Congress Must Investigate Trump’s Aid and Comfort to Putin

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Saturday, October 17, 2026

 

There’s serious competition, but the Soviet Union could claim the title of modern history’s most monstrous regime. It killed tens of millions and enslaved hundreds of millions more. In the post–World War II era, it emerged as the mortal enemy of the United States in the Twilight Struggle that lasted four decades — during which nuclear war was barely averted in 1962 and the Kremlin sponsored proxy wars against our nation and our allies, killing thousands of Americans. As President Ronald Reagan declaimed, the Soviets were “the evil empire.” His Cold War solution was simple — “We win, they lose” — because peaceful coexistence with an enemy committed to our destruction was too precarious a prospect.

 

Vladimir Putin, the former KGB agent, is a born and bred devotee of the Soviet system. He solidified his despotic status by orchestrating a series of bombings inside Russia as a pretext to crushing Chechnya. We’re now well into his third decade as Russia’s murderous dictator. He openly regards the 1991 fall of the USSR — America’s foe in modernity’s greatest triumph for liberty — as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century.” Putin’s war of aggression and hoped-for conquest against Ukraine, like his war of aggression and conquest in Georgia (swaths of which he has occupied for nearly two decades), is part of his quest to reconstitute America’s Soviet enemy.

 

And President Donald Trump is giving him aid and comfort.

 

Congress has become a laggard even when it is in session. Now, it’s the political season, so it is inconceivable that midterm campaigns will be suspended to do the nation’s vital national security work. Yet in a properly functioning republic, there would be immediate hearings about this week’s shocking escalation of the Trump–Putin alliance.

 

Since the start of Trump’s second term, it has been excruciating to watch America’s president blame the victim, our ally Ukraine, for Putin’s war of aggression. Reagan and Poland this is not. As Ukraine fights for its survival against Moscow’s would-be hegemon, today’s president of the United States hectors it to surrender territory that Putin has been unable to take on the battlefield after four years of barbarism.

 

Notwithstanding the slew of war crimes through which Russia’s dictator persists in bombing civilian infrastructure, calculating that the prospect of Ukrainians freezing in the harsh winter will bludgeon President Volodymyr Zelensky into conceding defeat, Ukraine has staunchly resisted, despite glaring deficits in manpower and resources. Its astonishing military ingenuity has shredded Putin’s forces, leaving a staggering 1.5 million Russian casualties, including half a million killed in action. Kyiv’s innovative drone warfare has stopped Putin cold on the front lines, nullified Russia’s Black Sea fleet, and now markedly degraded its vaunted energy production platforms.

 

Russia is a pillar of an anti-American axis led by China and joined by Iran and North Korea — the trio providing Putin with the economic backstop, materiel, and manpower he desperately needs. In 2022, Putin and China’s Xi Jinping issued a joint statement of cooperation that bluntly challenged the United States and NATO. The Russian regime is actively abetting Iran’s military operations against the United States, providing intelligence for targeted attacks on U.S. personnel, as well as drone weaponry (which Iran initially designed but Russia can produce at scale). That is to say: While Trump embraces Putin, Putin aids and abets the “Death to America” regime.

 

Moreover, the Kremlin is actively provoking our NATO allies with what the Institute for the Study of War describes as a “coordinated series of kinetic campaigns,” including drone incursions. And just a month ago, the Justice Department announced criminal charges against named members of Putin’s intelligence services for conspiring to finance terrorism and carry out murders in our country.

 

Americans should thus be gratified by the Ukrainian war effort. Most who are paying attention probably are. Trump claims to want peace, but his fine print consistently spells out Russia’s terms. Regardless of the president’s personal interest, the vital American interest stems from Russia’s being America’s enemy, quite apart from being Ukraine’s enemy. Mindful of all our defense obligations, we should vigorously support Ukraine’s war effort for as long as Ukraine is willing to fight. For what is a relative bargain — about $127 billion in direct aid over four years (Trump’s claim that the U.S. has provided $350 billion is absurd) — Ukraine is hollowing out the armed forces and diminishing the war machine of our incorrigible geopolitical adversary.

 

Instead, President Trump has sided with the totalitarian aggressor over the allied European democracy upon which it preys.

 

This week, in lunatic public statements (see, e.g., here and here), the president again blamed Ukraine for the war and gratuitously insulted Zelensky (in stark contrast to Trump’s unconcealed admiration for Putin). Trump’s emissaries revived their pressure on Ukraine to settle the conflict by surrendering Ukrainian territory, and threatened that the administration would withhold crucial intelligence that Ukraine needs for its self-defense against Russian aerial attacks unless Ukraine halted its attacks on Russian oil refineries.

 

Simultaneously, as I detailed earlier this week, the president proclaimed his reprehensible diesel deal with Putin — stunning Kyiv by announcing that, with no concessions from Putin on Ukraine, the Trump administration will waive sanctions against Russia (in likely violation of federal law) in exchange for a relatively trivial amount of Russian diesel fuel that would have negligible impact on sky-high diesel prices (which have surged due to Trump’s decision to start a war with Iran, not, as he claims, Ukraine’s decision to keep fighting for its survival). And even this negligible price impact hinges on Russia’s capacity to deliver, which is doubtful, to put it mildly. (Putin’s invasion and Ukraine’s responsive attacks have so diminished Russian export capacity that it had to import diesel from South Korea during the summer.)

 

Subsequently, in a display of cynicism impressive even by Trump standards, the president tried to induce Ukrainian capitulation by decreeing that the parties had agreed to an “energy ceasefire” when they had not.

 

Not only was this agreement non-existent; it was patently rigged against Ukraine. For three days Zelensky heeded Trump’s warning to cease attacks on Russian refineries, but Russia continued pounding Ukraine’s electrical grid and other energy infrastructure. When Zelensky cried foul, the Trump administration countered that the “energy ceasefire” only applied to oil refineries. As Trump officials knew, Ukraine has no operational oil refineries, Russia having bombed the last one four years ago; by contrast, Russia has dozens of refineries. That is, the “energy ceasefire” was insidiously designed to prevent Ukraine from conducting the kind of strikes that most deter Russian aggression, yet enable Putin’s continued obliteration of the energy infrastructure Ukrainians need to survive the imminent cold season.

 

Now, we have what Congress — Republicans and Democrats, together — should regard as the last straw.

 

Starlink is the satellite communications system provided by SpaceX, which is owned by Trump’s pal Elon Musk, an unrestrained Zelensky detractor. SpaceX also makes Starshield, a military application of the Starlink technology.

 

SpaceX provides Starshield to the U.S. Defense Department. The Pentagon, in turn, provides Starshield to Ukraine, on a contract that runs into 2027. (Most reporting indicates that the U.S. pays for Starshield; citing an unidentified source in Kyiv, the journalist Alex Raufoglu reports that our NATO ally Germany pays.) Starshield has enhanced surveillance and communication capabilities that have been essential to Ukraine’s capacity to fend off, or at least minimize the carnage from, Russian aerial attacks.

 

This week, Ukraine was horrified to learn, without warning, that Starshield had been restricted. Right at the moment Trump was warning Zelensky not to attack Russian refineries, the Starshield settings were somehow altered, such that the system could not track objects traveling at speeds greater than about 100 miles per hour — woefully inadequate to detect Russian aerial assaults.

 

Coincidentally, while the system was compromised, Putin’s forces conducted some of the most intensive aerial attacks against Ukrainian territory since the war began, firing 39 ballistic missiles and 128 Shahed drones, mainly at the greater Kyiv and Kharkiv areas. At least nine civilians were killed, and many others wounded. Zelensky says 26 power facilities and four oil and gas facilities were damaged. More than 600,000 people lost power, for the most part, in the capital.

