‘Just Say It’s a Genocide’

By Noah Rothman

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not even bother to disguise her wholly justified irritation with the far-left agitators who, in the spring of 2024, chased her and her then-fiancé around a Brooklyn movie theater in pursuit of a shibboleth.

 

“Just say it’s a genocide,” one of her pursuers demanded. “Just say it. Just say the word. That’s all we want.”

 

AOC’s harasser deserves points for honesty, at least. At the time, amid the fog of war and with so many global institutional interests invested in portraying Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal, the activist class was as inclined toward intimidation and violence as it was to persuasion. The movement’s members sincerely believed that they had the evidence on their side. After all, everyone worth listening to insisted that they were right.

 

But the campaign to delegitimize Israel predated the October 7 massacre and the war that followed, and it continues today — almost one year after high-tempo combat operations in Gaza concluded in an ambiguous cease-fire. Still, the charge of “genocide” persists, but it does so in the absence of either the fog or the evidence. Today, we know that the so-called famine that was said to prevail in Gaza has been replaced with a minor outbreak of childhood obesity, and the Gazan population (according to even the Hamas-led Gaza Health Ministry) experienced more growth than almost any other country in 2025.

 

Either Israel is executing the most incompetent genocide in history, or the allegation is and always was unsubstantiated.

 

With contrary evidence mounting, the activist class has placed a peculiar emphasis on just saying the word “genocide.” Indeed, they do so with an urgency that suggests they sense a closing window of opportunity.

 

Maine’s Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Troy Jackson, recently apologized for telling an interviewer that “It’s unfortunate that there are people here in Maine that don’t like to use that term [“genocide”] only because they’re Jewish.” But as Semafor’s Dave Weigel pointed out, Jackson has been hounded by the activist class to say the word “genocide” as often as possible, despite having long ago checked that box. “Pass the ‘genocide’ litmus test, and you might be forced to re-take it, again and again,” he wrote.

 

In his bid to replace retiring Representative Nancy Pelosi, California State Senator Scott Wiener failed that litmus test earlier this year during a debate when he failed to hold up a sign affirming his support for describing Israel’s actions as genocidal. “Shame,” the crowd chanted. The abuse that followed seemed to teach Wiener a lesson. “Days later — under fire from progressives — Wiener released a video,” KQED reported. “He acknowledged that genocide has occurred.”

 

Michigan Representative Haley Stevens was similarly abused by an irate activist who sought only a declaration of fealty to his preferred myth. Stevens admirably brushed off his hectoring even as she was bombarded with fabrication after fabrication, including the still-unretracted claim published by the New York Times in which it was alleged that Israel had trained dogs to perform sodomy on prisoners.

 

The activists’ demands carry imperative weight. It’s as if they feel they must force as many people as possible to commit themselves, rhetorically at least, to the notion that a genocide didn’t just happen but is ongoing in the Gaza Strip.

 

The hectoring activist class regards mouthing “genocide” as table stakes, and every Democrat must ante up if they are to be taken seriously in progressive politics. In this way, they force their representatives to make a reputational investment in the existence of a genocide that they cannot take back lest they admit they lied or were muscled into promulgating a lie.

 

In this, however, we see the activist strong-arming campaign not as strength but as weakness and insecurity. The evidence for their outlook is elusive while the evidence against it is plain to see. There’s precious little time left to maximize the political effect of the hysteria that accompanied Israel’s response to the October 7 massacre, and the anti-Israel crowd seems to know it.

Howard Zinn and the Failures of the Left

By Jeremy Black

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Why the Right Is Nixonmaxxing

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

Earlier this week, Donald Trump shared a 43-second clip of CNN’s Harry Enten going through the latest midterm polling data.

 

“In the 2024 election versus Kamala Harris, [Trump] got 99 percent of the MAGA GOP vote—perhaps surprisingly, I might have thought it’d be 100 percent, but it was 99 percent,” Enten said in the clip. “Compare that to his approval rating now with the MAGA GOP. It’s 98 percent; there’s been no real decline in MAGA support.”

 

You can understand why Trump would celebrate this news.

 

Of course it leaves out a few things, including the other 13 minutes of Enten’s analysis. We’ll get to that. But the clip also ignores the fact that people who self-identify as MAGA are definitionally Trump supporters. It’s sort of like asking self-described vegans whether they support eating salad, or asking Hells Angels, “Do you think biker gangs should be legal?”

 

Weirdly, Enten, who is very good at his job, didn’t address this problem. In fairness, the share of voters who describe themselves as MAGA has not shrunk that much. From what I can tell, the share of people self-describing as MAGA has dropped about 7 to 10 points. So, if MAGA means “super-committed Trump supporter,” the total number of them has not dropped a lot, and, among self-identified super-committed Trump supporters, they remain super-committed to Trump.

