swalwell business until it suddenly “could.”

 

A high-profile member of Congress allegedly drugged and raped women and somehow got away with it for more than a decade, through the #MeToo era and even a presidential campaign. Until now, reporters just couldn’t report the story, even though they claim they knew Swalwell had a reputation as a creep and predator. The press couldn’t lock it down, choosing instead to demonstrate a level of responsibility that was wholly absent for the duration of Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

 

Then Swalwell becomes a problem in the California gubernatorial race, and the next thing you know, those rumors no one could confirm suddenly appear in print.

 

All it took was seven terms in Congress, nearly a half-dozen victims, and possibly one spiked investigation in 2020.

 

Hooray for journalists indeed.

This Is No Golden Age

By Alfredo Carrillo Obregon

Thursday, April 16, 2026

 

Addressing the nation from the Rose Garden on the afternoon of April 2, 2025, President Donald Trump declared America’s “economic independence” from the nations that had long “ripped [us] off,” heralding the start of a “golden age” for American consumers, companies, and workers. He dubbed the event “liberation day.” The president assured the American people that, through so-called reciprocal tariffs applied on nearly every country, factories and jobs would come “roaring back” to the United States, foreign trade barriers would be broken down, and consumers would benefit through lower prices.

 

A year on, despite the president’s colossal promises of a new golden age, the reality looks much different.

 

To begin with, the president’s “reciprocal” tariffs are no longer. This past February, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the president’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose these tariffs. Trump had declared a national emergency stemming from “large and persistent” trade deficits. The Court’s ruling also invalidated tariffs levied by the president through IEEPA pursuant to other national emergency declarations. It thus overruled the primary mechanism of the president’s tariff-setting agenda during his second term.

 

Even before the Court scrapped the Trump administration’s reciprocal tariffs, however, these duties were riddled with tariff-rate reductions and exemptions. First, the president paused the implementation of the tariffs for 90 days following a stock market plunge in reaction to his liberation day announcement, and he invited countries to negotiate lower rates during that time. Several U.S. trading partners (including the European Union, Japan, and South Korea) proceeded to negotiate agreements (or frameworks for agreements) with the administration, locking in lower reciprocal tariff rates in exchange for trade concessions and investment pledges. Then the president issued many rounds of exemptions from the reciprocal tariffs, most notably for semiconductors and certain electronics, including smartphones and computers, products from countries that negotiated agreements or framework agreements, and agricultural products.

 

As a result, the applied U.S. tariff rate fell from 21.5 percent, at its highest point in 2025, to 13.6 percent before the Supreme Court ruling. Most notably, only 42 percent of U.S. imports (based on 2024 import levels) were subject to IEEPA tariffs by the end of 2025. While these numbers help explain why the tariffs were not as harmful as many experts feared in April 2025, they also demonstrate that the president’s policies, from the outset, were hampered by economic realities and influenced by political considerations.

 

***

 

Myriad exemptions and rate reductions notwithstanding, the president’s tariffs undeniably raised prices for American consumers and producers.

 

The emerging economic literature on the tariffs imposed in 2025 broadly finds that Americans paid for most of the tariffs’ higher costs. Studies published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Goldman Sachs, and the Brookings Institution, among others, find that, in the aggregate, Americans bore 77 to 96 percent of the 2025 tariffs’ higher costs, with American companies paying for most of this tariff pass-through. At the same time, a Harvard Business School survey of products sold at large U.S. retailers found that tariffs led to higher retail prices of both imported and domestic goods in the same product categories. Not only did U.S. consumers pay for about 43 percent of the tariff-induced increase in the cost of imported goods, but import-competing U.S. producers also marked up their prices.

 

The administration and proponents of protectionism often point out that tariffs did not lead to an inflationary spiral. A low bar, to be sure, yet many economists doubted this could happen from the outset. Even many economists opposed to the tariffs doubted such a spiral, in part because imports of goods accounted for only 11 percent of U.S. GDP in 2024.

