C.A.A. on Short Breat

 The C.A.A. will be on a short break starting Monday. Regular posts will resume later in the coming week.

The True Toll of Conspiracy Theories

By Eva Terry

Sunday, December 14, 2025

 

It was a sunny September afternoon. I was standing in the crowd at Utah Valley University with my VoiceMemos app rolling when I watched Charlie Kirk’s body jerk backward. He closed his eyes and fell out of his chair.

 

It was the gunshot heard from every phone, viewed by millions almost immediately. I heard it with my own ears. I saw what it did with my own eyes. And I, along with everyone else, want justice for the Turning Point USA founder and slain father of two.

 

Tyler Robinson currently sits in Utah County Jail, facing six felony charges and a Class A misdemeanor. The 22-year-old turned himself in to authorities in Washington County the night after the shooting.

 

Though he has not pleaded one way or the other (and will likely not do so until May at the earliest), the case against him is strong, and empirical evidence points its iron finger at Tyler Robinson.

 

He had a motive, he was seen on camera, the gun’s trigger had his DNA, and he confessed to his parents before turning himself in to the FBI.

 

The bolt-action rifle used in the killing belonged to Robinson’s grandfather. His own family told authorities he had shifted politically to the left; during a family dinner shortly before Kirk was assassinated, Robinson brought up the UVU event and said the 31-year-old was “full of hate and spreading hate.”

 

Yet since Kirk’s death on September 10, there has been a steadily growing, insatiable thirst for conspiracy — and it is not without consequence.

 

The conspiracies germinated immediately following the shooting. In Robinson’s hometown, three days after Charlie Kirk was killed, I interviewed a mother of two young sons. In earnest, she told me it was not Robinson who’d killed Kirk; it was a TPUSA donor with grievances. In our brief conversation, she referenced a plane that took off from the Provo Airport around the time of the shooting and added that she’d seen the video of him being shot, and the bullet path defied logic. “We live in a world where there’s a lot of stuff going on with the government, and I think we just need to take our precautions and do our due diligence as citizens, not jump to conclusions as far as damning him and convicting [Robinson],” the woman told me.

 

About a week later, outside UVU’s student- and community-made vigil, I spoke with a man who told me he’d driven down from Washington State that morning to check out the grounds for himself. As an ex-military guy, he didn’t think Robinson was the culprit either. An inexperienced kid wouldn’t be capable of taking apart the gun that quickly, and his escape route didn’t make sense, he told me. I’m not sure what he discovered when I pointed him in the direction of the amphitheater, but I hope it was worth the twelve-hour drive.

 

Enter Candace Owens.

 

I have neither the word count nor the will to explain the accusations Owens makes across her 40-plus episodes on Charlie’s murder. It suffices to say that in her mind, TPUSA is guilty, his wife Erika is guilty, Jews are guilty, the FBI is guilty, Mormons are guilty, France is guilty, and Egypt is guilty. They’re all in on it; they’re lying to you, she says.

 

Guilty of what? We’re not sure. And guilty why? That, too, we don’t know.

 

The people bearing the deepest grief and trauma from Charlie’s murder — Erika and the staff at Turning Point — have been recast as villains in Owens’s universe. With an audience of millions, she declared, “Charlie Kirk was betrayed by the leadership of Turning Point USA and some of the very people who eulogized him on stage.” Candace Owens has flipped the truth on its head.

 

TPUSA asked Owens to join a special livestream event on Monday to address her claims against them, but she now says she will instead offer a rebuttal on her own show.

 

Though conspiracy theories are nothing new, they are newly mainstreamed. As journalist Andy Ngo recently reasoned, self-styled journalists like Candace Owens who peddle conspiracy theories as hoaxes and innuendo are not harmless. “News” with no guidelines, no accountability, and no guardrails reduces a situation to fiction.

 

This is not to suggest the traditional press is faultless. The original sin of journalism is that it profits from tragedy, mayhem, and dirty laundry. But in exchange, it offers the simple reward of knowing what’s going on. What happened? Who did it? Why?

 

But Owens and those pushing conspiracy theories around Charlie Kirk’s death are counterfeiting knowledge, jeopardizing the judicial process and skewing public perception.

 

When I asked a friend what he’d heard about Robinson recently, he said he’d seen that he was at Burger King when Kirk was shot. He added, “Didn’t Tyler plead not guilty in court or something?” Both claims are easy to verify as false.

 

The Manhattan Institute recently published a study that found a disturbing positive correlation between believing in conspiracy theories and justifying political violence. And it makes sense: If you believe your government conspires against its own citizens and shoots the people who defend it, there is fertile ground for disobeying its laws against killing, looting, and burning. The left has discredited the U.S. government for decades, saying it’s built on slavery, racism, sexism, and colonialism. And perhaps this indictment provides solid justification for Antifa to act the way it does.

 

When institutional distrust and paranoid ideologies breed, their offspring is ugly. It has been ugly for the left; it is starting to look ugly for the right.

 

What do conspiracy theories do on a human level? A few days ago, Erika Kirk re-entered the national spotlight, and in an interview with Fox News, she said the conspiracy theories about herself and TPUSA are a “mind virus.” “Just know that your words are very powerful,” she said. “We have more death threats on our team and our side than I have ever seen. We have kidnapping threats — you name it, we have it. And my poor team is exhausted.”

 

But conspiracy theories wound more than their targets. They take a toll on the believer; they exacerbate helplessness and make it difficult to forgive.

 

I was surprised at Owens’s reaction on her own podcast to Erika Kirk’s interview with Jesse Watters last month. With an earnestness reserved only for the widow of a murdered husband, Erika said she has never been angry with God for her new reality. “I know that He uses everything, even what the enemy meant for evil,” she said.

 

But Owens disagreed. In what she called a “hypercritical” self-assessment, she said she cannot forgive Robinson, “because I cannot forgive until I know what happened.” Then she resumed untangling her cold spaghetti slop of who conspired to kill Charlie.

 

But perfect knowledge is not a prerequisite for forgiveness, or it would be an impossible task. In fact, the Creator of the human experience proclaimed on the cross at Calvary, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

 

It’s natural to want the complicated universe to make sense. It’s what drives scientific discovery, honest journalism, and a thorough judicial system. But truth cannot be reliably discovered on a podcast-a-day schedule, especially when the shows are incentivized to shock and awe. Fortunately, while the wheels of justice turn slowly, they do turn — and despite the distractions from Owens and her fellow conspiracy theorists, justice will ultimately be served for Charlie Kirk.

What the Hell Is Wrong with a Country That Makes a Widow Defend Herself for Living?

By Kathryn Jean Lopez

Thursday, December 11, 2025

 

“I’ve had paper cuts that took longer to heal than Erika Kirk.”

 

You may have seen this comment on X in recent days. And yes, by the author of a book titled, If God Is Love, Don’t be a Jerk. I’ve also read that she’s “hawking her dead husband’s book.” And that’s far from the worst of what’s out there.

 

Erika is doing publicity for Charlie Kirk’s final book, on keeping the sabbath, because he can’t do it himself because he was murdered before its publication date.

 

You may have seen what she felt the need to say to Harris Faulkner on Fox News Channel Wednesday while talking about Stop, in the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life:

 

 

What the hell is wrong with us?

