Will Anyone Stop America’s Creeping Socialism?

By Scott Lincicome

Thursday, October 15, 2026

 

When I first checked in last year on the Trump administration’s unprecedented ownership stakes in private U.S. companies, I warned that the 10 equity deals—and “the year America went (kinda) socialist”—gave us plenty to worry about. Ten months later, Uncle Sam’s equity portfolio has now grown to cover 35 deals across the steel, critical minerals, semiconductors, quantum computing, nuclear power, rocket motor, and crude oil industries, using a variety of laws and agencies to acquire the stakes. Even more deals are likely on the way—including ones, such as the new Andruil submarine arrangement announced last week, that give Washington a stake in certain projects instead of entire companies.

 

Given the radical and opaque nature of the Trump administration’s moves—recall that Washington hadn’t taken a non-crisis stake in a healthy company in decades—Cato this week launched our Restoring Free Enterprise project to document, analyze, and counter the trend.  As I wrote in the project’s introductory essay and in an August piece for the Washington Post, the government’s ownership stakes raise serious problems that have already begun to materialize: capital misallocation, politicized business decisions, preferential treatment, state coercion, corruption, and more.

 

Yet the biggest problem of all might be the simplest: Nobody—not even the Trump administration’s own lawyers—can point to a single U.S. law that expressly authorizes the executive branch to do any of this. That omission is glaring, and it matters for the stakes themselves, for how they might get unwound, and for whether anything stops the next president, of either party, from doing more of the same.

 

What the law actually says.

 

It’s been 16 months since the government took its first stake (last June’s U.S. Steel “golden share”), yet the Trump administration still hasn’t offered a clear and detailed legal justification for that deal or any other equity-based transaction. When Sens. Jack Reed and Roger Wicker asked about the legality of the Defense Department’s equity deals at a Senate Armed Services hearing in March, the Pentagon’s top industrial-base official said government lawyers would soon submit something to Congress on the issue. You’ll be shocked to learn that we’re still waiting for the memo. Other agencies have been similarly circumspect, offering little more than a press release with a statutory citation and no elaboration. Sometimes, we don’t even get that.

 

 

The Trump administration’s silence is notable—and troubling. Without a clear and official paper trail for all these equity deals, the public is left to guess as to how these expansive new powers—influencing or even controlling private companies!—are permissible under the law. The table below, constructed from press releases, SEC filings, and third-party reporting, is one such guess (and it’s admittedly incomplete). As the final column shows, none of the laws implicated by these deals expressly authorizes the federal agency at issue to take an ownership stake in a private, U.S.-based company:

 

 

In court, a Justice Department lawyer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently argued that the CHIPS Act expressly authorizes the government’s Intel stake, but this is clearly false. Instead, these laws say the government can offer grants, loans, and other subsidies to target companies, and some of them contain broad language—e.g., “mitigation agreements” for transactions reviewed by the  Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) or “payments” and “other transactions” under the CHIPS Act—into which one could argue that equity arrangements fall. Yet none of these laws is new—the Defense Production Act that created CFIUS dates back decades; the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) loan program program started in 2008; the Industrial Base Fund began in 2011; CHIPS was enacted in 2021; and the Office of Strategic Capital in 2022—and no president has ever used them to acquire direct ownership interests like the ones Trump keeps taking. (A single ATVM loan to Tesla in 2010 gave the government the right to eventually exercise warrants to buy Tesla stock between 2018 and 2023, but the warrants were terminated when Tesla repaid the loan in 2013.)

 

In other words, numerous presidents of both parties did not read these laws as a broad license to indefinitely hold stock in numerous private companies. Only Trump did.

 

As Georgetown’s Peter Harrell explained last year, the administration’s best legal argument here is simply that the language of these laws is vague and does not expressly forbid taking a golden share, equity stake, or other slice of the corporate pie, and a target firm could always just walk away if it didn’t like the government’s terms. Yet this argument fails for several reasons.

 

For starters, this is Washington we’re talking about, and there’s already evidence in several cases that these companies couldn’t just walk away from the equity deals (i.e., demands) they were presented. As I noted in the Post, in fact, the Intel deal and others appear to have been coerced by the Trump administration or “conditioned on the granting of a permit, subsidy or other government privilege.” When the federal government wants a slice of a company whose business depends on something Uncle Sam has, saying no isn’t really an option. And it’s foolish (at best) to pretend otherwise.

 

There’s also clear evidence that Congress knows how to say “equity” when it wants equity, just like it knows how to say—and does say—“grants” or “loans” in these very same laws. In CHIPS, for example, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren proposed an amendment forcing subsidy recipients to hand over equity, but it never passed. This year, Republican-led committees in the House and Senate have advanced legislation to authorize the Pentagon to make government equity investments with certain limitations, but those aren’t yet law, either. On the other hand, the Troubled Asset Relief Program expressly required the Treasury Department to obtain warrants (or senior debt) from the institutions it bought assets from, and the CARES Act barred Treasury from lending to eligible large businesses without receiving warrants or equity. (Both laws were also enacted during crises, of course.)

 

In a forthcoming essay for the Restoring Free Enterprise project, Cato legal expert Molly Nixon examines this statutory language in detail, finding that none of the laws behind today's equity stakes contain anything like it. That matters—or, at least, it should.

 

The Trump administration also knows about equity authority—until it doesn’t. When Trump’s Venezuela oil deal was announced, for example, a spokesman for the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital initially said that the office doesn’t take equity stakes in private companies. A few days later, another U.S. official claimed, without evidence, that Congress had given OSC exactly that power. Semafor, meanwhile, reports that Congress previously had declined Pentagon requests for equity authority, and over at Lawfare, Benjamin Press elaborates on the administration’s selective memory in this case (emphasis mine):

 

At the outset of the second Trump administration, the executive branch evidently believed that the department lacked clear authority to take equity stakes, and the Office of Management and Budget requested language in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2026 that would have granted the Defense Department the authority to do so. Nevertheless, no such language was added to the NDAA—or any other law. In other words, the only thing that could have changed between the beginning of the Trump administration, when the White House evidently believed that the Defense Department lacked clear authority, and mid-2025, when the department began making its investments, is its interpretation of existing authorities.

 

The administration’s new “interpretation,” meanwhile, appears to be distressingly thin. As Semafor reported last month, a June 2025 memo from the Office of Management and Budget claimed that a $400 million investment in MP Minerals was legal simply because it was “necessary to avoid an imminent threat to human life and government property.” The opinion also cited the Defense Production Act, a 2017 defense authorization, Article II of the Constitution, and—I kid you not—the “venerable tradition of presidential obligations in advance of appropriation” stretching back to 1792. (None of these things, of course, actually authorize equity stakes.) Former Pentagon officials briefed by Semafor said they were “skeptical” of OMB’s legal reasoning. “[I’m] surprised that the current team has discovered the authority to do this under the Defense Production Act,” one former OSC official told the outlet, adding that “laws can be elastic, but elasticity snaps at some point.” Sigh.

 

These justifications, by the way, are the best of the bunch. Some, such as the Commerce Department’s “participation interest” deal with Westinghouse or the government’s cut of Nvidia and AMD chip sales to China, don’t even bother with a statute. (Nvidia is now getting sued in Delaware on the grounds that the government is “constitutionally barred from imposing duties or taxes on exports.”) Trump’s Venezuela oil deal is even sketchier.

 

Finally, there are the obvious and troubling implications of an executive branch declaring sweeping and unprecedented new powers simply because Congress didn’t expressly bar such actions. As I explained in a new podcast accompanying the Restoring Free Enterprise project rollout, that’s an argument for unlimited executive power, not just for equity stakes, and it directly contradicts our constitutional system of government and enumerated powers. Even folks who are decidedly not from my libertarian side of the law, such as Georgetown’s Harrell and Biden-era Assistant Secretary of Defense Laura Taylor-Kale, are uncomfortable with where this is all heading.

