Swamp Things

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, July 02, 2026

 

In January the president was asked why members of his family had begun doing business overseas during his second term when they had sworn off doing so during his first. If perceptions of influence-peddling were enough to put them off the practice once before, why would he and they engage in it orgiastically now?

 

“I found out that nobody cared,” he replied, matter-of-factly.

 

That’s classic Trump. On the one hand, it’s a pristine vista onto a criminal mind. Moral misgivings about monetizing one’s public office are nowhere in sight, nor is there any interest in setting a good example or anxiety about the civic consequences of letting an appearance of impropriety go uncorrected. To him, the question is simply whether the crime, once committed, is likely to go unpunished. If so, proceed.

 

On the other hand, he’s right. For all intents and purposes, nobody cares.

 

Don’t take my word for it. This morning Semafor reported on the trouble Senate Democrats are having gaining traction for a bill that would limit Trump’s ability to make money off of digital assets. “A lot of Dems really want to bankrupt Trump—and they can’t,” one source complained to the publication. “The entire model of a president’s ethics is electoral and the voters have clearly established they don’t care. … We’re just screwed.”

 

America at 250: We’re just screwed.

 

Any explanation of why we’re screwed begins with the promiscuous civic delinquency of the American right, but we’ve been over that many times and don’t need to belabor it here. Depending upon what sort of Republican you are, you’re either an enthusiastic member of a fascist personality cult, a brain-damaged hyperpartisan willing to excuse anything to keep the left out of power, or so embarrassed by where Trumpism has led that it’s easier psychologically to pretend its abuses aren’t happening than to confront them.

 

Not an interesting topic at this stage. What is interesting is the fact that few on the left seem to care very much about the president’s corruption either.

 

Manna from heaven.

 

Two House Democrats who played key roles in Trump’s first-term impeachments faced primary challengers in the past two weeks, Semafor (again) points out. Both lost.

 

“Israel is eclipsing the desire to hold the Republican president accountable as a motivating factor for many Democratic base voters,” reporters Nicholas Wu and Dave Weigel write. “With Trump returning to office and previous Democratic attempts to rein in his power through impeachment falling flat, the kind of Trump accountability messages pushed by the incumbents didn’t stick among constituents.”

 

Weird, no?

 

If ever there were a moment when you might expect anger at Trump’s financial corruption to break big among voters, this is it. In the middle of an affordability crisis, with huge numbers of Americans exasperated by the cost of living, evidence that the president is profiting lasciviously from his office is everywhere you look. He earned $2.2 billion last year, according to financial disclosures released this week, nearly four times his income in 2024. Of that amount, $1.4 billion came from businesses related to cryptocurrency, an industry his administration regulates (sort of?) and for which he’s a key policymaker.

 

Foreign interests with business before the U.S. government have used the president’s stake in crypto to great advantage. Small American investors, most of them presumably Trump supporters, didn’t fare as well. Although if it makes them feel better, they did help make him richer: “Every time $TRUMP [his cryptocurrency] was traded, the president and his partners collected transaction fees, which along with other revenues from the coin totaled hundreds of millions of dollars,” the New York Times reported.

 

Trump did suspiciously well in 2025 with conventional securities, too. At least three times last year, he purchased shares of Nvidia shortly before major announcements that boosted the company’s value. He also made hundreds of stock purchases the day before announcing that he was “pausing” his “Liberation Day” tariffs, which sent markets soaring. All told, according to the Financial Times, he engaged in more than 22,000 stock transactions during his first 11 months back in office. Over four years as president, Joe Biden engaged in 13.

 

The president would say, and has said, that his purchases and sales weren’t made by him personally but by brokerage firms that are barred from accepting trade requests from him and his family. You tell me: How likely is a guy whose sense of ethics boils down to “will I get caught or not?” to scrupulously observe that firewall?

 

And that’s just his conflicts of interest. If we broadened the Trump corruption inquiry to cases of petty graft like kickbacks and pardon-selling, we’d be here all day. “What strikes me as remarkable is how many pies Trump has his fingers in,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told NBC News. “There is no precedent to compare it with. No president in the 20th or 21st century has had something that’s vaguely comparable.”

 

For Democrats, this should be manna from political heaven—especially with populism now ascendant in both parties.

 

Populism is the idea that venal and incompetent elites have captured the state and perverted it to serve their own corrupt interests rather than the people’s. That narrative is now being handed to the left on a silver platter, replete with endless soundbites of Trump on the campaign trail in 2016 wheezing disingenuously, and ironically, about “draining the swamp.” No greater fraud was ever perpetrated on the oafishly gullible American people than the idea that a lowbrow mafioso wannabe from Queens would be a crusader for good government if they trusted him with the presidency. Democrats are all teed up to expose that fraud.

 

The attack ad writes itself: While your family is struggling to make ends meet, the swamp creature in the White House is making billions by turning the presidency into a criminal racket. It’s populism at 100 percent purity, reclaiming the mantle of that movement from Trump. And it’s 100 percent true.

 

But left-wing populists don’t seem that interested in talking about it. They’d rather talk about … Israel. Why?

 

Nobody cares.

 

There are prosaic answers to that question, I think, and less prosaic ones.

 

Prosaic: Democratic candidates probably will talk more about Trump’s corruption once the primaries end and the general election campaign begins. The party’s incumbents can be faulted only so much for failing to restrain the president at a moment when they’re in the congressional minority, locked out of oversight power. Zeroing in on their records on Israel as a litmus test of left-wing credibility and “outsider” backbone is a better play for progressive upstarts.

 

Besides, different populists prioritize different things in undertaking to “drain the swamp.” For some leftists still smarting from Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign disaster, purging Washington of its neoliberal gerontocracy may be more important—for now—than the Trump crime spree.

 

Also prosaic: Democratic voters outraged by the war in Gaza would say that restraining Israel from killing thousands more Palestinians is obviously more morally urgent than restraining an already-rich crook from getting richer. If your government is helping to bankroll a so-called “genocide,” that should matter to you more than whether your president is taking bribes.

