Starting the Day with a Transphobic Donut

By Abigail Anthony

Thursday, July 30, 2026

 

The Canadian branch of the coffee-and-donut chain Tim Hortons announced on Monday that it is launching a brand collaboration with themed donuts and merchandise to celebrate the “Back to Hogwarts” season and the 25th anniversary of the first Harry Potter movie release. Starting on August 12, customers can order the Gryffindor Strawberry Cheesecake Donut, the Slytherin Chocolate Pistachio Donut, the Ravenclaw Blueberry Donut, the Hufflepuff Lemon Meringue Donut, and Golden Snitch Caramel donut holes, along with a limited-edition Golden Snitch container. The chain is also offering Potter-inspired drinks in a special cup, hosting a trivia night at select locations, and holding a contest for a trip to England. “Harry Potter has been a beloved part of so many of our guests’ lives for decades and we couldn’t be more excited for Canadians to discover the wizarding world at Tims restaurants,” Hope Bagozzi, the chief marketing officer of Tim Hortons, said in a press release.

 

But what you thought was a sugary celebration of a globally popular franchise is actually a genocide, since J. K. Rowling thinks that men who put on a dress aren’t women.

 

One problem with the themed donuts is that they might make unstable people feel lousy, which of course is wholly unacceptable. Egale Canada, an organization that received more than $4 million from Canadian taxpayers in 2023 to fight for “2SLGBTQI people,” released a statement condemning Tim Hortons and its dangerous donuts: “As anti-2SLGBTQI hate continues to rise in Canada, especially for trans and gender diverse communities, campaigns that celebrate the Harry Potter brand can be deeply disappointing, infuriating, and saddening for those who are directly affected by that harm as well as their allies. Egale urges companies to consider the impact their partnerships and marketing decisions can have on communities — particularly communities that are already facing heightened levels of discrimination, violence, and hostility. Everyone deserves to feel seen, respected, and included, and marketing promotions such as this only further exclusion and harm.”

 

Aside from upsetting people, the donuts actively promote Rowling’s views and advance the “global anti-trans movement,” in part because she benefits financially from the collaboration. “It’s probably unrealistic to expect Tim Hortons to be a bastion of trans activism. Brands are not our friends, and queer and trans people rightfully roll our eyes when they try too hard in the other direction to do corporate Pride activism,” wrote a “they/them” in Xtra Magazine. “But collaborating with Rowling is not simply a tone-deaf brand partnership — it’s actively harmful.” In other words, Tim Hortons should have known that recognizing one of the most popular book series of all time would amount to assault on already vulnerable people and spark backlash.

 

Pink News reports that some individuals are calling for a boycott, and indeed, some individuals have posted online that they will never make another Tim Hortons purchase again. “If you need another reason to hate tim hortons, here’s one: They are collaborating with a transphobic hate monger. F*** JK Rowling,” one person wrote on X. Someone else declared that Tim Hortons is “coming out in 2026 as a proud sponsor of bigotry.” Another person on Bluesky urged calling the donut shop’s customer service line to complain. In response to that post, an individual — a self-described “47yo Stoner Furry Aspiring Pro-Wrestler Queer Transgender Woman” — responded that the phone line operator committed the unforgivable crime of misgendering.

 

Others have argued that the brand collaboration is bad because the Harry Potter series itself is replete with evil views; not only is Harry Potter deeply “transphobic” by virtue of its author’s views on gender, but the books themselves also espouse white supremacy. “Try the new Tim Hortons anti-miscegenation doughnut,” someone wrote on Bluesky. That person added that “we should talk more about how a quarter of [Harry Potter’s] branding is a symbol for in-universe race science” and “one might have expected the series to culminate in some kind of refutation of the values of Wizard Hitler, but instead the slave-owning protagonist became a cop and his school retained its race supremacist house.” The fictional distinction between wizard and Muggle blood is reminiscent of the Third Reich, I guess.

 

It’s all so tiresome. What’s annoying about the culture wars is that the battles are not confined to the trenches, and the most anodyne things — pistachio donuts, the Crab Museum, bunny sanctuaries, colorful yarn, and chewy candy, to name a handful — are somehow politically inflected. While progressive activists are usually entirely unsympathetic but fiercely intimidating, this particular episode reveals how they are so psychologically fragile.

 

If you perceive flashy new donuts as a direct attack on you, then you probably need professional help — ideally not from providers who will reflexively “affirm” your every delusion and feeling.

Nixon and McGovern

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

 

Richard Nixon is back in vogue among Republicans, something that a younger me wouldn’t have thought possible. After all, a Nixon renaissance would require the right to lose its taste for small-government conservatism and to acquire a taste for criminality, which seemed unlikely.

 

But modern American politics is full of surprises, isn’t it?

 

Strange New Respect for the 37^th president is reportedly concentrated among younger right-wingers, presumably for the same reasons that antisemitism is. Both beliefs are proudly transgressive, a juvenile middle finger aimed at the pieties of liberal elders. And both are far removed from the historical events that made them taboo to begin with, creating a degree of emotional distance that older Republicans don’t share.

 

So it’s probably no coincidence that the most prominent Nixon admirer in the GOP is our conspicuously young, conspicuously amoral vice president.

 

Last month J.D. Vance marveled that a matter as minor as Watergate could sink a presidency and blamed the scandal on a “deep state” plot against Nixon, demonstrating the sociopathic contempt for norms and self-serving historical revisionism that’s required of any postliberal thought leader. Vance is also considerably more comfortable with central economic planning than Reaganites are, another not-so-coincidental hallmark of Nixonian statist Republicanism.

 

And, like Nixon himself in 1958, as the sitting vice president he’s the presumptive nominee of his party for president in the next election cycle.

 

I thought of Vance and Nixon this past weekend as I watched the co-chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America get grilled on Fox News Sunday about the kookiest elements in her party’s platform. Do you guys really want to abolish the Senate, anchor Shannon Bream asked DSA chief Megan Romer? Defund the Pentagon? Get rid of prisons? Erase America’s borders and grant amnesty to all illegal immigrants?

 

Sure do, Romer calmly replied, assenting to each provision individually as Bream rattled them off.

 

Richard Nixon lost the 1960 election but won eight years later and secured a second term in a landslide despite being an unethical Republican saddled with an unpopular war. A radicalized Democratic base made it easy for him by nominating George McGovern, a far-out-of-the-mainstream leftist. Now here we are again, perhaps, headed in that direction in 2028—except this time, in warming to the DSA, the left is trending toward a faction that makes McGovern look like Barry Goldwater.