 

So, how do we stop it?

 

That leads us to what might be the worst part of it all: Without any clear legal framework for doing this stuff, there’s no clear way to undo it or to stop more transactions in the future. As already noted, the pace of these deals has accelerated in 2026, and Trump has literally said that his standard for taking government equity stakes is simply “when people need something.” Trump and his team will surely announce more deals this year and next (another one popped up while I was typing this). And whoever wins in 2028, Republican or Democrat, will inherit both the portfolio and the unbridled power to expand it. The economic and political consequences—private capital increasingly flowing to the connected, a government with a direct financial interest in a growing set of firms, crony losers flocking to D.C, for an equity bailout, a president who increasingly uses stock deals to reward and punish American companies, and plenty more—could be enormous.

 

Congress could pass a law to force divestment and dismantle these (implied) powers, but that’s easier said than done. Some Democrats are uncomfortable with the equity deals, but many others—and not just Bernie Sanders and his fellow travelers—simply want more transparency and structure around them. Meanwhile, the party campaigning against “socialism” this fall is ironically the one advancing bills to authorize equity investments rather than terminate them. There are welcome exceptions—Sen. Jon Husted introduced a bill requiring covered stakes to be liquidated, and Sens. Thom Tillis and Mike Rounds have criticized the deals—but they probably won’t be the rule as long as Trump’s in office. Thus, securing a veto-proof majority for broad divestment legislation will likely be a serious challenge for the foreseeable future.

 

That leaves the courts, but the path here is also difficult and murky. Most companies with government equity stakes have little incentive to challenge a deal that inflates their stock prices, and the same goes for their shareholders. Any such challenge, moreover, would risk upsetting an all-powerful federal government and its, ahem, temperamental president. The same risk applies to federal contractors who might challenge government contracts awarded to state-backed firms on conflict-of-interest grounds.

 

These incentives likely explain why there’s been just one shareholder lawsuit to the equity deals so far. There, plaintiffs have challenged the Intel deal as a breach of its directors’ fiduciary duties (because they gave the government shares in exchange for nothing). Many legal experts think it’ll be a tough case to win, and, even if it is eventually successful, there are dozens of other deals that would also need to be challenged.

 

Finally, Congress could sue the Trump administration, similar to how the House of Representatives challenged—successfully in part, and unsuccessfully in others—President Obama’s implementation of the Affordable Care Act. That case required only a House majority, which Democrats will likely have next year. But here, too, there are major uncertainties surrounding whether Democrats will actually want to trim these new powers and whether a federal court would rule in their favor, given courts’ deference and these laws’ ambiguities.

 

In short, the same government that took these unprecedented equity stakes without clear statutory permission has no clear path for getting out. To restore both free enterprise and the rule of law, however, it’s imperative that we chart one.

What Hasan Piker Believes

By Jonathan Chait

Monday, October 12, 2026

 

About a year and a half ago, Hasan Piker, the left-wing activist and streamer, was hailed as the Democratic Party’s Joe Rogan—an influencer who can reach young men. A wave of gushy profiles paid more attention to Piker’s physique than to his habit of making impolitic comments. The New York Times’ entry in the genre was titled “A Progressive Mind in a Body Made for the ‘Manosphere.’”

 

Piker has since been welcomed, with notable holdouts, into the Democratic Party coalition. He has appeared with multiple Democrats on the stump, and has boasted that several others privately seek his counsel. Vanity Fair named Piker one of the 50 most influential people in America. He sees his influence as extending even to candidates who have not aligned with him publicly, pledging to pressure James Talarico to side with the left should Talarico win his Senate race in Texas. (“We have to remind him that we are the force that backed him both early on, and we are the force that allowed him to win this seat of power, and if he wants to maintain it, he’s got to play ball.”)

 

The predominant Democratic Party view of Piker was perhaps expressed by the Pod Save America host Jon Lovett, who told him last month on the liberal podcast, “My view is: I am part of a pro-democracy coalition in the fight against fascism, and it includes everyone from former Republicans like Nicolle Wallace and Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell, it includes establishment politicians, it includes Neera Tanden, it includes Shannon Watts, it includes AOC and Bernie, and it includes voices on the left like you.”

 

Piker’s stratospheric ascent—he now earns seven figures from his Twitch stream—and grandiose ambitions have made him the target of recriminations from a handful of suspicious Democratic Party moderates, as well as a recurrent villain for Fox News, which has attempted to turn him into the party’s face. Those critics have tended to recirculate a handful of Piker’s most outrageous statements, some of which—saying America deserved 9/11, and calling Orthodox Jews “inbred”—he has retracted and apologized for. Piker has complained that the mainstream media cover him but rarely deign to speak with him. Seeing that as a reasonable grievance, when he invited me on his show, I invited him to instead do an interview with The Atlantic. He accepted, before postponing the interview and then ultimately canceling it.

 

As I prepared for the interview by researching his commentary, I realized that Piker is right to complain that the handful of frequently repeated controversial statements fail to accurately represent his worldview. In fact, it’s much worse than those quotes suggest.

 

***

 

The most important problem with inviting Piker to join the pro-democracy coalition is that, by any reasonable definition of the term, he does not believe in democracy.

 

Piker declared at a debate this year, “I say we put the power back in the hands of the many rather than the power in the hands of the few. If a dictatorship is inevitable, I’d rather have it be a dictatorship of the proletariat than one that is designed around the needs of the bourgeois class.” On his Twitch stream he has said: “I love Lenin. I love Fidel Castro. And I love Che Guevara. They are genuinely fucking heroes.”

 

When asked to cite an example of socialism that he admires, Piker replied, “China is probably the closest,” while conceding that “there are still plenty of failures within the Chinese system.” Although he cites China’s economic model, rather than its single-party Communist regime, as the source of his admiration, other countries have exhibited the same rapid industrialization without attracting Piker’s fawning praise.

 

He has dismissed Mao’s campaign of mass terror as mere mistakes. “Do I believe that it was intentional? No, I don’t believe that it was intentional.” In fact, as the Brookings scholar Kenneth Lieberthal, who has taught a course on China under communism at the University of Michigan, told me, “Mao never shied away from violence among Chinese civilians to achieve his goals, and he never expressed regret for any deaths that occurred as a result of his initiatives.”

 

Piker has extensively praised economic development in North Korea, a country that he has acknowledged engages in repression, while maintaining that “it’s certainly not as bad as the way that Western media presents it.” In one segment marveling at economic development in the Stalinist kingdom, where even the slightest acts of dissent are met with confinement and torture, he said, “It is fucking mind-boggling to me that a country so fucking poor and so distraught, a country that withstood a fucking genocide, could get to this level, dude. Like, how does this not make you mad as an American citizen? How does this not fucking piss you off, where you look at this shit and you’re like, if they can do it, why the fuck can’t we?” Piker concluded by saying that North Korea’s achievement “shows you that a better future is possible for all of us.”

 

Piker does acknowledge shortcomings in the Communist regimes he defends, but treats their millions of victims as the tragic cost of progress. This contrasts with his treatment of anti-communists, which is marked by unsparing contempt. He has proclaimed his hatred for NATO on the grounds that it opposed communism: “Of course I am anti-NATO. NATO is designed with the explicit intent of being an anti-Communist institution.”

