The Social World

Category: Politics

Nicki Minaj and Mike Waltz team up at the UN

Before Nicki Minaj spoke at the United Nations today, Ambassador Mike Waltz referred to her as “the greatest female recording artist” and a “principled individual who refuses to remain silent in the face of injustice.” Adele, Beyoncé, Madonna, Lady Gaga, Barbra Streisand and many others would like to have a word with Ambassador Waltz (I hear he’s on Signal). But unlike Minaj, none of them appeared at the UN to speak out against the persecution of Christians in Nigeria.

“Ambassador,” Minaj wrote on X, “I am so grateful to be entrusted with an opportunity of this magnitude. I do not take it for granted. It means more than you know. The Barbz & I will never stand down in the face of injustice. We’ve been given our influence by God. There must be a bigger purpose.”

The event included a panel discussion, which didn’t include Minaj, moderated by Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner. Waltz appeared as part of that panel, and he also gave some opening remarks, which invoked a Nigeria torn apart by violence against Christians. “This is not random violence,” he said. “This is genocide wearing the mask of chaos.”

Waltz invoked the kidnapping of little girls from school, church burnings, the beheadings of pastors “for preaching the sermon on the Mount.” “We have an entire faith that’s being erased, one bullet at a time, one torched Bible at a time,” he said, which is why President Trump has declared Nigeria a country of extreme concern for violation of religious freedom. “He has reminded the world that protecting Christians is not about politics. It’s a moral duty.”

But Waltz knew why thousands of people were streaming a UN panel on a Tuesday afternoon, and it wasn’t to listen to him. “We’re going to hear from an especially powerful voice, a fearless advocate whose passion for justice transcends borders, and she uses her voice to defend the voiceless… She steps onto this world stage not as a celebrity, but as a witness. She uses, and has used, her influence to spotlight Nigeria’s persecuted Christian church, reaching out to her 28 million followers. Her ‘Barbz,’ as I’ve now learned.”

That was, of course, Nicki Minaj.

“Nicki,” Waltz said, “I can’t tell you how much I admire you. You’re stepping up. You’re leaning into this issue. You’ve enjoyed amazing success. And you could be sitting back just enjoying it. You could be just living the good life. But you’re coming here today, rolling up your sleeves, and let’s try to save these people. So everyone, please join me in welcoming a daughter of the Caribbean, a champion of the oppressed and a sister in Christ.”

Minaj wore a tasteful black pantsuit and stood at a conference-room lectern far stage right, humbly, out of the spotlight. She wasn’t there to sing “Starships” or her verse on the remix of “WAP.” “I must say,” she said, “I am very nervous.”

Minaj came before the United Nations, she said, “to combat extremism and to stop violence against people who want to exercise their natural right for freedom of religion or belief… we’re way beyond thinking or expecting or assuming that the person sitting next to you to needs have the exact same beliefs. We’re beyond that. That’s ridiculous.”

Music, she said, has taken her around the world. “I have seen how people no matter their language, culture or religion, come alive when they hear a song that touches their soul. Religious freedom means we can all can sing our faith regardless of who we are, where we live and what we believe. But today faith is under attack in way too many places. In Nigeria, way too many Christians are being targeted, driven from their homes and killed. Churches have been burned. Families have been torn apart, and entire communities live in fear constantly, simply because of how they pray.”

This problem, she said, demands urgent action. “Protecting Christians in Nigeria is not about taking sides or dividing people. It is about uniting humanity.”

Minaj looked at the audience as if to say I am serious here, people. “Nigeria is a beautiful nation with a deep faith tradition and lots of beautiful Barbz that I can’t wait to see. When one church is destroyed, everyone’s heart should break just a little bit. And the foundation of the United Nations with its core mandate to ensure peace and security should shake…

“Barbz, I know you’re somewhere listening. I love you so very much. You have been the ultimate light in my life and career for so long. I appreciate you, and I want to make it very clear once again that this isn’t about taking sides. This is about standing up in the face of injustice. It’s about what I’ve always stood for my entire career. And I will continue to stand for that for the rest of my life. I will care if anyone, anywhere is being persecuted for their beliefs. Thank you.”

The panel discussion followed. It was long, detailed and serious, and included testimony from a Christian pastor in Nigeria. But most of the online audience clicked away after Minaj finished her five minutes. The headliner had spoken, and she made her point strongly and loudly. Waltz chose his ally wisely. Nicki Minaj has a broad reach. And all true Barbz know that she doesn’t quit until she gets what she wants.

November 18, 2025
How Trump could attack Venezuela

President Trump has assembled the largest naval force in the Caribbean since the Cold War. How will it be used? Is he considering an attack on Venezuela to overthrow the Maduro regime? Will he pursue the drug cartels by attacking them in Venezuela? Or will the President simply continue America’s counter-drug operations at sea? With all of these possibilities there is the hope that the Maduro regime will collapse under the pressure of America’s military might.

At present, the United States is countering the flow of illegal drugs by sinking suspected drug-carrying boats off the coast of Venezuela. The effort is in its 11th week and has led to at least 21 vessels being destroyed. US counter-drug operations in the Caribbean have been going on for decades and have bipartisan support (although the use of lethal force does not). In 2023, President Trump campaigned against drug smuggling, calling it an attack on US citizens. Yet he also cautioned against being involved in foreign conflicts. As he said in his inaugural address: “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” The current approach to Venezuela balances these two commitments.

The political challenge is that, having built up such military strength and made explicit threats against the regime (with Trump saying “Maduro’s days are numbered”) if America doesn’t attack, it could be characterized as another instance of TACO – “Trump always chickens out.” Maduro would celebrate having successfully stood up to the gringos for a second time. President Trump would need some sort of diplomatic success to stand down without looking weak.