 

If that’s why the left has been comparatively quiet about Trump’s corruption, then we shouldn’t expect them to go harder at the issue during the general election campaign. Why would they? Why distract voters from America’s complicity in Gaza by making a stink over a minor thing like the head of state being a racketeer operating in plain sight?

 

A few days ago I watched video of an openly gay left-wing lawmaker from San Francisco being hounded out of a rally for transgender rights by pro-Palestinian protesters, not because he supports Israel’s operations in Gaza but because he didn’t label them a “genocide” soon enough. Opposing “settler colonialism” is a cherished part of the progressive omnicause and fighting presidential graft is not: That might suffice to explain why Trump’s swampiness is of little interest to left-wing populists.

 

A less prosaic reason for why restraining him hasn’t mattered much in Democratic primaries is that the left has grown more interested in unseating its own party establishment than unseating Trump.

 

All Jacobin movements eventually reach that point, whether because they earnestly believe national reform requires first purging the milquetoasts who lead their own faction or because pretending that they believe it supplies a virtuous justification for their lust for power. Either way, the left has obviously reached it.

 

The right’s Tea Party Jacobins reached it quickly, ousting incumbent Republicans in Congress within a year of their movement gaining traction. By 2016, Trump was free to run against the Bush dynasty in a national Republican primary and took full advantage. By 2024, Marjorie Taylor Greene was warning conservatives—ironically, it would turn out—that “any Republican that isn’t willing to adapt … [to Trumpist] policies, we are completely eradicating from the party.”

 

Democratic socialists have taken longer to make their mark on the left, but they’re trying now to make up for lost time. “We have to root out the corruption and get money out of our politics,” progressive Melat Kiros told Politico after upsetting 30-year Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado on Tuesday. “It’s not about popular support, it’s about political will—and that means we have to vote out any of the incumbents that are standing in our way by taking that kind of corporate PAC money.”

 

Trump isn’t the prime target anymore. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are. And Israel is a far better wedge issue against those targets for leftists than the president’s self-dealing is.

 

There’s one more thing steering Democrats away from making an issue of his corruption: broken windows.

 

I’ve written before about the United States as the civic equivalent of a neighborhood that’s gone to hell, where the locals grow numb to antisocial behavior as they come to expect it. That’s straight out of the so-called “broken windows” theory of policing, the idea that “letting lesser offenses like window-breaking go unpunished signals … that laws won’t be enforced. Criminals respond by escalating to more serious offenses and law-abiding locals become fatalistic or apathetic.”

 

As America turns 250, Trumpism has left broken windows in every liberal institution as far as the eye can see. Even Democrats, primed by partisanship to resent it, seemingly can’t muster much shock at the sight anymore. I flagged the president’s financial corruption as an example of civic desensitization when I wrote about this previously, in fact: “If a business in a good neighborhood gets held up, everyone talks about it. But if a business in a bad neighborhood gets held up, it’s barely news. What can the locals realistically do except sigh and say, ‘Yeah, that happens now’?”

 

It happens now in America. It happens so often that the average joe struggles to care.

 

To make matters worse, Trump got elected in 2016 by essentially exclaiming loudly and often, “Look how many windows these elites broke in our neighborhood!” He convinced voters that their government had already gone to hell; then he turned it into Skid Row, and now many of the residents seem to believe that it’s always been this derelict. How mad can one be at the new mayor for behaving as corruptly as the old ones—supposedly—did? Haven’t you heard of Hunter Biden?

 

Populism might, in short, have become a prisoner of its own success. Having taught Americans to believe that they live in a swamp, complacency about swampiness is now part of the national character.

 

Wait ’til next year.

 

Someone should run a poll asking whether corruption was worse under the last two Democratic administrations or under the criminal syndicate that runs the government now. I’ll be surprised if opinion deviates wildly from the usual party lines. That’s the sort of ignorance and moronic tribalism that a Democratic strategist looking to galvanize voters this fall would be banging his or head against by flogging the issue of Trump’s unethical behavior.

 

But they might have better luck two years from now.

 

The most optimistic spin on Americans’ disinterest in the president’s corruption is that they simply haven’t heard of it yet. They’re distracted by the cost of living, they don’t (or can’t) keep up with the news closely enough to follow the trail of sleaze, and they’re not hearing a peep from our Republican-controlled Congress that anything might be amiss.

 

The fact that Trump has begun flying around in a giant plane-shaped bribe from the government of Qatar, with fake books lining its shelves as decor in an unintentional tribute to populist erudition, has simply escaped their notice.

 

That might change in January, as the minority party will feel obliged to do something about the state of the proverbial neighborhood if it returns to power in 2027. “If Democrats take back the House or Senate this November, they will have a field day probing the Trump family deals,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board warned on Wednesday. “Charges of GOP corruption will resound through 2028. This will feed the left’s class warfare and facile narrative that billionaire ‘oligarchs’ are getting rich off government.”

 

Trump as an unwitting accelerant of American socialism? I can sort of see that.

 

By the next cycle, the electoral incentives for the left might have changed as well. With J.D. Vance or some even less savory figure leading the ballot for the GOP, opposition to Israel might not be a major point of distinction between left and right. Progressives may also have deposed various Democratic leaders in Congress by then, satisfying their appetite (for the time being) for war on their own party. The left could pivot to redistribution, particularly if the affordability crisis grinds on.

 

The attack ad I imagined earlier would finally be ready to air.

 

But I can also imagine Democrats concluding in 2028 that corruption still doesn’t have the juice to meaningfully influence an election. The post-Trump era will be upon us, after all. Any uncomfortable stirring in the national conscience about having allowed a con man to turn the presidency into a financial asset will be quashed with self-soothing pabulum about not dwelling on the past.

 

And some left-wing strategists will ask themselves this: If attempting a coup wasn’t corrupt enough to stop Americans from reelecting Trump himself in 2024, why would the president’s insider trading and crypto scams dissuade them from reelecting some entirely different Republican in 2028? If voters were willing once before to lay aside all ethical considerations about national leadership in order to vote their wallets, why wouldn’t they do so again?

