Liars and Loons

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, July 30, 2026

 

You know populism is having a good week when the White House Correspondents’ Dinner isn’t the most self-discrediting elitist spectacle of the past seven days.

 

That came on Wednesday, when COVID pope Anthony Fauci was hauled before a Senate committee to explain why some of his public statements during the pandemic didn’t jibe with the thoughts he recorded in the private diary he was keeping at the time. Modern congressional hearings unfailingly generate far more heat than light, and this was no exception. But the heat was enough to melt a meaningful chunk of what’s left of Fauci’s reputation.

 

On the advice of counsel, to avoid the risk of perjury charges that might arise from his testimony, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right to refuse to answer questions no fewer than 111 times. A man who spent seemingly every waking moment of 2020 and 2021 chattering into microphones suddenly had nothing to say.

 

It’s true, of course, that pleading the Fifth isn’t proof of wrongdoing, no matter what Josh Hawley might tell you. But it’s also true that it’s a tactic that the public associates with criminal lowlifes like gangsters, or the president. Fauci will never fully recover.

 

Just as embarrassing was the habit revealed by his diary of the doctor squeeing like a teenage TikTok influencer about how famous he was becoming during the pandemic, replete with name-checking the celebrities who had reached out to him. The eternal populist critique of the ruling class is that its highest priority is enhancing its own prestige, and now here was apparent confirmation in Fauci’s own words.

 

“Reading this, I truly worried about someone who would take a call from Dionne Warwick to talk about vaccines in a moment when the country really needed him to be a bit more focused,” The Atlantic’s Gal Beckerman sniffed of the diary entries.

 

And then, to round matters off, there was the matter of the blanket pardon Fauci received from Joe Biden during the final hours of the former president’s term. Biden would say that he did that to shield the doctor, a longtime MAGA hate object, from being unfairly harassed by a renegade Trump Justice Department. (A reasonable concern, to be sure.) But it had the effect of immunizing Fauci from any crimes he really did commit between 2014 and 2025—like, say, perjury in the testimony he gave to Congress during the pandemic.

 

So Fauci is untouchable legally—living proof that Trump and the right haven’t quite cornered the market on granting clemency to ideologically aligned cronies and shielding them from public accountability. Fauci will never need to explain whether he deliberately undersold the possibility that COVID leaked from a Chinese lab when, it turns out, he was privately agnostic about its genesis early on. Or whether his public skepticism of the lab-leak theory had to do with the fact that his own agency helped fund the Wuhan lab that was carrying out the sort of research that might plausibly have produced a Frankenvirus.

 

The political script here writes itself. You can’t trust the experts. They’re drunk on their own power and will lie to protect it. They care more about their own press than they do about your life. As I say, a good week for populism.

 

But not as good as it might have been.

 

No reckoning.

 

“It’s a real shame that the country cannot have an honest conversation, with the benefit of hindsight, about the many mistakes that were made six years ago,” the Washington Post wrote in an editorial about yesterday’s dismal Fauci hearing. “America has never fully grappled with the causes and consequences of COVID.”

 

My editor made a similar point this morning. In the past, he noted, major national failures typically generated serious inquiries into finding out what went wrong. Sometimes, as with segregation, those inquiries were informal matters of cultural reflection and debate. But with acute episodic crises—the Kennedy assassination, September 11, Nixon-era abuses by federal intelligence agencies—Congress opened bipartisan fact-finding investigations that ended with recommendations for reform.

 

Not the pandemic, though. Even if Fauci had agreed to answer the committee’s questions, it’s hard to imagine yesterday’s hearing producing anything more illuminating than Republican members telling him that he belongs in prison and Democratic members asking him how it feels to be a hero. Why is that? Why can’t America do a fruitful, thoughtful examination of what everyone agrees was a mismanaged once-in-a-lifetime calamity?

 

The easy answer is that the same bitter hyperpartisanship that’s made presidential landslides a thing of the past has made earnest nonpartisan problem-solving a thing of the past too, at least in matters as intensely politicized as COVID. Consider this: Unlike with most major national failures, the two sides can’t even agree on what the failure during the pandemic was.

 

The Warren Commission probed the government’s failure to detect an assassin and to protect the president from him. The 9/11 Commission probed the government’s failure to sniff out and foil a terrorist plot. The Church Committee probed the government’s failure to keep intelligence bureaus from being turned against the public those bureaus were supposed to protect.

 

Which failure would a “COVID Commission” probe? The failure to limit transmission of a virus that ended up killing more than a million Americans? Or the failure involved in locking down schools and businesses and imposing mandates for masks and vaccines?

 

The divide over how America failed during COVID is less an ideological “disagreement” than it is a divorce. It’s why, to borrow a term my editor used, Fauci has become a “totem” of sorts for both sides. In a country where each party increasingly regards the other’s continued viability as a threat to the American experiment, politics is less a shared struggle toward national improvement than a battle for dominance to crush an incompatible worldview. Each worldview reflexively polarizes around sources of authority, and so Fauci became an angel to the left and a devil to the right.

 

That also explains why idiot socialists are still masking in 2026. It’s not because they’re terrified of COVID. It’s because they’re keen to signal their allegiance to a worldview in which the state is empowered to take draconian measures in the name of “safety”—as leftists define it, at least. Masks are totems too.

 

In my darker moments (which are most moments, admittedly), I’d go further and hypothesize that Americans aren’t clamoring for a “COVID Commission” because they simply no longer expect national problems to be addressed seriously, let alone solved. In May, Pew Research Center published a poll in which it asked respondents whether they thought the country’s best days are behind it or ahead of it. Across all parties and all races, majorities answered “behind.” An America that continually stumbles into wars it can’t win, that remorselessly amasses a national debt it knows it can’t sustain, and that twice elected a character like Donald Trump is plainly incapable of dealing conscientiously with challenges.

 

We’re in our “managed decline” phase as a nation, and most of us know it. So why go through the motions of pretending that a “COVID Commission” might be productive?

 

There’s another reason that a thoughtful bipartisan investigation into the pandemic is impossible, though. One of our two major parties is beholden to populists, and “populism” and “thoughtfulness” are basically a contradiction in terms.

 

The lesser evil.

 

The two lessons I gleaned from yesterday’s hearing and the right-wing commentary around it are (1) Fauci isn’t very trustworthy, and (2) if you’re forced to choose between letting him set your scientific policy and letting Republicans do it, take Fauci every time.

 

That’s what I meant when I said above that the hearing was a missed opportunity for populism. Having effectively discredited the expert di tutti experts, the GOP should have been teed up to assert itself as the superior choice for Americans on public health. It … did not do that.

 

When I say that Wednesday’s “right-wing commentary” about COVID wasn’t reassuring, I’m not talking about crank randos on social media. I’m talking about Republican lawmakers. Sen. Ron Johnson babbled at the hearing about an alleged epidemic of suicides among people who’ve been “injured” by the COVID vaccine. Rep. John McGuire complained to Newsmax that Americans had been urged to take a vaccine that includes “human fetus baby parts” when they could have simply used ivermectin instead. Then Sen. Tommy Tuberville topped both of them by accusing Fauci of having been responsible for no fewer than 9 million deaths.

 

Granted, not every Republican in Congress is a lunatic. But they all answer to lunatics, which is how we ended up with Bill Cassidy, M.D., feeling obliged to support the most infamous anti-vaccine advocate in the country to be head of the Department of Health and Human Services. In a declining America, you can have Fauci spearheading pandemic policy in between signing autographs—or you can have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presiding over an unfolding disaster in American vaccine uptake with potentially dire long-term consequences. Take Fauci.