The arrival of the Gerald R. Ford seems to signal some sort of direct action against Venezuela. The aircraft carrier, a scarce and powerful military asset, is not suited for plinking small drug boats. Aerial gunships, maritime patrol aircraft and drones have been doing this fine on their own. However, the Ford, in combination with bombers and other naval assets, is perfect for attacks on the mainland. The United States has enough Tomahawk missiles and other land attack munitions in the region for such strikes. Indeed, the Pentagon has reportedly briefed the president on attack options.

What are these options? The United States could expand its ongoing counter-drug campaign by using this assembled military force to attack the drug cartels in Venezuela: destroying drug production facilities, disrupting seaports and airports used for smuggling, and killing cartel leaders. Such strikes would hit a major drug transit hub and deter would-be cartel members. Even when the cartels adjust, as they will, the attacks set a precedent for a muscular way of countering the flow of drugs. Attacking the cartels ashore is also attractive because it is easy to stop and claim victory, as the strikes will have visibly destroyed some drug smuggling capabilities.

The administration could decide to overthrow the Maduro regime, which it sees as leading an illegitimate narco-terrorist state. It has put in place a narrative that would justify such a step. An air campaign could attack the headquarters of the Venezuelan security forces and Maduro’s United Socialist party, as well as bases for internal security forces, and perhaps some military air defenses.

An air campaign might also try to kill Venezuela’s leaders, including Maduro himself. But even putting aside the legality of this, it is hard to hit a target that is moving and hiding. In the 2003 invasion of Iraq, for example, the United States launched an aggressive air campaign against “high-value targets.” None were successful in killing senior Iraqi leaders. It took a decades-long intelligence effort for Israel to penetrate Hezbollah to track and kill its leadership in 2024. It is unclear whether the United States has a similar level of reach within the Maduro regime.

In the background of all of these options is the hope that the regime collapses internally – an implicit goal from the beginning of the campaign. The intimidation effort has increased over time with the rising military capability, operations close to the Venezuelan coast, flybys of US bombers, and covert CIA action to undermine the regime. Perhaps an element of the Venezuelan security forces could be induced to break away and launch a coup. To prevent this, Maduro has worked hard to ensure his military’s loyalty, incorporating senior officers into his kleptocracy and weeding out any who showed unreliability. Yet the United States is quietly pointing out to military figures that when it overthrew Saddam’s government, the Iraqi military was disbanded. The message is clear: change sides or face social and economic ruin.

A ground invasion, despite all the attention it has garnered, is not possible at the moment. The United States has about 2,200 Marines in the region, whereas Venezuelan ground forces number about 90,000 between the army, national guard, and marines. Conducting a ground invasion would require massive, multi-divisional reinforcements of at least 30,000 troops and likely much more. There are no signs of such deployments.

Yet current situation is unsustainable. The United States is like an archer who has drawn his bow. Eventually, the archer must launch an arrow or stand down. An armada – particularly the USS Ford – cannot remain in the Caribbean for more than a few weeks. These assets will be needed elsewhere to respond to crises in other parts of the world, conduct exercises with allies, or show force to competitors like China. There is immense pressure to begin operations or back down. President Trump says he has “sort of” made up his mind. What he does now will reveal his theory of victory.

November 18, 2025
Are AI stocks about to crash?

Bitcoin has lost almost a quarter of its value. The tech-heavy NASDAQ index on Wall Street has started to fall. And even leaders of the industry, such as the Google CEO Sundar Pichai, have started to warn about valuations getting out of control. We already knew that AI was driving a boom in investment. But this week there are worrying signs the market is about to crack. The only real question is whether that turns into a full scale crash.

Bitcoin, as so often, is leading the market rout. More than $1 trillion has been wiped off the value of the crypto market over the last six weeks, with Bitcoin itself down by 28 percent since its peak. But that is just part of a wider fall in tech and AI stocks, with the chipmaker Nvidia, which has powered much of the boom, starting to slide, along with many of the other stars of the AI boom. Plenty of stock market experts are starting to think it is looking like a bubble that is about to burst. Indeed, Michael Burry, who became famous in the crash of 2008 and 2009 for accurately predicting the collapse of the market, has started betting against the sector.

There are many worrying signs. The leaders of the boom have reached extraordinary valuations. Nvidia is up by over 1,300 percent over the last five years, and earlier this year became the first company to reach a market value of $4 trillion. It was quickly followed by Microsoft, which has soared mainly on the back of its stake in the leader of the AI boom ChatGPT, which itself became the most valuable start-up ever with a funding round that made it worth $500 billion. Meanwhile every company that managed to attach itself to the boom, no matter how spuriously, has seen its share soar. Goldman Sachs estimates that AI stocks have added $19 trillion since ChatGPT was launched, a huge run-up in valuations.

It is starting to look very like the dot com bubble of a quarter century ago. There is little question that AI is a valuable technology, and one that is starting to have a real impact. At the same time, there is far too much hype, no one has quite figured out how to make money from it, and no one has any real idea which of the new companies will turn into the long-term winners.

This week may or may not turn out to be the moment the bubble bursts. In reality, every investment boom has lots of sharp corrections as it soars upwards, and there is nothing very unusual about a fall of 5 percent or 10 percent in prices before the market starts climbing again. It is only when there is a final “melt-up” that it becomes dangerously over-valued. The AI boom does not look like it has reached that point yet. But there is little doubt that it is turning into a classic bubble. It will be very messy when it finally bursts.

November 18, 2025
China has quietly taken over America’s food supply

For all the talk about artificial intelligence and quantum supremacy, the fate of civilizations still depends on breakfast. ChatGPT can’t grow corn. Empires rise on stomachs as much as on silicon. And America’s food system – long dismissed as safe and self-sufficient – has quietly become a front line in the US-China rivalry. We act as if lunch is inevitable, but Beijing knows that food is power.