 

According to Musk, the restrictions on Starshield had to be caused by the Defense Department “and ultimately POTUS.” The government, not SpaceX, owns and controls the system. Initially (i.e., after the devastating Russian attacks), Trump officials denied that the White House had anything to do with the restrictions. As of this writing (on Thursday evening), neither the president, nor his staff, nor the Pentagon has responded to Musk’s statement. Reuters, however, has reported that the order to impose the restrictions came from inside the White House. (The report, behind the paywall, relies on two U.S. government officials and one official from a Western government, none of whom is identified.)

 

Immediately, Congress should hold hearings, demanding testimony under oath from Defense Department and other administration officials about the chain of events that led to restrictions that facilitated Russia’s suspiciously timed attack. Even if we suspend disbelief, ignore the Reuters report, and assume this was some sort of technological glitch, it would be critical to know that: After all, it would mean vital American interests around the world are vulnerable.

 

If we instead allow common sense to enter the equation, too many dark signs point in the direction of an American administration — at the very moment it was seeking Ukraine’s capitulation and threatening to leave it defenseless by denying intelligence — taking conscious action that left Ukraine exposed to an intense attack, which Russia just happens to have conducted right at the perfect time.

 

This is dark. It demands answers. Now.

A Blessing in Disguise

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, October 16, 2026

 

One problem with belonging to a political party composed of Leopards Eating Other People’s Faces is that the leopards eventually start eating each other’s faces.

 

Until recently, most of the mastication has happened at the grassroots level. For instance, some Trumpists of Indian ancestry have been dismayed to find that parts of their own base don’t care much for Indians, just as many Trumpists who support Israel have discovered some don’t care much for Jews. Who could have guessed that a movement of tribal postliberal demagogues might end up with a cohort of bigots that makes no exception for the suckers in its own ranks?

 

At long last, though, face-eating has begun inside the White House.

 

With a possible electoral disaster impending, the knives are allegedly out for chief of staff Susie Wiles. Donald Trump didn’t consult her before appointing his new (and now former) press secretary, the Washington Post claims, a move that “was viewed internally as undermining Wiles, creating the impression of a less-disciplined operation and an unsettled center of power inside the West Wing.” Elite toadies ranging from Stephen Miller to Bill Pulte to Lee Zeldin have reportedly already begun “angling” for her job in case a vacancy should open.

 

Meanwhile, former Trump lawyer Alina Habba Mildon apparently met with Trump last week to accuse Kennedy Center supremo Ric Grenell of what sounds an awful lot like embezzlement. Mildon claims that her husband sent millions to a bank account “at Mr. Grenell’s direction” in exchange for a promise that her husband would get to feed at the trough of Venezuela’s oil riches. (Grenell was Trump’s special envoy to that country before being demoted to entertainment impresario.) Of that money, $5.6 million was supposed to go to the Kennedy Center. According to Mildon, it never did. Grenell denies everything.

 

Only in this administration would the president be asked to mediate a dispute over whether a pay-to-play bribe made to one of his deputies failed to produce the specified “play.”

 

That’s not all. A few weeks ago the Wall Street Journal reported that Pulte, in his role as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, “clashed” last year with then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. Pulte had dug up evidence of possible mortgage fraud by Trump enemies like New York Attorney General Letitia James and was frustrated that Blanche wasn’t pursuing the matter more aggressively. So, according to the Journal, he dug up Blanche’s own mortgage paperwork—presumably to see if he could find any irregularities he might use as leverage against him, to hurry him along.

 

That’s still not all. The Atlantic reported yesterday that it wasn’t just distaste for public executions that led J.D. Vance to oppose Pete Hegseth’s now-canceled Nidal Hasan snuff film. “One administration official told us that Vance’s response reflected his general frustration with Hegseth, who, like Vance, is said to harbor 2028 presidential ambitions,” the magazine alleged. Part of that frustration surely also has to do with Hegseth having pushed out Dan Driscoll, a longtime friend of the vice president’s, as Army chief. Payback will come at some point for Secretary Pete.

 

All of this face-eating has me wondering whether some leopards might secretly be hoping that they’ll get to feast on something more appetizing next year.

 

The downside for the Republican Party of controlling the government over the past 21 months is that it’s had no foil—no enemy to unite against, no opponent with whom to share blame for America’s misfortunes, no faces worth chewing on. So it’s eating its own. That fractiousness might persist if the GOP retains its House and Senate majorities on Election Day, ensuring two more years without a foil for a party that’s already facing an uncertain post-Trump future.

 

So if you’re a loyal partisan Republican, maybe you (gasp) shouldn’t want the GOP to overperform.

 

There’s no point trying to convince partisan conservatives that their party will benefit morally or civically from being repudiated at the polls this year. The sort of anti-anti-Trump chumps who’ve gone on pulling the lever through 10 years of Trumpist depravity are deaf to such things. But I wonder if they’d consider an appeal to their partisan power-lust—that is, an argument that the GOP will benefit strategically from a midterm loss. Is there a case to be made that the party will accrue more power on balance over the next two election cycles if it loses this year?

 

For conservative Republicans, could the blue wave be a blessing in disguise?

 

2028.

 

The case that conservatives might be better off with a Democratic Congress falls apart instantly if you think there’s a chance the president will spend his final two years in office governing in a reasonable manner. If he intends to embrace popular policies that will improve Republicans’ chances in 2028, then wanting the GOP in charge of the House and Senate to enact those policies is a no-brainer.

 

But he’s not going to do that, is he?

 

Trump will get worse. The fact that figures as loathsome as Pulte and Miller stand a chance of replacing Wiles as chief of staff tells you all you need to know about what his lame-duck era will look like. Liberated from any longer having to care what voters think, the president is about to go full Trump. And going full Trump will not make the Republican Party more popular come 2028. On the contrary.

 

That’s the first argument for why partisan conservatives should prefer a Democratic Congress. Democrats might save the president from some of his most self-destructive excesses by using their legislative leverage to thwart him, sparing Vance and Republican candidates downballot in 2028 from having to answer for those sins. If the president wakes up next year and decides, say, that he wants to start sending weapons to Moscow to help the Kremlin in its heroic crusade against Ukraine, a Democratic Congress might start cutting off funding to federal agencies to force him to relent.

 

But a Republican Congress? After Trump’s barnstorming helped deliver an unexpected midterm victory for them? I wouldn’t bet a dime on them intervening. And if they don’t, how do you like J.D.’s chances two years from now when he’s stuck having to explain to swing voters why arming the Russians was a good idea?

 

Having a common enemy to rally the right against is another key Republican benefit from a Democratic victory, as I suggested above. As Trump’s heir apparent, the vice president is facing a very dicey outlook if his party remains solely culpable for whatever insanity this country will spend the next 27 months being subjected to.

 

With the GOP in control of Congress, Vance will own the president’s failures completely in the 2028 election. He’ll also have his work cut out for him in trying to hold together an increasingly untenable Republican coalition of “America First” postliberals and traditional conservatives. As Trump staggers toward retirement, those factions will compete ferociously for control of the GOP’s direction. And, having spent more than five minutes observing the VP, I’m skeptical that Vance’s animal charisma will be enough to unify them.

 

A Democratic Congress might solve those problems for him. As Democrats begin antagonizing Trump, most of the right will do what it always does: putting aside differences and coming together behind him. And Vance will suddenly have a ready scapegoat whom he can blame for any policy disasters that America stumbles into. In the scenario I raised about Democrats shutting down the government to block some Russia-friendly Trump gambit, for example, the VP could and would spin any subsequent economic downturn during the president’s term as a product of that shutdown—whether that’s true or not.