 

“We’re just screwed” is anathema to anyone who cares about politics, an endeavor based on the devout conviction that we’re not screwed as long as the faction one supports gets to be in charge. But it’s hard to draw any other conclusion as a civic matter after watching the American character degenerate over the last 10 years. In all likelihood, with respect to presidential corruption, we’re just screwed. Happy national birthday.

Vive la France!

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, July 3, 2026

 

When I was 19 years old, I was drinking Shiner Bock in Austin, writing newspaper editorials, and going to see punk shows at Liberty Lunch—a full schedule, but somewhat short of the ambitions of Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, the young French aristocrat who, being inspired by the ideals of the American Revolution, bought a ship and sailed to the New World in order to present himself to the Continental Congress and offer his services. Congress was in Philadelphia, and Lafayette landed in South Carolina—he was an idealist, not a geographer.

 

But with a letter of recommendation from Ben Franklin in his hand, he made his way up to Philadelphia, where Congress, grateful for the services of an enthusiastic young aristocrat who had the good taste to bring along his own money, commissioned the 19-year-old as a major general. Contrary to what probably was Congress’ intent, Lafayette took his commission seriously—not merely as an honorary title. The revolution was to be a grand adventure, to be sure, but also a hard one: Lafayette was wounded at Brandywine, endured the hardships of Valley Forge, and was one of the key players when the tide was turned at Yorktown. Lafayette also provided a critical channel between the upstart Americans and the French monarchy, whose financial and naval power were simply indispensable to the project of American independence.

 

No Lafayette, no United States of America.

 

Spit hot contempt at foreign aid all you like: No foreign aid from France, no United States of America.

 

The French have contributed a heck of a lot more to the great American project than that magnificent statue in New York Harbor. Of course, we saved France’s bacon in a big way—twice—in the world wars. But if you think that makes us even, that we have paid France back, then I would say only that you do not know how friendship works: Friendship is a sediment, not a ledger. Lord Palmerston and Henry Kissinger et al. of course are correct that allies and friends are different things, but the French have always been both. Who else can say that they were there with us from the beginning? Ed Burke was right about the American cause, and he was right about the character of the French Revolution, too, but Ed Burke wasn’t freezing his dangly bits off at Valley Forge—Lafayette was. A nation that cannot remember these things and continue to feel their relevance—not as a historical curiosity but as a real and living and entirely relevant thing—is a nation that does not understand itself. The people of such a nation may find themselves swayed by supposed “realists” who speak coldly about the “national interest,” but if there is anything we know about those “realists,” it is precisely that they do not understand the national interest.

 

This is a time for thinking about the things we like and love best about these United States but there is a national shortcoming weighing on me that I feel compelled to mention: Of all the many regrettable political developments of the past dozen years, the most regrettable is the fact that the United States has become such a poor friend and a shabby ally, and not only to the French. Americans sneer at NATO, an alliance organized around a collective-defense provision that has been invoked precisely once in its history: rallying to the defense of the United States after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Americans lament—not without reason—the expense of what seems to many to have been a pointless war in Afghanistan, and we mourn the loss of American lives there. We are less likely to mention the 457 British soldiers who gave their lives in that conflict, the 159 Canadians, the 90 French, the 62 Germans, the 53 Italians, the 44 Poles, the 44 Danes, and the Australians, Spanish, Georgians, Romanians, Dutch, Turks, Czechs, New Zealanders, and Norwegians. When the United States under Joe Biden decided to suddenly quit Afghanistan, our government did so with hardly any consultation with the allies who had fought and died beside us there. It was a blunder and an insult. The same administration blindsided the French with the AUKUS agreement that, among other things, torpedoed a French-Australian submarine project–another blunder, another insult. The succeeding administration, it goes without saying, has done everything within its considerable power to make things worse with its childish displays of incompetence, ingratitude, and resentment. There is a certain horrifying symmetry at work: Donald Trump, a man without friends, presides over a nation without allies–or one that will be without allies if we continue on our current course.

 

Americans sometimes talk like we are the only people in the free world who will fight, forgetting—if we ever knew—that (to take one example of many) Canada’s losses proportional to its population were about nine times those of the United States in World War I, and that Canada was in it before we were. The Canadians were there in World War II, they fought alongside Americans in Korea, stood with us in the Gulf War in 1991, flew missions alongside Americans over Kosovo. The British have been just as steadfast if not more so—when much of the rest of the world was walking sideways away from the United States on the eve of the Iraq invasion, the British stepped up: 45,000 personnel in all, including 26,000 ground troops. The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards may sound quaint to the American ear, but they showed up in tanks and fought the biggest armored battle U.K. forces had seen since World War II. Please do go lecture those brave soldiers about being “freeloaders” on U.S. power.

 

We didn’t get to 250 by ourselves. There have been times when the United States has carried the world on its back—and times when the United States has been borne up by our friends and allies. We never forget when it’s been us doing the heavy lifting—but we are, at times, shamefully forgetful of what others have done for us.

 

I have not gone to many semiquincentennial parties this year, though I am looking forward to Independence Day—I do love fireworks. (The best fireworks show I ever saw was from the porch of Lucianne Goldberg, whose New Jersey home was a great reminder that the people in Weehawken have a view of Manhattan while the people in Manhattan have a view of … Weehawken.) But I did recently go to a party hosted by the Lafayette Company, a Washington-based communications firm founded by my friend Ellen Carmichael, whose French ancestry makes her more mindful of the Franco-American alliance than most. (And perhaps she is inclined to be history-minded: Her great-great-great-great-grandfather, Robert Mills, designed the Washington Monument.) As you might expect, the Lafayette Company celebrated with a French theme, hosting Consul-General Caroline Monvoisin and entertaining guests with a presentation by Benjamin Goldman, an actor who performs as Lafayette. As the fictitious Lafayette recounted his role in the American Revolution and his triumphant return to the United States in 1824, accompanied by his son, Georges Washington de Lafayette, I felt a little bit ashamed of my country but also sad for it—that we have lost touch with something important and that we are denying ourselves the benefits and the pleasures of these centuries-spanning friendships and alliances.