A new report from the America First Policy Institute should wake us up. Washington long treated agriculture as a post-political space where globalization could do no harm, and was therefore happy to let much of the nation ship its growth to China. As Ambassador Kip Tom and Royce Hood argue, China has thus taken over critical pieces of the US agricultural system and food supply. That’s created an obvious strategic vulnerability.

Through state-owned giants such as WH Group and SinoChem, the CCP has spent the last decade spreading its tentacles through America’s food production. Its means of doing so have been so patient and banal that it’s gone mostly unnoticed.

Consider Smithfield Foods. Once a model of American agribusiness, it was bought in 2013 by WH Group, then called Shuanghui – a Chinese conglomerate financed by state banks and guided by Beijing’s Five-Year Plan directive to “go abroad.” At the time, as Tom and Hood indicate, it was the largest-ever acquisition of an American company by a Chinese firm.

The Obama administration approved the deal despite some bipartisan objections. In one stroke, China gained control over roughly a quarter of US pork processing. At the time, the story barely registered beyond the business pages. Now it reads like an opening chapter in a longer, scary story. Say what you will about the CCP, but dumb they are not.

Smithfield’s market power lets it shape prices and standards across the industry, and the profits flow neatly back to China. During the pandemic, as American grocery shelves emptied, the company still managed to ship thousands of tons of pork to Chinese ports each month.

Then there is Syngenta. The seed and agrochemical titan was acquired in 2017 by ChemChina, a state-owned enterprise that later merged into SinoChem. Despite being headquartered in Switzerland, Syngenta is now an organ of Chinese industrial policy. Its Chinese subsidiaries are linked – through a thicket of shell companies – to Xinjiang entities accused of using forced labor.

One of them, the report notes, sells seeds directly to the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, the paramilitary conglomerate that anchors Beijing’s campaign of “re-education” aimed at the region’s Uyghur population. So while American farmers buy Syngenta products to improve yields, the profits feed into a system of repression half a world away. That is globalization at its bleakest.

Then there’s the question of data – which matters more now than ever, considering that data-access is the CCP’s greatest advantage in the AI race. Modern farms are sensor-laden, drone-mapped, and algorithm-advised. Syngenta and its partners, including Chinese drone manufacturers DJI and XAG, sell “smart agriculture” platforms that collect torrents of data on American soil composition, crop patterns, and yields. Under China’s National Intelligence Law, all that information can be requisitioned by the state. Imagine handing a rival superpower a continuously updated MRI of your own food system – and calling it efficiency.

China views American openness as weakness – and its own opacity as strength. We’d do well to understand that mindset without arrogance. While we assumed moral superiority would carry the day, China stayed focused on the simpler, harder truths of power.

It would be funny if it weren’t true. While our media spent years fixating on TikTok tracking teenagers – a real concern, to be sure – China nonchalantly secured access to the datasets that actually keep people alive.

None of this is accidental. The CCP’s economic blueprints explicitly instruct its companies to secure global agricultural assets to achieve self-sufficiency through overseas acquisition. What Beijing calls “food security,” Washington calls “foreign direct investment.” One phrase belongs to a civilization that thinks in centuries; the other, to one that thinks – if it does at all – in dollar signs.

Our policymakers should compel divestiture of strategic assets and restrict our fiercest geopolitical competitor from owning American land. If “dominance” sounds too impolite, we can at least strive for symmetry. The alternative is to tolerate theft and give up the defense of our own farmland.

November 18, 2025
Can Trump control inflation?

Notionally, Americans have never been better off. The ructions in tech stocks over the past few weeks cannot detract from the fact that the US economy has been outgunning other developed economies all century.

The overall graph of real disposable income for Americans continues to trend upward, almost as if the sharp dip during the pandemic had not happened. That is certainly not true everywhere: in many countries, Covid has been followed by stagnation in GDP and wages. Yet, for all the wealth generated, many Americans simply do not feel that they are living in a thriving country. On the things that really matter, such as basic living costs, citizens at the lower end of the income scale feel their wages are increasingly inadequate.

They are not imagining it. Figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show, for example, that the cost of staple goods in New York City – where a Democratic socialist has just been elected mayor – has outstripped wages since 2021. Rent, food, recreation: all are less affordable now than four years ago, and there has certainly been no relief in the past 12 months. Just about the only basic service which has not outstripped wages in New York is healthcare, but that may soon change.

A surge in global food and energy prices afflicted the entire world after the pandemic as supply chains recovered from disruption; in the US, which has unashamedly championed a policy of national energy security over cuts to carbon emissions, and done so under several different presidents, the effect was very much less drastic than in climate-change-driven Europe.

Donald Trump has made driving down energy prices one of the core missions of his presidency. Yet some of the blame for higher prices can be laid at Trump’s door. His imposition of increasingly higher tariffs on most imports has raised extra tax revenue without a direct cost to US citizens, but not without an indirect cost, which is inflation running at 3 percent over the past 12 months. Nor have tariff wars achieved their principal objective: to preserve industrial jobs. While the US economy continues to create jobs at an impressive rate, manufacturing is the exception in having shed 78,000 payrolled jobs in the year to August. On the other hand – and ironically, given the President’s efforts to shrink federal government – the overall number of government jobs has increased by 138,000.

On the back of the rising cost of living came a six-week government shutdown. It is one thing to champion smaller government, quite another to provoke a situation where, for example, planes cannot take off because air traffic controllers are not being paid. However great the waste that needs to be trimmed, government needs to function. Again, Trump should not take the entire blame for the shutdown – Democratic posturing was arguably more responsible. But many will see him at fault whether he likes it or not. When you advocate combative politics, you must expect the other side to play the same game.

