A few days ago Thomas Chatterton Williams published a piece in The Atlantic about the white identity movement on the right. The thesis Chatterton puts forward is the same one you’ll find in almost all of his columns, not to mention his books: there is a dangerous ascendant right-wing movement in this country, but that movement is the result of overreach by the left. He says: 

This contains all of the fallacies that you will generally see in a Thomas Chatterton Williams piece. It imagines that history begins in approximately 2013, and it treats the left as the only political actors with any agency. The right, to Chatterton, is not a political movement as much as a naturally occurring, reflexive response to the left. Any moral judgment directed toward it must be tempered by the fact that their hand was forced.

Chatterton doesn’t align with white supremacists, but when he criticizes them he always emphasizes that they are making the same categorical error that people on the left do - treating race as a real distinction that matters. His latest book, The Summer of Our Discontent, lays out the argument that blacks and whites in America have nearly reached material parity, and therefore calls for racial justice are at best misguided and at worst a way of reifying race as a material distinction.

It struck me when reading the Atlantic piece that I had just read a version of the same argument a few hours before, when I was re-reading the Civil Rights Cases of 1883. Back in 1875, Congress passed a robust anti-discrimination law that prohibited discrimination in various accommodations, from theaters to railroad cars. But the Supreme Court struck it down. They said this:

This is, at its core, the same argument made by Chatterton: affirmative efforts to promote equality have exhausted their utility, and any further attempts will only operate to unjustly favor black people. 

The argument has recurred throughout our history in different forms. In 1935, Congress was considering anti-lynching legislation (the laws were never passed, with Southern Democrats in the Senate holding the line on a filibuster). The New York Times published an opinion piece opposing the bill, arguing that “popular education, and the growth of civilization therefrom, have produced a constant lessening of mob violence of the types which are the objectives of the Costigan-Wagner bill.” In other words, enough progress has been made, and we don’t need legislation to force any more.

While Chatterton is not any sort of ideological white supremacist (he is black, after all), he believes that they have “identified a genuine problem.” One white supremacist he speaks to argues that ethnicity is “valued for minority groups, and it’s denigrated for majorities.” Chatterton concurs, saying that at “universities, nonprofits, and the publishing industry, I have repeatedly served on selection committees in which jurists—in many cases white jurists—stated that a candidate’s racial, ethnic, or sexual claim to marginalization ought to be the deciding factor for a coveted position or prize.”

There are a handful of obvious rejoinders here – the idea that ethnicity is “denigrated” for white people is only true in the sense that celebrations of whiteness itself are generally frowned upon. But celebrations of white ethnicities – Irish, Italian, German, etc. – are a part of mainstream culture. 

More notably, Chatterton seems to buy the idea that whites nowadays are discriminated against in hiring, pulling from his own experience. But his own experience consists entirely of his time sky high in an ivory tower. It’s not hard for me to believe that in some highfalutin academic circles, minority candidates are being granted occasional favor in hiring. But if it were true that minority status was actually coveted in the workplace as a general rule, it’s not showing up in the statistics. A few years ago some researchers conducted a classic resume audit study. They sent out tens of thousands of identical resumes for entry-level jobs, half with stereotypically white names and half with stereotypically black names. The white candidates scored interviews about 10% more often than the black candidates. That – not some anecdotal selection committee at an unnamed university – is the reality of employment discrimination in America today.

Chatterton believes that modern social justice movements have made racial victimhood into a form of rhetorical currency, and that white supremacists are now trading in it:

But white supremacists were claiming victimhood long before the social justice movements of the 2010s. Segregationists in the 1960s bemoaned the tyrannical overreach of the civil rights movement. The Southern redeemers decried Reconstruction governments as oppressive, and chastised Northern Republicans for their divisive rhetoric. They took offense at the continued use of the term “rebels” by their Republican colleagues. They argued that the inequities of slavery were in the past, that the South had moved forward, and that Northern Reconstructionists were dwelling on the tensions of the Civil War. Communication scholar Kirt Wilson summed up the Southern argument: “bury the past and harmony will prevail.” Many powerful Americans took them at their word, and the result was nearly a century of Jim Crow.

Across three different centuries, the so-called white identitarians embraced different iterations of the same position. The legitimate grievances of black Americans were long past, they said, and attempts to remedy them would tip the scales too far and impose an unfair burden on the white majority. Whenever people in power acquiesced to the white supremacists, they leveraged that acquiescence to subjugate minorities and entrench white supremacy further. Chatterton is a contributor to this longstanding intellectual tradition, not because he believes in its mission but because he buys its excuses.

Sound familiar?

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Last week CBS News head Bari Weiss fired Tanya Simon, the longtime 60 Minutes producer and interim executive producer, and replaced her with Nick Bilton, a tech journalist and producer with no experience in broadcast news.

Nick Bilton’s career is hard to explain except other than to say that some people just seem to have the wind at their back. He started out as a design editor at the Times before morphing into a prominent tech columnist (this might seem a little unusual, but jumping from a completely unrelated field into tech journalism is fairly common – Kara Swisher was at the style desk before she started writing about AOL in the 90s). He eventually leveraged his renown into a gig writing and producing documentary films. Now he’s set to head up CBS News’s flagship program. Each career move a little less explicable than the last.

Bilton has occasionally embarrassed himself. Once he wrote a piece for Vanity Fair titled “How I Got To the Bottom of the Theranos Mess.” That’s a pretty interesting title, considering that the Theranos story was famously broken by the Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou (which Bilton acknowledges), and Bilton provided little more than a bit of supplementary reporting almost a year later.

But for the most part, Bilton’s tech reporting is forgettable, run of the mill stuff. He’d report on the internal goings-on at Twitter, or about how technology was changing our lives in some minor way. When he started writing about tech for the Times, his first few columns were so vacuous that Leah Finnegan wrote a piece in Gawker mocking them.

Last week The New York Times published an article that I haven’t been able to get out of my brain, headlined “In Attack on Mamdani, Vornado Chief Likens ‘Tax the Rich’ to Hate Speech.” The piece was a summary of remarks made by Steven Roth, the CEO of Vornado Realty Trust, criticizing Zohran Mamdani’s rhetoric about taxing the rich. 

The remarks themselves were not notable except for being idiotic: Roth said that the term “tax the rich” is “just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs.” The Times reports this straightforwardly, not as commentary on the bizarre nature of Roth’s statements but as part of a story about a few of Mamdani’s ultrawealthy critics.

The question this brings to my mind is: why is this a story at all? This is nothing more than the moderately unhinged opinion of a guy whose company owns a lot of real estate. Why is it in the newspaper? 

The answer is that there’s an entire genre of media coverage best described as “rich guy has an opinion.” It’s surprisingly common, and once you notice it you’ll see it everywhere: entire news stories dedicated to the otherwise unremarkable opinion of a rich person, or news stories that fold the opinions of rich people into their otherwise neutral coverage. It’s taken for granted in many newsrooms that a person’s wealth imbues their opinions with newsworthiness. 

This style of journalism has thrived in the Mamdani era. Barry Sternlicht, another investment fund CEO, went on CNBC late last year to rant about how bad Mamdani’s policies would be for the city. Sternlicht, who has no relevant policy expertise, pontificated on the merits of defunding the police, and said that “socialism has never worked anywhere on the planet Earth, ever.”

A lot of people have theorized about the relationship between the press and the rich. Back in 1990, a political scientist named W. Lance Bennett postulated the theory of indexing – the idea that the mainstream media index their views to those expressed by powerful institutional sources. Chomsky had theorized something similar in Manufacturing Consent, noting how journalists become reliant upon and socially embedded with elite sources. 

But this is something slightly different. It’s not just that elite opinions are bleeding into press coverage, it’s that they are being treated as news per se. It’s journalism consisting of quotes from rich guys.

One simple reason for this is that rich people are often able to reframe their opinions as news. During Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, rich New Yorkers started telling the press that they planned to flee New York City if Mamdani won the election. This wasn’t actually true: we’re several months into Mamdani’s tenure and there’s no indication of an exodus from the city by rich folks or anyone else (vacancy rates remain at historic lows, and some business leaders who threatened to leave quickly walked it back). That’s because it was never a genuine threat. The entire purpose of the exercise was to take an opinion (we don’t like Zohran Mamdani) and turn it into something that feels more like news (wealthy people will flee the city!). 

