The Social World

Category: Politics

  • Sébastien Lecornu’s resignation is a humiliation for France and Macron

    Sébastien Lecornu’s resignation is a humiliation for France and Macron

    In a sensational development, Sébastien Lecornu has resigned as prime minister of France. His departure, after 27 days in office, makes the 39-year-old the shortest reigning premier of the Fifth Republic. Lecornu’s resignation is a humiliation for him, for France and for Emmanuel Macron. The president has now worked his way through seven prime ministers in eight years, a Fifth Republic record he shares with Francois Mitterrand. He, however, presided over France for fourteen years.

    The catalyst for Lecornu’s departure was the new government he unveiled on Sunday evening. He has promised a “break” with Macron’s centrism, but when he announced his government it was anything but. Twelve of the eighteen ministers had been reappointed to their posts, and the response across the political spectrum was one of fury. Within hours the left and the right had promised to bring down the government at the earliest opportunity. They probably didn’t expect that Lecornu would do the job for them.

    Jordan Bardella, the president of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, has demanded fresh elections. “There can be no return to stability without a return to the polls and without the dissolution of the National Assembly,” he said.

    For Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far left La France Insoumise, the only route left for Macron is the exit. “The countdown has begun. Macron must go,” declared Mathilde Panot, one of the party’s leading figures.

    Even venerable centrists believe that the game is up for Macron. In an interview on Monday morning, prior to Lecornu’s shock announcement, one of the Republican party’s grandees Xavier Bertrand, castigated Macron for creating the “mess” and then “losing interest” in France.

    It is hard to gainsay that statement. Macron is rarely seen in France these days; if the people want to get a glimpse of their president they must switch on their televisions and watch him pontificating at the United Nations or hugging a minor world leader in some quiet corner of the globe.

    It explains why his approval rating is at 16 percent, and two thirds of the country want him to resign. Increasingly, that does appear the only way out of the quagmire into which Macron has led France.

    A few weeks ago, Bruno Retailleau, the leader of the Republicans and the minister of the interior, declared that “Macronism will end with Emmanuel Macron, simply because Macronism is neither a political movement nor an ideology: it is essentially based on one man.”

    He is right, but unfortunately for France this one man is as intransigent as he is inept. His presidency has destroyed and demoralized the country in so many ways – economically, socially, diplomatically and intellectually. But he refuses to accept responsibility for his actions.

    Xavier Betrand accuses Macron of “losing interest” in France. But did he have any in the first place? Macron is a narcissist; the presidency has always been about him. France is an afterthought. France is in agony, and the pain will only get worse as long as Macron is in power.

  • Did Bibi miscalculate?

    In her new memoirs, 107 Days, Kamala Harris recounts that in July 2024 she had an important meeting about Israel and the Gaza Strip. Harris, who was running for the presidency, hoped to show that she could pressure Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu into reaching a ceasefire with Hamas. “Netanyahu’s hooded gaze and disengaged demeanors,” she writes, “made it clear to me that he was running out the clock.” His only goal was a temporary ceasefire and to undermine the Biden administration. “He wanted Trump in the seat opposite him,” Harris recalls. “Not Joe, not me. Netanyahu wanted the guy who would acquiesce to his every extreme proposal for the future of Gaza’s inhabitants and add his own plan for a land grab by his developer cronies.”

    But did Bibi miscalculate? Right now, Trump is pressuring him to stop bombing Gaza and to reach an accommodation with Hamas as the two sides negotiate in Egypt. On Truth Social, Trump declared, “I am told that the first phase should be completed this week, and I am asking everyone to move fast.” Trump was right. Speed is of the essence. The longer the negotiations last, the greater the chance of a hiccup.

    But for Netanyahu and his chums, Trump’s pressure could not be more unwelcome. The dream of expelling the Palestinians from the Gaza strip and even annexing the West Bank remains just that. For Netanyahu’s truculent coalition partners it is a cold dose of reality administered by an American president prepared to strong-arm his Israeli counterpart.

    Trump’s sudden embrace of a peace plan shouldn’t come as a big surprise. It is further testament to his unencumbered approach to foreign affairs, whether it’s Ukraine, NATO or the Middle East. “The heart wants what it wants,” Woody Allen once remarked. Something similar could be said about Trump. He wants what he wants. And he often gets it.

    Netanyahu should have been more perceptive. The Middle East was Trump’s proving ground in his first term, the region where he struck the Abraham Accords. Now Trump wants to build on them in the hopes, however evanescent, of securing a Nobel Peace Prize. To accomplish that goal, he has no compunctions about chastening Netanyahu and insisting upon an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

    How successful he will be remains an open question. Hamas is apparently demanding the release of some of its most sinister figures – terror chiefs Marwan Barghouti, Ahmad Saadat and Abdullah Barghouti.

