The EU’s Inexplicable Aggression Toward America’s Tech Industry

By Josh Hodges

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

Last month, the American AI company Anthropic reported that Chinese operators had circumvented its security safeguards to develop military software, including air-defense suppression tools simulating strikes on Taiwanese targets. Chinese AI labs have also siphoned off Claude’s capabilities to train rival models. Months before that, the EU sanctioned two China-based companies for their roles in cyberattacks across six member states. And in January, a San Francisco jury convicted a former Google engineer of stealing AI trade secrets for China’s benefit.

 

China is coming for Western technology, and neither the United States nor Europe can claim they haven’t been warned. The EU’s own sanctions show that its leaders understand the danger of an authoritarian adversary willing to hack and steal its way to technological dominance over the West and, ultimately, the world.

 

Given that threat, Europe has every reason to stand alongside the American companies that China is targeting. Instead, the EU increasingly treats those companies as enemies.

 

On September 21, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined Google, whose AI trade secrets had been stolen for China’s benefit, nearly $500 million over its handling of users’ location data under EU privacy rules. That came barely two months after the separate European Commission fined Google nearly $1 billion over its search rankings and restrictions on purchases outside Google Play.

 

European penalties against America’s leading technology companies now total roughly $18 billion, with Google’s alone accounting for nearly $12 billion. According to U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, the EU’s fines against Google account for “over 2 percent of the EU’s budget,” effectively making the company a larger financial contributor to the bloc than many EU member states. In late September, France’s Minister for Europe proposed using €4.6 billion in Google fines to cut what member states pay into the EU budget.

 

The rest of America’s technology sector is getting much the same treatment as Google. EU officials have already used the Digital Services Act to investigate how X moderates speech, while House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan has accused them of pressuring the platform to censor political speech the European Union disfavored. The European Commission ultimately fined X $140 million over its blue-check system, advertising database, and refusal to give them sufficient access to its data.

 

Similarly, Apple was fined $570 million by the European Commission over the App Store’s management of outside purchases, on top of a $2 billion penalty involving music-streaming apps the year before. Meta was fined another $228 million over its advertising model.

 

In June, the European Commission went further, preliminarily designating Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure under the Digital Markets Act — even though it conceded that neither meets the law’s quantitative thresholds. That move would subject both cloud services to European regulations backed by fines of up to 10 percent of the companies’ annual revenue.

 

Meanwhile, potential changes to the Digital Networks Act described in a leaked January draft raised the prospect of requiring American platforms to subsidize European telecom companies through “network usage fees.” Doing so would directly contradict the EU’s explicit promise in its 2025 trade commitment to the United States that it would not adopt such fees.

 

In its quest for “digital sovereignty,” Europe has become shamelessly determined to bleed America’s technology industry dry. Never mind that it’s targeting a democratic ally’s companies already under attack from China, or that these are the very companies whose technology European businesses and broader economy have depended on for years.

 

Even the commission has struggled to replace American technology with European alternatives. This summer the European Commission rolled out a “sovereign” backup to Microsoft Teams. Its staff kept using Teams. One official called the replacement “absolute shit,” Politico reported; another conceded that if American technology went dark, the U.S. would “instantly win the war.”

 

When Europe’s homegrown alternatives inevitably fall short, the fallback won’t be European; it will be a choice between America and China. Europe has a direct stake in keeping American companies strong, both for its own economy and for the West’s broader economic and national security.

 

Beijing, of course, isn’t complaining about Europe’s aggression toward U.S. tech companies.

 

Chinese state-owned outlets have praised the EU’s fine against X as evidence of the bloc’s willingness to confront major technology companies. They’ve also characterized European investigations into Google and Meta as flashpoints in the transatlantic relationship and described the bloc’s technology disputes with Washington as “a new focal point of transatlantic conflict.”

 

But Beijing’s support for that scrutiny disappears as soon as Chinese companies are involved. Any EU proposals to remove or even investigate high-risk Chinese suppliers are framed under the same media apparatus as “naked protectionism” and “unreasonable suppression.”

 

Beijing clearly wants European markets open to Chinese companies and European regulators occupied with American ones. And its state media is perfectly willing to encourage the fights that help make that possible. All the while, Chinese operators will keep trying to hack into and steal from companies on both sides of the Atlantic. European leaders should recognize whose interests they are serving. Burdening American companies gives their Chinese competitors more room to advance, while the resulting disputes give Beijing more opportunities to divide the allies.

 

Europe has another reason to reconsider its approach: The United States still holds substantial advantages in the global AI race. American firms drew $286 billion in private AI investment last year, 23 times China’s total, according to Stanford’s 2026 AI Index. The United States hosts roughly three-quarters of the world’s AI computing power; China, about 15 percent. And where Chinese labs have closed the gap, they’ve often done it by copying: According to Anthropic, a single Alibaba campaign used fraudulent accounts to generate more than 151 million exchanges with Claude between May and July this year to train its own models. China’s frontier is, in no small part, built on the back of America’s technology and innovation.

 

The EU claims to understand the danger of Chinese technological dominance. It cannot expect to prevent that outcome while relentlessly penalizing the American companies best positioned to compete. Each new fight with those companies is another opening for Beijing, and Europe has already given it far too many.

Tucker Carlson Receives a World War II Education

By Brittany Bernstein

Monday, October 05, 2026

 

Since leaving Fox News, Tucker Carlson’s talents as a debater have atrophied, likely due to a lack of exercise.

 

As an independent journalist, Carlson tends to interview people who share his conspiratorial worldview. In these lengthy conversations, Carlson will nod along as his guests proffer bizarre theories about how things really work, interjecting to amplify, but rarely to contradict, the latest conspiracy theory du jour.

 

All those friendly interviews with like-minded guests have left Carlson unprepared to deal with serious pushback from someone who knows his subject and is constitutionally incapable of being riled up by the veteran broadcaster’s routine.

 

Carlson met such a person in his most recent guest, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former member of Parliament who advocates building up the British military as a means of deterring further Russian aggression.

 

What began as a conversation about whether Britain should prepare for a possible conflict with Russia ultimately devolved into Carlson arguing that he “never understood” why Britain fought in World War II in the first place. Rees-Mogg’s country is worse off culturally and economically for having fought the war, Carlson asserts, refusing to alter course when confronted with Rees-Mogg’s evidence to the contrary.

 

Carlson lays out a theory of WWII that relies on the false premise that war with Hitler could easily have been avoided had allied leaders wished to do so. He implies that Hitler was simply correcting the wrongs done to Germany at the conclusion of World War I and had no design to occupy Great Britain.

 

“I’m certainly not here defending Hitler,” Carlson said before going on to argue that “the idea that Hitler just randomly rolled into Poland is a lie.”

 

“The truth is that Germany had big parts carved out of it, including parts of Prussia.” He further argues that the U.K. had “nothing to do with” the Treaty of Versailles, which assigned the previously German provinces of Posen and Western Prussia to Poland. However, the U.K. played a key role in convening and negotiating the treaty. And despite Carlson’s suggestion that Hitler was interested only in overturning the Versailles Treaty, Hitler did not stop at Posen and the Danzig Corridor, but went on to occupy the entirety of Western Poland in September 1939.

 

Pressed on what would have become of the U.K. had it not to gone to war with Germany, Rees-Mogg points out that his country’s entire cultural inheritance, including its language, would have been trampled.

 

“We’d be speaking German,” Rees-Mogg says.

 

That outcome, Carlson suggests, occurred anyway by other means, namely mass migration.

 

“Who cares?” Carlson said. “There are a lot of people in Britain who can’t speak English. So it would be nice to have at least a European language spoken in your country.”