When the media isn’t printing the opinions of rich people verbatim, it’s printing the opinions of their proxies. There are countless interest groups that ostensibly represent the interests of “business” but in practice represent the interests of the rich people who run very large businesses. In New York the biggest player in this space is The Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit founded by David Rockefeller whose members include over 300 New York CEOs. 

The Partnership for New York City will do things like publish reports about the perils of higher taxes. They are frequently quoted in the media on political matters. While they say they represent the interests of “business,” the reality isn’t so clear: as The City reported last month, while the group railed against Mamdani’s candidacy, many employees of the Partnership’s member companies actually supported him. The group isn’t speaking for them; it’s laundering the opinions of their bosses.

Nonetheless, the Partnership is frequently quoted as a “business group” or “pro-business group” (the fact that pro-management organizations are postured as pro-business while pro-worker organizations are treated as a narrower interest group is a topic for another day). They’re mentioned or quoted in stories about raising taxes, political endorsements, consumer protection, philanthropy, the police commissioner, and transit strikes, to name a few. 

There might have been a time you could justify all of this by arguing that wealthy business types hold some special knowledge – that their money is proof that they understand something about the world that the rest of us don’t. But we live in an age where we have unparalleled access to the thoughts of rich people. The richest man in the world posts his thoughts on X all day, every day. Billionaires go on podcasts and talk about identity politics. This has given us confirmation that, whatever their talents, an extremely large percentage of rich people are, in fact, idiots. The Partnership for New York City itself is now led by Steven Fulop, who spent 12 years as mayor of Jersey City and left it in financial ruin.

Much of the media in the Trump era is in an endless state of self-flagellation over their failure to anticipate Trump. They believe they are in a liberal bubble, and they adjust for this by granting Trump and his supporters an endless supply of their credulity. But they’ve missed the ways in which they’re truly out of touch, like their steadfast belief that the voices of a handful of ultrarich cretins are important enough to deserve a megaphone.

Somewhere downstream of this is a political environment that very much reflects the preferences of the rich. In 2012, Martin Gilens published a book on the issue called Affluence and Influence. Gilens did some research and found that where the preferences of the rich and the lower classes diverge, the preferences of the rich tend to be enacted into policy. That’s not simply the result of this style of media coverage, of course. But it reflects a world where the views of the rich are paraded in front of us at all times, absorbed into our political discourse until they appear to be part of its organic composition. I don’t have a structural solution to this, but if you want to improve your media literacy, one simple way is to ask yourself whether you’re reading the news or just some rich guy’s opinion.

There’s a media ritual that we’re forced to endure every time there is a flare-up in political violence, where media types insist that, for all the violence endemic to this country, this particular type crosses a critical line. 

After the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting, we saw breathless pieces from different corners of the media. The Washington Post published a piece saying that “political violence is intolerable in every instance.” The editors at The Free Press published one titled “The American Way Is Under Fire.” Then they published another titled “The Culture that Bred Cole Allen,” where they argue that we must have “zero tolerance for those who justify or excuse bloodshed.”

But they don’t really mean that. The Free Press is happy to publish advocacy for bloodshed of all types. They publish apologia for war in Iran and genocide in Gaza with regularity. They famously published an attempt to retcon the murder of George Floyd, arguing that his death was more likely an overdose (this account was somewhat famously debunked by Radley Balko, with no corrections or retractions ever made). 

What they mean when they talk about “political violence” is violence directed at political figures by members of the public. Violence that goes in the other direction does not count. That’s important, because “political violence” as they define it makes up just a tiny fraction of the political violence we all experience. When Trump deploys federal agents to cities he doesn’t like, and some of those agents murder civilians, and investigations into the incidents are blocked, that’s not political violence. Blowing up schools and targeting civilian infrastructure in Iran isn’t political violence. Nor is cutting funding for cancer research or foreign aid. That’s all just politics. 

(This reminds me, by the way, of how politicians and the media deploy the term “terrorism,” a word with an amorphous meaning that, in practice, tends to refer exclusively to violence committed by Muslims and never to violence by anyone else.)

This disconnect may be why the media’s framing of political violence doesn’t seem to resonate with the public. A recent survey asked participants what acts they thought qualified as "political violence.” Here are the results:

The story here, to me, is that while the media’s discussions of political violence fixate almost entirely on the targeting of public figures, most of the public folds that into a broader narrative about violence flowing both to and from the state. And that makes coverage like what we see from The Free Press ring hollow: they deem violence against political figures to be more noteworthy and disconcerting than violence against the rest of us. 

The worst iteration of this came after the murder of Charlie Kirk, whose death was treated as a seminal event by the press despite him personally being more than a bit of a scumbag. The lives of certain elites just seem to weigh more in the media’s mind.

The common argument is that violence directed at political figures is particularly corrosive because it doubles as an attack on our democracy. The popular term is the “assassin’s veto” – the idea that threats of assassination could inhibit politicians from enacting their preferred policies. The Free Press went a step further, saying that an attempt to kill Donald Trump was an attack on the First Amendment, because it stifled the speech of the people who voted for him (not sure that would hold up legally, but I can appreciate the spirit of it).

I don’t entirely disagree with any of that. But it’s hard not to notice the types of violence that we have digested into our body politic and are expected to allow to loom over us indefinitely. It’s difficult, in a world where children dying in school shootings is accepted as a given, to believe that attempts on the life of Donald Trump reflect some sort of crisis point. 

A New York Times piece by national political correspondent Lisa Lerer catalogued the individuals at the WHCD whose lives had been “upended” by political violence. They included RFK Jr., “whose father was assassinated after leaving a hotel ballroom in Los Angeles in 1968 in an earlier era of political violence.” But RFK Jr. will have, by the time he leaves office, killed more people than any gunman possibly could. He’s overseeing funding cuts to research for cancer, Alzheimer’s, HIV, and mRNA vaccines, to name a few. His primary connection to political violence isn’t his father, it’s that he is committing it.

Last week the Times published an interview with leftist streamer Hasan Piker and journalist Jia Tolentino about the idea of shoplifting as a form of protest. The segment got the vaguely provocative title “‘The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?’” and mostly consisted of Piker and Tolentino opining on morality of petty theft, and the extent to which shoplifting might serve as either a form of protest or an outgrowth of inequality.

The interview triggered multiple pearl-clutching responses. The Atlantic alone published two of them, including one from Thomas Chatterton Williams titled “Theft Is Now Progressive Chic” (at no point in either the original interview or any of the response pieces did anyone try to quantify how many people are actually engaging in shoplifting as a form of protest.)

But why? The topic is straight out of freshman year philosophy – property is theft and all that. The discussion revolved mostly around the fact that in many cases average people are held to a higher standard than the elite, and the double standard erodes our social contract.

I think the reflexive response from some media types stems from the fact that everyone knows those things are true. Everyone knows that elites can act with impunity while the rest of us cannot. Everyone knows that corporations engage in wage theft on a massive scale with few repercussions, but the average person could have their life upended by a larceny charge. Everyone knows that a single murder is unspeakably evil, but if you scale it up enough it’s just public policy. But the truth makes them uncomfortable, because the imbalance can only be resolved by ending elite impunity or granting it to everyone else, and they can’t stand the thought of either.

I was in the middle of writing a piece about The New York Times’s foremost hawk, Bret Stephens, when in the span of about a day we saw Trump threaten civilizational annihilation and then agree to a temporary ceasefire.

The ceasefire is obviously precarious (Israel has continued its invasion of Lebanon, and negotiations are reportedly going poorly) but the tentative deal reflected a near-total victory for the Iranian state. The terms will be very different if there’s ever a final agreement, but the mere fact of the ceasefire signals that Iran found a significant point of leverage in its control over the Strait of Hormuz.

What would be the most embarrassing thing to have published immediately before this ceasefire began? Here’s a contender: just hours before the preliminary agreement was announced, Stephens published a piece titled “The Iranian Advantage is an Illusion” (the alternative title: “No, Iran Isn’t Winning the War”). 

The premise of the piece (which he writes, for no practical reason, as a second-person account of “a gifted midcareer intelligence officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps”) is that Iran is, contrary to widespread belief, losing the war. The regime’s regional proxies are weakened, its leadership and military are depleted, and its people are in a state of unrest.