 

I sometimes find hope for our country hard to come by. But maybe the recent nadir is only part of the usual ups and downs. The centennial year 1876 wasn’t the greatest year in American history, either—a disputed presidential election took months to sort out. For that matter, the country wasn’t in great shape when Lafayette returned in ’24 to have a look around and, among other observations, lament the persistence of slavery. Lafayette was not blind to the sins and shortcomings of the new republic, and many of those persist. Americans can be a stiff-necked and bumptious people. Let us not be an ungrateful people.

 

 “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” That’s life. This too shall pass. Nothing new under the sun. All that.

 

God bless America, yes. We will need His blessing.

 

But, also: God bless the friends and allies who have invested their own blood and treasure in the extraordinary project of liberty that we took up 250 years ago. Vive la France!

Dana Milbank Doesn’t Understand the Constitution

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, July 02, 2026

 

Dana Milbank, formerly of the Washington Post, now of NOTUS, thinks that he has unlocked a brilliant new One Weird Trick, which will allow the next Democratic president to impose unilaterally a whole host of policies that the party cannot get through Congress. Milbank writes of a “nascent Democratic effort” that:

 

contemplates something far more consequential — and it should be even scarier to Trump’s enablers: ways to use the all-powerful, unitary executive that Trump has invented (and the Roberts Court has blessed) to launch a new Progressive Era, in which a Democratic president imposes by executive fiat government run health care and many other ideas liberals have long dreamed about but lacked the votes to enact. Virtually all of it can be done without Congress, using powers Trump has unlocked.

 

Oh dear.

 

Reading this, one honestly has to wonder whether Milbank has read any of the Court’s recent opinions — and, indeed, to wonder whether he has ever looked, even casually, at the text of the Constitution itself. That supposedly “all-powerful, unitary executive that Trump has invented (and the Roberts Court has blessed)”? It has absolutely nothing to do with substantive presidential power, or, contrary to an assertion by Neera Tanden that Milbank subsequently prints, to do with “the aperture of the powers the federal government has.”

 

The “unitary executive theory” — otherwise known as Article II of the Constitution — holds one thing and one thing alone: That the president, and not anyone else, gets to run his own branch of government. It does not shrink executive power. It does not expand executive power. It has nothing to say about the enumerated powers of the federal government. It is purely, completely, exclusively about personnel, and, thereby, the president’s authority over the powers that the Constitution accords to him.

 

Milbank muses wistfully about those “ideas liberals have long dreamed about but lacked the votes to enact.” But the unitary executive theory is about exactly that: votes. The argument, based on the plain text of the Constitution, is that each of the two elected branches of government must be accountable to the people who were voted in to lead them. Article II, which creates the presidency, begins:

 

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

 

This means all of that power. If the people vote for Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Donald Trump to run the executive branch, it is Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Donald Trump who must run that executive branch. Not bureaucrats they can’t fire. Not cabinet heads with whom, after Senate approval, they are stuck for the rest of their terms. Not “independent agencies” that exist on some magic fourth plane, inoculated against democratic feedback. The president, who is the sole custodian of the executive Power.

 

But to confirm that the president gets to exercise all of the power of his branch is not increase that power per se. The president gets whatever power the branch inherently gives him, plus whatever power Congress has constitutionally delegated to it. And that’s . . . it. That’s the whole game. In Slaughter, the case to which Milbank is presumably referring, that is all the Court said.

 

Of course, precisely the same rule applies to Article I, which reads:

 

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

 

Again: that means all of that power. The fact that the president also gets to run his own branch has no bearing whatsoever on the guarantees in Article I. They coexist. Congress runs the legislative branch, and the president runs the executive branch. To look at recent decisions that have upheld this principle and conclude, “so I guess the president gets to use the legislative power then,” as Milbank and his friends do, is a bizarre and ignorant non sequitur.

 

Especially given that, in recent years, the Court has proven more, not less, interested in policing the lines between the two branches than it has been in nearly a century. What, I wonder, does Milbank think the recent tariff case was about, if not the Court confirming that the president is not permitted to claim powers that he has not been given by the legislature? How about the student loan case under Biden? Or the never-ending litigation involving the EPA? If there is one message being sent by the Court’s recent jurisprudence it is that if Congress wants certain outcomes, Congress needs to start legislating again. (This even applies to the cases that did not involve statutory analysis or delegation queries, such as the recent TPS case, the bump stock case, the overturning of Chevron, the overturning of Roe, and more.) Much as it may disappoint Dana Milbank, there is no new order in which the next Democratic president would be able to impose “by executive fiat government run health care and many other ideas liberals have long dreamed about but lacked the votes to enact.” That claim is based on a total misunderstanding of our system of government and of the Court’s piecemeal attempts to knock it back into shape.

 

As for Neera Tanden’s idea that:

 

“Trump has discovered, or created, powers that no president has ever had that have been sanctioned by a right-wing Supreme Court. In many ways, Trump has widened the aperture of the powers the federal government has.”

 

This is downright weird. The powers of the federal government exist independently of these disputes between the branches, and are not in any way affected by them. To argue otherwise is akin to arguing that if you change who is driving a car, the car’s engine will get faster. One can take pretty much any conceivable position on Slaughter or Jarkesy or Loper Bright or West Virginia v EPA, and one will not have advanced a case that the federal government has more power or less power. One can believe, as I do, that Congress is not allowed to delegate its power at all, or one can believe, as Elena Kagan (usually) does, that Congress is allowed hand massive amounts of authority to the president and its favored experts, and one’s position will not alter the underlying enumerated powers that Congress enjoys. If, in a new Democratic administration, Milbank, Tanden, and others proceed as if the presidency has carte blanche, they will be neutered quickly by the Supreme Court — which, given the party’s newfound enthusiasm for destroying the judicial branch, may in fact be the point of all this.

What’s Going on With Wikipedia?

By Jonathan Gibson

Friday, July 03, 2026

 

In a 2004 interview with the social news website Slashdot, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales described his vision for his nascent online encyclopedia: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.” At the time, the site had fewer than 200,000 listed articles.