 

Educated in a milieu that prizes debate, Rees-Mogg ably deconstructs Carlson’s arguments and lays down a marker to show his audience where Carlson’s rhetorical moves were leading him.

 

“You’re verging on defending Hitler,” Rees-Mogg says. “I think this is not really what you want to be doing.”

 

Carlson replies: “Yeah, I guess I’m just a secret Nazi. I’m actually not a secret Nazi . . . and hardly a public Nazi.”

 

“I’m reassured,” Rees-Mogg deadpans in a subtly devastating blow.

 

The U.K. has its problems, as Rees-Mogg conceded, but hosting U.S. troops is not one of them. Carlson, however, seemed convinced that the U.S. posed a great threat to British sovereignty. Rees-Mogg responded by making the simple point that the U.K. and the U.S. have shared security interests, which are secured by having American troops on British soil.

 

But the arguments over WWII and its legacy were really a proxy for the debate over whether and to what degree the West should be supporting Ukraine in defending itself from Russian aggression.

 

Carlson, who has interviewed Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and spoken favorably about Russia’s war efforts in Ukraine, told Rees-Mogg he “never cared” that Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 because Ukraine “is the most corrupt country in the world.”

 

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said Carlson’s latest interview shows he “needs help. Serious help.”

 

“When it seemed impossible for Toxic Tucker to descend deeper into the sewer here he goes opining that U.K. should have let Nazis take over,” he posted on X. “Forget that Hitler murdered 11 million people? I thought Tucker was against killing?”

 

Last year, National Review published a lengthy essay on Carlson’s “dark turn.”

 

After his firing from Fox News in 2023, Carlson established his self-named podcast and later hosted white nationalist Nick Fuentes and Holocaust revisionist Darryl Cooper.

 

When Cooper appeared on the show, he argued that Winston Churchill, not Hitler, was the “chief villain” of World War II.

 

Weeks later, Carlson invited on Fuentes, who has called Hitler “awesome,” “right,” and “f***ing cool.”

 

Carlson behaved so deferentially in his interview with Putin in 2024 that the Russian dictator himself said he “did not get full satisfaction” from the interview.

 

“To be honest, I thought that he would behave aggressively and ask so-called sharp questions,” Putin said. “I was not just prepared for this, I wanted it, because it would give me the opportunity to respond in the same way.”

Howard Zinn and the Failures of the Left

By Jeremy Black

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, by Dave Zirin (Dutton, 320 pp., $33)

 

This biography, an apotheosis of Howard Zinn, begins with the words, “What would Howard say?” Apparently, for each major social or political event, people want to hear “the analysis of an activist-historian.” And that is what we are offered: sage as saint, plus Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation, as amanuensis and guardian of the Sacred Flame.

 

There are various ways to write about historians. For example, David Hayton’s portrait of the British historian Lewis Namier (who, rather unlike Zinn, was outside of the establishment), offers possibly the best combination of personal and intellectual biography; it addresses contexts and contingencies, the play of professional connection and the role of patronage. Hence Hayton does a good job of explaining the political reasons why Namier did not get an academic post for so very long.

 

And then there is Zirin. All he can say about Zinn’s academic career is, “Given what we know about the complicity of ‘the Academy’ with the FBI, the Red Scare may have scared away his teaching prospects.” Zirin’s subject is a hero. The author is fired up not only by his perception of the past (he did not meet Zinn until the mid-1990s) but also his urgent concern about the present, directed at “Trump and his cabinet of reality-show contestants, pro-wrestling executives, and fascist-fanfic authors.” These villains, Zirin says, “lock away the works of Zinn not because they loathe the historian but because they fear the history.”

 

In a scene-setting introduction, Zirin uses the tired concept of false consciousness to explain why the Black Lives Matter protests were followed, a few years later, by 77 million voters’ choosing to reelect President Donald Trump. The book’s prospectus promises engagement but not necessarily debate or nuance. In other words, exactly what might be anticipated of a work about Zinn:

 

Think of this book as ‘A People’s History of Howard Zinn’: it’s a story about the small acts and grand struggles of the twentieth century that shaped him and the ways he shaped those struggles as well. A closer look at his life also provides insight into how to tough it out during the worst of times and why we can never let the bastards steal our hope.

 

And so we start, in “a jungle of terrible odors” where Zinn was born, Brooklyn in 1922. The author’s emphasis is on the city’s poverty even though, especially at that time, it was far better to be a Jew born in New York than in Eastern Europe. Having worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and enlisted as a bombardier during World War II, Zinn returns home and becomes part of a radical milieu that, Zirin argues, resisted paranoia: “Because Western powers no longer needed the Red Army to fight the Nazis on the Eastern Front, the USSR was quickly branded an existential, godless enemy.” Tell that to the Poles. Besides, as Zirin has to note, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s perception of domestic radicals was widely shared in America.

 

It is not only Hoover who is criticized but also “anti-communist liberals.” Zinn in 1948 backs the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, candidate of the Progressive Party, against Harry Truman. He gets a post at Spelman, a historically black women’s college in Atlanta. There, “intersectionality” (avant la lettre) and “Black feminist activism” play out, with Zinn as an active participant opposed to the “paternalism” that does not accept his views. He is dismissed in 1963. In 1964, he joins Boston University. Old academic quarrels rarely retain their relevance or interest, but Zinn’s clash with Boston University’s president and later chancellor, John Silber — a conservative Democrat critical of many left-wing nostrums — provides Zirin with an opportunity to employ his subtlety to go after Donald Trump. He writes, of Silber: “The ego on display was truly and even impressively ahead of its time. The man was born fifty years too soon. And just as with a certain modern, far more powerful, far less well-read individual, the students knew how to hit him where it hurt.”

 

The book makes much of Zinn’s involvement in the “Black Freedom Struggle,” with an emphasis on his support for “modes of leadership that didn’t come from the top down, but from the bottom up.” The rest of the 1960s find Zinn occupied with civil rights and the movement against the Vietnam War. Zirin sees “anti-liberalism” as the common theme that linked the supporters of the war with those who opposed civil rights: a somewhat warped presentation. That leads him to a hilarious question: “Why wasn’t the entire country in the streets?” He also continuously snipes at others who might share Zinn’s limelight: RAND Corporation whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, for example, is “a smooth talker” who enjoys fame and is always willing “to go to the press with bravado.” Alan Dershowitz is “the future publicity-addicted defense attorney, now disgraced for his association with notorious child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.” Judgment is absent and histrionic language is spread thick. Meanwhile, Zinn’s intellectual influence is exaggerated.

 

Given the great noise that Zinn made relative to his little insight and nuance, it might be asked why one should bother with a new biography of the man. The fact is that Zinn would make a worthwhile topic for a good book: one primarily about the misleading character of so much historical “analysis” (e.g., as Zirin mentions, “When Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, Zinn attempted to theorise the traumatic event by speaking about it in the context of President Johnson’s war agenda”), the divisions and failures of the left, and the successes of capitalism — not least in the sales of Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Zirin is incapable of such analysis and does not appear to understand the questions.

 

The biographer’s focus is the notion of “this land’s five-hundred-year ongoing fight between progress and reaction.” So much for other historical themes. So much for urbanization, economic growth, and religion: the latter conspicuous for its neglect by both Zinn and Zirin, and a subject handled far better by Philip Jenkins in A History of the United States. Indeed, in terms of works that are far better than Zinn’s, Walter A. McDougall’s Freedom Just Around the Corner and Throes of Democracy, complemented by his Promised Land, Crusader State, deserve close attention.