 

In one especially revealing episode, he attacked a refugee from Vietnam. Piker’s stream typically includes snippets of videos that he and his audience watch together, interspersed with his own commentary. As the video showed the refugee saying “We have endured suffering under the Communist regime,” he threw back his head in disbelief and began to rant: “Okay, fuck you, dude. I mean seriously, fuck you, old lady. Shut the fuck up, you stupid fucking idiotic old lady with your stupid fucking gamer headest. Who has fucked you harder, America or fuckin’ Ho Chi Minh? Suck my dick, old lady. Goddamn, dude. Fuck this refugee.”

 

Alongside his pro-Marxist-Leninist principles, the second pillar of Piker’s worldview is anti-Zionism. This does not distinguish him from other progressives. What does distinguish him is his belief that American Jews who do not share his position deserve punishment.

 

“In a totally just world, regardless of your background, any kind of fucking Zionist tendency should be treated in the same way as being a fucking rabid neo-Nazi,” he has said. Piker attracted attention when he recently predicted, “If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to come around and take action—not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.”

 

The two statements in combination have dire implications for American Jews. A recent poll found that, while about two-thirds of American Jews oppose the current Israeli-government policy toward the West Bank and Gaza, more than 70 percent describe themselves as very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel. Piker’s argument that “any kind of fucking Zionist tendency”—which includes the many Zionists who strongly criticize Israeli policy—should be treated as akin to Nazism, and that American Jewish affinity with the Jewish state invites anti-Semitism, would justify subjecting Jewish Americans to ostracism and abuse.

 

Piker’s second and more recent comment drew predictable condemnation from several leading Democrats. Piker has depicted this response as puppetry orchestrated by the Israel lobby.

 

“Aipac boss call was made,” he wrote on X. When Neera Tanden, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress, said that Piker was not helping the Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to win his campaign in Michigan, Piker replied, “You should probably stop highlighting and ‘legitimizing’ reactionary framing and republican attacks against abdul from a ‘nominally liberal’ perspective but i guess your donors w financial ties to tel aviv don’t want you to stop.” The notion that any opposition to his ideas must be evidence of hidden control, exercised by wealthy Jews, is a classic anti-Semitic trope.

 

***

 

Some of these comments have largely been taken as confirmation that Piker is essentially a shock jock. His defenders see these rude remarks as the unavoidable cost of having a popular media personality to amplify the Democrats’ message. “Some segments of the Democratic coalition would find Piker to be edgy, or crass, or even despicable. But, if ‘Rogan of the left’ is to mean anything, it would surely mean a higher tolerance for controversy, even at the risk of alienating parts of the base,” a New Yorker profile concluded in March 2025.

 

But unlike Rogan, who is foremost an entertainer and who lacks grounding in any serious ideology, Piker sees his work as advancing a long-term political project.

 

He tends to analyze his work most openly when he gives interviews about his Twitch stream, rather than on the program itself. When he is speaking to his audience, he falls into a frat-boy patois laden with generous helpings of profanity. When he is speaking about his show, he employs more sophisticated language and concepts.

 

“I am, at the end of the day, someone who is engaging in—and this is a Marxist term that a lot of people get mad at, because they don’t understand that propaganda is supposed to be a neutral term in its inception—but this is agitative propaganda,” Piker told Vox last month. Agitative propaganda—or, as it is more commonly known, agitprop—is a term derived from the department of agitation and propaganda, which the Soviets created in the 1920s to instill communist thinking in workers and peasants. The method is not generally known for its faithful adherence to truth and accuracy.

 

Piker describes his role as the spearhead of a long-term persuasion campaign to build power through gradual means. “I want to, through a system of, at first, modest social democratic reforms, basically claw back autonomy for the everyday person and hopefully give them more of a voice in their workplace and in the political process as well, and slowly but surely, yield more egalitarian outcomes,” he told Ross Douthat a year ago.

 

Piker frequently derides liberalism as a failed ideology. In an interview this past spring with Trevor Noah, he explained that voters who think they’re liberal are actually suffering from false consciousness.

 

“They self-identify as liberals because they don’t really understand what that means. If you were to pick apart their worldview and offer them a little bit of political education, you might find that they’re actually not liberals at all. Maybe they’re socialists, maybe they’re Marxists, maybe they have a different ideological tendency than liberalism, which is basically just the monoculture that we’ve taken for granted,” he said.

 

He considers the Democratic Party essentially a hollow shell, its governing ideology a kind of mindless vestige to which its voters have no authentic attachment, one that he and his allies can easily replace. This strategy requires Piker and his allies to gain a foothold within the party in order to ultimately capture it. He actively campaigned for several left-wing Democrats, especially El-Sayed. “During the 10 days I spent in the Midwest ahead of the primary vote, Piker was everywhere,” my colleague Helen Lewis reported.

 

When El-Sayed’s Republican opponent began to tie him to some of Piker’s more infamous remarks, Piker responded pragmatically to contain the damage. He apologized for having said that America deserved 9/11, claiming that the remark was taken out of context. He dismissed comments about hating the United States: “It’s laughable to say guys like myself, guys like Abdul El-Sayed, we hate America.” (In fact, Piker has expressed this precise sentiment, or iterations of it, many, many times.)

 

El-Sayed responded by acting as though Piker were simply a media figure to whom he had given an interview, rather than his campaign wingman. He described Piker as “a streamer in California,” and said he would have “a conversation” with any media figure with whom he disagrees, as if campaigning with someone were just like talking on Fox News.

 

Piker has cooperated with this message. He has repeatedly referred to himself as “a Twitch streamer,” mocking his critics for being so small-minded as to pay any attention to his beliefs. Republicans “centering their midterm strategy around a twitch streamer no one knows was extra dumb,” he wrote on X. His go-to line in response to any important piece of news has been to mock Democrats for complaining about his influence. In response to a story about deaths in the Iran war, he posted, “will the democrats demand accountability and transparency on this issue, or will they continue crying about a twitch streamer?”

 

The notable thing about this rhetorical pivot is that it requires Piker to belittle himself as irrelevant and unworthy of attention. That depiction hardly comports with the seriousness with which he has previously described his influence, but it does show a level of message discipline and commitment to the cause. CNN reported last week that El-Sayed had recently spoken with Piker and “warned his rhetoric was costing El-Sayed votes, asking him to stop.”

 

Do not expect Piker’s reticence to continue after Election Day. There is little reason to trust his current self-presentation as a mere Twitch streamer who is too obscure to merit discussion. He sees himself as a representative voice of a movement that can take control of a major party, and then the country itself.

 

Describing the Democratic Party to Noah, Piker said: “That’s a weak party. That’s a party that you can seize. That’s a party that you can take advantage of.” Many earnest liberals see Piker as a handy megaphone who can convey their message to an elusive constituency. Piker, however, is not so much joining the team as sizing it up as prey.

El-Sayed’s Trouble with Minority Voters

By Noah Rothman

Monday, October 12, 2026

 

It seemed to me that, while Mike Rogers delivered an underwhelming performance on last Thursday night’s debate stage, he probably succeeded in his effort to incept concerns in viewers’ minds about Abdul El-Sayed’s judgment and loyalties. The Jewish Insider reinforced that impression when it asked Michigan’s Jewish Democrats how they felt about the conduct of the Democratic Senate candidate.

 

“He’s not really made any accommodations whatsoever” to Michigan’s Jews, said prominent Democratic fundraiser David Kramer, “and the debate was just the latest example.” Kramer added that he’s hearing from his fellow Jewish Michiganders the general belief that El-Sayed is “absolutely showing who he is.” Michigan Democratic Party Central Committee member Joan Lowenstein agreed. Debate watchers “didn’t get anything new about what El-Sayed thinks, or what he was willing to do for Jewish safety,” she said, “not at all.” Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus secretary Zach Nessel (who is the son of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel), agonized over the choice before Michigan Democrats. “It was a sorry excuse not to stand up for our community three years after the Oct. 7 attack,” he said of El-Sayed’s refusal to honor the anniversary of the October 7 massacre. But then, perhaps the candidate’s silence was preferable. “I don’t think anything he would say would have been true to his values and probably would have been inflammatory,” Nessel added.

