Mexico’s southernmost city, on the line with Guatemala, was then the most reliable transit hub in the hemisphere. Tens of thousands of migrants from across Latin America waiting on humanitarian visas from the Mexican government that would let them continue north. The conditions were grim and the visas trickled in.

The extended stay of so many additional people strained the resources in the area, much as it strained the American border towns that migrants eventually found their way to. But people left, in varying numbers and at varying speeds, and the expectation that one would eventually leave remained the organizing logic of the whole arrangement.

In 2026, that expectation has all but vanished. The Mexican government has slowed visa issuance to a near-standstill, and the migrants who came expecting passage are increasingly stuck.

What’s happened in Tapachula has been happening across the region during Donald Trump’s second term: a deliberate restructuring of the status quo and infrastructure around migration, built on three reinforcing factors: tariffs against cooperating governments, deep cuts to the aid that underwrote the NGO transit network, and a revived web of third-country deportation agreements that the Biden administration dismantled in the opening months of 2021.

The Los Angeles Times reported in March that the Mexican government agreed to take in nearly 13,000 non-Mexican deportees the U.S. is sending across the border, regardless of where they originally came from. The same piece documented roughly $2 billion in cut U.S. aid that had funded the extended network of shelters, legal aid providers, and transportation services that migrants relied on to make the long journey north. With those funds gone, large portions of the network have either drastically reduced services or shut down entirely. The Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (COMAR), indirectly underwritten by U.S. taxpayers through United Nations channels, has had to downsize accordingly.

Mexico’s cooperation runs on the credible threat of tariffs. That is worth being direct about: whatever else can be said about the administration’s diplomatic style, the stick has produced concrete results where the previous administration’s vice-presidential search for the “root causes” of “irregular migration” did not. Mexico is not acting against its own interests out of goodwill, here. The cost of not cooperating with the Trump administration is simply too high.

The third-country agreements matter because they give the administration operational flexibility — the ability to remove people the U.S. cannot return directly to their countries of origin. Costa Rica has expanded its cooperation from 200 last year now to 25 per week for this year. The Costa Rican government retains final say over which deportees it accepts, a provision that has helped the arrangement clear domestic political resistance. U.S. funds that once supported migrants moving north are now supporting their stabilization in place.

Paraguay has gone even further with a new Status of Forces Agreement which allows the U.S. military to operate inside the country for training, joint exercises, and humanitarian operations. The agreement also keeps criminal jurisdiction over American personnel with the U.S. government rather than giving it to Paraguayan courts—which is an unusually deferential provision for a host country to accept, and a signal of how far some governments are willing to go to align themselves with Washington on cartel enforcement and migration.

None of this is permanent, and I would be dishonest if I pretended otherwise. Interior enforcement has hit real setbacks, both from the courts and from leftist protests in response to DHS operations. Border wall construction, accelerated by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is making progress but remains incomplete. And every agreement described above is an executive action that a future president can undo immediately, just as Biden unwound the first Trump administration’s deals within months of taking office.

The migrants currently stuck in Tapachula, and in the other Mexican cities where the bottleneck has formed, are not going home.

The people who could not get into the United States before the border was effectively closed, and who have decided to stay and wait it out, will still be in northern Mexico in 2029. The forces holding them there is durable only as long as the political coalition that built it holds power.

Given how the Democratic Party has positioned itself on immigration, and given how quickly the previous shift in policy produced the crisis Trump was elected to end, another reversal is not a remote possibility. It is the default outcome of an election going the other way.

The American electorate will decide whether they get in.

We woke up today to a new example of this phenomenon: a16z-backed MTS—Monitoring The Situation (of course.)

I am in a rare moment of my life where I was simply too busy to monitor the situation about MTS, but Junto staff writer Lee Becker was kind enough to keep me abreast with frequent texts. He was not impressed. In free moments, my timeline validated this: I saw plenty of snark and criticism. The tastebearers seem to be in relative alignment that MTS is effectively an institutional marketing play, and whatever relevance it has is bought rather than earned.

The secret to new media—and really any media that leans heavily on socials—isn’t just assembling the right ingredients. Organic growth, scaling naturally, surviving the competitive gauntlet: the market selects for what works. Compelling digital content is compelling mostly because it has undergone that competitive pressure and emerged victorious. There is some inherent quality to content that has earned its way to an audience, and most institutional plays lack it.

One may think that aggregating a bunch of independently successful creators is sufficient. It is not. The smart play is to seed something and grow it organically, not to blast it all over the internet, relying on partnered promotion and purchased virality to carry it.

In the moments I was able to consult the timeline, I noticed many of my media compatriots lamenting how big tech seems to have discovered media yesterday. This I can somewhat sympathize with, but generally discard as rooted in jealousy. Who wouldn’t want big tech to fund their project? I sense an overt and implied I could have done this if you had paid me; I could have done this years ago from many of them. And honestly, I think they’re probably right. I don’t think that launching something like MTS would be all that difficult for myself or many of my peers, and we’re not that impressive. Seriously, just pay a media guy and his Twitter friends and you’re halfway there. But should you?

We in media and politics are prolific talkers and rare doers. I have many friends with grand ideas for projects, they just lack the funds. Meanwhile, tech and business is all about doing. Yes, they have more money than many small countries, but just as important, they have a bias for building and action. What they are not good at, it seems, is building durable and relevant media.

Media and politics, however, exist entirely in that space—though mostly in other people’s projects. They have a bias for deliberation and conceptualization, and are not good at the actual build side of the equation.

What we see with MTS is how Capital got the premise of media wrong. The creators who built audiences from nothing on Substack and Twitter didn’t succeed because they were talented, though many are. The random anon posters and writers and artists and thinkers and dreamers succeeded because they had something to say and don’t stop saying it. The content was compelled. That’s what the competitive gauntlet actually selects for: conviction, and production value may follow with success. Or, it doesn’t, and sometimes that’s part of the appeal.

So those with money who want to replicate it glance at the results and reverse-engineer the wrong inputs. You see successful creators and conclude that the secret is the creators. So Capital aggregated them, gave them a budget, pointed them towards the product, and expected the same outcome. But the outcome was a function of the why, not the talent.

When The Federalist launched, when the Daily Wire launched, when National Review launched… They were built by people who believed something about the country and wanted to argue the case. The business model served the mission. I didn’t launch Junto to sell ads, and I don’t think a version of it aimed at making money would be successful. MTS, as best anyone can tell, is just a distribution and influence vector for tech interests wearing the skin of a media company. The mission serves the business model.

I don’t have tremendous love for everything the conservative media ecosystem has produced, and we definitely have our share of problems. But the impulse—people who cared about something building media to talk about what matters—is a hell of a lot more defensible than whatever this is. And, honestly, I can think of many rosters worth of people who deserve the funding more. Many of them read Junto!

Junto is hiring a part time editor. Please reach out at philip@readjunto.com.

Siegel describes echo chambers, bot swarms, manufactured consensus… A game played for control of a stage. He speaks as if he’s standing offstage, but he’s not. He’s writing for a national publication, read by the same class of people who read The Atlantic and The Free Press and argue about who’s manufacturing whose consensus. It’s the national attention economy analyzing itself, the snake eating its own tail.

This is the accountability trap. When institutions face criticism, they can either accept responsibility or produce elaborate theories about why they are not responsible. Siegel’s option is several thousand words of the second option.

But my quarrel today isn’t with Siegel—in fact I find his commentary on this somewhat compelling. I just think all of this is a distraction from what matters.

By producing thousands of words interrogating the attention economy, he feeds it. By treating the question “is there a civil war on the Right?” as worthy of sustained intellectual engagement, he validates the premise that this question matters more than, say, whether the children in your school district can read.

The truth is the federal government accounts for somewhere around 55 percent of total government spending. When you strip out entitlements, funds that pass through to the states, defense, and other general nonsense, you’re left with a federal budget of less than a trillion spent on programs it directly administers. State and local governments spend over four times that on actual government: schools, police, roads, water systems, parks, courts, fire departments, zoning administration. And this money is managed by names you probably don’t know, elected in contests you probably didn’t vote in where turnout struggles to crack double digits.

Very little of this registers in the national attention economy. If it does, it’s because the data points are wrapped up in national narratives (*cough* Mamdani *cough.*) There are precious few influencers talking about county budget hearings. What Siegel describes operates entirely above this layer, they’re irrelevant to it.

Which is the point. The governance that shapes our daily life exists outside of the theater. When your school board fails to teach kids basic math or how to read, digital swarms are not there as a cope. There’s no Information State to take the blame. Our national discourse and all of its pathologies simply feel silly and self-absorbed by comparison.

I wrote last year about the broken windows of American government—the idea that American decline isn’t rooted in partisan warfare but in the cumulative weight of thousands of small civic failures. Infrastructure deferred and decaying. Permits delayed. Meetings ignored. None of it is dramatic enough to penetrate the national attention economy but all of it compounds.

This is where trust is actually eroding before our eyes. The national attention economy tells us who's to blame, and which side is worse, but the underlying dissatisfaction is primordial. It's the product of lived experience with institutions that stopped doing what works. Siegel's entire analytical apparatus floats arrogantly above this reality.