 

QAnon chronicler Mike Rothschild captured the absurdity of populist strains of thought about COVID with what’s at best a half-joke: “The overwhelming right-wing sentiment is that COVID was an engineered bioweapon that was also harmless. Trump overreacted to it by shutting down the country, then engineered a drive to create a vaccine that was the real bioweapon that killed millions, and it’s Joe Biden’s fault.” Another Twitter user flagged a dispute between two populists, one insisting that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab and the other insisting that the virus never existed, with the caption “the diversity of right-wing thought on display.” Those are the impulses that congressional Republicans somehow have to navigate.

 

How could they possibly conduct a serious pandemic investigation under the circumstances?

 

What about Ron DeSantis? you might say at this point. The governor of Florida is very much a populist, and he had a thoughtful COVID policy in the early days of the pandemic, back when Democrat Andrew Cuomo was seeding contagion in nursing homes across New York. DeSantis is the exception that proves the rule, though: Having boldly defied the left-wing lockdown consensus and followed the facts initially, he began meekly pandering to right-wing anti-vax paranoia as he prepared to run for president in 2024. At last check he was busy pushing his state legislature to repeal certain vaccine mandates for schoolchildren.

 

Not every Republican politician is a lunatic. But they all answer to lunatics.

 

The supreme tragicomic example is Trump, of course, who’s never been free to celebrate his momentous achievement in helping to bring the COVID mRNA vaccine to market during his first term. He spent months after leaving office in 2021 urging supporters to take the vaccine, only to discover that this is one matter in which their loyalty to him isn’t absolute. By 2024 he had stopped mentioning it altogether; “I’m not allowed to talk about it,” he said, not a little resentfully, “because I’m a Republican.”

 

Two years on, though, he seems to have finally caught up with his own base. Reportedly, Trump approached Kennedy recently to ask why he wasn’t moving faster to reduce the number of childhood vaccinations recommended by the federal government. The president is now more eager than his fanatically anti-vax deputy to scale back immunizations. Once again, for emphasis: Take Fauci.

 

Brain worms.

 

Even thoughtful right-wing commentators, when writing about left-wing pandemic failures, rarely reckon seriously with the fact that they’re allied with a faction of witch-doctor lunatics who’d rather spend money studying whether ivermectin cures cancer than encouraging mRNA research.

 

In noting that, I don’t mean to imply that, because the right is crazy, it’s acceptable for Fauci to lie or for Democratic policymakers to take dictation from the teachers unions on opening schools. But if we’re going to critique the expert class usefully, with an eye to convincing readers to trust it less blindly, we should probably be more forthright about pointing out that the main alternative to Faucism in modern America has brain worms. Literally.

 

Nor should we excuse populist derangement over the pandemic as an understandable or even defensible reaction to the expert class’ deceptions. It’s doubtless true that Fauci’s deceit about masking and revisionism about herd immunity piqued skeptics’ mistrust in the science bureaucracy, but right-wing mania over COVID was already raging long before Fauci became an Enemy of the People. As early as April 2020, just a month after the virus began spreading aggressively, the FDA had to debunk the populist craze over hydroxychloroquine as a pseudo-folk remedy against it.

 

You can have Fauci telling “noble lies” about masks to try to protect the supply available to hospital workers, or you can have the president musing about bleach injections and his fans praising the magical healing powers of a deworming medication. Only a doomed, decadent country would put itself in a position of having to choose between the two, but if we do have to choose—and most right-wing critiques of Fauci implicitly invite us to do so—the choice is clear. “The experts are untrustworthy” does not rationalize brain-worms populism.

 

And that’s the only kind of populism there is in practice, I suspect. Even when it has valid grievances, even when it’s led by obviously intelligent figures like DeSantis, the intense pressure populism is under to affirm and ventilate the suspicions of its supporters—whether those suspicions are reasonable or not—will lead it inevitably toward crankery. To its own detriment.

 

It’s why DOGE, led by the richest man in history and driven by an obviously legitimate belief that government is too wasteful, ended up cutting federal programs so vindictively and indiscriminately that Elon Musk himself recently admitted that he’d gotten carried away. It’s why Trumpists, despite enjoying strong popular support for measures like mandatory voter ID, can’t resist framing calls for better election security in terms of ludicrously paranoid conspiracies to rig elections. Populism could and should win on those issues, just as it should win its case against Fauci.

 

But the brain worms always find their way in.

 

Maybe we’ll eventually see a form of it that’s better suited to governing responsibly. (Leftists might point to the New Deal or the Great Society as examples, although you can imagine what an anti-statist conservative like me thinks about that.) “Populism, but smart” is the implied warranty of J.D. Vance 2028; a brilliant Ivy-trained mind like his can deliver the sober, reality-based people power that skeptics are waiting to see, his fanboys would insist. Could be—but remember that the vice president has also “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” according to the White House chief of staff. Even in a brain as formidable as his, the worms are stirring.

 

I’ll believe “populism, but smart” when I see it. In its current incarnation the movement is a purely adversarial force, unequal to the challenge of governing effectively and not even very interested in doing so. It won’t pursue an inquiry like “What went wrong with COVID?” because it won’t risk having to reach conclusions that challenge the inviolable suspicions of its supporters. If populists were more intellectually honest and civically virtuous, Wednesday’s Fauci disaster would have been the first chapter in an earnest effort to improve America’s scientific bureaucracy. As it is, the book is closed.

 

 

Vance Goes Down the Epstein Rabbit Hole

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, July 16, 2026

 

Vice President JD Vance appeared on Joe Rogan’s program yesterday, and while the conversation covered many topics, in the second hour, the host steered the conversation to the scandals involving Jeffrey Epstein. The vice president had quite a lot to say on that subject:

 

VANCE: So, what I think a lot of people — I’ve heard this argument is this idea that Donald Trump, you know, was sort of — I’ve even heard people say he was blackmailed into this.

 

ROGAN: Yeah. A lot of people believe this.

 

VANCE: . . . It’s just it’s just not true. I’ve seen the decision making up close. Again, whether you agree or disagree with our negotiation or whether you agree or disagree with the decision to launch the campaign Epic Fury to begin with, the idea that Donald Trump is being like blackmailed is crazy to me because, again, I see the way that he makes decisions. I see the way that he processes this stuff. Like, the idea that he picks up the phone with anybody and says, “Hey, like, I’m going to take orders from you.” No, that’s just not how Donald Trump operates.

 

ROGAN: Can you understand though, why people would come to that conclusion, especially because of the Epstein files?

 

VANCE: What do you mean?

 

ROGAN: Well, the Epstein files were supposed to be released. We were — and there was a tremendous amount of resistance to those files being released.

 

VANCE: Sure.

 

ROGAN: And that concerned a lot of people, because . . . you’re talking about very wealthy, powerful people that were engaged in crimes.

 

VANCE: I see. So, you’re — you’re basically saying, like, there’s a — the fear is that whatever’s in the Epstein files was used to blackmail, like, the administration into doing the Iran thing.

 

ROGAN: Or at the very least the people that were involved in the Epstein files, that didn’t want them coming out, had undue influence.

 

VANCE Well again, like, say this with all candor, like, we absolutely screwed up the comms of the Epstein files. Like, we just did. But do I think the reason we screwed up the comms is because we were trying to hide something? No. I think the reason we screwed up the comms of the Epstein files is one, you know, Pam said, Pam Bondi said the client list is on my desk, right?

 

ROGAN: Well, see, they had binders.

 

VANCE: 100 percent.

 

ROGAN: They were sitting in front–

 

VANCE: But those binders were largely documents that had already been released, right? So, so here’s — let me try to defend—

 

ROGAN: So, what was the purpose of that performative display of the Epstein files, and she was saying there’s tens of thousands of hours of film.

 

VANCE: I don’t know what the purpose of it was, but I know that the effect of it was to make people mistrust the entire effort. And I think — what I think was happening, look, I know Pam. I like Pam. I don’t think there was anything malicious going on. I think Pam was trying to respond to the political moment. I think she overstated what we had and what we didn’t have. And I think that she, you know, got roasted for it publicly by a lot of people, including me. Like, you know, you and I have talked about this a lot. I’m like one of the OG [original gangster, or long-time] Epstein conspiracy theorists. I’ve probably gone down every single rabbit hole. We could go down most of them today.