 

Jonah Goldberg has a piece out today urging calm about the allegedly ascendant socialist menace. Americans still support free markets decisively, he notes, which is true. And for all the hype, the DSA still hasn’t scored any truly impressive electoral victories lately. Until it proves it can win in swing states or purple House districts, not just cerulean-blue strongholds like Manhattan, the commie takeover of the Democratic Party is mostly hot air.

 

Mostly. But if you’re watching the polls, you know that socialist Abdul El-Sayed has pulled ahead of Rep. Haley Stevens by double digits in each of the last four surveys of Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. Francesca Hong, the far-left option in Wisconsin’s Democratic race for governor, is up by 20 points or more in the two most recent polls there. Either might plausibly win the general election in an anti-Trump environment like the current one. And if America’s fortunes in Iran decline and/or gas prices climb higher, they might win easily.

 

Victories by El-Sayed or Hong would be treated by the DSA as proof of concept about their faction’s electability. If they can win in the Midwest, they can win anywhere. And if they can win anywhere, why shouldn’t one of their own be the Democratic nominee for president?

 

So while I take Jonah’s point, I can’t help thinking that a similar point—a Trumpist takeover is not imminent—could have been made in 2015 and would have felt equally plausible at the time. In reality, things move fast nowadays. Change happens quickly.

 

Modern American politics is full of surprises.

 

How likely are we to get Nixon vs. McGovern 2.0 in 2028?

 

The McGovern option.

 

Needless to say, there’s no scenario in which J.D. Vance carries 49 states with 60 percent of the popular vote in the next presidential election, as Nixon did in 1972. Our hyperpartisan country doesn’t have enough swing voters to produce landslides like that anymore. Democrats could nominate Hasan Piker and make him campaign in his Mao suit and he’ll still win 47 percent of the vote and every state to the left of Virginia. Van Jones and James Carville might howl about DSAers now, but they won’t be voting Republican in 2028, rest assured.

 

Oh, and Richard Nixon was rocking a 60 percent approval rating at some points during the 1972 campaign, another wildly unreachable benchmark today. Vance will be lucky to manage 45 percent in 2028.

 

Still, one can imagine a scenario in which the vice president faces a far-left challenger and defeats him or her comfortably, I think.

 

It would go something like this: Progressive voters unite in the primaries behind some neo-McGovern candidate while the rest of the Democratic electorate fractures among more mainstream options. Black voters and Biden dead-enders rally behind Kamala Harris. Technocratic neoliberal hearts flutter over Pete Buttigieg. Normies who prize electability and defeating Republicans at all costs tilt toward Josh Shapiro and Jon Ossoff (who’s suddenly on the left’s s--t list for having given a series of sensible “blue politician in a reddish state” answers to questions about culture-war flashpoints in a recently resurfaced clip from 2020).

 

We end up with a reprise of the 2020 Democratic primary, in other words, in which Bernie Sanders united the left and won several early primaries while the rest of the party splintered among the center-left candidates. That problem was eventually solved by the figure of Joe Biden, who seemed eminently electable by dint of his name recognition and long experience in Washington and who ended up running away with the South Carolina primary. Once he did, the other “normie” candidates took it as their cue to get behind him in the interest of preventing the far-left Sanders from winning the nomination.

 

There will be no Biden figure in 2028, though. The closest thing is Harris, another experienced former VP who stands to do well with the mostly black South Carolina primary electorate. But no one is confident in her electability after 2024. Buttigieg, meanwhile, is despised by the left, has struggled with black voters, and would face his own electability questions over the fact that he’s gay. And it’s anyone’s guess how Shapiro or Ossoff would perform as national candidates; conceivably they would destroy each other in their battle for the title of Most Electable Guy From a Must-Win Swing State.

 

There’s also a chance that the DSA’s neo-McGovern candidate will be more compelling than Sanders was, or at least better served by the politics of the moment. The worse the cost of living gets, the more appealing “eat the rich” populism might become even to normie Democrats in 2028. And Vance’s weakness as a politician might entice the Democratic base into taking risks in choosing a nominee that it wasn’t willing to entertain against an incumbent president with cultish support like Trump in 2020. The vice president is unlikable and will be hamstrung by having to defend unpopular policies that feed directly into voters’ Trump fatigue, making him ripe for defeat.

 

We don’t need to nominate the most electable candidate this time to win, DSAers will tell Democratic voters. We can nominate a warrior.

 

To support their case, they might point to the fact that—unlike the GOP of 1972—the modern Republican Party is plenty radical in its own right, making a radical leftist comparatively less objectionable to centrist voters. Or they might argue that the vice president’s own progressive economic sympathies require Democrats to nominate someone who can “outbid” him on policy from the left. If the party chooses a centrist like Harris or Shapiro, the working class might surmise that Vance will do just as much for them economically as his Democratic opponent would and will be considerably better on “law and order” priorities. Only by dazzling those working-class voters with a truly robust socialist economic agenda, the DSAers will claim, can they be wooed away from favoring the Republican for cultural reasons.

 

Maybe the centrist Democratic candidates will end up uniting too late behind a single champion in 2028, or maybe the neo-McGovern will build up too much steam early to be derailed the way Sanders was in 2020. However it plays out, he or she goes on to win the nomination—at which point the GOP launches a monthslong carpet-bombing campaign of advertising about the insanity of the DSA platform. I don’t support the most radical elements of that agenda, the neo-McGovern will swear, but swing voters either won’t believe them or won’t care. Who wants a president who’ll feel in any way beholden to a faction that wants to abolish prisons?

 

Vance ends up cruising to a 5-point victory, helped along by Carville types who can’t bring themselves to turn out for a left-wing Jacobin. Forced to choose between two nominees who are pro-criminal, albeit in different ways, American voters end up deciding that they’re better off choosing the one who won’t defund the police.

 

Even if a Vance win seems likely, that might not deter DSAers from pushing hard to nominate a candidate from within their own ranks. Read El-Sayed’s recent comments about putting “ogres on pikes” and you’ll understand that the socialist wing’s highest priority is flexing its muscles against establishment Democrats, not against Republicans. In 2020, one sensed that ousting Trump superseded all of their other political goals; in 2026, asserting control over their own party is the supreme imperative. Many would rather lose with a neo-McGovern than win with a Harris or Shapiro, I suspect, so long as that cements their faction’s primacy among other left-wing constituencies.

 

So: It’s Nixon versus McGovern again in 2028, then? Well … no, probably not.

 

2012, not 1972.

