Shellshock

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, April 29, 2026

 

There is humor in every tragedy. Usually you have to search for it, but sometimes it plops in your lap.

 

Tuesday was a plopper. At a press conference in Washington, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel fielded questions about the latest federal criminal charges filed against one of Patel’s predecessors, James Comey.

 

Those charges stem from actions Comey took 11 months ago. “Why now?” reporters asked.

 

“This investigation just didn’t come ‘now,’” Blanche corrected them. “It’s the result of a lot of work by law enforcement over the past year.” Patel confirmed that: “This has been a case that’s been investigated over the past nine, 10, 11 months,” he said. “These cases take time. Our investigators work methodically.”

 

Eleven months of methodical gumshoe work—over a photo of seashells on a beach.

 

Last May, Comey posted an image on Instagram of shells arranged to spell “86 47.” The number “86” is old slang for “throw out” or “get rid of,” traditionally used when denying service to a customer. The number “47” obviously refers to the 47^th president, Donald Trump. Right-wingers occasionally called for “86-ing” Joe Biden during his presidency and no one took it as a veiled assassination threat. But when a despised political enemy applied the term to their hero, the opportunity to misconstrue his intentions in bad faith was too delicious to pass up.

 

“I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence,” a contrite Comey wrote at the time after the partisan fake-outrage machine revved up. “It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.” To demonstrate his good faith, he sat for an interview with the Secret Service afterward to put their minds at ease.

 

Yesterday he was indicted in North Carolina on two counts of “knowingly and willfully” threatening to kill the president.

 

No hyperbole: Between the blatant legal absurdity of the charges and the blatant malevolence of the people who pursued them, this is a strong contender for the most corrupt prosecution in the history of the Justice Department. Certainly it’s one of the most corrupt speech cases the DOJ has brought since the Supreme Court began defining the parameters of the First Amendment roughly a century ago.

 

Retribution.

 

Don’t take my word for it. Lawyers ranging from the Trump-friendly to the Trump-ambivalent to the Trump-hating agree that it stinks on ice. “I’ve been talking to current and former prosecutors, federal prosecutors who are calling this the flimsiest federal indictment that they have ever seen,” ABC News’ Jonathan Karl reported this morning. “Even Trump’s allies are privately calling it ‘embarrassing,’ or as one very prominent former Trump DOJ official told me last night, ‘depressing.’”

 

Another former Justice Department official bluntly told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, “This might be the worst case DOJ has filed in my lifetime.”

 

There are thoughtful legal analyses out there that explain why, with much more to come from Sarah Isgur and David French on the next Advisory Opinions. But you don’t need a meticulous constitutional exegesis to understand why the indictment will be dismissed. This should suffice: The First Amendment grants Americans a very, very wide berth in using inflammatory political rhetoric.

 

So wide that someone who said, “If they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ” during the Vietnam era couldn’t be prosecuted for threatening the president. So wide that a cretin urging a restive mob of angry fanatics to march down to the Capitol as Congress prepared to certify his opponent’s presidential victory wasn’t prosecuted for incitement.

 

A photo of seashells spelling out an ambiguous phrase that was deleted and replaced with an apology isn’t within 100 miles of a “true threat” exception to the First Amendment, even if a grand jury thinks so. Comey will never face trial in this case; a federal judge will flush the charges down the toilet long before that, and every lawyer in America knows it. Especially Todd Blanche.

 

Legally, there’s really nothing more to say about it. It’s the politics of the case that are worth talking about.

 

The correct answer to the question “Why now?” isn’t that the FBI needed 11 months to investigate a photo. Unless Jim Comey was part of a terror cell and “86 47” was the secret code to activate an assassination plot, this inquiry could have and should have been wrapped up in hours.

 

The correct answer is that Blanche and Patel are auditioning to keep their respective jobs and understand that boorish acts of retribution against enemies like Comey are the path to the boss’s heart.

 

Your humble correspondent wrote about that less than two weeks ago. Now that the presidential axe has fallen on Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, everyone else in the Cabinet who hopes to avoid being chopped is highly motivated to prove their worth to Trump. As it happens, Patel is on thin ice after embarrassing the White House in various ways, and Blanche knows that Trump is considering other people to replace Bondi as attorney general.

 

So each is taking as many scalps of Trump nemeses as he can, as quickly as he can. Patel has promised that arrests are coming soon in ye olde 2020 rigged-election conspiracy, while Blanche is targeting a smattering of Trump foes for questionable charges. You can imagine the lightbulb going off over his head after Saturday night’s foiled assassination attempt. “Is there anyone I can charge quickly to show the boss that I have zero tolerance for threats against him? Wait, I know.”

 

Frankly, if I were Jimmy Kimmel, I’d be looking around for a criminal defense lawyer right now. His joke about Melania Trump becoming a widow has already inspired an FCC censorship jihad against ABC; it can’t be long before Blanche tries to muscle in on that action and charges him with solicitation of murder too.

 

The thesis of my earlier newsletter was that the administration would start to behave more autocratically as its support declined and the president began purging deputies in frustration. Now here we are, less than two weeks later, with James Comey facing 10 years in prison for a photo of seashells. QED.

 

Officers of the court.

 

There’s another dimension to the Comey indictment beyond mere scalp-taking, though. By filing it, Todd Blanche and his department have functionally declared that they no longer intend to operate as officers of the court, ethically bound to pursue a just outcome rather than a “win.”

 

“The primary duty of the prosecutor is to seek justice within the bounds of the law, not merely to convict,” the American Bar Association has explained. “The prosecutor serves the public interest … both by pursuing appropriate criminal charges of appropriate severity, and by exercising discretion to not pursue criminal charges in appropriate circumstances. The prosecutor should seek to protect the innocent and convict the guilty … and respect the constitutional and legal rights of all persons, including suspects and defendants.”

 

To put that another way, prosecutors have an ethical duty to assist the judiciary in preventing injustices. Filing bogus charges in the expectation that a judge will eventually toss them out doesn’t satisfy that duty, as doing so will gum up the courts with frivolous cases and force the innocent to suffer the expense, anxiety, and reputation damage that comes with having to mount a defense. Being an “officer of the court” means that a prosecutor must do everything in his or her power to secure a just outcome even before a case reaches the courthouse door, starting with dropping the charges if conviction is unlikely.

 

All of that is out the window as of Tuesday. Transparently, Blanche and his cronies sought an indictment they know won’t survive judicial scrutiny and did so for no nobler reason than that the wannabe king to whom they answer wanted it that way. That ethical dereliction of duty is so absolute that it amounts to formally renouncing their allegiance to the judiciary as officers of the court and pledging their allegiance instead to a vindictive miscreant known to boast about being “the most powerful person to ever live.”

 

“The point of the indictment is to demonstrate that the United States Department of Justice is wholly an instrument of Donald Trump’s senescent pique, no more independent of him than a boil on his ass,” attorney Ken White wrote. Just so. The American public is now on notice that no case is too absurd to be pursued if doing so might cause a presidential enemy grief, whatever ethical guidelines might have to say about it. The prosecution of James Comey will fail legally but will succeed politically at its rotten goal of making Trump critics think twice before saying something unkind about him.