 

Zinn was, of course, a polemical political scientist rather than a historian; a master at leaving out of his scholarship what did not really suit his purposes. He was no Fernand Braudel in his scope and interests but a shouter, one without particular insight or originality. Read A People’s History, if you must, but do not bother with Zirin. He does not illuminate his subject’s problems and deficiencies. He magnifies them many times over.

Trump Is Betting on the Wrong Europe

By Thomas Wright

Saturday, September 19, 2026

 

Donald Trump says he wants a Europe that is more capable of defending itself. But the nationalist-populist movements he is championing there will not advance this agenda and may put Europe at odds with the United States over China.

 

Earlier this month, the nationalist-populist Alternative for Germany party came just a few seats short of an outright majority in a regional parliament, its best-ever result. This Sunday, Germans will vote in two more regional elections. The ruling Christian Democrats are behind in both races, and the AfD is expected to do well in one. On Wednesday, Chancellor Friedrich Merz canceled his visit to the United Nations General Assembly next week, sparking speculation that he could soon be forced to resign.

 

U.S. officials are ebullient. Trump greeted the AfD’s recent electoral victory with a triumphant message on Truth Social that finished with “MGGA” (Make Germany Great Again). Richard Grenell, Trump’s former ambassador to Germany and now a presidential envoy, called the result “a huge win and a new day in Germany.”

 

The Trump administration has consistently embraced Europe’s nationalist-populist parties as ideological partners, and even launched a State Department fund to support MAGA-aligned European groups. It surely sees the AfD’s ascendance as a sign that politics are moving in its direction. But that is true only if Trump’s real goal is a fragmented Europe that accommodates Russian and Chinese power and is unable to punch its weight. Such an outcome would be catastrophic for U.S. interests.

 

Some people in the administration insist that the idea is not to weaken Europe but to shift the burden for its conventional defense to the Europeans themselves. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for example, reject claims that the administration is soft on Russia and say that they are calling instead for greater European self-sufficiency. Colby advocates for what he calls NATO 3.0, in which Europeans would take on the primary responsibility for their conventional defense.

 

But the nationalist populists do not share this view. The AfD has called for an end to all arms deliveries to Ukraine and a lifting of all sanctions on Russia. Its co-leaders, Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla, boycotted Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to the Bundestag in 2024, dismissing the Ukrainian president as a “war and beggar president.”

 

In France, Marine Le Pen, the parliamentary leader of the nationalist-populist party National Rally and the front-runner for next spring’s presidential election, has promised to take France out of NATO’s integrated military command (France would remain a member of the alliance). Such a withdrawal would hardly help the Trump administration shift the burden of NATO’s defense to Europe.

 

The Trump administration’s affinity for Europe’s nationalist-populist right seems to be almost entirely cultural and civilizational, and based on the notion that Europe’s populists are fighting the same culture wars—including against immigration—as their counterparts in the United States. J. D. Vance explicitly praised then–Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as an ally in defense of Western civilization at an election rally in Budapest on the eve of the Hungarian elections. And the Trump team seems to see the European populist right’s enemies—the European Union and national political establishments—as versions of its own domestic foes. This commonality appears to take precedence over foreign-policy concerns.

 

Trump officials have blasted centrist European governments for being too soft on Beijing but have said nothing about the populist right’s position on China. Some of these parties—particularly the AfD and Fidesz, in Hungary—favor much closer ties to the American adversary. The AfD’s Weidel lived in China for six years, speaks Mandarin, and wrote her doctoral dissertation about China’s pension system. Chrupalla, her co-leader, accused the German government of waging “economic war” against China for proposing a tougher trade policy toward Beijing. They have both called for warmer relations with China. Orbán, who was defeated in the Hungarian elections earlier this year, blocked the EU from criticizing Beijing, initiated an “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership” with China, and welcomed Chinese investment in Hungarian infrastructure.

 

These largely transactional attitudes toward China and Russia may reflect a broader worldview among the nationalist populists, who praise Trump but are deeply skeptical of American power. In an analysis for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Jeremy Cliffe argued that the AfD supports a multipolar world order and believes that great powers, such as China and Russia, should possess spheres of influence—a perspective that Trump seems sympathetic toward. The AfD, Cliffe wrote, “may regard Trump as a civilizational ally, but its senior figures have long described the United States as a raumfremd in Europe, a hard to translate German word that means something like ‘territorially alien.’”

 

If parties with these views take power, they could reduce American influence in Europe while making common European action on Russia and China much more difficult. They will also make Eastern Europeans nervous about German rearmament. In 2011, Radek Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, said, “I fear German power less than German inaction.” He recently revisited that remark, telling the German newspaper Handelsblatt, “We want Germany, under democratic leadership and as the largest economy in Europe, to play a strong role in securing our common security. But we remember all too well where a rearmed Germany can lead in the hands of a far-right, pro-Russian party—and that is exactly what the AfD represents.”

 

Senior Trump-administration officials say they are building a Europe that will carry its own weight. Maybe they are so beguiled by the nationalist populists’ domestic agenda that they have not yet realized it will come at the expense of NATO 3.0. Or maybe Trump doesn’t care about Europe’s defense, doesn’t see it as a U.S. interest, and doesn’t believe that Europe has any contribution to make to America’s security.

 

Trump and Vance seem to be laying the foundation for a more divided Europe that is incapable of deterring Russia, ever more dependent on China, and at odds with itself. If the administration continues on this path, it may get the European culture war it wants, but the United States will lose its ally.

El-Sayed Shouldn’t Get Away with It

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

‘I do not agree with this statement, nor do I give much weight to the statements made by a social media streamer,” Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed told Axios this week. “Streamer” is the dismissive sobriquet El-Sayed has applied to Hasan Piker ever since the scandalous online commentator became a millstone around the candidate’s neck. And yet, the pejorative isn’t doing as much heavy lifting as El-Sayed might like.

 

The comments El-Sayed tried to distance himself from were certainly toxic but, for Piker, hardly uncharacteristic. “Pound for pound as far as the number of deaths, yes,” the “streamer” said when asked by Axios reporter Alex Thompson whether the United States is “worse” than al-Qaeda. “We have caused tremendous terror all around the world.”

 

 

In the interview and his subsequent remarks, Piker displayed an impressive level of ignorance about the subjects on which he opines. He suggested that accidental mistargeting in wartime amounts to “terror.” It doesn’t. Legitimate mistakes are not even war crimes, properly understood. He indicated that the U.S. — and, presumably, our Israeli overlords — installed and propped up the Ahmed al-Sharaa regime in Syria. He conspicuously elided Turkey’s significant role in the operations that brought down Bashar al-Assad, as well as Israel’s skepticism toward the al-Sharaa regime and Washington’s overtures to it.

 

Piker doesn’t seem to know much. But he does have a following among the similarly dispossessed and bitter. That was what attracted El-Sayed to Piker in the first place, and vice versa. He was a vehicle that helped introduce El-Sayed to young Democratic-primary voters. El-Sayed may want to run away from that record today, but Piker is not playing along. In that regard, Piker has a point. He brought El-Sayed to this dance, and he shouldn’t let anyone forget it.

 

Piker’s outsize presence in Michigan’s Democratic senatorial primary race was controversial from the outset. Even before the pair held their first joint rally in early April, El-Sayed was forced to explain the association. The candidate told Politico that it was “critical” that Democrats embrace Piker. “I’m not here to disavow people’s views,” El-Sayed insisted. “This whole gotcha game, platform policing, cancel culture — I thought we were over it.” Indeed, he cast his own lack of discernment as a species of bravery: “In politics,” El-Sayed insisted, “condemnation is what you do when you can’t win an argument.” After all, if “perfectly inoffensive won elections,” he later added, “then Donald Trump would never have been president.”