The disaffection he dismisses as an information operation or influence game is real, not some product of podcasts and posters on social media. If you listen to the populist base, they’re genuinely angry. But they haven’t been led astray, they’re simply angry that institutions don’t work. They want visible results. You may disagree with their policy prescriptions, but everything is downstream of competence. They’re sick of explanations that sound like excuses. At the national level, yes, but locally too.

At its core, these are local grievances. They’re about schools, roads, cops, business, about the general sense that no one is minding the store. These grievances have been captured by the national attention economy because that’s the only shared political language available.

The national discourse teaches people to care intensely about things they cannot change while ignoring the things they can. A voter furious about the system probably can’t name his city council representative. He’s been trained to look up when he should be looking around.

The populist instinct that someone should be held responsible is correct. It’s just been pointed at the wrong target by the very attention economy Siegel analyzes. His essay is part of the problem it describes.

When you can’t build roads, when you can’t pay cops, or balance a budget, or when millions of American children are relegated to poverty and lost opportunity because their schools can’t even teach them how to read, I don’t care about the bot swarms. We can worry about the Information State when we can actually govern ourselves. Right now we can’t.

Mississippi improved its reading scores more than any state in the nation over the past decade. A state government that decided literacy mattered passed a straightforward policy and executed it, doing FAR more for children than any influencer you can name from your Twitter timeline.

This doesn’t exist in Siegel’s framework. It can’t. There’s no swarm, no counter-swarm, no Information State dynamics. Just a government doing its job, the thing that actually builds trust.

American trust isn’t rebuilt in the national media. Not in the Information State.

I'm aware I'm doing the thing I'm criticizing, but I don’t care. Look away from the stage, America. There's nothing for you there. Look to your city council, look to Mississippi. Look to your neighbors and your neighborhoods. That’s where you can make a difference.

She is the founder, editor, reporter, crime correspondent, social media manager, webmaster, and sole full-time employee of the Alachua Chronicle, a right-of-center local news outlet covering Alachua County, Florida.

She watches every local government meeting, writes them up, edits everything that appears on the site, files daily crime reports, handles reader emails, troubleshoots the website, and manages the social media accounts. She had one freelancer. He died unexpectedly a few months ago—she found out after asking the police department to do a wellness check. She hasn't been able to replace him, it's just her now. There are no major investors, no foundation backing, and no real institutional support of any kind. Her husband calls the Chronicle her “hobby that pays for itself.”

Cabrera has a master's degree in electrical engineering and no background in journalism. She started writing about local government after repeated frustration with the local newspaper's coverage. Her first site was called Alachua Conservatives. It became the Alachua Chronicle after a Democrat friend told her the coverage was excellent but she couldn't tell anyone to read a site with that name.

“Nobody sane would just do this on a shoestring, as a solo endeavor, 365 days a year with zero days off for seven years,” she told me. “No backers, no staff. It’s more of a mission than anything that could be replicated.”

And replicable it is not. The Alachua Chronicle is one of the few remaining conservative local news outlets in America that actually covers local government with original reporting, and it exists because a single individual decided to dedicate basically all of her time to it. When she stops, that’s it. There is no Plan B.

The progressive left, on the other hand, has spent the last fifteen years and well over half a billion dollars to make sure that its side of this equation never depends on a single person’s willingness to work without a day off.

The Institute for Nonprofit News is a major trade organization in this space with roughly 500 member organizations. The nearly 400 digital-first outlets among them generated an estimated $650–700 million in annual revenue and employ more than 3,200 journalists. Impressively, a third of their outlets publishing today did not exist five years ago.

And INN is only one subset of the broader ecosystem. Hundreds of nonprofit newsrooms, public media stations, and university-based reporting projects operate beyond INN.

Nearly all of this infrastructure was built by progressive philanthropy.

Press Forward is a nonprofit journalism project launched in 2023 that now comprises over 100 funders who have committed to give $500 million in grants over five years. To this project, the MacArthur Foundation pledged $175 million and the Knight Foundation committed $150 million. The American Journalism Project has raised $243 million since 2019 and invested in 53 nonprofit newsrooms.

These outlets do not describe themselves as progressive. But the money that builds them comes overwhelmingly from progressive foundations, and the reporters who staff them are drawn overwhelmingly from a left-leaning talent pool. A study published in Science Advances found that most journalists sit far to the left of even the average American Twitter user. Only 7 percent of working journalists identify as Republican. More than 96 percent of journalist campaign donations in 2016 went to Hillary Clinton.

States Newsroom, which operates on a $25 million annual budget with over 220 full-time employees and now has a presence in all 50 state capitals, was found by the Columbia Journalism Review to have instructed reporters in its commentary section to seek out “progressive-leaning” contributors.

The scale of this investment is strategic and intentional. Whoever funds the reporters sets the frame for what gets covered, how it gets covered, and what doesn’t get covered at all.

The conservative equivalent of this infrastructure does not exist. It is not small or underfunded, simply absent.

Conservative foundations do spend on media but almost none of it builds local newsrooms. The Bradley Foundation and the Bradley Impact Fund have given millions to media entities, including $2.5 million to American Independent Media (which operates The Center Square, a state government wire service), $1.8 million to Project Veritas, and smaller grants to Encounter Books, the National Review Institute, and PragerU, according to IRS filings analyzed by the Center for Media and Democracy.

The Koch-connected donor-advised fund DonorsTrust distributed $26.5 million to 36 right-leaning media outlets in 2024 including the Reason Foundation, the Daily Caller News Foundation, RealClearPolitics, and others. The Koch foundations themselves have spent over $8.5 million on media grants and contracts since 2015.

The Center Square, the closest thing to a local reporting operation in this group, functions as a free wire service with a “taxpayer sensibility.” DonorsTrust did give the Metric Media Foundation $1.27 million in 2020, but Metric Media’s 1,200-plus websites generate over 90 percent of their content algorithmically from public datasets. NewsGuard rates the network 32 out of 100 for credibility.

Compare the total conservative media philanthropy, even a generous estimate of low tens of millions annually across all projects, to MacArthur’s single initial grant to the Press Forward pooled fund. $32.5 million. Or to the American Journalism Project’s $243 million raised since 2019, every dollar of which went to building local newsroom capacity.

The conservative donor class has no strategy for local news. A former Republican CPB board member captured the sentiment when he told the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “Any conservative money would be so outweighed and outmaneuvered by progressive billionaires that it would not be dollars well spent, I’m afraid.”

Cabrera knows what this gap looks like in her community. “I’ve been to political fundraisers, and I know there’s money,” she said. “They donate to politicians for access and don’t see a personal benefit to donating to journalism.” The person who pays $1,000 for a VIP photo with a congresswoman is not thinking about the role of media in a functioning republic. They are buying a transaction.

The progressive nonprofit model provides salaries, benefits, editorial support, institutional stability, and the cushion of foundation money that absorbs years of losses while an outlet finds its footing. Houston Landing burned through $20 million in two years before shutting down. The Baltimore Banner has a $50 million pledge behind it. Even failure in the progressive nonprofit model is lavishly funded.

On the right, there is no equivalent. There is just the work, done by whoever is willing to do it.

“Every business consultant just suggests doing something else to make money to support the journalism side,” Cabrera said. “But I don’t have time for that. I don’t want to run events or fundraisers. I want to write so people in my county know what’s going on.”

This is the bind. The journalism itself is a full-time, all-consuming job. The business development required to sustain the journalism is a separate full-time job. The progressive model solves this with specialization: foundation officers handle fundraising, executive directors handle operations, and reporters report. The conservative local journalist is all of these people simultaneously and that’s a challenge somewhere between very difficult and impossible.

Cabrera’s readers routinely ask her to do more. “Nobody outside my family knows that I haven’t had a day off in years or that I do everything you see on the site,” she said. “I’m at my limit, but I’ve been there a long time, and it’s just normal.”

She estimates that $100,000 would allow her to hire a second reporter. “Our county doesn’t need a ten-person newsroom,” she said, “but it’s also too much for one person.” $100,000 is less than what a single mid-career reporter earns at a well-funded progressive nonprofit outlet and a rounding error in the Press Forward budget. And it is more than anyone has been willing to invest in the Alachua Chronicle.

“I always hesitate to put my experience out there,” she told me, “because nobody would do this if they knew what it was like.”

Eighty-three percent of counties classified as news deserts or on watch lists voted for Trump in 2020. The communities most affected by the collapse of local news are, overwhelmingly, conservative ones. The progressive philanthropic class recognized the vacuum and stuffed it with over half a billion dollars.

When a local outlet like the Alachua Chronicle disappears, it gets filled by existing left-leaning news or precisely the kind of progressive nonprofit infrastructure described above.

The meetings might still get covered. The lunacy of local government would still surface in the public record. But the coverage is shaped by the worldview of the people doing it. Or, worse, it doesn’t get covered. The town is “too small” to matter and not worth investing in.

What definitely does not get covered is the other perspective: the new regulation is insane, or the curriculum change is bad, or where did the bond money go? All because they never occur to the reporter as a story worth telling.

Cabrera understands this better than anyone. “The mainstream outlets have their own narratives to push,” she said. “It’s hard to comment on the things that need to be called out when nobody has reported on them.” Conservative commentary depends on conservative reporting. You cannot criticize what local government is doing if nobody is in the room when it does it. The entire ecosystem of conservative opinion is downstream of someone doing the unglamorous work of attending a county commission meeting and writing down what happened.