This framing is telling. Bret insists that “Western commentators” believe that Iran is winning the war. But that’s not exactly right. What most commentators believe is that the United States is not winning the war, in the sense that it is not achieving anything concrete. Bret can list off the various ways that the Iranian regime is depleted, but he doesn’t, other than in abstractions, explain how any of it redounds to the benefit of the United States. 

Bret’s column comes on the heels of another, from just a couple of weeks ago, titled “The War Is Going Better Than You Think,” where he argued that compared to past American wars, Iran has been a success. But the metrics he uses are selective. He mostly argues that American losses have been minimal. Which is true, and especially compelling if you believe that Iranian lives don’t matter. Stephens delineates exactly how many aircraft were lost, but doesn’t mention Iranian civilians even briefly. 

One of the weirder spats in Democratic politics over the last few years has been over what should be done about Hasan Piker, the leftist streamer and influencer who has become increasingly known for his outspoken anti-Zionism.

A couple of weeks ago Jonathan Cowan, president and co-founder of the centrist think tank Third Way, published a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Democrats are too cozy with Hasan Piker,” arguing that Democrats need to distance themselves from Piker, who Cowan describes as “anti-American, antiwomen, anti-Western and antisemitic.”

I’m not particularly interested in litigating the details of the allegations against Piker, but suffice it to say that what I’ve seen is pretty weak. Cowan implicitly concedes as much, saying that “[l]eft-wing antisemites are savvier than the Nazi-endorsers on the right…the antisemites of the left cloak their attacks in critiques of the present Israeli leadership.” That’s a cute sleight of hand – there isn’t solid evidence that Piker is antisemitic, but that just gets chalked up to him being too “savvy” to reveal his true beliefs. (Cowan goes on to explain that he considers the use of the terms “apartheid” and “genocide” in the context of Israeli politics to be antisemitism, which gives you a sense of his angle here).

The dispute here isn’t really about Hasan Piker exactly. Piker is a proxy for the broader dispute about the future of the Democratic Party, and a symbol of the growing dissonance between the party’s establishment and its increasingly disillusioned base.

In that light, the pearl clutching over Piker’s influence is telling. Politico recently asked 14 potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates whether they’d appear on a livestream with Piker. A few, including Senator Cory Booker, said no. That’s interesting, because in the past Booker has expressly rejected “purity politics,” specifically in the context of his associations with Jared Kushner, Mark Zuckerberg, and John McCain. He went so far as to write about the issue in his latest book, arguing that Democrats are shrinking their coalition by “cancel[ing] everyone who fails a purity test.” Booker’s calculus seems to change when he’s asked to include people to his left in that coalition.

Booker’s office responded to Politico’s query by saying that the conversations Piker has “aren’t the kinds of conversations Cory participates in.” Here’s Booker talking to NY Mag in 2019 about the conversations he does participate in:

So Booker pats himself on the back for talking to Grover Norquist (a long-time radical anti-taxation activist who occasionally finds himself involved in lobbying fraud) while rejecting the likes of Piker, whose worst crime from what I can gather is a handful of marginally distasteful comments.

Most tellingly, Booker very warmly received Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in December 2024. The timing is important – it was just a few weeks after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Gallant’s arrest for using starvation as a weapon of war and targeting civilian populations in Gaza. Gallant, in cutting off food, water, and electricity to Gaza, said that “we are fighting human animals and we must act accordingly.”   

The theme running through Booker’s apparent hypocrisy is pretty clear. His concern is not expanding the coalition, nor is it having conversations with controversial figures. His actual concern is disciplining the left flank of the party by keeping them in a perpetual state of weakness. This is how the center of the Democratic Party keeps the left at bay. They forge alliances to their right and leave the left isolated from power. Convening with the right is practical politics; convening with the left is beyond the pale.

It wasn’t long ago that the big debate in Democratic circles was about how to find the left’s Joe Rogan. Rogan and his cadre of alternative media dipshits had supposedly helped swing the 2024 election to Trump, and Democrats were looking to imitate his success. Cory Booker himself led an effort to embrace alternative media platforms.

The most obvious “Joe Rogan of the left” is Piker, who already boasts an audience of millions. The trouble for Democrats is that Piker (like Rogan) presents a trade off: he’s not actually controllable. He will, with some frequency, criticize the Democratic Party and some of its political commitments. That’s the whole point – his audience wants and expects independence and authenticity. This makes him a bit of a cautionary parable for Democrats. They would like to capture someone like him, but if they do he will become inauthentic, and lose whatever value he could have provided them. The only path forward is to actually win Piker over.

Confronted with this dilemma, Booker and others in the centrist establishment have decided that it’s simpler to try to excise Piker entirely. You can’t win him over while you’re hobnobbing with the IDF, so why bother? It’s easier to cast him out.

One of the go-to frameworks for Piker’s haters is to compare him to Nick Fuentes and other far-right influencers. One Third Way co-founder told Politico that “Piker is close to — but not over — the Nick Fuentes line.” Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow (whose opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, recently announced an event with Piker), said that Piker “says extremely offensive things in order to generate clicks and views and followers, which is not entirely different from somebody like Nick Fuentes.” The idea here is to portray the left and right as having parallel problems with extremists in their party. But Fuentes is an open Hitler-admirer who has said that the biggest challenge society faces is “organized Jewry.” Piker, on the other hand, has frequently condemned antisemitism. It’s not just that the comparison is inapt, it’s that it’s so wrong that it can really only be made in bad faith.

The centrist wing of the Democratic Party is making two simultaneous pitches about the left: first, it is so evil that collaboration is impossible, and second that it is so feeble that it can safely be ignored. The first pitch is plainly a lie. The second may or may not be true, but the Cory Bookers of the world are staking their political lives on it.

Joe Kent, Trump’s chief of counterterrorism, resigned his post this week on the basis that Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran was made “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby” and that he “cannot in good conscience” support it. He has since gone on a bit of a media tour across right-wing podcasts, repeating different versions of the same claim.

The Anti-Defamation League responded by saying that Kent was trafficking in antisemitic tropes, presumably by suggesting that Israel was manipulating the United States behind the scenes. The ADL’s ability to accurately diagnose antisemitism is more than a little questionable, but in this case they’re probably on to something. Joe Kent is most certainly an antisemite, having cozied up to various neo-Nazis within the right-wing media ecosystem. His resignation letter ascribes no agency to Trump, portraying him only as the victim of Israeli manipulation and misinformation. It also claims that the United States was drawn into the 2003 Iraq War by Israel, an argument that if not inherently antisemitic can be filed away under “things only an antisemite would believe.”

Kent’s rancid politics aside, it’s worth looking at the central claim on its merits. It is without question that the Israeli government played a role in launching the war on Iran. This isn’t conspiracism or fearmongering, it’s just a fact. Shortly after the war began, there was extensive reporting that Netanyahu (alongside Saudi leadership, although the Saudis dispute this) was pushing Trump to attack. The Washington Post reported it. Axios reported that Netanyahu provided Trump with the intelligence that would underpin the initial strikes on Iranian leadership.

Trump officials and allies have functionally admitted all of this. Early in the war, Marco Rubio stated that the precipitating factor for America’s engagement was an imminent Israeli attack on Iran, before walking it back by saying he was taken out of context. Senator Lindsey Graham, maybe the most prolific Iran hawk of our time, said that he coached Netanyahu on how to best convince Trump to attack.

Did America attack Iran “due to” Israeli pressure? Not exactly, but the Israelis played a key role nonetheless. The obvious reality is that blame doesn't really need to be allocated between America and Israel. Neither would have gone to war without the support of the other. Each is load-bearing. 

And so we are confronted with what has in the past few years become an increasingly familiar dilemma. If you assign Israel too much power and agency, you veer into antisemitic tropes. If you don’t assign it enough, you will simply be wrong.

The Trump administration has for the second time in just a few weeks attempted the decapitation of an enemy regime, killing Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and some uncertain number of the Islamic Republic’s leadership in a series of airstrikes this past weekend. The attacks are ongoing.

Like nearly everything else the administration does, the operation is illegal and immoral. It was conducted without any notice to Congress, let alone congressional approval. Some strikes hit an all-girls elementary school, killing dozens of children. 