Trump may want to wave away the victory of a left-wing mayoral candidate in a liberal-minded city full of Democrat activists – even if it is his own city. His political heartland lies elsewhere, in the Rust Belt and in Midwestern states. But he would be ill-advised to dismiss a mayoral election which was won and lost over the cost of living – and well-advised to pay close attention to the easy Democratic victories on November 3. In Virginia and New Jersey, as in New York, candidates campaigned on “affordability” and were handsomely rewarded with large majorities. The greatest argument for capitalism is that it works in practice, not just in the minds of idealists. But ordinary people in ordinary jobs must be able to imagine a world in which it is possible for them to be able to better themselves with their monthly paychecks. If they are to be retained as supporters of capitalism, there must be a means by which they can acquire capital. If voters feel they are going backward, then the vaulting success of the stock market or the tech sector can feel like an insult.

The rising cost of living is not an argument for confiscatory socialist policies such as wealth taxes, nor for interventionist measures such as rent controls. These have been tried in many countries and have failed every time.

But there is another failed interventionist policy which is partly responsible for the pain that is being felt by many households: punitive tariffs on imported goods. And while Trump’s proposal for a $2,000 tariff “dividend” for every American (excluding high-net worth individuals) might help mitigate the pain, it’s unlikely to prove popular in the long term if American manufacturing does not start to thrive dramatically.

The President has proved wrong all those who predicted economic Armageddon. The economy has continued to grow. But he seems largely to have ignored the fact that manufacturing businesses are themselves consumers of imported materials and components. Place punitive tariffs on those and you drive up their costs.

The arguments between free traders and protectionists have become old and stale. But it’s foolish for the Trump administration to pretend that it can impose radically high “surcharges,” as it prefers to call them, on imports without hurting American businesses and consumers. As Bridget Phetasy notes, the Biden administration made the great mistake of insisting to voters that inflation was “transitory” when it was not. It would be a grave mistake for Trump 2.0 to repeat the error.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

November 18, 2025
Trump’s Oddjob: the rise of Steven Cheung

Though reporters covering the Trump administration are very familiar with Steven Cheung, the Donald’s combative White House communications director, he’s not a recognizable face to the general public. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt plays good cop, deflecting questions; Cheung is bad cop, trolling the media on X. But Cheung had a moment in the spotlight early this month during a press conference in which Trump announced reduced prices for GLP-1 “fat drugs.” “Where’s Steve?” Trump said. “He’s taking it.”

The press is very familiar with Cheung’s weight issues. When one media outlet compared him to the rather overweight Bond villain Oddjob, Cheung leaned into the racially tinged stereotype and posed for a photo while wearing a bowler hat. Trump himself has called the 43-year-old “my sumo wrestler.” Cheung grew up in Sacramento, the son of Chinese immigrants, and participated in sanctioned amateur sumo wrestling tournaments in the early 2000s. The experience, he said, helped shape his “discipline and competitive spirit.”

Cheung, for whom no job is too odd, has been with Trump since the beginning. He was “director of rapid response” during Trump’s 2016 campaign and has continued to rise through the ranks. He’s also worked for Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elise Stefanik and as a spokesman for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. In November of last year, after Trump’s re-election, Cheung posted on Instagram: “It’s been a hell of a ride – a campaign for the ages. We finally finished the story.” Included among the photos with that post was a (presumably AI-generated) image of himself as a blood-spattered UFC fighter sitting on a stool, with a besuited Trump as his cornerman. In the next image, his hands are reaching for Joe Biden’s throat. With Cheung, Trump has definitely chosen his fighter.

Cheung’s greatest hits this year alone have included him saying, over a video of California Senator Adam Schiff, “The camera can’t stabilize because the watermelon head is wobbling precariously on a pencil neck.” He said watching CNN’s Erin Burnett talk about economics “is like watching a donkey try to solve a Rubix Cube.” In August, in the midst of a gerrymandering debate, he called California Governor Gavin Newsom a “coward and a beta cuck” who is “too chicken shit to take questions from the press” – even though Newsom did take questions after the speech. “He’ll never be ready for prime time,” concluded Cheung.

In 2023, he called Ron DeSantis, then Trump’s chief rival for the Republican nomination, a “desperate eunuch.” He branded Kamala Harris a “stone-cold loser who is increasingly desperate because she is flailing and her campaign is in shambles.” Of Biden: “He can barely put two coherent sentences together and slowly shuffles around like he has a full diaper in his pants, often falling on his ass in front of the world.”

But Cheung saves his harshest vitriol for the press. He hits hard, hits often – and doesn’t like it when people try to hit back. In May, HuffPost reporter S.V. Dáte asked why the White House didn’t make the President’s remarks available on the White House website. Cheung responded: “You must be truly fucking stupid if you think we’re not transparent. The President regularly does multiple press engagements per day and they are streamed live on multiple platforms.”

He already had the upper hand in the argument, but went for the body slam anyway. “We’ve even granted low-level outlets like HuffPo [sic] additional access to events, because we’re so transparent. For anyone to think otherwise proves they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Stop beclowning yourself.”

On Halloween, citing national security concerns, the White House announced that it was restricting press access to communications staff offices, making it by appointment only. Cheung said that reporters had been “eavesdropping” and “secretly recording audio and video,” though he didn’t provide any evidence.

“Some reporters have wandered into restricted areas (our offices are feet away from the Oval Office),” Cheung wrote in a post on X. “Cabinet secretaries routinely come into our office for private meetings, only to be ambushed by reporters waiting outside our doors.” White House Correspondents’ Association president Weijia Jiang said her organization “unequivocally opposes any effort to limit journalists from areas within the communications operations of the White House that have long been open for newsgathering, including the press secretary’s office.”