The Alachua Chronicle is not scalable or replicable. It is instead a testament to one person’s refusal to let her community go uncovered, and every structural incentive points toward quitting. The progressive left spent $500 million building an ecosystem designed to ensure that its version of local news never depends on any single person’s willingness to sacrifice everything.

The investment is not charity. It is done deliberately to control the information ecosystem and set the narrative at the local level, where most policy is made and most people live. The conservative movement has built nothing comparable and shows no serious intention of starting.

What happens to the thousands of communities—conservative, underserved, functionally invisible to the national media—when the last person willing to do this work decides she has finally had enough?

Maybe nothing. Maybe no one cares enough to fill the gap.

Or, more insidiously, progressive philanthropy will be there to fill the gap. That is what half a billion dollars buys you: the permanent right to define what counts as news.

The Museum of the Bible in D.C. was tastefully arranged for war. Not the military conflict in the Middle East, but a discussion of one here at home. Three ornate chandeliers overlooked a sizable crowd for the Republican Jewish Coalition’s (RJC) symposium on antisemitism, done in partnership with National Review.

Elder donors sat in formation by the stage. I sat in the very back with the rest of the media and our staff writer, Lee Becker. Hill staffers flitted in and out as their bosses took and surrendered the stage. The energy was decent—not defeatist but not triumphant. It was a very different event than the RJC leadership conference just months prior in Vegas. It was also a very different political moment.

Junto attended to determine where institutional conservatism stood on the issue of antisemitism, mainly to see if they “knew what time it is.” These events are usually some mix of boilerplate rah-rah Israel, grrr antisemites, clap at the right moments, and go home.

And there was some of that. Chuck DeFeo, head of National Review, opened by arguing that our influencers and algorithms concentrate antisemitism. Sen. Jim Banks gave the customary condemnation: antisemitism has no place in America, no place in our politics, and no place on the right, and got the obligatory applause for it. Fine.

Something had shifted, though, since the last time an event like this took place.

An Asymmetric War

The first thing apparent when watching politicians try to address the antisemitism-on-the-right problem is that this is an asymmetric conflict, and the institutional side has not yet realized it is the one at a disadvantage.

The pro-Israel institutional right has all the conventional firepower in the world: think tanks, legacy media, donor money, floor speeches, and, indeed, symposiums at the Museum of the Bible. This is very similar to the American military advantage we possess in our war against Iran. The other side, anti-Israel influencers and their audiences—who must be discussed as a bloc even though anti-Israel and antisemitic are not the same thing—has none of that. What they do have is asymmetry itself. They are fighting on platforms that the institutional right barely understands for an audience it has already lost.

The characteristics that make someone an effective senator or institutional media figure are the same that make someone invisible on the platforms where antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment spreads. Politicians and institutional media are trying to do battle with influencers but the mediums, audiences, and incentive structures are different. As we have seen, you can have all the influence in Washington and still lose if the battlefield is podcasts, group chats, and TikTok.

Sen. Tom Cotton was the embodiment of this dynamic. He gave the strongest speech of the opening session, condemning “influencers on the erstwhile ‘right’” and drawing his line in the sand: “I do not agree that I share a political movement or party with anyone who traffics in antisemitism… shares Liz Warren's economic policies, or Rashida Tlaib's foreign policy." He employed the now common technique of elevating the argument beyond antisemitism alone and chaining it to a general policy temperament. Anyone on "that side" is, by definition, not on the right at all. It is no accident that Cotton went the most viral of any speaker not named Ted Cruz at the symposium. The pro-Israel crowd loved it while the anti-Israel crowd hated it, as designed. The people who most need to hear it—admittedly, probably a small number—will never encounter it, because they don't watch C-SPAN clips of think tank conferences.

This is a fundamental problem, and several speakers showed signs of understanding it.

What Changed

The first panel raised an important idea. Tal Fortgang, speaking with Philip Klein, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, and Matthew Continetti, made what I think is a genuinely significant rhetorical move: Rather than the standard invocation of "Judeo-Christian values," he argued that Jews should actively help bring Christianity back as the central pillar of the public square. That Jews should "actually provide something in their partnership with Christians by joining up to help defend Christian ideals as stridently as they have Jewish ones."

This goes beyond the familiar Judeo-Christian co-optation you usually hear from these voices.

A Jewish intellectual, at an institutional Jewish conservative conference, explicitly argues to embrace America as a Christian nation and argues that Jews should invest in that project. Your priors determine whether you find that encouraging or alarming, but it is an interesting rhetorical move in the current political climate.

This panel continued to make the case for Israel and against Iran in the same breath as the case against antisemitism, which is common, though decoupling antisemitism from other issues would be more compelling. But, on the next panel, David Azerrad said something I have believed for some time but have rarely heard acknowledged in these rooms.

David argued that in an age of populism and nationalism, if the soil is becoming America First, some of the rhetoric of Israeli defense is becoming off putting. This may not be a novel concept in the abstract, but it was totally absent at the RJC conference mere months ago. Hearing it from a panelist at a symposium on antisemitism is genuine progress. The pro-Israel right is beginning to grapple with the fact that its messaging was built for a movement that no longer exists.

Ted Cruz and the Diagnosis

Then, Sen. Ted Cruz took the stage and became the main event.

Cruz did something none of the previous speakers had done in earnest: he disagreed with the premise that “we are winning.” While others condemned the rise of antisemitism, even slipping into self-congratulation about the mainstream resistance to antisemitism citing poll data and other figments, Cruz pointed out the obvious: the people in that room were already persuaded and the people who aren’t were nowhere near it. He said: “The fact that the people in this room are persuaded doesn't mean that the interns at Heritage, at CPI, in Congress, or on the college campuses are persuaded." If anything, I believe he was underplaying the situation.

He called Tucker Carlson “the single most dangerous demagogue in this country” to sustained applause. He also noted that “virtually all of my colleagues on the Republican side have agreed with me about Tucker, but they're all afraid to say his name," and argued that antisemitism is a gateway to anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism, a "green-red alliance" of Marxists and jihadists united by a common enemy.

Cruz was substantive and direct and also unavoidably himself. One of the most caricatured figures in Republican politics serving as the most prominent advocate for the anti-antisemitism campaign. This is the asymmetric war at its essence: the institutional conservative’s chosen fighter is a man whom the enemy has already decided to laugh at.

He acknowledged this directly, quipping about edited photos of himself in an Israel-flag bikini. But it’s a self-defeating dynamic. At a fundamental level, among those who need to be persuaded, Tucker Carlson is cool and compelling. Ted Cruz comes across as the professor whose class no one wants to take.

If you believe that this is a war of words that can be won, the right would need compelling voices that don’t register as scolds and can discuss things in a rhetoric young people won’t find offputting. Ted Cruz is not that voice, and his willingness to be The Guy may paradoxically make it harder for those better suited to emerge, or at least degrade the credibility of the rest of the movement.

He also made what I think is a continued core mistake of the entire discourse: tying antisemitism to an expanding constellation of adjacent issues. Iranian foreign policy, Qatari university funding, foreign media strategy and influence operations. All relevant individually, but together and as a part of this conversation dilute the central point for anyone who isn’t already a believer.

Half the room got up and left after Cruz spoke, including reporters from several major outlets. A theory, not my own, is that the antisemitism debate is a proxy for the broader conflict over what the conservative movement will become—who defines it, who is excised, and why. The attendees who remained wanted to talk about Israel and Tucker Carlson, but the ones who left already captured the real story, which is the fracture itself.

What This Means

The good news for anti-antisemites and their allies: in the span of a few months, the institutional right went from the usual talking points to acknowledging that its messaging has failed, its coalition assumptions are outdated, and that the threat from within may be winning. That is genuine progress, and I think the RJC ran a valuable event in the face of structural weaknesses.

The discouraging element is that the diagnosis has outpaced the capacity for treatment. The people who understand the problem are either structurally incapable of reaching the right audiences, ideologically blocked from making good concessions, or easily caricatured as ineffective messengers. The symposium’s most important insight, that the captains have picked their teams and you will not convince many defectors, hung over the room.

The institutions built to fight antisemitism were designed for a movement that took its cues from National Review and the Republican Jewish Coalition. That movement is gone or quickly disappearing, and in its place is one that takes its cues from group chats and algorithms. In these conditions, the institutional right keeps bringing battleships to a drone war. The opposition knows it will get pummeled in the think tank white papers, institutional media, and on the Senate floor, and they don’t care.

Until the institutional right builds something that responds to the movement where it actually lives and breathes, events like this will remain rooms full of people who already agree, refining their arguments for an audience that is not listening.

3AM. I had finally endured the delayed flights and landed in Tallahassee, where my father lived. Driving in silence through the northern suburbs, I wondered how he was doing.

Not well, of course, I knew that. He had been in hospice care for months, though he didn’t seem to understand that he was terminally ill. Just the previous visit–where I had arrived at a similarly late hour and sat, reading, in the rental car, too afraid to find out if he was still alive–he had told me all about how he’d like to work back up to playing golf and moving around the house.

I knew he would never be active again, but I didn’t know that the man I knew as my father was already gone.

He had good genes. Even at eighty-six years old, dealing with late stage heart failure, COPD, and a litany of other issues, I was sure that his time was not up. Diminished, perhaps, but not up. Unfortunately, diminished was what matters.