The official justification for the strikes is unclear. Trump at some points cited Iran’s nuclear program, although he claimed to have completely destroyed the program with airstrikes last summer. He also hinted at a regime change justification, although, similar to the operation to capture Nicolás Maduro, there doesn’t appear to be any succession plan in place. He mentioned an imminent threat from Iran, though that appears to be a lie. He also cited allegations of Iranian interference in the 2020 and 2024 elections, which we can safely assume is simply made up.  

We don’t know how much this might escalate because we don’t know what Trump actually wants, other than to feel strong and watch things blow up on a little screen. Certainly he has no interest in nation-building, and even if he did he’s not competent enough to do it. It’s possible that he is attempting to rally national morale and boost his approval ratings, à la Mussolini’s foray into Ethiopia. But that gets the political causation a bit mixed up. It’s not simply that war rallies the nation, it’s that the nation is rallied into war: the rallying is the point. But we have not been rallied.

Trump has at times famously been cast as a dove by the media, an image that he fostered back in 2015 when he was one of the few Republicans to criticize the Iraq War. Of course, his actual criticism of the war was that the whole ordeal was insufficiently cynical. We should have simply taken the oil, he said. His concern wasn’t the human toll of the conflict, it was the trappings of liberal internationalism: the nation-building, the coalition of the willing. This was all, to his mind, bullshit. War is an exercise in domination. We should have simply killed our enemies and taken their shit. 

So while it’s undoubtedly true that Trump’s portrayal as a dove was dishonest, in many ways this is the world he promised. It’s one of unfiltered cynicism, with demonstrations of violence and domination stripped of all formality and pretext. 

Where are the Democrats in all this? Senator Chuck Schumer, the de facto leader of the Democratic Party, put out this statement:

My statement on President Trump’s strikes on Iran:

— Chuck Schumer (@schumer.senate.gov)
3:26 PM • Feb 28, 2026

It’s hard to express how pathetic this statement is. Schumer seems to be saying that the problem here is a lack of explanation, as if there could be some lurking justification for a power-drunk moron’s war of aggression and he just needs to fill us in.

Of course, it’s hard for someone like Schumer to criticize Trump’s actions with any moral force. He’s said that Iran is the “leading state sponsor of terrorism,” a “brutal, theocratic dictatorship” that poses an “existential threat” to Israel. It’s hard to meaningfully criticize military action against Iran when everything you’ve said to this point makes military action seem like a necessity.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries released a similar statement. Here’s the material bit:

This, too, is entirely a procedural objection. The Iranian regime is deeply evil and dangerous, but Trump should’ve asked Congress first. Heavily implied by their statements is that both Schumer and Jeffries would have voted to approve military action had Trump properly requested it. They just wanted the courtesy of him asking.

I am loath to become one of those people who responds to Trump’s actions exclusively with criticisms of the Democratic Party. But part of Trump’s success is explained by the Democrats’ vacuousness.

Michael Mann, the (occasionally controversial) sociologist, described liberal democracy as “antiheroic.” “Liberal and social democracies,” he said, ”recognize no monopoly of virtue, no absolute truth.” Liberal politics, in other words, is inherently compromising. It often subjugates morality to process and negotiation. Fascism steps into that void, confidently declaring its claim to moral authority. It’s liberalism’s feckless proceduralism that creates space for fascism to thrive.

Schumer and Jeffries are crying for more procedure, but the lack of the procedure is the point. Fascists cast it aside for its weakness. Prominent Democrats have been castigating the Islamic Republic as a dangerous threat for decades; Trump is simply manifesting their rhetoric into reality. He is offering a purer form of their own politics.

Trump’s disposal of proper procedure is dangerous, but if it’s the focus of our opposition then there is no countervailing moral argument. It calcifies Trump’s claim to moral authority. Chuck Schumer and his ilk have publicly hoped that the Iranian people would be freed from their government, but their prescriptions were a hedging mish mash of tough talk and feeble diplomatic tactics. Trump, by openly trying to topple the government, has synthesized their arguments. He can claim to be a more effective version of them, and what grounds do they have to say that he’s wrong?

I will add one last thought. Many of the responses from Democratic lawmakers and liberal commentators (even the good ones) contain some ambivalence - some hope that perhaps the fall of the Iranian regime, even at the hands of Donald Trump, will be for the best. I understand why. I am the son of an Iranian immigrant. Ultimately I want freedom, democracy, and dignity for the Iranian people. The problem is that I’ve seen the American government promise all of those things a hundred times, and I’ve never seen them deliver it once.

A quick preface: it has been exactly one year since I first launched String in a Maze. It started as an outlet for my thoughts during an unhinged second Trump administration, and grew into a newsletter with many thousands of subscribers. I appreciate all of you. Thanks for reading.

We’re a few days removed from Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance and the accompanying right-wing meltdown, and I’ve had some time to reflect.

When Trump won in 2024, many onlookers took it as the sign of a significant cultural shift. The public had rejected wokeness and was “exhaust[ed] with Democrats’ cultural overreach.” “Trump’s cultural victory has lapped his political victory,” said Ezra Klein. Conservatives were triumphant.

A year later, Megyn Kelly was fuming about a Spanish-speaking artist being allowed to perform at the Super Bowl, screaming that “football is ours,” by which she means white people, but more specifically English-speaking white people, and even more specifically English-speaking white people who support Donald Trump. Turning Point USA attempted to counterprogram the show with performances by Kid Rock and an assortment of other nobodies. They touted it as a great success, though it fell about 125 million viewers short of the real thing.

There’s a vestigial belief among conservatives that they are still a silent majority - that liberal cultural domination is not a natural phenomenon but one manufactured by a handful of plotting elites. To them, Hollywood isn’t liberal because people who dedicate their lives to the arts tend to be liberal, or because audiences are mostly liberal, but because it is a captured institution. Bad Bunny isn’t playing the Super Bowl because the NFL is trying to appeal to new fans, but because shady forces are trying to steal football away from its rightful cultural heirs. 

One of the more popular sayings on the left right now is that abolishing ICE is the minimum. I happen to agree. The last several weeks speak for themselves. ICE as it is currently constructed is a policy disaster and a moral abomination. There is no tepid reform, no amount of training or oversight that could redeem it. The more material issue is: what would it mean to abolish ICE?

Abolishing ICE means different things to different people, but in its simplest form means a reversion to the pre-2003 status quo: ICE’s function would be removed from the purview of the Department of Homeland Security and reconstituted under the Department of Justice in a form akin to its progenitor agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Presumably you’d throw in a few reforms: more oversight, more accountability. 

It’s easy to see that this isn’t enough. ICE has a culture of violence and impunity. Its agents have committed countless crimes and systematically violated the Constitution. Additional oversight is not a fix for people who imprison toddlers and murder civilians. 

Abolishing ICE shouldn’t mean shuffling around the acronyms at federal agencies. The rot needs to be cut out. The most obvious and immediate prescription is prosecutions. Charges need to be brought against the agents who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti, at a minimum. It’s possible that the charges don’t stick, or that the Trump administration successfully obstructs the proceedings. But a message needs to be sent that ICE agents are not protected from on high, that the administration’s promises of immunity can’t shield them.

There are some lessons to be gleaned from Trump himself here. One of the main pillars of Project 2025 - one that Trump seemed to eagerly embrace - was the gutting of the civil service. Trump laid off federal workers en masse across a host of agencies. Many of them would eventually find themselves reinstated, by court order or otherwise. Many more might find themselves rehired if a Democrat enters office in the future. But that is mostly beside the point. Even if every worker is eventually reinstated, the statement has been made: the civil service is no longer a stable career. If you work for the federal government outside of the military, your job is at risk every time a Republican holds power.  

This is the sort of unease that should be cast over ICE. The goal shouldn’t be simply to undo the agency in 2029, but to undermine it right now. Democratic leadership should make promises about what it will do the next time the party holds power. It should include robust federal inquiries into ICE’s conduct at every level, including both civil rights and criminal investigations. It should include placing every single existing agent on a permanent no-hire list to ensure that the cultural issues do not simply transfer over to whatever entity replaces ICE. 

This isn’t an exhaustive list. But the goal must be demoralization. It needs to be made clear to every ICE agent that, should they remain with ICE, they will soon be unemployed and potentially under investigation.  

Ever since the Supreme Court gifted Trump near-total immunity, he has acted accordingly. He has aimed to overturn constitutional amendments by executive order. He has sent men to be tortured in foreign prisons without due process. He gutted federal agencies without Congressional approval. He shakes down corporations in exchange for favors and special treatment. For all of these crimes, the only consequence he has suffered is declining poll numbers. Not surprising that people have started to believe in the legitimacy of his claim to impunity.