 

It’s the end of the Justice Department as a respectable institution in American society (insofar as that end hadn’t come already) and its rebirth as something more like a secret police force, with everything that entails.

 

The most one can say for what Blanche has done is that it’s in line with how every other Republican-controlled institution has behaved toward Trump over the last 10 years. The cowards who populate the president’s party decided long ago that restraining him is always someone else’s responsibility, never their own. Sometimes that means Democrats, sometimes voters, sometimes the courts: You may recall that one of the excuses offered by Senate Republicans for not convicting him at his second impeachment trial was that the criminal justice system could and would hold him accountable for January 6.

 

Then, when the criminal justice system tried to hold him accountable for January 6, they screamed like infants about “lawfare.”

 

Blanche is now engaged in the same buck-passing, forcing a federal judge to face Trump’s wrath by dismissing the Comey indictment rather than face it himself by declining to seek the indictment to begin with. Being an officer of the court means prosecutors are supposed to act in the interest of justice even when doing so disappoints their constituents: Indicting a celebrity with a huge fan base, say, or refusing to charge a suspect in a sensational murder case due to lack of evidence will make you unpopular with the public but them’s the breaks when you have an ethical duty to seek a just outcome.

 

The acting attorney general decided he’d rather light that ethical duty on fire than make the president mad. That’s right-wing politics in microcosm since January 2017, a remorseless feast of bootlicking postliberal maggots eating through the carcass of the constitutional order.

 

Remedies.

 

I’m open to punishing those responsible for this case with any lawful or professional sanctions available. “The remedy is to make certain that nobody involved in this travesty is ever respected or trusted or accepted again,” as White put it.

 

To begin with, lawyers—especially talented ones—should shun employment by the Justice Department. We can debate whether attorneys who work there now have an ethical obligation to quit, but I can’t imagine the case for signing up. You won’t change the institutional culture there for the better with Trump and Blanche running things. And you won’t starve by saying no: Anyone with the legal chops to land a job at the DOJ has the chops to land a job at a state or local prosecutor’s office or a higher-paying position at a private firm.

 

Force this mafia law firm to staff up with clowns who can’t get hired elsewhere. That’s one way to deny it and its leaders respectability.

 

Needless to say, the Senate should also reject Blanche if Trump moves forward with nominating him to become attorney general. It’s the least they could do—literally—to show higher-ups at the DOJ that there will be consequences if they follow the president too slavishly. Blanche went ahead with the Comey prosecution because he believed that the White House is the only constituency in government to which he answers, which is technically false but practically true. It’s time for Congress to do something about it.

 

I’m also open to House Democrats impeaching Blanche, Patel, and other Senate-confirmed officers who were involved in this debacle next year. The point wouldn’t be to remove them, as we all know the Senate wouldn’t do that. The point, again, would be to drive home to Trump cronies that the opposition party is watching their behavior closely and is prepared to hold them accountable in draconian ways. The president won’t be there forever to shield them from having to answer to the federal government for their corruption.

 

Plus, it’d be fun to force lawyers like Ted Cruz who know the Comey indictment is a preposterous constitutional disgrace perpetrated for the foulest authoritarian reasons to feebly mumble about it not quite rising to the level of a high crime or misdemeanor.

 

Failing that, there are other remedies Democrats could pursue. They could seek some sort of targeted defunding of the DOJ—not on the meat-and-potatoes crime-fighting or counterterrorism side, obviously, but certainly there are perks that the department’s leadership enjoys that can be stripped away. And state bars could and should take a hard look at whether the lawyers involved committed ethical breaches in pursuing the case. For instance, Blanche’s home state of New York warns prosecutors not to seek criminal charges “when the prosecutor or other government lawyer knows or it is obvious that the charge is not supported by probable cause.”

 

“But wait,” you say. “The grand jury issued an indictment against Comey. There is probable cause!”

 

That will be Blanche’s defense to all of this, yes, and would assuredly be the excuse Senate Republicans use not to impeach him. But to let the Justice Department hide behind the ignorance of a panel of laymen after it sought facially unconstitutional charges would be to endorse another example of cowardly buck-passing by Republicans who know better but were too gutless to tell the president no.

 

Again, this is what it means to be an officer of the court. Todd Blanche and his toadies know there’s no probable cause to believe that Comey issued a “true threat” within the meaning of the First Amendment even if the grand jury did not. (I’d be surprised if the jurors were instructed on the constitutional nuances of what is and isn’t a “true threat” before they issued their bill.) They know that a federal judge will dismiss the indictment, and so they know there will be no conviction. Their ethical duty was to not pursue the case, whether or not they believed they could clear the initial “ham sandwich” threshold of obtaining an indictment.

 

If they’re no longer officers of the court, the stewards of their profession should treat them accordingly. They’re no longer practicing law in a meaningful sense so why should they be permitted to say they’re licensed to do so?

 

The likeliest punishment Todd Blanche will face, though, is from Donald Trump himself. Maybe the president will be satisfied by his team’s effort after this matter is inevitably resolved in Comey’s favor, happy that his acting AG at least tried to put his nemesis in jail before some “radical left” judge stepped in. But I wouldn’t bet on it. Trump has always been a results-oriented guy; if James Comey ends up walking free with every lawyer in the country blessing the outcome, that doesn’t seem like a result he’d consider a win.

 

Blanche’s reward for pursuing the boss’s vendettas more vigorously than even Pam Bondi did might be getting tossed out on his ear, the latest in a series of underwhelming henchmen who disappointed the president by failing to make his dreams of “retribution” come true. It’s just what he deserves.

An Apology Would Be Nice, But It Isn’t Enough

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, April 29, 2026

 

When Australian authorities announced they would restrict the routes that pro-Palestinian marches were allowed to follow two months ago, it was because of the impending visit of Israel’s head of state. When UK officials suggested today that they support heavily restricting pro-Palestinian marches, it was because they don’t know how to get “anti-Zionists” to stop constantly trying to murder Jews.

 

The explanations were slightly different, but the underlying problem was exactly the same: not one of these so-called protests is free of foaming-at-the-mouth pogromniks. Their slogans unambiguously call for violence against Jews anywhere in the world, and violence against Jews almost inevitably follows.

 

In America, where even anti-Semitic lunatics have free-speech rights, the institutions of democracy—universities, political bodies, etc.—had a responsibility to counter the Hamasniks’ bad speech with good speech. Instead, they ceded the field to Beijing-backed terrorism supporters. Joe Biden said the demonstrators “have a point.” University administrators invited lawlessness, and their faculties went on teaching anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.

 

The result was that commencement ceremonies had to be canceled or live student speeches had to be removed from the programs, restrictions that will continue at many of this year’s ceremonies. That is, school administrators reached the same conclusion that institutional authorities reached in Britain and in Australia: Every single time so-called anti-Zionist activists are given the floor, they will whip up anti-Jewish bloodlust.

 

Jonathan Hall, a UK government adviser on anti-Semitism policy, reportedly told Times Radio today after the stabbings in Golders Green: “It pains me to say this, but I think we may have reached a point where we need to have a moratorium on the sorts of marches that have been happening. It’s clearly impossible at the moment for any of these pro-Palestine marches not to incubate within them some sort of anti-Semitic or demonizing language.”

