One of Us

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

Not every Republican from Ohio is sleazy.

 

Take Sen. Jon Husted. He’s as normal-seeming a human as any modern right-winger can be, unremarkable in every way—save one. “I looked at his ass,” the president said of Husted yesterday. “I said, ‘His ass, s—t, it’s like, it’s like a pile of muscle.’” That was the second time this month that the commander in chief interrupted a rally to remark upon Husted’s cake.

 

If the weirdest thing about you is that your booty turned Donald Trump gay, you’re doing well for yourself by GOP standards.

 

So, no, not every Republican from Ohio is sleazy. But it does often feel like all of the sleaziest Republicans are from Ohio.

 

There’s Rep. Max Miller, allegedly so menacing to the women in his life that his former father-in-law has accused him of needing “serious psychological help” and once said, “I hold my breath every minute [Miller] has custody of my granddaughter.” That former father-in-law is U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, a fellow Republican.

 

Unbothered, the president gave Miller a shout-out from the podium at a rally in Youngstown earlier this month.

 

J.D. Vance is also a Buckeye. In a party full of careerists willing to sell their souls to postliberalism to get ahead, no one sold as eagerly—or got as much in return—as our erstwhile Never Trumper vice president. What Vance lacks in demagogic charisma, he makes up for with effort: At any moment you might find him smearing an opponent as pedophilic, passing along Internet hysteria about immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets, accusing congressional Democrats of plotting to literally burn down America, and pretending not to notice that his boss and patron is a racketeer.

 

He refuses, and will continue to refuse for selfish and cynical reasons, to say a harsh word about his friend Tucker Carlson, even as Tucker’s politics branch out from antisemitism into, er, anti-anti-bestiality.

 

And then there’s Vivek Ramaswamy, a native son of Cincinnati and a man so personally obnoxious that Nikki Haley once called him “scum” at a Republican presidential debate.

 

Ramaswamy is his party’s candidate for governor in Ohio this year, but he’s always been a strange fit for the Trumpist GOP. A meaningful percentage of the right’s nationalist base doesn’t care for “his kind,” resentful of the economic and political influence that Indian Americans are gaining. (Vivek is painfully aware of this.) But he’s an odd duck in another way: Ramaswamy is the platonic ideal of an overachiever, a brilliant fast-talking mega-rich nerd with multiple Ivy League degrees who palpably believes he’s the smartest person in any room he happens to be in. And is often correct, I suspect.

 

I can’t imagine a politician less suited to a movement of white working-class populist nativists than a business-class son of Indian immigrants educated at Harvard and Yale. Vance, another Yalie, at least had sob stories of hillbilly anomie to buy him some “real America” cred amid his stops in New Haven and Silicon Valley. Ramaswamy has none of that. To prove to the MAGA base that he was “one of us” when he ran for president in 2023, he resorted to flamboyant demagoguery.

 

And now, as his fledgling political career hangs by a thread, he’s done it again.

 

Doubling down.

 

On Tuesday night, Ramaswamy’s campaign admitted that it was behind a new ad featuring his opponent’s mother.

 

Democratic nominee Amy Acton is the daughter of Donna Arthur, who addresses the camera directly in the clip. “Amy has a serious problem,” Arthur warns the viewer. “She is a liar. She lies about her past. ……. She’s lied her entire life. My daughter needs help. And she can’t help you if she needs help herself.”

 

When the ad began circulating online on Monday evening, it lacked the typical disclaimer at the end identifying the outfit that had produced it. Pressed about it on Tuesday afternoon, Team Vivek remained coy about its provenance—but endorsed its message. “We don’t know what happened between Amy and her mother, who first spoke out about Amy in 2020,” a spokeswoman said in a statement, “but we know that Amy Acton is a serial fabulist who has some serious problems with the truth that the public needs to be aware of before deciding who to entrust as governor.”

 

“What happened between Amy and her mother” is a matter of public record.

 

In 2019, Acton told an Ohio newspaper that her stepfather, Donna Arthur’s husband Cledith, had sexually abused her between the ages of 9 and 12. That was no late-in-life revelation, though: Acton had come forward about the abuse in 1978 with support from her father and testified against Cledith Arthur before a grand jury, leading to his indictment. He fled to avoid being arrested.

 

And Donna Arthur fled with him, abandoning her children. She “has her own criminal history,” former Dispatcher Charles Hilu noted yesterday at National Review, “including pleading guilty to theft by deception while living in Pennsylvania in the 1990s and being accused of animal abuse as recently as 2021.” That’s the type of character whom the ad is asking Ohio voters to trust in a test of credibility with Acton, a physician who was Ohio’s Department of Health director during the COVID-19 pandemic. Acton hasn’t so much as spoken to her mother, she claims, in nearly 50 years.

 

By yesterday evening, as the details of why mother and daughter are estranged began to spread and the uproar grew, media scrutiny finally forced Ramaswamy to come clean about the ad’s origin. “It is an ad from our campaign,” he told reporters, “and the thing that I want to say is that I would love for this race and this election to be about the substantive issues that impact Ohioans, and unfortunately, Amy Acton has been hiding from those issues. She won’t debate me.”