    Will Hamas actually surrender its remaining hostages, not to mention its weaponry? Will it accede to an international board running Gaza? Its sanguinary record provides ample reason for doubts about its intentions, no matter what Trump and his vice president J.D. Vance may aver about the prospects for an agreement.

    Meanwhile, Israel is about to release further members of the Global Sumud Flotilla. Led by the activist Greta Thunberg, the flotilla had hoped to break the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. The convoy of 42 boats was intercepted by Israel and the prisoners are alleging inhuman conditions. They will be able to amplify their claims to a receptive western press when they are deported to Greece today.

    Their self-appointed mission, however, is likely to be overshadowed by the ongoing negotiations in Egypt. Even Iran has welcomed the termination of the conflict, though it was careful to stipulate that any agreement “does not negate the responsibility of governments and competent international institutions to pursue legal and judicial action against the crimes of the Zionist regime.” Zionist regime? Some things never change in the Middle East.

  • What can we learn from Singapore?

    I was in Australia last week, having been invited to give the annual oration by the Robert Menzies Institute, and stopped off in Singapore on the way home. I’ve always been curious about this Southeast Asian city state, having read so much about Lee Kuan Yew, its Cambridge–educated founding father, who holds the record of being the world’s longest-serving prime minister.

    When he assumed office in 1959, Singapore was a fading outpost of the British Empire, seemingly destined to be swallowed up by one of its larger neighbors. The population was impoverished, illiterate and riven with racial conflict. It had no natural resources and most of its 224 square miles was swampland. Yet by the time Lee stepped down 31 years later, it had been transformed into an Asian tiger with the second-highest GDP per capita in the region. Today, it is arguably the most successful, best–governed country in the world.

    For someone like me, who believes western liberal democracy is the best system of government, Singapore poses a challenge. Lee ruled with an iron fist, exiling political opponents, muzzling the press and introducing severe penalties for low-level anti-social behaviour such as spitting, littering and – famously – chewing gum. Like many post-colonial countries, only one party has been in power since independence and Singapore is dominated by a dynastic ruling family: the previous prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong is Lee’s son. The model has been described as “enlightened authoritarianism” but it’s not that enlightened. Caning is a regular occurrence, drug traffickers are executed, and homosexuality was only decriminalized in 2023.

    Lee Kuan Yew boasted of being unburdened by ideology and was ruthlessly pragmatic

    Yet you only have to set foot in the place to realise just how well run it is. It took all of 20 minutes to get to my hotel from the airport, not because it was close but because traffic jams are virtually unheard of. If you look at the quickest way to get from A to B on Google Maps, buses are often a better option than the subway, although the metro is remarkably clean and reliable. The carriages are decorated with posters featuring smiling cartoon characters telling you how to behave – cute authoritarianism – and among the verboten activities are feet on seats, loud music and consuming food or drink. Hard to argue with that.

    Singapore is a low-crime, high-trust society, which is remarkable given that it’s largely made up of different immigrant populations. Lee Kuan Yew put various measures in place to end the racial tension that threatened to boil over in the 1950s and 1960s, the most important of which was to desegregate neighbourhoods. He recognised the dangers of multi-culturalism, insisting that the schools teach children to be proud of their country and introducing national service. It helps that annual growth has averaged about 7 percent since 1965. Widespread home ownership was made possible by the Housing and Development Board, a state agency responsible for swamp clearance, land reclamation and building tower blocks.

    Lee boasted of being unburdened by ideology and he was ruthlessly pragmatic, with a suck-it-and-see attitude to public policy. If something worked, great, but if it didn’t he’d abandon it. Everything was subordinate to transforming Singapore into a modern economic powerhouse. That inevitably meant he was drawn to conservative measures, even though he originally described himself as a socialist. The highest rate of income tax is 24 percent, there’s no capital gains tax and inheritance tax was scrapped in 2008. He ensured that education and health, while heavily subsidized, are not 100 percent free. Social security works differently, too, with employees able to keep track of their payments in different pots and even use some of the money to put down a deposit on a flat.

    I could go on. Singapore is a powerful argument not just for one–party rule, but for centralised planning – every technocrat’s dream. Yet I’m not convinced we should abandon democracy quite yet. The 20th century is littered with less successful examples of this model, from Stalin’s Russia to Mao’s China. It works in Singapore because it’s a city state and Lee Kuan Yew was a political genius. The test will come when one of his less gifted successors comes to power, which could turn out to be the current PM. As Aristotle pointed out, the problem with the best kind of rule – a virtuous and wise monarch – is it can devolve into the worst: tyranny. Democracy is more limited, but also less risky.