Liberal fecklessness has enabled this state of affairs. As the right has radicalized, the strategy from elected Democrats has largely been to hope and plead for a return to normalcy. That approach has failed. It has left Trump’s allies emboldened, violent and unafraid. 

It’s possible that Trump will never see meaningful consequences, at least in this life. But it should be made clear to everyone in his orbit, from Stephen Miller to the median ICE thug, that he can’t protect them, that they won’t be allowed to scatter back into the shadows when the lights come on. There won’t be body cams and sensitivity trainings; there will be justice and retribution.

ICE’s belligerent campaign of violence and intimidation in Minneapolis has been well-documented, and it has resulted in a marked turn in public sentiment against the agency.

A Navigator poll found that 57% of respondents view ICE unfavorably, compared to 37% who view it favorably. A YouGov poll found that 46% of respondents supported abolishing ICE altogether, with 43% opposed. Further, 47% said that ICE is making Americans less safe, with only 34% believing the agency is making Americans safer. 

The more specific you get, the less popular ICE looks. 59% of respondents say that ICE has been too aggressive. 56% said that ICE agents shouldn’t be allowed to wear masks. Several polls have found that a majority of people believe the shooting of Renee Good was unjustified, with only about 30% saying it was justified (30% may seem high, but it’s about as low a number as you’ll see on a heavily politicized issue – Trump’s approval rating still sits at about 35%). 

This is a tremendous political opportunity. There is a large, powerful contingent of people who want to stymie immigration and sow chaos in blue cities, and ICE is one of their primary weapons. The political conditions are building to strip that weapon from their hands. 

The appetite for this among Democrats seems mixed. The Congressional Progressive Caucus vowed to oppose funding the Department of Homeland Security (ICE’s parent agency) until significant reforms are made, and backed a bill to redirect ICE funds toward affordable housing. But some prominent Dems, especially in the Senate, seem to be focusing on ticky tack reforms. Senators Cory Booker and Alex Padilla centered their public statements around better training and hiring practices - as if the problem is a handful of rogue agents rather than an agency that is all-in on institutionalized violence. 

Centrist forces within the Democratic Party have started to rally against the prospect of abolishing ICE. Third Way, a centrist think tank, described it as a “politically lethal” and polarizing slogan akin to “defund the police.” They failed to note that abolishing ICE is about 20 points more popular than defunding the police was in mid-2020.

A few weeks back, President Trump unleashed maybe the most expressly racist tirade of his political career (no small feat), calling Somali immigrants “garbage” who “we don’t want…in our country.”

Not long after that, presumably spurred to action by Trump’s rhetoric, Nick Shirley, a 23 year-old right-wing YouTuber, conducted a makeshift investigation of several Somali-run child care centers in Minneapolis and concluded that there was widespread fraud. His primary evidence was that some of the centers appeared to be empty during working hours, and that nearby citizens claimed not to have seen children entering the building. 

Shirley’s claims are across-the-board bullshit. Independent media inquiries found no indications of fraud, and when state officials investigated they found that the centers were “operating as expected.” To give you a sense of how dishonest the allegations were, one of the centers Shirley claimed was committing fraud based on the lack of activity at the center actually closed earlier this year.

The right-wing slander was, however, orbiting around a broad truth: there have been several high-profile instances of fraud involving what are largely Somali immigrant-run child care centers in Minnesota. These are not new – Minnesota’s legislative auditor published this report on the issue in 2019, and the largest prosecution, concerning misappropriated Covid funds, occurred under Joe Biden’s DOJ in 2021. Of course, that does nothing to bolster the case that any of the centers in Shirley’s video were committing fraud, other than serving as a basis for guilt by racial association. 

Nonetheless, the Trump administration seized the opportunity: when Shirley’s video picked up traction online, they announced their intention to crack down on ostensible fraud, and a few days ago they froze billions in federal child care payments to five blue states pending the provision of exhaustive documentation. FBI Director Kash Patel claimed to have “surged” investigative resources into the issue. Just yesterday the Department of Agriculture suspended federal funding to the state. The Republican base played their own role, jumping in to subject every Somali-run child care they could find to endless harassment.

It was also revealed that the Minnesota GOP had coordinated with Shirley, directing him toward certain sites and who knows what else. They achieved their goal – not only have Somalis been demonized, but Governor Tim Walz announced he would not seek reelection.

The Trump administration features a lot of these public-private partnerships, where it’s difficult to tell where the depraved MAGA base ends and the official machinations of our government begin. Even the most purportedly sacred government rituals take on a private character. When the administration published photos of its war room during the operation to capture Nicolas Maduro, Twitter was open in the background. The team no doubt enthralled with how the scenes would play to their ravenous base on social media.

Twenty years ago or so there was a material divide between the beliefs of the Republican establishment and its more radical base. The establishment, generally speaking, was characterized by what you might call “traditional” conservative views: fewer regulations on business, a strong and aggressive military. The base, fed by right-wing talk radio and television, was driven more by cultural grievance, nativistic anger, and conspiracism.

Maybe the most definitive element of the Trump era is the collapse of that divide. Trump, himself radicalized by gutter propaganda, functionally merged the Republican establishment with its base and relieved the accumulating tension between the camps.

Now, to the extent they are distinct at all, the groups are symbiotic. They engage in a sort of call and response, each alternately sending and receiving cues with the other. Trump goes on a racist rant about Somali immigrants, members of the base stir up some conspiracy theories, and the administration manifests some type of vindictive public policy.

They have created, in other words, a moral panic machine. They are a political operation that can arbitrarily identify targets, generate a media frenzy, and use it to justify draconian policies. This is especially useful because the modern Republican base doesn’t have much of a policy platform per se. What they have are grievances against perceived enemies. 

This is, ultimately, the essence of fascist politics. No policy agendas, just targets. They can be generated by the base and fed to the administration, or vice versa, but they circulate from one to the other, propelled by centrifugal force.

It’s fitting that it was also in Minneapolis that an ICE agent murdered Renee Good a few days ago. We got to see the same political operation spring into action, this time not to justify inflicting pain upon a chosen target but to justify pain that had already been inflicted. 

Jonathan Ross, the murderous agent, is an emblem of the collapsed divide between the base and the establishment; an agent of the state who thinks that his job is to actualize his violent fantasies, and who receives full-throated support from the party in return.

Moreover, Nick Shirley’s “investigation” could be the very reason that ICE was so active in Minneapolis - the administration surged ICE’s presence in the city in response to the fraud scandal. The brutal murder of a citizen by the government may well be traceable to a halfwit’s YouTube video.

The Republican Party as it is currently constructed is less of a traditional party than it is a vessel through which the Nick Shirley’s and Jonathan Ross’s of the world can materialize their various bigotries. If you are a hate-filled right-wing dipshit, you can now call the institutional power of the conservative political movement to your back. It was only a few weeks ago that we saw an Oklahoma University student escalate her failing grade to an issue of national import. 

To his followers, this has always been the promise of Trump. Whatever bitterness you harbor in the recesses of your heart, you can hold it forward and be embraced. But these days it’s more than just social acceptance. You can enact vengeance on your chosen enemies in the real world. There’s an audience for your fearmongering and a protectorate for your prejudice.

Editor’s Note: Happy Holidays

Back in 2017, The New York Times hired Bari Weiss alongside conservative columnist Bret Stephens. The purpose, according to opinion editor James Bennet, was to challenge the paper’s mostly liberal readership by presenting them with opposing perspectives.

That basic idea has been the guiding premise of Bari’s career. Wherever there is a liberal audience, a journalist’s obligation is to confront it with conservative views. The idea does not flow in the other direction: the fact that Bari’s audience at The Free Press is profoundly pro-Israel does not necessitate pro-Palestinian coverage. It’s a one-way corrective. The media’s longstanding liberal bias has left its audience in a bubble, which must be pierced so that the audience can be chided and disciplined for their narrow-mindedness.