 

I’ll leave the legal aspects of this suggestion to UK law experts, but as for the cultural aspects: By pretending there is such a thing as “just Anti-Zionism”—that is, anti-Zionism that isn’t merely a flavor of anti-Semitism—the West has saddled itself with a massive hate movement. And now the realization sets in. (To be clear, Jonathan Hall isn’t guilty of this. The lawmakers who seem ready to implement Hall’s suggestion are guilty of this.)

 

Among other reactions, I can’t help but think that so much time and energy and political capital was wasted denying something everyone always knew was true. No one marching among Abu Obeida t-shirts and Globalize the Intifada banners was making a good-faith distinction between anti-Israel activism and anti-Semitism. If such a distinction existed, someone would find it. But they cannot find such a distinction. They thought it was there, but oh well. Mistakes were made!

 

We were told that it was unfair to accuse the mobs of supporting Hamas just because they were taking Hamas’s side in a war against the U.S. and Israel. So the demonstrators started showing up outside synagogues yelling “we support Hamas” and at Jewish shops wearing Hamas headbands to make sure that everyone knew the truth about them.

 

The point of this isn’t to say “We told you so.” That much is obvious. It’s to say that merely acknowledging, finally, that there is no difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism isn’t enough anymore. Those who tried to characterize these protests and this protest movement as peaceful, as comprised of people genuinely concerned about human rights, or as “having a point” owe society more than an apology—though an apology is the proper place to start.

 

Rather, they should invert the activism they so stupidly rationalized. Consider it a kind of community service. Individuals should organize rallies in support of Jewish self-determination. Institutions should hold seminars and literary events and panel discussions and cultural festivals that celebrate the Jewish people.

 

If you’ve enabled tent cities or occupations, go sit now at a government building and tell them you’re not leaving until they take action against violent anti-Semitism. Organize a fundraiser for a local shul or children’s school that now needs to pay for increased security. Lobby your government to undo anti-Israel embargoes.

 

You did this. Not all of it or even most of it. But you are part of the reason this is happening. You were part of the problem. Now go be part of the solution.

Lee Zeldin Awards Rosa DeLauro No Points, May God Have Mercy on Her Soul

By Jeffrey Blehar

Wednesday, April 29, 2026

 

A brief dispatch from the world of congressional comedy, because in all honesty we’re starved for any kind of comedy these days. On Monday, Environmental Protection Agency chief Lee Zeldin — formerly a congressman from Long Island — sat before the House Appropriations Committee to defend the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to the agency’s wildly bloated budget. Ranking Democrat Rosa DeLauro, of Connecticut — she of the famously purple hair and crone-like demeanor — was having none of it, of course, and came intending to read Zeldin the riot act:

 

The budget proposal reads like a climate change denier’s manifesto. When climate change is flooding our streets, poisoning our air, driving up healthcare and disaster cots [sic], how can the EPA justify abandoning that duty to protect Americans to appease polluters under the false flag of economic growth?

 

In other words: more of the same, in terms of off-the-rack Democratic rhetoric. (Only Captain Planet villains or Aaron Sorkin characters normally “appease polluters” under the “false flag” of growth.) Was it completely uninformed by law? Of course — I would expect no less, in terms of argumentative persuasiveness, from any given moron on social media.

 

And unfortunately for us, Rosa DeLauro is not some mere Bluesky interlocutor, though I suppose her political understanding is interchangeable with one; she is the most powerful Democratic appropriator in the House. She didn’t read the statutes or the governing precedent; she read only from a text prepared by her staffers. Same as it ever was, as least as far as televised House committee hearings go.

 

But this time I want to applaud Zeldin for having the temerity to fire back at this kind of ignorance, and the composure to do so in such a hilariously low-key, stubborn way. “Following the law? Section 202 of the Clean Air Act: Where does it say anything about global climate change.” It was phrased as a question but inflected in his neutral tone to come across as a statement. Then he refers to the recent Court precedent that significantly reduced the scope of the EPA’s regulatory authority: “Loper Bright. Supreme Court case — you familiar with it?”

 

“No, I-I-um, maybe others are, but let me ask you—.” At which point Zeldin politely interrupts: “But that’s really important as a member of Congress.” Later, in full (and fully justified) condescension mode, he ever-so-politely replies, over a yowling, gummy-voiced DeLauro, “I understand you’re upset that you don’t know what Loper Bright is . . . you’re very defensive about not knowing the two biggest landmark Supreme Court cases of the last year with regard to your question.”

 

DeLauro just kept shouting on. It was hilarious, in that “grandma tries not to lose her dentures while ranting” way — she really needed a cane to wave crazily in the air for emphasis — but also thoroughly insufferable. I recommend the full clip only for those who enjoy punishment. (And some of you will no doubt watch; my theory is that most political junkies are secret masochists.)

 

Zeldin’s defense hinged on technical legal arguments — I could unpack them further here, but that is beside the point. (I do cringe slightly to hear Zeldin call the major questions doctrine the “major policies doctrine,” but I know what he meant.) The point is that Zeldin understands the legal world that governs the EPA — and it has changed significantly in recent years! — while DeLauro simply does not. More to the point: She does not care that she is ignorant of law. The law may have changed, but her feelings haven’t. And she represents the good people of her state, faithfully.

 

So that’s why I enjoyed a moment where Lee Zeldin, who bears an uncanny vocal and physical resemblance to actor and former SNL writer Jim Downey, channeled the spirit of Downey’s quiz-bowl host from Billy Madison: stunned disbelief at the ignorance of the person he had to talk to. The only thing that would have made Zeldin’s appearance more satisfying was if he had concluded by saying, “I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

The Conspiracy Paradox

By Abe Greenwald

Wednesday, April 29, 2026

 

The basic, most sensible argument against believing conspiracy theories is that pulling off a given conspiracy would be too large, too far-reaching, and too complicated an effort to remain a secret. You can’t rely on individual competence when things get that big. Something or someone would leak.

 

The best argument in favor of conspiracy theorizing is that we’ve recently lived through a few documented conspiracies. Isn’t it time we started to wise up?

 

Here’s the thing about those actual conspiracies: They turn out to bolster the first point, as well. They involved too many people in too many institutions and required too much clean-up to remain undiscovered. The conspirators were only so competent. That’s why we know about them.

 

Take Russiagate. Whether or not it started out as a semi-earnest effort to uncover a suspected crime, it bloomed into a conspiracy. People working for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign dug up a bogus story about Donald Trump colluding with the Kremlin to throw the election. They roped in intelligence and law-enforcement officials who abused their authority, ran with bad information, ignored countervailing evidence, and surveilled several individuals who had done nothing wrong. This involved the coordination of various institutions, high-level figures, and people on multiple continents. While the collusion narrative endured for too long, the whole thing was eventually revealed as what Trump rightly calls it, a hoax.

