The Empire of Baloney

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, May 11, 2026

 

An item from NBC News: “U.S. and Iran exchange fire near the Strait of Hormuz; Trump says ceasefire still holds.” Wha? “The attacks highlighted the fragility of the ceasefire in the area around the Strait of Hormuz ....”

 

An item from the Wall Street Journal: “Muted U.S. Response to Iranian Attacks Deepens Gulf Fears About Cease-Fire.” Fears about what? More WSJ:“The efforts to play down the attacks came as the Trump administration tried to protect a fragile cease-fire and keep peace talks moving forward.”

 

In the words of that great philosopher Jules Winnfield: “English, m----------r! Do you speak it?”

 

A ceasefire is what you have when the firing has ceased. There is no fragile ceasefire that “still holds” between the United States and Iran—we are in a shooting war. There’s no ceasefire—there is firing. A good deal of it. Donald Trump may no longer be threatening (let’s not forget!) war crimes and genocide, but it’s only Monday, and no one knows what the week will bring. I don’t think there probably is much of a market for media apologia from your favorite correspondent, so I’ll try to keep this part brief: There is a real challenge for reporters and editors, opinion columnists, and the poorly trained monkeys who evidently write the headlines over at nbcnews.com when it comes to covering Donald Trump and his grim, grubby little band of slavering sycophants, which is that it is difficult to write about people who simply lie about everything all the time, from the minor to the major, changing their story from moment to moment, saying the first thing that comes into their minds or whatever it is they think will get them through the next two minutes. The difficulty is in striking a balance between implicitly adopting the assumptions of the people who are lying to you (who you know are lying to you, and who know that you know are lying to you, and you know that they know that you know, etc. ad literal nauseam) and writing as though you were always performing a real-time fact-check in the background of whatever reporting it is you are trying to do or whatever argument it is you are trying to make.

 

And so we end up with reporters writing about the possibility that a ceasefire that does not exist will cease to exist, with legal reporters and analysts tugging at the nuances of the administration’s superficial and entirely thoughtless legal pretexts without acknowledging that they are pretextual, carefully considering the “qualifications” of nominees to high office who are reality-television grotesques and dancing bears from cable “news” programs, economic writers who studiously ignore the fact that National Economic Council director and ghoul-Muppet Kevin Hassett has been transmogrified into the intellectual version of whatever kind of lobotomized “—doodle” it is you get when the non-poodle part is Walther Funk.

 

It ain’t easy, I know.

 

Every now and then, I have a podcast conversation or a panel talk with a straight-news reporter who isn’t supposed to share his opinions about the stuff he covers, exemplifying a long and proud tradition of journalistic hypocrisy, and I’ll say something that is obviously true, e.g., “J.D. Vance is a throne-sniffing Luciferian gargoyle who would sell his beloved Mawmaw into white slavery if he thought it would move him a quarter-inch closer to the presidency,” and the reporter will do that thing where someone nods and says “No” at the same time and can’t help but laughing a little bit and says, “Well, I don’t know that I would put it exactly like that. ....” Or, less colorfully (if I must), when I characterize something the president or one of his toadies has said as a “lie,” and the reporter puts on his best Very Serious Man of Washington face and goes off slightly diagonally, insisting that the statement was offered “without evidence” or that it was “bluster” or “hyperbole” or whatnot.

 

But a lie is a lie is a lie is a lie is a lie.

 

That’s important for people in the journalism business, of course—if you can’t write or say that a lie is a lie, or if you feel compelled to treat an obvious lie as though it were something other than an obvious lie, then you really can’t do the work of journalism, whether you are an opinion-and-commentary guy or a straight-news reporter—but, more than that, it is important for us as free men and women in our roles as citizens in a self-governing republic. You can run a fiefdom on deceit, a kingdom on lies, and an empire on baloney, but you cannot long maintain a free society under the rule of law without a reasonably high baseline of honesty in the public conversation. Right now, we have a situation in which federal judges have decided that they can no longer assume that the lawyers serving the executive branch are not simply lying to the courts in their filings and statements. (The legal mumbo-jumbo for this is the “presumption of regularity.”) Once you lose that, you don’t get it back. Trump right now is trying to transfer $10 billion from the federal government to his personal bank account, and much of the commentary treats with strange respect the fiction that this is a lawsuit in which the president is, in effect, suing himself, if you take that “unitary executive” stuff seriously.