 

El-Sayed’s Democratic opponents were not convinced. Both State Senator Mallory McMorrow and Representative Haley Stevens objected to Piker’s invitation to participate in Michigan politics, and they made El-Sayed’s indiscretion a wedge issue.

 

Piker is a “misogynistic and antisemitic” “provocateur,” McMorrow said. He “says extremely offensive things in order to generate clicks,” not unlike, she added, the racist right-wing influencer Nick Fuentes. Piker’s presence in Michigan has caused “pain and trauma across our state.”

 

Stevens agreed. Piker is “the exact opposite of someone I’d be campaigning with,” she said. “El-Sayed is choosing to campaign with someone who has a history of antisemitic rhetoric.” To her credit, Stevens declined to back away from her condemnation even after she narrowly lost the Michigan Senate primary to El-Sayed.

 

Even much of Michigan’s Democratic political establishment rained opprobrium down on El-Sayed. Piker’s rhetoric “sounds deeply antisemitic, consistently, and therefore not someone that should be helping anybody out in the Michigan political environment,” Senator Elise Slotkin observed, adding that he consistently unleashes a “cascading set of antisemitic tropes.”

 

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel told The Atlantic’s David Frum that she believed Piker was “very antisemitic, in addition to being racist and sexist and many other things.” Moreover, Nessel challenged the Democratic establishment to stand up and be counted. “Who are the members of Congress, of our congressional delegation in Michigan who will say, That’s not right?” she asked. “Is it only going to be a handful of us? Will we have any allies that are non-Jews who will stand up and say, This is wrong?”

 

Democratic Representative Hillary Scholten went so far as to promise to withhold her vote for El-Sayed if he won the party’s nomination to the U.S. Senate. “I think that condoning behavior like this from candidates like Abdul El-Sayed is taking us in a direction that we don’t want to go as a party,” she said. “I would never stand on a stage or be at a rally with someone like Hasan Piker because he chose to say comments like that.”

 

Even some of El-Sayed’s own staffers have experienced crises of conscience. The candidate’s comments in public as well as private “give credibility to the claims of [El-Sayed’s] antisemitism and pro-Islamist regimes/factions,” said Jordan Domingue, a former top security official on El-Sayed’s campaign. “Personally,” he added, “I regret and feel shame for excusing antisemitism and for not leaving sooner.”

 

Through it all, El-Sayed retained his penchant for stoic condescension. “I love and revere the Jewish people because I love ALL people,” read El-Sayed’s late-March response to sharp criticisms from the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt. “And I criticize Israel’s genocide because I love ALL people. I pray someday you understand.” If only the ADL wasn’t so pig-ignorant about the ongoing “genocide” in Gaza, where Israeli combat operations had ended almost six months earlier.

 

El-Sayed’s initially protective instinct toward Piker stemmed from self-interest. Far from undermining his prospects, the El-Sayed–Piker buddy act boosted his support. Before their joint rallies, El-Sayed never led any poll. Afterward, he led in all but three polls of that race — often by double digits.

 

Piker helped El-Sayed corner the market for anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiment among the youngest and most radical members of Michigan’s Democratic-primary electorate. That was barely enough to push him over the finish line. Now, sensing danger, El-Sayed would like to erase the primary from public memory. Good luck with that.

 

Hasan Piker has no interest in letting El-Sayed squirm away. Piker will not quietly allow voters to overlook his claims that Americans deserved the 9/11 attacks, that Israel is more immoral and inhumane than Hamas, and, now, that the United States is a greater force for evil in the world than even al-Qaeda.

 

Piker is a true believer, as is El-Sayed. The difference between them is that one is trying to win a statewide election. To do that, El-Sayed seems to believe that he can ensorcell Michigan voters into forgetting all they know about the toxic presence on the Democratic column this November.

 

Michiganders shouldn’t let him get away with it.

Osama bin Laden’s Revenge

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, September 09, 2026

 

According to the “American Taliban,” John Walker Lindh, the September 11 attacks were supposed to be the first of a three-stage assault on the United States.

 

In one of his FBI interrogations, Lindh — who had direct contact with Osama bin Laden and was informed of al-Qaeda’s preparation for attacks inside the United States — said that 9/11 was just the beginning. The “second attack would involve attacking nuclear facilities, oil/gas pipelines, or some kind of biological attack,” the FBI’s report read. Part two would “bring the U.S. to its knees,” Lindh contended. A third unspecified attack would “finish it off.”

 

Lindh’s confessions were made public in late October 2002, when 9/11 was still fresh and the Islamist terrorist threat pronounced. Only months earlier, on the Fourth of July, an Egyptian gunman had stormed the ticketing counter at Los Angeles International Airport and shot two Israeli El Al employees to death. Weeks later, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo executed a campaign of sniper attacks targeting Washington, D.C.–area residents, killing ten and wounding three more. Islamist mass casualty events in Israel, Kuwait, Kenya, Yemen, Russia, and Bali, Indonesia — where a suicide bomber targeted a Western tourist trap on October 12, killing more than 200 — demonstrated that the Global War on Terror was truly a world war.

 

It was only the following month that bin Laden’s “Letter to America” began circulating inside the United States.

 

Given all that preceded it, the letter got an understandably poor reception, but it was not dismissed as a document unworthy of study. Surprisingly enough, the terrorist kingpin’s indictment of the United States touched only cursorily on its foreign policy (and in delusionally unpersuasive fashion, at that). What the letter revealed was that bin Laden’s problem was primarily with the Jews.

 

“The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and [Americans] are the leaders of its criminals,” OBL fumed. America’s presence in Saudi Arabia, by invitation and as a legacy of the 1991 war that had ejected Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, was a grave insult to the “ummah.” So, too, are American liberties, which allow for “immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and trading with interest.” He charged the United States with releasing AIDS into the wild and waging a campaign of environmental destruction as represented by, of all things, the Senate’s failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Each of America’s allegedly nefarious acts was, bin Laden claimed, the work of a secretive Hebraic sect. “Behind them stand the Jews, who control your policies, media and economy,” he concluded.

 

At the time, the letter was held in nearly universal contempt. Now, 25 years later, the ghost of bin Laden has managed to establish a credulous new audience.

 

Within a few years of its initial circulation, the letter was getting a second look.

 

“Let me begin by describing bin Laden’s view of history less inflammatorily — not as anti-Semitic, but as Judeocentric,” Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in a 2007 review of a book by the international relations theorists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who have both since become reliably caustic critics of U.S. foreign policy and its close relationship with Israel.

 

Goldberg was not a fan of Mearsheimer and Walt’s own line of “Judeocentric” thought. He found their contention that Congress was controlled by the Israel lobby (they were ahead of their time) unconvincing, and he took special exception to Mearsheimer’s apparent enthusiasm for bin Laden’s works:

 

At Politics and Prose, Mearsheimer uttered this remarkable statement: “Osama bin Laden wanted very much to make sure that the attacks struck at Congress, which he saw — quite correctly — as the location of the critical support of the United States for Israel.” Mearsheimer seemed pleased, rather than appalled, that bin Laden’s analysis of Congress’s priorities squared so perfectly with his own.

 

“Who really benefits from making anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism seem so indefensible?” Goldberg asked in conclusion.

 

Fast-forward 16 years. About a month after the October 7 massacre, the worst single-day slaughter of Jews since 1945, bin Laden’s letter not only resurfaced but became a sensation among youngish social media users, particularly on the then-Chinese-owned platform TikTok.