 

Okay, so you don’t like Erika Kirk’s rings.

 

(God bless her sense of humor. She did a mock “conspiracy rings” infomercial in the Fox interview with Faulkner.)

 

Or her makeup.

 

Or her clothes.

 

Or the fact she has been seen smiling on occasions in the last few months. Or, as now CEO of the organization her husband founded, she would dare to raise money as all eyes are on her as she’s in a new position of leadership at the darkest moment (please, God) of her life.

 

Or that she let the vice president of the United States — whose wife she has obviously spent some intimate time with at the most harrowing time of her life — hug her. (JD Vance and his wife, Usha, escorted Erika with her husband’s dead body from Utah home to Arizona.)

 

Am I missing anything? I know there are many opinions.

 

A seemingly sick woman whom Erika’s husband was kind to is obsessed with the idea that Erika, her friends, her colleagues, and the government somehow plotted her husband’s murder. And, as Erika pointed out, that same woman is making serious money every time she furthers the madness.

 

But you don’t have to click on Candace Owens to see a rot among us.

 

Who are any of us to have an opinion on this widow and how she grieves? (Or anyone, at any time.) Okay, you don’t look up to Heaven when you pray or think of your deceased loved ones, fine. I close my eyes when I pray. If you were watching me grieve my husband’s murder on television, I’m sure plenty would hate the way I was doing it, too. Every human is unique. And while there is nothing new under the sun, every grief is unique. People die every day. People are even murdered daily. But there was one Charlie Kirk, and his murder was widely seen. If you weren’t there, if you did not watch it, you may have accidentally wound up clicking on it. It was everywhere in that first day, during the first hours. That’s a trauma on everyone who was impacted by it, even in small ways.

 

Erika Kirk is not just grieving the extremely public murder of her husband for herself and their children, but for all of the young people who were invested in his life and hurt by his death. She clearly feels a sense of responsibility to not just his audience — his “fans” for lack of a better way to put it — but to the people who hate him and his legacy or what they think he and his legacy stand for.

 

Even if some of the out-of-context statements I’ve seen were masking a darker vision (which I haven’t been convinced of the more I’ve listened), you have to wonder if you’re ever murdered, will anyone who disagreed with you on something political decide that while that wouldn’t make your murder acceptable, it does come with the territory of having not held the most conventionally sophisticated views. And then there is the question of: Who among us wants to be remembered for the worst we’ve done, or even things we wish we said differently?

 

What I find remarkable, in hindsight, since his murder got me to sit down and watch more than I did when he was alive, is how many videos there are of Charlie Kirk being compassionate and considerate and discerning with his words. Especially when someone was in front of him and obviously hurting. I say obviously. But the human reflex and the American incentives are to go and eviscerate and win the argument. But those encounters on college campuses were not about winning debates for Charlie Kirk so much as opening doors to Christ. I confess, I did not fully appreciate that when he was alive. I regret that. And I pray we learn from the example — especially in hostile situations.

 

Erika Kirk gave a remarkable Christian witness and a gift to every human being alive when she forgave the man who murdered her husband. She could be bitter. She could be spewing hate. She could be thirsty for blood revenge. Instead, she remembers that it is precisely the kind of lost young man who killed her husband that her husband was trying to reach with reason and the grace of God.

 

 

Consider that the grace of God is amazing. And has nothing to do with the pantsuit that isn’t black or the jewelry you wouldn’t wear, or whatever nonsense thing people are criticizing Erika Kirk for today. Ask God for His mercy and His grace and consider Charlie Kirk on his best days is a good role model for young men, in a particular way.

 

God doesn’t let anything go to waste and if young men lives are impacted for good in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, that seems to be his widow’s prayer.

 

God bless her.

 

And consider Erika Kirk, too, is a gift for the young women of our day. A college-educated woman who chose young marriage and children in faith. And as the target of some of the most heinous hate, she gives God room to let love prevail even when she’s on Fox News or talking with the New York Times.

 

No small miracles.

What a Bodega Taught the Socialist

By Tim Chapman

Sunday, December 14, 2025

 

New York City’s socialist Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani walked into a Queens bodega recently and stumbled his way into Milton Friedman–style conservativism. This sentence would shock most people, but it happened. In one of his latest small-business campaign videos, the world’s newest socialist darling unintentionally promoted beating back burdensome government through deregulation.

 

Mugged by the reality of running a bodega, Mamdani now wants to cut fines and fees by 50 percent, expedite permitting, and cut the bureaucratic red tape that slows new businesses from opening their doors. Blissfully unaware, he lamented: “You shouldn’t have to fill out 24 forms and go through seven agencies to start a barbershop.” Then, he channeled his inner Elon Musk and announced a new “mom-and-pop czar” who will coordinate city agencies to improve turnaround times and help businesses navigate the cumbersome regulatory system. A little New York City DOGE?

 

This is a surprising rhetorical change for someone who campaigned on a full-scale socialist takeover of the world’s financial capital. Throughout the race, Mamdani argued that more government would make New York more affordable. His Election Night declaration that “there is no problem too large for government to solve” made it clear for all.

 

Yet only weeks before officially being sworn in — and confronted with the daunting realities of governing a complex economy — he unwittingly conceded that rather than solve “large problems,” big government’s numerous rules and regulations actually drive up costs and make life unaffordable.

 

Mamdani’s sudden embrace of deregulation, however, should not be mistaken for a broader change of heart. Nothing else in his agenda suggests one.

 

Mamdani is still the same man who campaigned, and won, on Communist Manifesto–inspired policies that would smother any remaining chance of economic revival in New York and, in turn, make the city even more expensive. Let’s not forget that he endorsed “seizing the means of production” and promised rent freezes and government-run grocery stores and child care and free public transport, then proposed race-based tax hikes on “richer and whiter neighborhoods” to pay for it all.

 

These proposals are the core of his platform. And they rest on the same flawed assumption that has guided socialist command economics for a century: that affordability is created when government consolidates more control. In fact, the opposite is true.

 

Mamdani’s bodega deregulation moment shines a light on his silver-spoon socialist ignorance. It is his proposed policies and that very ideology that create bureaucratic encumbrances and make everything more expensive. The same red tape that Mamdani now concedes is suffocating bodegas is driving up the price of almost everything New Yorkers buy, build, or try to open.

 

New York City has some of the most complex and lengthy permitting timelines of any major city, a barrier that continues to worsen its housing shortage and undermine business competitiveness. The city is also known for its “complex regulatory environment,” with more than 6,000 rules and roughly 250 business-related licenses and permits, each accompanied by its own compliance process. New York City is still missing 30,000 small-business jobs that never came back after Governor Andrew Cuomo’s disastrous mismanagement during the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, NYC’s overall cost of living is 130 percent above the national average.

 

Working families live in this reality every day through higher grocery bills, higher rent, and fewer neighborhood stores. Investors and entrepreneurs are jetting off to states such as Florida and Texas because taxes are too high, compliance is too expensive, and the regulatory environment is nearly impossible to navigate. Why bother?

 

The cost of living in NYC keeps climbing because the cost of doing business has been ratcheted up to the moon by a city government that inserts itself into nearly every step of the economic process.

 

New York is not expensive because the private sector is failing. It is expensive because the private sector is handcuffed to a New York City bureaucrat at every turn.