 

I care about the issues, the candidate said … while handing a megaphone to a possible accomplice to child molestation to smear the victim, her own daughter, as a liar. Somehow, in an election cycle teeming with partisan attacks involving child sex abuse, this isn’t the first Ramaswamy ad to approvingly feature someone who’s tangled up in sexual offenses against a minor.

 

Within hours, Acton’s campaign had released its own ad in which her brother attested to the abuse the two had endured. “Shame on Vivek,” he went on to say. “He’s not fit to lead.” The backlash against Ramaswamy was so ferocious that it seeped across party lines, causing even some normally dependable Republican mouthpieces to denounce it. It seemed inevitable that he would pull the ad back, possibly with an apology.

 

He did not. He doubled down. Per Axios, Team Vivek is planning to plow $4 million into promoting the Donna Arthur ad. “This is a campaign-ending moment for Amy Acton. The people who know her best keep warning Ohioans about her,” Ramaswamy’s campaign manager crowed to the outlet. Sources close to his operation told Axios that the spot “tested well” with persuadable voters.

 

I can believe that—provided that those persuadable voters knew nothing of the history between Acton and Arthur. A mother urging voters not to trust her daughter is powerful character testimony … until that mother turns out to have taken sides with a pedophile who allegedly preyed upon that daughter as a child, at which point her testimony begins to smell distinctly different.

 

Given how much media buzz and outraged criticism the ad has generated, I’m guessing most persuadable Ohio voters will learn the nature of the estrangement between Arthur and Acton before Election Day. And if they do, Ramaswamy, not his opponent, will be the candidate whom they find despicable.

 

Which leaves us with a mystery: Why? Why did he and his advisers think this ad would work to their advantage?

 

Trial balloon.

 

I suspect this was a trial balloon that got away from them.

 

It makes no sense to drop a bomb like the Arthur ad on Acton two weeks before the election. That gives her, and the press, far too much time to educate voters about what happened to her and what sort of person her mother is. For the ad to have worked to Ramswamy’s benefit, it should have been released 48 hours or so before the polls opened, leaving little time for a rebuttal.

 

Which was likely the plan.

 

The key detail on how the ad ended up online this week comes from a CNN report. “The video was first published on Monday night by an Ohio political blogger, D.J. Byrnes,” the network noted. “Byrnes told CNN he obtained the video from a voter who saw it as part of a poll and recorded it.” The existence of a poll was confirmed by another reporter, who got hold of a copy.

 

It sounds like Team Vivek was quietly testing how voters might react to the spot, not intending for it to surface as soon as it did. (That’s why it lacked the standard identifying information at the end, presumably.) Whoever recorded it and released it turned what was supposed to be a November surprise into an October one, effectively spoiling it.

 

The fact that Acton’s campaign was up with a rebuttal ad so quickly suggests they had an inkling of what was coming, possibly because they got wind of the poll while it was in the field—although it’s also possible that they simply expected Ramaswamy, being Ramaswamy, to eventually drag Acton’s abuse into the race somehow. “He’s a bad guy,” his old rival, Nikki Haley, said yesterday of the ad. A bad guy will inevitably do bad-guy things, as our friends in Ukraine are now discovering.

 

The interesting—and reprehensible—part in all this is how Ramaswamy responded when his trial balloon burst. Once the ad went public, he had a choice. Should he disavow it, blaming some overzealous staffer for producing it and insisting that it never would have seen the light of day had it not leaked? Or should he lean into it despite the obvious risk of a backlash?

 

In the end, he defaulted to the most basic rule of right-wing postliberalism. When in doubt, err on the side of ruthlessness.

 

Once the ad leaked, a backlash among Ohio’s centrist voters became a fait accompli. Disavowing the spot as the work of a renegade deputy would have done little for Ramaswamy, as appalled swing voters either wouldn’t have believed his claims of innocence or would have blamed him regardless for buck-stops-here reasons. Many (including me) would have suspected a dirty trick: Of course a weasel like Ramaswamy would cook up a vicious attack on his opponent and then try to have it both ways, feigning ignorance even as his allies circulated it widely online.

 

With the genie out of the bottle, Team Vivek was forced to do damage control. And in a mostly red state, with the left and its media allies baying for his blood, and with Ramaswamy already burdened by suspicions among the Republican base that he’s not “one of us,” the best way to minimize the political damage was to impress that base by doing what Trump would do. Be ruthless. Never apologize. Double down.

 

That’s what Max Miller did when he refused to quit his House race earlier this year despite the ugly headlines about his behavior toward Bernie Moreno’s daughter, granddaughter, and other women. Donald Trump didn’t quit after the Access Hollywood episode, did he? The president is a “fighter,” and so Miller would be a fighter too.

 

That’s also what J.D. Vance did earlier today when he was asked about Ramaswamy’s attack on Acton. “Politics is a tough business,” he told reporters, “and my message to my fellow elected Republicans is: If you actually believe in the things you say you believe in, stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race in 13 days.” A Democrat got her feelings hurt because Vivek tried to weaponize her childhood sexual trauma against her? Boo hoo.