 

Influential as its individual members may be, Michigan’s Jewish community is small. Although he seems to have thoroughly alienated them, that does not spell defeat for El-Sayed in November. The candidate’s problems with the Wolverine State’s black voters are, however, another matter.

 

Longtime political analyst Ron Brownstein recently recalled a moment just prior to the state’s Democratic primary in which he found himself in a “black church in Detroit” where El-Sayed was “excoriated” from the pulpit. The church’s minister “said he was more concerned about Gaza than Detroit,” Brown observed. That mistrust persists.

 

Kamala Harris has already parachuted into the state to campaign on El-Sayed’s behalf, though her power to persuade Michiganders didn’t amount to much two years ago. Barack Obama will follow suit next week, and the former president has cut a 60-second spot endorsing “Doctor” Sayed. But while Democrats still believe that Obama’s popularity can transfer to other politicians, that has almost never been borne out in electoral results. What’s more, no one should expect the Democratic Party’s heavyweights to paper over the black community’s displeasure with El-Sayed or the constituencies he’s perceived to represent.

 

“They expect us to come get in lockstep and like him,” Detroit-area commentator Adolph Mongo told NewsNation. Mongo believes, NewsNation wrote, “that some Arab American political leaders have not sufficiently supported Black candidates or invested in the Black community.”

 

Writing for The Guardian, longtime columnist Charles Blow detected a similar discontent with El-Sayed among black Michiganders. Attorney Christopher Burtley, the chairman of Michigan’s black leadership advisory council, “says that the overwhelming feeling he detects toward El-Sayed from the Black community in Flint is ‘unfamiliarity,’” Blow reported, adding:

 

Phyllis Sykes, founder and executive director of the International Center of Greater Flint, and Burtley’s cohost at the meeting, chimed in: “People were on the fence. . . . I don’t think he has really been plugged into the African American network or whatever here like I know he has with some of the international populations.” None of that bodes well just a month out from election day. Both Burtley and Sykes are supporters of El-Sayed.

 

Then there’s the Hispanic vote. The New Yorker reported earlier this month that some of the El-Sayed’s allies fretted that he had not formalized his campaign’s outreach to Hispanic voters early enough, and they warn that he talks too much about abolishing ICE at the expense of “cost-of-living issues.”

 

In the August primary, El-Sayed performed strongest both in youngish urban precincts and “majority-Hispanic areas.” Progressive activist groups claim that the primary “saw an increase of 13% to 18% in Latino turnout compared to the 2022 primary,” suggesting the Hispanic vote is “fertile ground” for El-Sayed’s campaign to till. But El-Sayed will soon welcome another progressive celebrity with a conspicuous agenda to the state, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Beyond rallying with the candidate in college towns, AOC will host a “Latinos for Abdul” event in Detroit.

 

Unlike in previous cycles, high-quality polling has been scarce. The Senate race in Michigan is no exception. The last reliable poll of the race, Fox News’ late-September survey, found El-Sayed with a one-point lead over Mike Rogers but still winning with a narrow (50 percent) majority of the vote. And yet, that poll showed El-Sayed earning just 46 percent of white voters, 77 percent of black voters, and 68 percent of the “non-white” vote.

 

When Senator Elise Slotkin just barely won her 2024 race, by only 76,000 of the 5.4 million votes cast, according to the exit polling, she did so with the support of 44 percent of white voters (who made up 76 percent of the electorate), 40 percent of Hispanics (6 percent of all voters), and 85 percent of blacks (11 percent). In Fox’s poll, El-Sayed is winning 54 percent of the female vote and 49 percent of self-described independents. Slotkin won 53 percent of women in 2024 and 51 percent of independents.

 

These core constituencies will make or break El-Sayed’s political career. Right now, the candidate has more pathways to victory than Rogers, but not nearly as many as he’d probably like.

 

“If they want to make me the main character in the midterms, I’m not shying away from it,” El-Sayed told the Los Angeles Times in a recent interview. “Run against me. See how well that works out for you.” Given his middling performance in the polls, even as gusty tailwinds boost Democratic prospects almost across the board, Republicans might want to take El-Sayed up on that offer. Rogers needs to transform Michigan’s Senate race from a referendum on Donald Trump’s presidency into an up-or-down vote on El-Sayed’s fitness for office.

 

If the polls are right, Michiganders aren’t sold on El-Sayed. It remains to be seen whether Rogers can capitalize on their trepidation.

Why We Spaniards Want to Oust Pedro Sánchez

By Itxu Díaz

Saturday, October 10, 2026

Lately, I haven’t been able to get the words of William F. Buckley Jr. out of my head: “The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.” Last Monday, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced that the country’s general election would be brought forward to November 29. As a sociologist, I usually place limited value on casual observation, but I confess I haven’t seen such joy on the streets as I have this week in a long time. Sánchez has done something worse than govern poorly: He has managed to exasperate the Spanish people.

There is a common joke in Spain: If your mobile phone gets stolen in Madrid or Barcelona, you’re best off looking for it that same afternoon in a souk in Rabat. While he wasn’t physically pickpocketed, Pedro Sánchez himself had his phone infected with Pegasus spyware in 2021, likely an attack from Moroccan intelligence services. No one knows what is in those two-and-a-half gigabytes of data (it is unlikely to be treatises on apologetics), but all of Spain is convinced that ever since then, most of the strange decisions he has made have been conditioned by that espionage, including his historic shift in position on Western Sahara in Morocco’s favor and his silence toward Rabat following the migrant invasion of Ceuta this summer. Someday we will know if the mobile phone holds the key to this early election call.

In any case, the hard part is finding a reason not to call an early election. Today, Sánchez’s popularity among his own voters is low, but the hatred he stirs up among non-voters has reached unprecedented levels. His authoritarian exercise of power and his allergy to telling the truth (he calls it “changing his mind”) have turned him into meme fodder.

Sánchez’s socialist-communist government has been a disaster on all fronts: Spain suffered the worst pandemic management in the entire OECD, as confirmed by The Economist; Sánchez has hounded taxpayers with more than a hundred tax hikes since taking office in 2018, a period during which prices rose by more than 20 percent and the cost of the shopping basket surged by nearly 40 percent.

Furthermore, housing prices have risen by 50 percent over the last eight years. Hyper-regulation is a recipe for misery: Since 2018, Spain’s population has grown by 3.3 million due to mass immigration, yet new construction permits have barely exceeded 700,000 during that same period. The government has also wreaked havoc on the rental market with policies targeting landlords, such as eviction bans and price caps; you know you’ll be living at Mom and Dad’s place until you’re at least 50 the moment you hear a politician claim that the solution to the severe housing shortage is for the government to set the price.

Sánchez has proven disastrous even when faced with outside events, such as the floods in Valencia, when he tried to manipulate the disaster to blame the conservative regional government; the total blackout that left Spain in the dark for 15 hours following a reckless attempt to force green energy into the grid; or the train crash in Adamuz (Córdoba), which claimed 39 lives and exposed unprecedented infrastructure safety flaws due to a lack of maintenance. This occurred in the very same week that we learned that the minister in charge of infrastructure, who was later imprisoned, would pick prostitutes from a catalog one night and land them jobs at state-owned companies the next morning — like Pretty Woman, but with other people’s money.