 

Enten’s larger point was that Trump is venting support of non-MAGA Republicans like a space station with a blown-out airlock. In 2024, Trump got 56 percent of the non-MAGA GOP vote. Now, if polls are to be believed, he is supported by just 7 percent of self-identified non-MAGA Republicans, a drop of 49 points. “So, his support is definitely not just ebbing there,” Enten said, “but is absolutely crashing there.” Indeed, 10 percent of non-MAGA Republicans say they will vote Democratic in the midterms. Oh, and among “pure independents”—i.e., people who don’t lean toward either party—support for Trump has dropped like Hans Gruber exiting Nakatomi Plaza. In 2024, he won them by 15 points. Since then, support for Trump has dropped 86 points to minus-71. It’s as if Gruber plunged through the pavement and kept going.

 

Oh, and Trump’s overall approval rating is stuck in the mid-30s, and a new AP-NORC poll this week had his approval on the economy at 17 percent.

 

I know what you’re thinking: The obvious strategy for the GOP to climb out of this hole is to tell voters the economy is doing great and to pretend that Trump is on the ballot. Also, the best way to repel grizzly bears is to slather yourself in a thick paste of salmon, honey, and vanilla ice cream and then grab a bear cub for a selfie.

 

Dead, rested, and ready.

 

On the MAGA and MAGA-adjacent new right, Richard Milhous Nixon is supposedly so hot right now. The hotness is called “Nixonmaxxing.” Christopher Rufo released a video called “Nixon Forever.” Introducing it, he suggested emulating Nixon, who “left behind a blueprint for counter-revolution—the last hope for restoring the American republic.” On social media, Rufo helpfully explained that “[t]he right’s rediscovery of Richard Nixon is not about particular policies—some good, some bad—but about the aesthetic, the attitude and the narrative of the self-made man who won 49 states on behalf of the Silent Majority, and was taken down in a Deep State coup.”

 

To their credit, the Nixonmaxxers concede that the case for Nixon is mostly a vibes thing. Or as Rufo puts it with little apparent sense of irony, “aesthetics.” I mean we’re talking about the guy who wore a dark suit and wingtips on the beach and needed 3-by-5-inch notecards to navigate small talk with strangers.

 

Scott Greer, a dabbler in white identity politics, concedes that “the new Nixon myth … has issues.” Nixon, Greer writes, “had few substantive accomplishments as president, especially on the issues dear to the Online Right. While one of the better presidents when it comes to foreign policy, he had no real domestic achievements, aside from advancing liberal causes and programs. In many ways, the country actually got worse on his watch, with crime spiraling out of control and the economy plummeting. Nixon may not be responsible for these developments, but he certainly didn’t solve them.”

 

Greer really can’t avoid this conclusion given his belief that a “serious conservatism will always amount to white identity politics no matter how much its advocates deny it. The sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we can make America great again.” So he acknowledges, with some soft-pedaling, Nixon’s central role in codifying affirmative action and extending the civil rights agenda of Lyndon Johnson.

 

(For an excellent primer on the strengths and weaknesses of Nixon’s legacy, I can’t recommend enough Dan McLaughlin’s “Nixon’s Not the One.”)

 

I think the vibes-merchandising of Nixon is pretty amusing. It reminds me of the hipster effort from a while back to make Spam—the tinned lunch meat—hip and cool. I mean, who can forget the SPAMERICAN Tour?

 

But given how Rufo, J.D. Vance, the Trump DOJ, et al. don’t seem to think it’s entirely a joke, we should give it some serious consideration.

 

I think there are a number of reasons why this is happening. Some of them are openly and honestly argued by the Nixonmaxxers. They like his Rousseauian appeal to the “Silent Majority.” They like his willingness to use all the instruments of the state for political advantage, including numerous economically preposterous moves. They prefer Nixon’s dour anger to Reagan’s sunny charm. I think some find Nixon’s intense white-dude awkwardness appealing as they try to embrace “whiteness” as an identity. They certainly love Nixon’s hatred of lefty elites. In a National Conservatism Conference speech, Vance won cheers for invoking Nixon’s line, “the professors are the enemy.”

 

Vance and others also insist that Nixon was taken down by the “deep state” and that, on the merits, Watergate would be “like a 12-hour news story” today; the “idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,” he said.

 

Such messaging serves some obvious purposes. If Watergate is synonymous with a presidency-destroying scandal, that implies there’s a limit to what Trump can get away with. If Watergate was no big deal, then it’s an open question whether anything—from January 6 forward—can be considered a big deal. It definitely buries the dead letter of Congress’ impeachment power even more deeply.

 

Similarly, the idea that Nixon was unfairly taken down by the deep state makes the paranoia surrounding the thick constellation of conspiracy theories MAGA relies on seem more legitimate, and legitimizing, for the MAGA crowd whenever inconvenient facts get in the way.

 

And of course, retconning the story that Nixon marshaled the necessary integrity and character to resign from office for the good of the country into a sad mistake forced on him by his enemies in the deep state and media has to have particular appeal for Trump, given his adamantine inability to imagine doing such a thing.

 

Nixonmaxxed Weber.

 

But I think there’s another reason, which will take a minute to explain.

 

The great German sociologist Max Weber identified three sources of legitimate political authority. First there is traditional authority, which rests on inherited customs, the royal line of succession, and that kind of thing. Then there’s legal-rational authority, which is the impersonal rules of law and process, whether it’s democratic elections under a constitutional regime or the bureaucratic systems of, say, the old Soviet Union.