 

In the first place, the scenario I’ve sketched depends entirely on one or more major wins for socialist candidates this fall. If El-Sayed, Hong, and others wet the bed—especially in a cycle where mainstream Democrats are winning their own races easily—then the DSA’s electability argument is up in smoke. The party’s base might consider supporting a radical in 2028 if there’s some reason to believe he or she might beat Vance. If there isn’t, they won’t.

 

Beyond that, there’s an obvious question lurking. Who is the neo-McGovern who’ll supposedly unite the left in the next presidential primary? Bernie Sanders is 84. Zohran Mamdani is ineligible, having not been born in the United States. El-Sayed will have less than two years’ experience in elected office when the primaries begin, and in any event would be an impossibly heavy lift as a socialist Muslim in Trump-era America.

 

That leaves Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who’s never held statewide office and would need to overcome whatever “glass ceiling” hesitation remains among Americans about putting a woman in command of the military. Harris and Hillary Clinton couldn’t manage that against a figure as flawed as Trump despite running as “safe” establishment Democrats. AOC would have to find a way against Vance while pulling a truckload of baggage involving radicalism and “wokeness.”

 

To complicate matters further, there’s some reason already to believe that factionalism might make a socialist nominee broadly unacceptable to the Democratic base in a way that McGovern wasn’t in 1972. Black Democrats have never been keen on DSA types, as Sanders learned the hard way in 2016 and 2020 and as El-Sayed is finding out in his race against Stevens. Some black Democratic officials have also spoken up recently about being given short shrift by party leaders consumed with courting Latinos and accommodating the far left. If the 2028 primary plays out in such a way that African Americans end up feeling alienated from the socialist wing, a neo-McGovern nominee is a nonstarter.

 

In a recent piece for Axios, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen ticked through the ways in which the DSA’s rise on the left resembles Trumpism’s rise on the right—and, more importantly for our purposes, a few in which it doesn’t. “The far left has no Fox News synchronizing base and elites,” they note. “In fact, it’s safe to assume the New York Times, The Atlantic and MS NOW will resist socialism, at least initially.” And Democratic voters have been more institutionalist than Republicans have historically, they note. Which I suppose is true, but seems considerably less true than it used to be when catastrophic ideas like court-packing are being kicked around.

 

My decidedly unscientific prediction is that we’re still one more presidential cycle away from socialists contending seriously for the Democratic nomination. (Again, assuming they prove they can win statewide in battleground races first.) Lacking a DSA Trump equivalent to galvanize the base toward radicalism, Democrats will probably give electability uber alles one more chance in 2028 by opting for an Ossoff or Shapiro—with the proviso that if they turn out not to be electable against J.D. Vance, the party’s days of playing it safe with its nominees are over.

 

That’s what happened to the GOP in 2012. Mitt Romney was a strange choice for a party in the grip of populist mania, but such was the right’s desire to oust Barack Obama that they heeded the advice of the Republican establishment and went with the “safe” electable option. (Whether they would have done so if Trump or some other demagogue had given them a true firebreathing populist alternative is anyone’s guess.) They were willing to compromise by nominating a guy they weren’t crazy about for the sake of winning. And then … he didn’t win.

 

That’s what’s waiting for the Democratic establishment in 2032 if a supposedly electable centrist can’t get it done two years from now.

 

In fact, if the DSA wing fails to produce a viable candidate in 2028, I wonder how many of its members might quietly (or not so quietly) root for a Vance victory for precisely that reason. Not only would another electoral failure by the Democratic establishment strengthen the argument for taking chances with a far-left nominee going forward, but it would fit the Marxist framework of “heightening the contradictions” to create popular appetite for radical change. If Americans aren’t miserable enough after a second Trump term to consider socialism, let’s see how they feel after an additional term of postliberal misery under J.D. “What’s the big deal about Watergate?” Vance.

 

There’s one amusing possibility we haven’t considered, though. What if we end up with Nixon vs. McGovern in 2028 … except with the two sides’ roles reversed?

 

The GOP isn’t the only party that could conceivably nominate a (former) vice president as the sane alternative to some alarmingly fringy opponent. For all of her faults, Kamala Harris at least doesn’t give the impression of being deranged. Whereas the eventual Republican nominee very well might, assuming Vance ends up not running for president in 2028—an unlikely but not unthinkable possibility—and some exciting new wild-eyed postliberal demagogue jumps in and steamrolls the competition.

 

I’d like to tell you that Harris vs. Tucker Carlson would be Nixon vs. McGovern 2.0. But given her shortcomings as a politician, Carlson’s sinister charisma, and Americans’ near-total civic bankruptcy, no one would bet much on the Democrat winning that race, let alone winning it easily.

 

In all likelihood, then, there will be no Nixon-McGovern scenario in the next cycle. A better bet is something like the Nixon-Kennedy race of 1960, with Ossoff, perhaps, in the JFK role. If J.D. Vance wants to gratify his “Tricky Dick” aspirations, he’ll need to content himself with his administration carrying out many more Watergate-tier scandals in 18 months than Nixon managed in a lifetime.

The American Commentator Making Excuses for Iran

By James Kirchick

Tuesday, July 28, 2026

 

When I saw that the commentator Max Blumenthal was going to speak in Washington, D.C., about his recent trip to Iran, I couldn’t stay away. I have long been fascinated with Americans—especially privileged, well-connected Americans—who, out of alienation from their own country, show an admiration for distant authoritarian lands.

 

Blumenthal, the son of the Clinton-family adviser and former journalist Sidney Blumenthal, was one of some 400 pro-regime influencers invited by the Iranian government to cover the funeral earlier this month of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a joint U.S.-Israeli air strike on February 28. Speaking last week at the flagship location of the progressive bookstore and restaurant chain Busboys and Poets, Blumenthal portrayed the man who’d overseen the mass slaughter of young Iranian protesters in January as “a father, a guide, a religious teacher” and presented the regime that he’d led as not only legitimate but also an inspiration to the world. Khamenei’s assassination, he told the standing-room-only crowd, ought to have generated far more outrage than it did. “Imagine,” he said, “if a rogue foreign state went and assassinated the pope, how so many Catholics would feel.” The analogy feels slightly off: Pontiffs aren’t typically known for brandishing rifles at Mass or calling for the death of entire countries.