And diminished is what I saw when I came through the door early that morning. Legs stretched down to the floor from his hospice bed, breathing ragged, dysfunction emanating from his bedroom.

I put his legs back in bed, checked on his oxygen, and tried to communicate. He didn’t seem to see me, just reacting to the sound of my voice, my touch, like he was haunted.

The hospice nurse arrived later that morning. She told me that he was actively dying, and we needed some prescriptions filled by a 24-hour pharmacy. But, she warned me, if I went to get them he could be dead by the time I made the short drive back.

Oh. Well, he needs the pain medication. I should go now, as soon as possible.

He did not pass in my absence, and I spent the morning and early afternoon sitting with him and the caretaker, counting down the time to his next dose. CVS called, asking if I wanted to have future medications delivered. I had been trying to set this up for weeks–let’s do it.

Then, shortly before his third dose of the painkiller, his breathing slowed to an impossible degree. I stood watching, my own breath trapped like his. How long had passed, I do not know. Fifteen seconds, thirty seconds. Then, he breathed again. I breathed with him, but he did not continue. That was his last.

The caretaker grew emotional and left the room. I stared for a minute, not sure what to believe. He had breathed again before, so I waited and watched for the rise of his chest that never came. I knew then, of course, that he was dead, but no one had ever taught me how to manage death.

In the Army, I had been taught what to do for a sucking chest wound, or a blocked airway, or profuse bleeding. But what now? I figured I needed to check his pulse. I put my fingers to his neck, an act which felt deeply strange to me, and confirmed that he was dead.

Then came a blur of hospice workers, family members, and legal responsibility to what came after. Countless conversations–yes, I am fine. No, he was suffering but now he’s in a better place. I’m sorry, I don’t know if you can have any of the furniture yet.

I lost myself in the practical aftermath. In fact, I would say that the functional moments far outweighed the emotional ones. I wondered why. Was I “processing” correctly? Did I care too much or too little? How many tears is the right number to shed?

But really, what I came to know very quickly was that my father had passed a long time ago. All those trips back home over many months–resigning from a job that I deeply wanted in order to take care of him, noticing capacity and coherence slip away more with each passing visit. Understanding that what made my father who he was had left long before I stared motionless at his chest, praying for another breath.

Death takes a long time. So long, sometimes, that you might not notice it.

I was most overcome, that day, with relief. Not for the end of his suffering, but relief that I had made it in time. I had grabbed that final connection out of Atlanta. That I had even been lucky enough to visit at all. Hopefully he knew his son was with him, in the end. I had done that job.

Now, though, I know the truth. Being there at the very end was only part of it. Death is slow, and I was there for all of it–I just didn’t recognize it at the time. Carrying him to the shower and helping him bathe. Paying his property taxes. Watching phone calls get shorter and less coherent. Noticing, visit after visit, that the man who chose to adopt and raise me as his own was no longer accessible behind those eyes.

The caretaker said she saw him smile before the end. Who can say.

That being said, we must be honest about the ways this could fail. By my observation, many Iran critics are caught in a quagmire of either the irrational or the irrelevant. No, Iran poses no meaningful military threat to us. There is no way they can defeat our military, short of some pyrrhic symbols like expensive radars and limited American casualties. No, Iran is not winning some complicated 4-d chess. They planned for this war, but planning and execution (and the ability to do something about it) are two different things. Finally, no, Trump is not likely to allow us to commit to a protracted ground invasion. The logistics are too difficult, the risks too high, and his entire administration understands the political reality. I wouldn’t be surprised if CIA or special forces were on the ground working with dissident factions, but a real invasion the likes of which is vehemently opposed by the pundit class is unlikely.

A number of anti-war voices aren’t even approaching the conversation from the angle that intervention will fail. Some people are arguing that Iran was never really the enemy. This is either naive or a rhetorical evasion, because admitting Iran is a definite adversary means admitting that some kind of response is just and necessary, and these people would rather relitigate the premise than face reality.

But there are two ways Iran could go deeply wrong. One is very dramatic, the other is quiet, more probable, and in some ways worse.

The dramatic risk is that Iran becomes a failed state. We bomb the regime into total collapse. No successor emerges, we don’t allow it to happen because we bombed every possible leader. The IRGC fragments into regional factions and power centers. The opposition is too weak, uncoordinated, or disunited to govern or even attempt to seize power.

And into this vacuum steps everyone with an interest. Russia, with deep military and intelligence ties to the Iranian security apparatus, backs whichever faction preserves their regional influence. China, Iran’s primary oil customer, backs whichever faction keeps the energy spigot turned on. We back whoever promises to give up the nuclear program. Azerbaijan masses on the border, the Kurds move, every small player with an interest mobilizes to take advantage. A country of 90 million with huge oil reserves becomes a multi-front proxy competition between three great powers and every possible regional actor.

Not like Libya, or even Syria—bigger, richer, and with both China and Russia at the table. This is a real possibility, and something that anyone seriously considering the war must be concerned with.

We're already seeing early signs. The IRGC publicly overruled President Pezeshkian this weekend after he stated Iran would not attack neighboring countries. The IRGC issued a statement calling his comments 'a mistake' and 'demonstrated' this by striking Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The civilian government no longer controls the military. If the regime falls, this is the faction that remains—the one with the guns and apparently the authority to override the president.

All that said, this probably doesn’t happen. Iran is much more durable as a nation than Syria. Total fragmentation assumes fault lines comparable to other sectarian divisions in the region. Iran's are real but less severe. More importantly, Trump seems to have no intention of truly occupying the country, and his administration seems to be broadly against it. Without an occupying force catalyzing the conditions for factional warfare, like Iraq, the most likely postwar dynamic is not collapse but something more ambiguous and more frustrating.

The probable losing scenario is that nothing changes. The boring one. The military campaign succeeds on every tactical metric. Missile infrastructure, navy, nuclear facilities, and every tangible tool for external power projection are destroyed convincingly.

Trump, perhaps rightly, declares victory and we all celebrate as the news cycle moves on. Then, quietly, the status quo reconstitutes. The IRGC’s networks, multi-decade infrastructure, and institutional knowledge remain intact. A covert nuclear program begins again. Proxy networks, damaged but not eradicated, rebuild over a few years. New leadership emerges from the middle ranks that is no less dedicated or hostile to our interests.

Five years from now, we’re looking at the same Iran. Weakened in some ways but deeply humiliated and with a specific grievance against the U.S. and the West that makes the previous few decades look restrained.

The mechanism that produces quiet failure is the trap of declaring premature victory. Trump has every domestic incentive to end this quickly—before the midterms, before gas prices shoot too high, and before the base that supports him begins to label his administration and his future likely successors as incompetent warmongers.

Trump has to thread a needle: he needs to change the country without destroying it. His military advantage, excellent at destruction, can only create some of the conditions required for change. He realistically cannot utilize American forces more than he already is—remote war, limited troops on ground. The factions on the ground that would form a new Iran, or at least pressure the old regime, must be assertive and soon.

Every American military intervention in my generation has succeeded militarily and failed strategically. We can hit our targets, but the aftermath of the bombs leaves something worse or indistinguishable from what existed before. Destroying a regime’s capability is not the same as solving the problem it represented.

Trump has been smarter about this than his predecessors. He shows no real desire to occupy and nation-build—he oscillates between “give me a government to work with” and “Iranian people, take back your country.” The lesson to focus on is the gap between refusing to occupy and having a plan. Trump could succeed in every way that disproves the Twitter doomers—and he likely will—and still fail to win strategically. This is what we must be wary of.

The strikes were justified and the strategic logic is sound. The military execution has been extraordinary. The dramatic risk is that Iran becomes a failed state with great-power proxy competition. The probable risk is quieter and in some ways worse—that the regime absorbs the blow, makes some concessions, and reconstitutes behind a curtain while we move on and a new President takes office.

The administration has genuinely earned our trust. They have shown tremendous strategic depth on foreign policy and the military campaign has been run as well as it realistically could have. It has not earned trust on the aftermath, and likely will not until the dust settles, because there is no credible aftermath we can be certain of.

Trump learned the right lessons from Iraq. Avoid occupation and don’t invest in unrealistic nation-building projects. But the space between those lessons and an actual plan for what comes next is where every American intervention has gone to die. Not occupying is only half of a strategy.

Curtis Sliwa got seven percent. In a race where nearly half the electorate was so desperate for an alternative that they voted for Andrew Cuomo (a man who resigned in disgrace, ran on no discernible message beyond “stop the socialist,” and still pulled 42 percent as a third-party candidate) the Republican nominee couldn’t crack double digits. The appetite for a credible opposition was enormous, yet the supply was nonexistent.

And nothing has changed. The national GOP has decided Mamdani is useful as a prop and not a problem to be solved. The NRCC is blasting emails linking vulnerable House Democrats to the scary socialist mayor. Congressional Republicans spent the transition period trying to strip him of his citizenship. There is a lot of activity but very little of it is serious—Republicans would rather watch New York City like some kind of cable news segment than invest in winning it in any meaningful way.

Mamdani’s inauguration speech promised to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” Three weeks later, over a dozen New Yorkers were found dead on the street during a brutal cold snap.