 

The third is charismatic authority. I should be clear that charisma in the Weberian sense doesn’t mean “charming” in the way we mean someone who has a lot of charisma or “rizz” (which is derived from “charisma”). But Weber does mean charming in the older sense, as in charmed, as if by spell or magic or, in biblical terms, gifted with divine grace or favor.

 

Charismatic authority rests on the heroic, exceptional, even superhuman traits the charmed see in a transformative leader. Napoleon, Jesus, Muhammad, Mao, Ayatollah Khomeini, Joseph Smith, Gandhi, Hitler, Mussolini, Atatürk: History is full of such examples, good, bad, divine, and satanic.

 

Weber is not offering normative or moralistic opinions about charismatic leaders—and neither am I. Please do not infer any moral equivalence here, because I am not implying any.

 

The challenge for societies, Weber argued, was when charismatic leaders die (or, I suppose, retire). The movements they built were based on an intense personal, often religious, but always passionate, commitment to the leader. When the leader is gone, that leader’s followers and elites are generally left with a conundrum: How do we keep going? How do we stay true to the mission, the cause, or the movement? What do we do with the power left to us, and how do we keep it?

 

Weber calls this the “routinization” or “bureaucratization” of charismatic power. Under a charismatic authority, people follow the leader because the leader’s authority is derived from him personally. He is the ruler. When the leader departs, “Do this because the leader says so” becomes “Do this because this is what the leader would have wanted.”

 

After Jesus ascended to heaven, the church was built to institutionalize his teachings. After Mao died, the party bureaucracy took over. When Fidel Castro died, the Cuban government stayed committed to Castroism. Charisma is replaced with rules, institutions, procedures, and laws that allow the uncharismatic to rule in the “spirit” of the leader’s ideas without the spiritedness of the leader’s personality.

 

Trump was elected as a legal-rational leader. In 2016, he lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College. In 2020, he lost both. In 2024, he won both. But over this whole period, he has chafed, squirmed, and railed against the constraints of the legal-rational box he was elected to. He wants to be a charismatic leader who governs based on will, “instincts,” personal authority, and Weberian charisma. At the midterm “convention,” Republicans played a video that explained how “God made Trump” to save us. “On June 14^th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump.” Just this week, he once again explained that he was betrayed by his Supreme Court appointees because they haven’t shown him personal loyalty. The idea that Supreme Court justices should be constrained by the law rankles him because he thinks he is above the law and loyalty to him should be the highest law. Do what the leader says, for he is your leader.

 

Some Trump fans agree with this to one dismaying extent or another. Some of his sycophants and enablers merely pretend to, as political requirements demand. But everyone deeply invested in Trumpism, and the political projects made possible by it, is desperate to keep the party going. They don’t want to go back to the pre-Trump era of Reaganism.

 

Ironically, Reagan was a charismatic figure, too. When he finished his second term, he was very popular, which made it possible for his vice president to run as the inheritor of the Reagan mantle. People wanted four more years, which is why George H.W. Bush was the first sitting vice president elected directly to the presidency in 152 years. Bush distanced himself at the margins from Reagan when he ran in 1988, but Reagan’s popularity and success were what made victory possible. Bush was no Reagan, but the assumption that he would routinize Reaganism is what got him elected.

 

A lot of J.D. Vance’s fans have convinced themselves that he will have a similar success at the end of the Trump era. I am very skeptical that voters will want four more years of this at the end of Trump’s presidency. And it is dawning on some folks that Vance, for whatever skills you think he has, has nothing like Trump’s charismatic connection with voters. You might think he has charisma—I don’t—but he certainly doesn’t have Weberian charisma.

 

So, what do you do if you’re professionally, politically, and personally invested in the Trumpian transformation of the GOP and politics writ large? How do you successfully routinize his shtick into our politics so that his uncharismatic heir can gain and wield power? Well, you might construct an ornate theory about another charisma-deficient politician who nonetheless navigated politics brilliantly. You might look for someone who symbolized and personified your own resentments. You might lionize a “realistic” statesman who was content to make peace with our enemies, withdraw from foreign wars, and dismiss the idea of standing up for freedom and human rights. You might try to rehabilitate a leader who shared your view that the point of power was to use it for the betterment of your team or tribe and to punish your enemies whenever possible. You might claim that a certain disgraced president was actually a kind of prophet without honor, a John the Baptist heralding what was to come.

 

In other words, you might just start Nixonmaxxing.

Don’t Be Like China

By Judson Berger

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

You might not have heard of the case of Guo Degang. He’s a popular comedian in China who recently was investigated for the offense of modifying the lyrics to a Chinese revolutionary song in, of all places, Wuhan. Reportedly, he changed the line, “The sun is about to set in the west; all is quiet on Weishan Lake,” by swapping the lake for “the Forbidden City.” You had to be there, I suppose. For this lyrical tweak, “he was reported to [Wuhan’s] culture and tourism bureau,” according to the New York Times, and fines followed.

