Mao’s Longest Shadow

By Jianli Yang

Wednesday, September 09, 2026

 

Mao Zedong — who died 50 years ago today — spent roughly 28 years making a revolution and nearly 27 years ruling the country his revolution created. Yet Mao imagined his reach on an even grander scale, declaring in his youthful poetry: “Confident that my life would last 200 years.” He did not live 200 years. But his influence on China, and perhaps beyond it, may well do so.

 

The most obvious part of Mao’s legacy is written in blood and suffering. The political campaigns, executions, persecution of “class enemies,” the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Great Leap Forward, famine, and the Cultural Revolution destroyed tens of millions of lives and subjected hundreds of millions more to hunger, humiliation, fear, dispossession, and political degradation.

 

But Mao’s deepest damage to China may be harder to count. He poisoned its political culture. Mao did not merely teach generations of Chinese people what to believe. More consequentially, he taught them what kind of person prevails.

 

The lesson was simple: Life is struggle. Your opponent is not merely wrong; he is an enemy. Rules are useful when they serve you and dispensable when they do not. Cruelty is strength. Mercy toward an opponent is weakness. Loyalty matters more than competence. Repetition can manufacture truth. Mobilized anger can overwhelm institutions. And ultimately, winning vindicates everything. Mao was a master practitioner of this philosophy.

 

He understood that politics could be conducted not simply through institutions but through the manipulation of fear, resentment, humiliation, and loyalty. Again and again, people who had helped him defeat yesterday’s enemies became tomorrow’s enemies themselves. Allies became “rightists.” Revolutionary veterans became “capitalist roaders.” Intellectuals invited to speak became counter-revolutionaries. The categories changed. The essential rule did not: Mao decided who belonged to “the people” and who became “the enemy.”

 

Mao famously wrote that “a revolution is not a dinner party,” and that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” His political vocabulary elevated douzheng — struggle — into something far larger than an occasional necessity; struggle became a way of understanding politics itself. Ideology mattered, but it was also extraordinarily adaptable in his hands. What remained constant was power. Yesterday’s orthodoxy could become today’s deviation. The standard was ultimately not consistency with doctrine, but consistency with Mao’s political requirements.

 

Mao always had the noblest words available to describe the ugliest acts. Everything was done “for the people.” Enemies were destroyed, property confiscated, and families torn apart, all for the people. If Mao embodied the people, his opponents opposed the people. If he alone could save the country, resistance to him became treason. Politics became a moral war between patriots and enemies, and hundreds of millions starved while policies were defended in the name of the people.

 

The Cultural Revolution was the purest expression of this logic. Mao encouraged people to “bombard the headquarters,” turned young people against teachers and parents, and transformed political accusation into a form of civic participation. The genius — and horror — of the system was that Mao could present himself simultaneously as the supreme authority and the leader of rebellion against authority, the establishment and the insurgent against it at once. Chaos therefore strengthened rather than weakened him. Institutions became suspect; personal loyalty became paramount. Expertise became elitism. Moderation became cowardice. Compromise became betrayal. Politics became theater, and the theater demanded ever more dramatic demonstrations of loyalty.

 

The Cultural Revolution eventually ended. The political psychology it cultivated did not. Nor was Mao’s corruption of political culture confined to Communist officials; it penetrated society at large. Inherited moral traditions, family obligations, and elementary standards of decency could all be denounced as remnants of the old society. Children were encouraged to expose parents, students to attack teachers, colleagues to inform on colleagues. Suspicion became prudence. Ruthlessness could masquerade as revolutionary virtue.

 

The damage outlived Maoism as an economic system. When China later embraced markets, an old political habit found a new arena: The principle that no means were too unscrupulous if they served the revolution mutated into the principle that no means were too unscrupulous if they served profit or personal advancement. Market economies did not create Maoism, and Maoism alone cannot explain China’s later corruption, but the moral inheritance mattered. A society repeatedly taught that rules, truth, and human relationships could be sacrificed to a higher objective was poorly prepared to build a culture of honesty.

 

This helps explain a bleak sentiment still heard often in China: that decency is naïveté, honesty a disadvantage, compassion a weakness, and only the ruthless and unscrupulous ultimately succeed. Mao did not invent these vices. His achievement was demonstrating, at enormous scale, that they could be converted into a philosophy of success.

 

A country can recover from bad economic policy more quickly than from that kind of moral injury. Deng Xiaoping tried to move China away from permanent revolution; economic development replaced class struggle, expertise returned, pragmatism acquired legitimacy. Yet China never completed the harder task: a moral reckoning with Maoism. Mao’s portrait remained over Tiananmen. His embalmed body remained at the symbolic center of the capital. The Party continued to derive its legitimacy from the revolution he led. That unfinished reckoning helps explain why Mao has returned so easily to Chinese politics.

 

Xi Jinping is not Mao Zedong, and today’s China is not Cultural Revolution China. Xi values order where Mao sometimes deliberately cultivated disorder, and contemporary China possesses a sophisticated economy and bureaucracy unimaginable in Mao’s time.

 

Yet there is a striking irony in Xi’s rehabilitation of Mao’s political authority. Few Chinese leaders of his generation had more personal reason to resent Mao. Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, a senior revolutionary official, was purged under Mao in 1962 and spent much of the following 16 years under detention and political disgrace; the persecution engulfed the family, and the younger Xi was eventually sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. One might expect such a history to produce a leader determined to distance the Party from Mao. The opposite happened.

 

Compared with his immediate predecessors, Xi has restored Mao more fully to the center of the Party’s legitimacy, insisting on continuity between the Mao era and the post-Mao era rather than allowing the latter to become an implicit repudiation of the former. Independent investigation of the Cultural Revolution has faced tighter boundaries. This does not require us to imagine personal affection for the man responsible for his family’s suffering. There is a colder explanation.

 

Xi understands the political utility of Mao’s methods: the identification of enemies, the elevation of struggle, the demand for loyalty, the subordination of institutions to political leadership, the mobilization of nationalism, and the insistence that the Party represents a mission larger than ordinary rules. These remain extraordinarily effective instruments for concentrating authority and disciplining government and society. Xi does not need to reproduce Mao’s chaos to recognize the usefulness of Mao’s political logic, and he appears more prepared than his immediate predecessors to reach for those instruments when he judges circumstances require it.