 

“When you read Osama bin Laden’s letter to America, and you realize you’ve been lied to your whole entire life,” one commenter said directly into her camera as she brushed her hair. “Trying to go back to life as normal after reading Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ and realizing everything we learned about the Middle East, 9/11, and ‘terrorism’ was a lie,” read the caption beneath another user’s video of her dishwashing routine. “If we’re going to call Osama bin Laden a terrorist,” said one ensorcelled teen, “so is the American government.”

 

The combination of narcissism and solipsism, all in service to the promotion of a criminally insane worldview, perfectly captures the madness of the social media age.

 

Some claimed that the letter’s resurgence was an inorganic phenomenon. Blame it on the popular online journalist Yashar Ali’s “compilation” of the pro-bin Laden videos, each of which would have received less attention than they got collectively. Others insisted that the letter’s renaissance was a work of Chinese statecraft — a “proxy war” against Israel amid its ongoing hostilities with the Islamic Republic of Iran. It was comforting to believe that bin Laden’s rationalizations for mass violence didn’t have a real constituency in America. If only that were true.

 

In December 2023, a J.L. Partners poll sponsored by the Daily Mail found that, while 81 percent of all Americans expressed negative views toward bin Laden, about 30 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds were willing to tell the pollster that OBL’s antisemitic views and violent actions represented a “force for good.” That’s not a small number. Nor can it be dismissed as a youthful provocation designed to shock the elders. Positive retrospectives on bin Laden have since taken on a life of their own.

 

It was only weeks ago that Tucker Carlson squinted inquiringly as independent journalist Glenn Greenwald gushed over bin Laden’s letter, calling it a comprehensive deconstruction of the myth that the Islamists hated America only for its freedoms. The youngsters who only just discovered OBL’s missive were “shocked to discover this history that they had never been told,” Greenwald insisted. By that, he meant America’s support for Israel and its violation of Saudi Arabia’s “sacred soil.”

 

In the wake of the slaughter of Australian Jews on Bondi Beach in 2025, the British “pro-Palestinian activist” Moazzam Begg heaped praise on bin Laden’s prose, hailing the jihadist as the “voice of freedom.” Earlier this year, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim charity in America and an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing scandal, produced a back-to-school reading list that included bin Laden’s manifesto.

 

CAIR is one of several high-dollar institutional contributors to Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign, which makes sense. El-Sayed could not bring himself to commemorate the 9/11 attacks without also condemning America’s response to those attacks. The candidate has surrounded himself with figures like the streamer Hasan Piker, who famously claimed that “America deserved 9/11.”

 

If the United States didn’t exactly “deserve” those attacks, they certainly created the conditions for them, according to the Democratic nominee for Congress in Colorado’s first district, Melat Kiros. The September 11 attacks were “inevitable in the sense that we destabilized a lot of the Middle East,” she said, presumably referring to the multinational coalition that liberated Kuwait. That act, Kiros added, “forced people to believe that another act of violence was the only response.”

 

Kiros may soon be headed to Congress, along with Adam Hamawy, the Democratic nominee in New Jersey’s twelfth district, despite his work for an al-Qaeda-linked charity in 1994 and his genuine friendship with the architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman. In a post-9/11 edict smuggled out of prison, Rahman urged “Muslims everywhere to dismember their nation, tear them apart, ruin their economy, provoke their corporations, destroy their embassies, attack their interests, sink their ships . . . shoot down their planes, [and] kill them on land, at sea, and in the air. Kill them wherever you find them.”

 

“He did speak about violent things,” Hamawy said in condemnation of his friend’s rhetoric. “But it wasn’t the only thing he spoke about.” Sure. Hitler loved dogs, and bin Laden was an avid soccer fan and an amateur poet. Individuals contain multitudes. But to focus on that at the expense of their most evil and lasting contributions to history is an act of conspicuous charity.

 

When bin Laden’s letter was published, the Western world was still arguing over whether the War on Terror was a “clash of civilizations.” That language has fallen out of fashion, but it remains the most apt description of what that conflict was and remains. In the decades since 9/11, the threat posed by transnational terrorism has receded amid its battlefield defeats. But the casus belli that those 19 hijackers nursed has found a new and receptive audience among the Westerners whose civilization they set out to destroy.

 

That audience, now entering or in adulthood, is unmoored from history, ungrateful toward those who created the prosperity and safety they had the good fortune to be born into. And they will vote. When they do, they will take with them their chilling disregard for the sacrifices Americans who came before them made to preserve their liberty.

 

So, what kind of America will they vote for?

The DSA’s Problem Isn’t ‘Media Training’

By Arash Azizi

Monday, September 07, 2026

 

American socialists are convinced that they have a media-training problem.

 

In the past year, members of the Democratic Socialists of America, the country’s largest leftist organization, have won electoral victories in places such as New York City and Michigan, drawing a spotlight that the group has struggled to handle.

 

Last month, the DSA’s co-chairs, Megan Romer and Ashik Siddique, gave several high-profile interviews that even many of their most fervent supporters agree were disastrous. The two leaders struggled to give straight answers to simple questions, and they defended outlandish policies, such as abolishing prisons and police. They seemed to present socialists exactly the way their opponents caricature them: as extremist, unserious, and unprepared.

 

In damage-control mode, many of DSA’s defenders on social media are repeating the phrase media training as though it were a mantra. If only the group’s leaders had been better prepared to deal with media outlets, the thinking goes, they would have avoided this train wreck. The DSA’s communications director, Priscilla Yeverino, recently told Axios, “Our leaders aren’t politicians. They’re working-class people and new to doing media.”

 

The idea that the DSA’s troubles on prime-time television are a technical matter solvable by the right training is surely comforting, but it is also wrong. The group has a bigger problem: It is led by unpractical extremists whose views are a far cry from those that its electorally successful figures, such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, espouse.

 

This disconnect is partly explained by a sharp division within the DSA. One wing engages in mass politics and includes AOC, Mamdani, and other socialists committed to democratic principles. The other wing is sectarian and extremist: It evinces little commitment to democracy and includes open admirers of Hamas, the Iranian regime, and historical dictators such as Mao Zedong. If the interviews with the DSA’s co-chairs were embarrassing, that’s a result not of a lackluster media performance but of the actual positions the group has embraced.

 

A closer look at the interviews confirms this. Romer, who belongs to the sectarian wing, evidently did not know what the 2000 Camp David Summit was and could not say what “taxing the hell out of millionaires,” as she demanded, would look like in practice. When asked about authoritarianism in Cuba, she praised the country’s constitution and suggested that Americans should learn from it.

 

Maybe media training could have taught Romer what happened at Camp David and what a tax policy might entail. It still wouldn’t have made the pro-authoritarian politics she shares with her faction of the DSA more palatable. In December, Romer’s Red Star caucus, a self-declared Marxist-Leninist faction of the DSA, posted quotes from a speech by Mao in “celebration” of the Chinese Communist leader’s 132nd birthday. Members of the faction study the works of Mao and the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin as part of their political education. Red Star has declared its unequivocal sympathy for Hamas and praised the “good judgement” of “our socialist siblings” in Palestine for working with the Islamist organization and “external groups like Iran, Hezbollah, and Ansarallah under a principle they call unity of the fields.” In other words, Red Star is an admirer of Iran’s notorious “Axis of Resistance.”

 

That Romer wouldn’t critique authoritarianism in Cuba is not a lapse but an expression of her faction’s politics. Red Star’s stated policy couldn’t be any clearer about this: “To publicly critique a government or movement that stands in opposition to the American government is to do the U.S. State Department’s work for them, from Iran to Palestine.”

 

In other words, any state or group that opposes the American government should be beyond criticism. Liberation, the DSA’s “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist caucus,” likewise declares the United States to be “not a nation” but a “prison-house of nations, with the Euro-Americans being the jailer.”