  • Wikipedia’s harmful untruths

    Wikipedia’s harmful untruths

    There was a time when Wikipedia felt like a miracle: a spontaneous, self-governing lexicon arising from the turbid chaos of the web. No editors kept gates, no gilded towers barred entrance, no one had power to impose a worldview, it was all done by thousands of neutral volunteers harvesting and serving the world’s knowledge, onto a digital platter. And their sheer numbers – it was hoped – would preserve accuracy and objectivity. The same way a crowd has more wisdom than the individual.

    However, as the years pass, that illusion of noble neutrality has shattered. And a clear and maybe terminal tilt to the left has revealed itself. As Wiki-founder Larry Sanger lamented in a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, the Wikipedia he wanted has long gone. What we have now is, in particular areas, worse than nothing.

    I can personally vouch for the way Wikipedia slants left. About 15 years ago, while journalistically researching some horrible crimes in northern England, I came across the case of young Charlene Downes. She was a tragic victim of the vast Muslim rape and grooming scandal in the UK, this time in Blackpool.

    Yet one thing marked out her case, amongst the tens of thousands of victims of this crime; a crime which – in terms of state failure – is arguably Britain’s Chernobyl. Charlene Downes was not just raped and tortured, she was murdered, and then – according to lurid witness statements never proved nor disproved – possibly eaten. Literally put into fast-food kebabs. I wish I was joking.

    I used Wikipedia to research her appalling fate. But then one day I found the entry on her case had been taken down – disappeared like an Argentinian dissident under the junta. I dug into the entrails of this editorial decision, and discovered that activist editors had deleted it because it “lacked notability.” How could the rape, torture, murder and alleged cannibalization of a young British girl not be “notable”? Especially when much more “everyday” murders had their own entries?

    The answer is, I believe, that Woke Wiki editors didn’t like any focus on the ethnic identity of the perpetrators. In the end the page reappeared, and it stands today. But the attempt by Wikipedia editors to conceal the scale and horror of the overall Muslim rape gang scandal goes on. A few months ago the entire entry devoted to this monumental horror got renamed as “Muslim grooming gang moral panic”, like it never existed. Like it was just some fever dream of fascists, rather than the greatest black mark in Britain’s modern history. Again, the original entry – after much angry slanging – has been reinstated, but the fact this attempted erasure even happened is telling.

    Deeper data throws light on the problem. A 2024 Manhattan Institute report, Is Wikipedia Politically Biased?, used sentiment analysis on over 1,600 politically charged terms and found a mild-to-moderate tendency for right-of-centre figures to be depicted with more negative language than left-of-centre figures. Another study, Polarization and Reliability of News Sources in Wikipedia, examined nearly 30 million citations and concluded that Wikipedia exhibits a systematic liberal polarization in its choice of news sources – even after controlling for their factual reliability.

    The initial gatekeeping of sources is another fierce battleground. A 2025 report by the conservative Media Research Center found that none of the right-leaning media outlets studied earned a “generally reliable” classification in Wikipedia’s source assessments, while 84 percent of left-leaning outlets did. Critics argue these reliability judgments are decided via opaque community consensus among liberal-left editors.

    This is of course self-reinforcing. If a conservative editor adds a citation from, say, the New York Post, it is swiftly questioned or deleted; if a progressive editor adds one from Vox, it often slides through. Over time, this creates a lopsided citational ecosystem that makes neutrality impossible. Even if you have the best intentions.

    It is worth reflecting on why this tilt persists. Partly it is those demographics: anecdotally, the volunteer army of Wikipedians tends to be young, tech-savvy, university-educated, comfortable with progressive assumptions. Also, this is an example of institutional capture: once a small group of committed editors has embedded a set of norms, they can and do police the boundaries with ferocious diligence.

    The consequences are, as we see, grave. First, contested pages simply cannot be trusted. Second, even when a page appears reasonable, the selection of sources ensures that readers encounter a progressive consensus rather than the full spectrum of debate. Third, the instability of controversial pages means that “truth” can swing from week to week, depending on the latest edit war. Fourth, because Wikipedia is mined relentlessly by search engines and artificial intelligence, its bias is then amplified and propagated far beyond its own digital horizon. Elon Musk has complained that his AI, Grok, skews to the left however he tweaks the machine. This must be partly because it is trained on Wikipedia.