 

We need to put Congress back in Republican hands to restore the glory days of 2026, he’ll say on the trail two years from now. And partisan conservatives will nod thoughtfully.

 

There’s one more reason those partisans might logically prefer to have Democrats in charge next year. As counterintuitive as it may seem, the GOP might benefit politically from having the opposition performing oversight of Trump.

 

Team Trump’s graft has been so flagrant and so grotesque that, according to a new Fox News poll, “corruption in government” is now the issue about which voters say they’re most concerned. “Inflation and high prices” has fallen to No. 2. Do you realize how unethical an administration has to be to make civically catatonic Americans care more about corruption than they do about the cost of living when diesel is $6 a gallon?

 

Do you further realize how much worse the White House’s graft will get over the final two years of Trump’s presidency if his party remains in charge of Congress, scrupulously indifferent to what he’s up to? MAGA’s heroes will steal everything that isn’t nailed down. And if they do, as much of a political problem as corruption is for the GOP right now, it will be an order of magnitude greater for Vance and his party come 2028.

 

The one thing that might cause the president and his cronies to keep their noses somewhat cleaner for the rest of his term is putting Democrats in charge of the House and/or Senate next year, armed with subpoena power. If that happens and the graft tails off, the vice president will be poised to argue in 2028 that Trumpist corruption is old news. “Some people around the president behaved badly in 2026,” he might say, “but then Donald Trump cracked down.” Afflicted with famously short memories and attention spans, American voters might buy it.

 

There are other things we could say here about why a Democratic Congress would be better for conservatism. Shaming the right by exposing Trump’s corruption would be good for Reaganites in the long term, for instance, because it would demonstrate that postliberals can’t be trusted with power. Likewise (and as strange as it may sound), having leftists in charge of the House and Senate until 2029 would probably make the government more fiscally responsible. Democrats will oppose Trump’s atrocious tariffs and runaway spending out of partisan spite, but Republicans will not.

 

The partisan conservatives we’re trying to persuade don’t actually care about conservatism on the merits, though, only about whether the laundry they’re rooting for gets to be in charge. So let’s move on.

 

Nominees.

 

I struggle to see any downside for right-wing partisans in Democrats winning the House. If your partisanship is so nihilistic that you’d prefer that the public simply not know how much racketeering our Republican head of state is engaged in, I suppose that’s a reason not to want the opposition in charge of the House Oversight Committee.

 

And if you can think of some important legislation that Trump hopes to pass over the next two years, that would also be an argument for preferring a GOP House majority. But if you do think of it, let me know. I’m stumped.

 

Given how dysfunctional Speaker Mike Johnson’s Republican conference has been this year and the probability that Democrats will gain at least a few seats next month, a Republican midterm “victory” might leave the party with a one-vote majority and a total inability to govern. Under those circumstances, isn’t it better to be in the minority, making life hell for Hakeem Jeffries instead?

 

There’s no good partisan case for wanting Republicans to retain the House—but there is a case for wanting to retain the Senate, which is responsible for confirming presidential nominees, of course. Judges judges judges was the argument in 2016 for conservatives to embrace Trump’s immorality, and judges judges judges remains the argument in 2026 for them to keep pulling that lever for garbage.

 

What type of judges, exactly, are partisan conservatives expecting in years seven and eight of a Trump presidency, though?

 

That’s probably a stupid question to ask. Again, these people don’t care about conservatism on the merits, so whether they get an Amy Coney Barrett or an Emil Bove, a Neil Gorsuch or a Todd Blanche, for the next Supreme Court vacancy is probably academic to them. They’ll get a Republican, and any Republican is good. (The motto of anti-anti-Trumpism, by the way.) But let’s be clear: They’re almost certainly not going to get someone of the caliber of the conservative triumvirate that the president added to the Supreme Court during his first term.

 

One of the few times Trump has ever admitted error in office came last month when he whined that Barrett, Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh had let him down again by blocking his attempt to restrict mail ballots in November. “These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court,” he wrote on Truth Social, “they are merely a shell of their original selves.” If I’m right that his postliberalism will grow more extreme after the election, when he’ll no longer need to care about public opinion, we should expect his taste in judicial nominees to grow more extreme as well.

 

Loyalists, not originalists. Toadies, not constitutionalists. A Republican Senate will rubber-stamp Trump’s nominees, fearing that every vacancy that goes unfilled before 2029 will eventually be filled by a Democratic president. A federal bench stocked for decades with eminent Federalist Society eggheads will be heavily diluted with Trumpists.

 

Which, I admit, would be a sort of poetic justice for anti-anti-Trumpers. Partisan conservatives rationalized supporting Trump 10 years ago by convincing themselves that doing so was necessary to keep the judiciary conservative. It’d be a fitting reflection of their ideological bankruptcy if they were to turn out next month to keep the Senate red, enabling the president to start unmaking judicial conservatism.

 

Again, though, that argument won’t appeal to the partisan mind. Ask an anti-anti-Trumper whether they’d prefer putting Aileen Cannon on the Supreme Court to letting Senate Democrats hold open a court vacancy so that the winner of the 2028 election can fill it, and they’ll look at you like you’re crazy. (Any Republican is good!) So here’s a more pragmatic reason for them to think twice about two years of the Senate GOP rubber-stamping any ol’ judicial candidate whom Trump happens to nominate: It’s going to turbocharge Democrats’ appetite for court-packing.

 

Democrats will pack the court eventually no matter what happens next month, partisans will say. Maybe—it depends on how big their Senate majority is after Trump leaves office, assuming they have a majority at all, and whether they regain the White House. But the spectacle of Senate Republicans approving obviously unqualified Trump hacks to the Supreme Court will finish off whatever misgivings remain on the left about expanding the court and “balancing” it with hacks of its own. If the right dispenses with all pretense that it’s selecting judges based on merit or judicial philosophy rather than their willingness to deliver certain outcomes, the left will treat that as license to dispense with any pretense that it, too, still cares about judicial norms.

 

If, on the other hand, a new Democratic Senate majority managed to block some of Trump’s judicial nominees, that might tilt some on the left back toward thinking that radical reform of the judiciary is unnecessary. The old ways of influencing the composition of the bench still work; all Democrats need to do is win elections.

 

Of course, judges aren’t the only presidential nominees whom the next Senate will consider. Lord only knows what an unleashed lame-duck Trump might find under the rocks he’ll turn over to fill vacancies in his Cabinet as they emerge. The worse his appointments are (Attorney General Bill Pulte? Defense Secretary Kid Rock?), the worse his administration will function and the more probable an electoral backlash to the GOP in 2028 becomes. For self-interested reasons, then, partisan Republicans should want Congress to impose some quality control over the president’s horrendous personnel choices. A Senate led by their own party won’t.

 

Failure.

 

I realize that none of this is likely to persuade anyone, though. For two reasons.

 

My original point about face-eating is probably overblown. I do think Republicans are more likely to go on feuding with each other if they don’t have a Democratic foil over the next two years, but one could easily argue the opposite. The finger-pointing and recriminations that would follow a midterm blue wave might accelerate the right’s fractiousness and ignite political war between conservatives and postliberals. We might wake up on November 4 to find faces being eaten everywhere, as far as the eye can see.

 

It would be like a chud version of Night of the Living Dead.