 

I would make a joke about Bondi getting thrown under the bus, but the former attorney general deserves to get raked over the coals for erroneously telling a Fox News anchor, on live television, that the list of Epstein’s clients is “sitting on my desk right now to review.”

 

A bit later in the conversation, Vance continues:

 

VANCE: Epstein gets pinched. I think he goes to prison, or maybe this is when he was on house arrest. But, like, anything that existed from the ’80s and ’90s up to 2006, 2007, anything that existed that we didn’t get back then, was disappeared. Right? So, like, when people say, has what you’ve seen on the inside make you think that, you know, that Epstein never blackmailed people or that Epstein never engaged in broader sex trafficking? No, absolutely not. What I have seen, and I’ve looked at most of the files, is that there just wasn’t dispositive evidence. And if that dispositive evidence ever existed, it was probably destroyed after 2006, 2007.

 

Vance’s comments are, ironically, echoing the assessment in the unsigned two-page memo released by the U.S Department of Justice and FBI in July 2025 that their investigation had found “no incriminating ‘client list.’ There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”

 

Vance continued:

 

Now, look, again, in our defense, yes, was there some, you know, b****ing and moaning and was there some back and forth? Yes. But there we eventually collected 6 million documents as part of the effort. The president — people say the president was forced into releasing the documents. Like again, the idea that Donald Trump could not have killed that legislation, especially with the United States Senate, is a joke. He absolutely could have killed it. What did he do? He actually said, “Nope, we’re going to release these files.” He thought, you know, he was annoyed by the story. He was annoyed by the Democrats accusing him of doing things bad.

 

This is a convenient misremembering of history on the part of the vice president. Yes, the president eventually called for releasing the files, but only after furiously opposing it for months, and after it became clear that increasingly vocal congressional majorities opposed keeping them secret.

 

In July 2025, President Trump raged on Truth Social that no one cared about Jeffrey Epstein, and added an out-of-the-blue contention that unspecified “Epstein Files” were created by former President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other officials from a Democratic administration.

 

On November 12, the administration invited Colorado GOP Representative Lauren Boebert, “one of the Republicans pressing for more Epstein disclosures,” for a briefing in the White House Situation Room with Bondi and FBI director Kash Patel to discuss her demands.

 

The same day, the seating of Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva gave the 218th vote to a discharge petition on the Epstein Files Transparency Act. (If the speaker of the House opposes bringing a piece of legislation to the floor, it requires 218 signatures on a discharge petition to overrule the speaker and bring the bill to the floor for a vote.)

 

On November 16, Trump posted on Truth Social, “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide!” Two days later, the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed the House 427–1 and the Senate then passed it without a formal roll-call vote.

 

(Also, it’s an easily forgotten detail, but under the Act, the DOJ was supposed to release all relevant files by December 12; the majority of the files were released January 30.)

 

Later in the conversation, Vance adds:

 

VANCE: The problem is if you go back to the original investigation, it was designed in a way that was way too narrow. If there was a broader conspiracy, and you know, my view is that there probably was. The evidence that existed in 2007, that was the opportunity to get.

 

ROGAN: So, when you say there probably was a broader conspiracy, what exactly are you saying?

 

VANCE: I think there are a few different options. I mean, look, man, like, you could –you and I could literally do two episodes about this. I’ve gone on down every rabbit hole. There’s this funny New York Times story that’s somewhat true, somewhat false, but where Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, says, ‘Well, we know JD’s a conspiracy theorist on this.’ Like, I am, actually. I’ve gone down every rabbit hole here.

 

Look, so there’s the theory that whether it was American intel, or foreign intel, that Epstein was sort of using — Epstein was using sort of the sex ring to blackmail rich and powerful people. There’s that piece of it.

 

Vance went on to speculate about Epstein’s involvement with billionaire Les Wexner; their longtime relationship is well established, and Wexner told Congress he was “duped by a world-class con man.” Vance told Rogan, “Epstein was, like, the genius at identifying weird tax strategies that would allow you to not have to pay taxes,” and “Epstein like doing a lot of tax stuff that was not on the up and up and is that one way in which he gained blackmail. It’s not opposite of the sexual blackmail story, but, in some ways . . . you could imagine both things being true.”

 

Epstein has been dead for 2,532 days.

 

It’s a free country, and the vice president is free to speak his mind. But one can wonder how helpful it is for the second-highest-ranking figure in the executive branch to go on one of the country’s most popular podcasts and lay out all of his theories involving Epstein, and to declare that any evidence that would back up his theories has long since been destroyed.

 

Are we really to believe that Epstein was an agent of U.S. intelligence using sex trafficking and blackmail as a tool for American policy for some considerable period of time, and there’s absolutely no way for anyone in this administration to determine if it is true?

 

Or are we really to believe that Epstein was an agent of some foreign intelligence agency, using sex trafficking and blackmail as a tool for that country’s policies for some considerable period of time, and there’s absolutely no way for anyone in our intelligence community to determine if it is true?

 

Inevitably, someone will ask or complain, “Jim, why are you writing about this?” For starters, the vice president talked about the subject at length.

 

ADDENDUM: Our Christian Schneider, keeping us up-to-date on the sterling choices of the Democrats out in Wisconsin: “The Democratic front-runner in the gubernatorial race is 37-year-old State Assemblyman Francesca Hong, a self-described Democratic Socialist who was taken to court last month for failing to pay a decades-old credit card debt of nearly $30,000.”

 

Capital One was asking Hong, quite literally, what was in her wallet, and why it hadn’t been used to pay down the $29,344 debt she had accumulated since 2011. (If you’re doing the math on this, Hong started accumulating that debt at age 22. Her debt is older than iPads, Instagram, Google Chrome, and any of Netflix’s original programming.)

 

I don’t understand how a person can choose to not pay her debts for decades, live what seems like a pretty happy life serving in the state assembly — base salary of about $61,000, for what is effectively a part-time job — and then somehow complain that capitalism is unfair.

J. D. Vance’s Own Alien Abduction

By Helen Lewis

Thursday, July 16, 2026

 

Well, thank you very much, J. D. Vance. Because of the vice president’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast this week, I found myself googling photos of Joe Biden licking an ice-cream cone to pass judgment on whether, as Vance claimed, they look “suggestive.” I will save my final ruling for the end of this article, to keep you in suspense.

 

Watching Vance’s media appearances is uniquely painful. He lacks the authentic berserk of Kash Patel, or the pageant-queen polish of Karoline Leavitt, or his boss’s unique corkscrew approach to conversation. Like Stephen Miller, Vance desperately wants to be funny and cool. Like Stephen Miller, he is neither. And that’s before we get to the awkwardness of knowing that Vance—a Yale Law School graduate—has voluntarily lobotomized himself in the pursuit of power and attention. Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his dignity to be Donald Trump’s lackey.

 

Vance was allegedly on The Joe Rogan Experience to promote his second memoir, Communion, which I haven’t read. (He fooled me once by presenting Hillbilly Elegy as the sincere output of a thoughtful writer, and I won’t be fooled again.) Luckily, that doesn’t matter, because the two men spent most of their time on weightier matters, such as alien abductions and which foodstuffs risk making you look gay. When Jesse Watters of Fox did the latter bit a few years ago, his suggestions were at least excitingly left-field—soup, plus anything drunk through a straw—but Vance and Rogan just went with the obvious corn dogs and bananas. “Anything that looks like a dick,” Rogan helpfully explained.