 

These economic analyses consider tariffs’ visible costs — that is, their effects on prices — yet tariffs also impose invisible costs on Americans that, while harder to quantify, compound their economic damage. One of these unseen costs is the uncertainty surrounding U.S. tariff policy. The U.S. tariff code underwent 50 changes in 2025, most of them related to tariffs imposed and modified by the executive branch. That is double the average number of tariff changes in the preceding five years. It is no surprise, then, that researchers have quantified that uncertainty surrounding U.S. trade policy reached its highest point on record in April 2025. For businesses with global networks of suppliers that took years to build, this uncertainty is crippling.

 

Another unseen cost is the degree to which the various tariff regimes implemented in 2025 made the U.S. tariff code increasingly difficult to navigate, even for seasoned customs experts. Complex rules regarding “tariff stacking” (i.e., adding duty rates levied under separate regimes) have made the process of importing a product into the United States much more byzantine and costly than it was a decade ago. The rules’ opacity eroded the system’s predictability. The Financial Times, for instance, noted a case in which U.S. customs authorities assessed four identical shipments from Europe with four different tariff rates. The costs of complying with such complex import regulations and the prospect of higher tariff liabilities or penalties act as an additional barrier to importation — one that disproportionately affects small businesses.

 

The tariffs imposed real and significant economic costs on Americans and fomented political dysfunction at home and abroad.

 

Domestically, the tariffs led to an explosion in special interest politics. Driven by the opportunity to win exemptions from the tariffs or higher barriers for overseas competitors, tariff lobbying in 2025 reached levels not seen in years. Open Secrets data show that the number of registered clients for tariff lobbying climbed to 382 in 2025, a 218 percent increase relative to 2024. Bloomberg, meanwhile, reported that expenses on trade lobbying reached more than $900 million in the first half of 2025 alone and were 28 percent higher than in the first half of 2024.

 

Perhaps the most egregious aspect of this tariff-related cronyism is its brazenness. Thousands of Americans watched as Apple CEO Tim Cook presented Trump with a statue sitting atop a 24-karat gold base and promised to invest $600 billion in the U.S. economy. Four days later, iPhones (along with other products with embedded semiconductors) became exempt from the IEEPA reciprocal tariffs. Cook was far from the only prominent CEO with direct access to the president — an access that small businesses crushed by higher tariffs did not enjoy.

 

Tariff-induced dysfunction has also put a strain on the country’s judicial system. In anticipation of the Supreme Court’s ruling invalidating the IEEPA tariffs, importers filed more than 2,000 lawsuits seeking refunds. In the wake of the Court’s decision, the government owes more than $160 billion in tariff refunds to more than 300,000 importers, with $700 million in additional taxpayer-funded interest for every month it further delays issuing refunds.

 

The tariffs also tarnished America’s reputation as a reliable trading partner. The duties ran afoul of America’s commitments under the World Trade Organization and free trade agreements (FTAs) it had previously negotiated. And the president’s ongoing tariff threats further evince that U.S. trade policy, built for decades through careful cooperation between the executive and the legislative, runs on the whims of one man.

 

It should not be surprising, therefore, that the affected countries are moving to establish alternative trading arrangements. Just in the past few months, for instance, the European Union has inked comprehensive FTAs with the Southern Common Market, Australia, and India, while Canada is moving to conclude negotiations with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and reportedly looking to “broker a bridge” between the EU and the members of the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership.

 

Altogether, the Trump administration’s tariff policies have accelerated a yearslong trend whereby other countries negotiate and enter additional trade agreements while the United States — not having entered an FTA since 2020 — stands on the sidelines. Threatening high tariffs may serve to secure some purchase commitments and tariff concessions from foreign countries, but it is less effective at creating long-term competitive advantages for American farmers and businesses in foreign markets than traditional and meticulously negotiated agreements.

 

***

 

Against the backdrop of high economic and political costs, the administration’s tariff policies could be defensible only if they had produced the golden age the president heralded in his speech announcing the new tariff regime. The evidence so far suggests this is not happening.