 

This is why Xi has revived one of Mao’s most consequential concepts: struggle. Under Xi, “daring to struggle” has again become a celebrated political virtue, elevated in Party doctrine and applied to internal discipline, ideology, and China’s confrontation with perceived external adversaries.

 

More importantly, Xi shares something deeper with Mao: political ruthlessness combined with tactical flexibility. He can be intensely ideological about ultimate control while highly pragmatic about the means of preserving it. Markets may be encouraged or restrained; entrepreneurs celebrated or disciplined; nationalism, Marxism, tradition, and pragmatism all invoked as circumstances require. There is no contradiction so long as the ultimate objective remains constant: Power must not be contested.

 

In this sense, Mao’s most durable victory was not communism; China today bears little resemblance to the economic order he tried to create. His more durable victory was cultural. He helped normalize the idea that winning is the ultimate proof of being right. That poison reaches far beyond communist ideology; one does not have to be a communist to become a Maoist in political temperament.

 

China’s failure to fully confront Mao’s legacy matters, because a society cannot achieve political civilization merely by becoming richer. China has skyscrapers, high-speed trains, artificial intelligence, and spacecraft, yet its political vocabulary can still return effortlessly to struggle, enemies, loyalty, and ideological purification. And political culture does not stop at the walls of government buildings. Once a society rewards humiliation over persuasion, cunning over honesty, tribal loyalty over truth, and victory over rules, those habits migrate outward, shaping families, workplaces, and the way ordinary citizens see one another. Political barbarism can become social barbarism — one reason China’s path toward democracy has proved so difficult.

 

The anniversary of Mao’s death should not be an occasion for Chinese reflection alone. Imagine what happens when this political poison enters a democratic society: Opponents become enemies, each side regards the other’s victory as illegitimate, truth becomes tribal, restraint is ridiculed as weakness, and institutions are respected only when they deliver the desired result. Citizens no longer merely disagree about how to govern the same country; they begin to doubt whether they still belong to the same one. The immediate result is social fracture. The eventual casualties are democracy and the rule of law; no constitution permanently immunizes a society against the seductions of cruelty, lies, tribal loyalty, and the worship of power.

 

China offers a stark warning about what a single political leader can do to a nation’s political culture, and how long the habits he legitimizes can endure. Institutions matter enormously — constitutions, courts, elections, a free press. But no institution can indefinitely protect a political civilization whose citizens cease to value the norms that gave those institutions life.

 

The boundary between political civilization and political barbarism is thinner than prosperous, established societies like to imagine. On one side stand democracy, human rights, the rule of law, tolerance, restraint, and respect for human dignity. On the other stand the law of the jungle, the worship of winning, personal revenge, contempt for restraint, and the conviction that a lie repeated often enough becomes truth. The distance between these two worlds can sometimes be no thicker than a sheet of paper.

 

The 50th anniversary of Mao’s death should remind all who cherish political civilization that its greatest defenses are not only constitutional. Democracy, human rights, the rule of law, tolerance, and respect for truth survive only when leaders and citizens alike continue to regard them not as impediments to winning, but as limits on what winning is allowed to mean.

 

 

The Moon Is Ours

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, September 08, 2026

 

I’m an overthinker, and I’m mindful of my tendency to overthink. Which sometimes leads me to overthink whether I’m overthinking.

 

Case in point: How much thought should I devote to Facebook slop reposted by an 80-year-old man idly scrolling on his phone, possibly while sitting on the toilet?

 

I worry that I’m overthinking things in pondering the meaning of not one, not two, but three separate images published by the president Sunday of himself flanked by killer robots over captions like “GIVE THEM NIGHTMARES” and “THEY WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN.”

 

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar; sometimes a fantasy about leading an army of Terminators to crush your enemies is just a fantasy about leading an army of Terminators to crush your enemies. I’m probably overthinking it.

 

But I might be overthinking whether I’m overthinking it. If the most powerful man in the world’s ability to remember the words “person, woman, man, camera, TV” tells us something important about his mental state, so should his eagerness to imagine himself as the villain in a dystopian sci-fi film, no?

 

Why, next thing you know, he’ll want to dress up the U.S. military to look like the imperial officers in Star Wars—with the Nazi aesthetic dialed up a notch or two.

 

There’s no way to grasp the breadth of Donald Trump’s manic posting binge this weekend without scrolling through it yourself, although this (incomplete) list with timestamps will give you a taste. Amid the usual indecorous trolling of Democratic predecessors, there were numerous fantasies—a visit to the Oval Office from George Washington, an image of Trump in hockey gear looming over Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney after knocking him down, and robots, robots, robots. The official White House account got in on the act too, posting an elaborate video that cast the president as the Green Lantern.

 

The recurring theme, though, was territorial conquest. One image uploaded by the president declared the Strait of Hormuz to be a U.S. possession; another redrew the map of Iran to resemble his facial profile. Then he pivoted to the Western Hemisphere, posting several times about changing the name of New Mexico to (what else?) “New America” before zooming out and publishing a map in which all of North America, from Greenland to Mexico and Canada to the Caribbean, had become part of the United States.

 

Not content with that acquisition, he eventually zoomed out and off Earth entirely with a photo of the lunar surface alongside an American flag captioned “The Moon Is Ours.” That one was my favorite: Rarely have the three hallmarks of Trumpian nationalism—greed, grandiosity, and nostalgia—been synthesized so efficiently.

 

Many of the president’s critics are howling today about invoking the 25^th Amendment, as if his Truth Social diarrhea reflects a deficit of sanity, not dignity. I’m uninterested in that, and not just because (as those critics often forget) the procedural hurdles for removing the president under that amendment are actually higher than they are for impeachment.

 

What interests me about his posting binge is the same thing that interested the authors of today’s new Dispatch editorial—namely, that the post-Trump era is approaching. It’s a clue as to whether the president will spend the last two years of his term on populism or on slopulism.

 

‘Postliberal UBI.’

 

Eric Hoffer wrote that “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

 

For conservatism, that progression roughly tracks with the Reagan revolution, then the emergence of conservative talk radio, and ultimately the ascension of Fox News and online media as loyal partisan megaphones for whatever message the Republican Party needed amplified on a given day.