One of his first actions as mayor was to halt the encampment sweeps that had been standard practice for ushering the homeless indoors during cold weather. He declared that forced removal would be used “as a last resort.” Then people died. When the winter storm hit on top of the cold weather, streets remained unplowed nearly a week later, garbage piled up across the city and the sanitation department announced “limited collection” with “slight delays.” By mid-February, Mamdani quietly reversed course and reinstated the sweeps. Behold, the warmth of collectivism.

The fiscal picture is somehow worse: Mamdani inherited a $12 billion budget deficit from Eric Adams, and his proposed solution—tax hikes—requires Albany’s cooperation that Governor Hochul has been understandably reluctant to acquiesce to. His fallback is the city’s first property tax increase in years, landing squarely on middle-class homeowners. His preliminary budget already breaks his campaign promises and beyond the budget, the full Mamdani agenda constitutes the most ambitious expansion of municipal government since John Lindsay. Lindsay’s ambitions nearly bankrupted the city.

Mamdani was polling at 1% fourteen months before the election. He won because he had extraordinary political magnetism, weak opposition, and the correct read on what working-class New Yorkers were hungry to hear. That’s enough to win an election but it has never been enough to run the most complicated city on earth.

This city elects Republicans. Not often, but it does.

New York tolerates Democratic mismanagement until the dysfunction becomes intolerable, then turns sharply to an outsider who promises competence, public safety, and fiscal discipline. La Guardia. Giuliani. Bloomberg. Each governed for at least eight years.

Bloomberg left in 2013. Since then: twelve years of Democrats. De Blasio governed like he was building a national brand. Adams governed like he was above the law. Mamdani governs like the problem with New York is that it hasn’t tried socialism yet. We are twelve years into the cycle. The conditions that historically trigger a Republican correction are assembling fast.

But the pattern isn’t automatic. It requires someone to walk through the door. Right now, there’s no one even standing outside.

New York City has the greatest concentration of talent in the world, and Republicans can’t produce a mayoral candidate who clears single digits. The citywide party apparatus is a shell. There is no serious political operation to speak of. Republicans hold five City Council seats out of fifty-one, down from six after losing their lone Bronx seat last November. Five out of fifty-one.

What New York’s conservatives need right now, not in 2028, is someone who was already there. Someone doing the unglamorous work: running a campaign for city council even though they’ll lose. Organizing on the ground. Showing up to community board meetings. Not someone who needed a Democratic Socialist as mayor to convince them the city was worth fighting for.

Bill Ackman and his cohort spent enormous social and financial capital trying to stop Mamdani last fall and accomplished nothing. If even a fraction of that energy had been channeled into something politically productive over the preceding decade, the landscape would look completely different. Instead, the money class showed up at the last minute to panic, which is what the money class always does.

If conservatives keep writing off the cities, instead of treating New York as someone else’s problem, we are ceding the commanding heights of American economic and cultural life to people who think collectivism is a good thing. Mamdani is not going to be mayor forever. If his agenda crashes into reality, the political environment in a few years could look radically different. But it will only benefit the right if someone has spent the intervening years building something real. Not tweeting. Not fundraising off the spectacle. Building.

Once a generation, New York opens the door. The question is whether anyone will be ready to walk through it or whether we’ll be standing around bashing the next Curtis Sliwa on Twitter.

The answer is North Korea.

When you allow a hostile state to build a credible military deterrent it becomes permanent and untouchable. A problem that can never be solved, only managed, at enormous cost, forever. Every president for decades has known that the cost of “solving” the North Korea problem is a price far too high to pay—the regime cannot be dislodged without civilizational catastrophe.

Iran has been building towards the same deterrent. The Trump administration understood that the window to prevent a second North Korea was closing, and closing quickly. Every failed intervention moved Iran closer to the point of no return. The pressure to act now was strategic because the lesson of North Korea is that once the door locks, it is locked forever.

The Conventional Shield

North Korea’s conventional deterrent is built on blunt geography and positioning. The demilitarized zone and much of the terrain north leading to Pyongyang is liberally ornamented with pillboxes, bunkers, and reinforcing obstacles.

Nearby, in the mountains, thousands of hardened artillery sites (HARTs) are hewn into the rock, aimed squarely at Seoul and its population of ten million people. They are fixed, often on tracks, optimized to roll out, pre-aimed, and fire from just behind the terrain before returning to cover. Even with extensive counter-fire artillery, any military action against North Korea means accepting that Seoul takes catastrophic damage in the opening salvos.

This is the foundational defense that has made North Korea untouchable for decades. Certain destruction of a major city, combined with the prohibitive cost of digging the North Koreans out from their own terrain—the very mountains militarized against potential invaders.

Iran’s version of this is its ballistic missile program, ironically built with direct assistance from North Korea. The Shahab series of medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) are descendants of North Korean NoDong missiles, transferred in the 1990s. Iran has since developed indigenous systems with increasing range, accuracy, and numbers.

In recent days the Trump administration has revealed that Iran began to heavily expand their missile stockpile and production capacity.

Iran was pursuing an overwhelming conventional ballistic missile deterrent to make the cost of military action so high that we could not threaten them. Meanwhile, they continued working towards the thing that makes you permanently untouchable.

The Nuclear Umbrella

The artillery aimed at Seoul kept the United States and South Korea from acting while Pyongyang developed and miniaturized nuclear technology. By the time the world recognized the full scope of the program, the window for intervention had passed. A nuclear-armed North Korea could not be regime-changed or coerced.

Iran has been running—increasingly, sprinting—towards the same goal. Its nuclear program has been the subject of diplomatic theater for two decades. The JCPOA, the IAEA inspections, the enrichment caps that were agreed to and then exceeded. Iran has moved closer to weapons-grade enrichment and weaponization with each passing year. The conventional missile arsenal would exist to buy time for this program, exactly as North Korea’s artillery bought time for theirs.

The Asymmetric Networks

North Korea is fully committed to an asymmetric threat. Hundreds of thousands of Special Operations Forces (SOF) trained for unconventional warfare to sow chaos behind enemy lines. Military speedboats tasked to infiltrate the eastern and western coasts. Thousands of airborne troops to paradrop into South Korea in the event of a conflict. Ballistic missile submarines. Chemical weapons. In sum, much of their military is designed with the sole purpose of making a conflict too costly for their adversary.

The Iranian equivalent is its militia network. Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi Shia militias, and various Palestinian groups represent a distributed asymmetric coalition operating throughout the region. Where North Korea’s SOF would deploy locally, Iran’s proxies can strike across an entire region. They serve the same purpose: raise the cost of conflict beyond what any adversary is willing to pay, and do it through means that are difficult to deter or destroy.

Both countries understood that a conventional military alone isn’t enough to prevent regime-change from a militarily superior power. You need forces that are capable of imposing costs far out of proportion to their size.

The Economic Lifeline

North Korea persists through a creative juggling act of illicit activity. It sells military training to African police and military units, runs cyber operations that steal billions in cryptocurrency, and exports laborers to Russia, China, and the Middle East to generate foreign currency for the regime. Its economy is admittedly tiny, but the regime’s survival budget is funded by activities that exist entirely outside the legitimate global economic system. This is why it has been so difficult to control them through sanctions and economic pressure.

Iran’s version is simpler and much more useful. Oil. Despite decades of sanctions, Iran has continued to export crude to countries like China, generating the revenue that funds its military, its nuclear program, and its proxy network. Where North Korea built its deterrent on a relative shoestring budget, Iran is building the same ecosystem using materially greater resources.

A nuclear North Korea with oil revenue is harder to outlast and harder to contain. It is impossible to wait for the regime to collapse under economic pressure (which has failed for seventy years with North Korea) when they have some of the largest oil reserves in the world.

The Window

Every facet of Iran’s strategic deterrent mirrors North Korea’s. They were pursuing an expanded conventional deterrent, a nuclear program, asymmetric forces, and a sanctions-resistant economy.

The only difference is that Iran had not finished yet.

North Korea finished its conventional and nuclear deterrents and became permanent. No amount of economic or diplomatic pressure has managed to change the status quo on the Korean Peninsula. The Kim regime will likely persist indefinitely because the cost of removing it is higher than any country is willing to pay.

Iran was on the same trajectory. Every month that passed without decisive action moved it closer to the point where the same logic applies. Once Iran crosses the nuclear threshold with a nuclear-capable ballistic missile, the calculus changes permanently.

The administration had watched this trajectory for months. When the latest round of negotiations began to collapse, the questions became unavoidable. Allow Iran to continue running the clock on its missile stockpile and enrichment program, or accept that the window was closing in real time. Operation Epic Fury was their answer.

The strikes currently underway are not about punishing Iran for past behavior, though that behavior certainly meets the threshold for a Just War. Trump and the administration are trying to close the door on Iran before it could finish its deterrent. Whether the war succeeds in closing that window permanently remains uncertain, but the cost of waiting was increasingly clear.

Why Iran Is Worse

North Korea, for all its bluster, is largely a defensive problem. Just about every institution and strategic move made by the regime is in the sole pursuit of self-preservation. It is a hermit kingdom with a nuclear weapon, dangerous but contained to its own devices.

Iran, on the other hand, is not contained. Iran is the most persistent adversary the United States has faced since the Soviet Union.

Where North Korea is a problem we failed to prevent, Iran is a long-standing enemy we have failed to confront. The Marine barracks in Beirut. The IEDs that killed hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq. The proxy network that has bled American allies for four decades. The order to assassinate President Trump. No other adversary since the Soviet Union has inflicted such sustained, direct costs on American lives and interests like Iran has.