It is often said that corruption does not influence elections in Spain, a fact that might seem surprising elsewhere. However, Sánchez’s case is unique: He is not merely an isolated “bad apple” in his government. His closest ministers and aides have gone to prison, while his wife and brother remain under investigation for corruption. This week, the Spanish newspaper El Debate revealed that government emissaries offered tax breaks to drug traffickers in exchange for assassinating the judge presiding over the case against Sánchez’s brother. With prostitutes, poverty, corruption, and crime, Sánchez has made it difficult at times to distinguish between Madrid and Havana.

Spain now has a historic opportunity to oust the only government in the West that includes communist ministers. However, for that change to happen, free and democratic elections are required. Sánchez’s repeated attempts to alter the electoral roll, via a law that would allow descendants of Spaniards living abroad to vote in Spain — a measure currently stalled by the Supreme Court — have kept the opposition on high alert to ensure a fair process.

Given the polls, which show the conservative PP and Vox holding a majority, it would take something very strange to prevent Sánchez from being ousted from La Moncloa next month. Yet strange things are already happening: Trade unions, for instance, silent for the past eight years, have just called a general strike protesting the prospect of a right-wing government.

The last time polls predicted a major electoral disaster for the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), back in 2004, a mysterious group of Islamists blew up several trains in Madrid two days before the election. Socialists then staged massive protests across Spain, not against the terrorists but against the right-wing government, which they falsely accused of having dragged Spain into the invasion of Iraq. They pulled off an electoral upset. That is why there’s another recurring joke in Spain: Whenever Sánchez is in trouble, you should stock up on tons of toilet paper, candles, and non-perishable food, and avoid taking trains.

In short, Sánchez has not only ruined the Spanish economy, the business environment, entrepreneurship, legal certainty, public safety, and the prospect of buying or renting a home, but he has also eroded democratic coexistence, repeatedly interfered with the judiciary, and shattered public trust in institutions. Ousting Sánchez from La Moncloa is not merely a national priority; it is the only way for Spain to regain its status as a reliable partner, both within the EU and in its relations with the United States. Sánchez is a wretched figure who, through sheer lack of scruples, has held an entire great nation hostage for eight years, a nation now desperate to free itself from the yoke of communists and socialists and shine once more in freedom.

Do Republicans Want to Rehabilitate Socialism?

By Noah Rothman

Friday, October 09, 2026

 

Of course, if he wanted to, JD Vance could define socialism. He just doesn’t.

 

Contrary to the vice president, “socialism,” a theory of socioeconomic organization in which the state, to varying degrees, owns property and enterprise and redistributes private wealth and goods based on central planners’ determinations, is not a “hard term to define these days.”

 

“Classically, you would think, socialism is about prioritizing workers,” Vance said. That sounds nice! But in the vice president’s view, today’s self-proclaimed socialists have perverted the philosophy’s noble intentions. “So, I don’t know what the term means anymore.”

 

“Vance has to redefine socialism as ‘things I oppose’ because if he defined it in terms of its actual economic philosophy, he’d agree with much of it,” our own Phil Klein observed.

 

Klein is probably right that Vance’s brand of self-described “post-liberal” economics too closely resembles classical socialism to be honest about it. But think about that for a moment: Vance cannot, or will not, argue against socialism just weeks before an election in which the GOP’s hopes rest almost entirely on polarizing the electorate against the Democratic Party’s rising socialist wing. What’s more, he won’t do that because, if he did share the GOP’s priorities, he’d have to put off feathering his own political nest.

 

If Vance cannot define socialism, how can Republicans expect him to combat it? And make no mistake, that is what the GOP’s voters want from their representatives. They are not in thrall to the “warmth of collectivism.” They don’t hunger for the public appropriation of private goods and the inefficient distribution of resources to reengineer society so as to match Vance’s expansive vision for us all.

 

The vice president’s personal project in the second Trump administration has been to rehabilitate big government in the eyes of Republican voters. And he’s enjoyed some success. Pew Research Center, for example, found that GOP support for “big government” rose from 20 percent in 2020 to 24 percent in 2025. But the GOP still despises socialism. While the Democratic Party is increasingly inclined toward state ownership of the means of production, Gallup’s late-September survey found that only 14 percent of Republicans are similarly disposed.

 

So Vance will have to spend down his accumulated political capital to rehab socialism’s image on the right. And it seems he’s doing just that:

 

 

The strategy here, if there is one to speak of, is mystifying. In 2026, the Republican Party is all but united in its opposition to the rise of socialist candidates. Its voters seek a champion who can cogently and forcefully articulate their fundamental and inviolable values. Perhaps foremost among those values is the belief that remote technocrats in Washington can never have the requisite knowledge to distribute resources as efficiently as markets. What’s more, they don’t want to surrender their freedom to Washington just so it can engage in that timeless folly.

 

Vance isn’t fighting socialism. He’s surrendering to it. But is that what Republican voters want?

 

 

The Persuadable Gen Z Voter No One Wants to Persuade

By Noah Rothman

Monday, October 05, 2026

 

Depending on your political persuasion, the Wall Street Journal’s informal focus group featuring six “Democratic voters,” two of whom expressed irreconcilable objections to Abdul El-Sayed’s candidacy for U.S. Senate in Michigan, might produce one of two reactions: Wow, two out of six Democrats won’t back El-Sayed, or, My God, only two out of six Democrats won’t back El-Sayed.

 

“Being on this panel made me lose all faith in the party,” one of the two dissenters on the panel, 18-year-old Stanford University student Samson Cain, wrote last week.

 

I asked him what he meant by that.

 

“This is not an isolated event but, rather, part of a broader trend,” Cain explained in a Monday interview with National Review. “I feel like the party is going in a very dangerous direction.”

 

“It seemed first of all like the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] in the progressive wing of the party was not just a fringe idea but very popular,” he added. Cain spoke with disdain about the DSA agenda: “abolishing police and prisons, nationalizing essential industries, abolishing the Senate, abolishing the Supreme Court.” To Cain, most participants on that call seemed either supportive of those specific policies or at least enthusiastic about what he called the DSA’s “mission.”

 

“This didn’t make it into the final video, but I found myself having to defend capitalism as an institution,” Cain continued. “We got to a point where there was a discussion not just about reforming capitalism but whether it was the right system.”

 

The university student confessed: “I walked away from this call thinking to myself, ‘Wow, I really don’t agree with these people on just about [anything].’”

 

Democratic partisans will take solace in Cain’s admission that he does not see himself as a rock-solid Democratic voter (his billing by WSJ notwithstanding). “I didn’t exactly consider myself a true Democrat walking in,” he said. Cain says he identifies as a centrist independent and identified himself as such on that call. Yet he conceded that there was no point in this election cycle in which he “seriously considered” voting for Democratic candidates.

 

The Democratic Party would, however, be fooling itself if members conclude that Cain — and young men like him — were never persuadable. He caught the Journal’s eye because of his work with Promise to America, a center-left advocacy organization dedicated to beating back the far left’s influence from within the Democratic milieu. “I have a very fundamental belief in free markets and, you know, a strong national defense,” Cain explained. That those have become “right-of-center” views, in Cain’s words, reflects less on him than on the Democratic Party.

 

When it comes to El-Sayed, Cain told the Journal that his problem was with the company the candidate keeps — in particular, the incendiary streamer Hasan Piker. But Israel did not feature prominently in our discussion of the Michigan candidate’s demerits.

 

“I think you see a huge mischaracterization of how the economy works on the progressive left,” Cain explained. “Just recently, he gave an interview saying he’d rather have one thousand millionaires than one billionaire. Like, sure. Okay. But the reality is, the economy doesn’t work that way. In fact, they feed off each other. And, in fact, the more billionaires you have, the more millionaires you have as well.”

 

When the Journal’s panelists were asked to look ahead to the 2028 presidential nominating contest, Cain emphasized his preference for a candidate with “electability.” He cited Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear as an example of that kind of candidate. If the party goes in a different direction, though, and assuming the GOP does not alienate him further, “there’s quite a good chance that, in 2028, it is, in fact, a Republican that I end up voting for.”