 

Unlike Romer, Siddique belongs to the mainstream wing of the DSA, but he is bound by the group’s statements and broader culture. The sectarian wing currently dominates the DSA: The group’s convention in Chicago last year rejected a resolution opposing “all governments that engage in the repression of democratic rights.” Thus, when asked repeatedly what he thought of Fidel Castro, whom the DSA had praised in an earlier statement, Siddique awkwardly referred to “inequality in the United States” and criticized U.S. policy—deflecting the question and offering sound bites instead of engagement, much as an establishment pol might do.

 

This pro-left-authoritarian orientation explains why DSA electoral observers shamefully reported no fraud when they were dispatched to monitor the electoral sham organized by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in 2024. Those results were so bogus that even the left-wing governments of Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay couldn’t accept them. Yet at a DSA session on the subject, a pro-Maduro organization’s assessment that Venezuela’s electoral system was “one of the very best in the world” was presented as fact, as was the false claim that Venezuela’s main opposition candidates were “fascist.”

 

The two wings of the DSA are committed to wildly different methods. Mamdani governs New York City partly as a technocrat, and AOC has sought to influence the Democratic Party from within. One of the DSA’s sectarian factions, by contrast, recently suggested that socialist lawmakers “should do everything in their power to disrupt any Congressional business that does not benefit the working class or advance the socialist program.” They should, it went on, “creatively abuse their powers to make it difficult to conduct legislative business,” for instance by packing the galleries of Congress with hecklers. This faction seems to view elected lawmakers as “tribunes” for the socialist movement rather than as people who, you know, make laws.

 

The sectarian wing got the DSA to drop its endorsement of AOC and refuse to support Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. Red Star argued against endorsing AOC unless she withdrew her support for Joe Biden (then the Democratic nominee), and it refused to fundraise for the Democratic leadership or central congressional campaign. But ultimately, the DSA dropped AOC on the grounds that she was not sufficiently anti-Israel—a singular obsession of the sectarian wing. (The foreign-policy section of the DSA’s political platform discusses the details of only one country’s politics, and that’s Israel and Palestine, in which it calls for the self-determination of Palestinians without making a similar provision for Israeli Jews.)

 

For all of the extremist wing’s influence, however, my years of research into the group suggest that the DSA’s members are mostly not members of any caucuses. The average DSA member probably has more in common with AOC than with Mao or Hamas, and the nonsectarians seem especially dominant in the group’s large urban chapters—such as in New York City, where the DSA has more than 15,000 of its approximately 120,000 members. More than 80 percent of DSA members in the Bronx and Queens voted in 2024 to endorse AOC. The sectarian wing came to control much of the organization’s leadership by manipulating internal processes, which is one reason it opposes organizational referenda and other one-member-one-vote procedures.

 

The DSA’s mainstream wing includes thinkers who are committed to democracy, critical of authoritarianism (including that of socialist regimes, past and present), and who reject some of the signature policies of the sectarian wing, such as police abolition. These figures have been vocal in response to last month’s media fiasco.

 

Eric Blanc, a labor historian at Rutgers, sharply criticized Romer for “falling into a trap being set by the establishment,” which seeks “to paint DSA as extreme.” Like others in his wing, Blanc advocates for adopting a Nordic-style social democracy as a step toward overcoming capitalism. This position is also shared by the Jacobin founder and former DSA Vice Chair Bhaskar Sunkara, whose 2019 Socialist Manifesto explores Swedish social democracy in envisioning a socialism for the 21st century.

 

Reacting to the DSA’s recent media debacles, Ben Burgis, a philosopher and Jacobin writer, opined: “We don’t do ourselves any favors by refusing to say anything too negative about left-wing dictatorships targeted by US foreign policy,” especially “if we’re trying to argue that the failures of authoritarian state socialism in the twentieth century shouldn’t mean that capitalism is the best humanity will ever be able to do.” The group has failed to reassure its critics of its commitment to multiparty democracy, Burgis added.

 

Thinkers in this wing of the DSA take seriously the imperative to reconcile socialist commitments to economic justice with democratic and liberal values. Burgis, Sunkara, and the economist Mike Beggs have co-authored a forthcoming book called The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World, which attempts to offer a “realistic model” of a post-capitalist economic system. Drawing on the work of the liberal philosopher John Rawls, as well as detailed economic research, the book takes the Soviet Union to task for a “record of systematic economic failure, not just political repression” and suggests a model that mixes social ownership with a significant role for the market. It also engages the arguments of well-known critics of socialism, such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. This work puts the flippancy of Romer’s “taxing the hell out of millionaires” comment to shame.

 

But if the likes of AOC, Sunkara, Burgis, and Blanc wish for the American public to give their notions of an economically rigorous and democratically committed socialism a chance, they need to break with the fans of Mao and Hamas. So long as they share an organization with the DSA’s sectarians, they can’t complain when the media associates the DSA—and American socialism—with the extreme positions that it formally adopts and that its leaders espouse. No amount of media training can solve that.

Vance’s Scoreboard

By Daniel Foster

Friday, September 04, 2026

 

At his much commented upon White House presser, the vice president said: “America has fought a lot of wars since I’ve been alive. Forty-two years. And we have won almost none of them until Donald J. Trump became the president of the United States.”

 

By my accounting, since 1984:

 

·         Operation Praying Mantis (Iran), 1988 — Clear U.S. victory. Iranian ships and platforms destroyed, U.S. objectives achieved.

 

·         Operation Just Cause (Panama) 1989–90 — Clear U.S. victory. Noriega removed and captured.

 

·         Persian Gulf War/Desert Storm (Iraq) 1990-1991 — Decisive U.S. victory. Kuwait liberated, Iraqi forces expelled and routed.

 

·         Operation Deliberate Force (Bosnia) 1995 — U.S. victory. NATO air campaign helped force Bosnian Serbs into Dayton settlement.

 

·         Operation Desert Fox (Iraq) 1998 U.S. victory in its limited objectives.

 

·         Operation Allied Force (Kosovo) 1999 — U.S. victory in its stated objectives. Serbian forces withdrew from Kosovo after NATO bombing.

 

·         Destruction of ISIS, (Iraq, Syria etc.) 2014–2019 — Unambiguous U.S. victory. Trump shares credit with Obama.

 

Even though it was a mistake to start it, I’d put the Iraq War in the U.S. victory column. Iraq today is not Switzerland, but it is a functioning state with an elected government, regular transfers of power, and security forces capable of keeping nonstate threats manageable. It has also held up in the face of the war on Iran, not a small thing for a state full of Shia and Kurds.

 

There are failures (though not strictly speaking losses) in the column as well. Somalia, Libya. Afghanistan was having a rough go of it when we pulled up stakes and quit.

 

In any event, it’s not clear to me that Vance’s statement is especially supportable.

Why Keir Starmer Should Never Run NATO

By John Gustavsson

Friday, September 04, 2026

 

On Monday, Keir Starmer announced his resignation as a member of British Parliament for the Holborn and St. Pancras constituency. In his statement, Starmer said he wished to “focus on other issues” including international affairs and defense. While he did not specifically name NATO, many believe Starmer wishes to succeed Mark Rutte as secretary-general when the role is up in 2028. If that’s indeed where his sights are set, America should not let that happen.

 

Why might Starmer think he has what it takes to be secretary-general? The truth is that for European politicians, NATO has become something of a retirement gig. Former secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg got the position after losing reelection in Norway, as did Mark Rutte after his last government imploded in the Netherlands. The same can be said for the EU: Ursula von der Leyen was a moderately successful politician back in Germany before she was elevated to the position as president of the European Commission. Neil Kinnock, who lost two general elections as Labour leader, was later appointed as Britain’s European commissioner.

