The United States Senate Judiciary Committee this week revealed that Joe Biden’s FBI spied on eight Republican Senators and a Republican House of Representative Member in 2023. The underlying FBI record reveals the agency sought telephone tolling data as part of the Arctic Frost investigation that Special Counsel Jack Smith used to concoct an election fraud case against President Donald J. Trump. Although the indictment was ultimately dismissed when the President was re-elected in 2024, Smith expended the resources of the federal government for two years investigating the President in search of a federal crime.
The data revealed the telephone numbers the elected officials called, the dates of the calls and the duration of the calls made by Senator Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee), Senator Lindsey Graham (South Carolina), Senator Bill Hagerty (Tennessee), Senator Josh Hawley (Missouri), Senator Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), Senator Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming), Senator Dan Sullivan (Alaska), Senator Tommy Tuberville (Alabama) and Representative Mike Kelly (Pennsylvania) in the wake of the 2020 election.
Senator Chuck Grassley commented, “Based on the evidence to-date, Arctic Frost and related weaponization by federal law enforcement under Biden was arguably worse than Watergate.”
More than egregiously unjust, the latest revelation shows just how deep the rot penetrated during the Biden years. During its long and occasionally ignoble history, the FBI has spied on everyone from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Elvis Presley, but tracking the communications of sitting United States Senators might be a new low.
Smith’s indictment charged the President with obstructing the election certification process on January 6, 2021, a process in which the aforenoted Senators were actively involved under a process governed by the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution. All Republicans, all MAGA and all Trump supporters, none of the Senators was previously known to have been targeted by law enforcement. One can only surmise Smith was contemplating an indictment in which those Senators, and perhaps others, would have been charged as conspiratorial co-defendants along with President Trump.
It is difficult to envision a world in which Joe Biden, his Attorney General and his FBI Director were unaware of these escapades by Bureau agents. It is more baffling still to fathom how any of those longtime public officials could possibly think the eventual eruption of the FBI’s insidious investigations would cause anything less than a counter-revolution, which is precisely what we are seeing unfold at this moment. Thus, the predicate evidence for procuring something as serious as a citizen’s telephone records should have been substantial. At this moment, no purported justification has been disclosed, let alone substantiated.
The FBI has some difficult questions to answer, and forthwith. Just what was the agency fishing for in 2021, and why? Who authorized the requests for the tolling data? How far up the chain of command at the FBI, DOJ and White House did the knowledge, authorization and directives go? What was the basis for targeting these individual Senators and Representatives? What particular crime in the federal criminal code did the FBI think the people’s duly elected representatives had committed to justify such a gross invasion of their privacy? Significantly, did the agency learn anything from its failed scorched earth campaign against President Trump and his allies? If so, what is the FBI doing to ensure abuses of this nature are not repeated?
FBI Director Kash Patel, whose plate is already full, needs to empower a massive clean up crew to repair the institutional damage done by his predecessors. The Senate should, and the President will, fully support him as he gets to the bottom of how it all went so wrong.
Tag: Joe Biden
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Why did the FBI spy on Republican Senators?
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Kamala blames race when it suits her
When Kamala Harris sat across from Joy Behar on The View, the exchange revealed more than just political spin. Behar insisted Harris’ struggles on the campaign trail were largely about racism and sexism – that she “really lost” because of prejudice, not performance. Harris replied, “I’m not naive; race and gender do play a factor… I have never run as a woman or as a person of color. I have run because I believe I am the best to do the job.”
That answer might sound polished, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Harris has built her career on identity politics. She was polling below four percent in the Democratic primaries in 2019 – a campaign so weak it collapsed before a single vote was cast. Yet when Joe Biden pledged to select a woman as his running mate, the Democratic Party base and the media made clear that race and gender would be central factors in the choice. Harris ultimately benefited from that push for representation – her candidacy revived not because she was leading in the primaries, but because she fit the historic profile many Democrats wanted to showcase.”
Let’s be honest: without Biden’s pledge, Harris would not be vice president today. She was not propelled to the ticket because she outperformed the competition, but because the Democratic Party wanted to showcase representation. Identity was wielded as power. That’s the plain truth.
And that is what makes her The View comments so hollow. Harris cannot run on her race and gender when it benefits her – and then dismiss questions about competence by claiming she never used identity in the first place. Voters remember the reality. They saw a campaign that leaned heavily on being the “first” – first woman, first black woman, first South Asian woman – without ever answering the more pressing question: first in what vision for America?
The tired refrain from Democrats that every failed candidate was the victim of racism, sexism, or some combination of both has worn thin. Hillary Clinton blamed misogyny in 2016. Stacey Abrams has repeatedly blamed voter suppression for her gubernatorial losses. Now Joy Behar and Biden himself float racism and sexism as the reasons Harris couldn’t break through nationally. But at some point, the question must be asked: why can’t Democratic leaders admit when a candidate simply ran a poor campaign?