 

Besides, one should never underestimate the right’s ability to manufacture catastrophist “Flight 93 election” bulls–t to paper over its divisions and restore unity. No matter how fractious things get within the GOP, they’ll come up with something in 2028 to explain why a Jon Ossoff presidency would mean the end of civilization. You don’t need a foil when you’ve got a political movement that subsists entirely on propaganda.

 

The other reason no one will be persuaded is that partisanship in one election can always be rationalized by partisanship in every future election. Sure, it might be better on balance for the GOP if Democrats controlled the legislature for the next two years—but every seat liberals win next month is a seat Republicans will need to win back in 2028. That will make winning control of Congress harder during that cycle. And if winning is harder in that cycle, it might be even harder in the next cycle, when yet more seats might need to be regained.

 

Play that out and you’re forced to conclude, conveniently, that it’s never proper to vote against the team. Do it just once, and you’re potentially voting for … well, for the end of civilization.

 

That attitude explains how a party of Leopards Eating People’s Faces managed to get reelected after it tried to eat American democracy’s face on January 6, and how it stands a fair chance of holding on to the Senate next month despite its leader very publicly trying to eat Ukraine’s face right now. There’s no conservative appeal to be made to someone who’d rather be governed by fascists than by garden-variety Democrats simply because of the laundry they’re wearing. There’s a name for people like that, and it isn’t “conservative.”

California’s Peculiar ‘N-Word’ Case Against Tesla

By Will Swaim

Saturday, October 17, 2026

 

On September 21, I took a long tram ride through Tesla’s factory in Fremont, Calif. It was a marvel for a white-collar kid from the suburbs: helmeted men and women working in partnership amid a Jurassic Park of swinging robot arms inside 3.7 million square feet of industrial space — the equivalent, my notes show, of about 64 NFL football fields, including the end zones.

 

On that same trip, I accomplished something California’s state investigators never did in the course of an eight-year probe: I actually went to Tesla.

 

California’s Civil Rights Department (CRD) says the factory is a “racially segregated workplace,” where black employees encounter racist graffiti, hear racial slurs with astonishing frequency, and work in areas known as the “plantation” and “slaveship.” The state’s case went to trial the very day of my visit. Yet the CRD had never set foot inside the factory. Its investigators met with Tesla officials just once, for two and a half hours, before filing their lawsuit the following day.

 

The state alleges a range of discriminatory practices. But much of the case’s force comes from one accusation: that Tesla tolerated the frequent use of a single terrible word, one capable of making an entire room of Americans seize up before anyone has finished pronouncing it: the N-word.

 

The state will have its experts. But Tesla has called its own, Hiram L. Smith. A sociolinguist at Bucknell University, Smith specializes in African-American English and has just published a book on this lexical minefield, Wassup, My Nigga: The Hidden History of a Controversial Word.

 

Unlike me, Smith is black and refuses to deploy the customary euphemism “N-word.” It’s not because he is trying to be provocative — though provocation is an unavoidable occupational hazard here — but because he thinks the euphemism muddies the very distinction he is trying to examine. In a recent academic presentation, he told his audience, “In this talk, I do not use the word ‘nigga’; I refer to it.”

 

More important for Department of Fair Employment and Housing v. Tesla, Smith rejects the idea that the word is self-interpreting. Who said it? To whom? In what grammatical construction? With what pronunciation, intention, relationship, and social context? His research examines how the word has served different functions over time: insult, affiliation, masculine in-group marker, quotation, lyric, reference. Simply counting occurrences tells us remarkably little about what happened. Smith’s point is not that racial epithets are harmless. It’s that linguistics does not permit us to convert every utterance mechanically into a racial assault. A word that is unmistakably an insult in one setting may carry an entirely different meaning in another.

 

And there’s a related problem, one that the state doesn’t seem to account for, which sticks out from my own nonlawyer’s perspective: Many of Tesla’s factory workers are Latino and black. If Tesla executives had disciplined those workers for their use of The Word Which Cannot Be Uttered (TWWCU), California might be making a very different claim: that Elon Musk’s company was guilty of policing black language. You can imagine the headlines for that case.

 

Indeed, while my group of tourists and car buyers was ferried about Tesla’s “slave plantation” in a humming electric tram, the trial was beginning an hour’s drive north: in the Alameda County Superior Court, a 1960s brutalist admin building that includes the courtroom of Judge Peter Borkon. There, opening his defense of the carmaker, attorney Tyree P. Jones Jr., himself a black man, told the court that the state’s case against Tesla is, in fact, a case against black speech. “By this action, the state of California attacks the way many black people greet each other,” Jones said. “It’s offensive.”

 

This cannot mean that every invocation of TWWCU at Tesla was affectionate, harmless, or protected by some exemption from workplace rules. A black employee subjected to repeated racial insults by hostile co-workers has a serious complaint, and an employer that ignores it may be liable. Nor does Smith’s research answer the state’s separate allegations about pay and promotions.

 

But those distinctions make the circumstances of each alleged offense essential. Unfortunately, state law allows the state to make such allegations without what you and I — or anyone who grew up on a television diet of courtroom procedurals — would recognize as a named victim. In a pretrial hearing, one of the state’s attorneys explained that its expert witnesses would address Tesla’s human resources practices and their departures from professional standards, as well as the historical and sociological significance of the word. Smith’s presence this week makes that testimony considerably more interesting. The CRD appears prepared to establish that the word has a long, ugly history; Smith will ask Judge Borkon to consider what particular speakers meant by particular uses of it. One might suppose that an agency that has conducted an eight-year investigation would already have answered those questions.

 

***

 

The state’s case has a second peculiarity: the methods of its investigators.

 

From 2017 to 2022, Tesla claims, CRD (then called the Department of Fair Employment and Housing) investigated almost 50 claims of racism at the Fremont plant. “On every single occasion, when the DFEH closed an investigation, it did not find misconduct against Tesla. It therefore strains credibility for the agency to now allege, after a three-year investigation, that systematic racial discrimination and harassment somehow existed at Tesla.”

 

Tesla also claims that CRD officials never visited the factory and never interviewed the Tesla executives one might suppose were the architects of the Jim Crow system CRD says it has discovered. And although the department has a statutory responsibility to investigate discrimination complaints and attempt conciliation, its single encounter with Tesla consisted, the company says, of a single, two-and-a-half-hour meeting on the day before the state filed its 2022 lawsuit.

 

Despite all that, in May, Judge Borkon rejected Tesla’s effort to dismiss the case before trial. CRD Director Kevin Kish celebrated the ruling by declaring that Tesla’s employment practices were rooted in “some of the ugliest relics of the past.” Yet the judge himself seemed perplexed by one aspect of the department’s case. After years of investigation, the CRD had proceeded without identifying individual workers as plaintiffs in its lawsuit. In a let-me-get-this-straight moment, Borkon asked the CRD’s attorneys whether identifying an entire category of people but not a single named victim was, you know, sufficient.

 

“You don’t have to ever name the individual?” the judge asked.

 

A CRD attorney explained that the department brought the action in its own name to seek relief for affected workers. If Tesla wanted the names of every person potentially entitled to relief, she asked, “How would CRD have known that?”

 

“Why would you not have known that?” the judge replied with something like exasperation.

 

It’s a marvelous exchange, and not because the state necessarily lacks legal authority to sue on behalf of workers who aren’t individually named in the complaint. California law gives it that authority. Rather, the exchange raises an elementary question about an investigation that consumed years: How closely did the state investigate the experiences of the people it says were victimized?