 

Not every Republican from Ohio is sleazy, but all of the sleaziest Republicans (not named “Ken Paxton,” anyway) are from Ohio.

 

The president’s son and namesake eagerly promoted Ramaswamy’s ad on Tuesday when it leaked online, not surprisingly. And when Trump himself is asked about it, I assume he’ll land somewhere between credulity and enthusiasm about Donna Arthur’s testimony. Vice-signaling is the way postliberal sociopaths demonstrate their commitment to winning to each other; Vivek, being a smart guy, understood that when he chose to embrace the ad on Tuesday night, just as he understood it in 2023 when he set out to distinguish himself as the most “based” demagogue on the Republican debate stage.

 

He’s cutthroat enough to be a leader in this party, you see. He doesn’t tremble before media disapproval. He’s a fighter. He’s “one of us.”

 

All in.

 

Look at it this way. At this point in the campaign, what does he have to lose by putting all of his chips on ruthlessness?

 

He trails Acton by 3.9 points in the RealClearPolitics average. If he comes up short in this race by any margin, his political ambitions are finished. Even in a national environment as dismal for Republicans as this one, losing a state that the president won by 11 points two years ago will be unspinnable.

 

A more likable politician might survive a defeat and get a second chance from his party in some statewide race down the line, but Ramaswamy is not that politician. And the GOP, which is likely to become more hostile to Indian Americans over time, is not that party.

 

If he loses next month by 8 points because angry voters disgusted by his attack on Acton wanted to punish him, he’s done. But if he loses by 1 point because voters turned out not to care about the ad, he’s still done. So why not air it? Either way, in the quite plausible event that his party underperforms across the ballot, Ramaswamy is destined to end up as a scapegoat for many Republicans looking to blame someone other than you-know-who for having dragged down the ticket.

 

The only unforgivable sin in Donald Trump’s movement is weakening the party’s hold on power. Ramaswamy won’t be able to atone for that sin if he loses.

 

But if he wins—and one should never count out a Trump-endorsed candidate in Ohio—then the Donna Arthur ad might be a career-maker for him.

 

It’ll be his Access Hollywood moment. He went nuclear on his opponent, was savaged by the left for it, stood his ground, and prevailed. In fact, not only did he go nuclear, he went nuclear when he was behind in the race and turned a likely defeat into an unexpected victory. In so doing, he’ll have confirmed postliberalism’s central thesis—that the key to political success is unabashed ruthlessness. His “based” fellow travelers will be grateful to him for it.

 

As of Tuesday night, Ramaswamy is all in on Donna Arthur and all in on that thesis. We’ll know in two weeks whether American politics is rid of him or not.

Vivek Ramaswamy Reminds Voters Why They Never Liked Him

By Jeffrey Blehar

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

Throughout the electoral chaos of this 2026 midterm cycle, I have consciously neglected my duty to pay attention to the Democratic wave threatening to hit Ohio. Part of the reason for that is it would require me to revisit the single most painfully, memorably incorrect prediction I have ever made in the pages of National Review, back in August of 2025, concerning Sherrod Brown’s potential competitiveness as a 2026 Senate candidate. (Seriously, reading it now is like visiting my younger self as a Dickensian wraith; I want to scream, You have no idea what’s coming, you fool! across time to that author.)

 

But the other reason I’ve avoided Ohio is that my gag reflex kicks in at the thought of having to write about Vivek Ramaswamy. What can I say? The man just makes my gorge rise, and not without reason. Readers may have forgotten Ramaswamy’s farcical presidential campaign in 2023-24, where he ran as a kamikaze pilot fish attached to Donald Trump (in hopes of an administration gig) — but I was professionally obligated to watch it all. Allow me to recall the impression Vivek made upon me (and America as well) back during those days:

 

As for Vivek Ramaswamy, what is there left to say about this egregious muppet? The entire Vivek “trip” through these debates has been akin to sitting through a forced rewatch of Sibyl, the Sally Field “multiple-personality disorder” TV movie from the late Seventies. For the first debate, “Bad Vivek” showed up, calling everyone bought-and-paid-for frauds and grandstanding. Then for debate two, “Bad Vivek” was stuffed in a closet and instead we got “Nice Vivek.”

 

Nice Vivek didn’t play so hot either, so Bad Vivek was back with a vengeance tonight, and his performance was easily his most unhinged yet. The absolute confidence and overenunciated conviction he brings to even the most spurious, wildly nutty statements marks him out as either deeply weird or as a man who simply has decided to forfeit his dignity for profit. He called January 6 a conspiracy theory, said the 2020 election was stolen, called Haley corrupt, a fraud, a “puppet for the puppet masters,” said that she would send your children to die in Iran so that she could buy a larger house, and — there was a lot of cross talk — he might also have anathematized her in medieval Latin somewhere in the middle of it all. It was hard to keep up with his serial ridiculousness.