 

Vance then spent a lot of time defending his negotiations to end the war with Iran—which, as you might have noticed, have not turned out particularly well. The people criticizing his efforts, he said, want America “to bomb and bomb and bomb. And the honest view, Joe, is that they do not actually have a solution.” He added: “They’ll say things like, ‘Well, just bomb them to oblivion.’” Madness! Who are these idiots? Vance blamed Mike Pence, his very own Ghost of Christmas Past, but inexplicably failed to mention President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who began the war by promising to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age.” Perhaps Vance’s amnesia is political genius: He simply picks his favorite of the nine conflicting opinions that Trump has expressed on any given subject, and enthusiastically agrees with it.

 

The Iran discussion was one of several stretches in which Vance, who sits near the top of the government of the world’s most powerful country, affected the demeanor of a guy spitballing at the bar: Someone should really look into this. “You know, I will go to my deathbed believing there’s a story there, but I can’t prove it,” he told Rogan about the possibility that Jeffrey Epstein was running a blackmail operation. He also suggested that Epstein had caused wokeness in academia. Really. “He was funding a ton of scientists, but like when he died it’s almost like the era of censorship started to break,” he observed. Yes, as if Epstein’s pedophilia were not horrifying enough, Vance seemed to hold him responsible for land acknowledgments.

 

***

 

The other explanation for this hey-I-wonder approach is that Vance is dealing with the cognitive dissonance between his own self-image as a smart guy and the constant requirement to defend dumb and inconsistent actions by hallucinating that he is not really part of this administration, but instead a mere interested bystander. Vance treats the vice presidency the way that Instagram influencers approach a vacation in the Maldives: It only truly exists when converted into content. In one telling exchange, Vance said that he felt like he had “made it” when he was satirized on South Park, rather than at his inauguration.

 

Rogan was, by his usual collegiate standards, pretty tough on Vance over U.S. support for Israel, probing whether Trump would have gone to war in Iran without Benjamin Netanyahu’s lobbying. But then the podcaster swerved into suggesting Trump had been blackmailed over the Epstein files, a connection that made no sense until he asked whether Jeffrey Epstein was a CIA or Mossad agent. In the interview’s most viral moment, Vance joined Rogan in a kind of shrugging speculation, suggesting that the disgraced financier “clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence.” Vance had asked for any relevant documents and came up with nothing, he said, “but if that shit existed, it wouldn’t exist in 2026.”

 

Vance played the same card when talking about the possibility of a vast alien conspiracy, one of Rogan’s animating obsessions: “I’ve said that I’m going to, like, I’m going to look into the UFO thing,” the vice president said, “and I’ve been saying for a year and a half, and I haven’t done it yet because I haven’t had the time.” Sir, you had time to fill in as host of Charlie Kirk’s podcast after he died. You can take five minutes to send Kash Patel a memo with the words: Roswell fake Y/N?

 

***

 

Vance often feigns ignorance for strategic reasons, because the pose gets him out of all kinds of trouble. He pretended not to understand what he called the “overreaction” to the fighter Josh Hokit taking the mic at the White House UFC event to shout that Michelle Obama was a man. Vance left it to Rogan to explain that it might be bad form to visit the official residence of every president since John Adams and make baseless insinuations about a former first lady for attention. “If he said Michelle Obama’s a man at the T-Mobile Arena in Vegas, it’s like, okay, less of a story,” said Rogan, adding: “Not the best thing to say at the White House.”

 

Vance took a similar wide-eyed approach with his criticisms of California Governor Gavin Newsom, whom he disdained as a populist, before suddenly remembering that Republicans now like that word. “There’s a real populism that I’m very much a fan of because I think you should be responsive to people,” he said, recovering, “but there’s like a faux populism of: The way that I’m going to appeal to people is by assuming that they’re idiots and acting like they’re idiots.” Again, Mr. Vice President, are you aware that you are saying these things out loud?

 

Two hours in, Vance and Rogan began to talk about whether there’s “a meaningful difference between an angel or a demon and a space alien with super technology.” Rogan suggested that his guest should hurry up with Iran-war negotiations and get on with the real business of the government, such as finding out whether the government is secretly hoarding extraterrestrial corpses. “I’m skeptical that it’s true that we have the physical remains,” Vance said, before promising that he would take a photograph of them if he found them. Show it to the “ladies of The View,” suggested Rogan—“the intellectual leaders of our world.” The ABC show’s hosts may look like philistines to Rogan, but when Vance appeared on their show last month, they asked him tough questions about deaths in ICE custody, not Area 51.

 

The final half hour of Rogan’s interview dealt with Vance’s book, his surprising support of labor unions, and the effect of immigration on wages. But I know what you’re thinking: Joe Biden. A waffle cone. Maybe some rainbow sprinkles. Could that really be as unbearably erotic as J. D. Vance made out? The answer is no. As is the answer to the question, “Does J. D. Vance have the capacity to feel shame?”

Trump Just Did More Damage to American Elections Than China

By Tom Nichols

Thursday, July 16, 2026

 

President Trump addressed the American people tonight and told them that their elections are at the mercy of foreign actors—especially China. He called the current situation a “crisis” and vowed to prevent any future elections from being “stolen.” He directed the public to a website where people can peruse documents that he says prove not only that bad actors have influenced U.S. elections, but that all of this was kept from him by “deep state” malefactors during his first term.

 

Foreign powers do, in fact, try to influence American elections, but that was about all that the president—who seems shocked that other nations have preferences about who wins elected office in the United States—got right. The rest was a mishmash: Much of the previously classified material that Trump just splattered on the internet does not support his accusations, and in some cases, these declassified documents actually undermine and refute his charges.

 

Trump’s speech tonight rested on a few solid facts submerged in wild, and even somewhat paranoid, extrapolations. It’s true that bad actors have accessed basic data about the names and addresses of voters in several states. It’s also true that China has some pretty strong views about Trump and probably didn’t want him to be reelected in 2020. (The Chinese wanted him out because, Trump said, “I was wise to them,” which does not explain how he was nonetheless hoodwinked.)

 

From there, however, we slip the surly bonds of Earth and head into the dark and cold of the space of conspiracy theories. Trump strongly implied that in 2018, China was on the attack and trying to influence the outcome of the 2020 election, and that American intelligence operatives plotted to keep that from him while he was in the Oval Office. He said that attempts to rectify all of this have fallen “catastrophically short” but that he will take “swift” action in the coming days.

 

The documents he offered tonight, though, tell a different story—so different that they raise the question of whether Trump, or anyone else in the White House, actually read them.

 

For example, one of the memos from the National Intelligence Council (the analytical group within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) said in 2020 that the group in charge of cyber-issues and threats to U.S. elections “assesses that Beijing has taken at least some low-level, exploratory steps to undermine the President’s reelection chances by denigrating him and shaping voter perceptions.”

 

That sounds pretty bad. Except that (as often happens in the intelligence community) this group was representing a minority view, as it says in the very next sentence: “Their assessment differs from the IC’s judgment that Beijing has considered but not deployed influence efforts to affect the Presidential election.”

 

So, which is it? The IC (shorthand for intelligence community) seems to have reached a pretty firm judgment in these documents: “The IC,” one of the memos says (with some passages redacted),

 

has seen no evidence that Beijing is engaged in an effort to influence the outcome of the presidential election, nor has it observed activity that it assesses is likely the result of such an effort by Beijing. While we have seen Beijing develop other options that could be used to influence the election, we have not seen these capabilities deployed.

 

Note that what these documents discuss are influence operations—propaganda, proxies who speak for foreign interests, fake stories, and so on—rather than interference, which would involve actual manipulation of data or sabotaging of electoral infrastructure. These classified revelations, despite Trump’s assertions, show that the intelligence community didn’t even agree that China was fully engaged even in these more limited influence operations.