Cheung didn’t rise to his current high status in the Trump administration by cozying up to reporters, even if one reporter told the New Yorker last March: “I like dealing with him. He’s not a white nationalist. He gets back to you. He gets you statements.” Regardless, he owes his professional life to unrelenting loyalty to the Commander-in-Chief, who he’ll defend on any topic. When Joanna Coles, chief content officer for the Daily Beast, suggested on CNN in April that President Trump has lost a lot of weight because he’s been taking Ozempic, Cheung responded on X: “CNN had this blithering idiot on @InsidePolitics from the Daily Beast named @JoannaColes making unsubstantiated claims about President Trump’s health. Joanna is a piece of shit, clearly suffering from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome rotting her pea-sized brain.”

That stood in stark difference to Cheung’s public response after Trump outed him as being on “fat drugs.” On that occasion, Cheung said: “It’s important to encourage others to explore options to address health concerns by speaking openly and honestly about it.” All the pea brains, beta cucks and desperate eunuchs surely appreciated his sincere candor.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

November 18, 2025
Andrew Cuomo was the spoiler, not me

In the final weeks of the New York City mayoral campaign, there was heavy involvement from billionaires and masters of the universe. Donald Trump and Elon Musk joined the chorus of the Democratic Establishment. And the message was clear: a vote for me was a vote for Mamdani. There was a 72-hour barrage from super PACs running this message on conservative radio and news shows in an attempt to convince Republicans and conservatives to abandon their beliefs and principles and effectively join the Democratic party. No longer was the focus on what each candidate stood for. The point was to rewrite history and distance fact from reality.

We had Andrew Cuomo – a failed governor who left office in disgrace – being presented to the public as NYC’s only savior. He was the architect of “no cash bail,” “raise the age” and the man who sent more than 15,000 seniors to their graves because of his Covid nursing-home mandates. Yet here he was, repackaged to Republicans as the only candidate they could rally behind. Really? The most important initiatives Cuomo stood for were things the Republicans he was openly and aggressively courting stood against. On virtually every issue, I stood alone with the principles of the party. When you abandon Republican principles in this way, what do you get? A weakened and fractured party met by a strengthened opposition, the face of which has become Zohran Mamdani.

Zohran never wanted to run against me, Eric Adams or Cuomo; he wanted to run against Donald Trump. He knows he will not be able to fulfill his promises: his fallback will always be that “Trump prevented us from doing this” and “Trump is the reason we are suffering.” He can make Trump the problem plaguing New York City, rather than admitting that he spun a web of fantasies.

The Democratic Socialists of America’s goal in New York was to rupture the status quo, undermine independent Republicans and conservatives by separating them from the core of their beliefs and create a frenzied state in which the electorate was positioned not to support the person who represented their values, but to act from a mindset of fear. As it turned out, Cuomo was the spoiler, not me. Even if he had taken every vote that went to me, he still would have lost – again. He was trounced in the Democratic primary and his failed attempt to siphon off Republicans left him on the outside.

I continue to focus on what matters. First, I realize we are witnessing a generational change in politics. No longer are the baby boomers the loudest voices in the room. Making sure younger voters know what you stand for is essential. I was able to harness the reach of my existing social media platforms thanks to my campaign team, which was primarily made up of millennials. As a proponent of retail politics, I spent nine months on the campaign trail in every borough of NYC. Our team ensured that for every hand I couldn’t shake, someone who wanted to learn more about my policies could do so online.

I also realized that accessibility is key. In the final week of the election, I was invited to Baruch College by Turning Point USA to participate in a debate with students. This type of open conversation with young voters is a must. It was an excellent, peaceful debate at a liberal college, so even though some may not have been on board, they came away with a better understanding of where I stood. You can’t be afraid to go into a hostile environment: it’s the only way to hear every voice.

Last, and most importantly, I have learned that standing by one’s beliefs is paramount, in politics as in every part of life. I called myself the “Mayor of the People” because I stood with the working class on the issues that mattered most to them. I was realistic in my approach to fiscal responsibility to elevate NYC. I didn’t promise free things I knew could never be delivered. I stood up for the rights of animals and the majority of people with pets who consider them family because I believe a good leader is strong, caring and compassionate. So, while this mayoral election was plagued by calls to abandon party, belief and principles, I stood firm. I continue to stand firm in uniting people with the message to “improve, not move.” I hope all New Yorkers will hear it.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

November 18, 2025
Is MAGA cracking up?

In the year since his triumphant reelection, Donald Trump has racked up an enormous list of accomplishments, both foreign and domestic. His sweeping, “move fast and break things” approach to governance has generated a form of accepted normalcy which his first administration never experienced.

His White House staff and cabinet, once full of leaks and disloyalty, has turned out to be incredibly faithful. On the international scene, he has credibly been suggested as deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. And at home, according to polling averages from RealClearPolitics, Trump is more popular at this point in his second term than either George W. Bush or Barack Obama was.

Yet within the movement that made all this possible, it seems everyone is at each other’s throats. The long knives are out for people not on the left, but inside the big tent that Trump built. It’s not just a hierarchical fight between social and fiscal conservatives, insiders vs outsiders. It’s MAHA moms and tech giants; tariff lovers and haters; the Wall Street Journal vs the Heritage Foundation; Candace Owens vs Turning Point USA; Megyn Kelly vs based icon Sydney Sweeney; comic Dave Smith vs the Babylon Bee; Ben Shapiro vs Tucker Carlson; and Tucker vs, well, pretty much everyone on Fox News and most people who aren’t. It’s the most vicious, catty, well-coiffed and fully botoxed melee since Anchorman, and no one knows where Marjorie Taylor Greene found that hand grenade.

The question on the mind of every Republican in Washington: are we witnessing the great MAGA crack-up? And the answer is: almost certainly yes.