 

Trumpism is unusual in that I’m not sure that it ever had a “business” stage. It began as a movement against right-wing interventionism and corporatist support for soft borders. But because it’s led by a born racketeer who craves blind loyalty, it decayed straightaway into a racket in which its leader’s momentary preferences define its orthodoxy, its media heroes defame others wantonly to serve him, and its henchmen steal everything that isn’t nailed down.

 

It’s the dry ice of political causes. There was no intermediate phase between its original solid state and its dissolution into a gassy amoral racket.

 

Once Trump is gone, nationalist ideologues will need to somehow reverse-engineer that gas into something politically solid. Which explains last week’s introduction of what economic historian Phil Magness derisively calls “postliberal UBI.”

 

“UBI” stands for “universal basic income,” a welfare-for-all concept in which the federal government pays every American household a fixed amount each month. (For what I hope are obvious reasons, it’s an idea associated with the far left.) “Postliberal UBI,” as Magness calls it, wouldn’t go nearly that far—but it would go quite far, redirecting funds from a Health and Human Services Department program designed to subsidize childcare for working parents toward families where one parent has chosen to care for the children full time in lieu of working.

 

Under the scheme, in other words, the government would be “paying parents to stay home,” as the New York Times put it in a piece published on Friday about a new draft rule to change the policy. Viewed charitably, it’s an Orbánist attempt to goose falling birth rates by incentivizing women to have more children. Viewed less charitably, it’s a bribe to career-minded women to quit working, get married, and be the sort of “trad wives” that postliberals are sure they long to be. Hence, “postliberal UBI.”

 

Needless to say, with the national debt at $40 trillion and interest rates rising, it’s glassy-eyed bonkers for Republicans to want to further normalize the entitlement state by extending its benefits from the lower class to the middle class. And it’s—probably—a sucker’s game for the right in the long run: As a young conservative, I was always told that Republicans could never successfully “outbid” Democrats, an overtly statist party, in bribing voters with taxpayer money. Better to challenge the propriety of such things than concede the left’s premise that the state exists to redistribute wealth.

 

But I haven’t been a young conservative for a long time. The right-wing zeitgeist under nationalism today, as former Mitt Romney aide Kevin Madden put it, has moved “away from criticism of an expanding state and towards the question/contest of who should benefit from its largesse.” That’s postliberalism in a nutshell: Government is a repository of immense power and that power should be wielded aggressively to shape society, chiefly by benefiting friends and harming enemies. In a movement that takes that view, maybe the right can outbid the left.

 

There are obvious questions to be asked about the new policy—for instance, won’t lower-class working women have fewer children once their childcare subsidies disappear? But, to paraphrase Walter Sobchak: Say what you want about the tenets of right-wing socialism, at least it’s an ethos. Given its potential electoral benefits, “postliberal UBI” is precisely the sort of gas-into-solid nationalist policy that J.D. Vance and his Orbánist allies should logically be championing as the Trump era winds down. Without the president’s charisma to run on in 2028, they have little choice but to start getting serious (or “serious”) about populist policies.

 

The problem is that, to all appearances, Trump himself seems to have near-zero interest in those policies.

 

Slopulism triumphant.

 

That’s the real significance of his killer-robots posting spree, I think.

 

With a transformative new welfare program all teed up to dazzle middle-class women before the midterms, the president instead used his megaphone this weekend pushing moronic fantasies about annexing Canada and Mexico. (Which reminds me: Does he realize which way most Canadian and Mexican voters lean politically?) I’ve written before about the degree to which he’s betrayed his populist agenda, but watching him bury the news about “postliberal UBI” makes me wonder if he intends to put any muscle behind helping Vance build a populist platform over the final two years of his term.

 

I don’t think he does. He’s scoffed at making housing reform a priority, launched an expensive new trade war on Canada for reasons no one understands, and has resumed browbeating the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates when it’s trying to manage inflation. (Actual quote: “When our country is strong, interest rates should go down. When our country is weak, frankly they should go up.”) More than once over the last year, he’s babbled about “affordability” being a “fake word” made up by Democrats as part of a political “hoax.”

 

Last week he took the most unifying populist issue in America and somehow placed himself on the wrong side of it. “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” he warned on Truth Social. “If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign.”

 

A checked-out Trump isn’t going to spend the rest of his term rebooting right-wing economic populism, particularly if he ends up with a Democratic Congress keen to infuse any legislation with its own economic priorities. In all probability, he’s going to spend those years on “slopulism”—circulating, and occasionally acting on, trollish dominance fantasies about humiliating his enemies and creating a personal legacy that can’t be expunged once he’s gone.

 

And the clearer it becomes that most Americans want to expunge that legacy, I suspect, the more energy he’ll devote to trying to make doing so impossible before he goes.

 

That’s also my theory for his obsession with building monuments and restoring landmarks. “Perhaps the president’s recent binge of architectural grandeur betrays his awareness that he, and America, are in decline,” I wrote in February, after his approval had sunk below 42 percent. Trump all but confirmed it in a recent interview with New York magazine when he was told that Sen. Jon Ossoff believes he’s building tributes to himself because no one will honor him once he’s gone. “That’s true,” he replied. “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”

 

Seven months and one damaging war since my February piece was published, his approval is now approaching 37 percent. If delusions of grandeur are the president’s response to declining popularity and a poisoned legacy, it makes sense that his response would escalate from things like ballrooms and arches to grander changes as his popular support crumbled—turning Lake Ontario into “Lake America,” imagining New Mexico as “New America,” and, much more ambitiously, hoping to swallow the entirety of North America into the United States.

 

“The moon is ours” is just how you’d expect a grandiose nationalist can't even restore access to a small waterway off the Iranian coast

 

Trump’s final two years in office will be suspenseful, I’m sure, but not with respect to whether he’ll choose populism over slopulism. He won’t. The vice president will need to spearhead a populist policy agenda himself. The suspense will have to do with whether Facebook memes will scratch the president’s itch for grandeur or whether he’ll end up doing something drastic to make his mark. We (probably) don’t need to worry about him leading an army of killer robots, but a surprise invasion of Greenland?