 

Cain does not, however, have many kind words for the GOP. “People don’t feel that they’ve taken the affordability issue seriously,” he said. Say what you will about the DSA, for Cain “it’s very obvious” that the socialist left “is taking the affordability issue very seriously,” even if he opposes the DSA’s approach. By contrast, when it comes to Democratic leaders like Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, “you have no idea what they believe other than that they don’t like Trump.”

 

Cain, who recently published a taxonomy of the primary political outlooks among his generational cohort, expressed his concern that Gen Z’s inclination toward “conspiratorial” and “anti-establishment” thinking “paves the way for more dangerous ideologies.” Nothing about that outlook would be alien to the Democratic Party as it was conceived a generation ago. Today, however, Cain’s political outlook — his support for the capitalist enterprise and a strong national defense, and his rejection of radicalism of all stripes — is all but anathema to the center- and far-left alike.

 

“If the Democratic Party could make a concerted effort to get rid of the crazy progressive wing, get rid of the DSA, unequivocally condemn a lot of these policies and ideas, and reform themselves to a more Clintonian 1990s version of the party, that would make me a gettable voter,” he concluded. “But at this point, I feel that we’re going in the exact opposite direction.”

 

Cain conceded that the Democratic Party didn’t actually lose him this year, but that’s partly because it never set out to win him over in the first place. The party that sets out to get Samson Cain may find that he represents more voters than either party seems to understand.

Importing the Third World

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, September 28, 2026

 

“Import the third world, become the third world” is a slogan popular with postliberals who, for whatever reason, are reluctant to say the 14 words. Publicly, anyway.

 

Like “Great Replacement theory,” it’s wormed its way into semi-“respectable” right-wing discourse to a degree that out-and-out racism still hasn’t quite managed. I doubt, for instance, that we’ll ever see the president deliver a fascist salute while shouting “white power.”

 

But “import the third world, become the third world”? Not only might Donald Trump plausibly say it, in 2024 his campaign did say it. And the visuals it chose to illustrate the point were as subtle as you’d expect.

 

“Import the third world, become the third world” is the conclusion you reach when you’ve despaired of America’s formidable ability to assimilate immigrants, as postliberals certainly have. It implies a second conclusion: To avoid becoming the third world, all you need to do is to stop importing the third world.

 

But that’s as false as false can be, in case you missed the previous thousand editions of this newsletter. Under Trump, America’s government did stop importing the third world—and immediately set about adopting every civic pathology for which third-world regimes are known and despised.

 

American postliberals have no objection to third-world government. What they want, and have always wanted, is a third-world government that works for them, privileging their own racial, religious, and ideological tribe while penalizing rival ones.

 

Which brings us to the president’s—or is it the American people’s?—new ads.

 

Three times in the past week, the White House has released videos that are indistinguishable from campaign spots. The first, which aired on Fox News and other right-wing outlets, features audio of UFC honcho Dana White celebrating Trump as “the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met.” Heroic images of the president flash onscreen, intercut with the words “America will never be a communist country.” A chorus sings “love me,” if you can believe it, in the background.

 

The second ad, more subdued, features Trump speaking about America’s future while romantic images of Mount Rushmore, fireworks, and crowds with flags float by. But the third is a return to form—the man in his element, glowering at the camera in black-and-white while audio plays from one of the most third-world speeches he’s ever given: “This is the final battle…. We will demolish the deep state, we will expel the warmongers…. We will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country…. We will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”

 

That one aired this weekend during Saturday Night Live, Fox News Sunday, and various football games. Not only does it look like a campaign ad, it was a campaign ad. It repurposes footage that Trump posted to Truth Social as a candidate in 2024—footage that, per the New York Times, his team spent upward of $60,000 to boost online in the final days of that year’s presidential race

 

Why is any of this newsworthy? Because: All three spots released this week are captioned “Paid for by the U.S. government.” That is, by you and me.

 

The White House addressed the outcry on Friday with a press release titled “Presidential Public Service Announcements Are Nothing New,” but it’s unclear what the alleged “public service” in this case is supposed to be. The historic examples the press releases cites—public health announcements, entitlement enrollment information, morale boosters during war—all had a policy rationale. The new Trump ads don’t.

 

According to the White House, the rationale is “patriotism.” What could be more patriotic than a fascist demagogue seething about cleansing America of internal enemies?

 

What’s the real purpose of these ads?

 

Because he can.

 

I’m open to the theory that there is no “purpose” per se.

 

What was the purpose of putting the president’s face on the currency? For that matter, what was the purpose of last week’s summit with Xi Jinping?

 

There’s no “purpose,” only vanity and prestige.

 

Earlier this month Axios reported that the people around Trump have largely given up on discouraging his worst impulses, particularly when those impulses involve his self-glorification. (And when don’t they?) “Many aides and confidants have been worn down,” the outlet reported. “They know they can’t stop him, and they don’t even try. More and more, they humor his whims.”

 

Perhaps the taxpayer-funded campaign ads are just the latest perk of the imperial presidency for a term-limited egomaniac, no different in substance from minting a coin in his honor. He’ll never be on the ballot again; the right’s emotional investment in him is declining and will soon enough shift to some younger successor. He intends to cling selfishly to the national spotlight for as long as he can, and the new ads are one way to do it.

 

But I think that’s too simple. If you’ve paid any attention to the president’s campaign rhetoric over the past month, you know that there is a purpose to these spots and it ain’t patriotism. Before, during, and after the spotlight-clinging convention he held a few weeks ago, Trump has begged fans to “pretend I’m on the ballot” in November. (He did it again this morning.) MAGA diehards reliably turn out for their hero in presidential elections, but much less reliably in midterm campaigns, when he’s on the sidelines. He needs them at the polls this fall to hold down congressional losses.

 

The three new ads are all designed to impress upon them the sense that the president himself is on the ballot, reminding the red cap-wearing wing of the right why they put those caps on in the first place. Trump’s own political fate might not be at stake, the commercials seem to say, but the fate of Trumpism is.

 

If you wouldn’t call ads that amplify a party’s core election message “campaign ads,” what would you call them?

 

Of course they’re campaign ads, never mind that federal law prohibits using money appropriated by Congress for political propaganda. The question is why a guy whose PAC was sitting on more than $400 million as of the end of August connived to have the U.S. government pay to air them instead of picking up the tab himself, or leaning on some private-sector crony to do so. Sticking the taxpayers with the bill feels gratuitous, seeking out controversy when it could easily have been avoided. Why would Trump do that?

 

Because he can.

 

The caption “Paid for by the U.S. government” is a sort of advertisement within an advertisement. As I said, the dream of postliberals is to be governed by a third-world regime that favors them and disfavors their enemies. The three ads are Trump’s way of reinvigorating his unenthused base by showing them the extent to which he’s achieved that. I’ve weaponized the federal government so ruthlessly against the left, he’s suggesting, that I’m going to have the U.S. Treasury pay for Republican campaign ads.

 

He might not have made groceries cheaper or weakened China or ended “forever wars” in the Middle East. But to the sort of anti-American cretin who believes that saving the country requires abusing federal power toward the goal of right-wing autocracy, he’s delivered in spades. That’s the sort of voter he needs at the polls in November and whose excitement he’s hoping to rekindle. “Forget the price of diesel,” the ads imply. “Remember the big picture here.”

 

It reminds me of Pete Hegseth commandeering Apache helicopters for him and Kid Rock to joyride around in, another memorable “because I can” postliberal moment that mimics the most loathsome aspects of third-world government. The ruling party makes no distinction between its personal interests and the national interest; high officials arrogantly flaunt their corruption, knowing that cronyism will guarantee their impunity; and the public, demoralized by the spectacle, loses confidence in liberalism’s ability to deter that corruption, which ironically feeds the opposition’s appetite for postliberal remedies.