 

Since then, Wales’ dream has largely been realized: Last year, the site hit 7 million articles, with a 1958 memoir about schizophrenia called Operators and Things claiming the coveted spot. Wikipedia remains among the 15 most-visited websites and, with the rise of artificial intelligence, has become a major source for large language models like ChatGPT.   

 

But with Wikipedia’s high profile comes concerns about its reliability. In recent weeks, editing wars over hot-button issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, accusations of bias from sitting lawmakers, and the site’s decision to ban its own co-founder, Larry Sanger, from editing entries have all resurrected debates about the platform’s reputation as an impartial, crowd-sourced repository of information.  

 

Although concerns about Wikipedia’s role in training AI are relatively new, criticism surrounding its reliability and objectivity is not. Sanger, who left the company more than 20 years ago, has long warned of the site’s ideological capture. “It faithfully represents the establishment view, especially the establishment left view,” he told The Dispatch. “It is a mouthpiece of the establishment.”

 

Yet it wasn’t Sanger’s views on the platform that saw him banned from the Wikipedia community last week. Days earlier, he had submitted a proposal to establish a reform group called WikiProject Intellectual Diversity, with the goal of “broadening the range of permissible sources on Wikipedia” to include views beyond those of the establishment, such as those “of traditional Christians, Hindu ... and Israeli nationals, and of course conservatives and libertarians.”

 

After publicizing the initiative to his 93,000 followers on X, he was deemed by Wikipedia volunteers to have violated guidelines around canvassing to influence the site’s content. A post by an anonymous editor known as ScottishFinnishRaddish described a “clear consensus for a community ban,” and concluded that Sanger was “not here to constructively build the encyclopedia.” Other commenters accused him of supporting past meatpuppetry, in which individuals recruit others who hold similar views to edit the site.  

 

Sanger disagrees. “I was tried essentially by a self-appointed mob,” he told The Dispatch. “My accusers were also my judges.” Despite long-standing disagreements between the two co-founders of Wikipedia over who founded the organization and how it should be governed, Wales also came to Sanger’s defense, describing his X post about WikiProject Intellectual Diversity as “unambiguously fine.”

 

In theory, anyone can edit Wikipedia. In practice, doing so is quite difficult, particularly when it comes to sensitive topic areas. Wikipedia relies on volunteer “administrators” to monitor changes to articles and block users who violate the site’s editing rules. When it comes to high-profile and controversial issues, in particular, this oversight is significant. For topics related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example, editors are required to have made 500 prior edits on an account that is more than 30 days old. This means that a small group of anonymous editors plays an outsize role in shaping the site’s portrayal of some of the thorniest issues of the day.

 

Sanger believes that people should have to identify themselves when making edits. Last year, Sanger published his “Nine Theses on Wikipedia,” which called on the site to allow for competing pages on topics, abolish blacklists of particular sources, and maintain neutrality on controversial issues.

 

The last recommendation may be easier said than done. State actors and ordinary individuals have for years sought to convey their preferred narrative on Wikipedia’s pages, often in subtle and sophisticated ways. “Every movement worth mentioning is currently trying to manipulate Wikipedia in some way. Every one of them,” Wikipedia editor and administrator Tamzin Hadasa Kelly told The Dispatch.

 

Topics related to Israel and its adversaries are perhaps the perfect illustration of these efforts. Last year, Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee reported that “sock puppets,” or fake online accounts, had conducted large-scale campaigns aimed at influencing pages related to the topic. With entries such as “Zionism” and “Israel-Hamas War” respectively garnering some 11 million and 8 million views over the last three years, there has been strong blowback around questions of bias and manipulation.

 

In 2024, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) published a report claiming Wikipedia entries show a consistent anti-Israel bias, pointing to examples such as the “Zionism” page, which reflects a one-sided narrative in its opening two lines alone:

 

Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in late 19th-century Europe to establish and support a Jewish homeland through colonization in the region of Palestine which roughly corresponds to the Land of Israel in Judaism—itself central to Jewish history. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.

 

The same year, an investigation by the Times of London suggested that entries have been systematically edited to downplay Iranian atrocities, with editors reportedly facing bans for minor challenges to the anti-Israel narrative. More recently, both Sanger and Wales have spoken out against the site’s “Gaza genocide” page, arguing that the page presents the information as factual and conclusive, rather than debatable.

 

“We’re witnessing what looks like open manipulation in favor of the Iranian regime in Tehran that’s been called out multiple times by myself, other journalists, and people on Wikipedia, and it has had no effect,” Ashley Rindsberg, a chief investigative officer at NPOV, a platform investigating coordinated ideological campaigns, told The Dispatch. “Wikipedia is an American 501(c)(3), something that everyone should be concerned about—and nobody is,” he added, referring to its parent organization’s status as a tax-exempt nonprofit.

 

Part of the issue may come down to Wikipedia’s preferred sources. For example, the Qatari-funded news agency Al Jazeera, which routinely makes unverified claims about Israel’s war conduct and has been accused by the Israeli military of employing Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists in Gaza, currently enjoys the community’s highest reliability rating.

 

But the pressure appears to be coming from both directions, even if not all campaigns are equally successful. Last year, The Forward, an American-Jewish news organization, reportedly uncovered a Heritage Foundation scheme to identify and target volunteer editors on Wikipedia who it claimed were abusing their position by publishing antisemitic content. Meanwhile, Kelly claimed that Israel itself seeks to influence Wikipedia’s entries: “There is one country involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict that has a lot of state-funded or state-adjacent sock-puppets. It is Israel.”

 

Kelly attributes the bias to the growing global support for the Palestinian cause. “The reason that there are lots of people on Wikipedia who are pro-Palestinian is because there are lots of people that are pro-Palestinian,” Kelly said, claiming that an emergent bias toward pro-Palestinian narratives is due to right-wing editors getting “kicked out for being assholes.”

 

Yet others believe that the problem is more complex. “Wikipedia is just one visible downstream manifestation of a broader cultural trend among the sort of people that are inclined to edit Wikipedia,” argued Jack Despain Zhou, an independent journalist who has written extensively on Wikipedia on his Substack.