 

Then there’s Hunter Biden’s laptop. In October 2020, it was staffers on Joe Biden’s campaign who got the ball rolling when a potentially incriminating laptop belonging to Hunter was brought to light. They got “51 former intelligence officials” to say that the laptop had “all the classic earmarks” of Russian disinformation—even as Biden and the FBI already knew that it was real. Social media platforms banned posts referring to the New York Post’s accurate reporting on it, and, once Biden got into office, his administration worked with social media to crack down on all sorts of inconvenient opinions—as exposed in the “Twitter Files.” Once again, there was no way this multifaceted conspiracy was going to stay in the dark.

 

All of this brings us around to yesterday’s federal grand jury indictment of Anthony Fauci’s longtime closest aide at NIH, David M. Morens.

 

The indictment accuses Morens of conspiring with others to hide potential evidence that the Covid-19 virus was created at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had been receiving U.S. funding through the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance. Morens is also accused of destroying federal documents and accepting bribes from EcoHealth. After one of Morens’s co-conspirators at EcoHealth had just received a big grant installment, Morens emailed him, “Ahem…. do I get a kickback???? Too much fooking money! DO you deserve it all? Let’s discuss.”

 

We’re now reading Morens’s emails because you can’t engage in an alleged conspiracy involving a massive U.S. government agency, its most celebrated official, millions of taxpayer dollars, nonprofits, foreign state-run laboratories, and millions of deaths worldwide, and make it disappear.

 

Yes, we should learn from these cases. The lesson isn’t that all conspiracy theories are true. It’s that grand conspiracies are too grand to get away with. 

 

There’s another paradoxical aspect to note about these actual conspiracies, and it’s also educational. Their aim tends to be the spreading of false conspiracy theories. Russiagate had half the country believing that Vladimir Putin got Trump into the White House. The laptop conspirators also pushed a tale about a Russian plot. And Fauci’s NIH dismissed the lab-leak theory as a right-wing conspiracy.

 

So if you believe in a particular conspiracy, you’re probably being duped by a different one altogether.

‘Microlooting’: The Left’s Latest Language Deception

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, April 30, 2026

 

Last week, pocket revolutionary Hasan Piker introduced the term “microlooting” into the American vocabulary. The innocuous prefix “micro” was affixed to “looting,” a crime, to make stealing from retail stores somewhat more palatable. Piker’s new Frankenstein monster of a word asks, “Property theft — how much is too much?”

 

(Sadly, the new “micro” trend came too late for Benedict Arnold to plead “microtreason” or for Jeffrey Dahmer to cop to “microcannabilism.”)

 

We all remember George Orwell’s famous essay explaining how political actors bend language to achieve their ends. But in the social media age, political appellations are being created and destroyed almost daily. And while mostly this is fun, the process can have malign intent.

 

Often, the competition to coin a new term is heated. (For example, I have spent years trying to make fetch happen with the word “fathlete,” to describe a chubby person who is a good athlete. It has yet to catch on.)

 

Picking a new word or phrase to explain something people already experience is similar to stand-up comics doing observational humor. Jerry Seinfeld noticed tiny things that happened in everyday life and talked about them. Audience members exclaimed, “That happens to me, too!” And a comedy empire was born.

 

But what once was the purview of comedians has been crowdsourced to the feral mob on social media. Whether you are “mansplaining,” or a “reply guy,” or “woke,” you have been categorized by the internet’s linguistic Edisons. If you are “aura farming,” “doomscrolling,” “looksmaxxing,” or “well ackshually’ing,” you are engaging in common behavior that has been identified and commodified.

 

But while observational comedy brings people together, observational nomenclature can drive us apart. Friedrich Hayek criticized central planners who believed that they could organize millions of human economic actions. The language planners want to manage our social interactions by way of words and phrases that too-neatly package our behaviors.

 

The left has always been particularly adept at this game, which is why we have so many words for things that simply used to be called “being awkward.” Take “microaggressions” — there’s that prefix again. Coined in the 1970s, the term hit the big time in academic circles in 2007, following publication of a paper by psychologist Derald Wing Sue. According to Sue, microaggressions are “brief and commonplace daily, verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults.”

 

For good reason, observers on the right had a field day with the concept of microaggressions. Asking someone where she was from, which any normal person would see as expressing interest in forming a connection, was seen as “othering,” or assuming someone was “not a true American.” Saying America is a “melting pot” assumes people from other countries must assimilate into a “dominant culture.” Perhaps the best of Sue’s examples: If you ask a woman her age, and she tells you she’s 31, you’re sexist if you glance at her left hand to see whether she’s married.

 

And yet full university departments were built on the concept of microaggressions. Once you have a word, you have a grievance. Once you have a grievance, you have a bureaucracy. And once you have a bureaucracy, you have a budget line.

 

This is the assembly line of modern progressive politics, and language is its raw material.

 

Sometimes, progressives steal a word in common usage and repurpose it for their cause. For most of American history, “equity” meant fairness — give everyone the same rules, the same shot, the same chance to fail or succeed on one’s own merits. But at some point in the early 2010s, the word was hijacked to mean something closer to the opposite: a system in which outcomes are predetermined and distributed according to group identity rather than individual effort. The genius of the theft was that they kept the same word. The word still calls to mind “fairness.” It has the same cultural warmth, the same moral glow. But it’s been hollowed out and restuffed like a taxidermied animal.

 

Orwell called this “doublespeak.” We might call it something more pedestrian: a bait and switch.

 

And the machinery accelerates. What once required years of academic incubation — a sociologist coined a term, it migrated into journals, then op-eds, then eventually NPR pledge drives — now happens at the speed of a viral tweet. A phrase like “late-stage capitalism” goes from a fringe Tumblr post to a New York Times Style Section entry in roughly 18 months. “Emotional labor” spent decades in academic sociology before Gemma Hartley laundered it into mainstream usage, where it now explains why men don’t remember to buy birthday cards.

 

The speed matters because it forecloses debate. When a term arrives pre-loaded with moral assumptions — when “microlooting” implies that retail theft is a problem only if you’re a picky property-rights obsessive — there isn’t time to interrogate the premise before the phrase becomes common currency. To question the word is to question the thing it describes, and to question the thing is to have revealed yourself as someone who needs to be described by a different word entirely. (That word, usually, something ending in “-phobe.”)

 

Which brings us back to Hayek, and why his critique lands so squarely on the lexicographers of the left. Hayek’s essential insight was that no central planner could ever possess enough information to rationally organize an economy because the relevant knowledge is distributed among millions of individuals making millions of decisions in real time. Language works similarly. Words evolve organically — through usage, through friction, through the slow democratic process of people deciding that a thing is worth naming and how to name it. When you manufacture a term in a political workshop and then carpet-bomb it across social media, you’re not describing reality but attempting to impose one.

 

The difference between a word that sticks because it captures something true — “doomscrolling” genuinely describes a recognizable human pathology — and a word manufactured to shift moral goalposts is the difference between GPS, which tells you how to get to where you want to go, and propaganda, which tells you where you’re supposed to go.