 

All of that was true of the helicopter episode, and all of it is true of Trump’s government-funded ads. Even the “love me” chorus in the first spot turns out to have been obtained improperly, lifted from a song by an artist who didn’t authorize its use by the White House. The logic of choosing that music was “in for a penny, in for a pound,” I suppose: If the president was going to steal money from the U.S. Treasury to pay for the ads, he might as well steal intellectual property to make them to his liking too.

 

Americans imported a third-world political movement into the federal government in 2024 and now here we are. Import the third world, become the third world.

 

A game of horseshoes.

 

The most preposterous soundbite in the three ads is the audio of Trump grumbling about “expelling warmongers,” a bit of 2024 verbiage that’s aged post-Iran like milk left out on a windowsill at Mar-a-Lago. But I was also struck by how large anti-communism loomed in his message, given the fact that one of his own diplomats went on television yesterday and claimed that the president offered last week to sell weapons to … China.

 

That feels like a gag someone like me would write to satirize his infatuations with dictators and “deals,” but it’s no joke. “President Trump continues to say, ‘Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world,’” David Perdue, the U.S. ambassador to China, told Fox News Sunday. “He actually asked President Xi, would he like to buy some at one point.”

 

Selling weapons to an enemy regime that might plausibly use them someday to kill American soldiers feels like the logical endpoint of the Trump era, which began with bluster about getting tough on China and now seems to be steering toward some sort of illiberal “grand bargain” involving joint global hegemony via the two countries’ “spheres of influence.” Never mind what the ad says: In what way is the president’s administration still meaningfully anti-communist?

 

There are two notorious communist leaders on planet Earth, Xi and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and Trump’s desire for better relations with both is so effusive that it borders on personal affection. He also appears to have been sincerely charmed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, America’s most influential next-gen socialist, and does nothing to hide it.

 

I’m not exaggerating for effect when I say that not only does Trump appear more comfortable with illiberal left-wing leaders than any modern Democratic president has been, he’s practiced socialist economics more aggressively than any modern Democratic president has. If Barack Obama or Joe Biden had sought government ownership stakes in 31 companies and counting, many grassroots right-wingers would have skipped the calls for impeachment and proceeded straight to egging on a military coup.

 

It all amounts to a second way in which Trump has “imported” the third world. Between his affinity for communist dictators, his cultivation of Arab client states, his abiding interest in rapprochement with Vladimir Putin and Russia, and his comparative hostility toward liberal powers in Europe and Canada, never before has American foreign policy held third-world forms of government in as high regard as it does now. At best, the president seems to view them as no worse than their Western counterparts. At worst, he actively prefers them.

 

It’s not his fault—or not entirely—that more than 40 percent of Americans now rate “socialism” positively, the highest share ever tracked by Gallup. That surge is a combination, I suspect, of years of loose talk on the right that foolishly made “socialism” synonymous with the welfare state (Americans love the welfare state!) and the cost of living having driven some desperate voters to give radical redistribution a second look. Trump is partly responsible for the latter, of course.

 

But I wonder if his presidency will end up durably destigmatizing third-world modes of government for younger generations. He’s governed largely by decree, has normalized Xi and Kim, has legitimized government meddling in the private sector, and is poised to reorient welfare programs around right-wing social engineering; as young Americans absorb all of it, this week’s new ads might seem even more ironically vacuous in hindsight than they already do. How could Republicans seriously campaign in 2026 on promising that “America will never be a communist country” while doing more than any other modern party to condition the public to tolerate statist autocracy?

 

The answer, I suppose, is that they’re not “seriously” campaigning on it. Terms like “communist” are substantively meaningless to the president and his fans, essentially just slurs that translate loosely to “domestic left-wing antagonist.” (That’s why, in the audio for the third ad, “communist” and “Marxist” are placed alongside “fascist” and “villains.” They’re all just empty swear words aimed at the president’s enemies.) When you hear “America will never be a communist country,” you’re not supposed to picture it being overrun by the Chinese army or under the yoke of some U.S. version of the Supreme Soviet. You’re supposed to imagine it being run by a Congress of “woke” twentysomething progressives with blue hair. Or President Jon Ossoff.

 

The essential disagreement in “horseshoe politics” doesn’t have to do with how government should operate, on which the far left and far right largely agree. It has to do with which side gets to be in charge. And, unintentionally, the three new ads illustrate that too: Insofar as their goal is to persuade Republican voters to turn out to vote and keep Congress in the GOP’s hands, they’re a plea to protect Trump’s quasi-autocratic powers by extending one-party rule in Washington. Normally the president doesn’t get to govern like a Chinese emperor just because his side happens to control the House and Senate, but in third-world America, the stakes in the midterms really are a choice between democracy and whatever the hell one might call the last 20 months.

 

You can have a communist country, i.e., one in which Democrats get to govern sometimes, or you can have the other thing, in which the attorney general mutters menacingly about media bias as a “national security issue” that Americans shouldn’t have to put up with. Having imported the third world into the government in 2024, voters will decide in November how much more of it they’d like to import.

A Parent Should Play Favorites

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

 

About a month ago, Bridget Phetasy posted on Twitter that it’d been two years since her dog passed away.

 

This was my reply:

 

The great thing about dogs — one of the great things at least — is the rules that govern ranking other things don’t apply to dogs. I have never doubted that someone was telling the absolute truth when they said their dog was the best dog ever, even though I know for a fact that I’ve owned two of the best dogs ever and my current dogs will one day join them on Mount Rushmore as the four greatest dogs ever. It’s just not like mountains or money. There’s only one tallest mountain or richest person. But the number of obviously best dogs ever is almost infinite.

 

I bring this up not to talk about dogs, though I think you know that I am happy to be thrown in that briar patch. I bring it up to talk about something that dogs are a good illustration of.

 

So, against all my better judgment, let’s stick with dogs for a moment longer. The replies to my tweet were more edifying than most, and not just for the conspicuous absence of antisemitic bile. People got what I meant. It’s not like I persuaded anybody. They already agreed before I said anything, because people who love their dogs understand that the realm they share with them is outside of the realms in much of the rest of their lives. Indeed, that’s one of the reasons I like posting stuff about dogs—they don’t care about politics or “influence” and their indifference is contagious. I find that deeply comforting in this time of stupid, ugly politics.

 

Humans and dogs are very different in all sorts of obvious ways: number of legs, mathematical aptitude, etc. But one difference I think about a lot may not be so obvious. Telling your dog you love it is pretty futile; you have to show it. I know dog owners who will disagree with this. The ones who aren’t entirely wrong will say that dogs can pick up on your voice, mood, etc. Fair enough. But even so, that’s more showing than telling. The words alone are the “blah blah blahs” from The Far Side cartoon. We show our love in all of the mundanely obvious ways. We feed them, we play with them, and we just hang out with them. The hardest parts of dog ownership, by far, are the ones where our love seems like punishment: taking them to the vet, retrieving delicious but dangerous things from their mouths, giving them pills, and, worst of all, having to decide to say goodbye to them (though you’re doing that wrong if it seems like anyone but you feels punished).

 

Which brings me to parenthood. Children and dogs are very different, and I think it can be a mistake to be confused on this point. People frequently ask me why, in my tweets in which Pippa talks to people, she refers to me as “thumb guy” and my wife as “the special lady.” Part of it is just a long-running silly joke about how, when we’re in the park, I’m using my phone to take her picture on the thumb machine I’m always using. But the more serious reason is that I don’t want to contribute, publicly, to the “furbaby” discourse in which we talk about dogs as if they are human children. I don’t want Pippa referring to me as “daddy” or to the Fair Jessica as “mommy.” I won’t claim we stick to this rule in private, but that’s sort of the point: That’s private. You can quibble with the reasoning of my rule of thumb (guy), but I’m sticking with it.