 

Wikipedia bias is emblematic of a broader, left-leaning internet culture, Zhou told The Dispatch. “Once you have a dominant local culture, it builds on itself and enforces its own norms,” he noted. Rather than being the “central node that has brainwashed everyone,” Zhou perceives Wikipedia to be “reflective of the broader left-liberal knowledge work consensus that exists.”

 

Whether that ideological consensus will be absorbed by many internet users’ newest source of information—AI—remains unclear. As large language models continue to use Wikipedia as a source of information, there is a risk that the technology will begin to parrot unverified, ideologically driven information.

 

But some analysts—including Timothy Lee, author of the Substack Understanding AI—argue that the broader information ecosystem is too large for Wikipedia alone to have a major impact. “It’s unlikely that Wikipedia is big enough to move the needle,” he said.

AOC Grabs a Tiger by the Ears

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, July 02, 2026

 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chose the New York Times as the venue to debut her first Senate endorsement of the 2026 midterm cycle. In its pages today, AOC threw her support behind Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed.

 

Sure, within the Democratic Party, there are “ideological differences,” she said, but all Democrats agree that we are in a moment of “existential” peril. That’s why, she said, “many people are willing to put aside differences in order to give us the best chance at winning.”

 

A lot can be said of El-Sayed’s candidacy, but the notion that he represents the Democrats’ “best chance at winning” is a stretch. Indeed, he may be the riskiest candidate in the field of mainstream Democrats vying to face the GOP’s likely nominee, former Representative Mike Rogers, in the fall.

 

Electability is not what El-Sayed brings to the table. Rather, his campaign’s selling point is that it channels the passion for “socialism” among the online left. For ambitious radicals, catering to that sentiment despite its potential electoral drawbacks is the order of the day.

 

AOC tacitly admitted as much. In her self-serving estimation, the Democratic Party cannot compete unless its candidates devote as much attention as possible to the radicals on social media. “I think we’ve now kind of crossed this Rubicon where online and digital messaging is no longer a niche,” she explained. “It is a core competency, just like any other.”

 

That’s a useful admission. It’s an implicit confession that the internet-based activist class is AOC’s core constituency, too. The extent to which the internet rewards and, therefore, encourages antisocial forms of communication is a long-studied psychological phenomenon. Being able to “message online,” as Ocasio-Cortez calls it, often entails being a jerk. And AOC is right: El-Sayed has that part down.

 

“Haley Stevens is a suit with a large AIPAC bank account, that’s it,” he told Semafor’s David Weigel, of one of his opponents. “I hope maybe they find some way to teach her how to string together two coherent sentences.” That’s the sort of pugilism that enlivens those who confuse governance with professional wrestling, many of whom consume politics as a form of entertainment. Whether it’s Donald Trump, Gavin Newsom, or the DSA activist class, dispensing with decorum for the benefit of internet-based shut-ins is not something most voters reward. A critical mass of the American electorate can be convinced to look past churlish irascibility, but they don’t endorse it.

 

Deft navigators of the online political environment also tend to align themselves with irredeemable miscreants who, in turn, reinforce the radicalism that generates attention on social media. That explains why El-Sayed maintained relations with a onetime staffer who was one of eight people indicted for harassing and vandalizing the homes of members of a Michigan-based pro-Israel organization (El-Sayed defended the accused, claiming they were being persecuted for their beliefs). It also explains why the communist influencer Hassan Piker has become a fixture at El-Sayed events. Piker’s schedule may preclude future appearances, though, as federal law enforcement has recently charged members of the group that brought him to Cuba with the allegation that their outfit is a front for Cuban intelligence.

 

Perhaps the biggest downside of being a darling of the online left is that the status can be attained only by those willing to offend a much larger number of American voters. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll of voters in six battleground states found that a majority of likely voters in five of those states said the Democratic Party had leaned too “far to the left” (in Maine, a plurality said the same).

 

The Times-Siena poll dovetails with the Pew Research Center’s findings. “Many Americans — including a 56% majority of Democrats — say they neither like nor dislike political leaders who call themselves democratic socialists,” Pew found. By contrast, about one-third of Democrats told pollsters they affirmatively endorsed self-described Democratic Socialists. Likewise, a recent Marquette Law School poll found that 42 percent of Democrats viewed the DSA favorably, but only 21 percent of all American voters agreed.

 

It wasn’t long ago that Democrats committed themselves to a struggle session over how they allowed the unrepresentative online left to dominate their party at the expense of their appeal to the middle of the American electorate. Whatever lessons Democrats gleaned from that process have gone out the window amid the frantic scramble by the party’s opportunists to rush to the front of the Democratic Socialist parade.

 

AOC’s endorsement of El-Sayed is a risky gamble. The Democratic Socialists have not been at all coy about what their intention really is: capturing the Democratic Party by posing as its members, only to hollow it out from within and replace it with an unashamedly socialist political vehicle. The DSA’s activists are more likely to identify as anarchists or Marxists than as Democrats. And as the Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait found through a careful study of the far-left’s program, once the DSA has coopted the Democratic Party, the plan is to “break off to form its own party, after which the husk of the old Democratic Party would wither and die,” he wrote. “This gambit is called the ‘dirty break,’ a term coined by a 2017 article in the left-wing magazine Jacobin.”

 

The DSA is wagering that the Democratic Party is a spent force. It’s so bereft of a self-preservation instinct that it can be coopted from within. And yet the party is not so enervated that a more socialistic iteration of it can emerge from that hostile takeover and immediately govern the country. That’s just the sort of sprung logic to which the terminally online are inclined.

 

AOC has signed herself up for that project. Her fortunes will rise or fall with it. And if the voters in November are willing to subordinate their worries about the socialist left to their dissatisfaction with Donald Trump’s GOP, history might come to regard her bet as a bold and successful one. If they don’t, Ocasio-Cortez will have put her political future in peril by associating herself with the oldest of ideological fads.

The Handful of Democrats Fighting Back Against the DSA Takeover

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, July 02, 2026

 

Democratic senators variously insist that the DSA is where the energy is, that the party needs to be a “big tent,” or that the voters’ verdicts are sacrosanct and cannot be questioned or even criticized. Others reassure the public (or perhaps themselves) that the DSA’s figureheads have abandoned the communist beliefs they held in their youth – assertions that are unsupported by any independently verifiable evidence.