 

Small government has always offered the opposite. Fewer, consistently applied rules give businesses the ability to plan, invest, and open their doors without procedural bottlenecks. Lower taxes keep capital circulating in neighborhoods rather than siphoning it off into the government’s treasury. A restrained regulatory posture gives today’s entrepreneurs the freedom to solve the problems of today without the bureaucrats of the past holding them back. These are the basic economic realities that make goods affordable, support job creation, and keep cities livable.

 

Mamdani’s bodega epiphany points toward this reality, even if unintentionally. His interest in reducing fines, accelerating permitting, and simplifying basic processes is an acknowledgment that government restraint is not an ideological preference but a prerequisite for affordability.

 

If Mamdani extended this logic beyond bodegas, he might actually deliver the affordability he campaigned on. He has already taken one small step. The city would benefit from several more.

‘Rich’ Ain’t What It Used to Be

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, December 12, 2025

 

A couple weeks ago a huge fight broke out over the claim floated by Michael Green, a Wall Street guy, that the real poverty line for an American family of four is—or should be—$140,000 a year.

 

Green got clobbered from critics across the ideological spectrum. It was like America’s leading economic commentators were a 1990s Los Angeles street gang, and the only way to leave the gang was to be punched and kicked by each member on your way out.

 

Our own indispensable Scott Lincicome wrote a fantastic roundup of the pile-on. But he went further, which is why he titled his piece, “The $140,000 ‘Poverty Line’ Is Laughably Wrong, So Why Does It Feel Right?”

 

I think Scott is asking the right question, and I think all of his answers have merit. But I think he’s missing one, admittedly partial, explanation for why people feel poor and are pissed off about it.

 

Let’s revisit the concept of positional goods. Simply put, a positional good is a zero-sum good. If I have it, by definition you can’t. It gets more complicated than that, but that’s sort of the way to think about it for now. If you’re elected prom king, no one else is prom king.

 

There’s another kind of good that is similar to a positional good and can sometimes also be one. These are Veblen goods (the concept was popularized by economist Thorstein Veblen). Part of the attraction of having a fancy car is the “signal” it sends that you can afford a fancy car. That’s a Veblen good. (In the 1990s, a good friend of mine had a used Honda Civic. We called it the “stealth mobile” because it rendered its passengers invisible to girls.)

 

The Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR “Uhlenhaut Coupé” is the rarest car in the world, with only two ever made. Not long ago, one sold for $140 million. That purchase is not only a classic example of conspicuous consumption (a Veblen good), but it’s also a positional good. Since the other one wasn’t for sale, buying it meant that nobody else in the world could have it.

 

Veblen goods are always about wealth but can sometimes be about status, too. Positional goods—at least in the way I am using the term—are always about status, but can also be about wealth. If the richest kid in the senior class is a paste-eating loser who constantly smells like old socks, he’s not going to get elected prom king. But the funniest, handsomest, most athletic kid, or simply the most popular—regardless of how much money his parents have—is an odds-on favorite for the title.

 

Both goods involve scarcity to one extent or another.

 

Now, obviously, the two overlap and can be conflated to the point of being indistinguishable from afar. That’s because you can buy a lot of status if you have enough money, and you can make a lot of money if you have enough status. Membership in an elite country club is both a positional good and a Veblen good.

 

Supermodels and movie stars don’t get to skip the line at clubs because they’re rich. The bouncer lifts the red rope because they’re famous, and fame is definitely a form of elite status in today’s culture. I know some very rich people who’ve literally waited decades to become members of the hoighty-toighty and mysterious Bohemian Club, while many prominent writers and artists can get admitted almost immediately.

 

In the real world, rich people tend to have very high status simply because they’re rich. Other people only get rich because they have very high status. It’s sort of like one of my peeves about the term “oligarchy.” Contrary to Bernie Sanders et al., oligarchy doesn’t mean rule of the rich. It means rule of the few. But, for kind of obvious reasons, rulers in oligarchical states find it very easy to make themselves rich. Vladimir Putin may be one of the richest men in the world, but he didn’t get that way via his KGB pension, his presidential salary, or a side gig as a chinchilla rancher.

 

Metaphorically, and in some ways literally, there are two ways to fly first class. You can simply buy a full-fare ticket, Veblen style. Or you can have sufficient “status” with the airline that you get to sit up front on points.

 

 Okay, so I took way too long explaining that. But I think it’s useful and important. The economist Fred Hirsch coined the term positional good and wrote a book called The Social Limits to Growth, in which he argued that rising prosperity—not widening inequality or deepening poverty—was putting the American Dream out of reach. Economic growth makes nonpositional goods—food, basic housing, a serviceable car, common electronics—more available. A century ago a car was a luxury, and 150 years ago having indoor plumbing marked you as well-off. Now these are the basics. But economic growth makes positional goods more scarce, i.e. more expensive. As Hirsch puts it, if everyone at a parade stands on their tiptoes, the advantage of being on your tiptoes disappears.

 

So as society gets richer, more and more people get “taller.” This leads to what Hirsch called “congestion.” When only the rich had cars, there was very little traffic. When more than 100 million people have at least one car  (and there are nearly 300 million in total), you have lots of traffic. When only the well-off can enjoy a nice house in the suburbs, the suburbs aren’t crowded. And so on. When societies get rich, positional goods become more valuable because once you’ve checked the material boxes, you care more about status and less about putting food on the table.

 

So let’s briefly talk about status. For deep evolutionary reasons, humans crave status. We crave it as individuals and as groups. We want to be respected, personally and collectively. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this craving, and there’s even much that is noble and valuable to it. Professional ambition, the pursuit of greatness and glory, the desire to be remembered by history or to make a difference, stem from this desire. But this desire can be corrupted, channeled toward selfish ends. “Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold,” Aristotle tells us.

 

That humans—and especially the males (sorry ladies)—hunger to have status in the form of honor or fame is one of the most commented-on sociological and psychological observations in history: from Tacitus (“Even for the wise, the desire for glory is the last of all passions to be laid aside”) to Hume’s “love of fame” to Rousseau’s amour-propre, the form of self-love that can only be realized through the esteem of others, to virtually the whole of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, to the writings of a slew of sociologists starting with Max Weber.

 

Weber is particularly interesting because his observation about America reveals something important. “Very frequently the striving for power is also conditioned by the social ‘honor’ it entails,” Weber writes. But he goes on: “Not all power, however, entails social honor: The typical American Boss, as well as the typical big speculator, deliberately relinquishes social honor.”

 

I’m not sure that was true then, but I’m sure it’s not true now. I think the American Boss—he meant a successful businessman, not a Boss Tweed type—has a lot of social honor, as do speculators. But the point Weber reveals is that what confers honor or prestige or status in one era or culture may not in another. Well into the 19^th century in Europe and to a lesser extent America, actresses were seen as profoundly low class and essentially glorified prostitutes. Today, they are people to be celebrated, i.e. celebrities.

 

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the left has spent the last decade or two complaining about “privilege.” I’m not a big fan of identity politics, but I think it’s irrefutable that being a minority gives one an extra insight and sensitivity to social privileges and status rankings that are largely invisible to the majority culture. Christians say harmless things that catch the ears of Jews, Muslims, and atheists. The same happens with whites and nonwhites, men and women, rich people and poor people. The rich kid who talks about just getting a new pair of sneakers may not intend to offend his poorer friend, but the poor friend is offended all the same. This is the stuff of life.