 

(Where is William Gaddis when we need him?)

 

The governments of free societies are based on consent, and there is no consent without trust. Trump is, of course, a pathological liar in his own right, but what is arguably worse is that he makes telling the most risible, shameful, and obvious lies a condition of serving in his administration, which is easy enough for a soulless wretch such as J.D. Vance, who already has lowered himself below the possibility of degradation, but consider how thoroughly association with Trump has corrupted—or revealed the corruption in—figures such as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Thune, and Tom Cotton. 

 

Words matter. Some words take the form of arguments. Some take the form of promises. Some take the form of lies. And some take the form of equivocation. It is better to be direct.

 

English: Do you speak it?

 

Words About Words

 

Note to the former Department of Defense: I will cut you.

 

The U.S. Department of War (Except When It’s in Iran or When We Need Some Legal Ass-Coverage In Which Case It Certainly Is NOT a War) is winning one arms race, i.e., the weaponization of irritatingly stupid acronyms. Behold the “Presidential Unseal and Reporting System for UAP Encounters,” or PURSUE.

 

Seriously: I will cut you.

 

In Other Wordiness ...

 

Slate: “Does John Roberts’ Whites-Only Childhood Home Explain the Supreme Court’s Callais Ruling?”

 

Clowns. Shameful stuff.

 

And Furthermore ...

 

Mrs. W. is a highly educated and literate woman but not one typically given to literary flourishes of the sort for which her husband has a weakness. So when I texted to ask for an update on the children the other day and her answer contained both the words “shenanigans” and “antics,” I knew it was time for an in-person appearance.

 

Economics for English Majors

 

When we talk about competition in economics, we tend to talk mainly about competition among producers and among sellers: We talk about how firms such as Amazon and Walmart work to maintain competitive prices, we wonder how American companies are supposed to compete with subsidized or protected competitors in China or the European Union, and we celebrate the role of competition in achieving economic efficiency and providing consumers with lower prices and more choices.

 

And that’s all true. But we also compete—often in a much more significant way—as consumers.

 

One of the stress-inducing aspects of what we call, for lack of a better word, globalization is that Americans (and local consumers everywhere) compete more directly with buyers from around the world than they did a generation ago. You can see this most dramatically illustrated in the case of limited-edition products or goods that are by nature produced in relatively small numbers.

 

Thirty years ago, a guy looking to buy a Rolex in Dallas was mostly competing with consumers who lived within easy driving distance of the local Rolex dealer, which typically would have a selection of most models in stock and for sale at the authorized-dealer price. But the rise of Internet-enabled global commerce means that the same guy in Dallas is now competing with every potential buyer everywhere in the world who wants that same watch, which produces some perverse results: absence of stock at authorized dealers and prices on the secondary market that far exceed authorized-dealer prices, meaning that buyers are left to pay two or three times the notional dealer price for secondhand goods. (There is an Audemars Piguet watch boutique that I have popped my head into a few times over the years that is fully staffed up and that has never, as far as I have seen, had any inventory in stock for sale.) It’s the same with limited-edition sneakers or Ferraris and things like that—but it also is the case with non-exotic goods such as jet fuel and houses and workers.