 

Piker’s preposterous “microlooting” will almost certainly fade, as most political neologisms do when they outlive their tactical usefulness. But its brief moment of circulation did exactly what it was designed to do: insert a small hesitation, a philosophical speed bump, between the act of shoplifting and the social consensus that shoplifting is simply wrong. That’s not wordplay. That’s the left burdening us all with more emotional labor.

The War Has Destroyed the Iranian Economy

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, April 29, 2026

 

Back on March 17, over in that other Washington publication, I wrote, “The Iranian mullahs weren’t exactly known as economic savants before the shooting started. Even if they retain power after the war, they’re going to be broke. Rebuilding their military will be expensive, and handouts for Hamas or Hezbollah, or a nuclear-weapons program, will look like unaffordable luxuries. The war is causing economic stress for the U.S. and its allies, but it’s worsening an ongoing economic nightmare for the Iranians.”

 

The headline above the column was, “When the Iran war ends, the mullahs will be broke.”

 

As you might expect, a lot of the responses were, “When the war ends, the United States is going to be broke!” and, “You haven’t looked at our national debt or deficit lately, have you?” (Yes, I have.) The reflexive insistence that everything going on in the U.S. must be the absolute worst does not actually change the dire economic circumstances for the Iranians and the current regime in Tehran.

 

This morning — about six weeks later — the Wall Street Journal offers a deep dive into the state of Iran’s wartime economy. And it turns out that the mullahs are, effectively, broke:

 

Government revenue has dried up just as the needs of its population are rising.

 

The war has thrown around one million people out of work directly and another million indirectly, according to early estimates cited by Gholamhossein Mohammadi, an official at Iran’s Labor and Social-Affairs ministry. That is a significant portion of the roughly 25 million people who are normally employed in Iran.

 

The cost of living has soared, with the annual inflation rate reaching 67 percent in the month through mid-April from the same period a year earlier, according to Iran’s central bank. The subsidized price of red meat, which was mostly imported through sea routes, has gone up to the equivalent of around $3.60 a pound, beyond the reach of most in a country where the minimum wage is around $130 a month.

 

“Living is not affordable anymore,” said Mahdi Ghodsi of the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies. “Iran is at its weakest point.”

 

Businesses across the country — from manufacturers to retailers — are closing, residents said. The lack of steel and other raw materials is hampering production in various industries. Electronic goods, which are mostly imported, are in short supply and expensive.

 

A 67 percent inflation rate? The worst we’ve experienced in recent memory was 9.1 percent in June 2022.

 

The Journal reports, “Iranian state media estimates that postwar reconstruction could cost around $270 billion, a crippling sum for a country with an annual gross domestic product last year of $341 billion.” That’s almost 80 percent of Iran’s annual GDP; the U.S. gross domestic product is about $31 trillion, so for us, it would be like facing a postwar reconstruction cost of $24.5 trillion. For perspective, the total economic costs of the 9/11 attacks were estimated to be between $33 billion and $36 billion.

 

But you don’t have to take it from just the Wall Street Journal.

 

This morning, Iran International reports, “Iran’s rial weakened on Wednesday, with the dollar trading at around 1.8 million rials, according to market trackers. The rate reflects continued pressure on the local currency amid economic strains.” Back at the start of January, this newsletter informed you, “When Ruhollah Khomeini swept to power in 1979, one US dollar traded for 70 rials. Today, that same dollar commands a staggering 1,130,000 rials, more than 16,000-fold its price in 1979. In the last year alone, the rial has lost 50 percent of its value.” The Iran rial was the weakest currency in the world . . . back when one dollar could buy you 1.3 million rials.

 

Also from Iran International:

 

A prolonged internet shutdown — now entering its third month — has compounded the crisis, cutting off income for millions. Tourism has also collapsed, with airlines, hotels and local accommodations nearly inactive after the 12-day war.

 

Even those who remain employed are watching their purchasing power evaporate.

 

At a petrochemical terminals company in Bandar Mahshahr, representatives for more than 700 workers say their employer has eliminated overtime, holiday pay and welfare benefits.

 

In some cases, workers report wages have gone unpaid for months.

 

Political analyst Shahin Shahid-Saless warned that a naval blockade restricting oil exports and broader trade could accelerate the currency’s collapse.

 

“The national currency will collapse at an unbelievable speed, and hyperinflation will emerge,” he said. “The country may face . . . hunger riots whose intensity and violence would be entirely different from [recent] movements.”

 

When your country faces the prospect of hunger riots, you are not winning the war.

 

A few other points worth keeping in mind.

 

That Journal article linked above notes, “There is no evidence any Iranian oil cargo has breached the U.S. blockade and reached Chinese customers or other buyers, said Homayoun Falakshahi, a senior oil analyst at the commodities-data company Kpler.” In March, the Iranians managed to get about 1.85 million barrels per day out of the country to buyers, according to Kpler. Now, they’re getting nothing out.

 

Monday’s report from Kpler calculated that Iran has roughly twelve days’ worth of storage space for all that oil they’re pumping, with no way to get it to customers beyond their borders:

 

As a result, 14.9 mbbls [1,000 barrels of oil]  is effectively unusable, leaving ~26 mbbls of usable storage, equivalent to ~14 days of exports. Including 15.4 mbbls of available floating storage, total available capacity rises to ~41 mbbls (~22 days).

 

Nonetheless, Iranian onshore storage is unlikely to exceed 80 percent utilization, consistent with historical patterns. This indicates onshore spare storage capacity is closer to ~8-10 mbbls rather than 26 mbbls. In that case, this is only equivalent to around ~12 days of normal export volumes.

 

When you no longer have a place to put all the oil you’re pumping, you have problems. Kharg Island’s storage facilities are either full or nearly full, and the Iranians are reusing at least one “derelict” tanker as temporary storage.

 

Some have predicted shutting down the oil pumps could create irreversible damage to Iran’s oil fields. But Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy argues that the Iranians can shut production facilities and restart them later; it’s just a time-consuming pain in the neck:

 

The reality, however, is that Iran has shut in oil production in the past without serious repercussions (as have other oil producers), although gas production may have to be cut back because of the lack of outlets for associated hydrocarbon liquids. That would require rationing of gas between the power, industrial, and residential sectors, as well as exports. . . .

 

Wells with a high water-cut may not flow naturally after being shut-in. They can be restarted by pumping or by temporarily injecting nitrogen to lighten the fluid column. Fluid blocking and cross-flow between reservoir zones with different pressures or water contents can create problems. Long-term shut-ins could lead to corrosion of wells and pipelines, the settling of sand and debris in the wellbore or pumps, or the mechanical deformation of the wells. Careful technical planning of shutdowns and restarts and the use of chemical corrosion inhibitors can fix most of these problems.

 

Meanwhile, Iran’s non-oil foreign trade is disappearing fast: “Figures from Iran’s customs administration show non-oil trade collapsed in the final month of the previous Iranian fiscal year (February 21–March 22), falling to just $6.4 billion — down 30 percent from the previous month and 50 percent from a year earlier.”

 

A national average price of gasoline of $4.22 stinks, and is no doubt driving a lot of economic pessimism. But the challenges facing the Iranian regime are exponentially worse, probably fairly characterized as catastrophic — can we keep the lights on, can we feed our people, can we avoid becoming a failed state? And perhaps most significantly, when the war ends, will the people driven to such desperate conditions continue to accept the rule of the mullahs?