 

Most notably, a tariff-induced “manufacturing renaissance” has not materialized. While industrial capacity indeed increased in 2025, this is only a continuation of a trend that started in early 2022. Real manufacturing output is unchanged from 2022. Real manufacturing value-added (i.e., output minus costs of intermediate inputs) appears to be on track for a historic high, yet this record has been broken nearly every year since the Great Recession in 2009. Meanwhile, inflation-adjusted spending on manufacturing facilities precipitously declined throughout 2025. The post-2022 decline in manufacturing capacity utilization continued, and the economy added no manufacturing jobs in 2025.

 

While the U.S. manufacturing sector, as a result of many factors, has gone through fits and starts since 2022, the recent tariffs clearly have not reversed the sector’s fortunes. On the contrary, they probably worsened them. Industry surveys during 2025 indicated that higher, tariff-induced prices and tariff uncertainty depressed activity and growth for firms throughout most of the sector. Re-shoring, though appealing as political rhetoric, is not a viable business strategy for many of these businesses.

 

Underscoring this point, the U.S. goods trade deficit increased in 2025, reaching an all-time high. Much of this increase materialized in the early months of the year, as firms front-loaded imports in anticipation of the administration’s high tariffs; but mitigating the noise from this front-loading and excluding trade in gold — which distorted trade figures throughout 2025 — reveal that monthly U.S. trade deficits are hovering at the same level as in late 2024. Meanwhile, declining bilateral deficits with certain countries, most notably China, have been offset by increased deficits with other countries, including Mexico, Vietnam, and Taiwan. In short, there has been no discernible “improvement” in the U.S. trade balance, and higher deficits point to the lack of substantial re-shoring.

 

The president’s lofty foreign investment goals have also not been met yet. Indeed, quarterly foreign direct investment in the United States declined in the second half of 2025, and the total for 2025 ($288.4 billion) was lower than the figures for the previous five years. The White House claims that foreign countries have pledged to invest about $5.2 trillion in the U.S. economy, yet this implausible figure would mean nearly doubling the total “stock” of foreign investment in the U.S. economy ($5.7 trillion at the end of 2024, not adjusted for changes in prices). Most countries’ reported investment pledges exceed their total historical investment in the U.S. economy, further raising questions about the feasibility of achieving the president’s investment targets.

 

Liberation day did not launch the promised era of economic prosperity. Taxes, prices, uncertainty, bureaucracy, and cronyism increased, while U.S. manufacturing, foreign investment, and the trade balance remained unchanged. And yet the administration is moving to re-create the IEEPA tariff regime through other executive tariff authorities, including Sections 122 and 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. The most arbitrary and unpredictable tariffs may be behind us, but elevated protectionism is here to stay — and most Americans will be worse off because of it.

Mamdani’s Socialist Super, Super, Supermarkets

By Andrew Stuttaford

Saturday, April 18, 2026

 

One of the reasons why free enterprise works so well is (apologies, this is basic stuff) because of the discipline provided by the need to earn a return on the money invested. It follows that the higher the cost of that money, the higher the return that will need to be earned upon it to make the venture worthwhile. Reduce the cost of that capital to zero by providing it out of taxpayer funds, which as we all “know” are free, and that discipline disappears, even more so when there is not even a nominal requirement to make money.

 

And so to some recent news about the new city-run grocery stores planned by New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani. He has announced that the outlet in Manhattan, a “business,” which will be open before (checks notes) the mayor’s term ends, will cost some $30 million to set up.

 

Mamdani boasted that “at our stores, eggs will be cheaper. Bread will be cheaper.” Not so “cheap” for taxpayers.

 

Meanwhile, Elsie Encarnacion, the city council member for the part of Manhattan where that borough’s store will be located, commented that “this means access to affordable, healthy food that is hopefully culturally relevant.”

 

So, this store will be in a food desert?