 

Now, before you say, “but Jimmy Kimmel” — if only Kimmel could have been so subtle. Yet the Guo episode is one of many reminders lately that the China model is nothing to emulate.

 

For the record, the FCC’s Kimmel fit was “preposterous,” as we’ve editorialized, and the court system is taking up that fight. And that is a crucial detail, the independent judiciary. Ask Jimmy Lai. Jianli Yang, writing on Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington, cites a more recent administration fight with the media to point up and appreciate our differences in that regard:

 

Here an apparently unrelated event during Xi’s visit becomes important.

 

The White House had barred CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House grounds. The organizations sued. Other major media organizations stood with them. Then U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, appointed by Trump himself, ordered their access restored. The administration complied.

 

Consider how strange this must appear from Beijing. A president appoints a judge. The judge later rules against the president. The president is angry. The ruling nevertheless takes effect.

 

Jianli goes on to argue that, in the emerging AI debate, America must hold onto its values and not adopt, for instance, “China’s methods of surveillance, information control, centralized data collection, and political management” in pursuit of technological goals.

 

Yet Beijing’s command of economy and society continues to hold a certain allure among Western policymakers and provocateurs alike: whether seen in the New Right’s pursuit of an industrial policy of our own or the far left’s fandom toward (in the words of one noxious host) “Chinese-style Communism” and “Cultural Revolution sh**” or, going farther back, the media’s early praise for China’s Covid response.

 

Thérèse Shaheen, addressing other misconceptions, explains that the country is not doing nearly as well economically as is often portrayed. She writes,

 

The Chinese Communist Party has been working overtime to present China as an unstoppable economic and technological power. Artificial intelligence has become particularly useful to this narrative. China’s advances in AI are real. So are its accomplishments in electric vehicles, batteries, robotics, drones, solar panels, and advanced manufacturing. But the Trump administration, along with other Western governments, much of the business world, and many economic and political analysts confuse the technologically sophisticated portions of the Chinese economy with the Chinese economy itself. China remains a mostly poor, mostly uneducated, aging society riven with internal inconsistencies. Only a sliver of its population is involved in the tech sectors that have the world so mesmerized.

 

Despite Trump’s praise for Xi as a “great leader” and his touting of their “fantastic relationship,” Jim Geraghty also lists the myriad ways China and its entities have tried to (almost literally) blow up that relationship: sending components to Iran that can be used in drones and missile guidance systems, providing satellite images to Iran of a U.S. base in Jordan before a fatal attack over the summer, allegedly conducting a cyber-espionage campaign that compromised federal agencies, and so on.

 

But most important, the personal liberties we take for granted remain unrealized in China, certainly by comparison. Guy Denton published a startling profile this week on a member of the long-persecuted Uyghur minority. Read it:

 

When Mihrigul Tursun arrived in the United States, nothing around her made sense.

 

The food, clothes, and buildings that permeated her new life were unfamiliar and disorienting. Insomnia and anxiety haunted her. When she managed to sleep, she was plagued by nightmares of what she’d escaped. In moments of distress, she would withdraw to the bathroom to scream and weep in privacy, running the shower and playing loud music to conceal the noise from her young children.

 

Slowly, however, she adjusted. And while the trauma of her past life will never fully disappear, America has come to feel like home. “I am safe here,” she told National Review in a telephone interview. “Nobody can hurt me.”

 

Tursun, a Uyghur Muslim, fled China to escape the government’s relentless campaign of religious persecution. Her arrival in America came only after years of abuse in China’s vast network of Uyghur internment camps. And her story is emblematic of a broader crisis unfolding in China that the Western world seems reluctant to address. The Chinese Communist Party does not simply wish to exterminate the Uyghurs — it seeks to purge China of all forms of religious faith.

 

As Guy reports, Tursun was detained in a Xinjiang camp several times, held once “in a roughly 45-square-foot cell with more than 60 other women,” conditions that led to several deaths: “The prisoners were frequently tortured. Tursun was once strapped to a chair and electrocuted. Others, she learned, were forcibly sterilized. Before she left China, Tursun was injected with a mysterious substance. She fears that it may eventually kill her.”

 

By all means, Hasan Piker, keep ranting about the model of Chinese-style imprisonment.

Is the Kennedy Center Naming Stunt Gross Negligence?

By Brian T. Allen

Saturday, October 03, 2026

 

It’s time for September art news. I for one am sick of reading about stunts and lawsuits over whether or not a certain middling, mostly middlebrow music hall in that midsize, widely reviled city — the Swamp — can be called the Trump Kennedy Center. Why in the world is President Trump involved in it? It’s no Palais Garnier. He can’t possibly care to bask in JFK’s afterglow. Camelot’s nearly as old as I am and far more moth-eaten.

 

I’m a stickler for ethics in museums, so why not in the performing arts? The Kennedy Center is a nonprofit, a messy one since the government owns the building and subsidizes it. Most of the board is appointed by the president, so there’s no trustee recruitment-board committee and trustees aren’t picked on the basis of their capacity and interest. That’s a terrible arrangement and a typical public-private partnership morass, as is the Smithsonian. It’s still a nonprofit. How can a board chaired by President Trump and mostly appointed by President Trump name the building after President Trump? Who’ll sign the naming contract on behalf of the Kennedy Center? Trump will be on both sides of the table. Isn’t this self-dealing?