Harris’ 2020 run faltered not because America is irredeemably bigoted, but because she never offered voters a clear or compelling reason to support her. Her positions shifted constantly – leftward on criminal justice, back toward the middle on health care, then left again on the Green New Deal. She struggled to define herself, and voters noticed. That isn’t prejudice; that’s politics.
What makes this cycle especially insulting is the implicit message it sends to the electorate. If voters reject a candidate of color or a female candidate, Democrats too often suggest it must be because of bias. But that robs voters of agency. It tells them their decisions weren’t thoughtful or principled – just hateful. And it shields candidates like Harris from honest self-reflection about why they fail to connect.
The irony is thick. Harris’ defenders weaponize race and gender as a shield against criticism. Yet Harris herself has never hesitated to display her identity as a credential when convenient. She has used it as her elevator to higher office. When it no longer works, she suddenly insists it was never about race or gender at all. That is not only disingenuous, it is corrosive to public trust.
Black conservatives have been sounding this alarm for years. We understand that tying our worth to identity politics doesn’t elevate us – it reduces us. It reduces the black experience to a talking point, the female experience to a checkbox, and every election outcome to a morality play about prejudice. Booker T. Washington warned against leaning on grievance instead of competence. Shelby Steele has written powerfully about how white guilt sustains this very cycle. Yet Democrats remain stuck in it, because it offers them a convenient excuse for failure and a convenient tool for power.
Kamala Harris wants it both ways: to be celebrated for breaking barriers, and excused for her failures by blaming the barriers. But leadership requires something deeper. It requires being judged on results, not optics. On merit, not identity. And on vision, not victimhood.
In the end, what voters want is not complicated. They want candidates who are competent, steady, and clear about what they stand for. They want policies that keep their families safe, grow the economy, and restore trust in institutions. What they don’t want is another lecture that their skepticism of a weak candidate must be rooted in prejudice.
Kamala Harris’ rhetoric isn’t just old and tired – it’s insulting. It tells the very people she claims to represent that their only role is to cheer her identity, not to question her record. That’s not empowerment. That’s manipulation. And voters are wise to it.
If Harris truly believes she is “the best to do the job,” then let her prove it on the merits. Stop blaming racism and sexism for every political misstep. Stop reducing voters to bigots for exercising their judgment. Because at the end of the day, America deserves leaders who rise on vision, not excuses. -
Is the Democratic party over the hill?
Call it a dilemma, quandary, or Catch-22 – just pray the aging Democratic party doesn’t pull a muscle trying to argue that it is in anything other than an unenviable position.
Eighty-eight-year-old Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington, D.C.’s longtime representative in Congress, has repeatedly stated that she will seek yet another term in office. The only trouble is that every time she does, her staff scrambles to assure the world that isn’t actually the case.
One must sympathize with their impulse. Norton has been absent from her day job even as the district dominates national headlines, and struggled through what few public appearances she’s made. The situation is dire enough that Norton’s self-described “dear friend” Donna Brazile took to The Washington Post to urge her to step aside.
“There are a lot of talented Democrats in D.C.,” wrote Brazile. “If Norton decides not to run for reelection, there will be a very competitive race for the seat.”
And besides, the stakes are low should Norton ride off into the sunset, given the fact that Democrats have a stranglehold on her seat.
But Norton is no outlier. Across the country, the party is staring down the barrel of a much more difficult choice between aged incompetence and unpopular extremism.
The divide between these two factions – a stale establishment and radical insurgency – was only deepened by Joe Biden’s failed presidency, and the ongoing debate over who ought to bear the blame for it. On the one hand, Biden, then 78-year-old, was the most conservative viable Democrat to run in 2020. On the other, he governed far to the left of where he campaigned; and Vice President Kamala Harris lost her bid to succeed him in large part thanks to the unpopular, progressive positions she staked out in 2020.
The story of how the party came to be stuck between a rock and a hard place begins, ironically enough, begins with the presidential campaign of geriatric socialist Bernie Sanders.
In 2016, Sanders’s overperformance in the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the general election, and Donald Trump’s presidency all inspired a leftward shift – or sprint – within the party. And in the years since, progressives such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, and New York City’s Zohran Mamdani have risen to prominence.
After Mamdani defeated establishment scion Andrew Cuomo in the Democrats’ Big Apple mayoral primary, the left turned the pressure up on party leadership to endorse Mamdani, who will face off against Cuomo once again come November.
Axios recently reported that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) is facing a “revolt” over his failure to throw his weight behind the upstart.
The Democratic Party is plagued by two afflictions exemplified by each of its competing cohorts. One need only watch a half-minute of a Jeffries or Chuck Schumer speech to agree with their critics’ evaluation of them. Their plodding, low-energy delivery – occasionally interrupted by shrill outbursts – underlines their lack of conviction. The pair represent a kind of empty suit, go-along-to-get-along politics that voters have emphatically rejected in both parties for the better part of a decade now.