 

The CRD’s answer may be that its evidence establishes a pattern of misconduct extending beyond the experiences of particular employees. But that raises the stakes of the evidence, not least because the agency is alleging something considerably more serious than bad behavior by a handful of employees. It is accusing one of the world’s best-known manufacturers of maintaining a workplace culture of racial discrimination. The distinction matters. A company that employs thousands of people can have racist employees without operating a racist employment system. Whether Tesla knew about particular instances of misconduct, tolerated them, punished them, or failed to prevent them is central to the case.

 

So are the meanings of the words the state has collected as evidence.

 

***

 

Tracking the evolution of California’s CRD over nearly 70 years is like examining the rings of an old tree. The agency’s changing names, expanding authority, and increasing appetite for litigation tell a larger story about California itself.

 

It dates to 1959, when California established the Fair Employment Practices Commission to enforce the state’s first broad workplace-discrimination protections. In 1980, the state’s employment and housing civil rights laws were consolidated, and the agency became the Department of Fair Employment and Housing. Four decades later, in 2022, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation renaming it the Civil Rights Department.

 

The changes weren’t merely cosmetic. The department’s jurisdiction now reaches well beyond employment and housing into other areas of public and private life. Its lawyers can pursue sweeping institutional claims, as they have in the Tesla case. It can retain outside counsel and seek substantial monetary relief — winnings that it can plow back into its budget for future investigations and additional staff. Painful litigation and eye-popping settlements are its business model.

 

There’s an essential place in American jurisprudence for civil rights enforcement. But there’s also a danger in an agency whose mission has expanded from investigating discrimination into pursuing massive legal actions against corporations — and whose success is increasingly measured in the size of the settlements and the changes it can compel employers to make.

 

Consider Activision Blizzard, the California video game maker. The CRD accused the company of maintaining a pervasive “frat boy” culture and pursued litigation that brought it into conflict with federal employment-discrimination investigators. In 2023, after more than two years of legal combat, the state announced that Activision would pay $54 million to settle. In exchange, the state admitted that no investigation, including its own, “has substantiated any allegations that there has been systemic or widespread sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard.” Nor is there any evidence, California now admits, “that Activision Blizzard senior executives ignored, condoned, or tolerated a culture of systemic, harassment, retaliation, or discrimination; or that Activision Blizzard’s Board of Directors including its Chief Executive Officer, Robert Kotick, acted improperly with regard to the handling of any instances of workplace misconduct.”

 

But the litigation demonstrated the old adage that the process is the punishment. It proved the extraordinary leverage available to a government agency that can threaten years of legal investigations and ruinous costs, reputational damage, and enormous potential judgments.

 

***

 

My tour of the Tesla plant was lovely, even though it recalled my early terror of industrial labor. As a ten-year-old, along with 25 or so kids in my fifth-grade class at the Old Mission School, the Catholic school on the grounds of the Mission San Juan Capistrano, I visited a lima bean canning factory in nearby Costa Mesa. Inside a rust-colored, barnlike facility, a speeding, clanging belt conveyed a river of unmarked cans. I saw a man with a kind of poking stick. He was, the guide explained, making sure that no dented cans were sent off to grocery stores. And as I watched, the man — who seemed old but was perhaps in his 40s — occasionally jabbed his short, wooden broomstick-like tool at the rare can with (to me) invisible defects. These landed in a box on the other side of the belt, a box that went to the poor, our guide said, shouting above the mayhem. During our debrief, we agreed that this appealed to our Catholic sense of charity. But in the moment, all I could see was a man in a state of constant, animal awareness, working in semidarkness and in claustrophobic noise. With God as my witness, I declared I would never work in a factory so long as I could do anything else to survive. Soon after, I determined that I’d become a priest. (I failed at that on first contact with the reality of celibacy.)

 

Tesla’s Fremont plant was nothing like that canning factory. Near the entrance stood something resembling an Apple Genius Bar, except that the sign above it read “HR Answer Bar.” Other signs told employees where to report workplace concerns, from vacation and insurance matters to safety problems and, presumably, allegations of racism.

 

We climbed aboard a kind of Disneyland tram and moved slowly into a vast, brightly lit space with red robotic arms and hard-hatted humans. Our guide, Salim, drove us through a maze of buildings devoted to motors, painting, aluminum-pressing, body panels, and interior finishing. He waved at workers moving between tasks, sometimes calling out their names. They responded with nods, waves, and the occasional fist bump.

 

Above and beside them, robots moved with alarming speed and inerrant precision. Salim pointed out “ro-bats,” machines suspended upside down above their floor-mounted brethren, all choreographed by software that seemed to possess a better understanding of factory traffic than most Californians will ever have of the 405.

 

The humans worked hard, it seemed. They wore helmets, neon vests, boots, rubberized gloves, and safety glasses. Their jobs appeared repetitive, demanding, and intense. My pleasant experience as a visitor proved nothing about their treatment by co-workers or managers. Whatever ugliness might exist in their intimate relationships would be largely invisible to someone passing through on a tram. But that is precisely why I would have expected the investigators to go there, talk to the workers and examine the circumstances in which the alleged misconduct occurred.

 

Near the end of the tour, Salim drove our tram past the quietest part of the facility. There, behind transparent sheets of plastic, engineers were building the assembly line for Tesla’s newest project, Optimus — athletic-looking wasp-waisted bipedal robots that can climb stairs, lift boxes, and manage tools. The Optimus robots use the same visual-perception tech that Tesla cars use to drive themselves. It’s easy to imagine that the CRD is unintentionally accelerating the development of Optimus, by launching legal assaults that may well incentivize the creation of human replacements. These robots would seem to herald the end of much of the factory work we saw that day. They would require neither lunch breaks nor overtime, and presumably they would be indifferent to the race, sex, or ancestry of the machines working beside them. And then (as Marx predicted in a different but related context) deprived of “victims,” the California Civil Rights Department would simply wither away.

Trump Betrays Lindsey Graham; Will Rally with Darline Wednesday

By Jim Geraghty

Saturday, October 17, 2026

 

This is exceptional timing. President Trump continues to become a de facto ally of Russia in its war against Ukraine*, and is willing to reverse a bill that he bragged about while addressing the United Nations less than a month ago:

 

President Trump is halting implementation of most of the sanctions that were to be imposed on Russia under a bipartisan bill he signed last month.

 

The announcement came in an executive order on Friday night, and was part of a broader pivot by Trump toward courting Moscow as he seeks to end the war in Ukraine and keep energy prices under control ahead of the midterm elections.

 

The law, which was championed by and named for the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), targeted certain Russian officials and institutions and would have allowed for tariffs of up to 100% on countries that import Russian oil.

 

In the executive order, Trump stated that waiving implementation of most aspects of the law was “in the national interests of the United States.”

 

The president did not elaborate on how the law was in the national interest of the United States, because it is not in the interest of the United States.

 

Guess how Trump is spending his Wednesday?

 

President Donald Trump is returning to South Carolina next week to rally support for Sen. Darline Graham and other Republicans ahead of the midterms.

 

The rally will be Wednesday in Clemson. The scheduled start time is 7 p.m., the Republican National Committee announced Thursday evening.

 

What exactly is Senator Graham supposed to say about the president at that event? “He’s betraying the legacy of my beloved late brother with the very best of intentions”?

 

*Some of us assessed this flip a long time ago.

The Problems Awaiting Any Future Democratic Congressional Majority

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, October 16, 2026

 

Don’t get me wrong; you’d rather face the problems of being in the congressional majority than keep dealing with the problems of being in the minority.

 

But if you’re a Democrat, you should savor these days and the likely big wins on Election Night. Because once you’re the majority, after a few days of celebrating, life gets harder. As one House Republican staffer put it to me after losing the majority decades ago, “Now we’re throwing the grenades, instead of catching them.”