 

If the moon is ours, why shouldn’t Greenland be?

 

Low stakes.

 

The point of our new Dispatch editorial is that the stakes of the post-Trump era are high. For Americans, it’s a time for choosing (to borrow a phrase): “The power to decide what comes next is in the hands of the only people on this Earth who have ever raised their flag on the moon. In that, at least, we find reason for hope—sober hope—at the end of a long, vicious, squandered decade.”

 

We might call that outlook “cautiously pessimistic.” I, a more incautious pessimist, would counter that the stakes are actually low.

 

They’re low because it seems inevitable that “what comes next” will be a choice between two factions that have given up trying to solve America’s problems. “Postliberal UBI” is not a rational response to the country’s impending fiscal disaster—unless you’ve abandoned all pretense of averting that disaster, in which case playing Santa with entitlements until the bottom falls out is, sort of, rational.

 

Does it matter terribly whether, in 2029, America ends up with left-wing policies that it can’t sustain or right-wing policies that it can’t sustain? Or whether it’s President Vance or President Ocasio-Cortez demagoguing oil companies for “making too much money”?

 

For cripes’ sake, the presumptive Republican nominee doesn’t want the dollar to remain the world’s reserve currency. That’s what I mean by “low stakes.”

 

“If we have a crisis of political leadership—and we do—we also have a terrifying crisis of American citizenship,” the editorial declares at one point, correctly. One small data point will drive that crisis home to you, in case the previous thousand editions of this newsletter didn’t. Last month, when CBS News asked Americans if they’d support government price controls to reduce the cost of living, majorities in all three partisan groups said yes. Even Republicans, whose traditional suspicion of central economic planning would have steered them away, one might think.

 

Guess what happens to businesses that can legally no longer charge enough for their product to cover their expenses. The fact that most Americans apparently do need to guess is what makes our citizenship crisis “terrifying.”

 

Trump’s slopulism binge this weekend is another symptom of that crisis. If Republican voters cared about populism on the merits, they’d resent their leader’s embarrassingly childish diversions more bitterly than his left-wing critics do. It’s their movement that he’s discrediting, after all, and it’s their party that will stand to suffer for it in November.

 

But Republican voters no longer take government seriously, and why would they? Unfathomable debt, creeping military obsolescence, and an artificial intelligence industry whose acceleration has turned the future of humanity itself into a black box: America’s leadership class seems to have no idea what to do. And it’s hard to believe that a better leadership class is coming when the citizens who choose that class will be increasingly postliterate, dependent on machines to think for them, reliant on handouts like “postliberal UBI” to pay bills, and sustained in their stupidest political prejudices by bespoke online slop.

 

There will be no revival in a country that chose unseriousness and that will grow progressively less capable intellectually of choosing anything else. It’s a good thing the moon is ours; it’ll have to be enough.

Osama bin Laden’s Revenge

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, September 09, 2026

 

According to the “American Taliban,” John Walker Lindh, the September 11 attacks were supposed to be the first of a three-stage assault on the United States.

 

In one of his FBI interrogations, Lindh — who had direct contact with Osama bin Laden and was informed of al-Qaeda’s preparation for attacks inside the United States — said that 9/11 was just the beginning. The “second attack would involve attacking nuclear facilities, oil/gas pipelines, or some kind of biological attack,” the FBI’s report read. Part two would “bring the U.S. to its knees,” Lindh contended. A third unspecified attack would “finish it off.”

 

Lindh’s confessions were made public in late October 2002, when 9/11 was still fresh and the Islamist terrorist threat pronounced. Only months earlier, on the Fourth of July, an Egyptian gunman had stormed the ticketing counter at Los Angeles International Airport and shot two Israeli El Al employees to death. Weeks later, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo executed a campaign of sniper attacks targeting Washington, D.C.–area residents, killing ten and wounding three more. Islamist mass casualty events in Israel, Kuwait, Kenya, Yemen, Russia, and Bali, Indonesia — where a suicide bomber targeted a Western tourist trap on October 12, killing more than 200 — demonstrated that the Global War on Terror was truly a world war.

 

It was only the following month that bin Laden’s “Letter to America” began circulating inside the United States.

 

Given all that preceded it, the letter got an understandably poor reception, but it was not dismissed as a document unworthy of study. Surprisingly enough, the terrorist kingpin’s indictment of the United States touched only cursorily on its foreign policy (and in delusionally unpersuasive fashion, at that). What the letter revealed was that bin Laden’s problem was primarily with the Jews.

 

“The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and [Americans] are the leaders of its criminals,” OBL fumed. America’s presence in Saudi Arabia, by invitation and as a legacy of the 1991 war that had ejected Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, was a grave insult to the “ummah.” So, too, are American liberties, which allow for “immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and trading with interest.” He charged the United States with releasing AIDS into the wild and waging a campaign of environmental destruction as represented by, of all things, the Senate’s failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Each of America’s allegedly nefarious acts was, bin Laden claimed, the work of a secretive Hebraic sect. “Behind them stand the Jews, who control your policies, media and economy,” he concluded.

 

At the time, the letter was held in nearly universal contempt. Now, 25 years later, the ghost of bin Laden has managed to establish a credulous new audience.

 

Within a few years of its initial circulation, the letter was getting a second look.

 

“Let me begin by describing bin Laden’s view of history less inflammatorily — not as anti-Semitic, but as Judeocentric,” Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in a 2007 review of a book by the international relations theorists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who have both since become reliably caustic critics of U.S. foreign policy and its close relationship with Israel.

 

Goldberg was not a fan of Mearsheimer and Walt’s own line of “Judeocentric” thought. He found their contention that Congress was controlled by the Israel lobby (they were ahead of their time) unconvincing, and he took special exception to Mearsheimer’s apparent enthusiasm for bin Laden’s works:

 

At Politics and Prose, Mearsheimer uttered this remarkable statement: “Osama bin Laden wanted very much to make sure that the attacks struck at Congress, which he saw — quite correctly — as the location of the critical support of the United States for Israel.” Mearsheimer seemed pleased, rather than appalled, that bin Laden’s analysis of Congress’s priorities squared so perfectly with his own.

 

“Who really benefits from making anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism seem so indefensible?” Goldberg asked in conclusion.