And that’s to say nothing of the fact that this wing is quite literally dying out. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) passed away in May after beating out Ocasio-Cortez to serve as the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee just a few months prior. He was the eighth federal legislator to expire in office since November 2022; all eight were Democrats.
Biden is long gone. Schumer is 74 years old. Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), the 85-year-old who made Biden king back in 2020, finally left House leadership this year. He endorsed Cuomo in the NYC primary, but has since come around and endorsed Mamdani in the general. The symbolism isn’t all that difficult to wrap one’s head around.
But then again, there’s little evidence that the far-left can find its footing outside of insular enclaves. Sanders came the closest to building a national movement in his mold, but his grumpy, grandfatherly affect has always softened the blow of his policy agenda. No one else is a proven entity anywhere but in large, ideologically uniform cities.
And for good reason. While Democratic voters are making googly eyes at socialism, it’s still a dirty word with the rest of the electorate. Among the former group, it boasts a +36 percent net approval rating; among the latter, it stands at a dismal -18 percent, according to Gallup.
Biden already test-drove the radicals’ laissez-faire immigration policy, while Harris took their social policies for a spin. They both ended up in the dustbin of American history, at once national jokes and villains.
The grass, at least for the elderly Democrat party, may not be greener on the other side. -
How Gen Z gender wars are reshaping America
The colossal divide, long suspected, between men and women of Gen Z – those aged 18 to 29 – has been confirmed by a recent NBC News Decision Desk poll. Beyond just a political split, young men and women have completely different ideas of what makes a successful life. From marriage and having children to prioritizing a lucrative career, they are further apart than ever. And this has enormous implications for the country.
A dizzying number of articles and think-pieces have been devoted to the enormous voting gap between young men and women in the 2024 election. Gen Z men overwhelmingly pulled for Donald Trump, women for Kamala Harris. The “podcast election,” as some dubbed it, reflects Trump’s multi-month media blitzkrieg wherein he appeared on some of the top, male-oriented podcasts in the nation. Trump proved he was relatable and one of the guys. Harris couldn’t get a male voter even if she bought them new F-150s.
Men’s top issues leading up to the 2024 election were typically jobs and the economy, while women’s were often inflation and abortion. As the sexes siphon off into different media spheres, competing narratives are shaping their worldview. Republicans are portrayed by left-leaning media as ruthlessly out to snatch away women’s “reproductive rights,” while the Right calls every Democrat a Bolshevik out to smash capitalism.
The aforementioned NBC News poll asked Trump and Harris-voting young men and women a series of questions to determine their hierarchy of values. Values such as “Having a job or career you find fulfilling,” “Having enough money to do the things you want to do,” and “Being married” were among the 13 they ranked.
The split could not be starker. “Having children” came in as the #1 priority for men who voted Trump, but nearly last for women who voted Harris. For young men on the Right, family is still the gold standard – the fulfillment of adulthood and the marker of purpose. For young women on the Left, children barely register, buried beneath goals like career, financial independence and self-fulfillment.
We see this split played out before us, too. Ella Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter, is the living caricature of the liberal Gen-Z girl. The artsy, boyish dog-mom is routinely fawned over in the pages of The New York Times and even has her new back tattoo gushed over by the press (it’s a big swan). At risk of sounding prejudiced, Ella Emhoff is probably not ranking marriage and children very highly.
Young conservatives like Charlie Kirk and freshman Congressman Brandon Gill point to a different path. Both are young fathers, modeling a successful life that cuts against the grain of a culture obsessed with chasing cash and status, though both men have an abundance of the two. The difference is that they advocate for and recognize marriage and family as being the highest, most fulfilling pursuits.
Not all conservatives are convinced of this, however. Even Trump-voting women did not rank marriage and children particularly highly. This may just reflect decades of feminist propaganda (a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle) – a cultural diet that convinced women that motherhood is drudgery and self-realization found only in doing spreadsheets in a cold high-rise. The poison took root, for generations.
The poll tells us what many already sense: money has replaced family as the central aspiration. Inverting the natural order carries consequences. When meaning is sought first in wealth, many will learn that the economic system, and in truth, no economic system, can deliver what they demand.
This is why young Americans now favor socialism more than capitalism. A recent survey found that over 60 percent of Gen Z has a positive view of socialism, and one-in-three have the same opinion about communism. In turn, half of all Americans disapprove of capitalism. The socialists are tigers crouching at the door. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, and the like are one market crash away from sweeping into power.
Even young voters who once backed Trump may, in time, sour on the economic system he champions. A growing number of nationalists already argue that unfettered capitalism undermines the common good. The European model – free markets coupled with expansive social programs – may not be far off, embraced by both the Left and the Right.