 

Blumenthal has become part of an ignominious tradition. In the early 1930s, the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty wrote stories denying the famine that Joseph Stalin’s forced-collectivization policies were causing in Ukraine and mocked journalists who reported the truth. “Russians Hungry, but Not Starving,” read the headline of one Duranty dispatch, which repeated an insouciant justification of revolutionary violence: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

 

Blumenthal doesn’t have the prestige of the newspaper of record behind him. But illustrious affiliations are no longer necessary to gain an audience. On X, Blumenthal has nearly 860,000 followers. He appears regularly on Russian, Chinese, Turkish, Iranian, and Venezuelan state-funded media. He founded a website, The Grayzone, whose roster of contributors includes alumni of Kremlin-backed media outlets. (Blumenthal did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)

 

On multiple platforms, Blumenthal has vouched for the world’s worst mass murderers. At Russia’s invitation, Blumenthal addressed the United Nations Security Council, where he denounced Ukraine and described Western support for it as an “international Ponzi scheme.” He denied that deposed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his own people and has implied that Syrian rebels did. He denied Hamas’s systemic sexual violence against Israeli women on October 7. “A Chinese state media darling,” according to Axios, Blumenthal has downplayed evidence that the Chinese government is repressing its Uyghur Muslim minority.

 

***

 

Outside Busboys and Poets before Blumenthal’s talk, two young Iranian women held a banner commemorating the demonstrators who had been killed by forces of the Islamic Republic during two days of protests in January. On his way into the store, Blumenthal paused to berate them. “Zionist cuck,” “Sellouts,” and “Persian gusanas,” he shouted at them. (Gusanas is the feminine form of the Spanish word for “worms”—what Fidel Castro called Cubans who fled his dictatorship.)

 

When Blumenthal entered the venue, he received rapturous applause. Sitting on a stage beneath portraits of the Dalai Lama, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr., he began with a breakdown of “Operation Epstein Fury,” a nod to the claim that President Trump initiated the war against Iran to distract the American people from his connection to the deceased financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But the actual instigator of the conflict, Blumenthal explained, was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, America’s “real president,” who’d visited the White House Situation Room in February and taken “the unprecedented step of sitting at the head of the table, moving Donald Trump to the side.” (The most detailed account of the meeting, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of The New York Times, placed Netanyahu on a side of the table, opposite Trump). It was at this meeting, according to Blumenthal, that Israel (“the epicenter of evil in the world”) ordered the United States (“the most perfidious force on the planet”) to attack Iran.

 

Blumenthal presents himself as a courageous truth teller whose work is too daring for the corporate media. But mainstream outlets abound with criticism of every aspect of the war, including Israel’s role in it. Indeed, outside the precincts of Trump-friendly media, the daily coverage of the conflict has been almost uniformly negative. But there’s a market for a darker and more insidious explanation as to how the world works. Blumenthal delivered just that—a conspiratorial account of Jewish power, American malignity, and the Islamic Republic’s righteousness. When he mentioned mourners at Khamenei’s funeral holding signs declaring KILL TRUMP, a smattering of applause broke out.

 

Blumenthal then returned to the country that Iranian leaders call “the Little Satan.” “Do we actually believe that the U.S. would be attacking Iran right now if Israel did not have full control over the Trump administration?” Blumenthal asked. He insinuated that Miriam Adelson, a Jewish Republican donor, had bribed the president to attack Iran, and he accused the Jewish state of trying to “weaponize the assassination attempts to manipulate Trump.” Israel would be “indirectly responsible” for an Iranian attempt on Trump’s life, which would be “blowback for the special relationship with Israel.” In other words, anything that happened to the president would be Israel’s fault.

 

Assessing the real motives and intentions of the regime in Tehran is difficult. Because Iran is a theocratic dictatorship that routinely arrests and in some cases executes journalists, Western reporters hoping to cover the country must either work clandestinely or submit to government supervision. Blumenthal sneered at his mainstream-media colleagues who disclosed in their stories that they were reporting from Iran with the Iranian government’s permission. “So they’re basically trying to say Iran is this authoritarian country that controls their coverage,” he argued. Blumenthal also defended the regime’s monitoring of foreign journalists due to “the long history of U.S. surveillance and spying and sabotaging.” Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter who was convicted on phony espionage charges and jailed for 544 days, might beg to differ with Blumenthal’s analysis.

 

In defending the Islamic Republic, Blumenthal made one false or misleading assertion after another. He parroted the regime’s claim that 35 million people had participated in Khamenei’s funeral, “possibly the largest gathering in human history.” He said that women make up a greater percentage of the Iranian Parliament than the U.S. Congress. (In reality, only 5 percent of members of the Majlis are women, compared with more than a quarter of Congress.) He described Israel’s apparently unintentional bombing of a Tehran synagogue as a deliberate act; the presence of a captive Jewish community in Iran “discredits Zionism,” by Blumenthal’s account. The exile-staffed news network Iran International, he said without evidence, is “run by Israeli intelligence,” and “there is so much U.S. air power concentrated in Israel right now that Israel will not allow U.S. planes to be at Ben Gurion International.” In reality, the Tel Aviv airport has bent over backwards to accommodate the U.S. Air Force, at one point reducing its civilian flight capacity to about a third of normal.

 

***

 

Blumenthal was particularly keen to minimize the Iranian regime’s brutality toward its own people. The regime maintains that slightly more than 3,000 people were killed during January’s anti-government protests, which Blumenthal characterized as “riots.” Reporting by human-rights groups and other journalists tells a different story. According to Time, so many people were killed during the two days of protest that “the state’s capacity to dispose of the dead” was “overwhelmed.” Two senior health-ministry officials, speaking anonymously, told the magazine that at least 30,000 dead (and possibly many more) was a likelier figure, and one that was corroborated by a group of first responders who collected data surreptitiously. Blumenthal insisted that a death toll this high isn’t possible. Regime opponents’ estimates of 40,000 or more dead, he said, are “fake numbers.”

 

Blumenthal was most contemptuous toward Iranians who do not share his rosy view of the late ayatollah and the brutal theocracy that he led for nearly four decades. He described Masih Alinejad, the Iranian exile whom the regime brazenly tried to murder in Brooklyn and who wears a flower in her hair in protest of the forced hijab, as “basically a CIA asset” and “the lady with the hair.” Her flower, he said, “should be drenched in blood.” Blumenthal showed no patience for Iranians he met who blame their government’s economic mismanagement, and not America, for their troubles. “I mean, as ignorant as you think Americans are about sanctions, there are many Iranians who don’t really see the role of sanctions in their economic misery,” he complained.

 

Presidents of both parties have provided critics of American foreign policy with endless grounds for legitimate criticism. But the work of Blumenthal and others like him reveals a reflexive paranoia, if not hatred, of the United States and its allies, to the point where criticism is insufficient. Far too often, they veer into downplaying or even endorsing the depravities of illiberal governments and movements simply because they adopt an “anti-imperialist” posture.