    It is a melancholy thing: because the Wiki project once seemed like maybe the finest creation of the digital age. An encyclopedia of everything, freely available, self-governing, universal. But noble dreams have a way of dissolving when they meet reality. Wikipedia is just such a case. It has fallen prey to the same “long march through the institutions” that reshaped the universities, many of the arts, much of the media, and the NGOs. It now too often reflects the worldview of its most committed editors, not the messy plurality of reality. And that makes it – how sad, how dispiriting – almost unusable as a source of facts on anything contentious.

    The lesson is clear. Use Wikipedia for lists of monarchs, for summaries of chlorophyll or Caravaggio, or deep dives on the moons of Jupiter. For that it remains absolutely marvellous, still an internet miracle. But if you want to understand a political dispute, a culture war, a controversy, you must treat Wikipedia not as the final word, but as a cleverly illustrated propaganda pamphlet. A mirror crack’d. It is also a warning of how even the grandest experiments in collective truth can be bent to one side: producing, instead, mournful and harmful untruths.

  • Why you need Big Balls

    Why you need Big Balls

    Big nicknames come with big responsibilities. And the owner of one of the mightiest monikers – Big Balls – feels the weight of his own obligations keenly.

    In a rare interview, Edward Coristine spoke about how his family fled to America from Russia after his grandfather was executed for spying for the US. Valery Martynov was a KGB officer who was recruited by the FBI in the early 1980s. He passed Soviet secrets to his American handlers until he was exposed by Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, two of the most notorious traitors in US history. 

    Recalled to Moscow under false pretenses, Martynov was arrested and executed in 1987. His widow and children eventually sought refuge in America.

    Coristine, now Big Balls, says he was inspired by the same patriotic call to action as his grandfather, who “died so that I could come here and live in this free country.”

    “I feel this great responsibility to serve my country,” Coristine added. For him, his role at DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency), where both he and his nickname came to public prominence, was a way to repay the country that took his family in.

    “When I started seeing these problems that we’ve got as a government, this $37 trillion national debt and counting… I was like ‘This is insane, is there any way I can help solve this?’”

    Coristine, still only 19-years-old, has already lived several lives. Elon Musk’s presence has been unmistakable in his early years. Briefly, he interned at Neuralink – Musk’s brain-implant company – and launched his own LLC called TESLA.SEXY that dabbled in web domains and AI bots. 

    As the teenage tech prodigy mastered the tech world, Musk juggled a half-dozen projects that were not enough to satisfy him. His Ayn Randian revulsion to public spending led him to the one institution inept enough to merit his time: the federal government. And with his pal Donald Trump headed back to the White House, his DOGE meme dream was set to become reality.

    DOGE featured a team of young, brilliant tech geeks. Coristine was singled out by Musk himself for a job in the big leagues – and nothing in his world was the same again.

    The media seized on him early. Journalists scoured his online trail and discovered TESLA.SEXY, mocking its Russian-registered domains as proof of malintent. They dug into his Neuralink internship, highlighting that he was fired after allegedly leaking internal documents. Coristine denies these accusations. 

    When they discovered he had, for a joke, once called himself Big Balls on his LinkedIn profile, they sensed blood. They published profiles that called him a “concerning” addition to Musk’s team who potentially posed a national security threat. For them, Big Balls was an easy foil: young, reckless, inexperienced, a symbol of what they saw as Musk’s arrogance in reshaping government with MAGA youth.

    Still a teenager, Big Balls held a senior advisory role in DOGE, where he gained direct access to federal systems like the General Services Administration and the National Finance Center, and served as a senior adviser to the Departments of State and Homeland Security. He pushed career bureaucrats to justify their jobs, oversaw plans to close smaller agency offices, and supported the rollout of AI tools to replace clerical work.

    He racked up more accomplishments than career staffers twice his age, apparently, all before being old enough to buy a beer after work.

    Then came the night that made him a martyr.

    It happened during the dim hours of August 3rd in Logan Circle – one of Washington’s busier neighborhoods. 

    According to police, ten young punks closed in on Coristine’s car, surrounding it like a pack of wolves. Coristine got his girlfriend into the car to protect her. He then turned to face the attackers head on, who descended on him in a flurry of blows. Officers on patrol caught the chaos as it unfolded, managing to stop two suspects while the rest vanished into the streets. 

    He was left battered and bloodied, but still standing. Big Balls had earned his nickname.

    News of the attack traveled quickly – and ignited an unprecedented federal response. Within days, President Donald Trump announced that federal forces would be deployed to Washington to address rising crime. His critics decried the move as authoritarian. Supporters called it overdue. Either way, Big Balls’ bravery was the catalyst for the nationalization of DC’s police force and the swarm of National Guard troops now patrolling the nation’s capital. 