 

Fast-forward 16 years. About a month after the October 7 massacre, the worst single-day slaughter of Jews since 1945, bin Laden’s letter not only resurfaced but became a sensation among youngish social media users, particularly on the then-Chinese-owned platform TikTok.

 

“When you read Osama bin Laden’s letter to America, and you realize you’ve been lied to your whole entire life,” one commenter said directly into her camera as she brushed her hair. “Trying to go back to life as normal after reading Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ and realizing everything we learned about the Middle East, 9/11, and ‘terrorism’ was a lie,” read the caption beneath another user’s video of her dishwashing routine. “If we’re going to call Osama bin Laden a terrorist,” said one ensorcelled teen, “so is the American government.”

 

The combination of narcissism and solipsism, all in service to the promotion of a criminally insane worldview, perfectly captures the madness of the social media age.

 

Some claimed that the letter’s resurgence was an inorganic phenomenon. Blame it on the popular online journalist Yashar Ali’s “compilation” of the pro-bin Laden videos, each of which would have received less attention than they got collectively. Others insisted that the letter’s renaissance was a work of Chinese statecraft — a “proxy war” against Israel amid its ongoing hostilities with the Islamic Republic of Iran. It was comforting to believe that bin Laden’s rationalizations for mass violence didn’t have a real constituency in America. If only that were true.

 

In December 2023, a J.L. Partners poll sponsored by the Daily Mail found that, while 81 percent of all Americans expressed negative views toward bin Laden, about 30 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds were willing to tell the pollster that OBL’s antisemitic views and violent actions represented a “force for good.” That’s not a small number. Nor can it be dismissed as a youthful provocation designed to shock the elders. Positive retrospectives on bin Laden have since taken on a life of their own.

 

It was only weeks ago that Tucker Carlson squinted inquiringly as independent journalist Glenn Greenwald gushed over bin Laden’s letter, calling it a comprehensive deconstruction of the myth that the Islamists hated America only for its freedoms. The youngsters who only just discovered OBL’s missive were “shocked to discover this history that they had never been told,” Greenwald insisted. By that, he meant America’s support for Israel and its violation of Saudi Arabia’s “sacred soil.”

 

In the wake of the slaughter of Australian Jews on Bondi Beach in 2025, the British “pro-Palestinian activist” Moazzam Begg heaped praise on bin Laden’s prose, hailing the jihadist as the “voice of freedom.” Earlier this year, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim charity in America and an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing scandal, produced a back-to-school reading list that included bin Laden’s manifesto.

 

CAIR is one of several high-dollar institutional contributors to Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign, which makes sense. El-Sayed could not bring himself to commemorate the 9/11 attacks without also condemning America’s response to those attacks. The candidate has surrounded himself with figures like the streamer Hasan Piker, who famously claimed that “America deserved 9/11.”

 

If the United States didn’t exactly “deserve” those attacks, they certainly created the conditions for them, according to the Democratic nominee for Congress in Colorado’s first district, Melat Kiros. The September 11 attacks were “inevitable in the sense that we destabilized a lot of the Middle East,” she said, presumably referring to the multinational coalition that liberated Kuwait. That act, Kiros added, “forced people to believe that another act of violence was the only response.”

 

Kiros may soon be headed to Congress, along with Adam Hamawy, the Democratic nominee in New Jersey’s twelfth district, despite his work for an al-Qaeda-linked charity in 1994 and his genuine friendship with the architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman. In a post-9/11 edict smuggled out of prison, Rahman urged “Muslims everywhere to dismember their nation, tear them apart, ruin their economy, provoke their corporations, destroy their embassies, attack their interests, sink their ships . . . shoot down their planes, [and] kill them on land, at sea, and in the air. Kill them wherever you find them.”

 

“He did speak about violent things,” Hamawy said in condemnation of his friend’s rhetoric. “But it wasn’t the only thing he spoke about.” Sure. Hitler loved dogs, and bin Laden was an avid soccer fan and an amateur poet. Individuals contain multitudes. But to focus on that at the expense of their most evil and lasting contributions to history is an act of conspicuous charity.

 

When bin Laden’s letter was published, the Western world was still arguing over whether the War on Terror was a “clash of civilizations.” That language has fallen out of fashion, but it remains the most apt description of what that conflict was and remains. In the decades since 9/11, the threat posed by transnational terrorism has receded amid its battlefield defeats. But the casus belli that those 19 hijackers nursed has found a new and receptive audience among the Westerners whose civilization they set out to destroy.

 

That audience, now entering or in adulthood, is unmoored from history, ungrateful toward those who created the prosperity and safety they had the good fortune to be born into. And they will vote. When they do, they will take with them their chilling disregard for the sacrifices Americans who came before them made to preserve their liberty.

 

So, what kind of America will they vote for?

Californians Shouldn’t Tax Away the State’s Prosperity

National Review Online

Friday, September 04, 2026

 

As hundreds of thousands of residents flee to states with lower taxes and friendlier business climates, one might think California would try to compete. Instead, the state may dig itself a deeper hole this November.

 

On the ballot is Proposition 40, which would impose a purportedly onetime wealth tax of 5 percent on all personal net worths in California above $1 billion. That levy would apply to roughly 200 billionaires. Revenue would be funneled overwhelmingly into low-income health-care spending.

 

This initiative was sponsored by the largest labor union of California health-care workers, SEIU-UHW, which projects that the tax could raise $100 billion over five years. The need for new revenue, the union claims, stems from the federal reconciliation law passed last year that requires states to shoulder more of their Medicaid expenditures. California should have taken the opportunity to slim down its bloated entitlement bill. Thirty-eight percent of state residents are dependent on Medicaid — compared to a national rate of 26 percent — despite California’s typical poverty rate.

 

Most of the problems with the billionaires’ tax are the same as when wealth taxes are floated nationally. The net worths of wealthy individuals are notoriously hard to pin down and can fluctuate wildly year to year. Most of billionaires’ assets are tied up in equity stakes in valuable enterprises, not liquid cash sitting ready to be wired. That wealth is being put to work, not “hoarded.” Should it work as intended, the levy would function as a staggering penalty on investment — on top of existing income taxes — thereby weakening economic growth and hitting job creation, the very opposite of the sort of measure a labor union should support. (Indeed, a number of private-sector unions oppose the tax.) Adding injury to injury, the tax is quite possibly unconstitutional.