We already have one permanent, nuclear-armed rogue state that no president can touch. The administration bet that a risky intervention now was preferable to continuing a problem that compounds forever. History will judge whether they were right, but the logic behind that decision is not difficult to understand.

We see this in most of the great social initiatives of the 20th century. From Johnson’s Great Society with its emphasis on using federal power to somehow “even the playing field” through economic interventions and affirmative action programs to more recent pushes to reshape the educational and employment landscapes through Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, the left’s answer to all problems tends to be top-down mandates to “fix” things. Take your experts, get them to craft policy, throw public money at it and trust that our problem is as good as solved.

But as we’ve seen things never seem to work out like this. Policies are crafted, money is thrown, experts are paid and things get worse in an endless loop. Man, as it turns out, doesn’t act in nature as he does on our spreadsheets.

This worldview doesn’t stay contained to the world of domestic policy. The same people who believe they can mold their domestic economy and society into an ideal form naturally believe that the same can be done on an international scale as well. Often we find that even those on the political right, who would look with scorn at a command economy within their own borders, are drawn into the belief that outside of these borders things can be made to be orderly and tidy and sensible if only the right people and the right ideas could be put into place.

Much of the latter half of the 20th century has been marked by these projects, implemented by administrations of both parties, which try to plug “experts” from the State Department, or USAID, or some area specific think tanks in to “fix” problems in other lands, with results that more often than not have been dismal and embarrassing in their failures. Using Afghanistan as a case in point, The Military Times sums up the Pentagon’s independent inspector general for Afghanistan’s final report on what went wrong in America’s efforts to rebuild the country after the American invasion as:

The Military Times goes on to quote The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction as concluding that:

The military did its job. They won our battles. Saddam Hussein was toppled within weeks, the Taliban collapsed within months. The American people have been led to believe that it was our military that failed “the mission”, when it was our bureaucratic corps of “experts” who should have their chops bloodied.

The American “expert” class in the State Department, at USAID, and elsewhere in government spent the better part of two decades trying to construct Middle Eastern and Asian countries that fit our own image, only to watch their top-down “command” society efforts collapse around them. In the end Iraq and Afghanistan were social engineering failures, not military ones.

The repeated failures at post-war nation building have, though, been laid squarely at the feet of our military. After their grand schemes failed, schemes built on the idea of the perfectibility of man as an interchangeable widget, the expert class threw in the towel on the entire project of American global interventionism.

“Interventionism doesn’t work” they said, “We’ve learned there are no military solutions, we can’t be the world’s policeman.” From the left and increasingly from the right, the worldview became dominant. But American force did its job. American force worked. It was the philosophical conceits under which nation building had been undertaken that were a failure.

Rather than try to understand what had gone wrong, the foreign policy expert class threw up their hands and declared the job impossible, tarring as discredited the very idea that America could exert positive force on the world since their preferred method had failed. The political right absorbed this lesson uncritically, adopting the establishment's conclusion without questioning its premise.

We now find ourselves with significant portions of both domestic political spheres who take it as granted that American intervention on the global stage can only bring about disaster and ruin… Disaster and ruin for the foreign nations, as the left would have it, or disaster and ruin for ourselves as those on the right would.

Donald Trump did not accept this consensus. Regardless of one’s thoughts about him otherwise, it’s difficult to deny that our President is an optimist when it comes to America’s place on the international stage. He was forged in a Cold War world, where there are good guys and there are bad guys and we know we’re not the bad guys. Not content to merely steward America’s decline into irrelevancy as he believed his predecessors had done, he set about throwing around America’s weight and hauling the West kicking and screaming into global relevancy once again. America has always been powerful. Trump hasn’t changed that.

What he’s changed is America’s willingness to use that power again, unhindered by the dour words of the foreign policy “expert” class. In Venezuela, rather than play the diplomatic game as it had been played for decades, Trump chose to cut the head off of the snake by whisking Maduro from his home and into American custody to face justice for his crimes against his own people and against ours. In Iran, rather than content himself with playing the usual political posturing as had been done for decades before him, Trump chose to cut the Gordian Knot by treating the Islamic Republic’s regime as the enemy of America that it has so frequently and loudly announced itself to be.

The difference between this administration and its predecessors is what happens after the force is applied. The Bush administration toppled Saddam in three weeks and then spent twenty years trying to construct what came next. Trump toppled Maduro and went home. In Iran, the president has been explicit: he has told the Iranian people to “seize control of your destiny” and “take over your government.” The White House has said openly that what follows is in the hands of Iranians, not American reconstruction teams. The force is the same. The conceit that we should manage what comes after is gone.

Trump is reasserting America’s place as the world’s foremost guarantor of peace through strength, not the illusion of peace through hollow words and quiet submission to “diplomatic realities” or “international law.” And our European allies have begun to take note: French President Emmanuel Macron has begun to talk tough, saying in a recent speech:

And in Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz stated grimly that "the international order based on 'rights and rules' is currently being destroyed," continuing:

As Walter Russell Mead put it on X: "Trump has won the ideological battle with Europe. If a generation of Europeans hadn't blinded themselves to this hard but necessary truth, the world, the EU and the transatlantic relationship would be better off."

But while Trump's return to a more forceful policy has begun to stiffen the backbones of our European allies, it has been met with much wailing and gnashing of teeth by the foreign policy think-tank set… And perhaps for good reason. Should Trump succeed here, the moral and literal cowardice of their preferred policies will be laid bare for all to see, putting into jeopardy their comfortable sinecures at NGOs and their side gigs sponging tens of thousands in speakers' fees from American colleges and universities every year.

Vast swaths of people in the academic and foreign policy community have staked their reputations and livelihoods on the idea that America as a force for good in the world — a force that can be willing and able to use its force for good — is antiquated and dead. One needs only look at their fury and their panic at seeing their entire argument being put to the toughest of tests, the test of reality.

They've been wrong about what we can achieve at home through top-down directives from atop their ivory towers. They've been wrong about what occupation can construct abroad. And now they face the possibility if not the probability that their prescriptions for what ails global affairs have been just as misguided, and for the same reason: The world doesn't work in reality like it does on paper.

People are unpredictable, and now as always strength and a willingness to use it trumps honeyed words every time. The "expert class," with their usually self-awarded claims of expertise, have failed to either forecast world events or to adequately grapple with them when they occur. Should Trump succeed where they all have failed, the irrelevance that follows will have been well earned.

At the end of the day we live in a real world, a world with now over 8 billion independent actors spread out across it and operating as its moving parts. What time has taught us is that when it comes to inputs and outcomes there is no magic recipe to make things so, no matter how many graphs and charts we have on hand showing that it will be so.

You can't design outcomes, either at home or abroad, because you can't see into the mind and the soul of every person operating in either sphere. There are levers that can be pushed and pulled… A helping hand in times of trouble, a closed fist in times of strife… but policy in the real world must acknowledge and use both to succeed.

As Theodore Roosevelt said, America's policy should be to "speak softly and carry a big stick," but for too long we've had nothing but soft words and no stick to back them up. We are learning, right now, that America's power works as advertised.

Speaking as a conduit for establishment consensus, McConnell wrote that Hegseth “failed, as yet, to demonstrate that he will pass this test.” The desire to be a “change agent” was “not enough” to run an organization of three million personnel with a trillion-dollar budget. Senator Chris Murphy called Hegseth “dangerously and woefully unqualified” and Senator Tammy Duckworth said he lacked “the qualifications, the breadth of knowledge or the moral fiber to lead the greatest military on the face of the earth.”

Mattis had been confirmed 98–1 and Lloyd Austin was confirmed 93–2.

Hegseth had never managed an organization larger than a hundred people and his largest budget had been $16 million. He was a Fox News weekend host, a culture warrior who railed against the “woke military.” He was, according to many a serious person in Washington, fundamentally unserious.

Thirteen months later, we can evaluate that against his record.

Operation Absolute Resolve

In the early morning darkness on January 3, operators from the U.S. Army’s Delta Force and 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment converged on downtown Caracas. Their target was Nicolás Maduro, longtime enemy of both President Trump and the United States, indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice on charges of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking.

Operation Absolute Resolve had been planned and prepared for several months. A CIA team had been operating inside Venezuela, tracking Maduro’s movements through a source who had infiltrated his inner circle, building a picture of his habits. The extraction force had rehearsed a raid countless times on a full-scale replica of Maduro’s compound. Once ready, a massive air package of F-22s, F-35s, F/A-18s, EA-18G Growlers, B-1 bombers, E-2 Hawkeyes, and drones suppressed Venezuelan air defenses across the country while the assault force targeted the Presidential palace.

With Chinese diplomats just a few rooms over, Maduro was black-bagged before he could reach his safe room. His wife later told interrogators heard aircraft outside just minutes before American forces breached the compound. Thirty two Cuban commandos from Maduro’s personal security detail were discombobulated and killed. Maduro and his wife were transported to the USS Iwo Jima, then to Guantanamo Bay, and finally to New York, where they were arraigned in Manhattan federal court. “I am the president of Venezuela, I consider myself a prisoner of war.” Maduro said before a judge. No Americans were killed.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff described the operation: “We think, we develop, we train, we rehearse, we debrief, we rehearse again and again, not to get it right, but to ensure that we cannot get it wrong.” Hegseth, speaking to sailors aboard the USS John F. Kennedy two days later, called it “the most sophisticated, most complicated and most successful joint special operations raid of all time.”