 

It should therefore not surprise you that I was uninterested in writing about Ohio’s gubernatorial race, or even thinking about it beyond the hope that Ramaswamy — already the inevitable, Trump-blessed candidate to replace Mike DeWine in office as a very different sort of Republican — wouldn’t blow it and break the streak of 16 consecutive years of GOP governance. But even before Trump’s mad moves shook up the 2026 map in unpredictable ways, Ramaswamy already had the stench of born-loserdom wafting off him.

 

Recall that Ramaswamy actually expected to be spending the last two years in Washington, D.C., as part of Trump’s administration in one form or another. But the administration cut him loose quickly; this, as he weighed in on the H-1B visa controversy in favor of Indian immigrants. Whether you agree with his position, it is a notably unpopular one among Ohio Republicans and many in Trump’s Washington.

 

But that was at least a difference of principle. What Ohioans are learning about now is the real reason Vivek Ramaswamy is a mismatch for the very idea of electoral politics: He’s an insincere and unlikable weasel.

 

Ramaswamy currently trails Democratic opponent Amy Acton in the polls by anywhere from three to five points, and yesterday he released an ad so revolting that it barely deserves recounting here. Acton and her brother are estranged from their mother, Donna Arthur, who — and this has long been a matter of public record — is credibly accused of allowing her to be sexually abused by her stepfather. This week, Ramaswamy’s campaign rounded up Arthur to record an embittered rant denouncing her daughter as a liar and telling voters not to trust her.

 

It was a staggering act of bad taste, a move made for absolutely no gain whatsoever — are voters supposed to hold Acton’s sexual molestation by a family member against her? — and Ramaswamy only made things worse by doubling down on it yesterday:

 

It is an ad from our campaign. I would love for this race and this election to be about the substantive issues that impact Ohioans. Unfortunately, Amy Acton has been hiding from those issues. She won’t debate me. She doesn’t allow cameras at her events.

 

And I think her record of continuously—certainly during this campaign—I would say spreading some defamatory, disparaging lies about me and my family that does deserve to be scrutinized, and this is part of a broader pattern.

 

If Ramaswamy thinks that people will watch this ad, and take this disgruntled woman at her word — who, it must be noted, willingly chose to stay with her daughter’s alleged sexual abuser — without looking up further details, he is both deluded and deeply cynical. His oleaginous response that “this is justified because she won’t debate me” is only going to disgust voters further.

 

And the simple fact that this ad even exists tells you everything you need to know about how dire the governor’s race in Ohio is for Vivek Ramaswamy. Candidates on the path to victory don’t take desperate swings like this. Only candidates certain that they’re going down in flames and have nothing left to lose reach that deep down into the gutter.

Could This Time Be Different on Ukraine?

By Daniel Foster

Thursday, October 22, 2026

 

I don’t expect the current sorry state of the U.S.–Ukraine/Russia relationship to endure, if only because President Trump has already occupied most of the possible positions on the matter and so I suspect he’ll come to occupy different ones in the future — or to occupy old ones once more.

 

But I do wonder if Trump’s latest lurch toward Russia is importantly different from the previous several. Not because Trump has changed, but because the political and strategic circumstances surrounding him have.

 

There are a few reasons to think so.

 

First, Trump has managed to tie his Russia policy to his unpopular war with Iran. The latest Pew polling finds that 65 percent of Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of the conflict, with support deteriorating even among Republicans. This includes people whose foreign-policy instincts are otherwise quite hawkish, but who share the MAGA aversion to “forever wars” and other entanglements in the Middle East.

 

By presenting the relaxation of Russian sanctions as a solution to the energy shock brought about by the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, Trump has invited an assessment of his Ukraine policy against the costs of what even many of his most ardent supporters regard as a war of choice in Iran. An added wrinkle here is that Trump’s own intelligence officials say Russia has supplied Iran with intelligence for targeting American military assets in the Mideast.

 

Second, there’s no fiscal argument this time. On the right, Ukraine skeptics have frequently fought with Ukraine hawks on the comfortable intramural ground of American fiscal prudence. That argument was central to JD Vance’s flamboyant performance during the February 2025 Oval Office meeting with Zelensky. But the circumstances have changed dramatically since then. Though intelligence sharing certainly costs money, direct American fiscal and matériel support has all but ended. As I suggested on The Editors last week, this is probably why Zelensky himself has taken a harder rhetorical line against Trump this time around.

 

Third, and relatedly, Europe’s position is now substantially less hypocritical. The White House got its wish, and European governments have taken up the burden of fiscal and military support for Ukraine. At the same time, they have reduced their own dependencies on Russia. For years the obvious rejoinder to European lectures about solidarity with Ukraine was that Europeans were themselves financing Putin’s war by purchasing Russian energy.

 

But according to the European Commission, Russian oil’s share of EU imports has fallen from roughly 27 percent at the beginning of 2022 to just 2 percent. Europe has substantially reduced dependence on Russian natural gas as well, while further restricting other imports.

 

Against that backdrop, the United States now finds itself making special arrangements to facilitate Russian petroleum sales just as Europeans have incurred considerable expense to move away from them.