 

Sadly, there is a large and growing audience for this reactionary analysis. “One of the reasons why I opened Busboys and Poets is to educate people,” the chain’s owner, Andy Shallal, said before Blumenthal took the stage. Shallal extolled the importance of freedom of speech, freedom of expression, international law, and international norms. These are fine principles, the bedrock of any decent society. What’s jarring is to hear them invoked on behalf of someone doing public relations for a regime that flouts every one of them.

 

 

We Can’t Indulge Gen Z Malaise

By Alex Demas

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

 

On average, Gen Zers say they’d need to earn a salary of $600,000 per year to feel financially successful. That’s around 13 times the country’s median income and more money than 99 percent of Americans will take home this year. It’s also just one of several startling statistics tucked inside of writer and former Google software engineer Emi Nietfeld’s recent guest essay for the New York Times, “Gen Z Fell Out of Love With Work. I Don’t Blame Them.”

 

Throughout her essay, Nietfeld sketches a concerning picture of how the youngest American workers view their chances of economic success. For Gen Z, she explains, the fundamental economic promise of America—that if you work hard, go to college, and get a job, you will be able to afford a comfortable and satisfying life—has broken down. Instead, the young Americans she spoke to reported feeling as if their degrees were worthless and their dreams were no longer worth striving for.

 

Nietfeld empathizes with this apparent plight of America’s youth, exposing readers to the beliefs that occupy the minds of many Gen Zers, young millennials, and maturing Gen Alphas. (I count within this population.) But Nietfeld also falls victim to her empathy by failing to ask the essential question: “Is the story Gen Zers are telling about themselves actually true?”

 

No, it isn’t.

 

America’s youth do face legitimate challenges. Their hopes for homeownership, for example, are legitimately diminished compared to those of their parents and grandparents. They are entering the workforce at a time of great disruption thanks to AI. They have likewise come of age during a pessimistic political era dominated by division, institutional decay, and populism.

 

But Gen Zers are not the victims of an economic system that has left them behind. Instead, they are the victims of a culture that has overwhelmingly convinced them so without evidence.

 

I agree with Jonah Goldberg that talk of generations as monolithic identity groups is mostly twaddle. But it is also true that we are uniquely shaped by the cultural circumstances in which we are raised and that shared experiences can produce broad—albeit inconsistent—differences from one age cohort to the next. I don’t think anyone would argue that Americans who graduated high school in 1939 were not greatly influenced by the onset of World War II or that millennials who entered the workforce in 2008 don’t share some attitudes toward the economy as a result of the circumstances of the Great Recession.

 

It’s unfair to take the perspectives of half a dozen college students—as Nietfeld occasionally does in her piece—and transpose their experiences across a diverse cohort of more than 80 million Americans. However, those students’ views are undoubtedly representative of a narrative that is quite pervasive among at least some Gen Zers.

 

So what are those views? Alongside the finding that Gen Zers believe they need to make $600,000 per year to feel successful, Nietfeld notes that many of the students she spoke to would need incomes of $200,000 or $300,000 to even feel secure and millions in the bank to consider starting a family or buying a home. She claims that Gen Zers have “watched millennial workers burn out, wages stagnate, degrees turn worthless and institutions crumble,” and that the prospect of getting a job after college, even in a field like computer science, is no longer considered a guarantee. She also notes that young Americans’ internal locus of control—meaning the extent to which they believe that they have the capacity to control the outcomes of their own lives—is slipping.

 

Nietfeld relies heavily on the anecdote of a 24-year-old general studies graduate, Mecca Durhal, who once dreamed of making a living as a Japanese translator and a writer but now is left scraping the web for administrative assistant roles with salaries of only $40,000. “The economy and society that we live in is not structured right now for me to have good answers,” Durhal says when asked about what the future holds. Delayed gratification, Durhal adds, is also a fool’s errand: “I think looking only ahead to the future is actually detrimental to you.”

 

But while these kinds of feelings are worth acknowledging, they should not go unchallenged.

 

Despite the feeling that America’s opportunities for upward mobility have not been passed down from one generation to the next, research has consistently shown that each generation of Americans has continued to economically surpass their predecessors. Millennials, for example (who themselves often blamed older generations for pulling up the economic ladder), have achieved real median household incomes that are 20 percent higher on average than those of Gen Xers at the same age. Gen Zers are no different. Median income for Gen Z graduates, adjusted for inflation, is already substantially outpacing that of their millennial predecessors, even as the average number of hours worked decreases.

 

According to a recent report by Deloitte, 55 percent of Gen Zers say they are delaying major life decisions—like marrying, starting a business, or furthering their education—because of their finances, and 38 percent (a plurality) say that cost of living is their greatest concern. However, research by Scott Winship and Jeremy Horpedahl at the American Enterprise Institute has found that the “cost of thriving” in America continues to fall and that, since 1985, after-tax earnings for full-time American workers have increased relative to cost of living by 53 percent.

 

But Gen Zers also aren’t entirely wrong about their changing circumstances. The relative cost of higher education and the cost of starter homes—two goods that, for many, represent milestones along the path from childhood to adulthood—have both increased (though perhaps to a more modest extent than many Americans believe). In a recent episode of her Washington Post podcast Reasonably Optimistic, Dispatch contributing writer Megan McArdle remarked that, for generations, American adulthood came with a picture attached of a modest house on a quiet street with a white picket fence and modest green lawn. “It’s easy to see why young people feel cheated,” McArdle said. “They followed the rules to go to school, find a job, save your money. And yet, one of the clearest markers of economic security—a home of their own—keeps drifting out of reach.”

 

Gen Z is also entering the workforce at a time when artificial intelligence is actively disrupting the sorts of entry-level roles in the knowledge economy that college graduates typically rely on when beginning their careers. Even though the unemployment rates for 18- to 19-year-olds and 20- to 24-year-olds are relatively normal compared with historic levels, they are trending in a concerning direction relative to rates for older Americans. And while economic disruption does offer young workers unique opportunities for innovation and advancement, it also leaves graduates with greater uncertainty about how to plan for their futures.

 

But despite these hurdles, Gen Z’s narrative of economic helplessness still presents a massive gap between how Gen Zers think they’re doing and how they’re actually doing. No amount of innovation or disruption justifies the belief that an income of $600,000 per year is necessary to feel “successful” or that a person needs a seven-figure salary before considering having children.