It is hard to argue with that. The Maduro operation required seamless coordination across special operations, air and naval power, intelligence agencies, and federal law enforcement executed against a defended target in a hostile capital, at night, with minimal American casualties. Maduro famously said, “Come and get me. I will be waiting at Miraflores!” Sec. Hegseth got him.

The same man that Mitch McConnell said had not demonstrated the capacity to pass the test.

Arsenal of Freedom

If the Maduro raid was the most visible achievement, the acquisition reform agenda may prove to be the most ambitious.

On November 7, 2025, Hegseth delivered a speech at the National War College titled “The Arsenal of Freedom.” The first several minutes of his address were taken nearly verbatim from a speech Donald Rumsfeld had given the day before the world changed and the acquisition reform agenda was shelved indefinitely, September 10th 2001. Every Secretary of Defense for a generation has promised to fix the Pentagon’s broken procurement system and none have come close to succeeding.

It takes the Department of War, on average, years to move a technology from concept to delivery. The process is dominated by a handful of massive prime contractors operating with limited competition. Urgent wartime needs have historically required going around the official process entirely. As Hegseth said: “We shouldn’t have to go outside the process to make it work.”

He scrapped the Defense Acquisition System and replaced it with a new one, the Warfighting Acquisition System, focused on speed. He eliminated the Joint Capability Integration and Development System requirements process, created Portfolio Acquisition Executives to replace program executive officers, mandated commercial-first procurement, and restructured foreign military sales by moving the Defense Security Cooperation Agency from the policy office to the acquisition office. He launched the BOND initiative which embedded over a hundred executives, including seventy-two former CEOs and COOs from companies like Apple, Microsoft, Ford, and Tesla, directly into government.

The Aerospace Industries Association called it “an ambitious, long-needed overhaul.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Defense and Aerospace Council praised the removal of barriers that “have, for too long, slowed innovation.” Applied Intuition, a defense-tech startup, called it “the most important step” the Pentagon could take to accelerate capability delivery. Axios reported that few Pentagon actions in recent memory had drawn such uniform praise across stakeholders in military industry.

The Arsenal of Freedom tour that followed was the opposite of his Quantico rally weeks earlier. An ambitious technical roadmap for how America builds and buys weapons with no culture war overtones. And virtually no mainstream media coverage relative to the bench press videos, or the tattoos.

Iran

And now, as of this writing, the United States is waging a comprehensive military campaign against Iran’s military infrastructure, with overwhelming operational success though details are still emerging. Under Hegseth’s leadership, the Department of War is simultaneously managing a complex campaign in the Middle East, helping to oversee a transition in Venezuela, and spearheading a generational overhaul of its own bureaucracy.

This is, by any measure, extraordinary for a department that is supposedly being run by an unqualified Fox News personality.

The Credibility Gap

So how did the people who evaluate these things get it so wrong?

The assumption that credentials predict competence. By the resume metrics that Washington uses to evaluate fitness for office, he was manifestly unqualified.

But credentialism tells you what someone has done, not what they can do. And the track record of credentialed defense secretaries is, to put it mildly, mixed. The resumes behind America’s most catastrophic military failures would pass Sen. McConnell’s test.

Hegseth’s predecessor Lloyd Austin was confirmed 93–2 and was the embodiment of bipartisan respectability. He was also responsible for the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, a crisis of competence that left thirteen American soldiers dead, stranded our citizens in a hostile country, and left an arsenal of billions of dollars in military equipment behind as a gift for the Taliban. It was, by nearly universal assessment, the worst American military humiliation in a generation.

Then, in January 2024, Lloyd Austin was covertly hospitalized for health complications due to prostate cancer surgery. He did not inform the President of the United States. He did not inform the his deputy secretaries or the National Security Council. The man at the head of the chain of command for the most powerful fighting force in human history was in the intensive care unit for days before the White House even knew he was there, and Biden did not learn of the cancer diagnosis for more than a week. This happened while the U.S. was actively weighing military strikes in the Middle East.

In the terms that matter, military success, the two figures are incomparable.

Granted, Hegseth has not played nice with the media. The “warrior ethos” rhetoric, bench press videos, the campaign against transgender troops, and renaming of the department are all irresistible provocations to mainstream media and Democrat lawmakers. The Signalgate scandal, in which he shared sensitive operational details over Signal hours before military strikes were executed, was low hanging fruit.

But the volume of coverage of the cultural and stylistic material created a trap. Having committed early to the narrative that Hegseth was unserious, critics could not pivot when this was emphatically and continuously disproven. The Arsenal of Freedom speech was covered in defense trade publications and largely ignored by prestige media. The operational planning behind the Maduro raid required months of quiet, competent coordination that didn’t fit the picture of Hegseth as a drunk idiot. The Iran campaign is being covered as a foreign policy story, with Hegseth’s role as the head of the orchestrating department barely acknowledged.

Institutional self-interest is also at play. Hegseth’s acquisition reforms are explicitly designed to break the power of incumbent stakeholders. The foreign policy establishment’s objection to Hegseth was never purely about his qualifications, it was clearly also about the fact that he threatens their structural position.

A Real Verdict

On January 24, 2025, Mitch McConnell said the desire to be a change agent was not enough. Thirteen months later, the guy he refused to endorse has a record more impressive than nearly any Secretary of Defense in recent memory by the only metric that should matter—performance.

The questions to ask are all simple: did the operations succeed, is his agenda substantive, and is the department more capable than when he arrived? The establishment has refused to ask these questions. It focuses on credentials and has substituted cultural objections for analytical ones when the credentialing argument proved insufficient.

A Fox News host went to war and the people who told you he couldn’t do it were wrong because they mistook their own discomfort for the national interest. This is a teaching moment and it should concern anyone who relies on establishment judgment to understand what is actually happening with the American government.

Every year that passes, demographic change transforms America and her media habits. We still have a great deal of the population that consumes media in a traditional fashion, but that change is speeding up, and soon it will be at a tipping point. The younger generations are entirely digital native, and even those who aren’t are increasingly sorted by the same forces.

When you consume most of your information on social media, like X/Twitter, the primary gatekeeper is the algorithm. You may arrive at a piece of content that is hosted somewhere: someone’s podcast, an article in the New York Post, or just a long tweet from someone that interests you, but the algorithm is what controls this. Very quickly, it learns who you are and what you want. In short time, it controls how you consume most of your information, sorting you into an algorithmic silo with other likeminded people.

In this way, we are all sorted into buckets. And because of algorithmic precision, those buckets can be much more niche and focused than ever before. No longer are we limited to “Republican” or “Democrat.” The algorithm can sustain a dozen distinct audiences that would have been impossible to maintain a decade ago.

What This Is Doing

When the primary driver of the information you consume is the algorithm, the primary driver of the type of person you become IS the algorithm. What you believe, who you trust, who you support. These were formerly questions answered by big, wide institutions like newspapers or political machines, but that role has shifted, and now belongs to the algorithm. In this environment, the institutions are leaning increasingly on the algorithms for relevance.

In this dynamic, our primary institutions are no longer brick and mortar, or even digital publications, but algorithmic ones. The algorithm is the institution. It is also terrain that someone else owns, which means building on it requires understanding that the ground can shift.

Consider 2024. An assortment of disparate podcasts (and some steering from campaign voices like Alex Bruesewitz) delivered young male voters to Trump in numbers that the RNC’s infrastructure could never replicate. No one at a think tank or a cable network decided to build it, the algorithm built it, sorting young men who watched Joe Rogan and Andrew Schultz and Adin Ross into our coalition.

This is why you see the weaknesses of our current political operations, and media. Societal change is accelerating, and narrative change is accelerating. The control that legacy gatekeepers had over nearly every element of this process is slipping. The gates of the gatekeepers close, and people simply build roads around them.

Conservative gatekeeping, in particular, seems to create the conditions with which it destroys the gatekeepers. The more rigidly the old guard defines who belongs, the more talent and energy flows into the algorithmic institutions that don’t require their permission.

What This Means for Media

Media is one of the most impacted areas of this shift. We now live in a world where creators have the tools to make content very easily on platforms like X, Substack, and YouTube. You no longer need an institution to be discovered. Audiences shrink dramatically and still support their respective niches. The algorithmic institutions, though smaller than the old coalitions, grow their own creator economies with durable audiences.

The institutional outlets remain, and they should, and they will. Legacy prestige and huge resources are definite advantages. The ability to fund long investigations, maintain dozens of writers and editors and producers and content teams, and convene audiences at a scale no individual creator can match are not trivial things, and the new media ecosystem is worse for pretending they are. But new media is now competing on substance and the best independent work is as compelling as anything coming from the institutions.

Where before, a creator or media figure needed institutional affiliation for legitimacy and distribution, they are now doing it on their own—or even creating newer, more nimble outlets. Because they are more involved with and products of the discourse, and because there is often more talent than the institutions can absorb, they find themselves with relevance and a real audience. Being an independent creator is now a very compelling path for both recognizable and insurgent media figures alike. The major outlet-to-Substack pipeline is practically written in stone, as seen with the WaPo layoffs.