 

I’ll have more to say on this topic on a forthcoming article in the print edition of National Review. But if Democrats win a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives or Senate, they “win” the fun of trying to get anything passed with an angry, frustrated, vindictive President Trump at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

 

And the threshold for a lasting Democratic Senate majority may well be 52 seats. If, after the midterms, the Senate has 51 Democrats and 49 Republicans, there will be intense discussions about Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman switching parties. If Fetterman did switch parties or vote to keep Thune as majority leader, it would turn it into a 50-50 split where Vice President JD Vance would break the tie, preserving the Republican majority.

 

Fetterman has repeatedly said he has no intention of switching parties; he only votes with the GOP’s position about a quarter of the time. (In the most recent 40 votes, he’s voted with the Democrats 90 percent of the time.) Nonetheless, Trump is talking up the possibility of Fetterman flipping to the Republicans, and it seems likely that no matter what happens in the next two years, Fetterman is either A) not running for reelection in 2028, or B) not running for reelection as a Democrat in 2028.

 

A little-noticed story from last month:

 

Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) attended an exclusive retreat with executives from Fox News, traveling to Montana in July at the invitation of the network’s owners.

 

The event, hosted at the Murdoch family ranch the weekend of July 11, featured a panel on social media that Fetterman headlined with Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL), one of his closest GOP colleagues in the Senate. Three sources and Fetterman himself confirmed his attendance at the retreat.

 

When you’re hanging out at Rupert Murdoch’s ranch, you are not that interested in staying on warm and fuzzy terms with Democrats in Pennsylvania or anywhere else. And Republicans will likely offer everything up to renaming his home state “Fettermania” to entice him to switch sides.

 

Even with a Senate majority, Democrats would need 60 votes to get most legislation passed. Democrats might talk about nuking the filibuster, but Fetterman says he’s opposed to that. Assuming every other Democrat agrees to get rid of it, there is an enormous difference between Democrats winning 51 seats in the Senate this fall and winning 52 seats.

 

That also assumes every Democratic senator . . . er, sticks around. Vermont’s Bernie Sanders just turned 85. Maine’s “independent” who caucuses with the Democrats, Angus King, is 82. Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal and Massachusetts’s Ed Markey are 80, Vermont’s Peter Welch is 79 (in his state, he’s the young one!), and Hawaii’s Mazie Hirono will turn 79 on Election Day. Rounding out the top ten oldest Democratic senators is Massachusetts’s Elizabeth Warren (77), Oregon’s Ron Wyden (77), Rhode Island’s Jack Reed (77 next month), and New York’s Chuck Schumer (76 next month).

 

Everybody got their flu shots, right? It’s not surprising to see so many Democratic senators opposed to burning fossil fuels . . . because they’re so close to becoming it.

 

Almost all those states have Democratic governors or are likely to have Democratic governors after the midterms, so an unscheduled departure from Congress would not see them replaced by a Republican. (Note that Vermont has a Republican governor, Phil Scott, who has a good chance of winning reelection in November. But in the past, Scott has said he would abide by Vermont’s tradition of naming a replacement from the same party as the outgoing officeholder.) But if there’s a 52–48 Democratic majority, any absence creates even less margin for error on a party-line vote.

 

And this is just focusing on the Senate. We’ll see what the split in the House of Representatives is, but Republicans currently enjoy a 219 (Yes, I know Kevin Kiley is calling himself an independent these days) to 214 majority with two vacancies — one in a GOP-leaning seat in Texas, the other in a Democratic-leaning seat in Florida.

 

Maybe the Democrats will win a solid majority; DecisionDeskHQ is currently projecting Democrats win 235 seats and Republicans win 200. But if it’s closer, a narrow House margin means vacancies, absences, and special elections matter a lot.

 

Speaking of absences, the 2028 presidential race will begin roughly 20 minutes after the polls close on Election Day. I exaggerate slightly, but last cycle, Trump announced his presidential campaign one week after the midterm election, before the runoff in Georgia was complete. One way to stand out in a crowded field is to be the first candidate to announce his or her campaign.

 

In the House, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ro Khanna of California are likely to run for president in 2028.

 

In the Senate, we are likely to see presidential campaigns from New Jersey’s Cory Booker, Arizona’s Ruben Gallego, Arizona’s Mark Kelly, Connecticut’s Chris Murphy, Maryland’s Chris Van Hollen, Georgia’s Raphael Warnock, and Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin. (For what it’s worth, Georgia’s Jon Ossoff says he’s not running.) Don’t tell me these figures have no chance of winning the nomination; no power on earth is stronger than the delusion of a senator who looks in a mirror and sees a president staring back at him.

 

That’s seven senators who will be looking for opportunities to jet off to South Carolina, Nevada, or New Hampshire, who will be introducing their symbolic bills, and generally elbowing their way into the spotlight. And there’s a good chance that most of these senators will try to outflank their rivals by proposing ideas that are further and further to the left.

 

Then there’s the gap between the big dreams and vast ambitions of the Democratic Socialists of America candidates and the progressive grassroots, and what can realistically be accomplished with a Republican in the White House. And a certain prominent Democrat is not helping matters by talking up the sweeping changes Democrats should be able to enact if they control Congress.

 

“The work that we can do about winning back the House and the Senate is going to be on a number of things. For example, I believe that we need to expand the Supreme Court. We need more justices on the Supreme Court so that we can have a court that actually reinforces the spirit and principles behind the Constitution of the United States.”

 

Yes, that is former Vice President Kamala Harris.

 

In theory, all it takes to expand the Supreme Court is for the House and Senate to pass legislation making the change. Under Article I of the U.S. Constitution and the Necessary and Proper Clause, Congress has the direct power to set and alter the number of justices on the Supreme Court. Of course, that assumes the legislation would not be vetoed by Donald Trump. And who would be appointing those justices until January 20, 2029? Trump, even if a Democratic-controlled Senate is just about certain to reject any of his nominees.

 

Passing this would mean that the next time Republicans have control of the House, the Senate, and the presidency, they would just expand the number of justices on the court to an even larger number to ensure a majority of their preferred justices.

 

Schumer and Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries spent much of the past two years being hated by the grassroots because they supposedly weren’t effective enough at fighting Trump. A Democratic congressional majority will have some leverage through the budget, appropriations, debt limit, and confirmation process, but Trump will continue to be Trump for the next two years, consistently finding new ways to outrage, antagonize, and immiserate progressive Democratic voters. The best night of a new Democratic congressional majority may well be Election Night.

Addicted to Protest

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, October 17, 2026

 

I’ll be honest: I’ve never liked Greta Thunberg.

 

That might sound mean, but that kind of animosity is one of the reasons she became a dashboard saint for climate justice in the first place. The fact that she was a ponytailed 15-year-old, a Joan of Arc of global warming, was a feature, not a bug. When people criticized her uncharitably—but also charitably—her defenders could claim the critics were picking on a little girl.

 

I’m not insinuating anything here—her fans were quite open about it. Here’s Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian (emphasis mine):

 

Greta Thunberg’s unique strength when she first emerged as an activist was that, as a child, and one with Asperger’s to boot, she had almost unassailable moral authority. Her critics argued that if she was old enough to tell world leaders what to do then she should be old enough to take the heat for it, but most people recognise that hers is still an innately vulnerable age; not quite a child, not quite grown up, instinctively evoking protective feelings in anyone with an ounce of humanity…. initially even her detractors accepted that to argue back as robustly as one might with an adult would seem bullying and unkind. It is a twisted testament to her success that the gloves have now come off with a vengeance, but it’s frightening all the same.