Antisemitism Isn’t Random

By Jacki Karsh

Thursday, April 30, 2026

 

On Wednesday morning, a terror stabbing attack in the heart of London’s most heavily Jewish neighborhood, Golders Green, shook the city. It was the latest in a series of attacks in April, including two attempted firebombings at synagogues in north London. The recent attacks targeting Jewish institutions in the city are now being investigated by authorities as part of a sustained campaign of intimidation rather than a series of isolated incidents. British counterterrorism police are investigating potential links to Iranian-backed networks, with officials warning that some attackers may be acting as “proxies” or “thugs for hire.”

 

The recent surge in antisemitism worldwide is often described as a spontaneous social eruption. It is framed as ugly and alarming, yet diffuse in origin and difficult to trace with precision. That description is not simply incomplete; it actually obscures more than it reveals. It allows institutions and policymakers to treat the problem as ambient rather than organized, reactive rather than cultivated. The reality is more structured and far less comfortable: Antisemitism today operates through systems as much as sentiment. One of its principal architects is the Islamic Republic of Iran.

 

In the wake of the October 7 Hamas massacre, antisemitic incidents around the world rose sharply, increasing by hundreds of percentage points in a single year. In addition to the evils of actual violence perpetrated against Jews, a synchronized effort emerged to reinterpret that violence: to blur moral lines, to cast doubt on victims, and to normalize suspicion not only of Israel, but of Jews more broadly. The speed and consistency of that shift carry their own meaning. Movements that are truly organic rarely produce aligned narratives across continents in real time. Coordination leaves a signature.

 

Iran has spent decades building precisely such a system. In the Islamic Republic, hostility toward Jews is embedded within the structure of the state, woven into official ideology, reinforced by clerical authority, and translated into policy through a network of proxies and aligned organizations. Antisemitism, in this context, serves a clear function. It mobilizes support, sharpens ideological boundaries, and provides a durable language for delegitimizing perceived enemies at home and abroad. It is not an aberration within the regime. It is part of how the regime governs.

 

That architecture has been under construction since the 1979 revolution, when the Islamic Republic moved quickly to consolidate power in part by targeting its own Jewish community and elevating anti-Jewish hostility into a defining feature of its identity. Over time, what began as internal repression evolved into an exportable model. Iran does not simply generate ideology; it operationalizes it. It crafts narratives, amplifies grievances, and cultivates proxy actors who can turn those ideas into actions, often far from Tehran but rarely disconnected from it. The exports extend beyond violence itself. It reshapes the moral language through which that violence is interpreted.

 

The results are now visible across Europe. Since early 2026, a group calling itself Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia has carried out a string of attacks on Jewish targets — synagogues, schools, community centers — following a strikingly consistent pattern. The attacks occur in the middle of the night and are immediately followed by coordinated propaganda designed to maximize visibility. The objective appears cumulative rather than singular: to erode the sense of permanence that underpins communal life and to introduce hesitation where there was once routine.

 

Investigators are increasingly probing the group’s connections to Iran, and the pattern is familiar enough to warrant sustained attention. Tehran has long relied on proxy networks to project power while maintaining plausible deniability. Front groups obscure attribution, local actors provide operational flexibility, and digital amplification ensures that each incident reverberates far beyond its immediate target. What might otherwise register as isolated acts of vandalism or intimidation instead becomes part of a broader psychological campaign. The effect is less about any single act than about the accumulation of pressure over time.

 

At a certain point, continued insistence on treating these incidents as disconnected ceases to reflect caution and begins to resemble avoidance. This is a system — one that integrates ideology, organization, and action into a coherent strategy designed to pressure Jewish communities while reshaping public perception. The damage is not measured only in broken windows or burned vehicles. It unfolds in the normalization of fear and the gradual erosion of the assumption that Jewish life can exist openly and securely. When patterns are visible but unnamed, their consequences compound quietly.

 

If this is our operating reality, policy responses must evolve accordingly. Governments that are serious about combating antisemitism cannot rely on statements of solidarity or domestic hate-crime enforcement alone. They must treat state-sponsored antisemitism as a national-security concern. That requires tightening sanctions not only on Iran’s nuclear and military programs, but also on the institutions and individuals responsible for exporting its ideological infrastructure. It requires disrupting the financial and organizational networks that sustain proxy groups, increasing intelligence coordination with European partners, and holding platforms accountable for the rapid amplification of propaganda tied to these campaigns. Addressing the downstream effects without confronting the upstream drivers will ensure that the cycle continues.

 

The question is no longer whether antisemitism is rising. The evidence is clear and widely documented. The question is whether we are prepared to examine how it operates and who is driving it. Naming that reality does not constitute escalation; it establishes the baseline for any serious response.

 

We are not facing a mystery. We are facing an adversary. The longer there is hesitation to describe that adversary with precision, the longer its methods remain effective. What is at stake is not only physical security, but the conditions that make open Jewish life possible.

The New Never Trumpers

By Rich Lowry

Thursday, April 30, 2026

 

It’s a tribute to the protean nature of Donald Trump that the new Never Trumpers are some of his most fervent former supporters.

 

Tucker Carlson thinks Donald Trump might be the Antichrist and had his brother Buckley on for a recent episode of his podcast where they lambasted Trump the man and president. Meanwhile, Sohrab Ahmari, who co-wrote an essay in 2022 declaring of Trump, “He’s Still the One,” now thinks that “Trump Was Never the One.”

 

The proximate cause of the disaffection is, of course, the Iran war, but the erstwhile MAGA acolytes also pronounce themselves appalled at Trump’s character.

 

“I always felt like there are things wrong with Trump, have always been. I overlooked most of them or just tried to ignore them or whatever,” Tucker Carlson said on his podcast.

 

Well, of course he did, but this is a big admission. During the period when Carlson was most determinedly ignoring the obvious, he was congratulating himself as a brave truth-teller and attacking those people who had the elemental honesty to notice Trump’s flaws.

 

It’s never seemed particularly difficult to acknowledge Trump’s shortcomings, at the same time as realizing that he’s been better than the alternative and done many important things.

 

For years, though, Carlson failed the Orwell test — of seeing what’s directly in front of one’s nose — and now has lurched all the way to believing thar Trump might be the figure of pure evil foretold in biblical prophecy. It’s a pretty big mistake to constantly puff up, spend time with, and help staff the administration of someone you’ve decided could well be bringing about the literal End Times, but this is the burden that Tucker Carlson now bears.

 

Ahmari, too, confesses to looking past Trump’s character flaws. In fact, he refers to “the chaos, messaging confusion, and sheer incompetence characteristic of the multiply-bankrupt ex-developer and reality-TV shouter.” I guess David French gets the last laugh.

 

Ahmari’s explanation of what’s become of Trump conveniently pins the blame on the other side.

 

He notes how “psychoanalysis speaks of ‘determination by the signifier’: the way people end up inhabiting the picture of them inscribed by others (parents, social institutions, and the like). You become what they say you are.”