 

One document says, with more firmness, that the Chinese were attempting to undermine Trump’s chances and to pressure business partners into withdrawing support for the president’s reelection. This is perfectly plausible behavior from a U.S. adversary. Of course, Trump skipped over the part about other nations, including one where “senior officials” and their leader were seeking to “covertly influence US politicians’ and political candidates’ thinking” about the election.

 

That nation? Turkey.

 

On one point, however, the declassified reports are clear. One country, more than any other, actively engaged in operations against the 2020 elections: Russia. And the Russians had a clear preference:

 

We assess that Russia is using a range of measures to denigrate former Vice President Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia establishment. For example, it is directing or encouraging proxies to spread claims about Vice President Biden. Some Kremlin-linked actors are also seeking to boost President Trump's candidacy on social media.

 

This isn’t news, but Trump carefully cherry-picked his way around it. In charts provided by the White House itself that compare Russia, China, and Iran, only Russia is judged to be actively involved in such efforts.

 

Trump not only ignored these multiple (and much more categorical judgments); he interpreted the normal in-house fighting that goes on every day in the intelligence community as evidence of some sort of plot against him. He made much of a comment in a group email—these conspirators were pretty relaxed about sending their nefarious ideas around to everyone—about “massaging” the President’s Daily Brief to take out references to the 2020 election. But the conversation was clearly about which product would include such issues, and how strongly the minority view would be stated. Like so much else in the speech and the documents, Trump threw everything he could find at the wall and in the hope that some of it would stick.

 

So what, then, was the point of Trump’s speech? First, he is almost certainly trying to soothe his wounded ego over the 2020 election. He is obsessed with his loss to Biden and wants to blame it on foreign manipulation. But Trump might also have a darker motive, attacking the integrity of American elections because he wants to delegitimize the coming midterms—and perhaps even create the predicate for interfering in them.

 

The Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans, and many other enemies of the United States clearly hope to undermine the faith of every American citizen in their own elections. But no regime, no spies, no saboteurs have yet matched the damage that America’s own president did tonight.

Trump Dooms His Own Party

By David Frum

Thursday, July 16, 2026

 

In early 2021, Republicans were poised to win a majority in the U.S. Senate. Had they won, they could have stalled President Biden’s agenda and forced him to govern on Republican terms. All they had to do was win the two Senate seats in Georgia headed to a run-off in January.

 

Then Donald Trump opened his yap. He had just lost the presidency. To assuage his own ego injury, Trump attacked the election as fake and rigged. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the effect of this talk in Georgia. In rural and conservative areas of the state, 752,000 Georgians who had voted in November stayed home in January. Turnout rose by 228,0000 in Democratic-leaning areas. Trump had discouraged his own voters and energized his foes. His party lost both seats and any hope of retaining the Senate.

 

Tonight, Trump repeated his self-destructive behavior.

 

If you are an anti-Trump voter who watched all or part of tonight’s speech to the nation, you saw a president removed from reality, babbling about conspiracy theories, threatening your right to vote. You probably came away from the speech alarmed, angry, and motivated.

 

If, on the other hand, you are pro-Trump, you heard a message of despair. Your president, in whom you trust, described a hopelessly compromised voting system, so broken that it fooled even Trump himself in his first presidency. Between the Chinese, the illegal aliens, and the hated liberal media, your vote will probably count for nothing. Plus, it’s crooked and unpatriotic to vote by mail. It’s all hopeless. Why bother?

 

When presidents face tough election environments, they typically look for ways to rally wavering voters to the cause. In October 2010, President Obama promised supporters, “If everybody who showed up in 2008 shows up in 2010, we will win this election.” Trump’s message was one of futility, as if to say: It doesn’t matter how many of us show up, because of all the sinister plots against us. We’re doomed almost no matter what we do.

 

That message makes psychic sense for Trump. He’s probably going to lose at least one congressional chamber in November, perhaps two, and he desperately needs an explanation as to why it’s not his fault.

 

But the message makes no sense for the Republicans who are actually on the ballot in 2026. There are marginal Republican-held seats that might be saved by an exciting message about Republican themes, by an economic plan to curb inflation, by some good news about the war in Iran. Instead, Trump is serving dismalness. Even the people credulous enough to believe that Trump lost the presidency in 2020 because he got outsmarted by crafty Venezuelans cannot be too eager to return to the polls so he can be outsmarted again.

 

We’ll know soon enough just how many Americans watched the speech, how many heeded Trump’s call to demand that their representatives pass his SAVE America Act. But among those who watched for sure—the hard-pressed Republican candidates begging for Trump to throw them a frickin’ bone on some issue of concern to voters—how mad are they tonight?

 

Trump is always about Trump first. Tonight was about Trump alone. He’s abandoned his allies because it’s his nature; he cannot help it. Soon he’ll discover what it’s like to be even more isolated and embattled than he needed to be, because he could not speak for—or about—anything other than himself.

The Damning Case Against Tyler Robinson

National Review Online

Monday, July 13, 2026

 

Within hours of Charlie Kirk’s tragic assassination, conspiracy theories started spreading on social media about his gruesome killing. Promoted most notoriously by the execrable Candace Owens, they mushroomed and became more outlandish over the past year. These irresponsible actors purporting to be searching for the truth have implicated Israel, Kirk’s friends and colleagues, and even a grieving widow, Erika Kirk herself. Sometimes they’ve suggested — this allegation is a Tucker Carlson favorite — that the government never properly investigated the killing and it all had something to do with pressuring President Trump into a war with Iran.

 

But in pretrial hearings this week, prosecutors provided a glimpse into the vast trove of evidence the government has compiled, and it all points to the obvious explanation that no rational, good-faith person ever doubted — that Kirk was killed by left-winger Tyler Robinson, who acted alone.

 

Owens claimed that she had a “source” who informed her that Robinson never even was on the Utah Valley University campus where Kirk was murdered. Actually, prosecutors have video of him on campus. They also found his DNA on the rifle that matches the type of bullets used to kill Kirk.

 

Robinson confessed multiple times to his roommate and lover Lance Twiggs. Robinson left a letter in their home that read, “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk, and I took it.” He also confessed after the murder, in a Discord message. On the day after Kirk’s murder, Twiggs has testified, Robinson showed up at their home. “I just asked him in person if what he said the night before was true, and he said it was,” Twiggs recalled, referring to a prior confession.

 

In a text message sent after the shooting, Robinson said of Kirk, “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Robinson also reminded Twiggs that he had been engraving bullets, and indeed there were multiple casings found with engravings on them. One messaged etched into an unfired round read, “hey fascist! CATCH!”

 

In other words, prosecutors have forensic evidence tying Robinson to the gun that was used in Kirk’s shooting, video of him at the scene at the time of the shooting, multiple confessions, a clear motive, and evidence of premeditation.

 

If this isn’t case closed, nothing is.

 

Of course, conspiracy theorists are never motivated by the pursuit of the truth, nor are they swayed by evidence. The likes of Owens will surely adjust to the mountain of evidence by declaring that the conspiracy is deeper and more elaborate than they initially suspected. That doesn’t mean that audiences have to believe them.

 

We hope that, in addition to delivering justice, the Tyler Robinson trial will put a dent in the influence of the lunatics and cynics who have perverted this case for their own abysmal ends.

Trump Is Getting Tired of Losing Election Cases

By Toluse Olorunnipa

Saturday, July 04, 2026

 

Earlier this year, President Trump claimed a new area of expertise: election law. “I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject,” Trump wrote on social media, and found an “irrefutable one” that he would soon present. He suggested that it would allow him to bypass Congress and gain approval from the courts to impose his will on the nation’s locally run election system, including requiring voters to show identification while casting ballots in the upcoming midterms.