 

For all the massively important and real differences between human children and dogs, those differences are, in some respects, narrowest when our kids are babies. That’s because when they’re babies, words don’t matter very much. Yes, talking to babies is good for their development and all that, but the imperative is to show your love more than tell it. Among the worst experiences in my life were the times I had to take my preverbal daughter to a doctor or hospital for her own good, because I couldn’t explain that it was for her own good. I had to do it anyway. Because that’s what parents have to do. Because we love our children.

 

We’ll come back to that.

 

Nikole Hannah-Jones’ values.

 

Nikole Hannah-Jones has generated a lot of buzz over her revelatory essay about deliberately sending her kid to a bad school. Some would describe her pensée as “soul searching.” I’m not inclined to do that, because I don’t think she searched as deeply as she wants to suggest. Charlie Cooke covers a lot of my thoughts on the matter.

 

He focuses, rightly, on something Hannah-Jones said in 2024: “My daughter is not worth more than any other child.”

 

This is wrong. It’s wrong in profound ways. It’s also a very old and shockingly common idea.

 

In 2013, Melissa Harris-Perry was featured in one of MSNBC’s old “Lean Forward” agitprop ads in which she said public education was underfunded “because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children ‘your kid is yours’ and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are ‘our children.’” Her solution: “We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”

 

Hillary Clinton said in 1996, “As adults we have to start thinking and believing that there isn’t really any such thing as someone else’s child.”

 

The first-wave feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman stated it more starkly. “There is no more brilliant hope on earth to-day, than this new thought about the child … the recognition of ‘the child,’ children as a class, children as citizens with rights to be guaranteed only by the state; instead of our previous attitude toward them of absolute personal [that is, parental] ownership—the unchecked tyranny … of the private home.”

 

I think this is gross. It’s no less gross if you are willing to grant that it is well-intended, something I struggle to do at times. We’re all familiar with the way good intentions can pave a path we don’t want to go down. Indeed, I find it fascinating how anyone can simultaneously treat The Handmaid’s Tale as almost a form of secular prophecy and entertain this line of thinking. After all, nationalizing, or socializing, the raising of children seems like a necessary first step down the path of good intentions leading to a kind of hell.

 

Before I get to my fundamental objection, I should offer a lesser one. This is bad public policy. One of the best ways to identify when the government is failing is not when we vote at the ballot box, but when we vote “with our feet.” There are few better examples of what social scientists call “revealed preferences” than packing up and moving someplace else—for better schools, lower taxes, or, in the case of people fleeing despotic regimes, for simple freedom. Watching a video of Germans trying to escape East Berlin, or of Vietnamese boat people, or anyone else fleeing countries with a more “collective notion” of raising children, will teach you more about those regimes than any textbook.

 

Our system works on the assumption that parents care more about their children than anyone else. I’m not saying it works great, and sometimes that’s because parents don’t care enough. But a system designed around the assumption that parents not only don’t but should not care more about their kids is a recipe for a system that would make “the tragedy of the commons” a real tragedy. Imagine a school system where parental feedback did not exist, save as some sort of sentiment about children as an undifferentiated, commodified mass of future workers.

 

But my point isn’t about public policy per se. It’s about parental policy, for want of a better word. Hannah-Jones didn’t vote with her feet, she voted with her child. She made her daughter an instrument of her politics, a flesh-and-blood virtue signal. And she did it based, at least in part, on her “values,” which take it as a self-evident truth that her child is not worth more than any other.

 

Now, seen from the perspective of an education bureaucrat or a politician, this is a more defensible claim than some are willing to concede. The job of public officials is to care about all of the kids under their supervision more or less equally. I say “more or less” because I think even here some distinctions can and should be made. The students who really care about doing the work should be rewarded with the ability to do it without having to navigate bullying, violence, or disruption by students who don’t. That doesn’t mean the bad apples should  be written off. It just means that choices always have to be made. Having a whole class held hostage to the worst-behaved troublemakers is a choice, just as removing those troublemakers is a choice. To govern is to choose. There are no policy solutions, only trade-offs, and all that.

 

But Hannah-Jones isn’t an administrator or politician. She’s a parent. And her kid is hers—and her husband’s—and no one else’s. It’s a bit like the Marine Rifleman’s creed: “This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.” Except a child is not a rifle, it is a human being that is dependent upon its parents to become the best, happiest, and healthiest person possible. It’s hard. Every parent fails to one degree or another. But the failures are all relative, and with love, hard work, and, alas, a good deal of luck, the failures are modest.

 

But what is essential is the idea—no, not the idea, because ideas are just theories held in the mind—the passion, the conviction, the certainty that your child is worth more than all the others, to you. That’s the realm that children are supposed to live in. It should follow them around like a force field as they navigate the world around them. My parents are in my corner. They may get things wrong, they may make mistakes, they might “just not understand” this or that, but that they love me is unquestionable.

 

I’m trying not to cannibalize my book in advance of it (eventually) being done. But the category error that Hannah-Jones makes is importing the logic of the external order, what Friedrich Hayek called the “macrocosm,” into her “microcosm” of the family. It’s the same mistake all of the people who want our children to be raised collectively make. They think the rules of our private realm of sacrifice and solidarity, familial loyalty and collective purpose, can and should be extended to the whole of society. But the political order in a liberal system—and ours is still a liberal system, for now—is for political things. Again, a politician can and should ideally work from the assumption that all children are of equal worth, because in a liberal system all humans are of equal worth. That is the core idea of liberalism: We are all equal in the eyes of God and government. But a parent isn’t a politician. A parent is a jealous guardian of their child or children. Vast swaths of good parenting are captured by the statement, “I don’t care what the other kids are doing. They aren’t my kids.”

 

And I should say, this is true in nonliberal systems, too. No society has ever been constructed where the attachments of family have been completely erased. Many have tried, with horrific successes at the margins. But total victory has always been impossible because love of children is written on the human heart, not in law books.

 

That’s because the microcosm is the cosmos we are born into. We can be torn from it, and trained to see the state as our parents, in some real-world version of Plato’s republic or some cockamamie postliberal “common good” or “social justice” utopia. But in the real world, we call such efforts the very definition of totalitarianism. That microcosm is where children and, yes, dogs live. The difference between dogs and children is that dogs never leave the microcosm. They stay in the pack of the little platoon forever. Where all we can do is show love without being able to explain it.

 

Children always keep one foot in the microcosm, ideally. But they also learn how to live in the macrocosm by first being formed in the microcosm. And eventually, the idea is that they create a new microcosm of their own.

 

I’m not saying what Hannah-Jones did was totalitarian or a crime. I’m not saying that she doesn’t love her child. She obviously does. I’m saying her attachment to politics broke the force field that is supposed to surround her child. As the line—often misattributed to Talleyrand—goes, what she did was worse than a crime. It was a mistake.

 

When Hannah-Jones explained that she voted with her child to her child, she “just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal.”

 

“‘So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?’ she said, hurling her words. ‘Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?’”

 

Hannah-Jones seems to realize her mistake: “Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the ‘best’ school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.”

 

But the primary mistake wasn’t that she didn’t send her child to the “‘best’ school” (there’s so much going on in those scare quotes by the way). That’s secondary. Najya’s shoddy education can be remedied, to some degree. But that’s a symptom. The real mistake, the actual betrayal, was in showing—and then telling—her child that she wasn’t worth the world, compared to all the other children in it, to her.