 

Good news for the nation is that billionaires and the companies they fuel can move out of California. But that is why a state-level wealth tax is especially foolish, as it drains a jurisdiction of its most productive residents. Much of the damage is already done. Several men collectively worth up to $1 trillion have preemptively left California, taking $27 billion in lost income-tax revenue with them. The Stanford-based Hoover Institution calculates that this exodus will result in the wealth tax raising $40 billion, not $100 billion, and will cost the state $25 billion in net revenue.

 

Thus, the health-care union is not only targeting billionaires, but threatening to yank money from other parts of the state government. That is why other influential unions that rely on public funds, such as the California Teachers Association and United Domestic Workers in home and child care, are rallying against SEIU’s proposition. Even progressive Democrats are deeply split. Both the current governor, Gavin Newsom, and his presumptive successor, Xavier Becerra, oppose the wealth tax. Nancy Pelosi withheld an endorsement. This week, the San Francisco Democrats — not usually a meek bunch — joined the chorus for fear of threatened revenue.

 

Most fundamentally, wealth taxes are immoral per se in any republican government. The American founders believed that justice is the end of government. California would turn that purpose on its head, making the government into an instrument of naked injustice by confiscating the property of a particular group. That is precisely the kind of oppressive measure the constitutional order was designed to protect against.

 

Voters may still slow California’s descent into economic suicide, if not reverse it. Should the billionaire tax pass, however, they risk killing the Golden State’s golden goose — the limitless spirit of building that erected Hollywood and Silicon Valley — by snuffing out the fuel of incentive.

Trump’s Runaway Trade War

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, September 09, 2026

 

The president’s advisers — senior White House officials and even “elected Republicans,” according to Axios, are throwing up their hands in frustration. “They no longer even try to persuade President Trump to do or not do something,” its Wednesday report read. “Why bother?” one asked. “What he wants,” another mused, “he gets.”

 

The deepening U.S. trade war with neighboring Canada is almost certainly one of those harebrained ideas that only makes sense to the president. On Tuesday night, Trump escalated his campaign of economic pressure on Ottawa by issuing a sweeping ban on imports of a variety of Canadian products. Americans will no longer have access to some Canadian dairy products, most alcoholic beverages, and all motorcycles. In addition, the U.S. imposed a 50 percent tariff on a range of other goods, ranging from “mattresses to motorboats.”

 

That’s not all. “Trump also moved to shut Canadian products out of large, long-term U.S. government contracts and directed the U.S. General Services Administration to declare Canadian products ineligible for those contracts until Canada allows “full and fair reciprocity″ for American products,” the Associated Press reported.

 

The Trump administration will contend that Canada started it. Ottawa has a protected market for dairy products and other key imports like soft lumber. The White House only wants an even playing field. Canada will also claim it’s the victim here. For over a decade, Canada’s liberal government has negotiated in good faith with the Trump administration over trade-related issues, but those deals aren’t worth the paper on which they’re printed. Both parties claim the other sabotaged the latest round of negotiations. Who is to say who is right?

 

That may not be a question most voters are interested in answering, given the acute threat to their pocketbooks. It’s true that the trade balance on the goods Trump targeted favors the United States. While the U.S. imports about $360 million in Canadian dairy products and roughly $900 million in alcohol, Canada imports more of both products from America. But the intangibles of statecraft may favor Canada in this conflict.

 

All evidence suggests that the Canadians are incensed by Trump’s trade aggression. They appear to be foursquare behind Carney, who owes his liberal government to Trump’s ham-fisted intervention into Canadian politics. Ottawa shows no signs of backing down, nor are there any indications that the Canadian people want him to sue for peace. The same could not be said for Trump.

 

An Ipsos poll released last week showed that just one-quarter of American adults believe Trump should take a firm hand with the Canadians. Seven in ten respondents, by contrast, want to see Washington compromise in its negotiations with its northern neighbor. Sixty percent oppose imposing new tariffs on Canada, compared with just 20 percent who do. While 12 percent blame Canada for the outbreak of hostilities and 18 percent say both countries are equally at fault, 46 percent say Trump is solely responsible for this unpopular contretemps.

 

That survey comes at a time when the public’s view of Trump’s economic policies is scraping the bottom of the barrel. Over the weekend, a survey sponsored by the Financial Times found that just one-third of registered voters approve of Trump’s economic record — a new low. Voters’ dim view of the president’s approach may be owed to what one CNN poll released in late July discovered. Then, only a meager 27 percent of American adults said Trump had the right priorities, while a “record-high” 73 percent said he had “not paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems.”

 

Sure, some dairy farmers, brewers, distillers, and motorcycle manufacturers will be thrilled with the news. And perhaps they are perfectly distributed constituencies that will, by virtue of their geography, make the difference in November’s vote. But that’s unlikely. More likely, Trump’s initiative pleases a few while angering a much larger host, and all while cementing the impression in the public’s head that he, like Joe Biden before him, neither understands nor cares much about the burdens associated with the rising cost of living in the United States.

 

If the Republican Party could have talked Trump out of it, they would have. The president is a runaway train now. And the GOP is just along for the ride.

Don’t Call It a Convention

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, September 09, 2026

 

Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters says the GOP midterm election “convention” will be a “Trumpapalooza.” It’d be better if everyone called it that.

 

American political conventions are one of the best examples—among way too many—of American institutional decay.

 

In the 19th century and much of the 20th century, the quadrennial party conventions were indispensable pieces of political technology. I mean that literally. Traditionally, conventions were where party stakeholders—elected officials, party bosses, etc.—chose the nominee. Factions representing regions, interests, even ideas (how quaint!) would debate and horse-trade with each other, sometimes over days of voting, to name someone the party could get behind.

 

That system started to atrophy in the 1930s, as Michael Barone, the great political analyst, has argued, because of the telephone. The kind of negotiating required for a nominee to win support was impossible to do by letter. It took too long, and besides, putting things in writing risked exposing deals and other favor-trading for which savvy politicians would never want a paper trail. You had to do it face-to-face.