 

It was a heady time for a man who obsesses over voting policy and is seeking to prove that the 2020 election was stolen out from under him. Two weeks before Trump claimed in his February 13 post to have broken new legal ground, the FBI had conducted a raid of an election warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia. Officials made off with more than 650 boxes of ballots as part of a criminal investigation stemming from Trump’s 2020 defeat, an unprecedented action that the president hailed as a major advance for his unsubstantiated claim that the contest was riddled with fraud. The House of Representatives had just passed the SAVE America Act, a bill that would force people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and to show photo identification when casting a ballot.

 

Now a sense of gloom has replaced the hope that Trump and his allies had when they thought they were on the verge of making good on his election promises, which also included eliminating most voting by mail and conducting mass purges of voter rolls. The SAVE America Act is doomed to fail in Congress, and Trump is at war with his own party over it. Nothing, so far, has come of the Fulton County case. And the president’s legal arguments are a lot more refutable than he claimed. Trump is consistently being rebuffed in court; the Justice Department has lost at least a dozen election lawsuits. Some changes to the election system that Trump laid out in a March executive order have been blocked by judges. The president is running out of time and low on options to change the country’s voting policies—which he has denigrated as “rigged” and reminiscent of developing nations’—because the courts, Congress, and the Constitution seem to keep getting in the way.

 

District-level judges have, over the past two weeks, ruled against Trump’s most significant executive orders on voting, blocked efforts by his administration to compel states to hand their voter rolls over to the Justice Department, and outlawed the Department of Homeland Security’s modified Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system. The administration has expanded the SAVE database, which previously focused on noncitizens, by adding Social Security records and other data from native-born Americans to conduct checks of people’s voter eligibility. A judge said that the expanded system “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.” Other judges are undercutting Trump’s assertion that he can remake the election system—which is administered by state and local officials—as he sees fit.

 

“The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani wrote in blocking much of Trump’s March executive order that aimed to give the U.S. Postal Service new authority to determine which Americans could vote by mail. She underlined the words does not for extra emphasis.

 

The administration’s “efforts have been rebuked by every court to consider them,” Cathy Bissoon, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Western Pennsylvania, wrote in a ruling that blocked the Department of Justice’s push to obtain voter data from the state. Bissoon noted that 10 courts had already blocked similar efforts in other states, before punctuating her comments with a footnote: “The administration’s demands have yielded one unexpected benefit, namely, bipartisan agreement. Five of the district judges are Trump appointees.”

 

They include U.S. District Court Judge Stephanie Gallagher, whom Trump nominated to the bench in 2019. She dismissed a DOJ lawsuit against Maryland seeking its voting records. “The Court joins every court to have addressed this issue,” Gallagher wrote in determining that an unredacted voter file is not something a state is compelled to give to the federal government. Trump has also lost in the Supreme Court that he helped reshape: Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote on Monday that states could allow mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, essentially dismissing the president’s argument that such late-arriving votes fuel fraud and distrust.

 

David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told reporters on Monday that the Trump administration’s cold streak is remarkable. “It is losing literally every single case it’s involved in,” Becker said. “I was a former voting section attorney in the DOJ, and I can’t remember the DOJ or any administration losing more than one or two trial-court cases a year, at the most. We are well into the double digits with this administration, and the year is not even half over yet.”

 

A Justice Department spokesperson told me that the Trump administration is “devoting significant resources” to continue the legal battle, including through its “litigation to ensure voter roll maintenance and a clear focus on ensuring that American elections are decided solely by American citizens.”

 

Publicly, the White House is shrugging off the legal setbacks. “President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told me in a statement, asserting that existing laws give the Justice Department what it needs to compel states to maintain clean voter rolls. “This campaign pledge from the President is why millions of Americans sent him back to the White House.”

 

But the president has done little to hide his frustration over his inability to make good on that pledge. The stalled SAVE America Act has led to shouting matches and standoffs over strategy with Republican lawmakers, leaving Congress in a legislative quagmire. And this year’s losing streak is a continuation of the president’s dismal record in the courts when it comes to voting cases. After Trump’s 2020-election loss, the president and his allies filed dozens of lawsuits in an effort to overturn the results. In the end, they lost almost every case. A Washington Post review of court cases a month after Joe Biden’s victory found that 86 judges had ruled against Trump or his supporters.

 

This is not to say that Trump has not had success influencing America’s electoral system, particularly in the past year. The president has elevated MAGA-friendly election deniers into the federal government, sicced the Justice Department on his political enemies, and drafted multiple agencies into his relentless hunt to substantiate his broad claims of voter fraud. The Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling in April gutted the Voting Rights Act and cleared the way for several Republican-led states to redraw congressional maps and eliminate Democrat-leaning districts with large portions of minority voters. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court rolled back campaign-finance restrictions on political parties, which Trump hailed as “A BIG WIN FOR REPUBLICANS.” At the state level, pro-Trump lawmakers have implemented miniature versions of the SAVE America Act or found other ways to support the president’s vision for voting. At least 10 states have voluntarily turned over the personal information of millions of voters to the Justice Department.

 

“They’re trying to appease Trump in these ways and implement his will in the states,” Gréta Bedekovics, the former director of democracy at the Center for American Progress, told me. In a report released Monday, Bedekovics and her co-author, Devon Ombres, found that at least 12 states have passed laws requiring documentary proof of citizenship for people registering to vote or mandating citizenship-verification checks for voters since 2024.

 

The setbacks that Trump has faced in court and Congress increase the likelihood that the midterm elections will proceed as election officials have intended, even though the president has, with little evidence, continued to denigrate the system as rife with fraud. On Monday, he lamented the “tremendous loss in the Supreme Court” on late-arriving mail-in ballots and said “it is more important than ever to pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.”

 

The president’s growing desperation over election policy has begun to bleed into other parts of his agenda. Last month, he abruptly canceled a signing ceremony for a bipartisan housing bill, suggesting that it was a “yawn” compared with legislation on elections. He has likewise encouraged Congress to block other bills, including national-security legislation, if the SAVE America Act—which Trump has deemed a “National Emergency”—is not attached. Congress left town this week mired in disagreement over how to balance the president’s election obsession with other pressing priorities, including the annual defense-spending bill.

 

Time is running out. Judges generally frown on any major actions to change voting laws in the weeks before an election. Early voting for the midterms will begin as soon as September in some states.

 

With Congress gridlocked and the courts repeatedly brushing back Trump, there is growing fear among election officials that the president may try to influence election policy in unprecedented ways, such as seizing voting machines—something Trump has said he regrets having not ordered the National Guard to do in 2020—and deploying federal agents to polling places.

 

The courts have proved to be a solid bulwark against Trump’s push to disrupt the midterm elections. But the president is nothing if not persistent when it comes to trying to bend the rules in his favor. As a result, the sanctity of the vote could rely on whether other government institutions and, ultimately, the citizenry can also mount a stand against the president’s worst impulses.

The Problem With the Marxist Mind

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, July 01, 2026

 

“The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”

 

That’s from the Communist Manifesto. And it’s garbage.

 

We’ll come back to that. First, I remind you of (Kevin) Williamson’s First Law: “Everything is simple when you don’t know a f—ing thing about it.” This is a variant of the old line, “Everything’s a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works.” This in turn is closely related to Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

 

I recently had Rana Dasgupta on my podcast to discuss his book After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order. To say that many readers hated it the way my old basset hound Norman hated a certain gray poodle would be an understatement—and an incredibly obscure reference. Suffice it to say, Norman was a mensch of a beast, but that gray poodle enraged him to Cujo-level hostilities. I’ll never know why.

 

But the fact is a lot of people hated it, and I was very frustrated by it. I don’t mean by Dasgupta himself. He was a decent fellow and played along. But I was very vexed by my inability to articulate what bothered me about his perspective.

 

The core problem was that we basically couldn’t get to a common agreement on some fundamental ways we think the world works. Dasgupta says he considers himself a small-l liberal in many respects, and I believe him. But his mode of analysis strikes me as a kind of elite cosmopolitan Marxism. He talks about systems being designed to do this or that. He says that the nation-state system was “designed to concentrate wealth in a small number of centers.” And the modern nation-state system was “conceived” by “American elites, particularly in the 1940s, as a universal project that would transform the lives of everybody on the planet.”