The insiders always knew it was too good to last. Trump’s remarkable political skill is in identifying the one issue that cuts across natural partisan tendencies to create a coalition that seemed incompatible. He won over the broad ethnic working-class coalition that supported him in 2024. He also scooped up the votes of those who wanted crackdowns on crime and those who want nonviolent offenders freed, of drug legalizers and vaccine skeptics, pro-natalists and crypto bros, supply siders and trade hawks, pastors and porn stars.

“Trump is so unique of a political figure, when he’s focused on governing, it’s actually time that daddy is spending away from the kids,” says one longtime GOP insider. “He brings back gifts whenever he comes back from one of his trips, but while he’s away at work or just not paying attention to us, we scrap like cats and dogs and start every day with bruises on our shins.”

The fights often take place on X – the site where everything is happening, which for many on the right these days seems to make everything about Israel, all the time. Ongoing squabbles can become so internecine as to be more difficult to follow than the plots of prestige TV shows. The strife is often colored by personal relationships: former employees feuding with past bosses or personnel fights with gripes held over from the first Trump term, or the different responses to January 6. This stretches all the way up to the President himself, who refused to endorse his former critic, Virginia Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, in the state’s recent gubernatorial race. It might not have made a difference, given her double-digit failure at the polls. But it was still a reminder that old wounds linger.

On the surface, the MAGA cohort should be enormously pleased with how things are going, even despite the Democratic success in the off-year elections. Yet rumbling underneath, multiple asymmetric fights are being waged, all of which can be viewed through the lens of who is up or down in controlling and directing the next generation of MAGA. Typically, conflicts of this nature are based on which ideological faction supports whom as the next presidential candidate. But in the case of the current fracas, such lines are often unclear. With even Marco Rubio reportedly acknowledging that J.D. Vance is the frontrunner for the 2028 Republican nomination, there isn’t really a competing candidate coalescing support for an uphill run… yet.

The Heritage Foundation’s struggles in this moment are a microcosm of the crackup’s tangled motivations. The story goes like this: in the aftermath of the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in September, a violent moment that both unified and depressed the coalition of the right, various figures began to position themselves to inherit all – or a portion – of Kirk’s role as the titular leader of the younger MAGA base.

It quickly became clear that this was about more than just reaching right-leaning college students and that it actually reflected competing visions about both Kirk’s and Turning Point’s attitudes toward Israel and anti-Semitism. Fights and arguments conducted via text messages and DMs spilled out into the open, with some conspiratorially minded figures claiming (without any evidence) that Kirk was actually assassinated over his shifting views on the subject. No personality exploited this moment more than Carlson, whose appearance as a speaker at Kirk’s memorial event included him comparing the young activist’s murder to the death of Jesus Christ. He invited the audience to “picture the scene in a lamp-lit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus,” painting the hummus-eaters as the ones who engineered the crucifixion. As he typically does, Carlson pretended the suggestion of anything untoward about his anecdote was ridiculous. But afterwards he brought a longtime Kirk antagonist, the aggressively misogynist and racist troll Nick Fuentes, onto his show for what essentially amounted to a softball promotional interview.

The interview broke something open. Conservatives already uncomfortable with Carlson’s pro-Russia and Qatar-spinning tendencies turned on him. This turned explosive when the leadership of Heritage, the central think tank for American conservatism and the creator of the Project 2025 agenda that has guided much of Trump’s second term, decided to weigh in on Carlson’s side. Heritage president Kevin Roberts released a video defending the broadcaster, claiming that “we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda,” and that “conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.” He denounced Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition” and suggested that criticism of the Fuentes interview amounted to an attempt at cancellation.

The statement prompted widespread condemnation. Texas Senator Ted Cruz denounced it, conservative publications and op-ed pages decried it, long-tenured scholars resigned from the think tank, Heritage’s dedicated committee to tackle anti-Semitism considered assigning staffers to observe Shabbat. Ultimately, Roberts’s chief of staff took the fall and left his post. Roberts himself was compelled to hold a lengthy apology session. In the face of calls for his resignation, he held on to his position with the mantra: “I made the mess; let me clean it up.”

At that session, a young female staffer provided a view of why that “mess” happened in the first place, standing up to say: “I condemn Nick Fuentes’s hateful rhetoric. That being said, I would like to point out that some of the most vocal people against Tucker Carlson have been calling him an anti-Semite since he started to hold more anti-interventionalist views. A handful of young colleagues and I had no issue with the points you made in the original video… Gen Z has an increasingly unfavorable view of Israel – and it’s not because millions of Americans are anti-Semitic. It’s because we are Catholic and Orthodox and believe that Christian Zionism is a modern heresy… as a young person, many of us are generally tired of foreign entanglements, while our problems in this country worsen.”

While the old guard GOP might like it to be otherwise, the young staffer speaks for a growing number of solid MAGA voters who have become frustrated with the state of things. In a cycle when Democrats are embracing a political message emphasizing “affordability” and Trump seems to be spending outsized time on legacy-building projects instead of addressing the problems of inflation and growth, even some of his most loyal supporters are beginning to sound like critics. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Representative who became the first Republican to call Israel’s actions in Gaza “genocide,” has become the recipient of a dramatic degree of strange new respect from everyone from Wolf Blitzer to Bill Maher to the harridans of The View. Her message is essentially that America’s leaders are spending too much time looking at other people’s problems and need to get back to focusing on their own. The critique is clearly aimed at Trump and those around him: the Donald’s focus has been decidedly more international in recent months.