Bari Weiss is now CBS News’s new editor-in-chief, and in that capacity spiked a 60 Minutes segment about CECOT, the Salvadoran gulag that the Trump administration has been shipping migrants to without due process. The segment, which viscerally described the torture that our government knowingly subjected these men to, was reportedly fact-checked to the program’s usual standards. Nonetheless, Bari claimed the story “needed additional reporting” and would be put on hold. She apparently suggested an interview with Stephen Miller (the administration had declined comment) and complained that the reporting didn’t draw enough attention to the criminal histories of some of the men sent to CECOT. She also argued that the Trump administration’s legal claims should be presented more favorably (I’m not sure what she’s talking about here, seeing as even the conservative Supreme Court held that the first men sent to CECOT were sent without due process). 

As 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi pointed out in a statement to her colleagues, a policy of refusing to publish reporting because it does not include comment from administration officials grants the administration a functional veto power over any CBS News story. 

Bari’s objections to the segment are not substantive, exactly, at least not in the sense that they are about the quality of the reporting. Bari is not a reporter, nor has she ever been. If she knows anything about reporting she learned it by eavesdropping on actual reporters. Her objections are ideological. If 60 Minutes’ reporting would naturally lead the viewer toward a left-leaning conclusion, then the reporting must be tempered and balanced and mitigated until it doesn’t.

These are the sensibilities she brings to the CBS newsroom. To her, liberal ideas are trite and boring, even when they’re correct. She argued that the segment’s reporting had been covered by other outlets. Everyone knows that CECOT is a horrific prison where migrants are shipped off without process, so why report it? The rationale never works in the other direction; everyone knows what Stephen Miller thinks about the situation, too, but his input is apparently essential.

Last year, Bari gave a TED Talk on the topic of courage. Here’s a sampling:

Now, maybe I’m just a stickler for language, but I think it’s a little odd to use a Senator concurring with the official position of the entire United States government as an example of “courage.” 

But this is a useful window into Bari’s mind. To her, what’s courageous is standing up to the left, no matter the circumstance. To a dedicated reactionary, the left is an indefatigable social, cultural, and political force. It must be confronted at every turn, and every confrontation is a noble cause. The median Senator taking the median position becomes brave. Mediocrity transforms into heroism.

It’s fairly obvious that this is all why Bari Weiss was hired. Her installation at CBS News was made by David Ellison, the head of Paramount Skydance, CBS’s parent company. It was part strategic – an effort to placate Donald Trump, who has expressed frustration at CBS’s coverage and targeted them with frivolous lawsuits.

But it was also because Ellison and his cohort have bought the hype, both about the liberal press and about Bari herself. The right has spent decades fostering the story that the media is irredeemably biased, and Bari has cultivated the image of a renegade moderate prepared to deliver it from its ideological stasis. This, they think, is what fairness looks like: a liberal newsroom being put in check by a fearless overseer. 

The problem for CBS is that if you don’t believe in the mythos about the liberal media – that is, if your brain hasn’t succumbed to right-wing propaganda – then none of this makes any sense. To someone without the requisite brain poisoning, the situation is straightforward: a powerful conservative spiked a story because it wasn’t sufficiently deferential to the Trump administration. Bari’s moves might please her bosses and Trump officials, but everyone else will see her for who she is.

Bari’s foremost talent is getting stuffy media types to hand her money and power. She convinced them that she shares their concerns about liberal overreach in newsrooms (and on college campuses), and that she had the antidote. She’s been selling that pitch her entire career. She sold it to The New York Times, she sold it to her investors at The Free Press, and she sold it to the big wigs at Paramount Skydance. Now she’s sitting atop the media world, and she’s trying to sell it to you.

Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), recently made an appearance on The Daily, The New York Times’ flagship podcast, where he received a soft little interview from host Natalie Kitroeff. 

I wrote early this year about the ideological crisis faced by FIRE, a free speech organization that has for 15 years focused primarily on threats posed to free speech by the campus left – liberal students and administrators who stifle speech in the name of social justice. FIRE made its name in large part by publishing rankings of the so-called “worst colleges for free speech,” and also prominently tracks attempts to deplatform campus speakers. 

In retrospect, it’s clear that FIRE has been obsessing over minutiae. The Trump administration’s aggressive, state-backed assaults on speech have done more damage to free expression in this country than any college administrator ever could. 

But it’s not just that FIRE misidentified the biggest threats to free speech; they were arguably complicit in the right-wing project. Their PR campaigns helped foster the narrative that college campuses were untethered hotbeds of liberal ideology, and that narrative in turn drove Trump’s extensive attacks on universities.

I’ve been waiting to see what Lukianoff says about this critique. For all of FIRE’s faults, I think that Lukianoff views himself as a good faith, nonpartisan actor. The organization has been openly critical of Trump all year, and their litigation wing has taken up liberal causes consistently: they’re representing folks who got into trouble for criticizing Charlie Kirk after his death, and they helped get Trump’s case against pollster Ann Selzer tossed out of court. They also acknowledge that what Trump is doing now is worse than what came before him.

But Lukianoff, it seems, is still in denial about what he’s wrought. At one point during his Daily interview, after much fawning, the question finally gets posed:

My apologies for the delay between newsletters – I’ve been out of commission with an illness for a few weeks. I started this piece last month and finally felt well enough to finish it. Enjoy, and thanks for bearing with me. - Peter

The past few days have seen some of the worst polls of Donald Trump’s political career. A new Gallup poll has his approval rating at 36%, just a hair above where it was in the immediate aftermath of January 6th. His net approval rating is -24%, having dropped 11% in just a month. 

Those numbers aren’t just an abstraction. Trump’s unpopularity (even preceding the most recent decline) led to a series of Democratic wins this November. The party’s candidates won overwhelmingly in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City, not to mention a gerrymandering referendum in California and state Supreme Court seats in Pennsylvania.

Given this, we might take a moment to reflect on what we were told following Trump’s win in 2024. Trump won convincingly, but more importantly he made huge gains among key elements of the Democratic coalition, in particular Hispanic voters and young people. Democrats, we were told, faced a “reckoning.” The party had been “shattered.”

Many pundits also had a diagnosis. One of the most popular was that the Democrats had moved too far left in recent years. The New York Times’ Ross Douthat said that “[i]t is completely obvious that the party lost in 2024 because it overcommitted to a range of unpopular left-wing positions.” Jonathan Chait, writing in New York Magazine, said that “the Democratic Party responded to Trump’s 2016 victory not by moving toward the center, as defeated parties often do, but by moving away from it.” Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote in The Atlantic that “Biden either could not or would not forcefully distance himself from the Democratic Party’s need for performative ‘wokeness,’” and that "in signaling their commitment to an extreme and debatable idea of trans rights, Democrats hemorrhaged other constituencies.”

Barely a year later, none of these narratives are compelling. The Democratic Party has not fundamentally changed in the past year. Whatever ailed them in 2024 ails them in 2025. And yet, that same Democratic Party dominated the 2025 elections. Not only that, it recovered from its 2024 deficits among key demographics. The Democratic advantage among young people returned. Republican gains among Hispanic voters vanished (a change also reflected in polling).

What happened? We were just told by Thomas Chatterton Williams that the Democrats’ commitment to trans rights alienated those constituencies. We were told by Ross Douthat that it was “completely obvious” that the party had embraced too many unpopular left-wing ideas. And yet Abigail Spanberger cruised to victory in Virginia while openly championing trans rights. Republican culture warriors running for school board got wiped out in swing states.

I circled back with these pundits to check in on what they wrote about the Democrats’ success in 2025. What did they think now that their prior theory of the political moment had been rendered incoherent? Most of them solved this problem by simply not writing about the 2025 elections at all. Nothing from Ross Douthat or Thomas Chatterton Williams. Nothing from David Brooks, who wrote in 2024 that Democrats had to “do some major rethinking.” 

It might seem a little trite to point out that the typical pundit is a bit of a hack. But it’s worth noting the scale of the failure here. These pundits have dedicated much of their recent careers to the issue of how woke ideology is undermining the Democratic Party and alienating regular voters. Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote a whole book about it. This is their entire framework for understanding progressive politics. In a just world, where the career of a political pundit was somehow tied to his ability to analyze politics, this would be an extinction-level event for these morons.

It’s worth noting that conservatives weren’t the only ones drawing big conclusions from Trump’s win. Dave Sirota wrote for Jacobin that “Democrats’ rejection of working-class politics — and the party’s open hostility to populist politicians in its midst” created the conditions for Trump’s victory. It’s common wisdom on the left that the Democrats’ problem is their equivocating centrism. Yet an equivocating centrist, Mikie Sherrill, outperformed expectations in the New Jersey governor’s race last month. 