When family is treated as an optional lifestyle choice rather than that which gives life its purpose, the results are predictable: a surrender to the loneliness of life, expecting it to be placated by a slightly bigger apartment or that extra vacation to Europe. The pursuit of career and financial security fills the gap only briefly, and when it fails to deliver the deeper meaning provided by family, faith and community, the disappointment curdles into political anger.
In that sense, the poll is a reflection of the deeper disintegration of American life. A nation can recover from bad leaders or economic downturns, but it cannot survive eternal childlessness. Just ask Russia or South Korea.
If marriage and children remain afterthoughts, then the story of our time will not be one of renewal or making anything great again, but of decline, with politics reduced to fulfilling a spiritual void in a culture that has lost the will to carry itself forward. -
The bloodthirstiness of the left is not new
The savage assassination of Charlie Kirk at a Turning Point rally at Utah Valley University yesterday prompts me to wonder, as I have often wondered, what is the leading characteristic of the left? There are several candidates. Intolerance is one. A rancid and anchorless do-goodism – think of Dickens’s Mrs. Jelleby and her “telescopic philanthropy” – is another.
But on balance I think that the late Australian philosopher David Stove was right: the leading characteristic of the left it is bloodthirstiness. Behind all the emollient rhetoric about brotherhood and equality, bloodthirstiness is the left’s most reliable calling card.
That is one reason that the nearly instant emission by prominent Democrats of their opposition to violence rings so hollow. “Political violence has no place in America,” said Kamala Harris, Alex Padilla, Nancy Pelosi, Cory Booker, Stacey Abrams, Jasmine Crockett and others.
But this came after years of calling every Republican from George Bush and Mitt Romney to Donald Trump “literally Hitler.” When Trump was first elected, in 2016, Kathy Griffin and her ghoulish ISIS-by-proxy photo shoot depicted her holding a blood-soaked likeness of Donald Trump’s severed head. Around the same time, a New York of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, included a Donald Trump lookalike in the title role and lots and lots of stage blood spilled when we come to the Ides of March.
Then of course there was Butler, Pennsylvania, last July when Trump came within millimeters of having his head, not just the tip of his right ear, blown off. Weeks later, a second assassin was discovered at the last minute hiding with a gun in the foliage at one of Trump’s golf courses.
No sooner had Charlie’s murder been announced than social media erupted with leftists celebrating the event and proposing lists of other people who deserved to be assassinated.
What was Charlie’s tort? Why did the left hate him so? Charlie humiliated them. He did this not by design but by holding up a mirror to their depravity and hypocrisy. Charlie was castigated by the left as a far-right agitator. In fact, he was a classical liberal whose daily activity owed a lot to John Stuart Mill. Charlie talked. He argued for his point of view. He wanted to hear your point of view and discuss it. At Utah Valley College, Charlie was conducting an open-air discussion under the rubric “Prove Me Wrong.” Some 3,000 students gathered to witness Charlie’s back-and-forth with the audience. Charlie came with arguments to advance his opinions.
In this context, it is worth noting that the bloodthirstiness of the left is not new. It is a central part of the socialist impulse. What is socialism? In part, it is optimism translated into a political program. Until he took up gardening, Candide was a sort of proto-socialist; his mentor Pangloss could have been one of socialism’s founding philosophers.
Socialism is also unselfishness embraced as an axiom: the gratifying emotion of unselfishness, experienced alternately as resentment against others and titillating satisfaction with oneself.
The philosophy of Rousseau, which elevated what he called the “indescribably sweet” feeling of virtue into a political imperative, is socialism in ovo. “Man is born free,” Rousseau famously exclaimed, “but is everywhere in chains.”
That heart-stopping conundrum – too thrilling to be corrected by mere experience – is the fundamental motor of socialism. It is a motor fueled by this corollary: that the multitude unaccountably colludes in perpetuating its own bondage and must therefore be, in Rousseau’s ominous phrase, “forced to be free.”
This is where the “mundane” side of the totalitarian temptation comes in. The starry-eyed aspect of socialist thinking does not preclude a large element of steel. The French Revolution was the nursery of both sides of socialism. It was then that the philosophy of Rousseau emerged from the pages of tracts and manifestos to strut and fret across the bloody stage of history. The architects of the revolution invoked Rousseau early and often as they set about the task of “changing human nature,” of “altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it.”
This metamorphosis does not come easily. Human nature is a recalcitrant thing. It is embodied as much in persistent human institutions like the family and the church as in the human heart. All must be remade from the ground up if “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” are at last to be realized.
Since history (the revolutionaries thought) is little more than an accumulation of errors, history as hitherto known must be abolished. The past, a vast repository of injustice, is by definition the enemy. Accordingly, the revolutionaries in France tossed out the Gregorian calendar and started again at Year One. They replaced the Genesis-inspired seven-day week with a ten-day cycle and rebaptized the months with names reflecting their new cult of nature: Brumaire (fog), Thermidor (heat), Vendémiare (wind), etc. A new religion was born, as imperious as it was jealous.