 

I’m not fond of any arguments that come with claims that the identity of a person, any person, gives their opinions “unassailable moral authority.” Now I should clarify up front that I think there are times when someone’s feelings can have an almost unassailable moral authority. Politics is full of examples where this very human fact is exploited. Parents of daughters raped and murdered, victims of all manner of crimes, female athletes deprived of their victories by biological males, survivors of school shootings: The victims dragooned into political fights to put a human face on policies and controversies are a regular feature of politics. Indeed, one of the few lamentable mistakes Ronald Reagan made as president was to turn a portion of his State of the Union addresses into a parade of human props. The whole point is to take a person’s unassailably legitimate feelings and make it hard to argue against the cause they’re made to represent.

 

But feelings aren’t arguments.

 

To her credit, when Greta Thunberg emerged as an international human shield for climate change, she made some arguments. She also provided an enormous number of theatrical and demagogic “How dare you!” outbursts.

 

The crux of her argument was that climate change was such an important crisis that nothing else should matter. Again, that’s no insinuation on my part. “The emissions are increasing and that is the only thing that matters. I think that needs to be our focus,” she told The Guardian. “We cannot talk about anything else.” The headline of the article: “Greta Thunberg, schoolgirl climate change warrior: ‘Some people can let things go. I can’t.’”

 

When she appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2019, she said:

 

Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as if you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is.

 

She said similar things at the U.N., at the EU Parliament, and no doubt at the Stockholm Starbucks. I think her arguments, shorn of their emotional candy coating, were literally and figuratively juvenile.

 

And whenever she was criticized for arguing that her personal feelings of anxiety should be translated into a global panic, her defenders attacked those who disagreed. She was like an earnest, proudly autistic version of the Jon Stewart “clown nose on, clown nose off” shtick. (For those of you who don’t remember, Stewart loved to deliver often brilliant, highly partisan attacks and then when people responded seriously, he’d say in effect, “Hey, I’m just a comedian.”)

 

Now, I think some of the attacks on Thunberg were gross, immature, and even cruel. But I also find the tactic of hiding behind children to make your arguments so that you can attack anyone who criticizes them for picking on children to be wildly cynical. Making a kid an ideological child soldier and then attacking grown-ups for shooting back is not exactly honorable or decent.

 

In 2019, The Washington Post ran an irate op-ed titled, “Politicians and pundits used to refrain from publicly attacking kids. Not anymore.” Another columnist for The Guardian began a tirade with: “A bunch of grown men have begun bullying a schoolgirl.” That “bullying,” the author explained, was “proof the right has run out of ideas.” I am happy to condemn some of the attacks on the kids, but I am also happy to condemn the tactic of putting kids in rhetorical harm’s way.

 

We should catch up on what Thunberg, now 23, is doing these days. This week she was in France lending her eminently assailable moral authority to the protesters in France setting fire to cars, purportedly in anger over substandard spending on schools. “The whole world is watching with awe,” she said approvingly of the protests, which included one teen taking a makeshift blow torch to a woman’s face. “This generation is one that has been growing up with a sense of hopelessness for the future, when we can see our future and our rights taken from us,” she said. “Of course people are going to fight back.”

 

One might wonder what school funding has to do with climate change. Also, back in 2019, Thunberg insisted that she didn’t want “hope,” she wanted “panic” over climate change, “the only thing that matters.” Now she thinks a lack of hope justifies pretty much everything she approves of. Pick a lane.

 

Of course, as many have noted, she thinks picking a lane is a false choice, because Thunberg has become seduced by the “omnicause,” or the “fatberg,” the idea that basically everything (progressives care about) is everything—a topic I wrote about almost exactly one year ago. She has spent the last few years chanting things like, “Crush Zionism.” Just last week, on October 7 (!), she attended a rally in Germany, amid chants of “There is only one solution: the Intifada Revolution.” Four years ago, she explained her new view that “[t]he climate and ecological emergency is, of course, only a symptom of a much larger sustainability crisis. A social crisis…. It’s all interconnected.”

 

I find all of this sad. Thunberg once explained in an interview that she considered her autism a “superpower” because it allowed her to focus on the climate emergency and it gave her “meaning in a world that sometimes seems meaningless.” Before she started on the climate warpath, she confessed, “I had no energy, no friends and I didn’t speak to anyone. I just sat alone at home, with an eating disorder.” That’s sad. That’s not an argument for throwing billions deeper into poverty by prematurely banning fossil fuels.

 

In a way, I think Thunberg is an extreme example of a crisis of meaning that exists for a lot of people, mostly but not exclusively the young. I think she’s admirably honest about her autism and I don’t think it should be mocked.

 

But I also don’t think one young woman’s hunger for meaning and her fight against personal loneliness helpfully illuminates hugely important issues. The plight of French schools has nothing to do with her that she is not projecting onto the issue. Addiction to protest culture is not a malady reserved for the neurodivergent.

 

I’ve just started a really interesting book by Alexandre Lefebvre titled Liberalism as a Way of Life. I can already tell there’s much I agree with and much I will probably disagree with. One of the interesting points he subtly makes is that the “postliberal” critique of liberalism has some merit (even if he profoundly disagrees with postliberalism’s conclusions). He quotes Patrick Deneen in Why Liberalism Failed. “Liberalism,” Deneen wrote, “is thus not merely, as is often portrayed, a narrowly political project of constitutional government and juridical defense of rights. Rather, it seeks to transform all of human life and the world.”

 

Lefebvre is very sympathetic to the postliberal argument that liberalism is more than just a political legal system; it’s a culture. I agree with that too. But I think I’m going to end up disagreeing with both of them about what that means.

 

The reason I bring this up here is to make a simple point. Liberal systems are a way—I would argue the best way—to find meaning, but I do not think they are very good at providing meaning. Deneen and I broadly agree on that. Lefebvre seems like he doesn’t (but I don’t want to be unfair and state that outright, though I have listened to some interviews with him that point to that conclusion).

 

One of the biggest points of freedom is being free to find a meaning that is meaningful for you. Part of the deal, therefore, is that, within very broad limits, you need to have a high level of tolerance for other people to choose sources of meaning you disagree with. I am sure Lefebvre agrees with me on that. Deneen’s position is different, because he thinks such freedom leads too many people to choose poorly and so we need to think of ways of providing meaning from above.

 

The problem with liberal culture isn’t the freedom, it’s the aspect of our culture that thinks cultural, economic, institutional, political, and even rational constraints on freedom are illegitimate or oppressive.

 

As with so many activism addicts, Thunberg buys into this way of thinking by indulging in all sorts of conspiracy theories about how corporate overlords are “killing the planet” on purpose. The omnicrisis is the result of powerful “Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression. … We need to dismantle them all.” Other meaning-thirsty young people on the left and right are even more adamant about all manner of conspiracies—orchestrated by billionaires, corporations, Zionists, Jews, the Deep State, etc.

 

Conspiracism is a species of narcissism, because it almost invariably places the conspiracy theorist in the position of prophet, truth teller, martyr, or hero. In other words, if the conspiracy is true, I have meaning. If it’s not true, I have to muddle through life trying to find a date, a job, a spouse, a boring traditional faith, etc. If I fail at these things, then I am a failure. Better to believe in an ornate cathedral of villainy behind the false facades of bourgeois life so I can blame my failures on it.