    The city went nearly two weeks without a single reported homicide, and over 1,000 criminals have since been arrested. 

    For Big Balls’ critics, diminishing him has been easier than grappling with what he represents. He, like many others, walked out of the US Government when Elon Musk left DOGE. Love him or hate him, Musk has revolutionized modern technology and is idolized by the next generation’s innovators. His ambitious, and often controversial, expedition into government auditing hit a nerve with the elite who rely on a tsunami of taxpayer funds to keep their cups overflowing. 

    As for Big Balls, the name remains, and perhaps that is fitting. He now lives larger than life in the MAGA memory – the kindle which sparked a military mobilization to restore order in the nation’s capital.

  • To mark George Floyd or Charlie Kirk?

    To mark George Floyd or Charlie Kirk?

    October 14 will mark the birthday of two very different American martyrs.

    On that day in 1973, George Floyd was born. And, as everyone knows only too well, he died in 2020 after being placed under arrest by a Minneapolis police officer.

    Twenty years later Charlie Kirk was born on the same October day. The nation is still coming to terms with his assassination while speaking to students on the Utah Valley University campus two weeks ago.

    Floyd’s death was the result of a tragic mistake; officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of second-degree murder, but on the basis that he killed Floyd unintentionally. Kirk was struck down by an assassin with an explicitly political motive.

    Floyd was unknown to the world until his death, while the 31-year-old Kirk had founded and built one of the most powerful organizations in the country, not to mention been the confidant of a president.

    Both deaths were not just tragedies, they had profound political and social aftershocks that have shaped the national psyche.

    And as the anniversary of their birth approaches, how that day is marked by their respective followers will reveal how close to boiling point America really is.

    The House and Senate have passed a resolution deeming October 14 of this year a National Day of Remembrance for Kirk, an inoffensive measure aimed merely at encouraging the country “to observe this day with appropriate programs, activities, prayers, and ceremonies that promote civic engagement and the principles of faith, liberty, and democracy that Charlie Kirk championed.”

    Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi was among the 22 Democrats to walk out of the House chamber during the vote.

    That act marked a stark contrast from June 2020, when Pelosi and her colleagues – dressed up in performative Kente cloth stoles – knelt for eight minutes and 46 seconds – the time Floyd was pinned under a cop’s knee for – in the Capitol Building’s Emancipation Hall to honor Floyd.

    “We’re here to observe that pain,” declared Pelosi. “We’re here to respect the actions of the American people to speak out against that.”

    There was, of course, much pain to observe. Floyd’s death kicked off a summer of divisive disorder that yielded pain, destruction, and still more death.

    In the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul alone, more than 1,500 businesses were damaged and well over $500 million in property destruction was wrought in violent riots in the days after his killing. Five years later, businesses are still struggling.

    “Even the guy that, you know, helped George Floyd, helped the guy get convicted for the murder. He had a black Chinese spot. He had to move out because he couldn’t afford it, you know. He wasn’t generating any income,” one resident noted.

    By the fall of 2020, the Insurance Information Institute was projecting that across only 20 states, $1 to $2 billion in paid insurance claims were forthcoming.

    The losses were more than pecuniary. It was reported that 17 people had died “in incidents stemming from the unrest following Floyd’s May 25 death.” Among those killed was David Dorn, a 77-year-old, retired black police officer who was shot and killed after responding to a break-in at his friend’s pawn shop in St. Louis.

    Contrast this carnage with the reaction to Kirk’s planned murder on the basis of his widely-held beliefs – a murder that was openly celebrated by the far-left, and lied about in the mainstream press.

    Where are the riots? Where’s the violence and recriminations? What about the vandalism and economic ruin? Has there even been a discernible amount of bitterness?

    Certainly not from Erika Kirk, the widow of the fallen and heir to his organization.

    “That man, that young man, I forgive him,” declared Kirk before a roaring stadium at her husband’s memorial last Sunday. “I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and is what Charlie would do.”

    “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know, from the Gospel, is love and always love,” she added.

    Good people lamented the deaths of both George Floyd and Charlie Kirk, and bad actors tried to take advantage of both tragedies.

    But how October 14 is marked will show whether the left has learned lessons from its last self-righteous moral panic – and likely demonstrate that the country is not yet done excusing the indefensible, both then and now.

  • The joke’s on Dave Chappelle

    The joke’s on Dave Chappelle

    The problem with Dave Chappelle taking his comedy to Saudi Arabia isn’t the money they paid him. It’s what they bought.