 

According to the New York Post, there are “already five grocery stores within a two-block radius” of the lot where the store will be located and 15 within five blocks. I wonder how they have survived without selling “culturally relevant” fare.  I also wonder how they will manage to deal with the challenge posed by a heavily subsidized competitor (which, incidentally, will not have to pay rent or real estate taxes).

 

The New York Post reported that some kulak, Carlos Collado, a Bronx supermarket owner who is vice president of the city’s Bodega and Small Business Group, has been whining about unfair competition:

 

“We believe it is fundamentally unfair to use tax dollars — collected from hardworking citizens and existing local businesses — to subsidize unproven, government-run endeavors.”

 

And his complaints didn’t stop there:

 

“The administration claims these stores are a response to inflation, yet fails to realize that their own constant mandates, regulatory hurdles, and rising fees are significant drivers of the very inflation hurting shoppers today.”

 

Talk about being on the wrong side of history!

 

Other bourgeois elements grumbled about the cost:

 

“I almost fell back when I saw the $30 million number,” Anthony Pena, president of the National Supermarket Association, told The Post. “Even a high end, gourmet store in the middle of Manhattan wouldn’t cost that much to build.”

 

Avi Kaner, the former owner of New York’s 17-store Morton Williams grocery chain, said “$30 million is an awful lot to spend to build one supermarket.”

 

Kaner and Pena both said that a typical, 15,000-square-foot store without elevators or escalators costs under $10 million to build.

 

The two appear to have forgotten that nothing is too good for the working classes.

 

Because this store will be good for the working classes, right, right . . . right?

 

New York’s city council has yet to approve the scheme.

Is Cultural Marxism the Root of Our Problems?

By Megan Dent

Saturday, April 18, 2026

 

Politics would surely benefit from the demise of the echo chamber. Within our political silos, we wander in self-referential logical mazes, convinced of our own righteousness because every sign we pass points to it. We are like the god Narcissus, doomed to forever gaze at his own reflection until he melts from the pressure of a purely interior passion.

 

When I see book titles that reference both the right and the left, then, I harbor a little flicker of hope. Perhaps this author will cross that rickety bridge between the two aisles and come away with the wisdom that we need to combust our implacably partisan moment.

 

Such was my naïve hope when I opened The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West, by English historian A.J.A. Woods, who uses they/them pronouns. To what extent did academic theorists—Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, and the like—really instigate the identity politics that the right has historically loathed? A fascinating subject. I opened the book with optimism.

 

Woods begins by defining “cultural Marxism” as “the political right’s attempt to explain why the culture of Western societies has changed over the past sixty years.” It’s a sort of catchall, bogeyman term for the many social convulsions that have upended small-c conservative social mores, from student protests and the Summer of Love in the 1960s, to LGBT and BLM campaign efforts in recent years.

 

The University of Frankfurt base for Marxist scholarship, established in 1923, provides conservatives with a point in time and space where critical theory—a series of disciplinary approaches that draws on Marxist analysis to challenge power inequalities in language, history, and public discourse—was born. Woods suggests that conservatives blame the Frankfurt School for setting progressive identity politics in motion: it was the beginning of what they view as its “long march through the institutions,” shaping public culture from media outlets to educational establishments. So far, this sounds reasonable.

 

How, asks Woods, can we understand the way right-wing figures have used the mantle of cultural Marxism to build a narrative about cultural decline? “What this task requires, I suggest, is a return to Gramsci’s theory of intellectuals,” they answer. Woods will draw on “conjunctural analysis as a method of contextualization,” they explain, which is “a methodological approach that comes from a particular reading of Antononio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks.”

 

To make the case that cultural Marxism is essentially a paranoid fever dream of the political right, Woods will use none other than … Marxist theory. I fear we are back in the maze. And quickly, the extent to which this book is a prolonged period of Woods gazing at their own reflection becomes clear.