 

Are the new members — and the ex-officio members, all pols — embracing a duty of care, making informed, thoughtful decisions, or a duty of prudence, exercising caution? How about a duty of loyalty? A board chairperson threatening to demolish a building unless it’s named for him? That’s a new one in the annals of trusteeship. Part of a Kennedy Center ceiling fell, not all of it, but it left a hole. “How convenient,” I thought, wearing my PR hat. Lawyers for the board say that naming the building after President Trump is necessary to induce him to lead the fundraising for its financial rescue, but that would be a reward for something he hasn’t done yet.

 

One of my readers told me that Trump’s involvement in the Kennedy Center has to be a prank played on people he despises as much as they despise him. That’s the center’s core audience of government employees, lobbyists, diplomats, pols, camp followers, and their families. If Trump is in a comeuppance mood — and why shouldn’t he be? — I’d suggest he go retrocession and push to send a big chunk of the Kennedy Center’s bourgeois socialist and parasitical audience, found in large numbers in Arlington and Alexandria, back to the District of Columbia, where the Founders put them in what was initially a tilted ten-square-mile box.

 

Arlington and Alexandria, plantation towns at the time, demanded for decades to be freed from the District to protect their slave-based economy. Congress complied, finally, in 1846. In 2026, Congress can rescind the retrocession. There’s a bill pending in the House to do exactly that. Fight, fight, fight for that to make a real difference, and keep trimming the government’s bloated payroll.

 

Sweet revenge indeed. Enact retrocession and, poof, 400,000 new Washingtonians will savor the joys of D.C. rule, that holy grail of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and by “joys,” of course, I mean miseries. Call it a reckoning, an atonement, a move for American’s 250th, effective altruism, a flagon of castor oil, or a comeuppance for the ages. It’ll be the mother of all pranks. But, please, let’s not play with a symphony hall, a theater, a place where young and old, rich and poor, go for cultural enrichment.

 

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit are challenging both the renaming and the closing of the Kennedy Center, and they’re weighing whether or not to ask the federal judge on the case to remove the board and place the Center in receivership or, at least, to appoint a monitor. The bar is high. The District of Columbia has an attorney general. Who knew? He enforces fiduciary standards for District charities. The ball might be in his court as well. It’s a distraction and diminishes Trump’s agenda.

 

***

 

Will the White House ballroom and the triumphal arch tap federal defense money if private fundraising lags? (Daniel Torok/Official White House Photo/via Wikimedia)

The new White House ballroom and triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery are to be privately funded, but shouldn’t we know by whom? They’ll be public buildings, after all, and this is Quid Pro Quo Land. The Clinton Library, not even a public building, was privately financed, too, and it’s thought that much of the money raised was in the form of backdoor bribes. After thousands of years of human depravity, leave it to the Clintons to find a new MO for theft.

 

According to President Trump, whom I admire, both the ballroom and the triumphal arch will be War Department assets, with drones flying from them and new laser Pentagon gizmos atop them. Good, in theory. We live in parlous times. Most of us in rural Vermont are armed to the teeth.

 

But cynical me. It does indeed make these two projects seem more urgent, but how is the fundraising going? If it’s sputtering — together they’re costing, I hear, $650 million — will defense dollars (public money) fill the gap? How much has been raised? The new Obama Library insisted that no federal dollars would be involved, but the project got $135 million in state and local road, sewer, and drainage improvements, with the Feds eventually covering the costs through reimbursements. Channeling my inner Oliver Twist: “Please, sir, I want some more.” Information, that is. Who wouldn’t?

 

***

 

No need to rush, Marbles. It doesn’t look as if the British Museum’s Parthenon sculptures will be leaving London any time soon. Pictured, the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum in London, 2022. (Photo by Diego Delso, delso.photo, License CC BY-SA)

Once in a while, say, every appearance of Halley’s Comet, I’m wrong. I’ve written a few times about the Elgin Marbles, the Parthenon sculptures displayed at the British Museum since 1817. The Greeks say that Lord Elgin stole them, and they want them back, though Elgin seems to have gotten the okay from Athens’s Ottoman rulers. I thought the British Museum’s trustees would cave. Only the technicalities needed to be massaged, among them British law, which forbids the deaccession of art from national museums without Parliament’s approval. Elites were dying to ease their fake guilt over pretend imperialism. The closest Brits ever came to conquering Greece was Prince Philip’s marriage to Queen Elizabeth II, and he was a German and Dane playing a Greek.

 

Parliament has priorities, top of which is an Islamophobia mirage. A close second is enjoying a state of salaried paralysis. It’s not helping. The British Museum’s trustees hoped to circumvent the law and lend the Parthenon sculptures to the Greeks long-term, meaning from here to eternity. But Greeks say they will accept nothing short of ownership. The deal is as dead as Patroclus. Good. There’s no evidence the Brits don’t own the Marbles, among the greatest of the museum’s treasures.