 

 I could go on (and on). I think there’s much to say about this subject. But I should get to this $140,000 poverty line thing. Again, I agree with the critics. It’s nonsense.

 

But.

 

We are a very rich country, with an enormous number of elites. Indeed, in the economic sense, we have a massive elite surplus compared to other countries. There are just shy of 1,000 billionaires in America, just more than 10,000 centimillionaires, and 24 million millionaires. By one estimate, America created 1,000 new millionaires every single day in 2024 alone. And they tend to cluster in certain regions.

 

With so many rich people, there’s a lot of congestion.

 

More importantly, we live in a culture in which nearly every kid is told they are special, exceptional even. A lot of them believe it. But they hunger for evidence of their specialness, particularly evidence that is recognized by others. And that evidence can be hard to come by.

 

An enormous amount of our politics has less to do with issues, including economics, than it does about status and status anxiety. Economic growth increases happiness to a point, and then sort of stalls out (this is called the “Easterlin paradox”). In the 2016 election, according to some studies, “status threat” played a bigger role than economic hardship in driving the results. The boats in the Trump boat parades in 2020 were not captained by sans culottes. The loudest and most passionate voices fighting both for DEI and against it are driven by fears of losing status relative to other groups. Rob Henderson’s work on “luxury beliefs” is a perfect illustration of the point. Being able to speak fluent intersectionality is simultaneously a Veblen good and a positional good. Like speaking French in the old courts of Europe, it is—or at least was—an extended linguistic shibboleth of your status. I thought it was embarrassing that so many right-wingers whined so much about Hillary Clinton calling them “deplorables.” But, in their partial defense, they were venting legitimate frustration about the scorn certain elites had for people like them.

 

Add in the fact that we’ve taught two generations of Americans that being a victim confers status, it should not surprise anyone that so much of our politics is a thinly veiled argument over who gets to claim cultural victim status. That’s what a lot of right-wing identity politics is now: an attempt to “elevate” white men and Christians as “the real victims.”

 

The rise in the attention economy is a profound real-world experiment about the most coveted positional good of our age: the attention of others. It is valuable because attention spans are finite. It is also valuable because in a very rich country, fame is becoming more desirable than wealth. Few people want to be very poor but famous. But many people, having attained sufficient wealth, would rather be famous than merely more wealthy, which is why so many rich people run for office and why some famous people will debase themselves just to stay famous.

 

The passion the left brings to the issue of economic inequality isn’t about economics so much as it is about resentment and envy. But couching such resentment in the language of economics is socially acceptable. So it is framed in economic terms.

 

I’m not crying for billionaires. There will never be a society where people don’t envy the superrich. I just don’t support bad economic policies aimed at scapegoating or eliminating them. (Zohran Mamdani is just one of a long line of lefties who think we shouldn’t have billionaires.)

 

The real danger in a democracy isn’t about envy of the very rich. The real danger is envy of your fellow citizens when they have slightly more status than you. Economic prosperity and political equality are breeding grounds for such envy. And this has always been the case. Alexis De Tocqueville noted this in Democracy in America:

 

It cannot be denied that democratic institutions strongly tend to promote the feeling of envy in the human heart; not so much because they afford to everyone the means of rising to the same level with others as because those means perpetually disappoint the persons who employ them. Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy. This complete equality eludes the grasp of the people at the very moment when they think they have grasped it, and “flies,” as Pascal says, “with an eternal flight”; the people are excited in the pursuit of an advantage, which is more precious because it is not sufficiently remote to be unknown or sufficiently near to be enjoyed. The lower orders are agitated by the chance of success, they are irritated by its uncertainty; and they pass from the enthusiasm of pursuit to the exhaustion of ill success, and lastly to the acrimony of disappointment. Whatever transcends their own limitations appears to be an obstacle to their desires, and there is no superiority, however legitimate it may be, which is not irksome in their sight.

 

Households that make $140,000 a year are not “poor.” But it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that they feel poor. And in some cities, as a cultural and psychological matter, I think they are poor in significant ways. But the reason—or one of the reasons—Green’s claim went viral is that an enormous number of people feel poor in terms of status and express that feeling in the form of economic resentment.

 

There are many economic policies that would help—fixing the congestion-fueled problems of housing, is an obvious one. But I think the more important fixes are cultural. We need more avenues for people to feel honored and respected other than fame and money. In short, we need a culture that creates opportunities for “earned success” at the ground level. A society that heaps praise and honor on being a good parent, teacher, nurse, friend, priest, etc., creates honeycombs of success and status. A culture that heaps praise and honor on people like Andrew Tate creates young men who are neither praiseworthy nor honorable. You can tell me that Tate is not being praised or honored by decent people, and with the exception of confused young men I’d agree with you.

 

But the tragic fact is that our culture today confuses fame for honor and attention for praise. Integrity is seen by too many as a waste of time at best, weakness at worst, while “success” is defined as gratifying your desires on your own terms. Envy, which is one of the deadliest of sins, is just another feeling, and feelings are granted an authority independent from, and oblivious to, the very concept of sin. 

Hanukkah Massacre in Australia Leaves More Jews Dead

By Philip Klein

Sunday, December 14, 2025

 

Terrorists opened fire on over a thousand Jews marking the opening night of Hanukkah on Australia’s Bondi Beach in Sydney, killing at least eleven people.

 

Chabad of Bondi had organized a event called “Chanukah by the Sea” that had been a tradition for decades. It had been going on for a little over an hour when two gunmen opened fire, causing the crowd to scatter. According to the local Chabad, there was a long police response time, so long that the terrorists had sufficient time to reload and keep shooting. Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who was assistant rabbi at the Chabad, was among those killed.

 

There were two gunman, including one who was heroically discharged by a bystander who was shown in a video sneaking up from behind him, jumping on his back, and ripping a long gun out of his hands.

 

One suspect was eventually killed by police, and another arrested.

 

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared the event an act of terrorism and acknowledged it was “a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first night of Hanukkah.”

 

Like many Jewish communities in the world, Australia has been under constant threat, with synagogues being burnt and Jewish homes being vandalized. The event itself was an act of defiance by Australian Jews, a demonstration that they would not let fear deter them from practicing their faith, which was a message of Rabbi Schlanger, who was among those killed.

It’s the Incentives, Stupid

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, December 11, 2025

 

In August 2011, near the steps of the Wisconsin Capitol, congressional candidate Kelda Roys stood atop a flatbed truck and addressed the attendees at a gay pride parade. Roys, now a state senator and candidate for Wisconsin governor, pressed the need for marriage equality and told the onlookers that because of Wisconsin’s ban on same-sex weddings, she herself had to flee to the gay-marriage-friendly state of Iowa to marry her “partner.”

 

Roys never mentioned that her “partner” was, in fact, a man, whom she had married in 2010. But she was running for Congress against Mark Pocan, an openly gay man, who succeeded Tammy Baldwin, an openly gay woman. In the heavily progressive Madison-area congressional district, being gay wasn’t something to hide; it was a résumé-builder. And Roys clearly found her résumé lacking.