    We’re all familiar with the reputation laundering that the Middle East has engaged in on a grand scale in recent years, spending big to get into sports, entertainment and now hosting more than fifty of the biggest names in standup comedy for a Riyadh Comedy Festival. Chappelle’s performance was notable for its direct attack on the quality of free speech rights in America – and a claim that Saudi Arabia of all places is actually more free.

    “Right now in America, they say that if you talk about Charlie Kirk, that you’ll get canceled,” he said according to the New York Times. “It’s easier to talk here than it is in America.”

    During his set, Kevin Hart – no stranger to the appeal of a dollar – was even more obsequious. “I love what y’all are doing here,” Hart said. “I’ll continue being a positive ambassador of your change to the world.” Who knew that amount of cringe could come in such small packages?

    Of course, the conditions for these men and others to go to Saudi Arabia in the first place was to break faith with the whole mindset of comedy. Entering a country where all media is government approved and massive legal sentences can be directed at people who flaunt the most basic conventions is easier when you’re a paid guest – but they still had to sign on a dotted line of a contract that included this prohibition:

    “[Artists] shall not prepare or perform any material that may be considered to degrade, defame, or bring into public disrepute…The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, including its leadership, public figures, culture, or people; B) The Saudi royal family, legal system, or government, and; C) Any religion, religious tradition, religious figure, or religious practice.”

    The actual problem isn’t accepting the money. Plenty of artists and performers and businesses have done the same. The problem is signing away the whole reason your comedy became popular in the first place. Hart is one thing – he’s always been a corporate shill, Jumanji, Draft Kings, Saudis, what’s the difference? No one would be surprised at him making the hand prints in the sand ceremony.

    Chappelle was different. He made a career skewering the hypocrisy and posturing of right, left, and middle for years. He made a recurring hilarious joke of going after George W. Bush. And the only real threat he ever experienced to free speech in America was when he ran afoul of the trans mob, who endeavored unsuccessfully to get him canceled from Netflix.

    When Chappelle signed up for the Saudi cash, he was giving something up by agreeing to their terms and going above and beyond to criticize America along the way. He was agreeing not to keep it real, lest anything go wrong. And the Saudis knew it, and were happy to pay for it. That’s because what they were buying wasn’t comedy – it was compliance.

  • Mamdani declares war on excellence

    Mamdani declares war on excellence

    New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani has a bold plan for the city’s schools: phase out the Gifted and Talented program in elementary education. His rationale is that these programs create disparities and feed inequality.

    It’s a familiar progressive argument. If some students are excelling, others must be suffering. If a child is recognized as gifted, it’s unfair to those who aren’t. The logic is as simple as it is destructive: equality means sameness, even if sameness means mediocrity.

    There is nothing wrong with recognizing giftedness. In fact, it’s common sense. If a child demonstrates unusual ability in math, science, writing, or the arts, you nurture it. You don’t bury it under a misguided notion of “equity.” Excellence, like athletic talent, must be cultivated. No one suggests we should stop training promising young athletes because not every child can make varsity. Yet in academics, this kind of reasoning now passes as justice.

    Mamdani’s proposal rests on a zero-sum view of education: if gifted students are challenged, average or struggling students are deprived. But reality says otherwise. The failure of struggling students has little to do with the success of gifted ones and everything to do with broken leadership, failing priorities and an education bureaucracy that confuses slogans for solutions.

    Worse, eliminating gifted programs doesn’t remove inequality; it cements it. Wealthy parents will always find ways to give their children an edge – through tutoring, test prep, extracurriculars, or private schools. It’s the working-class family, the immigrant striver, the ambitious child from a modest neighborhood, who loses the most when public pathways for talent are shut down. Mamdani’s policy would not reduce inequality; it would entrench it.

    Of course, defenders of his plan will say New York is already taking steps to help struggling students. And to some degree, they’re right. The city has launched NYC Reads, a phonics-based literacy initiative designed to reverse years of damage caused by failed reading instruction. It has trained literacy coaches and rolled out new programs to engage parents. Nonprofits and community groups also step in with tutoring and mentorship programs. These efforts matter – and they are a good start.

    But notice what’s missing. Schools still don’t give teachers systematic flexibility to intervene when students start falling behind across subjects. Mentorship and tutoring programs exist, but they aren’t scaled to reach every struggling child who needs one. And schools rarely celebrate excellence outside the narrow band of standardized tests. A student with a gift for music, or technical trades, or entrepreneurship is too often left in the shadows.