 

By the end of the introduction, Woods’ cards are out on the table. The conservatives who talk about cultural Marxism are “reactionary political forces” who “search for new ways to justify their opposition to equality, democracy, and justice.” They seek to “denigrate and disempower certain groups” and we must “resist their attacks and fight for a better future.”

 

The rest of this book unfolds as a—very impressive, at times—textual history of the lunacy of the right from a thoroughly unreflective progressive perspective. This is not a left-wing view that reckons with the weaknesses of identity politics or seeks to understand the right’s instinct—or, as some concede, nostalgia—for a bygone set of social and institutional norms. Woods insists that “the right will not be satisfied until every museum and every university and every street (and every hospital and every library and every pub) is cleansed of wokeness.” This is the replacement of one bogeyman—“cultural Marxism”—with another, the “transnational right.” Woods wants us to believe that one of these is a reactionary hallucination, while the other is totally, definitely real. 

 

To make the case, Woods traces the textual journey of cultural Marxism from the concept’s use by the bizarre then-Trotskyist Lyndon LaRouche in the 1960s, through William Lind at the Free Congress Foundation and figures of the new right such as Paul Weyrich in the 1970s. With scrupulous research, chapters lay out the how the concept was inflected to serve the narratives of a return to “family values” after the social disruptions of the ’60s; to battle the restrictions of “political correctness” in the 1990s; to galvanize the Tea Party movement in the 2000s; and most recently, to undermine contemporary “woke” social justice movements. 

 

Undermining this thorough intellectual history is Woods’ unabashed contempt for their political opponents. They refer to the theorists that they cite regularly as “scholars,” while anyone from the right is a “reactionary.” Everything that the right worries about in society is an “alleged” or “supposed” concept, while the concerns of the left are simply “grassroots struggles” against real problems. Thus what many on the right feel is a university environment dominated by obscure critical analysis and progressive social mandates is a “so-called field of ideologically-motivated scholarship on issues of race, gender, and inequality.” At the same time, “Indigenous and ‘Land Back’ movements, trans liberation, pro-Palestine protests and so on” are simply good-faith efforts to combat injustices. Nothing to see here.

 

With every insult aimed at the right—Tea Party protesters are “balding and bloated businessmen [who] donned tricorne hats and embarrassed themselves by adopting faux-colonial accents and parading down the street with antique muskets”—Woods misses an opportunity to have a much more interesting, and dare I say, adult conversation about the identitarian and political sentiments that have driven an impassable wedge in American politics.

 

This book is strongest when it alludes to the economic fallout that produces cultural discontent, but sadly these are not expanded upon. At a few junctures, Woods hints at the book that I wish they had written, in which Woods put their Marxist bona fides to good use to show that, as Woods argues contra Christopher Rufo, common people are victims not of “elite wokeness,” but of “market forces or systemic shifts.” This could build on the work of the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi’s book We Have Never Been Woke, to show that the right’s culture war hysteria is simply a misdiagnosis of the real ills in American society: economic and class inequality.

 

Along these lines, Woods rightly calls out the tokenism of corporate DEI culture, quipping that “Amazon’s pristine diversity, equity, and inclusion statement has never stopped Jeff Bezos from repressing unionization efforts in his warehouses.” And of Rufo, James Lindsay, and other online right-wing activists, Woods adeptly argues that their “counterrevolution represents nothing but the replacement of a woke ruling class with a conservative one … Rufo’s proposals substitute one type of paternalism for another.”

 

“Whereas the woke restricted free speech to protect the ‘feelings’ of the ‘snowflake left’, Rufo’s counterrevolution prohibits any speech that induces ‘guilt’ or ‘distress’ in white America,” Woods adds.

 

Unfortunately, Woods falls prey to something similar, their book often descending into the type of culture war tract that it decries. After persuading their readers that the right is wrong to imagine a cadre of Marxist academics conspiring to take down the West, Woods introduces a caricature of their own: “a subjective figure that I call the New Right think-tank intellectual.” This shadowy figure “hoped to remake subjectivities to conform to their notion of family values.” In non-Gramsci English, this means something like the new right think-tank intellectual hoping to advance their own policy agendas. Just like Marxists do.