It is significant that the socialist mentality is usually also an atheistic mentality, where atheism is understood not so much as the disbelief in God as the hatred of God – an attitude as precarious logically as it has been destructive in practice. There is an important sense in which religion as traditionally understood reconciles humanity to imperfection and to failure. Since the socialist sets out to abolish failure, traditional religion is worse than de trop: it is an impediment to perfection. (“Criticism of religion,” Marx said, “is the prelude to all criticism.”)
In 1793, the churches were closed to worship and ransacked for booty. The anti-clericalism that had been a prominent feature of revolutionary sentiment grew increasingly vicious. Hence the fashion for so-called “revolutionary marriages” in which priests and nuns were tied together naked and drowned.
Rousseau was always going on about establishing the “reign of virtue.” His far-seeing disciple Maximilien Robespierre spoke more frankly of “virtue and its emanation, terror.” It is one of the great ironies of modern history that socialism, which promises a more humane, caring, and equitable society, has always delivered a bloodier and more oppressive one.
Last April, Charlie tweeted that “Assassination culture is spreading on the left.” Alas, he was right. Requiescat in pace.
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The ‘recklessness’ of Joe Biden, according to Kamala Harris
The Atlantic published the first excerpt of Kamala Harris’s expensive memoir “107 Days” this morning, leading with a lickspittle editor’s note from Jeffrey Goldberg. According to Goldberg, the Harris we read in this book is:
“blunt, knowing, fervent, occasionally profane, slyly funny. As you will see in the following excerpt – and throughout this newsworthy book – she no longer seems particularly interested in holding back.”
In this short excerpt we learn that Vice-President Harris repaired our supposedly broken relationship with France, mais oui, and also did a good job as “border czar.” She says so herself, and we have only her to thank. But the most newsworthy portion of the excerpt comes earlier, when she discusses Joe Biden’s unwillingness to drop out of the 2024 race.
“It’s Joe and Jill’s decision. We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”
“Recklessness.” “Ego.” The remaining 12 loyalists in Bidenworld are going to be mad. Harris adds:
“Joe Biden was a smart guy with long experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president. On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best. But at 81, Joe got tired.”
Harris claims that she was more “loyal to my country” than she was to Joe Biden, but she held her tongue until the Party anointed her as successor and gave her free reign to completely botch her campaign against Trump. Anyone who read Fight, the excellent chronicle of the 2024 campaign that came out earlier this year, or even cursorily followed the narrative as it unfolded in real time, knows the contours of the story. Harris, handled an impossible task, managed to make a series of disastrous decisions, emboldened by her senior campaign staff imported from Barack Obama loyalists, who were both out of touch with reality and also didn’t like Harris much.
I don’t see any of that “bluntness” in this excerpt, which is also not slyly funny or occasionally profane. Unlike Fight, which was no Lost Illusions but still read like it had been written by actual humans with actual personalities, this excerpt of 107 Days reads very “as told to,” either to Harris’s extremely well-paid ghostwriter or to an AI chatbot, or to a ghostwriter who uses an AI chatbot. It may be unapologetic, but it’s also unapologetic sludge.
Harris, as the first female vice president, is an important historical figure, and she’s hardly the demon as painted by her opponents on the right. She’s also no great shakes. What we see in the memoir excerpt is what we saw of her in real life: marginal competence, extreme self-absorption, performative liberalism and laugh lines that fall dead to everyone but the most extreme paid loyalists. Let’s also keep in mind that it’s been less than a year since she’s lost, and even less time than that since she left office. This is a rehabilitation tour planned from the outset, and the whole thing feels fake, silly and manipulative.
Now we can sit back and wait for the recrimination cycle that may or may not come. There may be some ruffled feathers in Bidenworld. And Harris is, like it or not, going to be on our screens and in our feeds a lot in the next month or so. But there might also be less controversy than hoped for by people who love political gossip. Jeffrey Goldberg, invoking “my friend Kamala” just like Obama used to, may care about what’s in 107 Days, but the rest of the world has moved along.
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Why America needs the Department of War
Six months into President Trump’s second administration and there is perhaps no other government department that has been subject to more controversies than the Department of Defense. Brouhahas have ranged from the in-fact favorable (see the banning of affirmative action) to the admittedly concerning (see significant leaks of sensitive information). And now Trump has pulled the pin on possibly his most powerful grenade so far – and rolled it Pete Hegseth’s way. But after the smoke clears from this particular explosion, there is a real opportunity for the department to be born again, fighting fit, from the debris.