 

Nietfeld touches on one factor that could explain this gap: Gen Zers’ declining sense of agency. Research has almost universally linked having a high internal locus of control to greater resiliency, mental health, satisfaction, and life outcomes. Lacking such an internal locus means that younger Americans broadly feel less in control of their own lives and less capable of guaranteeing their own success. When success feels like something that, with luck, might happen to you as opposed to something that you can actively pursue yourself, it makes some sense that America’s youth would stop striving for it. Winning the lottery doesn’t require a whole lot of skill or determination, after all. And if effort feels disconnected from reward, then disengagement from that effort is a coherent response to a world you don’t think you can influence. “Speaking to Mx. Durhal and other young adults for whom tomorrow seems uncertain, I see a generation that’s learning not to hope too hard,” Nietfeld writes.

 

But even that fails to explain why a subset of America’s youth perceive success not just as out of their control but set at an unrealistically high standard. For that, I have one possible culprit: Gen Z’s all-encompassing influencer culture. Another metric Nietfeld cites, that around 57 percent of Gen Zers would be influencers if they could, is a telling one. What are influencers, after all, other than performers of success? Influencers design their lives around how they want to be perceived by others, building an authenticity only insofar as it photographs well and is capable of funding their continued stagecraft.

 

Influencers: the coolest, prettiest, fittest, and smartest peers across the country and world—peers who are often sponsored or paid for their one-dimensional pursuits and who almost certainly shouldn’t be considered peers at all. When your eyes are constantly pasted to a never-ending queue of people who structure their lives not to pursue actual satisfaction but instead to present an image of what they believe satisfaction looks like, you’re bound to end up with an unrealistic understanding of what you should expect from life. And that doesn’t end at wealth alone. Online, you’re faced with people who have dedicated their lives to perfecting one aspect of a good life: the perfect set of abs, an impressive half-marathon time, the most adventurous vacations, the most devout adherence to a religion or creed. Taken together, they offer an image of success that no one person could ever realistically achieve. And if that’s what success looks like, why strive for it at all?

 

For this, America’s youth deserve empathy, not derision. Undoubtedly, not every Gen Zer has been sucked into this unrealistic digital culture. But those who have are faced every day with the prospect that they will never be good enough and that their own success is out of their hands. The fact that this belief is false does not change the sincerity with which it is likely held by many young Americans. We can acknowledge the resultant distress without criticizing or mocking those who experience it. It may be easy to poke fun at the general studies major who believed their degree was a pathway to prosperity or the aspiring entrepreneur who thinks that starting a stay-at-home honey business is a surer way to earn seven figures than a corporate career (the belief of another recent graduate interviewed by Nietfeld)—but that doesn’t mean we should. Older generations should put themselves in the shoes of Gen Zers and seek to understand what America’s youngsters believe about themselves and why.

 

But Nietfeld’s approach—accepting this untrue narrative without challenging it—is also counterproductive. There is a cult-of-youth tendency among many American progressives that posits that young people have some wise insight that deserves inherent deference. However, to cite our own Jonah Goldberg, “Young people tend to be stupid,” and “as a statistical matter, the younger you are, the more likely it is you will be ignorant and, frankly, dumb.” Many young Americans—such as those referenced by Nietfeld—do seem ignorant of the opportunities for success and satisfaction that are available to them. Mocking them for that ignorance is unnecessary. But refusing to challenge it is, perhaps, even worse.

 

Gen Zers, and Gen Alpha behind them, do face uncertainties, barriers, and difficulties. But they also have vast opportunities. Both are coming of age during the most prosperous period in human history, in a country that—despite its political chaos—remains institutionally robust, wealthy, and innovative. They are entering the workforce as one of the greatest power and wealth transfers in human history unfolds, and they are the first generation to be native to AI.

 

The risk for America’s youngsters is therefore not that they are faced with insurmountable obstacles. The risk is that they are so bought into that narrative that they give up on success without even trying. “I also wish they understood how the dream itself illuminated the path a few feet ahead of me, until I stood on solid ground,” Nietfeld writes, speaking of her own experience climbing the ladder to corporate success. She is correct: Dreams can be more than just comforting stories—they can serve as functional tools to light the way from where you are to where you want to be. Which is why the narrative of helplessness absorbed by many Gen Zers is so corrosive. The truth for Gen Zers is that the ground beneath them is firmer than they’ve been told. The path is still illuminated, but only if they keep walking.

The Trump Administration Tells the Truth

By David A. Graham

Tuesday, July 28, 2026

 

In a court filing earlier this month, a government lawyer did something radical: He laid out the truth in plain English.

 

The surprise was not just the honesty from a chronically dishonest administration but also the substance: The Trump administration admitted that it had withheld federal money in retaliation against its political rivals. The disclosure, first reported by The New York Times on Friday, is part of a lawsuit from a group of researchers in California whose grants were canceled. In lieu of turning over documents to the plaintiffs in discovery, an Energy Department attorney acknowledged in a filing that decisions about which grants might be terminated had been “based solely” on a goal of political retribution. “With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing Senators (‘Blue State’ grants),” the filing stated, contradicting previous public statements by officials.

 

Every administration has its own policy agenda and preferences, but this goes beyond that, subjugating science to partisanship and holding research and infrastructure money hostage throughout much of the country. If the United States is to remain legally and civically coherent—and scientifically dynamic—the rules have to apply consistently.

 

Even before Donald Trump returned to office, the country was in some ways pulling apart into two different policy worlds: one governed by Democrats and one by Republicans, as the journalist Ronald Brownstein wrote in The Atlantic in 2022. This was being driven largely by decisions at the state level, producing widely varying economic, health, and social outcomes. Trump is now using the power of the federal government to drive the two sections further apart, a glaring act of division as the nation celebrates its 250th anniversary. (Punishing states that lean Democratic also punishes many Republican voters. More Californians cast a ballot for Trump in 2024 than voters in Alabama, Indiana, Kansas, and Tennessee did combined.)

 

In some ways, the retaliation acknowledged in the suit is in step with other Trump-administration actions. Trump is not coy about his desire for political retribution, especially against high-profile critics, or his sense that he is president to only those who voted for him. This is not his first example of using federal funds to reward red states while punishing blue ones. Earlier this year, Politico calculated that in his first 14 months in office, Trump approved 89 percent of requests for disaster assistance from GOP-led states but just 23 percent of those from Democrat-led states. Yet when asked about the disparity, the White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson denied any political motive, saying, “There is no politicization to the president’s decisions on disaster aid.”

 

Jackson faced no legal penalty for such an obvious falsehood—which is one reason courts remain a vital bulwark against Trump’s abuse of power. I wrote during Trump’s first presidency that many depositions demonstrated a huge gulf between the president’s public bluster and balderdash and his meeker, franker statements made when under oath. The same has been true of attorneys representing his second administration. In several high-profile cases, they have been forced to admit in court that public claims by officials were false. Last year, for example, the official White House line was that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a dangerous MS-13 gang member who had been rightly shipped to a Salvadoran prison. In court, however, lawyers acknowledged that his deportation had been the result of an “administrative error.”