 

Woods’ work is a notable history of an idea and an interesting portrait of the left’s understanding of both the right and of itself. It is written for others on the left who, like Woods, believe that Marxist theory is like air: You don’t have to persuade anyone of its truth, it’s just there, animating everything and shaping everything. For the rest of us, the theories of Marx and Gramsci, while not responsible for the decline of all civilization, are still better described in the words of a former progressive activist whom Woods interviewed: “misguided attempts to ‘shoehorn the square pegs of theory into the round holes of reality.’”

The Bonfire of the Title IX Agreements

By Paul Zimmerman

Sunday, April 19, 2026

 

During the Obama and Biden administrations, federal officials investigated several school districts for violating Title IX, the law banning sex discrimination in education. What was their offense? They refused to accept that Title IX includes “gender identity,” an idea that lawmakers never considered when they passed the law in 1972.

 

This stance was unacceptable to the radical political appointees in the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the Education Department, so they opened investigations that ultimately produced so-called “voluntary” resolution agreements between the department and the school districts.

 

For example, in 2015, the Delaware Valley School District in Pennsylvania agreed to sweeping policy changes after facing the threat of losing federal funding. Based on a radical interpretation of Title IX, the OCR coerced the district to ban discrimination based on “gender identity, gender expression, gender transition, transgender status, or gender nonconformity.” This led, in practice, to policies that opened the door to males competing in female sports and using girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms.

 

Earlier this month, the Trump administration rescinded these illegal “voluntary” resolution agreements. This historic step deserves more attention and praise.

 

By squelching those extortive requirements, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has confirmed that the department has no authority to impose gender ideology in schools across the country and that it will not enforce those provisions of existing resolution agreements that attempt to do so.

 

Current and former Education Department officials can cite no other instance in which a resolution agreement has been withdrawn. The unprecedented nature of the OCR’s revocation of these resolution agreements arises from the unprecedented rewriting of federal civil rights law by two previous administrations in furtherance of gender ideology.

 

Between 1972 and 2015, no administration had thought to interpret Title IX to prohibit discrimination based on “gender identity.” That understanding of what “sex” means changed in the lame-duck Obama years and during the unabashedly “intersectionalist” Biden administration, which issued regulations in 2024 that would have forced every public K–12 school across the country to eliminate sex-separated spaces such as bathrooms and locker rooms in favor of access based on gender identity. The Education Department has now ended that indefensible interpretation of Title IX, which has been blocked by numerous federal courts and the Supreme Court. These rulings recognized that it is for Congress to define what kind of discrimination is prohibited under federal law.

 

But the importance of the OCR’s rescission of these resolution agreements lies not just in ending unlawful government overreach. It is vital to recognize that, although the Education Department has changed hands, many states, from California to Maine, continue to enforce gender ideology in state law.

 

In Minnesota, girls who counted on sex-separated sports must surrender their safety and dignity by competing against boys who identify as female. In Maryland, students once protected from unauthorized bathroom access who object to using their sex-separated locker room in the presence of a member of the opposite sex must now either stay silent or request to use a less-convenient, single-user space. California bars parents from knowing whether their children are sharing a bedroom on a school-sponsored trip with male or female students or adult staff members. Other states mimic these requirements.

 

This blue-state dysfunction places school districts in an awkward position of having to choose between complying with state law or Title IX. But just as Title IX does not allow federal authorities to force schools to accept gender ideology, it certainly doesn’t permit state or local agencies to require that their schools discriminate. Title IX applies to all federally funded educational agencies and institutions, whether located in a red state or a blue state. Under the Constitution, Title IX reigns supremely on these issues.