 

Fourth, the administration’s actions are unusually cowardly. The respectable restrainer argument has been that America has limited strategic interests in Ukraine and plenty of reason to husband our finite resources elsewhere. But degrading Starlink and Starshield, withholding early warning of ballistic strikes, and possibly pausing other intelligence sharing are widely and correctly understood as purely punitive measures. Punitive measures that produced more dead Ukrainian civilians. The latest version via the Wall Street Journal is that Musk himself ordered the Starlink slowdown after discussions with unnamed administration officials, while Secretary Rubio has gone from insisting that nobody ordered it to explaining that it was a commercial decision for SpaceX to make. Meanwhile, Zelensky says ballistic-missile early warnings have resumed following a call with Rubio, who insists that intelligence sharing was never interrupted in the first place. The White House’s vagueness, finger-pointing, and evolving story about who made the decisions and why only added to the dirtiness of an already dirty business.

 

And at least anecdotally, even some of the hardnosed America-Firsters have appeared to be repelled by the combination of treachery and passive-aggression.

 

Fifth, we have a substantial record of failed détente with Russia against which to judge the latest effort. There is probably no number of times that Trump will not fall for Putin’s shtick. But each time it happens, we get a clearer and stronger record of the folly inherent in it.

 

In March 2025, the U.S. briefly suspended American military assistance and intelligence sharing. Ukraine subsequently accepted an American proposal for a 30-day ceasefire. Putin declined. Then came the useless Alaska summit. Then came the American 28-point peace proposal, drawn from a document supplied by Moscow. That too went nowhere.

 

Sixth and last, everyone seems to understand that waiving Russian sanctions and importing Russian diesel is not going to do anything for Americans.

 

The math isn’t there. Trump announced an initial Russian contribution of 300,000 metric tons of diesel to American and global markets. But the global diesel market consumes approximately 120 million tons per month. That initial volume amounts to about one-quarter of 1 percent of monthly consumption.

 

The United States is the world’s largest exporter of diesel. Its problem is not domestic supply, but global prices driven up by energy shocks. Russian diesel already reaches the market at a discount imposed by sanctions and honor. There’s no reason to think this drop in the bucket will have any effect on prices at the pump in Peoria, much less in the mere days left before the midterm elections that seem to be driving the policy.

 

The Zombie Hawks of the Legacy GOP have gotten up in arms about Trump’s Ukraine policy before. But never against such division and unhappiness in the MAGA ranks. Congressional Republicans have already joined a bipartisan demand that Trump reverse the arrangement. More materially, some House Republicans are reportedly threatening to block the administration’s proposed $350 billion in additional Pentagon funding unless Trump changes course on Russia.

 

Nobody ever made much money betting that Trump would stop iterating on his own bad instincts. But if things keep going this way for him politically and geopolitically, it may not be up to him.

He Didn’t Ask

By Rich Lowry

Thursday, October 22, 2026

 

People will make sacrifices in wartime when necessary.

 

It’s much harder to expect them to willingly endure any kind of hardship, though, when it’s a war they don’t support, didn’t want, and were never consulted about.

 

If Republicans get thumped in the midterms, all the polling suggests that prices will be one of the main reasons, with the Iran war’s contribution to higher costs looming large.

 

According to the latest New York Times/Siena poll, which is consistent with other surveys, 65 percent disapprove of President Trump’s handling of the war in Iran, and almost 75 percent disapprove of his handling of gas prices, two issues that are obviously closely intertwined.

 

Most of the public doesn’t spend time thinking about the balance between the executive and legislative branches, or worrying too much about the niceties of when a military intervention should be authorized by Congress. If the Iran war had been as short as advertised, or if it had dragged on with no appreciable cost back home, most people presumably wouldn’t have cared very much, even if they weren’t on board. It’s the combination of a relatively drawn-out war causing elevated prices that’s a killer, and I’m guessing that it’s insult to injury for many people that Trump has handled the matter with such high-handedness.

 

It’s often remarked that Trump’s obsession with naming things after himself, or building things in Washington, is hurting him because it makes him seem out of touch and interested only in his own priorities. But none of this directly harms anyone — unless they, say, hold a season pass to the Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center.

 

The Iran war, in contrast, has imposed an economic cost on nearly everyone in the country, one that is particularly marked for the people least able to afford it.

 

President Trump has an idiosyncratic view of representative government. The common understanding of our system is that we elect representatives who debate and vote on legislation, before standing for election again and finding out if their constituents still want them as their representatives.

 

Trump’s populist understanding is different — he’s the people’s representative. It makes sense that Trump, who has a highly personalized view of government and of his movement, has a highly personal view of himself as the tribune of the people.

 

This tends to render the other representatives an annoyance and unnecessary encumbrance, and indeed this is how Trump has largely treated Congress in his second term.

 

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that it evidently didn’t occur to him to ask Congress to authorize the Iran war. There have been comparisons made between Trump’s war and George W. Bush’s in Iraq, but this is a stark difference. Bush went to Congress, and by the time lawmakers authorized the war, it was a matter of national consensus (although one that quickly fell apart).