 

This past spring, charges against a group of people arrested at a protest near Chicago fell apart after federal prosecutors conceded a series of major mistakes to a judge: They impermissibly vouched personally for the credibility of evidence before a grand jury, spoke with grand jurors outside a courtroom, and, after failing to obtain an indictment, excused grand jurors who’d voted against charges and tried again. They then redacted transcripts to try to hide this from the judge. And last week, the Department of Justice dropped subpoenas issued to Times reporters after prosecutors admitted to a judge that they had not followed either DOJ policy or court precedent by not exhausting other options first.

 

(In some other instances, a related but inverted dynamic has emerged in which it’s not court statements that contradict the public ones, but the other way around: Government lawyers attempt to argue that administration decisions were made deliberately and without regard to politics, only for judges to point to public statements by the president that appear to reveal the true, improper motivations for the actions.)

 

Statements by government lawyers that contradict the official White House line are not merely the results of pangs of conscience. Attorneys understand that they can face sanctions, including disbarment, for lying in court. Earlier this month, a federal judge overseeing the lawsuit that produced Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for political allies blasted Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche for testimony that was “at best, misleading and, at worst, disingenuous.” She also referred Blanche, who faces a confirmation vote on his elevation to permanent status, to the New York State Bar Association.

 

An Energy Department filing could put Energy Secretary Chris Wright in a tight spot too. Last month, he told a House panel, “No decisions were made on politics.” The Times reported that, according to a department spokesperson, Wright had been “making a distinction between that review process and the timing of when certain cancellations were announced.” Was he trying to mislead, or was he himself kept in the dark, and which would be more troubling? Trump sees his time in office as a chance to settle political scores, and aides who pretend otherwise risk making themselves look like fools—or worse.

Trump Got NATO to Rearm. Now to Continue the Momentum . . .

By John Noonan

Monday, July 27, 2026

 

In 1950, the Truman administration and America’s newly minted NATO allies convened at The Hague to lay the foundation for the alliance’s first defense plan. The result was an integrated defense architecture, coordinated military planning, and a Western alliance determined to prevent another European war by means of credible deterrence.

 

Seventy-five years later, President Trump returned the alliance to The Hague for a historic summit, where its members committed to generational defense investments. Nearly every ally pledged to move toward spending 5 percent of its GDP on national security.

 

One year later, NATO is beginning to reap the benefits. From Lisbon to Tallinn, NATO members are accelerating a long overdue rearmament. As Secretary General Mark Rutte has proudly declared, the alliance has never been stronger.

 

Today, nearly every NATO member meets the 2 percent defense spending floor and has a pathway to 5 percent. Europe has shaken its dependence on Russian energy; European NATO members and Canada have committed approximately $1.2 trillion in defense spending since President Trump’s first term.

 

But defense spending hikes tell only part of NATO’s comeback story. To monitor the Trump administration’s NATO successes and remaining gaps, Polaris National Security has released a NATO assessment project, which chronicles the alliance’s remilitarization, its renewed deterrence posture against Russia, and its value for American power projection. The report classifies NATO countries in tiers, assessing their military contributions and strategic alignment.

 

Tier 1 members are NATO’s leaders. They don’t just meet alliance expectations — they exceed them. Poland is illustrative of this cohort: it spends the highest percentage of GDP on defense, rallies its neighbors around deterrence efforts, sacrifices for Ukraine’s defense, and consistently supports American security operations. Poland leads where other nations follow.

 

Tier 2 allies are significant contributors and where the bulk of members fall.  Their defense spending usually falls along the NATO median; they support alliance programs, align with NATO on threat assessments, and largely cooperate with the United States on security priorities. But they have room to grow by increasing defense spending, modernizing their militaries, weaning off Russian energy, increasing their strategic alignment, or backing American military action.

 

Tier 3 allies are the NATO members that require the most attention. These countries aren’t merely slow to align with NATO’s revitalization; their actions actively harm it. While important partners, they often stall increased defense spending, overly engage with adversaries like Russia and China, or obstruct American and NATO operations. Although they bring significant value to the alliance, the actions of these nations — Spain, Turkey, and others — undermine alliance cohesion and NATO’s strength.

 

The task before Washington now is capitalizing on Trump’s successes to finish the revitalization of the world’s strongest alliance.  America’s stick was always there for presidents to wield, but previous administrations were indeed too reluctant to use it.  

 

As the Trump administration builds out its NATO 3.0 plans, it will need to diversify its burden-sharing approach for effective alliance management.

 

Tier 1 allies are the administration’s vanguard — and should be rewarded as such. While other countries complain about high standards, these allies make no excuses — all the more impressive considering that many are smaller and have limited resources. These allies should be given priority access to advanced defense technology, prioritization for U.S. basing, greater say in NATO political and command positions, enhanced security assurances, and favorable trade arrangements. Rewarding Tier 1 countries will accelerate their remilitarization, provide positive reinforcement to those investing in their national defense, and generate goodwill toward the United States.

 

Tier 2 countries are the backbone of NATO: capable, dependable, and strengthening. While they may require more pushing from Washington to continue their positive trajectory, by and large these allies are constructive partners — and the Trump administration’s response should reflect that.  Cooperation with these countries should reflect our dual interests: getting them to commit more while affirming their role as needed partners. That means tying progress to advanced co-development and co-procurement, tying U.S. force presence to alliance contributions, establishing Ukraine aid floors, and encouraging them to aspire to Tier 1 status with incentives.

 

Managing NATO’s Tier 3 countries is the most challenging and will require calibrated pressure: diplomatic accountability, clear benchmarks, force-posture adjustments, and formal contribution reviews. These nations are important to NATO, but that doesn’t make their free-riding acceptable. The challenge will be to pull them up instead of pushing them away,

 

Critics who predicted that pushing NATO members to step up would fracture the alliance are being proven wrong. NATO is stronger, more capable, and more committed than it has been in decades. But the work is not finished — and the next phase of NATO’s great awakening will require both hammer and chisel.

 

By rewarding those who carry the burden, encouraging those with room to improve, and challenging those who lag, Trump can succeed where his predecessors failed, build on his burden-sharing successes, and position the West for long-term security.