 

The Trump administration should follow up its welcome rescission of lawless resolution agreements with a regulatory proposal to rescind the Biden administration’s indefensible 2024 Title IX regulations and replace them with new rules that protect students, families, and teachers against the harms of gender ideology. Such regulations would clarify that sex is binary and biological and would prohibit schools and colleges from requiring students to cede their privacy, safety, or dignity in sports or private spaces as a condition of equal access to educational opportunities. Such rulemaking could also serve as a model for Congress to enact statutory reforms that would prevent future administrations from exploiting Title IX to advance gender ideology.

Jabotinsky Was Right About Everything (So Cheer Up!)

By Seth Mandel

Friday, April 17, 2026

 

In a 2010 speech, former deputy secretary of defense Douglas Feith noted that although David Ben-Gurion is (rightly) honored as the founder and political foundation of the State of Israel, no one today calls himself a “Ben-Gurionite.” In contrast, it is very easy to encounter those who consider themselves “Jabotinskyites.” That is, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky—despised by Ben-Gurion and his left-wing establishment—is the one with the lasting ideological legacy.

 

I once asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose father spent time in Jabotinsky’s circle, why that is. He responded that in order to establish a state strong enough to survive the eliminationist enmity of its Arab neighbors, even Ben-Gurion accepted certain basic Jabotinskyite principles—chief among them, that Israel had to be strong enough to convince the Arabs that it wasn’t going anywhere.

 

Jabotinsky had a stronger sense of reality than almost anybody else on the planet when he contemplated the Jewish future. And so he turned into something of a prophet.

 

Jabotinsky believed, for example, that the path to Jewish self-determination must involve the Jews’ proving they could fight as an ally, not as a dependent, in war. He was right: Soon after his Jewish Legion, a Jewish fighting force under British command in World War I, helped liberate Ottoman Palestine, the Balfour Declaration announced Britain’s intention to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish home on that land.

 

Jabotinsky believed the future State of Israel—he didn’t live to see it, but he knew it would come—had to produce more than Jaffa oranges; it had to build things the world needed. He was right: He presaged the emergence of “the start-up nation” by many decades.

 

His influential writings on Ukrainian nationalism and Russian imperialism were eerily predictive of our current moment. His belief in the importance of persuading the general American public, and not just the government, of the justice of the Zionists’ cause has been likewise vindicated.

 

And these are just a few of the examples. There are more, because Jabotinsky was right about it all.

 

And that is one reason to feel less pessimistic about the still-very-concerning rise of Jewish anti-Zionism in our current post-October 7 moment. Jewish history leaves no doubt as to who will be vindicated and who will not: In the future, no one is going to say, “if only I’d listened to Peter Beinart.”

 

And so the self-humiliation ritual that Ezra Klein put himself through at the New York Times over the past week—in which he defended anti-American anti-Semite Hasan Piker’s inclusion in Democratic Party politics, only to have Piker reaffirm his Jew-hatred and his fanatical worship of those who murder American civilians—evinces outrage that melts into pity. We’ll send you a postcard from the future, Ezra.

 

Judaism is indestructible, which is why the destruction of the holy temple, at a time when it was the center and anchor of the religious aspect of Jewish peoplehood, still has millions of Jews around to mourn it. The best future anti-Zionists can hope for is to be a memory, to have been something that we vaguely recall.

 

Where do the Jews who aren’t anti-Zionist but who are easily cowed by anti-Zionists fall in this equation? They are ripe for an education. The Jews did not keep their status as the eternal people by voting against bulldozers for Israel, as several Jewish Democratic senators did this week. They seem to have forgotten that, just as they themselves will soon be forgotten.

 

When Jabotinsky was demobilized after the war, he recounted telling his fellow Jewish Legionnaires the following:

 

“Far away, in your home, you will one day read glorious news, of a free Jewish life in a free Jewish country—of factories and universities, of farms and theaters, perhaps of MPs and ministers. … Then you shall stand up, walk to the mirror, and look yourself proudly in the face … and salute yourself—for ’tis you who have made it.”

 

That was in 1918, 30 years before the rebirth of the State of Israel. Some people have an easier time seeing the future than others. It’s usually those who have a better grasp on the past.