 

“The conventions were thus communication devices,” Barone writes, “in which campaign managers assessed candidates’ strength—and responded. Votes would be held back, so as to show momentum on later ballots. Favorite-son candidacies would be launched, in the hopes that they could be withdrawn later for reward or parlayed into a dark-horse nomination. No one had an accurate idea of how many delegates candidates had.”

 

The telephone changed that. In 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt used the new technology of long-distance calling to organize support well in advance of the convention.

 

Polling, and then television, further sapped away the function of conventions. Who needs party bosses to tell you the mood of the rank-and-file, when polling can deliver a much richer picture? Why put floor fights and other fodder for opponents on TV? Better to offer a picture of solidarity and excitement.

 

But the real death knell came in 1972 with the “reforms” promulgated by Democrat George McGovern, which were quickly adopted by the GOP. These reforms—which I think were deformations of our democratic system—took the power to nominate a candidate away from the stakeholders and gave it to rank-and-file voters. We thus became the first and one of the only advanced democracies where parties can no longer choose their own candidates.

 

I think that was a disaster, but that’s a column for another time. One of the consequences of that disaster was that party conventions essentially became infomercials ratifying a fait accompli. The brokered convention—even the prospect for one—is gone now, replaced by a coronation.

 

But at least the coronation still serves a purpose. It’s still a necessary function of our electoral system. A boring, intelligence-insulting, performative function, but a function all the same.

 

This midterm “convention” isn’t even that. No one will be formally nominated. It’s just an opportunity for President Donald Trump to put on a show—about himself.

 

Defenders might say there’s precedent for this, but their argument proves my point about decay. Democrats in 1974, 1978, and 1982 had midterm conventions. But those conventions involved various committee meetings in which party rules and resolutions were proposed and debated.

 

In 1978, President Jimmy Carter defended the midterm convention.

 

“I believe it is very important for me, as a president, and also as head of the Democratic Party, to have my success and failures assessed objectively and openly by Democrats representing the grassroots of our party around the Nation,” Carter said. “I think that was done in a very forthcoming way.”

 

The Washington Post reported that John C. White, the Democratic Party chairman, was worried that delegate disputes could “turn the convention into a public relations failure.”

 

“Of course we have a broad range of opinions on some issues within our party,” White said. “But if we get foolish, if we go beyond proper political division and look quarrelsome, these are things that could hurt the Democratic Party and the Democratic president.”

 

If you think the Dallas Trumpalooza is going to include an open and objective discussion of Trump’s failures, or feature even the slightest political division, I want to congratulate you for having just emerged from a decade-long coma.

 

This is a commercial with a live studio audience and nothing more. Indeed, the rot of our political institutions on display are not confined to the GOP. One of the featured keynote speakers is Attorney General Todd Blanche. Whether the already ethically compromised AG’s appearance at an expressly partisan event is a violation of the Hatch Act is something for the lawyers to debate. But the spirit of it is grotesque, and a sign that our parties aren’t the only institutions that have lost their way.

A Mail Voting Fight About Nothing

By Stephen Richer

Wednesday, September 09, 2026

 

On Sunday, the Trump administration made its third appeal in less than six weeks to the Supreme Court, seeking to move ahead with implementing a role for the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) in overseeing mail ballots as some blue states try to block it.

 

Setting aside the legal back-and-forth, the strange thing about the saga is that even if implemented, the USPS list-matching rule—the item at dispute in the litigation—would do nothing for election integrity. There’s been lots of talk about election law, the president’s powers, whether the postal service can actually execute the role the president has tasked it with, and whether election administrators could handle the last-minute change. But overlooked in all the discussions is the fact that the administration is pursuing a change that will do nothing to make our elections more secure.

 

Before we get to that, some background: On March 31, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity In Federal Elections.” Section 3 of the order directed the U.S. Postal Service to take unprecedented steps to inject itself into election administration. The order gave the postal service until the end of May to issue proposed rules to effectuate the president’s wishes.

 

Previously, the USPS has treated election offices like any other customer. So long as election officials submitted appropriately addressed and stamped outbound envelopes containing mail ballots, the USPS would deliver them to voters. Under the executive order, USPS will not deliver mail ballots unless the outbound envelope has a certain new design and contains tracking elements, and unless election officials submit to USPS in advance the names and addresses of all mail-ballot voters.  

 

Public interest groups and Democratic-led states sued less than a week after Trump issued the order. They argued, among other things, that the Constitution doesn’t permit the president to unilaterally change election law nor direct the post office to do things outside of its statutory authority. Throughout the summer, a U.S. district judge in Massachusetts, Indira Talwani, issued injunctive orders against the administration, which appealed her orders to the Supreme Court.

 

As the litigation continued, USPS issued a proposed rule, and then, after receiving more than 200,000 public comments in response, issued a final rule on August 21. Three days later, the Supreme Court ruled that plaintiffs had filed their original April lawsuits too soon. The suits, according to the Supreme Court, were premised on speculative harm, rather than actual harm, because the USPS had not issued its final rule at the time of initial lawsuits.  

 

The plaintiffs shrugged their shoulders in response to this ruling and then filed a new lawsuit based on the USPS’s August 21 final rulemaking. Judge Talwani issued a temporary restraining order against the Trump administration and USPS on August 27 and a preliminary injunction on September 4. The Trump administration appealed directly to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court set a briefing schedule for this week.    

 

The ballot’s in the mail—or is it?

 

All this comes as election season is already underway. North Carolina mailed out ballots last week—60 days before Election Day, as required by state law. Plenty of other states will join them in the coming weeks. And federal law requires that military and overseas ballots (“UOCAVA” ballots) go out at least 45 days before Election Day.

 

Even if the Supreme Court ultimately deems the new USPS requirements lawful, the idea that election officials could fully implement them for this upcoming election is absurd. Tammy Patrick—the chief programs officer of the Elections Center, a national organization that trains and certifies elections administrators—explains what the new restrictions on mail voting would mean for election officials in her 63-page declaration accompanying the plaintiffs’ suit.  