 

“She was clearly trying to represent herself as a member of the LGBT community,” Katie Belanger, executive director of Fair Wisconsin, the state’s most visible LGBT rights organization, told me at the time. “That’s what happens when you start making a political calculation in order to help yourself instead of working for the common good,” said Belanger.

 

But Roys took this ill-conceived gamble because she had an incentive to do so. When benefits are handed down based on immutable characteristics, like sexual orientation, you’re going to find more people claiming to have those characteristics.

 

Consider reporter Rose Horowitch’s stunning story at The Atlantic last week, in which she noted the high number of students at prestigious universities today who seek to be considered “disabled” so they can obtain “accommodations” in the classroom. Horowitch notes that 20 percent of the students at both Brown and Harvard are deemed disabled.

 

Clearly, this cohort of kids and their parents have figured out how to game the system to receive advantages such as flexible deadlines for turning in work, missing classes without penalty, and being given extra time to take exams. Claim you have some sort of learning disability, and the school will typically grant you an exception rather than fight your parents over the special treatment. (For one kid at a California school, that accommodation meant bringing the student’s mother to class.)

 

Some argue that the increase in mental-health-related diagnoses — ADHD, anxiety, depression — is a step forward, as health experts are more accurately diagnosing problems that previous generations had to struggle with on their own. If this were the case, though, we would expect to see similar disability rates among students at two-year colleges. Yet, as Horowitch notes, only 3 to 4 percent of students at two-year colleges receive accommodations, and over half of four-year students magically develop these learning disabilities after they arrive at school. (In reality, students who attend two-year schools are much more likely to have learning disabilities, which keeps many of them from getting the grades necessary to attend a four-year college.)

 

Few people would disagree that students with legitimate disabilities deserve special accommodations to complete their school work. But again, the stigma of being labeled “disabled” pales against the desire to have a special advantage in the classroom.

 

Once again, the incentive is backward.

 

As Milton Friedman famously said, the greatest mistake we can make is to judge policies and programs “by their intentions rather than their results.” And yet, more often than not, our lawmakers celebrate inputs and ignore potential outputs. They imagine citizens not as dynamic individuals who will change their behavior in response to changes in the law but as cardboard cutouts who will dutifully act without considering their own self-interest.

 

And those self-interests are determined by the incentives given to people to pursue them. When university professors know they can move up more quickly in their profession by claiming to be members of minority groups, you get Elizabeth Warren pitching her family recipe for “pow wow chow.” When progressives promote homeownership by supercharging Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, people with poor credit are incentivized to buy homes that are well beyond their means, collapsing the economy. When “wealth taxes” are implemented, wealthy (and thus more mobile) taxpayers simply move their assets to lower-taxed areas.

 

“Unintended” consequences are only unintended for lawmakers with a lack of imagination.

 

Yet it seems to shock everyone when citizens react to a new government program in a way that is entirely predictable. Americans recently learned that a band of Minnesota-based Somali immigrants had raided a government fund meant to feed hungry children during the Covid-19 pandemic. These criminal pockets made off with more than a billion dollars to pay for luxurious homes and travel, yet it went on for years under the blind eye of Governor Tim Walz.

 

The Somali racket is a case of double incentives at work; when governments set up giant programs with little oversight, they effectively set up a bank with a “Rob Us, No Weapons Needed” sign out front. When the government distributes money to feed students, it is remarkable how many fictitious hungry students suddenly appear.

 

There were incentives at work on the part of Minnesota state investigators as well. Much of the fraud took place after the death of Minneapolis man George Floyd at the hands of police, so state agents were afraid to target the predominantly black Somali community, lest they receive blowback for racial insensitivity.

 

So when criminals are incentivized to steal, and law enforcement is incentivized to look the other way, taxpayers are left to watch a billion dollars of their money walk out the door.

 

Nobody wants to think their personal behavior can be reduced to a menu of incentives, but acting in our own self-interest is how we survive. Of course, people often act outside of their own interests, but that is because feeling good about helping others or giving to charity is an incentive in itself.

 

Whether it is society granting benefits to people with certain characteristics or governments granting benefits to preferred groups, it would help to game things out. Subsidizing an activity only creates more of it, just as making it more expensive guarantees less of it.

 

Policymakers can give as many speeches as they want about fairness and justice. Still, until they start crafting laws that account for human nature rather than ignore it, we’ll keep getting more of exactly what we’re paying for. And if history is any guide, the only incentive Washington ever seems to understand is the one that involves a camera pointed at them — which is why, when it comes to unintended consequences, Congress remains our most reliable repeat customer. After all, if the incentives weren’t broken, they’d have fixed them already . . . and then what would they campaign on?

So Jasmine Crockett Is Republicans’ Fault Now?

By Becket Adams

Sunday, December 14, 2025

 

How potentially disastrous is loudmouth Democratic Representative Jasmine Crockett’s campaign for U.S. Senate?

 

Disastrous enough that Republicans are already being blamed for tricking her into running.

 

Crockett announced her candidacy last week in a brief video, in which she miraculously accomplished the one thing most people thought her incapable of: she otherwise kept her mouth shut. Thus far, her entire campaign pitch is that she is not Donald Trump. That’s it. There’s nothing more to it. Historically, this approach has only succeeded when combined with a promise of normalcy (see: Clinton 2016 vs. Biden 2020). But Crockett, a lawmaker whose first real brush with internet fame came when she shamed fellow idiot Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “bleach-blonde bad-built butch body,” is anything but normal. She is that weird brand of politician who draws disproportionate media attention despite lacking any real, widespread appeal.

 

If Crockett wins the Texas Democratic primary, it’s not a question of whether she will lose on Election Day, but by how much.

 

This brings us to a fascinating mini-news cycle where Republicans are now accused of sabotaging Democrats — by tricking a generally unelectable politician into running for the U.S. Senate.

 

The cycle began with an anonymously sourced report in NOTUS titled, “An ‘AstroTurf Recruitment Process’: National Republicans Propped Up Jasmine Crockett to Push Her Into a Senate Run.” The subhead reads, “The NRSC started including Crockett’s name in polling and conducted ‘a sustained effort’ to get Crockett, the party’s preferred candidate to run against, into the race.”

 

The report cites an anonymous GOP source who claims the National Republican Senatorial Committee quietly worked behind the scenes to create polling that included Crockett in hypothetical matchups. When polling showed her performing well, the NRSC promoted that polling.

 

From this, we get allegations of “astroturfing” as well as copycat coverage, including from The Independent, which published a story titled, “GOP goaded Jasmine Crockett into running for senate by promoting favorable polls.” Its subhead adds, “Crockett was reportedly the GOP’s preferred opponent in the 2026 Senate elections in Texas, but had not been considered as a potential contender in the race by her own party.”

 

Then, there’s the New Republic, which went with this headline: “How GOP Secretly Helped Convince Jasmine Crockett to Run for Senate,” with the subhead, “The National Republican Senatorial Committee pushed polls in Crockett’s favor.”

 

And so on and so on.

 

Look, maybe you can credit Republicans with planting the seed in Crockett’s mind — they obviously would prefer her as the Democrats’ nominee — but you can’t credit them with tricking her into running. She’s a grown adult with her own agency. Anyone who has observed her time in the public eye knows she has an ego the size of Mount Rushmore and needs little convincing to run for higher office. It’s not the GOP’s fault she’s even more delusional than her dimwit colleagues, Representatives Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, like Crockett, do a decent job of making headlines and keeping the faithful engaged, but have no real ability to get elected outside their safe D or R districts.