 

Trump hasn’t gone to Congress on his tariffs, either, but he made it abundantly clear in the 2024 campaign that he intended to drastically increase foreign duties. Compared with that, the Iran war was a bolt from the blue.

 

There have been ongoing efforts to cushion the conflict from public accountability. Trump officials and Republican officeholders have tried to argue that it isn’t really “a war,” and Trump has made it clear that a renewal of a major bombing campaign will only occur after the election, an effort to try to keep the war from being front and center when people vote.

 

Now, although the war hasn’t gone as planned, we need to wait to see how it turns out to make an ultimate verdict on its wisdom and how it’s been conducted.

 

Yet we can’t expect great patience from the public when it wasn’t asked or even informed beforehand.

Discrimination in the Name of Diversity

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, October 22, 2026

 

Nearly a decade ago, Maryland’s largest public school district decided it had a problem. It didn’t involve student safety or plummeting test scores. It was that too many Asian-American children were being accepted into its magnet program for exceptional middle-schoolers.

 

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court accepted a case that will decide whether Montgomery County Public Schools’ plan to rebalance the racial makeup of the program violated the Constitution’s promise of equal protection under the law.

 

By the 2013–14 school year, half the students accepted to the county’s four magnet programs were Asian-American. To “correct” this “problem,” the district commissioned a study to see how it could begin to de-emphasize traditional criteria in an effort to grant more spots to black and Hispanic children.

 

Released in 2016, the report concluded that there were “significant racial and socioeconomic disparities in the enrollment and acceptance rates to academically selective programs, which suggest a need to revise the criteria and process used to select students for these programs.” The report suggested “broadening the definition of gifted” to include “non-cognitive measures such as motivation and persistence, using group-specific norms that benchmark student performance against school peers with comparable backgrounds,” and “offering automatic admissions for students in the top 5-10% of sending elementary or middle schools.”

 

The motivations in seeking these changes were not subtle. A board member expressed concern over the “substantial underrepresentation of students of color” in the magnet programs and expressed hope that “programs will become more diverse and be more reflective of our student population.”

 

As is the case with college admissions, concerns over the inclusion of “students of color” do not apply to Asian Americans, a group once largely barred from entering the United States by the federal government. And when the Montgomery County school district began running field tests using their new criteria, they got the result they wanted. At one magnet school, the percentage of Asian-American students in the program dropped from 45.6 percent to 31.5 percent, while the proportion of black, Hispanic, and white students all rose (by 5.3 percent, 8.3 percent, and 2.7 percent, respectively). At another school, the percentage of Asian-American participants dropped by 27.9 percent and at another by 15.4 percent.

 

Asian-American parents noticed. So did the school board, whose complaint was that the field test hadn’t gone far enough. One member had already warned colleagues that “if we expand blindly we are going to end up in the same place ten years from now,” because “privilege is not going to go away.” In Montgomery County, apparently, “privilege” is what you call a ten-year-old who aces a cognitive abilities test.

 

The mechanics were clever, in the way a pickpocket is clever. The new field test’s “peer grouping” rule made it harder for kids at high-performing elementary schools to win seats. A “local norming” provision scrapped the countywide yardstick and graded children on their own school’s curve. Asian-American families in the county are clustered in a handful of high-performing schools, so the district never had to write the word “Asian” anywhere. Geography did the sorting.

 

When a group of mostly Asian parents sued in 2020, the district swapped the field test for a lottery open to students scoring in the 85th percentile on a standardized assessment. Those percentiles were locally normed, too. Data the parents later obtained showed that kids at schools with the lowest rates of poverty among their school population needed to score in the 93rd percentile countywide to qualify for the STEM lottery. Kids at the county’s highest-poverty schools needed to score in the 60th percentile. This made it even harder for Asian-American students to qualify for the STEM programs than under the field test.

 

Yet the parents lost, and not because a court found that the district had done no wrong. The Fourth Circuit had adopted a rule in a similar case involving Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School. Under it, a plaintiff can’t even raise discriminatory intent unless the targeted group’s share of admissions falls below its share of the applicant pool. Asian-American kids didn’t fall below that line, so the case was tossed. Intent never entered the room.

 

The current legal standard is therefore that a school board can set out to shrink a racial group’s numbers, succeed, and still walk away clean, so long as the victims stubbornly keep outperforming everyone else. Justice Samuel Alito, dissenting when the court passed on the Thomas Jefferson case, said the rule “effectively licenses official actors to discriminate against any racial group with impunity as long as that group continues to perform at a higher rate than other groups.” The crime is excused because the victims were too good at surviving it.

 

The circuit courts have now split. The First and Fourth apply the Thomas Jefferson standard. The Second and Third, in cases from New York and Philadelphia, have rejected it. So a Maryland sixth-grader’s equal protection now depends on which side of the Mason-Dixon line her parents bought a house.