There’s an unanswered substantive question here: what did just happen? Trump seemed to realign key constituencies in 2024, and a year later nearly all his gains have washed away. Was 2024 the dawn of a new political era, or was it just a blip?

The boring but honest answer is that no one really knows. It’s easier to discern what’s not true than what is. Trump didn’t build a lasting multiracial coalition. The Democratic Party didn’t ruin its brand by moving too far left (or, to my chagrin, by moderating too much). But it’s hard to pinpoint why so much of the country veered one way in 2024 and the other in 2025.

There’s still a lesson to be learned. The winds of politics are strong and chaotic. It seems likely that Trump didn’t win because of his ideology, but in spite of it; if voters were excited for his policy agenda, his approval rating wouldn’t have tanked once he started implementing it. The best theory, with the most data behind it, is that Trump rode a wave of simmering resentment to power. People were upset about inflation and whatever else, and they voted for upheaval.

A lot of pundits and analysts get this backwards. They think of policy as a method for winning in politics: you propose popular policies, and political victories follow. But it’s often the other way around: you win power due to anything from charisma to sheer circumstance, and you use it to implement good policy.

It’s easy to think of this as a cynical view, but I find it hopeful. The possibilities of politics are broader than they appear. Pundits and politicians alike tie themselves into knots trying to craft widely appealing policies that won’t alienate any of their constituencies. The result is usually a watered-down, unambitious platform. We’d be better served spending less time thinking about how we’re going to win power and more time thinking about how we’re going to leverage it once we do.

Zohran Mamdani is the mayor-elect of New York City. His campaign was dominant from start to finish. He rose from obscurity to blow out Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams in the Democratic primary. He wiped the floor with Cuomo (again) and Curtis Sliwa in the general. And he did it against the will of the New York media.

From the outset, Mamdani has seen opposition from the city’s biggest media outlets. Some of that is a given: the New York Post is an openly right-wing rag, and the Wall Street Journal, for all of its establishment credibility, is a Rupert Murdoch outlet at the end of the day. Marginally more surprising has been the posture of The New York Times, which has been hostile to Mamdani at nearly every turn.

Last year, the Times’ editorial board announced that it would no longer endorse candidates in local races. But by this summer they seemed to regret their decision. Shortly before the Democratic primary, which was functionally a two-way race between Cuomo and Mamdani, the Times put out an anti-endorsement: a piece that didn’t technically endorse Cuomo, but told readers that “[w]e do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots.” 

Donald Trump’s reascendance to the presidency has left Democrats grasping for explanations and counterfactuals. Would we have won if Biden dropped out sooner? What if there had been an open convention? What if Kamala had focused less on cultural issues? More? 

But maybe the most compelling counterfactual, the “what if?” that should haunt Democrats the most, is this one: what if Merrick Garland wasn’t Biden’s Attorney General? 

There’s no real question that the prosecution of Donald Trump for the events leading up to January 6th was exceptionally slow. The first public confirmation that the Department of Justice was even investigating the matter was in January 2022. It wasn’t until November 2022 – two full years after Trump’s fake elector scheme was in motion – that Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith as special counsel for the investigation, and it wasn’t until the summer of 2023 that Trump was actually indicted.

The rest of the story is history: the court case got snagged on the question of presidential immunity. The Supreme Court stalled for months before ruling for Trump in the summer of 2024. The DOJ reformulated the case, but dropped the charges after Trump won. Here we are.

There has been a lingering question of what exactly was happening inside the Justice Department between Joe Biden’s inauguration and Trump’s indictment. Had they wanted, the DOJ could have put together a bare bones indictment and had Trump in handcuffs in a matter of days. Instead, they stalled, though it’s somewhat unclear why. Was Garland trying to build the most robust case possible? Was he nervous about political blowback? It was a self-evident failure, but the details were sparse and speculative.

Now more of those details are coming into the light. An upcoming book by Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis confirms some of the worst suspicions: the DOJ didn’t convene a grand jury until January 2022, and it took another ten weeks before the FBI would formally begin its investigation into Trump himself. Garland also apparently put the investigations on an unnecessary hiatus before the 2022 midterms:

And so it seems the cynical narrative is at least partially right: the Justice Department was very actively trying to appear above the partisan fray, and in doing so they dragged the prosecution on long enough for Trump to wriggle free.

The great irony of this is that people like Merrick Garland think that they’re eschewing politics. The reality is the opposite: the careful avoidance of anything that appears political is itself a political act. It is a performance, intended to convey to your audience that you are neutral and unbiased. It’s an effort in institutional PR.

Institutions from law enforcement to the media get caught in the same cycle. In their efforts to avoid the appearance of politicization, they just end up engaging in a different type of politics. At the same time, they lose sight of their actual purpose. The institutional mission becomes subjugated to the pursuit of good optics. Garland prioritized the appearance of neutrality and restraint, and the end result was less justice.

There is a theory I often see floated that Garland himself is not to blame. Even if his prosecution was slow and meandering, the theory goes, the real culprit here was the Supreme Court, which shielded Trump with grants of immunity. Matt Ford, who covers legal issues for the New Republic, argued on Bluesky that “[i]t doesn’t really matter when or how the cases were brought if [immunity] was always going to be the endpoint.”

The argument rests on the idea that the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States was an inevitability – that whenever and however the government tried to prosecute Trump, the Court was ready to jump in to save him.

But that misunderstands the politics of Trump’s return to office. Trump’s popularity plummeted after January 6th. One Politico poll found that Trump’s net approval rating dropped 15 points among Republicans and independents; a Quinnipiac poll found a 30% drop among Republicans. 

As time passed, though, a lot of those views softened. The percentage of Republicans who strongly disapproved of January 6th declined by 20 points over the span of Joe Biden’s term. Trump’s popularity waned among Republicans through 2022, but gathered steam again as it became clear that he was the inevitable party nominee. Polling by the Washington Post and University of Maryland found that by the end of 2023, Republicans were “less likely to believe that Jan. 6 participants were “mostly violent,” less likely to believe Trump bears responsibility for the attack, and [] slightly less likely to view Joe Biden’s election as legitimate[.]”

The Garland DOJ had the opportunity to prosecute a disgraced ex-president with no political future. Instead, they dragged their feet and ended up indicting the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee. By the time the Supreme Court Justices were deliberating, they were functionally deciding whether the Republican Party had a viable candidate for the presidency.

In other words, it wasn’t that the Court’s decision in Trump v. United States caused the failure of the Trump prosecution. It was the other way around. Garland slow-walking the case allowed Trump to rebuild his political momentum, which in turn gave the Court both reason and license to rule in his favor.

This isn’t to exonerate the Court, of course. That would be bad for my brand. But the Court’s conservatives are political creatures, and they respond to their political environment. That environment was built in large part by Merrick Garland’s Justice Department, which spent years trying to avoid politics and found them anyway.

A bit over a decade ago, a massive scandal hit the Obama White House: the IRS, possibly at the direction of Obama himself, had targeted conservatives for audits in the leadup to the 2012 election. It was argued in the Wall Street Journal that not only had conservative nonprofits been singled out, but Republican donors and activists had suddenly found themselves subjected to audits for the first time, in some cases shortly after criticizing Obama publicly.

The allegations made headlines across the country. Conservative columnist Peggy Noonan said it was “the worst Washington scandal since Watergate.” It was “not even remotely possible” that this was an accident, per Noonan: it was an orchestrated attack on opponents of the Democratic Party. Journalist Terry Moran called it a “truly Nixonian abuse of power.” Speaker of the House John Boehner suggested that it would end with someone in prison. Even elected Democrats joined in on calls for IRS officials to resign.

If you only vaguely remember this, it’s probably because it turned out that none of it was really true. What actually happened, according to a Treasury Department report released in 2017, was that the IRS used political key words to select nonprofits for further scrutiny (the intent was to examine political organizations that may have been skirting tax exemption rules). The key words used weren’t biased to one viewpoint: they included words like “tea party” and “patriots,” but also “progressive” and “occupy.” The practice wasn’t directed by the Obama administration: it originated in 2004. The Republican activists who claim to have been targeted were simply speculating, and no evidence was ever uncovered to support their claims.