It’s hard not to see this as sour grapes from supporters who expected a different Trump 2.0 than they are getting. As author James Kirchick summarized in the Washington Post: “Though Trump campaigned as an isolationist, he has certainly not governed as one. He has recently pulled a U-turn on Ukraine, imposing fresh sanctions on Moscow and calling off a proposed summit with Putin in Budapest. Trump is also ramping up action against Venezuela, citing dubious legal pretext to launch airstrikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and amassing military assets off the country’s coast for a possible attack on the mainland. And with Operation Midnight Hammer, he joined the Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear program. Even in symbolic ways, like changing the Defense Department’s name to the War Department, Trump has taken American foreign policy in a more interventionist, even bellicose direction.”

When Trump was making the decision to attack Iran in the summer and Carlson intoned, publicly, that such a strike would be likely to spark World War Three, the President responded by noting that he alone decides what “America First” means. The central question for the MAGA coalition is now who, once Trump is no longer behind the Resolute Desk, gets to decide what America First means?

For Vance, the man who seems likeliest to inherit that role, there seems to be recognition that things aren’t headed in the right direction. “We need to focus on the home front,” the Vice-President tweeted in response to the electoral drubbing the Republican party received earlier this month. “The infighting is stupid. I care about my fellow citizens – particularly young Americans – being able to afford a decent life, I care about immigration and our sovereignty and I care about establishing peace overseas so our resources can be focused at home. If you care about those things too, let’s work together.”

Whether Vance can hold things together through this moment of crack-up could determine whether this coalition, forged originally by Trump’s political ingenuity and force of will, can endure beyond the man himself.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

November 18, 2025
The bonfire of the New Right’s vanities

The American right has a problem: it can’t stop talking about itself. Commentators, academics and journalists of what used to be called a “conservative” persuasion all tend to think that their ideas are tremendously interesting. And, in the way a difficult child becomes argumentative when he or she isn’t getting attention, they fight. They fear irrelevance and so they fall out with each other and take sides in order to prove to themselves that they have something worth saying. Things become messy and nasty and everybody gets carried away – usually in the hope of grabbing their own slice of an all-too easily distracted online audience. (Why else am I writing this?)

Today we see the quarrelsome tendency of the so-called “New Right” at work in the squabbles over Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Kevin Roberts, Nick Fuentes and whether it’s OK to praise Hitler.

But we also saw it six years ago, in the so-famous-it’s-now-largely-forgotten debate between David French and Sohrab Ahmari in 2019. This was a curious clash between two highly intelligent men which took place in the months before a global pandemic shook the world. The French vs Ahmari argument was over big ideas: the First Amendment and the culture wars, jurisprudence and liberty, the free market and nationalism, technocracy, Catholicism and family values. The title of the actual debate, hosted at the Catholic University of America and moderated by the New York Times’s Ross Douthat, was “What is Integralism now?” (Put that question in your Chestertonian pipe and smoke it, you beta cuck.)

It was also about manners. Should conservatives keep upholding the importance of civility and lose? Or be as vicious as the left and win? Ahmari, representing the emergent “post-liberal” consensus, was on Team Rude. There could be “no polite, David French-ian third way around the cultural civil war,” he said. “The only way is through.” And at the time that seemed to be a clinching argument. French, a NeverTrumper, represented the tired and failed politics of the George W. Bush era. Few wanted to hear his equivocations when #MeToo was still empowering a particularly virulent form of feminism and controversies over “drag-queen story hour” were being were lost.

But, boy oh boy, what a boreathon did Sohrab cause! For weeks, right-of-center pundits continued to weigh in on whether they were Frenchist or Ahmarite. Most commentators waffled out a third-way of saying there is no third-way: French was wrong, yes, but conservatives should not necessarily embrace the Jacobite tendencies of the MAGA fringe. Ergo, facto, propter, hoc.

Then came 2020 – Covid, Black Lives Matter, peak woke, a contested election – and conservatives became increasingly radical. The left really was evil and needed to be smashed. Right-wingers started talking confidently about a “reverse march through in the institutions.” By the time of Trump’s reelection last year, and in the dizzying first months of his second administration, the New Right’s triumph seemed complete. J.D. Vance, who espoused the “paleo” or “post-liberal” worldview so eloquently, became Vice President. From day one, the Trump-Vance administration went to war with DEI and Harvard and anybody else who stood in the way. And on Liberation Day, Trump ignored the bleating of the free marketeers and upended the global financial status quo in favour of protection.

But the David Frenches of this world never quite went away. They merely licked their wounds. And now, amid the agonized infighting over Tucker Carlson’s decision to interview the Groyper-in-Chief Nick Fuentes, they are attempting to exact their oh-so-civilized revenge.

At the think-tanks, with all those nervous donors, the knives are out. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, at first defended Carlson. Then, under pressure, he performed a spectacular reverse-ferret and groveled.

On Friday, Christopher Long and Thomas Lynch, the former president and chairman of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, resigned from the board in disgust at what they called the “post-liberal hijacking” of their influential non-profit. In an “Open Letter to the Conservative Movement,” Long and Lynch denounced ISI’s current president, Johnny Burtka, for his “no enemies to the right” leadership, for indulging the “media crank Tucker Carlson,” the “postliberal icon Patrick Deneen,” the “neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin” and “others who seek to undermine the liberal ideas of the American Founding.” They denounced ISI’s Project Cosmos podcast for pandering to the “Yarvin-Fuentes-Carlson echo chamber”.

What Long and Lynch conveniently ignored is that Nick Fuentes in fact loathes Curtis Yarvin, whom he regards as a sort of controlled-opposition agent for organized Jewry. But who cares about logic when you’ve decided that you are defending America’s founding?

David French isn’t failing to seize the moment. “Once you’ve demolished respect for liberal democracy and demolished real value in rectitude and character in public life, it’s a short trip nihilism and fascism,” he declared on X, displaying something of a Cassandra complex.