 

Crockett is like every loudmouth who has come before her in Congress, big on posturing and insults but lacking a clearly defined platform with broad appeal. Crockett is like Ocasio-Cortez but with less media savvy — and this is to say nothing of Crockett’s off-putting personality and the many things she has said that obviously will not fly with the broader Texas electorate. The location is worth emphasizing: AOC performs her shtick in New York; Crockett is doing it in Texas.

 

Crockett’s campaign is nobody’s fault but her own, and it might prevent Democrats once again from claiming the Senate seat they’ve long sought.

 

By itself, it’s funny that Republicans are credited with Crockett’s campaign. It’s even more amusing when you realize the condescending attitude this story reveals — an attitude that appears to have gone unnoticed by the news outlets reporting it. Do these people not realize how this narrative suggests Crockett cannot make her own decisions? It’s not enough to say she made a poor and self-centered choice; they have to go that extra step and imply she’s dumb enough to launch a U.S. Senate campaign based on a sly Republican trick.

 

Not even Crockett’s harshest critics think so little of her as to suggest she’d fall for a watercooler whisper campaign.

 

Then again, it’s not the first time Democrats were patronizing toward a black candidate. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Green Energy’s Problems Go Beyond Messaging

By Andrew Follett

Friday, December 05, 2025

 

Environmentalists say they’re losing the fight on global warming due to disinformation from well-funded conservatives, placing the blame for the declining influence of environmentalism on rhetoric, not policy. But blaming messaging difficulties and “conservative misinformation” for the movement’s retreat is exactly backward.

 

The New York Times recently told readers that declining worldwide interest in global warming is due to an alleged shadowy conspiracy by “the oil, gas and coal industries [which] continue to downplay the scientific consensus that the burning of fossil fuels is dangerously heating the planet.” The Gray Lady then goes on to complain that Russia, Saudi Arabia, and, of course, President Donald Trump “promote disinformation on social media platforms” that “have long been dismissed as conspiracy theories” and blames this for the failure of a recent global warming summit in Brazil.

 

Yet about the only thing the summit could agree on was hating “climate deniers,” with Brazil’s leftist (and once convicted criminal) President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva opening the talks by denouncing obstructionists who “reject scientific evidence and attack institutions,” saying “[t]hey manipulate algorithms, sow hatred, and spread fear” with a disinformation and propaganda. Ultimately, the summit agreed on a separate “Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change,” calling on governments to address the “growing impact of disinformation, misinformation, denialism, [and] deliberate attacks on environmental journalists, defenders, scientists, researchers, and other public voices.”

 

In other words, all the world’s environmentalist-minded politicians could do was make a statement encouraging removing their political opposition from social media . . . and many of the environmentalists among American academics and politicians agreed with them.

 

“In fact, there’s been a quite systematic campaign that’s been sophisticated and extremely well-funded,” Timmons Roberts, executive director of the Climate Social Science Network and a researcher at Brown University, told the New York Times. “They have succeeded at undermining climate action globally.”

 

At least one elected representative agreed.

 

“Now, I think, there is a better understanding of the true nature of the fossil fuel disinformation and corruption campaign,” Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said while attending the conference, blaming its meager results on “interference” by a tiny group of bloggers. “We are where we are because we were completely ineffectual in fending off a decades-long disinformation bombardment.”

 

The irony is that environmentalists spend orders of magnitude more on what Whitehouse calls “disinformation and corruption” than their opposition.

 

In terms of expenses, the largest U.S. anti-climate alarmism think tanks are the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute (where I once interned), which spent $8.6 million in 2024, and the Heartland Institute, which spent $3.7 million, according to tax filings. Note that only a fraction of that money is spent on energy or environmental issues; both institutions focus on several additional areas of public policy.

 

In contrast, environmental groups are spectacularly well-funded. Last year, the Sierra Club spent $173 million, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) spent $220 million, and Earthjustice spent $152 million, funding which was almost exclusively dedicated to energy or environmental issues. (A portion of this money represents ill-gotten gains: As I previously reported, a member of the Sierra Club’s four-person board recently pled guilty to stealing $248 million, but the difference is still stunning.)

 

Each of these environmental groups spends well over ten times what they label their “climate skeptic” opposition does, and the spread of the environmentalists’ gospel is also backed by an absurd amount of taxpayer money.

 

Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act alone dedicated more than $1 trillion to grants, loans, and tax credits for wind, solar, and other green energy boondoggles between 2022 and 2031, according to estimates by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. And that’s in addition to the already existing tens of billions in previous annual spending.

 

The radical environmental movement’s opponents don’t have big-budget Hollywood stars, movies constantly promoting their agenda, or infamously inaccurate documentaries hosted by former U.S. vice presidents. Instead, this opposition is made up almost entirely of policy wonks on a comparatively shoestring budget, mostly conversing on a handful of blogs.

 

Seems like the well-funded messaging campaign is coming from an entirely different direction, as environmentalists spend orders of magnitude more on propaganda than the “climate skeptics” they blame for their defeats, have lucrative government support, and are vastly better connected.

 

If they’re losing an information war, perhaps that is because they’ve been selling a poor product, rather than just engaging in poor marketing as the Times suggests. The idea that a movement that is the darling of both Hollywood and Madison Avenue is bad at marketing compared to some think-tank wonks is laughable. Despite their immense resources, environmentalists blame their political opposition for their own waning ideological influence because the environmental movement has failed to achieve its goals.

 

The International Energy Agency reports that conventional oil, gas, coal, and other “fossil fuels” still accounted for 82 percent of global energy consumption in 2023, a figure that has remained stubbornly high despite decades of climate policy efforts from these groups and trillions in taxpayer support. The wind and solar power leftists favor generated less than 3 percent of that, as such resources simply haven’t scaled the way environmentalists predicted they would.

 

Environmentalists and their media allies have portrayed wind and solar power as the technologies of tomorrow for over five decades now. The plot of the 1974 James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun revolves around a fictional economical form of solar power, which is portrayed as cutting-edge and capable of replacing conventional energy. The problem is that the movie came out more than 50 years ago. Disinformation or bad messaging didn’t cause the last five decades of failure of solar power to meet its environmental evangelists’ expectations; physics did.

 

I’ve written before about environmentalists’ endless predictions of global warming apocalypses that never occurred, but suffice it to say that according to them, we’ve had mere years to save the planet for . . . the last five decades.

 

Climate radicals’ opposition didn’t force Dr. Noel Brown, senior environmental scientist who represented the United Nations Environment Programme at a number of major conferences, to tell the Associated Press in 1989 that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels,” that “[s]hifting climate patterns would bring back 1930s Dust Bowl conditions to Canadian and U.S. wheatlands,” or that mass famine would occur in Africa if extreme government action was not taken by the year 2000. Obviously, none of those events came to pass.

 

But 25 years after his own deadline passed, Brown still serves on the boards of multiple environmental groups, one of which has an annual budget of $95.3 million. Clearly, Brown stays close to the green in more ways than one, despite his long record of failed predictions.

 

Like many left-wing movements, environmentalism struggles with introspection and course-correction, scapegoating political opposition for its failures. But given how poll after poll shows world public opinion cooling on global warming, the movement should consider that its policies, not its paltry opposition, might be the root of its problems.