 

Patrick points out to the court that there are more than 10,000 voting jurisdictions in the United States, some with zero full-time election workers. A number of these jurisdictions still hand-address their outbound mail ballot packets. It’s silly to think those offices can, in a matter of days, redesign their envelopes, buy new envelopes, destroy old envelopes, address the new envelopes, assemble new mail ballot packets, and learn how to use a new USPS portal.  

 

Then there’s the question of whether or not USPS could keep up its end of the bargain. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, made news earlier this month when he released a report from an anonymous USPS whistleblower who called the postal service’s effort to comply with the order “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed,” according to a letter Blumenthal sent to the postmaster general. The whistleblower’s colleagues had a coarser description: “s—tshow.” ProPublica has also reported on concerns from within USPS that large numbers of eligible voters could face significant delays in receiving their ballots or perhaps not receive them at all.

 

The larger legal questions surrounding the litigation are simply the latest version in the omnipresent question of the past 1.5 years: “Does the president have this unilateral power?”  Although I’m a lawyer, I predominantly stay in the lane of a humble election administrator. And from the point of view of an election administration expert, it’s far from clear how these changes further the cause of making our elections secure.

 

Unclear objectives.

 

Most news coverage and commentary has focused on the section of the executive order that requires election officials to submit lists of all mail voters to the USPS before handing over the actual addressed ballot packets for delivery by mail carriers. According to the final USPS rule, the USPS will compare the addressees on mail ballot packets with the submitted list. If the addressee is on the list, the USPS will deliver the mail ballot packet. If the addressee is not on the list, the USPS will not deliver the mail ballot packet (and, potentially, none of the other mail ballots in that batch).

 

But that’s the extent of the USPS role. It’s charged with simply comparing two lists: the presubmitted list and the actual ballot packets. Even if the Supreme Court upholds the executive order, the USPS will not do anything to assess the validity of the mail voters on the submitted list. It won’t check to see if the addressees are real people. It won’t check to see if they’re U.S. citizens, or if they really live at that address, or if the recipient is registered to vote in multiple states, or even if they’re registered in two houses on the same street.  

 

The USPS acknowledges in its own FAQ that it has no role in determining the eligibility of mail voters beyond confirming they are on the presubmitted list:

 

The List will not be based on external sources of information, such as federal databases. It will be based exclusively on the information provided by each state’s chief election official or their designees. The Postal Service will not compare Portal data to any other internal or external source or change the information on its own.

 

The administration has made similar acknowledgments in its court filings, including with the Supreme Court: “USPS will not perform any verification of voter eligibility or the like.” In other words, election officials could give the USPS mail ballot packets addressed to fraudulent recipients, but as long as those fraudulent recipients are also on the presubmitted list, then the USPS won’t do anything about it. “Garbage out” is okay, as long as it matches the “garbage in.”

 

Some election integrity advocates noticed the rule’s inherent impotence. When publishing the final rule to the Federal Register, the USPS wrote, “some commenters urged the Postal Service to adopt additional measures, including citizenship-verification requirements, as part of a final rule.”   

 

And yet you wouldn’t know this based on commentary from the administration and MAGA’s most strident election skeptics. When the Supreme Court made its initial determination that the original suits challenging the executive order had been filed too soon, Trump posted to social media: “Supreme Court Delivers Major Election Integrity Victory in Big Win for Trump.” Sen. Mike Lee wrote on X: “An outstanding victory for election security across America”—a comment that earned him a “community note” correction for misconstruing the court’s ruling.

 

None of these people have explained how matching two lists—both provided by the same election administrators whom Trump has distrusted for many years—specifically improves election security. I suppose one could argue that it creates an additional public record of all mail voters, but that information is already public. You can, for example, make a public records request for a file to see every voter in Arizona who received a mail ballot in 2024 and every voter who returned a mail ballot in that election.

 

Heck, if I were still the chief election official in Maricopa County, Arizona, I would just submit my entire voter registration roll to USPS. That way, if a voter who is not originally set to receive a mail ballot later decides he wants a mail ballot, he’s already on the USPS list. There’s no penalty for oversubmitting potential voters to the postal service.

 

A placebo effect, or worse.  

 

When pressed in court on how the rule enhances election integrity, the administration has said it builds confidence in elections. As far as election administrators are concerned, this is all an expensive, administratively cumbersome, legally fraught placebo. The USPS will create a new portal containing the names and addresses of all mail voters, and state and local administrators will jump through a bunch of new hoops, not because it will do anything real, but because it will make people feel better.

 

It’s especially silly when states like Alabama and Texas say they want to voluntarily comply with the USPS rule, even if the executive order is deemed unlawful. If they wanted to, they could simply post a list of all mail voters on a state elections website. But I suspect this is less about actual election integrity and more about MAGA exhibitionism and the need to be seen as fighting for election integrity.

 

If this is all about improving public confidence in mail voting, I’d suggest there’s a quicker, less expensive, less legally fraught way to do that: Trump could simply announce on Truth Social that he trusts the security of mail voting, having used it himself, and that even after aggressively pursuing noncitizen voter fraud for months, his federal investigators have turned up only a few cases.

 

But that, of course, won’t happen. So what’s this push really about?

 

Here I can only speculate. Perhaps the Trump administration wants a federal “in” to election administration. The executive order is merely the beachhead, and the involvement of USPS in election administration, once firmly established, will expand in future elections. In those future elections, USPS will check the eligibility of all mail voters. It will run citizen checks.  

 

Another theory is that with election integrity initiatives like the SAVE America Act having stalled, Trump is building a pretext by which to cry foul when the upcoming election is administered in the same way the 2024 presidential election was administered. Oh, the irony.

 

And then there’s the chaos-for-the-sake-of-chaos theory. Andy Craig at The UnPopulist summarized this theory as envisioned by Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times:

 

[L]ose in the lower courts, stall, then declare the results in noncompliant states fraudulent, so a new Democratic majority takes office under a manufactured cloud. On that reading, the chaos and collapse are not the plan’s failings, they are the real purpose of it. Nor is it an isolated action.

 

I don’t know what the real reason is. Or if there’s any reason at all.

 

All I know is that it’s a darn shame that all of this effort is being invested in litigating, stressing out election administrators and USPS employees alike, and building a USPS portal that, even if fully and smoothly implemented, will do nothing to improve the integrity of American elections.