 

The whole idea of political liberalism is that the system we have is the system. But that isn’t exciting enough, it’s not Romantic enough, it doesn’t provide the kind of meaning conspiracists crave. It doesn’t fill the holes in their souls. Is it any wonder that the conspiracists of the left and right so often turn to illiberal silver bullets to slay the beast of liberalism? Is it surprising that the tip of the spear of the omnicause is now Palestinianism? In their fevered telling, flawed but liberal democratic Israel is a Nazi-like regime hiding behind a false mask of liberalism, while Hamas is a mere “resistance” organization of freedom fighters.

 

The whole idea behind a liberal culture is that people who disagree with you aren’t villains, liars, or accomplices in “colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression.” They’re just people who disagree with you and, when necessary, are free to tell you you’re wrong. Being disagreed with or told you’re wrong isn’t violence or oppression. But when your sense of meaning is bound up in explanatory theories for your unhappiness, it can feel that way. Our culture is struggling with the challenge of explaining that to people.

 

A first step toward fixing this problem is to teach more young people that feelings aren’t an argument.

What James Talarico Believes

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, October 16, 2026

 

I have come to believe that James Talarico, the Democrats’ Senate candidate in Texas, is generally sincere in his beliefs. I trust he won’t take that as a compliment.

 

Like most admirers of Donald Trump, like teachers who believe they are underpaid, like people who believe that the sun is a fiery chariot driven by Apollo, etc., Talarico sincerely believes things that are not true.

 

In contrast, I do not think that the new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, sincerely believes that the Democratic Party is secretly a cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles, though she has trafficked in that kind of conspiracy kookery. Like most people close to Trump, Zacharia is fundamentally dishonest: For example, her main job before this was pretending to be a lawyer, which she isn’t, even though she calls herself one. But I think she sincerely believes … something.

 

Let me explain what I mean.

 

C.S. Lewis argued that most sin is rooted in some good impulse gone bad, and, if one were in a charitable mood, one might observe that this applies to conspiratorial thinking, too. It is rooted in a moral impulse that has been perverted. There are very few genuine nihilists in the world—even the Marquis de Sade was a closet humanitarian—and ordinary people have a powerful need to live in a world that makes moral sense to them. The moral sensibility, particularly when expressed as the sense of “fairness,” easily overpowers such lesser powers as critical thinking and the appreciation for facts and the context of facts. That creates a kind of continuum of morally charged fiction, with conspiracy theories fitting in somewhere between traditional supernatural mythology (the world is the way it is because the gods make it so) and all of those just-so non-facts that “everybody knows.”

 

The notion that public school teachers are underpaid, for example, is an unquestioned “fact” for many Americans, something “everybody knows.” Earlier in the week, I interviewed a Democratic candidate for public office who is an elementary school teacher, and the inevitable observation about teachers’ supposedly low pay came up. We have long had pretty good economic indicators that consistently show that teachers are not underpaid at all, that their total compensation is equal to or a bit better than other workers with similar educational backgrounds, skill levels, time in the workforce, hours worked, etc. That is why you do not see a lot of teachers leaving the public schools for better-paying jobs in the private sector: In fact, census data shows that public school teachers who leave for private sector jobs typically earn a bit less, while private sector workers who take jobs in the public schools generally earn a bit more than they had been.

 

Good schools are an excellent thing to have, but our public school system is far from uniformly excellent, and even the best bits of it are part of a vast patronage network that exists as a kind of supplementary welfare state for people who tend to be Democratic voters. The myth that teachers are underpaid is a useful fiction for the people who benefit from that patronage system and, more importantly, for those who control it—but that does not mean, necessarily, that they do not sincerely believe that teachers are underpaid. Most do believe it, and they will fight for the lie: Show them the economic evidence and they will retreat into metaphysics and the vague morality of fairness. It is true because it must be true for their world to be morally legible.

 

James Talarico’s belief that U.S. politics is dominated by shadowy billionaires is a fiction, too, one that is closer to a conspiracy theory but also one that has something in common both with those “everybody knows” facts as well as with the loopier aspects of his daft progressive Presbyterianism. He believes it—he also believes that he wants to be a senator, and he probably has convinced himself that his reasons for wanting that are moral and patriotic if not downright heroic. That surely is a pleasurable thing to believe, and beliefs that provide pleasure are hard to shake, which is one reason conspiracy theories are so common and persistent.

 

Talarico is wrong, of course. The notion that our public policy would look radically different if not for the efforts of a handful of plutocrats does not stand up to rigorous analysis and also has some common-sense challenges, including the fact that billionaires do not share a single set of political views (there are right-wing billionaires, left-wing billionaires, centrist billionaires, apolitical billionaires, etc.) among themselves, the fact that the political views of the wealthy are not very different on average from those of the less wealthy, etc. As the economist Bryan Caplan observes, both high-income and low-income Americans generally support a higher minimum wage, to take one example, though support is stronger among the low-income. The views of the wealthy and the non-wealthy are generally similar when it comes to immigration, abortion, crime, etc. As Caplan reports, the preferences of the wealthy do override the preferences of the low-income in some areas where there is persistent income-correlated disagreement, the effect of which historically has been public policy that is moderately more liberal than the average American would like when it comes to issues such as free speech and gay rights. The average American, unfortunately, is a little bit of an authoritarian bigot. Americans did not elect Donald Trump twice because some nefarious rich guy put mind-control serum in their cornflakes—Americans like this stuff, and they reliably vote for it.  

 

Point out the reality of how money actually works in our politics and the conversation typically takes a markedly conspiratorial turn: “Well, yes, but what about this billionaire?” Take your issue—the deficit, fentanyl abuse, immigration, whatever—and somebody will have a “this billionaire” to blame for it. Sometimes, the two sides will settle on the same billionaire, or the same set of billionaires, as when both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders suggested that the Koch brothers were behind Washington’s lax immigration enforcement.

 

Talarico has hopped on the bandwagon opposing data centers, the supposed problems of which he blames on—surprise!—shadowy billionaires, “dark money” and all that sinister-sounding stuff. The thing is, we know a good deal about who owns data centers. The biggest operator of data centers in the world is Amazon Web Services, and while Jeff Bezos sometimes insists on acting like a sad ersatz Bond villain, there is no shadowy billionaire behind AWS.

 

Who is behind AWS? Teachers, among others.

 

Bezos owns a little more than 8 percent of Amazon, which is a publicly traded company whose shares are owned mainly by big institutional investors, many of which manage the generous retirement funds of those supposedly underpaid teachers. That’s true across the tech world: To take a prominent example, the California teachers’ retirement system is a substantial shareholder in Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta, among others. Through shareholder activism and ordinary business pressure, it exercises enormous influence over the operations of the firms in which it is invested and does so in a public way, for instance forcing Meta to adopt changes to its corporate governance. Ask Mark Zuckerberg how he enjoyed getting slapped around by the California teachers.

 

The most reliable antidote to the myth that billionaires control the government is watching one try. Do you really think that public policy in the United States today much reflects the preferences of Charles Koch or George Soros? (Or, somehow, both?) Or do you think that we have a gigantic debt problem because ordinary Americans childishly demand high levels of government spending and low taxes simultaneously?

 

If your view is that the world is the way it is because of bad people doing bad things behind closed doors—and that is what James Talarico says he believes—then your Weltanschauung has more in common with the imbecilic trash that despicable lowlifes such as Katie Zacharia traffic in than you might be comfortable admitting. What you have is simply a more respectable conspiracy theory.

 

To try to liberate ourselves from such things is part of the hard work of responsible citizenship. If the Almighty Nonbinary blesses his efforts and Talarico is successful in seeing off the contemptible Ken Paxton, then I hope he will take the opportunity—being useless, senators have a good deal of leisure time—to do the work.