The Pence Dividend

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, December 12, 2025

 

Here’s something you don’t hear much in America 2025, especially in politics and especially especially from the starboard side: “I’m going to do what’s right and let the chips fall where they may.”

 

The quote comes from Indiana state Sen. Dan Dernulc, fresh off a bomb threat he received at home on Wednesday evening. Dernulc was one of many Republicans in the legislature’s upper chamber skeptical of President Trump’s demand that Indiana redraw its House map before the midterms to gerrymander Democrats out of safe seats. Traditionally, redistricting happens at the start of each decade; Donald Trump wants it to happen now because he enjoys governing quasi-autocratically, with no oversight from the quisling GOP majority in Congress, and would like to continue doing so over the final two years of his term.

 

So he’s spent the last few months lobbying Republican lawmakers in Indiana, publicly and privately, to help him out. Two of the state’s nine House seats belong to Democrats at the moment, but a bit of creative line-drawing could easily turn all nine red. And those two extra seats might be the difference between a House controlled by Trump’s left-wing antagonists and one controlled by his right-wing turd polishers.

 

Indiana’s lower chamber dutifully approved a new map last week, and Gov. Mike Braun signaled he would sign it. All that was needed was passage by the reluctant state Senate. Last Friday, in a Truth Social post, the president identified eight hesitant Republican senators by name—including Dernulc—and advised his fans that the eight “need encouragement to make the right decision.” The brownshirt faction of his base understood what that meant and undertook to encourage them. Boy, did they ever.

 

The Senate voted Thursday and … rejected the new map, 31-19. It was one of the most shocking legislative outcomes of the Trump era, with more than half of the 40 Republicans in the chamber opposing the president. Given the moral premium that postliberals place on ruthlessness in pursuit of power, the Senate majority’s refusal to be ruthless felt less like an act of political independence than a form of religious apostasy.

 

How do we explain it?

 

“What happened is simple,” we might say. “Trump has become a lame duck, and Hoosiers reacted accordingly.” Well, yes, the president is more of a lame duck than he was a few months ago: Republicans have gotten drubbed in one off-year election after another lately, and his job approval on the economy is in the toilet. But he still has enough juice on the right to have scared a populist as beloved as Marjorie Taylor Greene into retirement by declaring his intent to find a primary challenger to her. Every Republican in Indiana who voted against the new map did so knowing they’d have considerably less job security as a result. The lame duck ain’t that lame.

 

“Maybe Indiana Republicans feared their gerrymander would become a ‘dummymander,’” you might speculate. “Dummymander” alludes to the fact that, by redrawing House maps to dilute the Democratic vote in blue districts, Republicans would also necessarily be diluting the GOP vote in red ones. If a state has, say, five R+10 seats and a single D+10 seat and it carves up the latter by redrawing liberal voters there into the five Republican districts, the new map might end up with five R+6 seats and a single R+1 one. In a midterm election in which the electorate shifted to the left by 7 points, Democrats would win only one seat under the old map—but all six seats under the new dummymandered one.

 

In theory, Dernulc and his colleagues recognized that possibility, worried the blue wave that appears inbound might be truly gargantuan, and resolved to protect the GOP’s House advantage in Indiana from our dummy president. But no, it seems that’s unlikely: Lakshya Jain, the head of political data at The Argument, estimates that Democrats would have won only one seat in Indiana under the new map even in a best-case scenario for the party next fall.

 

There’s no way to explain what happened in the state Senate yesterday in terms of the usual selfish or nihilistic motives that have driven cynical right-wing lawmakers during the Trump era, I think. The solution to this mystery begins with the sighting of a political unicorn—honest-to-God principled conservative leadership on the American right.

 

A good example.

 

Despite the paranoia of populist influencers, there’s no evidence that MAGA black sheep Mike Pence was involved in tanking the redistricting push. It was another former Indiana governor, Mitch Daniels, who ended up fielding calls from state senators and urging them to vote no.

 

But I don’t blame Trumpists for suspecting Pence’s influence. For one thing, he, Daniels, and the Republican majority leader of the state Senate, Rodric Bray, are politically simpatico. “I’m for small government, personal accountability, and liberty, and I work toward that every day,” Bray told Politico last month. When asked about his hesitancy to redistrict on an irregular timetable, in the middle of the decade, he replied that he wanted his state’s residents “to have trust in the institution” of the Senate.

 

He’s a Reaganite refugee in a dystopian autocratic party. Like Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence.

 

More than that, I find it impossible to believe that Pence’s example on January 6 didn’t affect the calculations of Bray and his caucus to some degree. “Imagine how different recent history would look if elected Republicans in D.C. had taken this very simple approach,” our own Steve Hayes said of Dernulc’s point about doing the right thing and letting the chips fall where they may. But we don’t need to imagine it: That was Pence’s ethos precisely when he refused to carry out Trump’s coup plot.

 

Some Republicans who voted against redistricting yesterday surely know the former VP personally from his time as governor. Those who don’t will nonetheless know him as the most prominent politician to come out of Indiana since Benjamin Harrison. (No offense, Dan Quayle.) Five years ago, they watched him pass a test of civic principle similar to the one they’ve been taking but with the difficulty dialed up by an order of magnitude—Pence was Trump’s right-hand man, the presidency itself was on the line, and responsibility for the outcome fell squarely on him instead of being spread among a caucus of 40.

 

He did the right thing anyway, and my guess is that many traditional Republicans in Indiana’s political circles admire him for it and resent those who don’t. So when the same creep who allegedly thought Pence deserved to be hanged came banging on their door, making demands about a new House map, what were conservatives who are uncomfortable with ruthless mid-decade redistricting supposed to do? Cower, despite their friend Mike Pence having faced everything they’ve faced and then some? Or follow his example?

 

The simple explanation for yesterday’s result is that it was a product of strong, principled leadership, a species gone almost entirely extinct among Republicans since 2015. By Bray, first and foremost, in refusing to strong-arm his caucus into approving the new map after being demagogued by the president; by Daniels, in lobbying against redistricting despite knowing that doing so will make him a target of White House “retribution”; and by Pence, in showing Hoosier lawmakers on January 6 that “no” is always an option when the illiberal right demands some appalling new power grab that will make American democracy more embittered and dysfunctional than it already is.

 

Leadership matters. And yet, that doesn’t explain everything.

 

“Indiana so decisively failing to pass a 9-0 gerrymander despite full pressure from Trump is something that was genuinely unthinkable even six months ago,” Jain alleged yesterday. It’s hard to disagree. If the president had leaned on Indiana lawmakers earlier this year to pass a new map, back when he was steamrolling every opponent in sight, I doubt that the courage Pence showed at the Capitol would have been as contagious as it was in Thursday’s vote. Certainly, there’s no way a majority of Senate Republicans would have voted to reject the new map.

 

Something has changed between then and now, but it’s not Trump’s growing lame-duck status or his polling on the economy. I think it’s the two S’s—statism and scumbaggery.

 

Statism.

 

The Indiana redistricting vote strikes me as a sort of political gag reflex. The president’s first year back in office has been so much more civically and ideologically disgusting than even I expected that conservatives with a modicum of self-respect are beginning to vomit it up.