Again, several barrages of other conservative media voices have taken to social media to clarify the position of their own bright minds in this celestial constellation of 21st century intellectualism. “No, the post-liberals aren’t solely responsible for the Groyper moment,” intoned the former National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg. “But the claim that they didn’t help… to get us to this point is such obvious contrafactual nonsense.”

In reply, various new-right influencers, who’ve been carefully building their large and “based” audiences for a long time, have taken to bemoaning all the fractiousness while pining for that recently lost voice of reason, the murder victim Charlie Kirk. As the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh put it, “everything that’s happened over the past two months has signalled to the left that assassinations work. Take out one of our leaders ands we’ll start eating each other.”

As ever in American conservatism, there’s masses of grandstanding and sentimentality covering over the more instinctive vanity and self-preservation. It’s exhausting. I love American conservatives, and it’s a sign of a vigorous culture, I suppose, to treat ideas and principles as worth fighting for. But is it really necessary for everyone to take themselves so seriously? Surely the most conservative insight of all came from that limey Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, who said: “Nothing matters very much and few things matter at all.”

November 18, 2025
What would Buckley do?

When Sam Tanenhaus’s monumental biography Buckley was published in June, I began a review by noting that William F. Buckley Jr.’s memory is as ill-served by some of his admirers as it is by his critics. The two have in fact largely converged on a single characterization of National Review’s founder: Buckley as the patron saint of purges, who excommunicated anti-Semites and conspiracists (as one side emphasizes) or antiwar dissenters and populists (as the other sees it) from the conservative movement.

This month marks the centenary of Buckley’s birth – November 24, 1925 – and, perhaps fittingly, began with questions of anti-Semitism and the boundaries of respectable right-wing opinion once more in contention, following an interview Tucker Carlson conducted with the self-confessed Hitler (and Stalin) enthusiast Nicholas Fuentes. Carlson didn’t endorse his guest’s beliefs in group guilt and Jewish wickedness. But the interview was hardly the kind of grilling Buckley had given George Wallace, a champion of segregation, on his show Firing Line in 1968.

The controversy that ensued on the right, not only online but in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, wasn’t just about whether Carlson had crossed the line but whether the conservative movement was in need of stronger gatekeeping of the sort Buckley had once provided. Only there is no William F. Buckley today and, given the fragmented nature of media in the 21st century, there will probably never be one again.

But was there really a Pope Bill even in Buckley’s own lifetime? Tanenhaus notes a twist in the tale of Buckley’s banishment of Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society. Welch was a wealthy right-wing businessman with a penchant for conspiracy theories – he entertained the prospect that Dwight D. Eisenhower was a conscious agent of international communism. As the 1964 presidential election approached, influential supporters of then-senator Barry Goldwater feared the JBS and its leader would be an embarrassment for the Republican. Pat Brown, running for re-election as California governor against Richard Nixon, was already demanding that Nixon disavow the JBS. Brown even had his attorney general investigate the group. Tanenhaus quotes the California AG report’s description of the Birchers as “wealthy businessmen, retired military officers and little old ladies in tennis shoes,” but the group was hyped in the media as an incipient fascist threat.

In December 1961, William J. Baroody Sr., of the American Enterprise Association – now the American Enterprise Institute – summoned a handful of influential conservatives to a meeting at the Breakers resort in Palm Beach to discuss Goldwater’s future and, by the by, the Birch situation. Baroody urged Buckley to denounce Welch, which he agreed to do. And two months later, he did, over the objections of National Review board member Clarence Manion and publisher Bill Rusher.

The twist is that the very next year, Baroody did to Buckley what he had courted Buckley to do to Welch. After a sequel to the Breakers meeting held at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, the New York Times ran an item on the supposedly secret gathering, complete with, in Tanenhaus’s words, an “unflattering photo” of Buckley and a narrative framed to portray Baroody as the savior of Republican respectability from the Buckleyite far right. “The Goldwater-for-President ship has just repelled a boarding party” led by Buckley and his brother-in-law Brent Bozell Jr. (the ghostwriter of Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative), the paper reported – “an item plainly designed, and planted, to make [Buckley] look foolish and even cracked,” Tanenhaus writes. The coverage helped ensure that Buckley and Bozell had no role in the 1964 Goldwater campaign. They’d been purged.

Buckley’s relationships with those he’s remembered as having expelled from the conservative movement, were often more complicated than the image of gatekeeper suggests. He did not, for example, call Pat Buchanan an anti-Semite, though he wrote in his 1991 National Review essay “In Search of Anti-Semitism” that Buchanan’s assertion that only the Israeli defense ministry and its “Amen corner” in Congress supported war with Iraq, and similar remarks, “amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it; most probably an iconoclastic temperament.” When Norman Podhoretz and other Buchanan critics insisted this formula really meant Buckley was convicting Buchanan, Buckley replied, “That is not the case. One finds it odd how much… happier some people are to believe that someone is really evil, when there is the alternative, intellectually respectable, of believing instead that that person misbehaved.” This satisfied no one: Buchanan and his accusers both felt betrayed.

The contrast with Baroody’s willingness to play to liberal media fears of the far right is significant. Baroody’s model, not Buckley’s, is the one conservative-movement cancel culture has followed for decades, with opponents of mass migration and foreign wars dismissed as nativists, racists, isolationists and supporters of dictators. Buckley, on the other hand, wrote in the 1992 book version of In Search of Anti-Semitism, “The pro-Nazi movement was no more critical within America First than the Communist movement was critical within the movement to Aid the Allies.” He’d been an America Firster himself. In this freewheeling media environment, conservatives must be their own gatekeepers. If they can’t figure out for themselves why Hitler-lovers should be shunned, we have much bigger problems than the lack of a Buckley, and more Baroodys will not be the solution – they’ll only give the kooks cover by falsely labeling everyone to the right of themselves “far right.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

November 18, 2025