 

But there are some Democrats who have nobly resisted the hostile takeover of their party.

 

“Capitalism has helped make America the most innovative and prosperous nation in the world,” Democratic Congressman Tom Suozzi wrote for the Wall Street Journal, in an implicit rebuke of his comrades. He has his criticisms of the capitalist enterprise, but the solution is not to “tear capitalism down.”

 

That op-ed strikes notes that harmonize with a pledge Suozzi signed with his colleague, California Democratic Congressman Adam Gray, in which both describe themselves as “capitalist, not socialist.”

 

In the Washington Post’s amusing write-up of the pledge, its reporters imply that “Democratic leaders” agree with its banal pronouncements – among them, the notion that an “orderly immigration system” is desirable and the axiomatic truism that lawmakers should discourage “lawlessness.” And yet, the document “could be polarizing on the left.” How? By contending that Democratic officials should be “proud, not ashamed of America.”

 

These intrepid Democrats can count on the support of some outside groups. In a praiseworthy op-ed, the leaders of the moderate PAC Third Way declared war on the DSA. The socialists’ “radicalism makes it not a faction to be appeased,” they wrote, “it is a movement to be opposed.”

 

The op-ed’s authors make a moral case against the DSA, but also an instrumentalist one. After all, the movement’s “ideas are electoral poison,” they wrote. The gun control activist Shannon Watts concurs. So, too, does Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden. “DSA makes claims for speaking for the working class, but Democratic candidates who do the best with working-class voters are pretty anti-DSA,” she wrote, citing Maine candidate Graham Platner’s fading prospects.

 

Still other DSA skeptics on the left make the case that the DSA’s cast of overwhelmingly white, downwardly mobile degree-holders is not only unrepresentative of the constituencies for whom they claim to speak — but that they’re also unbelievably condescending.

 

Manhattan Democrats Vice Chair Mariama James went so far as to accuse the DSA of a “mindset” that shares the paternalism she associates with “white supremacy.” Its members, she contends, “are racist, anti-Black, antisemitic, anti-East Asian.” Perhaps worst of all, they’re “non-Democrats” who are beholden to Bernie Sanders – “a registered Independent who’s never passed any legislation and is the senator of the literal Whitest state in the union.”

 

They may be waging a losing fight against the DSA’s ascension, but theirs is a venerable mission nevertheless.

What Caitlin Clark’s Treatment Tells Us About the WNBA

By Dan McLaughlin

Thursday, July 02, 2026

 

The unfair and often physically abusive treatment of Caitlin Clark by the WNBA is reaching a boiling point. The problem is not limited to Clark’s on-court rivals: The league itself is increasingly complicit in ways that look deliberate. The league’s behavior tells us a lot about what the WNBA really is — which is neither a sports league nor a business.

 

A Substack essay by Alexander Muse, dubbing Clark “The Outsider the WNBA Cannot Forgive,” lays out the case in detail. If the WNBA was primarily a business, Clark should be seen by the league as its most valuable asset. As Muse explains:

 

Ryan Brewer, a finance professor at Indiana University Columbus who specializes in valuation, calculated that Clark alone accounted for more than 26.5% of all WNBA economic activity in the 2024 season, a figure spanning attendance, television, and merchandise. Of the 24 WNBA broadcasts that drew at least 1 million viewers that year, 21 featured Clark. Her games averaged roughly 1.2 million viewers, about 200% more than games she did not play. Indiana set a single-season league attendance record, opponents relocated home games into larger NBA arenas to hold the crowds she summoned, and league merchandise sales surged above 600%, with Clark atop the jersey rankings. In the summer of 2024 the league signed an eleven-year media-rights agreement worth roughly $2.2 billion, more than triple its prior deal of about $50 million per year, a windfall that arrived on the growth she ignited. The independent economist Victor Matheson of Holy Cross estimated that roughly 1 in every 6 tickets sold leaguewide, home and away, owed to the Clark effect. . . . In 2025 Clark drew 1,293,536 All-Star fan votes, a single-season record.

 

By some estimates, Clark and her teammate Sophie Cunningham currently account for 71 percent of WNBA jersey sales between them. Even Michael Jordan at his peak didn’t represent such a predominating share of monetizable fan interest in his league.

 

This is not just hype, either. Clark was already a major national star by the time she reached the WNBA. She led the Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball team to consecutive national championship games in 2023-24, making her a folk hero in Iowa, where the men’s and women’s teams between them had made a total of one national title game before then (the men’s team, in 1956). When I visited the Iowa State Fair in 2023, alongside the iconic “Butter Cow” (a life-size sculpture of a cow made entirely of butter, which appears annually at the fair) was a life-size Butter Caitlin Clark. You can’t get more Iowa than that.

 

Since arriving in the WNBA in 2024, Clark has averaged 19.2 points, 8.4 assists, 5.1 rebounds, and 1.2 steals per game. If you follow the NBA, those may not sound like spectacular numbers, but they are unprecedented in the women’s game, which has never before seen this combination of scorer and playmaker. There have only been three seasons in WNBA history of at least 16 points and seven assists per game: Clark in 2024, Clark in 2025 (until her season-ending injury), and Clark in 2026 (so far, through 17 games). She’s the all-time WNBA career assists per game leader. She led the league in three-point shots made in 2024. At this writing, at age 24, she’s averaging a career-high 21.2 points per game. Those who are hostile to Clark’s popularity may feel that she’s only a fan favorite because she’s white, straight, and aw-shucks Middle American, but the reality is that she’s a generational offensive talent who is already building a case that she might end up being the best player the league has ever seen — if she stays healthy.

 

That’s always a big if in sports, but it is a much bigger if in a contact sport when opponents go out of their way to injure you. If the WNBA was primarily a sport, the league would do everything in its power to ensure that a talent this groundbreaking would get every opportunity to live up to her full potential, because that is what sports is about.