 

The museum staff is ambivalent. The new director doesn’t want his obituary headlined “Returned Priceless Antiquities to Ingrate Greeks to Juice Notting Hill Vanity.” And the curators know that everyone in the third world will say everything in the museum was swiped, and before long the place will echo in emptiness.

 

***

 

Left: Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Count-Duke of Olivares, c. 1626, oil on canvas.
Right: Rembrandt van Rijn, Saint John on Patmos, c. 1661, oil on canvas. (Getty Museum; Courtesy of The Leiden Collection)

Earlier this week, I wrote about my visit to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, always a joy. I saw good exhibitions, but the big news is the museum’s acquisition of The Portrait of the Count-Duke of Olivares, by Diego Velázquez (1599–1660). Velázquez along with Goya and El Greco are enthroned on Spanish art’s Olympus, but Velázquez is a special case. He was Philip IV’s court painter and also chief curator of the many royal palaces, so he was busy and didn’t paint much — 130 or so pictures. Many are in the Prado, and nearly all the rest are in captivity in other museums.

 

Olivares was Philip IV’s prime minister for years. His portrait is a head shot with an armored and sashed torso. Velázquez painted it in 1626 as a gift from Philip IV’s court to the Vatican’s ambassador to Spain. It stayed in Italian private collections until last year. The painting’s nice, not great, and Velázquez did magnificent full-length portraits of Olivares. Still, it’s a good thing to have. I don’t know how much the Getty paid. A stiff, drab full-length Velázquez portrait of Philip IV’s first queen, dating to the late 1620s, sold for $35 million in 2024. Since the Getty’s new picture is merely a bust and doesn’t have her big hair and certainly not her fancy farthingale, it probably paid a fraction of this.

 

In other big acquisition news, Thomas and Daphne Kaplan, owners of the famous Leiden Collection, announced a few days ago that they bought their 18th Rembrandt painting. It’s a boy! Or, more precisely, a saint, that is, Saint John on Patmos, from about 1661. Last seen in 1923, it’s dark and brown, in Rembrandt’s late style. The Kaplans bought it at Sotheby’s last year for $9 million but didn’t spill the beans until now. I admire them. They spot misattributed and long-lost art with a gimlet eye, sometimes taking risks, and are generous lenders.

 

***

 

Two final pieces of the puzzle that is Ambassador Leah Campos and Kehinde Wiley. She ordered a painting by Wiley removed from the walls of our embassy in the Dominican Republic, for which the painting was commissioned by the Obama State Department in 2013. It’s a big picture of four young artists, two black and two who look mixed-race, and she didn’t like it. “We are turning away from globalist and woke ideologies,” she said in her announcement about sending the painting back to Washington.

 

I thought playing Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” while the painting was taken off the wall was revelatory. Not gonna take what? Looking at art depicting two black people and two mixed-race people? That’s 85 percent of the Dominican people. That’s 20 percent of Americans. Be careful what you say and be careful what you play. Why should an undiplomatic art critic need to give advice to a diplomat?

 

I wrote a note to Ambassador Campos asking her to describe to me how the picture expressed “globalist and woke ideologies.” The subjects are students, and they do indeed look ratty, but the theme is kindred spirits, a warm and fuzzy concept espoused by young artists among other tender souls. I heard from Campos. “It is my intention,” the ambassador said, “that everything we project from the U.S. Embassy, including the art and decor, reflect the beauty, strength, and commitment to liberty of the United States of America and its people.” Fair enough. She bailed on explaining “globalist and woke ideologies” and why she’d evoked lesbians — “I saw a huge painting of a picnic in a park with flowers and some lesbians” was her response upon seeing the work, in which women seem to be dancing. Alas, the new art that the Art in Embassies program sent her earlier this year is mostly junk.

 

Wiley wrote a straightforward, nice letter to President Trump asking to buy the picture back. He’s a good, though not great, artist, and the decent thing would be to sell it back to him for what the State Department paid for it. End of an illuminating story.

We Need More Regret in Our Politics

By Andy Smarick

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

Forget everything negative you’ve read about Nikole Hannah-Jones’ viral essay about knowingly sending her daughter to bad schools in the name of social justice. This is actually a moment for optimism. For the time being, put aside the treatment of a child as an interchangeable widget in a political struggle, put aside her daughter’s justified hurt and anger, put aside the examples of classroom malpractice. Focus instead on one word: “regret.”

 

Jones writes, “But now I felt overcome with regret. Najya deserved better. They all did. But she was mine. This girl, my only child, looked to me to protect her, to give her what she needed to thrive. And I had not chosen her.”

 

Jones now knows she did wrong. All children should be able to trust that their parents will be their most tenacious advocates and protectors. All parents should know that their most solemn duty is tenaciously advocating for and protecting their children. Yes, Jones should have sensed regret was coming when she wrote a few years back, “My daughter is not worth more than any other child.” No, it should not have taken example after example of her daughter falling behind academically. It should not have taken her daughter’s heartfelt protests or repeated complaints about chaotic lunchrooms and poor instruction.