 

I’m not saying there’s no truth to any of this. I’m sure we can find some great quotes from John Foster Dulles or Dean Gooderham Acheson or some other gray flannel luminary of the midcentury establishment that lends some support to this view. But, ultimately, I think this is closer to nonsense than not. The early nation-states—you know, those Westphalian agglomerations of dynastic powers constrained by borders determined by geography and war—were formed in part to concentrate wealth in the hands of monarchs and emperors, but not just to concentrate wealth in monarchs and emperors. It was also done to protect the faith, please God, deter enemies, pursue glory, and a dozen other things.

 

The modern nation-state system organized by the U.S. and her allies was created to do all manner of things. Near the top of the list: prevent another world war and stop the communists from taking over the world. But also on that list were things like promoting trade, defending liberty, and burnishing the résumés and biographies of bureaucrats and statesmen.

 

But you know what else led to a lot of stuff? Accidents, mistakes, coincidences, unintended byproducts of new technologies, screws falling out in an imperfect world. Whatever. If the driver transporting the archduke hadn’t made a wrong turn, Gavrilo Princip would never have sparked World War I by shooting Franz Ferdinand. If Napoleon hadn’t failed in Haiti, he never would have sold the Louisiana Territory to Jefferson. The Berlin Wall fell in no small part because Günter Schabowski screwed up a press conference.

 

Now of course, the Berlin Wall would probably have come down sooner rather than later. We might have gotten the Louisiana Territory later in the 19^th century, but surely at a greater price. Whether we would have had World War I absent the events of Sarajevo is unknowable, but a different start might have led to a different ending as well.

 

Accidents and contingencies matter a lot. So do human desires and foibles. Blaise Pascal’s famous line about Cleopatra’s nose comes to mind: “Had it been shorter, the whole aspect of the world would have been altered.” But Caesar dug Cleopatra, and the rest is history. And one of the most important human desires or foibles is status. Elites compete with each other. They argue. They disagree.   

 

From the outside, institutions can seem monolithic. The institutions I know best are often described as collective nouns with monolithic intent. “National Review thinks this,” “AEI comes down on this side of the issue,” “The Dispatch says.” This is all perfectly defensible. We talk this way about Fox News and the New York Times, the Catholic Church, Major League Baseball, etc. It’s natural. But thinking this way often blinds us to the fact that many institutions have internal debates and disagreements.

 

And just because the public doesn’t see these schisms doesn’t mean they don’t exist, or that they don’t matter. As monolithically liberal as I think the Times is, I am nonetheless certain that there are internal debates where one side loses to another side, pretty much on a daily basis. Sometimes the fights don’t really matter (“Fine. The cafeteria will offer a second vegan option.”). But sometimes they surely do. If a different faction at the Times had won the internal argument over an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton, Bari Weiss probably wouldn’t be running CBS News today.

 

Heck, we put on our blinders even when we can see the schisms. The conservative majority of the Supreme Court is riven by profound—documented—disagreements. Yet an amazing number of people fall back on saying the court is a partisan “rubber stamp” for Trump.

 

The Marxist way of thinking about capitalism, or the liberal international order, or the modern nation-state, is so abstract that the role of happenstance and accidents evaporates, and the importance of human agency and leadership melts away, too. I don’t think “Marxist” is the best term for this way of thinking. Marxism is merely a very prominent example of it. But lots of modes of thought work this way, including conspiracy theories (which was what I was trying to get at in that earlier G-File). If you start from the premise that the system is rigged to reward the ruling class, the patriarchy, the oligarchs, or the Jooooooz, then internal disagreements in a society become a shadow puppet show for the rubes.  

 

According to the reified, teleological, dehumanized theories about neoliberalism, or the nation-state, or globalism—pushed by the left for nearly two centuries and by the right more and more—the “elites” are this monolithic bloc who not only know their own interests, individually and collectively, but they have the skill and agency to see them seamlessly satisfied. Every four years America tears itself apart fighting over the “most important election in our lifetimes.” But according to this “systemic” worldview, aren’t these national debates and decisions meaningless?

 

How is it that the system was designed to reward elites (however you define them) in perpetuity generation after generation, and yet the elites in every generation can’t agree on anything and can’t predict what will happen in the next week, never mind the next century? I reread Linton Wells’ memo on “Predicting the Future” at least once a year. Wells pointed out that since 1900, the world that security policy planners had expected to deal with over the subsequent decade had made fools of those planners. But the Big Plan behind The System has been working as predicted for centuries? Really?

 

That’s what’s so dumb about Marx’s line in the Communist Manifesto about the “executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” That wasn’t true then, and it’s not true now. The bourgeoisie in the mid-19^th century was divided on questions of nationality, religion, and politics. Different factions wanted different things. Some factions won—and then failed to get what they wanted. Some factions lost and ended up getting exactly what they wanted anyway. Or maybe the kaiser declared war and all the factions changed their plans.

 

Conspiracy theories are a form of this kind of systemic thinking. Marxism, of course, is in many respects a conspiracy theory (and Marx was definitely a conspiracy theorist). And the biggest problem with conspiracy theories—other than that they’re usually stupid lies—is that they breed fatalism or radicalism. When the real Powers That Be are always behind the curtain, pulling the strings and rigging the system, if every contrary piece of evidence is received as proof that the conspiracy goes even deeper, and if every event is proof that the Man always wins, and the system never fails, you’re left with two options. You can just surrender to the idea that you can’t change anything, and just not get out of bed or do anything with your life. Or you can decide to become some kind of heroic martyr in pursuit of completely tearing down the system. Both of these are stupid options.

 

Most people can see how the first option is a cop-out. But so is the second. The radical surrenders his judgment and agency to a theory—ironically a theory that says judgment and agency don’t matter. The radical decides to become an actor who simply reads from a script rather than think for himself.

 

The more exciting and rewarding course is to accept that the future is unwritten, the system is not rigged, and that your actions matter. The downside: This is the harder path. If what you do matters, then you are at least partially responsible for the consequences of what you do. You can’t blame everything on the system or outsource your agency to cosplay. The upside: Your arguments and actions matter, and you can have at least partial authorship of your life’s story.

Horseshoe Politics and the ‘Hidden Hand’

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, June 26, 2026

 

“People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about,” Thomas Frank wrote in What’s the Matter with Kansas?

 

Rarely has an idea been simultaneously so right and so wrong.

 

Progressives loved this thesis when Frank put it forward, because what Frank meant by it was that Republican voters were idiots who didn’t understand or vote on economic issues the way Frank thought they should. According to him, American politics was one long exercise in bait-and-switch. Voters are fed a steady diet of culture war issues, but get sops to fat cats. As Frank writes, “The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. ... Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation.”

 

Now, in the Trump era, my hostility to this thesis has softened somewhat. It’s hard to read this passage, 21 years after publication, and not see the glint of a point shining amid the bile “... the people at the top know what they have to do to stay there, and in a pinch they can easily overlook the sweaty piety of the new Republican masses, the social conservatives who raise their voices in praise of Jesus but cast their votes for Caesar.”

 

After all, we have a president who turned the GOP into a pro-choice party and periodically ends his tweets “Praise be to Allah!” He won saying that “she’s for they/them” while Trump is for you, and then proceeded to put his name on everything he could and dedicate the government to punishing his enemies and building monuments to himself.

 

But I still disagree with Frank because his understanding of “interests” was cartoonishly tendentious and arrogant. The question-begging was off the charts. He took for granted that he understood the interests of voters better than they did, he defined “interests” as narrowly economic, and he assumed that his preferred policies were uncontestably correct and effective.