    This is where conservatives can make a real difference: by insisting that fairness doesn’t mean dragging everyone down to the lowest common denominator. It means raising the floor without lowering the ceiling. It means holding onto gifted programs for those who excel, while building new ladders for those who struggle.

    Schools should focus on fundamentals. Every child deserves mastery in reading and math. Early phonics-based literacy and basic numeracy are the non-negotiable building blocks of opportunity.

    Teachers should be trusted and given the flexibility to intervene when a student is falling behind, rather than chaining them to rigid, top-down mandates.

    Families should be engaged. Strong families remain the greatest equalizer in education. Encourage parents to read with children, reinforce discipline, and support homework routines.

    Mentorship and tutoring should be expanded. Churches, civic groups and nonprofits should be scaled up so no struggling student is left without support.

    And excellence of all kinds should be celebrated. Not every child will ace calculus, but some will thrive in the arts, athletics, or skilled trades. Schools should dignify these gifts as much as test scores.

    The tragedy of Mamdani’s proposal is that it reflects a growing cultural fatigue with excellence itself. We live in a moment where fairness is too often defined not by how high the ceiling is, but by how low we can drag it. The logic is perverse: if some shine brighter, then all must be dimmed.

    But dimming the brightest lights does not make the room fairer. It makes the whole room darker.

    Excellence is not the enemy of equity. Real fairness comes when we allow the child who may one day cure cancer to reach his full potential, while ensuring the child who struggles with reading has every chance to catch up. Both deserve cultivation. Both deserve dignity. And both require rejecting the politics of mediocrity.

    New York’s future – and America’s – depends on it.

  • What Trump really wants from Venezuela

    What Trump really wants from Venezuela

    When the headlines scream “narco-wars” and pundits wag their fingers about “fentanyl,” it is tempting to reduce Donald Trump’s Venezuela policy to one issue: drugs. A convenient shorthand – but also a red herring. Read closely and a very different logic emerges. 

    Drugs matter, and the effort is to some degree about exactly that. Yet so does immigration. Venezuela’s hydrocarbons also matter – and they matter even more in a world where OPEC has been deliberately constraining supply to keep oil prices high.  

    Deploying narcotics as a public justification is smart politics. It communicates a moral urgency that resonates at home (the drug crisis is real) and offers a legal-rhetorical peg overseas (designating cartels as terror proxies, authorizing kinetic steps under counter-terror authorities). But policy is not simply argument; it is incentive architecture. 

    Trump’s operation in Caracas is being built around a set of incentives – for the United States, for Caracas’s elites, for regional partners – that are designed to minimize the chance of an expensive occupation while still extracting tangible leverage – maybe for regime change but also maybe for a great deal. Think of it as the art of coercion without conquest: pressure applied across multiple vectors until the cost of continued behavior exceeds the benefit. It’s actually pretty straightforward. 

    First: Trump dislikes regime-change wars in the classic sense. The “America First” portfolio is transactional by design: fewer open-ended nation-building campaigns, more calibrated use of force or diplomatic pressure where the legal and political cover exists. Analysts who assume he secretly dreams of invasions are projecting a familiar neocon fantasy onto an administration that, in practice, is stingy about long ground wars. Evidence? You don’t need it, just look at recent history. 

    Second: Immigration is leverage. Policy signals link security operations to deportation and migration enforcement. In recent moves, naval deployments and strikes on alleged trafficking vessels have been accompanied by rhetoric and, at points, explicit linkage to deportation policies. Military pressure, then, functions as bargaining power in a broader domestic political market.

    Third: Venezuela is about oil. The South American country has long been known as a hydrocarbon state, and for good reason. In World War Two, Venezuelan crude was indispensable to the Allied effort, fueling ships, planes and entire campaigns across the Atlantic. Today, by contrast, the United States trades virtually nothing with Caracas – a startling reversal given that Venezuela still holds the largest proven reserves in the world. If brought back into the US market, and modernized, its output could rival Gulf producers and alter the balance of supply. 

    Fixating on crude alone, however, misses the resources that also matter in 21st-century geopolitics – the critical minerals that feed electric vehicles, batteries and telecom. Beijing’s interest in Venezuela, for one, is not sentimental. It is a modern scramble for inputs. Washington’s policy calculus therefore has an industrial logic as well as a geopolitical one: deny adversaries secure access, protect supply chains, and leave a neighboring state structurally unable to become a reliable client of a rival power.