President Trump has signed an executive order returning the Department of Defense to its original moniker, the Department of War. In his inimitable style, Trump proclaimed, “We went woke and changed to the Department of Defense. This is something we thought long and hard about it. We won World War One, World War Two, everything before that and in between… we’re going to change it to the Department of war, it’s a much more appropriate name.” This will take an act of Congress, but Republican support seems forthcoming.
The reactions from the president’s detractors have been outlandish, particularly on social media. Critics have labeled the decision “a reckless and outdated stunt,” “performative” and a waste of taxpayer dollars. Opponents claim it is hypocritical for Trump to say he’s pro-peace while promoting this change. They even argue that it reveals the administration to be “warmongering neocons.” Some have suggested that this is merely a precursor for imposition of martial law and a total descent into fascism.
In reality, it is none of these. The title of the Department of War is more descriptive, honors our history, reduces rhetorical confusion and better fits the geopolitical moment.
The War Department was the second executive branch department created by Congress, being established on August 7, 1789. Until the Navy Department was created nearly a decade later, the War Department held all military portfolios in the US government. America fought the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and both World Wars under this arrangement, building our nation into the world-spanning colossus that it is today. The War Department would remain a staple of American government until 1949, when the various martial branches were consolidated under the auspices of the Department of Defense. Returning to the original name and portfolio would honor our nation’s military history in the lead-up to our nation’s 250th anniversary next year.
It would also better suit the actual purpose of the department and reduce confusion and overlap. The Department of Homeland Security, established in the wake of 9/11, carries out many of the functions of territorial defense of the nation. It polices our borders, enforces immigration and criminal law, and patrols the waters of our near-abroad, safeguarding our coasts. As such, the Defense Department is not engaged primarily in homeland defense; it fights wars and carries out missions everywhere on the planet and will likely do the same in the space domain this century. Warfighting is indeed what the military is for. We should not shy away from that reality; our adversaries surely do not.
And that points to the most useful aspect of this change: as a threat to our enemies. America faces the gravest geopolitical situation that we have seen since at least 1991, if not 1945. Our foes are arrayed against the US-led world order and have been threatening and attacking their neighbors in a quest to undermine our primacy and the very idea of national sovereignty. China, Russia, Iran and their satrapies are becoming more closely intertwined and dangerous with every passing day. They make no secret of their goal: overturning the international system and replacing it with something more amenable to their belligerent, expansionist desires.
This antagonism must not be ignored. It must be confronted head-on. This requires a change in mindset. No longer are we in the stable, post-Cold War era, where non-state actors posed the largest challenge to America. We are in the rough-and-tumble age of great-power rivalry. Our adversaries understand this. It is time we do as well. Returning the Defense Department to its original title shows that we are recognizing the new reality. -
The Democratic party is now messianic
The New York Times recently announced that Democrats face a “voter registration crisis.” With its delicate, frilly font, the Times story agonized over younger voters, Latinos, and men, especially young black men, who appear to be drifting away from the Democratic party. The Times diagnosis? It’s an accounting problem: The party isn’t signing up enough people. Its cure, predictably, was more money, more organization and more clipboards.
This is the answer you’d expect from a bureaucracy. If the shelves are full of unsold tins of beans, the problem is obviously the warehouse.
In truth, Democrats don’t have a logistics problem. They have a product problem. Americans don’t want to buy the party they are selling.
For decades Democrats have treated politics as an engineering exercise. Build the machine, crank the levers, identify and register the aggrieved which, conveniently, they manufacture. Registering black voters, the Times worries, “cost $575 per vote in 2020,” about the same as 100 Grande Blonde Vanilla Lattes at Starbucks! But the cost of collecting these customers is high because they keep walking out of the shop. They are spitting out the drink.
The Democratic party has come to embody a politics of national and personal self-degradation: Democrats are required to apologize for living in a strong country, profiting from its economy, and displaying the well-known privilege of ambition. The only time Democrats can define manhood is when they demand it request forgiveness.
Millions of young men, Latinos, and blue-collar workers are not impressed.
It isn’t simply immigration or inflation driving men out of the Democratic party. The fuel for the exodus is cultural. When a man works hard, plays by the rules and still can’t support his family, the wound is to his identity, not just his wallet. When he’s laughed at for his alleged toxicity, it is emasculating.
American culture has spent decades mocking fatherhood and sanding down the manly virtues of competitiveness and responsibility. Now the bill has come due. After years of derision, masculinity is walking out of the Democratic party and fighting back.
Trump’s language of strength resonates with women who want to put back the man back into manliness. It resonates with Hispanics, young Black men, Gen Z men, and union workers. In Republican strength, they see an antidote to chaos: not just to national chaos, but the chaos of their own diminished lives.
The Left has traded a culture of common strength for a government of weakness and separation. Democrats who used to carry rifles to defend the country now carry tote-bags to get a chai tea. But American men are not ready to give up on who they could still be.