 

The NBA has always understood this. Everybody knows that the stars get special treatment from the refs. There’s a famous clip of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird doing a 1992 photoshoot with Michael Jordan for the U.S. Olympic “Dream Team” in which Magic quips, “You can’t get too close to Michael or it’s a foul.” Everyone was in on the joke, which is even funnier because the league protected and promoted Magic and Larry Legend just as it did to His Airness, because the NBA is both a business and a sport, and it knows what makes championships, legends, and sales of tickets and merchandise. Everybody also understands that the stars sometimes need that protection to sustain physical strategies like “Hack-a-Shaq” or the Detroit Pistons’ “Jordan Rules” that sought to physically grind them down, even when those strategies were aimed solely for the legitimate purpose of winning games.

 

The abuse of Clark has been something else much more personal, and Muse details how the league has consistently failed to follow its own disciplinary standards in restraining it — while at the same time imposing disproportionate punishments on Clark herself for comparatively trivial offenses — to the point where her team has had to speak out: “Her own coach, Stephanie White, watching a fist pressed into Clark’s neck, abandoned the usual diplomacy and said only that it was crazy, that it was dangerous, that the cheap shots were unacceptable. When the people nearest the team are reduced to narrating their own star’s peril to reporters because the officials will not act, the institution has stopped pretending.” At the same time, Clark has been repeatedly snubbed in honors and promotions by the league, such as players voting her far lower than the fan vote in the All-Star balloting, or a league celebration of its 30th anniversary that pointedly left her out of a collage of its stars. The conclusion Muse and others have drawn:

 

We should be candid about the shape that resentment appears to take. The WNBA is a predominantly black league in which openly lesbian players are represented far above their share of the general population, and into it walked a straight white woman from Iowa who became, within weeks, its biggest draw and the face of an audience that had never before belonged to it. . . . A newcomer who made everyone wealthier is resented precisely for arriving from outside the tribe, and . . . the resentment surfaces in the elbows that go uncalled, the ninth-place ballots, and the poster that found no room for her face.

 

He then draws a parallel that seems damning, “One that cannot be unseen once named,” but in fact is even worse than he thinks:

 

When black athletes integrated white professional baseball in the 1940s, they were spiked, thrown at, and abused, while officials and league offices looked studiously away, and they were expected to absorb every blow in silence as the toll exacted for their presence.

 

Caitlin Clark is not on the receiving end of a societal backlash of the sort that faced Jackie Robinson and other early black players in Major League Baseball. And if you add up what Robinson had to endure just from his fellow players, you can make a pretty solid case that it’s still a good deal worse than this. But her treatment by her league is even worse. Robinson mostly suffered from the laissez-faire officiating attitude of the umpires and league officials of his day in the face of an unusual amount of hostility from some (by no means all) of his fellow players. But in baseball in the 1940s, almost nobody got suspended or disciplined just for beaning and spiking opponents. Carl Mays didn’t even have to leave the game in 1920 when he literally killed a guy with a pitch. The league in 1947 was especially rough because so many of the players (Robinson included) had just come back from the war. Also, while it’s true that Branch Rickey instructed Robinson to hold his temper at things the white players could retaliate for freely, his concern was more for ensuring public acceptance of Jackie; he and other black players of that era didn’t face, at least in the majors (as opposed to some of the more hostile minor leagues) a disciplinary campaign like what Clark has faced.

 

Nor did baseball fail to celebrate a player much beloved by its fans. Unlike Clark, Jackie Robinson was signed by Rickey more as a moral and baseball decision than a commercial one. The owners were genuinely fearful, and in some cases not entirely without reason, that fans would not warm to black ballplayers. At best, the owners and the commissioner made a long-term bet that an integrated league would deliver better baseball, that this would ultimately matter more to fans than the color of the men, and that they could also steal the black audience that went to Negro League games, which was small in some cities but meaningful in others. As it turned out, they were right: Baseball enjoyed a golden age in commercial popularity in the 1950s and 1960s. But the point for these purposes is that the owners (at least in Rickey’s case and at the league level) got ahead of the fans, rather than being compelled by a popular groundswell to accept a player they didn’t want.

 

And Jackie Robinson, who was a very good player as a rookie and soon became a great one in spite of playing almost no organized baseball before his mid-1945 discharge from the Army, was adequately honored by the league from the get-go. He was awarded the Rookie of the Year in 1947, an honor that was newly created that season, and finished fifth in the NL MVP voting, which is arguably higher than he deserved that year. By his third season in the league, he was voted the MVP and began a six-year run as an All-Star. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.

 

Larry Doby, the first black player in the American League, began a run of seven straight All-Star appearances in his second full season. Roy Campanella won three MVP awards in five years between 1951-55. Don Newcombe won the Rookie of the Year in 1949 and the MVP as well as the first-ever Cy Young Award in 1956 (like Robinson’s Rookie of the Year award, this was initially awarded as one MLB-wide award but subsequently split into an award for each league). Between 1947 and 1953, six of the first twelve Rookie of the Year awards went to black ballplayers. Baseball’s treatment of the black pioneers was certainly not always honorable, but they were nonetheless given the honors they fairly earned.

 

As I’ve written before, the progressive capture of major institutions is nearly always a product of bundling: Progressive politics is not demanded by voters or customers or other constituents, but is at best tolerated by them because the politics attaches itself to some product people otherwise want for other reasons, such as Disney or Harvard. When there’s an interchangeable substitute that can be purchased without the politics, the bundling strategy collapses — as Bud Light found out the hard way. If the WNBA was a business that needed to pay its own bills with the money it makes, its incentives to protect and celebrate Caitlin Clark would override everything else. That’s how the NBA works, and it’s how MLB worked when it was integrating its sport. Money talks, and it talks loudly. But instead, the WNBA from the outset has been an ideological project bundled with the NBA: People pay for the NBA because they want its product, and they tolerate the fact that the dollars they spend on it go to cross-subsidize the bundled project that has a tiny niche audience. So, the league can act out its resentments at Clark because it doesn’t need the money she makes — and worse, Clark’s popularity threatens the whole justification for continuing to treat the WNBA as a bundled welfare case rather than spinning it off to profit from its new audience.