 

For those failed politicians who don’t enjoy moules-frites, there’s always the U.N.: After losing the general election of 2010, Gordon Brown became U.N. special envoy for global education. His predecessor Tony Blair, meanwhile, was appointed Quartet envoy for the Middle East on the very same day he resigned.

 

There are several reasons why Secretary-General Keir Starmer would be bad news for the United States. First, while Starmer’s failures in domestic policy have dominated his political obituaries, he was arguably an even worse disaster on foreign policy. He attempted to give away the Chagos Islands to Mauritius — a country that never even controlled them — and pay Mauritius for the privilege. Only an intervention by the U.S. stalled the deal so that the handover couldn’t take place before Starmer was forced out.

 

The Chagos handover highlights how Starmer is, at heart, still the same human rights lawyer he was before entering politics, unable to distinguish between legal legitimacy and strategic necessity. The decolonialist, third-worldist mindset and submissiveness toward the U.N. that characterizes Keir Starmer would render NATO absolutely impotent. At a time when Americans’ trust in NATO has eroded, the worst thing that could happen would be for NATO to be led by a secretary-general who may seriously suggest the U.S. should give up control of Guam or Puerto Rico.

 

Second, there is Starmer’s stance on Israel. While he did support Israel after October 7, this support quickly waned as his party began to worry about losing Muslim and far-left voters to the Green Party. Starmer, who had started his tenure as Labour leader strong by expelling former leader Jeremy Corbyn and other extremists from the party, came to gradually embrace the fringe. Starmer and his government went on to recognize Palestinian statehood and also suspended certain arms sales to Israel, viewing the country through the lens of humanitarian, international law rather than as an ally. Though Israel is not a NATO member, it is a major non-NATO ally with cooperation ranging from counterterrorism to civil emergencies preparedness.

 

Third and related to this, Keir Starmer not only refused to back the U.S. war on Iran but also refused to let the U.S. use British bases like the joint British-American Diego Garcia base on the Chagos Islands to carry out attacks, though he later changed his mind and allowed limited “defensive” use.

 

Finally, and speaking of changing one’s mind, Starmer’s record in government is one of an unprecedented number of U-turns. Keir Starmer broke promises or reversed stance on everything from welfare reform to grooming gangs and digital ID. Though mostly not related to foreign policy, the constant U-turns reveal Starmer as someone who, even when backed by a massive parliamentary majority, cannot hold firm against pressure — an essential characteristic of any NATO secretary-general, especially in turbulent times like these.

 

In the short term, Andy Burnham’s problem will be to retain Starmer’s seat in the upcoming by-election. Though on paper a safe Labour seat, it is also a London seat — a poor match for Burnham, who has spent years railing against London and the London-centric government. Green Party leader Zack Polanski has announced his intention to run for the seat, and many in the local constituency Labour party are Starmer loyalists who may feel demoralized by his exit. While Labour is likely to win, even a close race would send shivers down the spines of the other 58 London Labour MPs, abruptly ending Burnham’s honeymoon.

 

Beyond that, however, Andy Burnham is all but certain to make a push for Starmer to be appointed secretary-general in 2028, if this is indeed Starmer’s goal. With the election coming up in 2029, Burnham will want to have Starmer safely stored out of his way and out of Britain, to prevent the former PM from causing any ruckus during the campaign.

 

In the past, failed British policymakers and aristocrats were routinely exiled to the country’s distant colonies, being “promoted” to positions with fancy titles that ensured they would never again set foot in London. Though the empire is long gone, Britain does still control the island of St. Helena in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, to which Napoleon was exiled and where he died. As the governor of St. Helena is appointed rather than elected, this position may be a more suitable retirement gig for Keir Starmer — as long as Andy Burnham makes it clear he’s not allowed to give the island away.

The September 11 Whataboutism of El-Sayed and Mamdani

By Dan McLaughlin

Tuesday, September 01, 2026

 

A resurfaced, since-deleted September 11, 2021, tweet from Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is making the rounds. On that 20th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in American history, El-Sayed tweeted:

 

Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my faith.

 

Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my country.

 

That same day, Zohran Mamdani tweeted a strikingly similar message:

 

Nearly 3,000 New Yorkers died on 9/11; 20 years later, the death hasn’t stopped. We mourn our neighbors who died that day. The hundreds of thousands who died in the wars that followed. The unknown millions injured & displaced. In their memory, we work toward a better world.

 

Mamdani tweeted virtually verbatim 9/11 anniversary messages in 2022, 2023, and 2024 before shifting his tune during the fall of his mayoral campaign.

 

The wording may be different in some ways — at least El-Sayed acknowledged that the deaths on September 11 were “perpetrated,” while Mamdani annually framed them in the passive voice as something that just happened — the common thread is the framing. Both men insisted on drawing a parallel, which El-Sayed underlined by using identical language in both sentences. To these men, the American wars against the Taliban and Saddam Hussein (like Israel’s response to the October 7 terrorist atrocities) were morally equivalent with terrorists attacking purely civilian targets in peacetime. That’s the whole point of pairing them in this way: to suggest that these are two sides of the same coin. (We’ll leave aside El-Sayed’s bogus math.)

 

While we have imported the term into our domestic politics, “whataboutism” is a rhetorical tactic that was introduced, or at least perfected, as a tool of Soviet propaganda: Whenever any of the many crimes of the Soviet regime and the communist bloc were pointed out, defenders would try to compare them to what America and the West were doing — e.g., “Gulags? What about Jim Crow?” The goal was always to erase our moral faculties by suggesting false equivalences between tyranny and liberal democracy, and between aggressive wars of conquest and responses to aggressive wars of conquest. But, as William F. Buckley Jr. once quipped, “That is like saying that the man who pushes a little old lady into the path of a bus is morally equivalent to the man who pushes her out of its path, because they both push little old ladies around.”

 

This is precisely what El-Sayed and Mamdani have been doing. To them, the September 11 attacks — like the October 7 attacks, or like the Holocaust — is an embarrassing fact that needs to be whatabouted away in order to prosecute their argument against America, the West, and “Zionists.” The fact that both men have done so in such strikingly similar turns of phrase illustrates that. When people tell you who they are, believe them.

One-Ideaism Is Brain Rot

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, September 02, 2026

 

I’m not writing about a tweet or about Hasan Piker, but I do have to start with a tweet about Hasan Piker, the streamer making life difficult for Democrats.

 

The other day I saw this clip, in which Piker says, “I have no problem with the Houthis. … If you think I’m a terrorism supporter for that reason, then yeah, I’m a f—ing terrorism supporter.” If you watch the extended version there are more f-bombs, and he explains that what he has in mind is Houthi “militancy” in the Red Sea, which he says is a “perfectly moral action.”

 

I responded to this with a simple factual observation: “The official slogan (the Sarkha) of the Houthis is: ‘God is the greatest. Death to America. Death to Israel. A curse upon the Jews. Victory to Islam.’”

 

Now, I don’t retract or apologize for that. But I got a very good email from an old friend, who has a sometimes-annoying habit of being my intellectual ombudsman. I’ll leave his name out of it. Let’s call him Cromwell, because that will likely annoy him.

 

In reference to my tweet, Cromwell wrote (in part):

 

I agree with you about the slogan supporting the claim that the Houthis are terrorists. But, in fairness to the Houthis, they don’t actually kill a lot of Israelis and arguably even fewer Americans (two Americans drowned attempting to seize Houthi assets, but I don’t think the Houthis are traditionally credited with those kills).