When Democrats invent new genders and quarrel over pronouns, they assault the connective cultural tissue that holds our nation together. The Democrats have not merely tolerated this erosion; they’ve fed on it. A confident nation does not require a self-anointed clerisy to micro-manage its language and thought. It does not need political priests to enforce woke commandments. But a weakened, divided people may. That is why the Democratic party exists.
If Democrats were honest, they would admit their woke hierarchy has failed. Defunding police unleashed crime. Open borders invited chaos. Spending produced crushing inflation. Pretending men can be women destroyed women, not just women’s sports.
But they cannot say these things because the Democratic party has become messianic. It does not pass laws to solve problems. It passes them to award its supporters a halo of moral superiority. Failure is irrelevant; every new radical program delivers the one thing the party truly values: a sense of being better than the rest of us.
The Times and the Democratic party, to the vanishing degree they remain separate entities, are wrong. They don’t have a voter-registration crisis. They have an identity crisis. Our saviors can’t admit they cannot save us. The Democratic party is broken because its soul is. -
Does Trump’s handshake deal with the EU put America first?
What’s really at stake in these trade deals? That is what we are slowly discovering as Donald Trump’s handshakes with America’s trading partners are turned into specific and detailed agreements. Today we are getting the details of one of the biggest deals struck so far: a trade agreement with the famously protectionist European Union, which agreed in principle to a deal back in July, with the caveat on both the US and EU side that taxes on key sectors were still up for discussion.
Those discussions, it seems, have produced some details. Despite early threats that America would impose tariffs of 250 percent and 100 percent on EU imports of pharmaceuticals and semiconductors respectively, the headline duties for both have been reduced to 15 percent. Indeed, most goods flowing from the EU’s 27 countries into the US will be subject to a 15 percent tariff. Still, there are some disputes. Trump is keeping the tax on EU-made vehicles at 27.5 percent until the EU drops many of the tariffs it has placed on American goods. Unlike trade deals secured with Indonesia and the Philippines, where both countries slashed their tariffs on US products, the EU has been reluctant to go as far.
While it’s admittedly refreshing to watch the European Union grapple with the harms of protectionism – similarly to what it’s forced other countries to endure in past decades – who is really emerging as the winner? While the huge drop in proposed taxes on pharmaceutical imports is being chalked up as a good deal for the bloc, it’s perhaps better described as a less bad deal for American importers, who will be paying the new and higher taxes on these medicines and materials as they make their way from the EU to the US.
It’s a curious tax hike from President Trump, who has been insisting that drug prices need to come down for American consumers. As my colleague Michael Simmons points out in the UK magazine this week, prices of weight-loss jabs in Britain are starting to soar as drug companies work to rebalance where their profits come from in an attempt to lower prices for these drugs in America (a little, anyway). But if Trump’s goal is to bring down the cost of drugs in the US, slapping higher taxes on imported medicine is an odd move.
Of course, in Trumpworld, trade-offs don’t exist. There’s no downside, no losing. There’s only “winning.” And you can bet his administration is delighted this week with a New York Times report revealing a mass exodus of registered Democrats from the party. The Democrats are “hemorrhaging” voters, according to the Times, in every one of the 30 states that tracks voters by political party. An estimated 2.1 million people abandoned their “Democrat” registration between 2020 and 2024, while an estimated 2.4 million voters signed up as Republicans.
We didn’t necessarily need hard numbers to confirm that the Democratic party is in the midst of a crisis (the 2024 election result was evidence enough), but these figures from suggest an even bigger problem for the left: one that appears to have been brewing long before Joe Biden was switched out for Kamala Harris. Even when the Democrats were winning elections and mid-terms, they were losing parts of their base, including people who were so on message that they were happy to register their affiliation with the cause.
One wonders if snide remarks about working Americans, or a full-fat socialist agenda, will bring left-leaning voters back home. It seems unlikely.
This article first appeared in Freddy Gray’s Americano newsletter. Subscribe here.
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How justified is climate-change alarmism?
For decades, the picture of Earth’s future – as laid out by journalists and climate scientists alike – has been bleak. By 2070 we will see famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us, melted icecaps, flooding, extreme hurricanes and ever-present tropical storms. “Vast swathes” of the planet will be inhospitable for human life. And Greta Thunberg, in her late sixties, will wear a gas mask as she sits on the steps of Swedish Parliament with a cardboard sign declaring, “I told you so.”
Advocates have poured gasoline on the climate-alarmism fire earnestly, backed by reports declaring, “There really is no serious scientific debate remaining about climate change.” At the behest of the Al Gores of the world, the United States has spent $166 billion between 1993 and 2012 to mitigate our effect on the planet. Former president Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act allocated another $132 billion toward climate-change reduction, clean energy and environmental protection. While the total climate-change expenditure is hazy, it has cost several times more than the entire Apollo program. Americans want to know what their money has done and why the government thinks the spending is necessary.