 

This is what happened to our 47th president: “Just so, Trump the war-wary populist has now fully given way to his liberal caricature: venal, erratic, childish, a chaos agent.”

 

So we were supposed to believe that Trump descended the golden escalator a man of politeness, equanimity, constancy, and discretion, who never had an eye on the main chance or cared about getting glory or credit, and after more than a decade of people saying the opposite about him, his character radically changed to confirm all the smears made of him?

 

I’m exaggerating for effect, but you get the point. If we are going to grasp for these sorts of explanations, it might make more sense to say that Trump concluded that his cadre of supporters was willing to look past anything he said or did, so he became more brazen.

 

The truth is that Trump has always been Trump, and always will be Trump. We haven’t learned much new about him — good or bad — since his bout of controversies during his first year or so in national politics.

 

If that wasn’t enough, we had his attempt to overturn the 2020 election result and, in his second term, his dubious military attacks on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, his illegal imposition of sweeping tariffs, and his attempted prosecutions of his political enemies.

 

All of this also made no meaningful impression on Trump’s regretful former boosters, who apparently became very adept at ignoring things.

 

Now, we shouldn’t begrudge them their dismay with Trump over the Iran war, when they thought they were guaranteed no more major wars in the Middle East. Unlike many other things he’s done, Trump didn’t talk about this in the campaign. It shouldn’t be a complete shocker, however, that a president who bombed ISIS and killed Soleimani with evident relish in his first term, who is headstrong, who loves wielding power, who has long hated the Iranian regime, and who was highly impressed with the proficiency of the Venezuela operation might conclude he could topple or bend to his will the Islamic Republic with a thunderous assault from the air.

 

The war isn’t about spreading democracy, and it doesn’t involve occupying Iran with tens of thousands of ground troops. Trump has been careful to try to limit his commitment and maintain his flexibility while keeping on the pressure via a relatively low-risk naval operation.

 

Of course, Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz has made this a costlier and more drawn-out affair than Trump expected. It turns out that he was overly optimistic and launched the operation without sufficient public or private deliberation. Are Carlson and Ahmari surprised by this as well?

 

Amid all the shock, President Trump might register some surprise of his own — that people who had given every indication they’d be on board whatever he did have now, suddenly and despite their past attacks on anyone upholding a consistent standard for how we judge politicians, jumped ship.

Hasan Piker and the Limits of the Big Tent

By Jeremiah Johnson

Wednesday, April 29, 2026

 

For the past few months, Democrats have been engaged in a strange and increasingly heated debate: Should the party be friendly with socialist livestreamer Hasan Piker?

 

Over the past few years, political livestreaming has grown rapidly in popularity, contributing to the ascent of figures like Piker, one of the largest political influencers across social media.

 

He’s best known for near-daily live broadcasts and viral clips in which he expounds on the news of the day from a leftist point of view, while frequently endorsing controversial views on political violence and dictatorships.

 

But Piker is becoming increasingly prominent in offline left-wing circles, too. He has campaigned alongside Democratic Senate candidates, been a guest on some of the largest podcasts in America, and appeared on CNN and NBC News. He’s received the tacit blessings of Democratic tastemakers like Ezra Klein and Jon Favreau. This is a miscalculation. Embracing Piker is a step toward a Democratic mirror of the GOP’s extremism problem.

 

It bothers me that Democrats need to spend time discussing this. Donald Trump and his merry band of MAGA minions are actively lighting the country on fire. Engaging in intraparty fights right now feels indulgent at best and needlessly destructive at worst. But the discourse around Piker refuses to go away. He continues to grow in prominence, continues to be welcomed into mainstream Democratic media spaces, and continues to be treated as a valuable voice for reaching younger voters.

 

Democrats trying to normalize Piker are making a mistake. He is not just a cool, edgy guy who wants universal health care. Nor is he disliked simply because he speaks up for Palestinians, as his supporters would claim. The core problem with Hasan Piker is that he is, at the most basic level, an ideological authoritarian. He promotes violence and repression whenever that violence and repression have a socialist lean.

 

***

 

Perhaps the most concerning part of Piker’s growing popularity is his open embrace of authoritarian governments.

 

During a two-week trip to China last year, Piker offered his thoughts on the country’s economic and political system in a series of livestreams. What did he have to say? Nothing but good things. He fell over himself to applaud the country’s technological development and urbanism to his millions of followers.

 

Given that Piker is a full-time political commentator, you might assume he’d have something to say about China’s lack of basic rights, the Communist Party’s repression of Tibet, the Uyghur genocide, the anti-democratic crackdown on Hong Kong, or Beijing’s threats to Taiwan. Yet Piker either made excuses for these abuses or outright ignored them. He went on Chinese state television to praise the country and rail against the “rumors” and “misunderstandings” about China peddled in the West.

 

When confronted with China’s human rights abuses, Piker frequently defends China’s government. When asked about the discrimination against LGBT people—China does not allow gay marriage, bans gay dating apps, and severely represses effeminate male celebrities—Piker first refused to acknowledge the problem before actively defending the ban on gay dating apps on the specious grounds that the ban was about ‘privacy’. He continued to champion the country even after his team was harassed by Chinese secret police for filming in Tiananmen Square. Setting aside that Piker’s first instinct was to show the secret police a meme of Mao Zedong on his phone (which led to the police confiscating his phone), hours later he was already arguing that America is worse.

 

We should be clear about what the Chinese Communist Party is. China is a country where mobile execution vans exist. The CCP runs a police state where you can be arrested for wrongthink as simple as holding up blank pieces of paper. The party is more than happy to literally weld people shut inside their homes, brutalize student political organizers, and jail or kill critics. It is still actively using Uyghur slave labor on a massive scale in Xinjiang. Beijing has also crushed other ethnic minorities and broken any semblance of political freedom in Hong Kong. The only reason it has refrained from invading and subjugating Taiwan is the Western world’s protection. China’s government is a nightmarish, totalitarian dictatorship.

 

And yet Piker always seems to have its back. He has downplayed the genocide in Xinjiang, recasting the concentration camps there as “reeducation” centers and claiming they’re all closed now (they are not). He has described Chinese colonialism in Tibet as a good thing, using arguments reminiscent of “civilize the savages” justifications for Western imperialism. He has deemed the idea of a politically free Hong Kong “ridiculous.”

 

Piker ends up parroting the CCP because he genuinely admires authoritarian governments. When asked which country does socialism in a way he approves of, he doesn’t point to social democracies like Sweden or Norway. He says that China is the closest to his vision of socialism. He recently said that he would “never make fun of Mao Zedong, one of the great leaders of the world.”

 

And his support for authoritarian systems isn’t limited to China. After a trip to Cuba last month, he called the Cuban government the “most moral” country in the world. Cuba, like China, is a country that jails and kills political dissidents for having the wrong opinions. Piker wishes the Soviet Union had won the Cold War, says he has “no issues” with Hezbollah, considers Hamas “a thousand times better” than Israel, and uses his platform to promote Houthi terrorists. He has said that the U.S. deserved 9/11, defended Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and even boosted North Korean propaganda.