 

The Supreme Court’s own precedent says this can’t stand. In the 2023 case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” and that what cannot be done directly through racial quotas cannot be done indirectly through ostensibly race-neutral programs with disparate impacts. Sixteen years earlier, he put it more simply: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

 

G. K. Chesterton observed that America is the only nation founded on a creed. That creed’s first article is that government treats citizens as individuals, not as tokens of a group. Montgomery County wanted its magnet programs to “reflect the community.” The Constitution asks for something harder: that the community treat each child as a person. The justices now get to remind the district which one is the law.

What’s With Donald Trump’s Man Jokes?

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

Jonah walks into a Gay Jokes Anonymous meeting.

 

Hi. My name is Jonah.

 

A half dozen middle-aged men and one big-haired woman on folding chairs say in unison: “Hi, Jonah.”

 

It’s been one month since I made a gay joke.

 

Smattering of applause. “Way to go, Jonah!”

 

Many of you know that I’m a writer and a pundit. That’s why I started attending these meetings. I mean, I have friends who work on Wall Street, and they say they can still use Andrew Dice Clay material …

 

“Dice! Yeah!”

 

Settle down, Phil … But in my line of work, falling off the wagon even once can cost you everything.

 

Nods all around.

 

When I was younger, I made a lot of gay jokes. I was never “anti-gay,” I just thought the jokes were funny. I mean, some of the best gay-joke tellers are gay themselves. That seemed unfair. But the rules are the rules. And besides, we still had schlong jokes.

 

But here’s the thing. Donald Trump is making it really hard.

 

“That’s what he said!” Phil yells, turning left and right for an unrequited high-five.

 

I mean, it was bad enough when he made “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People his campaign anthem and started dancing like he was making the “middle-out” scene from Silicon Valley into a musical. I mean, what is that? I half expected them to come out with a MAGA-branded Shake-Weight.

 

“So ghey!”

 

Sam!

 

“What? I did it with the gh- spelling!”

 

Anyway, if you follow politics, you’ve probably seen how Trump is out there almost every day talking about men’s asses, especially this Ohio senator, Jon Husted. I mean, last night he said … here, I have it on my phone:

 

But I looked at his ass, and then I looked at his legs. I said, “His ass, s–t, it’s like, it’s like a pile of muscle.” Then I looked at his legs, and I said, “Man, his feet are big.” Then I looked at his shoulders, and I tapped him on the shoulder, and it actually hurt my hand. He’s like a piece of steel. I said, “This guy’s a monster!”

 

Several men in the group clench their teeth. One bites a knuckle. Another mutters, “Don’t drop the soap, Senator!” The big-haired lady can’t stop laughing.

 

This guy is killing me. And this is like the third or fourth time he has talked about this Husted guy. Get a room already, you know? And it’s not just him. At a Coast Guard Academy graduation, Trump talked about one graduate who attracted his presidential gaze to the point where I thought he might invite him to Netflix and chill while watching a Judy Garland documentary.

 

Crap, I’m gonna lose my one-month chip for that.

 

“It’s OK, Jonah. This is a safe place.”

 

I mean, even the New York Times is like, “What the hell?”

 

I guess my real problem is, I don’t know what the rules are anymore. Is it like the Michael Scott rule? You can call lame stuff gay but can’t call “gay-gay” dudes gay? I mean, speaking of lame, the other week, someone at a J.D. Vance rally shouted he loved the vice president. Vance responded, “I love you too, sir. In a totally platonic way, to be clear. I’m the vice president, not James Talarico.”

 

“Hey, how do you tell Vance and Talarico apart? Vance is the one who leaves eyeliner smudges on your hotel pillow!”

 

Phil, come on.

 

I was watching Jesse Watters explain that Trump can get away with sounding “a little gay” because he’s straight. Yeah, okay, maybe. Is that the rule now? I mean, I’m not allowed to tell gay jokes, but Trump can spend all his time obsessing over interior decorating, putting on lavish gladiatorial shows, planning a fancy ballroom …

 

Phil: *snicker* “‘Ballroom.’ You know what he… ”

 

Phil, sit out a few plays. Meanwhile, Watters and that crowd think it’s fine to switch back to all this “Talafreako” gay stuff. They’re like Roger Stone; they swing both ways.

 

Look, what am I supposed to do? I mean, Trump has a bunch of openly gay dudes working for him. Scott Bessent is gay. He’s a billionaire but calls himself a “soybean farmer.” There’s nothing homosexual about that, but man, I could work with it. Ric Grenell is super gay, though in that weird Weimar Germany private-cabaret kind of way. Trump’s mentor, Roy Cohn, was one of those gay guys who hated gay guys.

 

Peter Thiel? He’s Vance’s mentor. He’s choreographed J.D.’s political career like a child-beauty-pageant-obsessed gay dad, but Vance wants people not to vote for Talarico because Talarico is gay? I mean, Talarico isn’t the kind of dude who attracts long-lingering looks from President Trump. But Talarico’s not actually gay. I get that Talarico looks like he rollerblades, but he keeps challenging Ken Paxton to debate, and Paxton is too much of a wuss to do it.