 

Jones’ acknowledgment of her regret is a sliver of a slice of a silver lining. Regret can be a powerful change agent: Realize your error, admit its costs, and then commit to doing better.

 

Jones is not alone. In fact, regret seems to be in the air on America’s political left. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently laughingly conceded that “Woke 1.0 was crazy.” Rahm Emanuel, a potential contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, describes his party as “toxic,” “weak,” and “woke.” A major left-leaning think tank created a long list of words, including “privilege,” “othering,” and “safe space,” that Democrats need to stop using. More and more Democratic officials and writers admit that their side went haywire in recent years. Even Malcolm Gladwell regrets being forced by the left to adopt insensible political positions.

 

We’re witnessing the kind of contrition seldom seen in public life outside of infidelity press conferences and courtroom allocutions: Figures freely admitting, “I’m the problem.”

 

Why did this mass mea culpa become necessary? How did the most influential thinkers and officials on the political left simultaneously, over an entire decade, make the same decisions that many now regret? Ferocious idealism. They embraced a crude but compelling view of society, and it turned them single-minded and excessive.

 

Ideology isn’t all bad. It’s easier to make political choices when you have a simple, coherent view of your surroundings. Whether it’s “personal freedom must be maximized!” or “justice requires the collective ownership of property and means of production!” or something else, a crisp scripture can be a terrific guide. But ideology can also curdle the mind. When real-life events don’t fit your framework or progress comes too slowly for your liking, you start to believe brash reforms are obviously necessary. Deliberateness and half measures become intolerable. Obstacles to your vision become villains. Dramatic action becomes warranted because only dramatic action will deliver justice. This is why extremism so often follows ideology.

 

Parts of the left came to believe that systemic oppression of marginalized groups defined American society. Radical proposals followed naturally. For instance: Prisons and police should be abolished. Property crimes should not be prosecuted. Homework and standardized tests should be ended. Defenders of oppressive colonial states should be named and shamed. Rules regarding bathroom use and sports participation should be rewritten. Public statements that hurt the underserved should be censored. Language should be policed. Media outlets should advance social justice, not “objectivity.”

 

Ideologies should be held lightly. They should encourage us to ask probing questions, not force us to accept pat answers. They should nudge us in a general direction, not demand we follow a dubious path. If you allow any ideology to hold too much sway, it will almost always lead you toward unreasonable conclusions. This is why principle and prudence—not ideology—have generally been the standard of American leaders. We want officials who stand for something and possess a coherent vision of governing. But we also want them to exercise good judgment and address issues pragmatically. We don’t want leaders who follow a dogma mechanically and ruthlessly.

 

The left is now recognizing the costs of following a dogma, and the resulting regret could lead to better decisions ahead. In fact, it probably explains why less ideological Democratic officials, like governors Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Wes Moore of Maryland, and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, have seen their stocks rising. Those of us on the right should be encouraged by the left’s possible new direction. But we should also recognize that some regret is in order for our camp.

 

Corners of the right also fell victim to ferocious idealism—and its consequences—over the last decade. Angered by the direction of economic and social change, the left’s aggressive agenda, and the belief that some conservative officials hadn’t fought hard enough, a tear-it-all-down, anti-institutional ideology took over. It would’ve been one thing had that ideology been lightly held. But it became a kind of creed and led to the support for, or at least the toleration of, extremism.

 

Consider all of the shocking anti-institutional behavior we have seen. From the president to members of Congress to state and local officials to advocates and commentators, we’ve witnessed bashing of the courts (and specific judges and justices), unsubstantiated claims about the insecurity of elections, threats to the stability of NATO, whitewashing of the events of January 6, and attacks on the credibility of the intelligence community. Unqualified, inexperienced individuals with poor temperaments have ascended to top positions in governing institutions, and tech-industry whiz kids with no or little governing experience were put in charge of DOGE, which, unsurprisingly, ended up as a massive impairment of government functions without meaningful changes to federal spending.

 

An equally corrosive aspect of the era has been the degradation of behavioral institutions—-honesty, civility, and integrity. The casual cruelty, insults, mendacity, carelessness, self-dealing, and nepotism have damaged our capacity to govern well and torpedoed citizens’ faith in public life. The resulting aura of unseriousness can be seen in a Congress full of wannabe pundits and pundits entirely more concerned with personal fame than the public good.

 

Just like test scores showing your daughter hasn’t learned what she should have, public life is now full of evidence—inept domestic governing bodies, a bevy of foreign-policy errors, stubborn inflation, growing distrust in institutions, a terribly unpopular president, perpetual populism—that some on the right made bad decisions with awful consequences. And just like those test scores, you can’t ignore the results and just hope things get better. You need a course change.

 

Just about everyone on the right can play a constructive role in this rehabilitation project. First, we need to stop empowering those trafficking in over-the-top rhetoric and proposals. That means firmly mentoring the young professionals engaging in extremism (e.g., no antisemitism, no sexism, no flirting with authoritarians), telling advocacy organizations to tone it down (e.g., if your language sounds like a Marxist revolutionary, you’re not behaving conservatively), and encouraging those with platforms to behave responsibly, not chase renown (e.g., you have a republican duty to put our shared institutions above your media hits).