 

That’s why the usual thunderstorm of primary threats against anti-redistricting lawmakers didn’t work this time. Why would any Reaganite care at this point about being drummed out of a position of authority in this garbage party, particularly a position as minor and unglamorous as state legislator? If you’re a Republican in the Pence or Daniels mold who believes in “small government, personal accountability, and liberty,” as Bray put it, all you have to look forward to as a GOP official in 2025 is watching your leader betray every value you cherish and potentially trying to get you killed if you don’t help him do it.

 

The White House campaign to pressure Indiana’s legislators is the problem in microcosm, with Trump once again imperiously imposing his will on a part of society that the president has no business meddling with. “It’s time to say no to pressure from Washington, D.C.,” GOP state Sen. Spencer Deery complained during Thursday’s floor debate. “It’s time to say no to outsiders who are trying to run our state.” Being a Republican nowadays means having to look the other way when Trump seizes control of trade, partly nationalizes corporations, engineers bailouts for favored constituencies hurt by his moronic agenda, and abuses antitrust law to try to remake the media in his image. His tariffs have delivered the biggest tax increase as a percentage of GDP in more than 30 years, and his spending has produced the fastest accumulation of $1 trillion in new debt outside of the pandemic.

 

Big government has rarely been so big. Now Trump wants red-state Republicans to ditch federalism and take dictation from him on redistricting, too.

 

On Thursday, as the state Senate prepared to vote, the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation shocked political media when it claimed that “President Trump has made it clear to Indiana leaders: If the Indiana Senate fails to pass the map, all federal funding will be stripped from the state. Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame.” Despite what MAGA shoeshiners will tell you, the White House has no constitutional power to withhold funding that Congress has approved and no civic right to deprive a state of public services because it declined to put a thumb on the electoral scale for the president’s party—but never mind that. Did Trump really make this threat to Hoosier lawmakers or was Heritage full of hot air?

 

It appears that he did. Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith seemed to confirm it last night, tweeting that “the Indiana Senate made it clear to the Trump Admin today that they do not want to be partners with the WH. The WH made it clear to them that they’d oblige.” As far back as mid-November, Politico reported that Gov. Mike Braun had begun “insinuating that Indiana could lose out on federal funding for key projects if the Senate doesn’t deliver a gerrymander.” That doesn’t sound to me like a scenario Braun came up with on his own; it sounds like one that had been communicated to him and which he was relaying.

 

The more statist and domineering the White House gets, the more reluctant to cooperate with it we should expect Pence-style conservatives to become. Yesterday was perhaps the logical result of 11 months of Trump trying to or-else Reaganites into embracing banana-republicanism. “You wouldn’t change minds by being mean. And the efforts were mean-spirited from the get-go,” Republican state Sen. Jean Leising told CNN of the president’s pressure campaign. “If you were wanting to change votes, you would probably try to explain why we should be doing this, in a positive way. That never happened, so, you know, I think they get what they get.”

 

Scumbaggery.

 

Which brings us to the other factor. Trump, his deputies, and much of his base are amoral scumbags, and as their amorality has gotten more repulsive over time, it stands to reason that the gag reflex among decent conservatives would grow stronger.

 

The barrage of threats Indiana lawmakers received during the White House’s pressure campaign was a major subplot of the state’s redistricting push. A number of Republican lawmakers were swatted; Leising’s grandson, an eighth-grader, and a number of his classmates received “bad” text messages about her. “I fear for this institution,” GOP state Sen. Greg Walker said yesterday during a hearing about the risk of giving into coercion. “I fear for the state of Indiana. And I fear for all states if we allow threats and intimidation to become the norm.”

 

Despite extensive media coverage of the harassment campaign as this drama played out over months, Trump said not a word to deter it, as far as I’m aware. As noted earlier, he seemed to wink at it when he posted on Truth Social that certain Republicans needed more “encouragement to make the right decision.” I’d bet every dollar I have that he privately believes figures like Walker, Leising, and Dernulc deserved what they got for opposing him, the same way Mike Pence did. In an era in which even Marjorie Taylor Greene now has to fear for her life from the MAGA mob, the urge to vomit is irrepressible.

 

It’s one of many signs that the president and his movement are coming off the rails morally as his political strength slips. The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser pointed to one of his increasingly dark tirades about immigrants from the third world recently as evidence of the trajectory: “Trump is still Trump, but what a difference it is, nonetheless, to go from a President who felt it necessary to deny that he had said ‘sh-thole countries’ to one who, eight years later, is celebrating the fact that he said it.”

 

Corruption takes place in plain sight. Indictments are sought against political enemies, are rejected by grand juries, and then quickly sought again. Predators are let loose on society for no better reason than that they support the president. The administration’s immigration policy—and not just its immigration policy—seems to be following an ethic of “whites only.” Meanwhile, the most influential figures in populist media are eating each other alive with insane, accusatory conspiracy theories, to the point where even people known for pushing insane, accusatory conspiracy theories are alarmed.

 

The American right is a moral disaster. Day by day we’re witnessing its utter civic ruination. Everyone knew going in that reelecting a coup-plotting felon bent on “retribution” would lead to an ethical nightmare, but even I’m surprised by how quickly Trump 2.0 has descended into brazen, unapologetic depravity. We live under a government that’s nihilistic on good days and deliberately immoral on bad ones, in many cases barely pretending to rationalize its behavior as motivated by some virtuous public purpose.

 

Go figure that a person of character like Rodric Bray would be less enthusiastic about further empowering the person who presides over that disaster than he might have been six months ago, or that he might even feel morally obliged to course-correct. “I hope that this is the beginning of the country stepping back from the brink,” Republican state Sen. Eric Bassler said after the new map failed yesterday in Indiana. He was talking about the partisan redistricting wars, but the larger subtext of his point was clear enough.

 

And so here’s where we land on why conservatives did what they did on Thursday: Why not?

 

Those two Democratic seats in Indiana are unlikely to decide the next House majority, but even if they do, it’s easy to believe that conservatism would benefit more from divided government in the last two years of Trump’s term than by letting him plow ahead with his statist, scumbag authoritarian project unchecked by an obedient GOP Congress. It’s not like he’s teeing up a Reaganite policy revival if his party retains the House. “He needs to be more positive about what he needs to address for ’27 and ’28,” Leising said to CNN of the president. “Why does he need to have a Republican majority in ’27 and ’28? What is he going to do next?”

 

Her guess is as good as mine, but “more bad than good” is a safe bet.

 

And if Trump, his son, the governor, and other White House lickspittles make good on their threats to help primary Bray and his accomplices, who cares? They might not succeed—Americans tend to dislike partisan redistricting—but even if they do, the worst-case scenario for Indiana’s Senate Republicans is that it’ll be some other group of chumps who have to deal with it the next time the president instigates a wave of death threats. Frankly, I think it’d be terrific if the Trump GOP wasted resources in a midterm year trying to primary obscure Midwestern lawmakers from within the party while a huge blue wave gathers force and bears down on them. That would show other Reaganite voters whose gag reflex has been tested lately where their leader’s priorities lie.

 

It’s long past time for conservatives to climb out of this fetid moral sewer. If they need to be chased out by a wave of primaries aimed at the latest poor slobs to fail a litmus test of autocratic ruthlessness, bring it on.