 

Piker’s extremist worldview often takes the form of calls for political violence here in the U.S. He’s advocated for people to kill landlords, joked about the rape of wealthy women, and pushed for violence against U.S. lawmakers.

 

It’s important to document these comments as extensively as possible to emphasize the core point: Hasan Piker does not care about liberal democracy. He is an authoritarian. He would happily take away your human rights, as long as the boot stamping on your face was made in a socialist factory.

 

Recent discourse around Piker has centered on questions of antisemitism, but his support for openly anti-Jewish terrorist groups is just one component of his broader embrace of extremism. The pattern with these controversies—and the core problem with Piker’s politics—is that he propagandizes for murderous totalitarian regimes.

 

***

 

In his recent column on Piker, New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein argued that Americans should be more willing to talk to people with whom we disagree politically. To Klein’s credit, he is consistent on this point. The left got very angry with him for making a similar point about Charlie Kirk, and now the right and center are angry with him because he’s advocating for keeping Piker inside the Democratic tent.

 

The problem with Klein’s argument is that other Democrats aren’t inviting Piker to their events and on their shows in order to have tough debates about his controversial stances. Bill Buckley versus Noam Chomsky, this is not. Virtually every podcast in today’s media environment is a hugfest, a conversation where the host spends 99 percent of the time sympathetically nodding along with the guest’s points. Nobody profiling Piker is grilling him on why he defends Chinese colonialism. They’re writing puff pieces and lusting over how physically attractive he is.

 

The Democratic Party needs a big tent. Donald Trump is uniquely dangerous, and it’s irresponsible to turn away allies, even if those allies are problematic in some ways. In theory, if Piker showed signs of moderating and wanted to help Democrats defeat Trump, it would behoove moderates to swallow their complaints and accept him in the tent. The issue is that Piker has no interest in changing or in helping Democrats. The only Democrats he promotes are far-left socialists running in primaries against moderates. He’s already talking about how he might not vote for Democrats in 2028. He repeatedly talks about how Democrats are just as bad as Republicans and how Kamala Harris would be doing the exact same things as Donald Trump. Even after attending the 2024 Democratic National Convention, he did not endorse Kamala Harris for president.

 

Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to talk with people who disagree with them, whether on the right or the left. But there’s a difference between having a conversation and letting the extremists choose the direction of the party. Hasan Piker is an authoritarian socialist who openly disdains liberal democracy. His views should not be glossed over, he should not be coddled in friendly interviews, and he should not be considered a leader in the Democratic Party.

The Evolution of Trump’s Corruption

By David A. Graham

Tuesday, April 28, 2026

 

Seven years ago, during a marginally more innocent time, the Trump administration announced plans to hold the 2020 G7 summit at Donald Trump’s resort in Doral, Florida. The backlash was fierce, and somehow the then–Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney’s dismissive attitude—“Get over it”—failed to quell concerns, including among Republicans. Two days later, Trump gave up and moved the event to Camp David. (In the end, it was canceled because of COVID.)

 

Things are different in Trump’s second term. Later this year, the United States will host the G20 summit—an offshoot of the G7 that includes approximately 20 leaders of the world’s largest economies—and the president has selected Trump National Doral as the location. A few days ago, The Washington Post reported that Trump even intends to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin, a global pariah, to the meeting. But the Doral G20 has gotten nowhere near the same amount of attention, and much less backlash.

 

The way the two summits have been received feels like a case study in the differences between the first and second Trump presidencies. In 2019, neither the press nor the public was yet so fatigued by news and numb to outrage, as New York magazine observed this week, nor were they yet accustomed to a president using his position to openly enrich himself. (The Atlantic’s headline about the G7 announcement was “Trump’s Most Shameless Act of Profiteering.” How young we were!) The Republican Party also had more leaders who were willing to criticize the president, either publicly or privately. Finally, although Trump has never seemed especially vulnerable to shame, the president and his aides could still be swayed by sufficient embarrassment back then. The phrase shameless corruption gets used a lot, but Trump’s second term embodies it.

 

Although the first Trump administration created a fire hose of news, the country has been going at this pace now for 10 years, and the public is getting tired. Trump’s announcement of the location for the G20 back in early September, was overshadowed by larger stories, particularly the Epstein files; days later, Charlie Kirk was assassinated, briefly blotting out all other coverage. The G20 summit may also seem less relevant than other global events, especially given that Trump is currently shaking or breaking the world order through different means. (He has also already disinvited South Africa from the summit for largely imagined offenses against Afrikaners.)

 

Perhaps most important, the idea of Trump grubbing a few dollars out of hosting a meeting at one of his properties seems positively quaint today. During the first Trump term, I covered a succession of egregious choices: Trump refusing to financially disentangle himself from his companies; diverting Mike Pence to his Irish resort for a stopover; charging the Secret Service exorbitant rates to stay at Mar-a-Lago while protecting him; and making his hotel in Washington, D.C., a physical affront to the Constitution’s emoluments clause.

 

To say that these actions now look like nickel-and-diming is not to forgive them but to acknowledge the much larger scale on which Trump and his family are working now. The president’s government is signing off on big payouts to former aides, including Michael Flynn ($1.25 million for a case in which Flynn pleaded guilty) and Carter Page (another $1.25 million, even though courts twice dismissed his lawsuit). The government has not yet made deals with people convicted for their involvement in the January 6, 2021, riot, but their lawyers are hopeful. Trump has handed out clemency to a slew of people who have donated money to his campaign or his other efforts, which looks a great deal like selling pardons.

 

Trump’s family business, the Trump Organization, has signed lucrative deals in cities around the world where his administration is also conducting foreign policy. His son-in-law Jared Kushner, too, is making business deals in some of the same countries with which he is negotiating on behalf of the president, even though he has no government role. Trump’s media company has jumped into cryptocurrency and prediction markets, a clear conflict of interest given the federal government’s role in setting crypto policy. The New York Times recently reported on how a Syrian billionaire had sought to get sanctions removed on his country with a charm offensive that included an offer to open a Trump-branded golf course. He was egged on by a Republican member of Congress. (The sanctions have been removed, but the Trump Organization says that no deal to build a golf course is in the offing.)

 

Last summer, David Kirkpatrick of The New Yorker attempted to quantify how much Trump and his immediate family had made off the presidency and came up with a rough figure of $3.4 billion. By late January, Kirkpatrick estimated that the total was up to $4 billion. And it will continue to grow. Trump is even suing his own government, hoping to get the Justice Department—led for now by his former personal attorney—to pay him $230 million for investigating him, and the IRS to pay him $10 billion for mishandling his tax information.

 

I worry that summarizing so many examples so briefly only contributes to the same fatigue that has enabled them. If one death is a tragedy and 1 million deaths are a statistic, perhaps it is also true that charging the Secret Service thousands of dollars on hotel rooms is corruption, but raking in billions is simply a new paradigm. Yet these examples pop up regularly. The Trump administration has realized that its profiteering no longer produces the same public fury it once did, that nearly all Republican officeholders will stay quiet, and that it can grit out or ignore any residual shame. The result is on a dollar basis, and perhaps on any basis, the most corrupt administration in American history.