 

They would if they could! But their primary impact is on Yemen, followed by [Saudi Arabia]. There’s a whole lot of countries they’ve killed more citizens of than Israel or America. There’s [a third of a million] dead Yemenis as a result of the civil war that [the Houthis] are the primary cause of, and that’s probably not their biggest impact on Yemen. Their millions of child soldiers and ex-child soldiers are just a part of their blight on the world.

 

Piker wants the debate to be about whether he should be supporting people who oppose America and Israel. He’s in a minority on that, but a lot of people who disagree with him have considerable patience for those views.

 

Surely instead the debate should be about his support for child soldiers, for slave raids into Africa, the abuse of variously: Bahai, women, UN staff and other hostages, land mines, and so on and so forth. People already know that Piker isn’t opposed to political violence against America, Jews, and Israel. But I believe they don’t know the depravity he’s willing to endorse as a reward for antisemitic violence.

 

This is in part because your tweet was far from the first writing to fall into a trap of responding to support for the Houthis by condemning them for being terrorists against the U.S., Israel, Saudi, and others (the Saudi and others complaint being more legitimate but often ignored). …

 

Cheers,

 

[Cromwell]

 

I think this is a fantastic point. I fact-checked some of the stats in Cromwell’s dashed-off missive. One can offer some quibbles, the biggest probably being the “millions” of child soldiers bit. I think it’s fairer to say that the Houthis are working on having millions of child soldiers. There are already many thousands of them, and the Houthis are building a pipeline for more. In 2023 alone, the Houthis sent more than a million kids to “summer camps” where they were indoctrinated with jihadi ideology and forced into a kind of militarized slave labor. Here’s an excerpt from a State Department summary (emphasis mine):

 

An international organization reported these camps took place between May and June 2023 in nine governorates, with children as young as 10 years old exposed to military training. An NGO reported that in one camp, children as young as seven were taught to clean weapons and dodge missiles. Cases of the unlawful recruitment and use of child soldiers by the Houthis and government and government-affiliated forces occurred with some familial knowledge or consent, while some cases occurred through coercion or threats of retribution if families refused to comply with recruitment, specifically by the Houthis. In other cases, monetary and material support – including offers of salaries and food baskets for families as well as waiving registration fees for the next school year – were reportedly incentives for joining the Houthis. An international organization and an NGO reported in cases where families refused to send their children to join Houthi forces, officials removed the child’s family from beneficiary lists entitled to humanitarian assistance and abducted and detained children, who were subjected to various forms of abuse, including sexual violence. Government and government-affiliated forces and other armed groups, including the Houthis, used boys mostly in combatant roles, to guard checkpoints, lay land mines, and to drive military vehicles, and forced other children to carry out support duties such as delivering supplies and escorting. In 2023, Yemeni officials did not report demobilizing any child soldiers; however, government and government-affiliated forces and Houthis detained children for alleged association with armed groups.

 

So, pretty bad stuff, and I think Cromwell was directionally right in his indictment.

 

I’ve been noodling this for the last few days, and I think it is a really good illustration not just of how anti-Israel monomania leads to intense moral myopia, but of how binary thinking generally is a form of brain rot that I stepped in a little bit.

 

Forget about Piker himself—I think he’s a midwit buffoon monetizing his midwittery by exploiting the faddish ignorance of his fans. But the fad is real. I need to stipulate that I think the “genocide” rhetoric about Israel is ridiculous propaganda. That doesn’t mean all criticisms of Israel, specific Israelis, settlers, etc., are without merit. But even when they have some arguable merit (and I am happy to argue about how much), these objections are often embedded in the broader “Israelis are the new Nazis” b.s.

 

Ironically, such claims are often made by Tucker Carlson types who also want to insist that the Nazis weren’t that bad. So even when there are debatable points on offer, they lose their moral or persuasive force for me because they are attempts to season a slanderous stew of lies with some half-truths. This is a time-honored tactic of demagogues and zealots. Take a few reasonable claims—COVID-era school closures were bad, healthy young people didn’t need to take the vaccine, etc.—and use them for a preposterous conclusion: COVID was an op by the deep state to destroy America!

 

What I like about Cromwell’s point is that “resistance” to Israel has become a way to buy a moral indulgence. The Houthis are good because they fight Israel (even though they really don’t—because they’re too far away). The Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, which Piker calls “perfectly moral,” have been “justified” by claiming the ships being targeted have some ties to Israel. But this is mostly a rhetorical fig leaf, as they have attacked numerous ships with no ties to Israel, the U.S., or Britain. Simply saying you’re committing violence in the name of the anti-Israel cause is enough to buy not just exoneration, but endorsement.

 

When Hamas raped and slaughtered Israeli citizens on October 7, members of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions crowd struggled to figure out how to calibrate their moral compasses. Some passed the test, obviously, condemning the horror. But a dismaying number of people didn’t. They celebrated the rape and murder, even when it was still ongoing.

 

What’s really remarkable about this way of thinking is how much it reflects the tendencies of Western arrogance the anti-Zionists claim to oppose. For them, the only issue is their pet issue of Israeli villainy. It is a bright line dividing the forces of good and evil. When anti-communists would defend Augusto Pinochet or Francisco Franco or some other right-wing or America-aligned autocrat, the left would mock and condemn these defenses as the sort of imperialistic immorality inspired by anti-communist paranoia and American hegemony. They’d point to the very real evils being committed by these regimes, insisting that complicity with them was an outrage. This wasn’t just true of useful-idiot supporters of the Soviet Union or the various Marxist rebels fighting for “national liberation”—it was also true of the much broader anti-anti-communist left.

 

In the 19^th century, various forms of radicalism often went by the label of “one-ideaism.” Whether it was the socialism of Fourierism, or the extreme abolitionism of John Brown, or the extremism of “slave power” maximalists, or even the fight for women’s rights, the critique was the same: If you cram all of your political passion into a single issue, you’re blinding yourself to other important issues.

 

One-ideaism is binary thinking. If one issue defines the good, then any issue that distracts from or hinders that issue is definitionally the bad. We’ve seen this sort of thing metastasize in our political culture. On the right, when support for Trump became the definitional crux of what it meant to be a conservative or even a Republican, then disagreements with Trump couldn’t just be wrong; they had to be heretical. Trump likes Russia, so Russia must be good. He thinks tariffs are smart, so objections to tariffs must be not just stupid, but treacherous. We see the same thing in reverse on big swaths of the left. Trump is bad, therefore whatever he likes must be bad. Praising something Trump does is considered just as treasonous for the popular front of the left as criticizing Trump is treasonous for the right.

 

When you look under the hood at the most virulent forms of anti-Israel madness, it becomes obvious that the arguments supposedly supporting it are pretextual. The people who prattle about Israeli “theocracy” have very little to say about Iranian or Saudi theocracy. The people who insist Israel is an “apartheid” state say little or nothing about Chinese “Han supremacy” and Jim Crow with Chinese characteristics. How many protests against the erasure of the Uyghurs and of Tibet have the people who wake up every morning shouting about Israeli “genocide” attended?

 

For that matter, how many of the “NatCon” nationalists who claim to consider national borders and national sovereignty to be their lodestars have spent much time condemning Russia’s brutal violation of both in Ukraine? How many are even troubled by our neo-imperial bullying of Europe over Greenland, or of Canada, or the vassalization of Venezuela? Again, Trumpist popular frontism is more important than intellectual consistency.

 

Some of this stuff can be chalked up to the intellectually corrupting demands of politics, some to the laziness inherent in letting one idea define you, and some to a kind of moral hysteria. For some people, it’s all one of these explanations, but for most I think it’s a combination of all three.