The Department of Energy recently released a 151-page review on what current data shows about the effects of greenhouse-gas emissions and how this data compares to the conventional story surrounding climate change. This report joins a list of others challenging Biden-era orthodoxy, including the gender-dysphoria-treatment report and the Make America Healthy Again report, commissioned and released by new department administrators.
The DoE report finds that while long-term global warming exists, it has been weaker than expected, and we do not know how much of it is due to human-generated greenhouse-gas emissions. The report also argues that higher levels of carbon dioxide are good for plants: it increases their water-efficiency and photosynthesis and is beneficial for plants such as rice, wheat and barley. The authors reevaluate humans’ influence on the carbon cycle and take a skeptical stance toward claims that electric-vehicle mandates effectively and substantially reduce carbon emissions.
Influencing the carbon cycle is, it turns out, more difficult than simply buying a hybrid and taking cold showers. One of the report’s contributors, Ross McKitrick, a University of Guelph professor specializing in environmental econometrics, told The Spectator, “The carbon cycle is very, very large and many times larger than human emissions of greenhouse gases. And so any adjustment that we make to our emissions is just changing a tiny little margin of the flows of carbon in and out of the biosphere and the atmosphere and the oceans and the ground.”
The report questions how effective international treaties are that require countries to meet emissions targets by set deadlines. For example, it references research by Dr. Tom Wigley, who modeled the effect of the Kyoto Protocol and found that the results in emission reductions were negligible. The Kyoto Protocol was the first legally binding commitment that required industrialized countries to reduce their CO2 emissions by varying percentages. Though it cost the US billions, “the result is you hardly notice a difference after 100 years,” McKitrick said. All the Kyoto Protocol would accomplish, he explained, is to delay the CO2 levels the world would have reached in 2100 to 2105.
The fundamental problem of policy designed to negate climate change, he said, is that to do anything that stops CO2 levels from rising is too costly to warrant it. McKitrick and his coauthors did some routine calculations with motor-vehicle emissions and found that even if the government removed every vehicle from the road, the change would not have the effect on the climate promised by the EV mandate’s designers.
The European Union, South Korea, Japan and other nations have committed to achieving effectively net-zero fossil-fuel use by 2050. “Look at all the ways that fossil fuels are involved in the modern economy, and immediately it’s apparent that that’s just not going to work,” McKitrick said. The only way net zero would become realistic, he explained, would be if someone invented a way to burn gasoline or use fossil fuels without releasing CO2. “In the absence of that technology, though, to build a net zero means no fossil-fuel use, and that’s just not realistic,” he said.
Dr. Steven Koonin, another contributor to the report and former DoE advisor to President Obama, said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change‘s R6 report from 2023 contains quantitative and qualitative misunderstandings about extreme weather events and rising sea levels. These misunderstandings have inflamed climate alarmism.
Extreme weather is not getting more extreme, Koonin said. “There’s a table in there in the back of the [R6] report, certainly not in the front of it, which shows about 30 different kinds of extreme weather events: droughts, floods, storms, et cetera. And the table says whether we have seen a trend in that particular event, and almost all of the entries in the table are blank. And the IPCC cannot find an observable trend in almost all kinds of weather events,” he said.
Koonin also addressed environmentalists’ concern over rising sea levels. From NASA’s 30-year record of satellite measurements, global sea levels have increased on average three millimeters a year, which is a foot a century. “This is not a catastrophe,” Koonin said. We have adapted to that kind of rise easily over the last century or so.”
For the last 20 years, the rise has accelerated, but there were comparable accelerations in the 1930s, when human greenhouse-gas emissions were much smaller, Koonin said, adding, “So again, sea level rise – not a catastrophe.”
Though the DoE report largely points at what climate scientists don’t have conclusions on, Koonin confirmed, “I think we know for sure that increased CO2 exerts a warming influence on the planet.” One major uncertainty comes from feedbacks, which are secondary effects of global warming. “If it weren’t for feedbacks, it would be about a degree. Not much to worry about at all. But it’s these feedbacks that we don’t understand that create the uncertainty. So that gives me some sense that we’re certainly having some influence on the climate, at least as far as the temperature goes,” Koonin said. The report concludes with the need for “more nuanced and evidence-based” climate science to accurately inform climate policy.
He has a message for climate debaters on both sides of the aisle: “Stop using the words ‘existential crisis,’ ‘catastrophe,’” Koonin urged. “The science does not support that.” And if you’re a skeptic of climate policy, “I would say stop using the words ‘hoax’ and ‘conspiracy.’ Climate change is not everything, but it’s not nothing.”
So is environmentalist rage justified? The short answer is probably not, at its present levels. But if I were Greta, I would be seething too if I grew up believing my generation was destined to death by fossil fuels, when I could have had a normal, guilt-free, press-free childhood. Perhaps we can give that to the Earth-lovers who come after her.