The EU’s Stealth Censorship Playbook

By John Gustavsson

Sunday, July 26, 2026

 

Western Europe’s struggle with free speech and with the tech sector is set to dramatically ramp up. Until recently, speech regulation has been a national matter, leading to vastly different tolerance levels in different countries (with laws stricter in Germany than in, say, Poland). New EU laws are changing that, and they could prove to have an intensely chilling effect on open political debate by rewarding self-censorship with algorithmic prominence.

 

In October of last year, the EU rolled out the Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising regulation, introducing an onerous regulatory burden on political advertising that included requiring explicit user consent to process personal data for targeting such ads, along with bans on profiling based on inferred political views (or other special categories). Platforms found in violation could be fined up to 6 percent of their worldwide revenue. For Meta, to take one example, this would mean a $12 billion fine.

 

Tech companies are used to being fined by the EU; just this week, Google was fined over $1 billion over what the Brussels deemed to be anti-competitive practices. Yet after they were first held responsible for disinformation under the Digital Services Act, this new regulation was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Rather than silently comply, tech companies pushed the nuclear button and responded by banning all EU-based political and social advertisements: Now, no political party in the EU can advertise on any social media platform. The same goes for grassroots advocacy groups and lobbying organizations, as well as individuals seeking to increase their follower counts by boosting posts of their own that feature political content.

 

The platforms understandably concluded that the risk of such an enormous fine was too high, and the definition of “political advertising” and “disinformation” too vague, for it to be worth the risk of allowing any political ads whatsoever. While political parties, organizations, and activists can still post on the platforms, they must now rely on organic reach. The new regulation also affects media organizations, which are now banned from promoting any posts — for example, an opinion column — that expresses political beliefs.

 

While tech companies have already begun to respond, this regulation is set to have swift and predictable consequences for political and media institutions in Europe. The rule benefits large and mainstream parties, movements, and organizations that do not rely as much on social media to get their messages out. Many already have large social media followings; being restricted to organic clicks and views will have much less of an impact on them.

 

Second, the regulation benefits traditional media. Without social media as an outlet to reach voters, advertising in and being covered by traditional media becomes all the more important. Political groups that had pivoted away from traditional media in favor of new outlets now find themselves trying to get their ads back into the morning newspapers.

 

Third, the rule benefits political influencers who already have large followings, for the same reason. Established political commentators don’t need to pay for visibility because they’ll get it anyway.

 

Finally, the regulation will benefit social media users who are willing to engage in rage-baiting. Posting incendiary, outrageous remarks is a common way for small accounts to “go viral” and grow overnight. This trend holds true for parties and organizations: If you post something outlandish, more people will click, reply, and share — the algorithm will reward you. Moderate and nuanced voices have always struggled to be heard on social media, and thanks to the EU, those voices now cannot even pay for visibility.

 

EU leaders likely expected the first two outcomes: At the risk of giving them too much credit, they must have known that tech companies would respond by banning political ads. The platforms told them as much a year in advance. But that the regulation’s consequences ended up benefiting the political establishment was a feature of its enactment, not a bug. Only belatedly, though, do EU leaders appear to have realized that their rules created an incentive for rage-bait — and, ironically, for disinformation, since posts peddling outrageous, made-up claims often receive more engagement than those that present nuanced truth. The EU has discovered one of social media’s sad realities: The best way to get organic reach is to make stuff up.

 

To fix this, the EU is now in the early stages of reviewing and revising the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD). Among the regulations being debated are rules that would force social media platforms to artificially increase the prominence of “media services of general interest.”

 

These include, first and foremost, publicly funded and operated media organizations. Imagine if posts by NPR were the first thing you saw when you opened Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube — that could soon be reality in the EU. Much like in the United States, public media in the EU leans left on most controversial issues — from identity politics to immigration. Their posts would effectively be automatically promoted without charge, while everyone else would remain unable to pay for promotion.

 

The absurdities don’t end there. The term “media services of general interest” is vague and deliberately crafted to allow member states to define the media outlets that qualify. As an example, a center-left, culturally progressive outlet like Der Spiegel could be classified as being of general interest by an ideologically friendly German government, dramatically increasing the paper’s social media reach. Such a situation would fulfill the European Commission’s expressed intention of giving a leg up to traditional media outlets; the Commission has said that the rule’s goal is “improving the level playing field between traditional and new digital players,” with the implication that it is traditional media who have been disadvantaged and require support.

 

This, combined with the political advertising ban, would quite possibly be the worst thing to happen to freedom of the press in Europe since World War II. All media outlets would be incentivized to play nice and refrain from criticizing their country’s government, because doing so would mean potentially losing the privilege of being classified as “of general interest.” Honest reporting on controversial topics like immigration could be discouraged and even censored by concerned media executives.

 

This isn’t speculation; in fact, Europe has already seen, albeit on smaller scale, the insidious effects of state intervention on behalf of favored media outlets. Some EU member states — for example, Sweden and Austria — maintain press subsidy systems in which the government dishes out grants to support the operations of private newspapers (including online outlets), enabling the media organizations to charge less for subscriptions than outlets who are not approved for subsidies. While officially politically neutral, these subsidies are frequently charged with being biased.

 

Of course, the EU’s new provision could also give right-wing, immigration-skeptical governments in Eastern Europe the ability to designate outlets friendly to their views as “media services of general interest.” Yet, true to form, Brussels is already plotting to “fix” this problem by introducing EU-wide guardrails and guidelines for designation. It goes without saying that this would have a chilling effect on outlets promoting Euroskeptic views: Even if guidelines were written with neutral-sounding language, the mere fact that the EU was involved — and could change the rules at any time in determining who gets boosted — could make journalists think twice about crossing Brussels.

 

As far as censorship goes, the EU’s decisions have been well-crafted: Outright banning a social media platform would immediately be noticed, and users would protest. Leaving the platforms legal but controlling what content reaches the top of the feed is a much smarter move for the progressive, pro-censorship bureaucrats in Brussels.

 

These troubling recent developments in the European Union should serve to highlight how money and political spending are fundamental to defending freedom of speech. Without being free to spend money to advertise their views, non-mainstream voices can have their voices neutered without being explicitly banned.

 

The revision of the AVMSD is still in its early stages. With the EU not having fully committed — at least in public — to any specific changes, now is the perfect opportunity for the U.S. government to intervene and put pressure on the EU not to proceed. Once an updated directive is in place, it will be much more difficult for the EU to back down without losing face.

 

The U.S. government should also put pressure on social media platforms to refuse to comply with any requests for preferential treatment of government-approved outlets — even if that would mean exiting the EU market altogether. In the end, it is likely that only the sudden lack of access to their favorite apps and websites would give European voters the wake-up call they need to protest the censorious conduct of their leaders. Washington should help make that happen.