    Unlike Ukraine, Venezuela’s resource wealth doesn’t need to be inflated – it is obvious, vast and sitting in plain sight. Unlike Iran, despite Maduro’s theatrical boasts of millions of “militiamen,” the country has no real military capability. Unlike Taiwan, we don’t need to invoke the complexity of semiconductors; Venezuela’s importance is more tangible, rooted in immigration, drugs, oil, gas and minerals. And unlike the myth of a population united in anti-Americanism, Venezuelans’ resentment of Washington is overstated – their hatred of Maduro certainly runs far deeper. 

    Seen from this angle, the narco-terror narrative is a tool – a great one. Declaring networks as terror or terrorist-adjacent reconfigures the legal playbook. It widens authorities, attracts military assets and legitimizes potential strikes that would be harder to justify under other rubrics. It also performs a diplomatic service: it makes pressure acceptable to partners who would recoil at a naked campaign aimed at regime decapitation. The subtext is surgical: apply pain without promising occupation. 

    A full-scale invasion or a prolonged occupation would be catastrophic for the United States politically and logistically; it would also play straight into the hands of Caracas’s propaganda and regional rivals. So if you cannot replace Maduro through direct warfare, how do you change his cost-benefit calculus? You make continued rule more expensive, more dangerous, and less useful: target revenue streams, hinder patronage, sap his ability to reward subordinates and increase the political price of belligerence. See the logic?

    Critics who treat Trump’s approach as incoherent are often reading intentions without seeing incentives. They assume that because the rhetoric is muscular, the endgame must be militarized. But policy is a transaction between ends and feasible means. Trump’s approach always aims to maximize leverage while minimizing open-ended commitments. That is not a cautious liberal policy of benign persuasion; it is a hard-nosed transactionalism that prefers calibrated coercion to costly conquest. By contrast, Biden relied too much on goodwill and “good gait” diplomacy – noble on paper, disastrous in practice.

    Trump’s policy welds legal cover, domestic political salience, asymmetric pressure, and an appreciation for resources into one instrument. The risks are real: escalation through miscalculation, the entanglement of law enforcement and low-intensity military force, and the moral hazard of normalizing extraterritorial strikes. But proceeding with prudence – not cowardice – has great potential. As Trump fans love to say, “trust the plan.” 

  • Trump has boxed in Netanyahu and Hamas

    Trump has boxed in Netanyahu and Hamas

    Hamas did not wait long to accede to Donald Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan – or at least accept it with conditions. It didn’t really have a choice. The same can be said for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu who was forced to accept a deal that he never wanted in the first place. Give credit where it’s due: Trump boxed in both Netanyahu and Hamas. For Trump, the pending agreement is a big accomplishment. It may not win him a Nobel but the aim is noble.

    With his usual flair for the dramatic, Trump responded to Hamas’ offer to release the remaining hostages by declaring, “I believe they are ready for a lasting PEACE.” He stated that “the bombing of Gaza must stop immediately.” He added that the details are being worked out, but breathed optimism about the outcome.

    Netanyahu, who presides over a fractious right-wing coalition, has been intent on prolonging the war. The crafty prime minister may have preferred to continue pounding Hamas, but his very audacious moves have created the context for Trump’s peace plan. He neutered Hezbollah in Lebanon. He attacked Iran. Add in the ouster of the Assad regime in Syria and you have a far more propitious moment for an actual Middle East peace deal.

    The blunt fact is that with the horrific October 7, 2023 attack, Hamas ended up isolating itself. The terrorist organization believed that it could topple Israel. The reverse occurred. Hamas was forced to accept the Gaza agreement because the Arab world has largely united against it. In particular Egypt and Qatar have pushed for a resolution to the conflict, one that will preclude Israel going on from Gaza to annex the West Bank (something that Trump himself has vowed he will not allow to occur).

    The pressure is now on for Israel and Hamas to reach a lasting agreement. Hamas stated that it supports the release of “all Israeli prisoners, both living and dead, according to the exchange formula contained in President Trump’s proposal, provided the field conditions for the exchange are met. In this context, the movement affirms its readiness to immediately enter into negotiations through the mediators to discuss the details of this.” The key questions are how far Israel will withdraw from the Gaza strip and what role, if any, Hamas would play in a future government.

    Then there is the issue of who gets to run Gaza in the interim. Trump has tapped former British prime minister Tony Blair, who has his own injudicious record in the region, to serve as the head of a board of peace. Not surprisingly, Hamas is balking at the prospect of an interim governing body, but it is more than likely to have to surrender on this point.

    Might Blair work to transform the Gaza strip into a new Trump Riviera? Rumors of a manufacturing zone named after Elon Musk are percolating in Washington. This past February, Trump released an AI-generated video of him and Musk cavorting on a beach called “TRUMP GAZA.” Perhaps the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change will prove more influential than anyone had hitherto contemplated.