 

Take his scorn for the pro-life argument. Who is to say that some pro-life voters didn’t actually believe what they professed to believe? Why is that not a valid reason to vote for a candidate? Surely, if we still had slavery in America, he wouldn’t gainsay someone who voted for an abolitionist, even though that abolitionist candidate opposed universal healthcare or a hike in the minimum wage. In a democracy, people decide what their interests are. Defining interests as support for a welfare state that more “generously” transfers wealth to the voter is fine. But saying that’s the only definition of legitimate interest is b.s.

 

But if you take that part out of it, I have to say I have a newfound respect for Frank’s claim. Voters do get their interests wrong. A lot.

 

I can make this point about Trump voters all day long. The Hispanic voters who believed he was just going to deport rapists and murderers, the farmers who thought he would be good for agriculture, the exporters and manufacturers screwed by tariffs, the hawks and the doves, and the friends and enemies of Israel have all been handed high fecal-content sandwiches at various points, and the larder is not close to bare.

 

But let’s look at the anti-Israel craze running through the Democratic Party. Basically, the prevailing demand is that Democratic politicians must say Israel is committing genocide and must commit to withdrawing support for Israel. Some resist, but the pressure is everywhere.

 

Now, I think it’s simply a lie that Israel is committing genocide. But let’s say that it is. How is making opposition to Israel the signature litmus test of the Democratic Party in the self-interest of voters? How does it lower rent in Brooklyn? How does it expand healthcare in Detroit? Answer: It simply doesn’t.

 

The answer to this from the anti-Israel crowd is much like my point about abortion voters. People get to decide what their interests are. For the left, and for much of the right, Israel is now a culture war issue. And left-wingers are just as capable of voting on culture war issues as the benighted right-wing voters Frank mocked.

 

Sure, some will hide behind a tiny fig leaf and say that aid to Israel could be spent on priorities at home. The fact that the numbers involved are a rounding error on a rounding error in terms of the money they want to spend doesn’t matter to them. You could probably fund Medicare for All for 15 minutes with all of the aid to Israel over the last decade combined. Their fig leaf covers their animosity like a postage stamp on Godzilla’s knee—it doesn’t conceal the true scope of the monstrosity at all.

 

But, as J.D. Vance might say, let’s forget about Israel.

 

I spend too much time thinking about horseshoe theory, or at least many readers tell me as much. I’m not the first to note that antisemitism is often the tip of the spear of horseshoe theory. I think that’s true. But why?

 

One easy answer that certainly explains a lot of it is simply bigotry. When a British visitor to the White House wanted advice on how to get in good with Woodrow Wilson, “Colonel” Edward House advised his friend on how to get a sympathetic hearing: “Never begin by arguing. Discover a common hate, exploit it, get the President warmed up and then start on your business.” I can think of several presidents this would work with.

 

Shared hatreds bring people together. Peter Viereck called this phenomenon “trans-tolerance.” When anti-Communism was a unifying cause, anti-Communists would forgive almost any other factor to broaden their coalition.

 

But I think this is only a partial explanation. Antisemitism boils down to a conspiracy theory. And pretty much all conspiracy theories work from the assumption that hidden forces and interests are manipulating events for their benefit. Most forms of Marxism work on this kind of assumption. But so do most forms of populism. The same tendency that ascribed lightning and volcanic eruptions to angry or mischievous gods fuels the assumption that our material circumstances were intended by the Powers That Be.

 

Since long before the name “capitalism” was affixed to notions of the free market, this has been the heart and soul of complaints about capitalism. I refer you to a famous observation by Balzac, if you can forgive the potty mouth: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.” This summarizes the thinking of centuries of anti-capitalist thought. It’s based on some variation of the assumption that there is a finite amount of wealth in society and therefore when one person gets richer, someone else gets poorer. For those committed to this idea, the protestations and denials of the capitalists are lies in service to their conspiracy against the public good.

 

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that all defenses of capitalism are to one extent or another based on refuting this mythology. Adam Ferguson, the “father of sociology” who inspired Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, observed:

 

Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.

 

Ferguson’s “establishments” became known as institutions, which in economics are simply rules. From this insight, Adam Smith developed the idea of the “invisible hand” and Hayek the “spontaneous order.”

 

The problem is that we are wired to believe that social arrangements are intentionally designed. As Michael Polanyi observed, “Wherever we see a well ordered arrangement … we instinctively assume that someone has intentionally placed them in that way.” This tendency leads to what Karl Popper called the “conspiracy theory of society.” This is “the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon.”

 

In short, it’s a cui bono theory. If Group X benefits from something, Group X must have intended it.

 

And we, as a species, like cui bono theories. Robert Nozick called them “hidden hand” theories, and they’re the opposite of “invisible hand” theories, because the whole point of Smith’s invisible hand is that there is no hand; beneficial cooperation operates “as if” guided by an invisible hand.

 

This sort of thinking explains a lot of the horseshoe. The antisemites of the left and right share the same conspiracy theory about how the economy—or Congress—works. But it’s not just the antisemites. Identitarians of the left and right believe that society is a zero-sum competition over scarce political resources. They disagree on which groups should win the competition, but they share the same worldview about how “the system” works—or should work. Donald Trump has declared that oil companies are “price gouging” because he thinks gas prices should be lower. It’s the exact same logic as Elizabeth Warren’s: look at inconvenient facts and assume sinister intentions.

 

This is the gateway drug to big government and what the Catholic Church calls “statolatry”—idolatrous worship of the state. If all the private institutions and private interests are greedy and selfish, then only the state—which looks after the interests of all the people—can be trusted to advance the people’s interests. Take the profit motive out of industry, and the “exploitation” vanishes, according to this fairy tale (tell North Koreans there is no exploitation in their factories and mines). If you think everything in our society is intended by someone, best to give power to the state so it can act in everyone’s interests.

 

We should get back to the problem of voters getting their interests wrong. Their error is not necessarily that they have the wrong interests. Most people vote on the economy in one way or another, and that’s entirely defensible. It’s wholly legitimate to want lower rents or more affordable groceries. So it’s not so much that they get their interests wrong, it’s that they’re wrong about how their interests are best advanced.

 

Rent control doesn’t work. Price controls don’t work. But if you think the economy is a static pie and that someone’s fortune is the intentional cause of your misfortune, then “make the billionaires pay for it!” politics not only makes sense but is morally compelling. Bill de Blasio, the ridiculous and failed former mayor of New York City, campaigned for mayor, and later president, on the slogan, “There’s plenty of money in this world. There’s plenty of money in this country. It’s just in the wrong hands!”

 

It would take me a thousand “news”letters to catalog all of the misery and bloodshed that can be laid at the feet of this idea.

 

Never mind that this idea would be morally wrong even if it were true. But it’s a lie. The “robber barons” of the 19^th century were accused of every manner of evil based on this Balzacian thinking. Now, not every so-called robber baron was an angel, but the truth is that the robber barons weren’t, as a class, robbers—they were givers. Cotton magnate, businessman, and public intellectual Edward Atkinson explained it well. “Through competition among capitalists,” he wrote in Addresses Upon the Labor Question, “capital itself is every year more effective in production, and tends ever to increasing abundance. Under its working the commodities that have been the luxuries of one generation become the comforts of the next and the necessities of the third. ... The plane of what constitutes a comfortable subsistence is constantly rising, and as the years go by greater and greater numbers attain this plane.”

 

Talking to some workers in 1886, Atkinson tried to explain how everyone gained from a free market. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Atkinson observed, made a profit of 14 cents from every barrel of flour shipped over his railroads. His efficiency in transportation lowered the price of flour for consumers. Atkinson asked, “Did Vanderbilt keep any of you down?”

 

If you’re the kind of voter who answers, “Yes,” it’s not that you have your interests wrong, you’re just wrong about how your interests are best served.