 

Brandon Gill, a Texas congressman, calls Talarico a “barely straight version of Pete Buttigieg.” What does that even mean? Buttigieg is openly gay, a fact the RNC is eager to remind voters of. I mean, Bessent supposedly wants to run for president as America’s first gay soybean-farmer commander in chief (that we know of—there are rumors that James Buchanan planted soybeans in his backyard). Would that be okay?

 

MAGA world is constantly talking about things like “globohomo,” which always sounded like a convention that Trump would be happy to host at Mar-a-Lago if the check cleared and the security staff had Grade-A Husted asses. Remember to buy Trump Baby Oil! Some of the Christian nationalist types are all freaked out about “gay race communism,” but a bunch of them rushed to catch Thiel talking about the Antichrist. I wouldn’t have been shocked if they showed up at the midterm convention dressed in Village People outfits doing the Shake Weight dance. These guys have sunk so low, I don’t know where the bottom is. Shut up, Phil.

 

I really don’t care who is gay and who isn’t. But, no offense, the coffee here sucks and, frankly, I sometimes think you guys are in the wrong room, if you know what I mean. So, just tell me. What are the rules? Because this is too damn hard.

 

“Thanks for sharing, Jonah. Good share. That’s all the time we have. The Recovering Antipedophile group needs the room.”

What the French Protests Can Teach Americans

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

On Monday, France’s Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez admitted that police have “lost control” as some cities continue to see massive waves of looting and mayhem. Social media brims with images of stores being ransacked, cars burning, and mask-wearing goons running wild. In Limoges, the beautiful Hôtel de Ville was burnt to the ground.

 

But the chaos, as is so often the case, began peacefully. And many supporters and leaders of the protests have condemned the violence. I think that violence has more to do with France’s miserable record of assimilating immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East than with budget cuts. Call me cynical, but I don’t believe the goons pillaging Louis Vuitton stores are planning to resell the handbags to buy better school supplies or to bolster their teachers’ salaries.

 

The initial protests were about budget cuts, primarily in education. As allied groups joined in—socialist and communist parties, labor unions, etc.—the argument expanded to generalized complaints about France’s “austerity” policies. In short, they argued, as they have for generations, that the government should spend more on pensions and other entitlements.

 

The problem is that France can’t afford it. It’s borrowed money to pay for its lavish government sector for a very long time. It has run consecutive budget deficits—i.e., took in less than it spent—for more than half a century. In 1974, public debt was around 15 percent of GDP. Today it’s at 116  percent. Government spending now makes up 57 percent of the GDP (compared with 23 percent of GDP for the U.S.), and France spends three times as much on “social protection” —including pensions and family benefits—as does the United States, and more than any other country in Europe and the OECD.

 

Naturally, the blame for this sorry state of affairs, according to some supporters of the protests, falls on capitalism. Famous French economist Thomas Piketty says the country’s woes are the result of the state pursuing the “capitalist logic” of underinvesting in the public sector and undertaxing the wealthy. In terms of personal income taxes alone—France has massive payroll and consumption taxes as well—the top 10 percent of French taxpayers provide 74 percent of the revenue. The top 1 percent provide a third. France also has the highest corporate tax rates of any country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

 

I’m hard-pressed to see how just a bit more taxing and spending will solve France’s problems.

 

I have real sympathy for the nonviolent French youth. Their economy is moribund in large part because retirees have a stranglehold on the state’s finances, consuming 14 percent of GDP. (Social Security and Medicare account for 9.4 percent of U.S. GDP. One reason education spending is so tight: A third of the education budget goes toward Education Ministry pensions.  

 

I don’t think retirees should be thrown to the wolves, but such a system is objectively unsustainable. Yet, in 2023, when French President Emmanuel Macron introduced reforms to bump the retirement age from 62 to 64, the resulting protests paralyzed the country (that modest reform was suspended last month). France is now caught in what economists call the “dependency trap,” producing too few workers to pay for the lifestyles of its older generations.

 

When protesters talk about feeling “hopeless,” what they often mean is that the gravy train will run out before they get to partake in it. I don’t blame them for being resentful, but it’s difficult to see how this is a failure of capitalism or “neoliberalism.” As Margaret Thatcher famously said, socialist governments “always run out of other people’s money.”

 

The most obvious answer to France’s problems is economic growth—much easier said than done, of course. The reason that’s so hard for France isn’t because the government is “unresponsive” to the people and their concerns., It’s because it’s too responsive. For decades, the French have demanded the economic policies that got them into this mess, and the government appeased them.

 

France is an outlier in its poor economic performance and lavish social spending, but its problems are recognizable across the West, including in America. The U.S. economy has grown twice as fast as France’s over the last quarter-century, but the demands for less “capitalism” from young Americans echo those protesting in Paris.

 

France has the sort of universal health insurance many insist would solve everyone’s problems here. It hasn’t spared France from political turmoil. Our own Social Security and Medicare aren’t far from insolvency, but demands for higher benefits and “Medicare for All” only grow louder.

 

The French canary in the coal mine is a good reminder that the best solution to some crises is to avoid them in the first place.