 

The increase in home prices, owing in no small part to barriers to construction in the markets where the jobs and opportunities are most abundant, has led to a growth in investor-owned rental properties, with private-equity funds and financial firms buying up single-family homes and operating lucrative rental businesses. This has produced a great deal of angst and rage among would-be homebuyers and the politicians who are sensitive to them, but, so far, no one seems to be listening very carefully to the market, which is saying: We need to build more houses in Austin, Boston, Silicon Valley, and other places where people want to live. The same firms that are investing in rental businesses presumably would invest in building new houses and selling them if it were as lucrative, but it isn’t—at least in many markets at this time. If you want to make housing more abundant, then the thing to do is to make housing more abundant. More is more.

 

The same holds true with firms that complain about a lack of workers in fields such as construction trades and other skilled blue-collar work. There isn’t a shortage of would-be workers in these fields, any more than there is a shortage of would-be agricultural workers or would-be hotel-room cleaners: The problem is that would-be employers are not offering sufficiently high wages for these jobs. “Americans just won’t do these jobs!” comes the cry from the farm lobby or the hotel industry, but that is not quite right—Americans won’t do those jobs at the wages the farmers and hoteliers wish to pay. The economic arguments for turning a blind eye to illegal immigration are particularly vexing: If you cannot run a profitable business without systematically breaking the law, then you don’t have a business at all, properly speaking—you have a criminal enterprise. If a hotel cannot operate profitably while paying market wages, then the problem isn’t maids and porters who do not wish to work for sub-market pay—the problem is to be found in economic conditions peculiar to that industry.

 

The same politicians who tax and regulate the crap out of every business from cosmetologists (2,100 hours of education required in Iowa) to plumbers (in many states, becoming a master plumber involves more years of education than going law school) rarely if ever stop to think about how these costs could put downward pressure on wages, to such an extent that otherwise law-abiding businessmen become habitual criminals when it comes to labor and immigration law. But we pile up costs on businesses and then talk as though the problem with the hotel industry is that people who clean rooms are getting paid too much.

 

On both sides of the transaction, we tend to talk as though the other party had all the power: The argument for minimum-wage laws and mandatory employer-provided benefits is based on the assumption that workers don’t really have much choice and have to take whatever the bosses are offering them, which not only isn’t true for highly skilled and in-demand workers but also is true for less-skilled workers, as anybody who has ever tried to hire a babysitter (ahem) can tell you: The minimum wage where I live is $12.77, but good luck finding childcare at that rate unless you want to leave your children in the care of hobos. Similarly, we often talk about producers and retailers as though they had unilateral price-setting power, e.g., the old saw about companies “simply passing on costs” to consumers, which is far from a simple thing when consumers have choices, especially in highly price-sensitive markets such as fast food or inexpensive clothing.

 

Global shipping has become much more efficient over the course of several decades. That means that consumers have a lot more choices and, in many cases, enjoy lower prices for manufactured goods. It also means that it is a lot easier to redirect a gallon of jet fuel or gasoline from North American consumers to Asian or African consumers if that’s what the market wants. That’s why even with our splendidly productive domestic energy industry, Americans are not sheltered from shocks to the petroleum markets—which is only fair, since the current big ugly shock was caused by Americans, who are really smart and creative as entrepreneurs and absolute blockheads as voters.

 

In 2024, a rare Star Wars doll sold for more than $1.3 million. It wasn’t a one-of-a-kind, but pretty rare: About 25 are thought to exist. But scarcity is a real thing, and, from that point of view, everything from a gallon of gasoline to a pair of socks is a limited edition—and, at some margin, the economics are going to reflect that. If you want more, then think twice before you vote for politicians who get in the way of more.

 

In Closing

 

I don’t think I would have liked the late Ted Turner, though I did once spend a few happy hours wandering around one of his vast properties in Montana. Turner may have had some silly political views but, God bless him, he put his money where his big ol’ mouth was when it came to land conservation. And I suppose somebody was going to create the 24-hour news cycle if he hadn’t got to it first. Turner was the best friend the American bison has had since Charlie Goodnight, with 51,000 shaggies roaming more than 2 million acres. As legacies go, that is magnificent.