 

Second, we need to strengthen our institutions through action. We need more people working honorably inside key organizations instead of making a living commenting on them from the outside. So our work includes encouraging good people to serve, developing a generation of young professionals who think in terms of public service instead of personal brand-building, stopping selfish people from using institutions for their own purposes, and backing board members who protect their longstanding institutions from unwise, destructive fads. But we must also recognize that customs and norms are institutions, too. That means we all have a duty to act right: Cut out the personal insults, watch your language, tell the truth, don’t cheat.

 

Third, high-ranking public officials set the tone. Their words and behavior are taken seriously by millions of people; party loyalists often form their views based on their leaders’ pronouncements. “Reaganism,” “Nixonian,” “Jeffersonian,” “Jacksonian,” and “Lincolnian” became not just policy agendas, but ways of seeing the world. Theodore Roosevelt’s “Big Stick” influenced how millions understood foreign relations; Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society shaped how millions saw the role of Uncle Sam. To change course, change those at the helm. Sincere personal regret means having a hard conversation with the person in the mirror. Sincere political regret means finding new leaders.

 

Indeed, we’ll know that we’ve begun to put this dreadful decade behind us once we see public support coalesce behind leaders who prioritize sober-mindedness, service, and statesmanship and swear off rigid ideologies and the ferocious idealism and extreme politics they beget.

As the Hamas Narrative Disintegrates, Can Its Devotees Rejoin Reality?

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

 

The following sentence in the Telegraph contains an absolutely gobsmacking statistic:

 

“The BBC has reported the deaths of 53 ‘journalists’ in Gaza who have been claimed as terrorists by Hamas and other groups.”

 

Fifty-three. That’s out of (in the BBC’s case) somewhere just north of 180.

 

And counting, by the way. That 53 number is more likely to go up than down.

 

I’ve written about this particular problem before, but the Telegraph’s reporting has implications beyond just the obvious.

 

The fact that every facet of the “genocide” accusation against Israel has fallen apart, along with the disintegration of numerous other false claims, raises a serious concern. The debunking of the claims of genocide, deliberate starvation/famine, mass targeting of journalists, and others, plus the near-halving of the number of war dead that can be reasonably attributed to Israel, means that the war that happened was entirely different from the war that much of the media-consuming population thought happened.

 

Therefore the test put before the public is the following: Can these folks admit they were wrong about their whole impression of the war and acknowledge that they were fooled—willingly or unwillingly—by a global propaganda scheme on a scale we’ve probably never seen before?

 

This question is especially relevant in democracies. A self-governing people must inhabit a shared reality. The villainous portrayal of Israel during the war was exactly backwards. Can these folks join the rest of us here, where the truth lives?

 

Over the weekend, I read Emily St. John Mandel’s latest novel, Exit Party. Ever since her novel Station Eleven, which was about a global pandemic, Mandel has been obsessed with alternate paths and realities. Exit Party tackles the idea of dimension-hopping, and there is a moment when we meet a character who has just arrived from an alternate version of the same physical location, and he has to get briefed on what life is like in this timeline.

 

That’s how I feel about everyone who bought into the post-October 7 anti-Israel narrative.

 

First of all, welcome. Acclimating to reality will be disorienting, but it is essential that the totalitarian ideology of the Western Hamasnik cult be punctured by the truth.

 

Stalinism is probably the closest relative this toxic ideology has. Stalinism was a way of speaking that eventually became, for all too many, a way of thinking.

 

When the supposed genocide “consensus” was found to be a mirage, Israel-haters only clamped down further on dissent. It was shocking to witness just how important it was to these people that the word “genocide” be used. But it wasn’t hard to figure out why the specific use of that word had suddenly become all that mattered. “Genocide” was a way of ending conversations before they started. You might object to the extremism of someone’s political tactics, to which they would respond well if you won’t make exceptions for GENOCIDE then your norms are worthless. The point of saying “genocide” was twofold: First, it allowed you to say and do whatever you wanted to the “Zionists” in your life. Second, it stopped you from having to defend your worldview.

 

If you replaced the word “genocide” with what actually took place in Israel-Gaza, which was “a war,” you would have to discuss and debate the complexities of that war. Since the “pro-Palestinian” movement in the West’s preferred victim was the one who started the war, that would get uncomfortable real quick.

 

The obsessive, Stalinist insistence on using only the word “genocide” was to prevent as many people as possible from understanding what actually happened.

 

But the truth broke through anyway. It’s there, it’s easily accessible, and even the purveyors of the Big Lie are finding it difficult to avoid. So the BBC doesn’t refute the claims made against it, but rather meekly insists its reporting was “based on the information available at the time it was published.” The UN’s affiliated food agencies post statistic-rich reports in which the lack of starvation in Gaza is made clear and unambiguous. And so forth.

 

Reality is steadily intruding in such ways. How, and to what extent, the adherents of the anti-Israel propaganda cult can welcome its arrival will tell us whether we all can in fact inhabit reality together.