But the idea that the IRS had been weaponized against conservatives still has purchase in right-wing circles. Even after it was clear that no political targeting occurred (the New York Times reported that left-wing groups were equally impacted as early as 2013), right-wingers spoke about it as though it were an uncontested truth. In 2018, a Wall Street Journal op-ed described the scandal as “unresolved.”

In response to all of this concern, Trump promised in 2019 that he “will never allow the IRS to be used as a political weapon.” That promise hit a snag recently, when the administration crafted plans to use the IRS as a political weapon. The agency is reportedly planning to start targeting left-leaning organizations. Per the Wall Street Journal, “[a] senior IRS official involved in the effort has drawn up a list of potential targets that includes major Democratic donors.”

Sometime in the coming days Paramount Skydance will officially acquire The Free Press, Bari Weiss’s faux-contrarian center-right Substack, for $150M. Weiss herself will become the editor in chief of CBS News, reporting directly to Paramount CEO David Ellison.

Weiss’s trajectory is one of the greatest upward fails in modern memory. Just five years ago she was an editor at The New York Times, where she put out the same “I’m a liberal, but…” column over and over. Before that, she was at the Wall Street Journal doing the exact same thing. When the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide in 2015, she published a column chastising LGBT Americans for celebrating rather than focusing on the mistreatment of gay people in Muslim countries.

The Free Press is fully dedicated to the same schtick, consistently framing every issue such that their criticism is directed toward the left, and pitching themselves as a necessary anti-woke corrective to mainstream media’s liberal bias.

They weren’t the only ones to work this angle – outlets like Persuasion and Quillette were doing roughly the same thing. But Bari took it to new heights. The Free Press (originally branded as Common Sense) launched in January 2021, and by October it had over 100,000 subscribers. Rather than rest on her laurels, Bari hired staff and raised money, expanding into podcasting and documentary video. By the end of last year the outlet had over a million subscribers, about 10% of them paid. It was generating at least a million dollars a month from subscriptions alone, and even that wasn’t enough to sustain Bari’s ambitions: she raised another $15M at a $100M valuation last December.

All of this raised the question of what exactly Bari intended to do with The Free Press. Where was this all headed? Now we know: toward an acquisition, where Bari will reap a fortune and land in a prestigious position that she does not deserve.

In retrospect this should have been obvious. When she was at the Times, Bari portrayed herself as a crusader for free speech in a den of cancel culture. She loudly resigned in the summer of 2020, claiming that the Times’ liberal orthodoxy had created a hostile environment for freethinkers like her. The move ingratiated her with Silicon Valley types who were themselves radicalizing against the left, and she leaned on those connections – early Free Press investors included Marc Andreessen and David Sacks.

She seems to have learned from them, because this is part of the Silicon Valley playbook. You build something sprawling and disruptive and wait for someone to buy you out. Is what you built profitable? Does it even do anything useful? Those are questions for the buyer to figure out.

The question on everyone’s mind is what this means for CBS News. We can guess, because at this point we have a clear sense of Bari’s editorial perspective. It’s conservatism with plausible deniability. The Free Press maintains that it is politically independent, but it’s endlessly credulous toward the right and relentlessly skeptical of the left. It entertains right-wing conspiracism and platforms right-wing elites. While criticism of the right is permitted, it’s often packaged in a debate format.

The site has a section covering free speech, but Donald Trump is almost entirely absent: the section is dedicated mostly to perceived overreach by liberals. There is almost no pro-trans rights content on the site, and there is absolutely no pro-Palestinian content. These are topics where Bari doesn’t tolerate dissent.

Maybe the most telling anecdote about how Bari will run CBS News comes from another project of hers: the University of Austin (UATX), which she co-founded in 2021. While The Free Press was Bari’s attempt to combat the liberalism of mainstream media, UATX was her attempt to combat the liberalism of higher education. The school’s “Constitution” states that its goal is to “establish an institution of higher learning that champions the pursuit of truth, scientific inquiry, freedom of conscience, and civil discourse, and that is independent of government, party, religious denomination and business interest in all matters.” A few months ago they fired a faculty member for posting a narrow defense of DEI initiatives on LinkedIn, apparently at the behest of a big donor.

That is the Bari Weiss project in microcosm: a statement of high-minded principles that serves as a thin veil over bog standard right-wing ideology. It’s what we saw in her columns, it’s what we see at The Free Press, it’s what we see at her university, and it’s what we will see at CBS News.

Bari Weiss’s coronation seems to be the final confirmation that CBS is taking a very conscious rightward turn. Paramount Skydance itself is the product of a merger that was approved only after Paramount paid out a $16M settlement to Donald Trump in order to placate the administration; a corporate entity born of political subservience. 

But if I’m being honest, I’m not convinced this matters much, because Bari Weiss has no idea what she’s doing. CBS News is a newsroom, and Bari has never run a newsroom (The Free Press does publish some real reporting, but the vast majority of its output is punditry). She’s never even really been a reporter. Her editorial output is embarrassing: just recently The Free Press published a piece about an AI “actress” where the author noted that the actress was a good option “if you wish to see a virgin on-screen.”

The Free Press’s success has been impressive, but it’s not without parallel: independent outlets like Semafor, The Bulwark, and Zeteo have found comparable success in recent years.

Nonetheless, in an era when many major publications are bleeding readers, Bari spun a niche column into a media outlet with a sizable email list and a recognizable brand. Paramount will try to take what she’s built and scale it up, and they will probably fail, because Paramount doesn’t know how to do that. Bari will be gifted control of CBS News, a declining brand spread across several dying mediums, she will try to turn it around, and she will probably fail, because she doesn’t know how to do that.

Much of American media operates as a spoils system. Favored pundits are handed cushy jobs as opinion columnists, company men get the sought-after cable timeslots. The most prestigious property in news isn’t run by someone who earned it; it’s run by the great-great grandson of the guy who bought it. Bari is the latest recipient of the kingmakers’ largesse. She said the right things and shook the right hands, and she’s been granted her own little protectorate in return. Don’t worry about her corrupting CBS; she wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t already corrupted.

The grisly murder of Charlie Kirk brought about a massive outpouring of public support and mourning. From newspaper op-eds to moments of silence at major sporting events and flags being flown at half-staff, the response seemed to reach every corner of public life.

The reaction has been so dramatic that you’d think this had never happened before. You’d think that a politician hadn’t been murdered a few months ago, that there wasn’t an attempt on a presidential candidate’s life last year, that we hadn’t recently seen a violent attempt to kidnap the Speaker of the House and a sophisticated plot to kidnap the Governor of Michigan. That we hadn’t seen an attempted coup just a few years ago.

Of course, events can take on a symbolic meaning, and if this was what it took to drive us toward actually confronting political violence, it would be an unequivocal good thing. But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, Trump and his allies are using the incident to advocate for vengeance against the left. They are leveraging the moment to exert control over the media, trying to designate inchoate left-wing factions as terrorist groups, and scouring the Internet to get anyone who was insufficiently polite about Kirk’s death fired from their jobs. 

Slightly less expected was how willing media elites were to come to their aid. MSNBC fired Matthew Dowd for suggesting that Kirk’s rhetoric might have fueled the environment of political violence that claimed his life. The Washington Post fired Karen Attiah for posting that she refused to engage in “performative mourning for a white man who espoused violence.” 

This all culminated with the brief cancelation of Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show at the behest of the Trump administration, after Kimmel said that MAGA had made efforts to distance themselves from the shooter. The comment wasn’t particularly offensive or untrue, but it was insufficiently reverential. The regime demands that you respectfully mourn its loss.

The Marxist thinker Walter Benjamin famously said that fascism is the aestheticization of politics. The fascist body politic is denied the ability to alter their material conditions, but it is granted the ability to express its frustrations. The administration cannot promise to put a stop to political violence or even make its constituents safer. But it can offer them a sort of aesthetic vengeance. It can lower the flags to half-staff and punish anyone who doesn’t demonstrate the due respect. 

What Trump has always promised his supporters, more than anything else, is a feeling. He promised to lift them up the cultural hierarchy, not by improving their lot but by subjugating their enemies. Some of his ugliest and most authoritarian policies have served that end. Deploying troops to blue cities isn’t meant to solve a real problem, it’s meant to produce a certain feeling in the viewer: fear in his opponents, the thrill of domination in his allies.