What we now observe is that the big companies are and will continue to rely on this relevance. Lomez and Rufo and Doyle get shows on The Blaze. The White House brings roundtables of new and independent media to discuss major issues. The Ruthless guys signed with Fox News. And of course, the flagship example: Bari Weiss turned a controversial resignation at the New York Times into a Substack valued at $150 million and control over CBS News. Increasingly, and this trend will accelerate, institutional media will rely on new media for talent and relevance. Right now as a sort of farm league, but in the future I expect it to become an active partnership with roughly equal weight.

Why Substack Is Part of This

It must be said: Substack is a huge part of what enables all of this. There are other platforms that do what Substack does, but people default to Substack, and it’s a genuinely good product. It has combined the network power of social media with the infrastructure required to build your own media project easily and from scratch. It has been heavily embraced by so many established figures because the product works.

Substack is positioned to be the platform where the next generation of media is built. The structural advantages are real, because the moat is established.

But,

What Is Holding It Back

As of this writing, Chris Rufo and Mike Huckabee are the only conservatives in Substack’s Top 50. The rest of the leaderboard is dominated by a wave of anti-Trump Substacks launched by former mainstream media figures since the election, largely repackaging the same slop from their former employers. Whatever you think of this content, the structural result is that Substack’s discovery and ranking system produces a bland liberal monoculture at the top. Conservative creators, no matter how talented or how engaged their audiences, are functionally invisible within the platform’s own ecosystem.

Substack’s leadership has been committed to free expression, but the leaderboard and recommendation systems, by aggregating everything into a single ranking, reward the largest existing audiences rather than highlighting the best work within specific communities. No marketing project to highlight the work being done will offset this structural invisibility. The algorithm that is reshaping identity formation across the internet is, on Substack, still sorting people into one big pile.

I’m confident that the fix is ideological subcategories. Not to build better silos, but so we can deliberately replace invisible algorithmic sorting with visible, chosen ones.

With subcategories in the rankings, conservative creators become visible to conservative readers who may now only see a list of everyone they hate at the top. More creators across the political spectrum would be drawn to the platform because they can actually be discovered. Left-of-center writers benefit too because a heterodox liberal or a genuine policy nerd could actually break out of the tired, top heavy resistance blob and find their own audience in a subcategory that reflects what they actually do. Readers get more granular discovery. More content that is more engaging and diverse. Debate naturally ensues across adjacent subcategories, which drives more engagement and more use.

There is more to be done than just adding subcategories and doing a little ranking revision. Substack should give creators real customization, like the ability to make a publication look entirely like its own product and not like a Substack (still stigmatized as a blog.) The ecosystem’s moat is established, so why not give the keys to creators so that they can build something in an afternoon that looks truly professional? Once you do this, the remaining stigma around the platform dies. It reinforces the already-kingmaker brand by making it invisible, the most powerful thing a platform can do.

What Comes Next

The right has a new generation of creators building outside of the old gates and yesterday’s rules no longer apply. The algorithmic institutions are where identity is increasingly being formed and where the next generation of political and media leadership is being shaped.

The painful cycles of consensus and debate that once took a generation to sort out now take just a few years. Political identity is outgrowing the institutions that used to contain it, and becoming harder to control from the top down. The old coalition model where a few institutions define what people believe and everyone falls in line is beginning to give way to something more contested and ultimately more productive. And the talent pipeline is inverting: institutions will recruit from creators, not the other way around.

We’re building for that future—come write for us.

In a post on his Truth Social account confirming the death of Khamenei, the president stated directly that “The heavy and pinpoint bombing, however, will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” This message was echoed in his Saturday morning speech laying out the rationale for the campaign against the mullahcracy, one that he explicitly labeled a “massive and ongoing operation.” In that address, Trump explained the history of the Iranian regime’s anti-American antagonism and detailed exactly what kinds of targets American forces are focusing on. The president said that the operation was being carried out to “prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests,” and described exactly what America was planning to do to achieve that aim:

“We’re going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground… We’re going to annihilate their navy… And we will ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon.”

Trump has referenced the unmentionable phrase – regime change – multiple times since the campaign began, exhorting “the great proud people of Iran” to “seize control of your destiny” and “take over your government” after American bombs have stopped falling. He told them that “the hour of your freedom is at hand” and that “America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force.” The White House has been clear that the actual overthrow of the regime lies in the hands of the Iranian people, but also that regime change is a desirable end result. This sentiment has been met with support by many of the White House’s most vocal defenders, as well as those in the right’s hawkish and pro-Israel contingents. A brief, successful campaign would likely be embraced by the vast majority of the Trump movement, similar to how the capture of Maduro in Venezuela has been received.

Still, some of the president’s MAGA faithful, primarily those in the restrainer foreign policy camp, are unhappy with the administration’s kinetic action against Tehran. They believed that the 2024 Trump campaign promised “no new wars” and valued several of the president’s more restraint-minded Cabinet selections, including Vice President JD Vance and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Restrainers were put in place throughout the secondary and tertiary levels of the defense bureaucracy, further assuring this faction that Trump was indeed one of them. Now that the president has launched military operations against Tehran, long seen as a pet project of the hated neoconservatives, this faction sees betrayal. Predictions of a new quagmire – yet another ‘forever war’ in the Middle East, sapping our attention from the crucial question of China – abound on social media, as do arguments that this war is not in American interests.

These objections do not survive contact with the administration’s own strategy document. Decisive action against Iran has been telegraphed by the president for years. Preventing the Islamic Republic from getting nuclear weapons has been one of Trump’s few consistent foreign policy ideas, going back even to his pre-political days. That goal alone justifies the current campaign; stopping an apocalyptic, millenarian regime that despises America from getting the most devastating weapons in mankind’s arsenal is directly within our core national interests. Add on top of that the regime’s rapid and sizable buildup of ballistic missiles, including attempts to produce or source intercontinental and hypersonic varieties, as well as its status as the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism – killing over 1,000 Americans during its less than 50-year existence – and you have an airtight case for decisive action. Iran’s proxies have carried out attacks on American civilians and troops across the region and further afield, including in the United States itself. The regime has tried to assassinate several American government figures, even President Trump; that those plots were foiled does not make them any less dangerous. Iran has also operated within the Western Hemisphere more broadly, relying on anti-American regimes in Latin America for money laundering, smuggling operatives into the US under false passports, and building terror networks to threaten Washington closer to home.

Besides those very direct threats to our security, the mullahcracy is an integral part of the axis of enemies America faces in the 21st century. They are close military and economic partners with China and Russia, supplying the former with oil and the latter with drones that it uses against Ukraine on the battlefield. The sanctions evasion industry was essentially invented by Tehran and they have been undermining our economic penalties for decades, trading illicitly with our greatest foes and strengthening their ability to avoid one of America’s most powerful punitive tools. They trade intelligence, military technology, and key dual-use resources with these antagonistic actors, tying them ever-closer into a full-scale alliance structure. Eliminating the Iranian regime would deal a hammer blow to these more serious enemies, especially China, which is Tehran’s main customer for oil export. Cutting off Beijing’s ability to fuel its war machine with Iranian crude dramatically limits China’s scope of action and hampers its plans to eventually retake Taiwan by force. At the same time, removing the Iranian sanctions evasion nexus would allow any future penalties we apply to Beijing to be far more cutting and painful for the Chinese.

We do not defeat the enemy in Beijing simply by focusing myopically on Asia. The Chinese Communist Party is strengthened by the global network of bad actors that it heads; each lesser power in China’s orbit is useful as a force multiplier, a trading partner, and a distraction from what Beijing is trying to do: achieve regional, if not global, hegemony at the expense of the United States. The Venezuela operation and the current war against the Iranian regime must be viewed in that light to understand the White House’s broader rationale. In case of a major conflict with China, its allies in the Middle East, Latin America, and Eurasia will all be activated to diminish our ability to confront Chinese aggression directly and with undivided attention. Instead of surging our strength to the Indo-Pacific, Beijing wants us to be bogged down with various other conflicts in Europe, the Middle East, and even our own backyard. Removing or cowing the regimes in Tehran and Caracas eliminates two of the CCP’s primary means of power projection. Paradoxically, going after these lesser regimes is perhaps the best way we can deter and degrade the capabilities of our greatest foe.

This approach is not a neoconservative or globalist one. It is grounded in concrete American interests, recognizes the world for what it is, and limits American intervention to what is needed to achieve our objectives. And all of it was laid out for the world to see in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, published last December. The same document that the restrainer right praised as a vindication of their worldview laid the groundwork for exactly this operation. In that influential planning document, the basis for the current intervention in Iran is described clearly and cogently. For instance, one of the first security objectives laid out by the Trump team reads:

“We want to protect this country, its people, its territory, its economy, and its way of life from military attack and hostile foreign influence, whether espionage… destructive propaganda and influence operations… or any other threat to our nation.”

The Iranian regime has been a “hostile foreign influence” in America for nearly its entire 47-year existence, fomenting anti-American sentiment, supporting hostile groups, and engaging in “destructive propaganda and influence operations.” This makes it a prime target for the US government under this particular strategy. Shortly thereafter in the document, in a list of America’s “core, vital national interests,” the bullet point on the Middle East says the following:

“We want to prevent an adversarial power from dominating the Middle East, its oil and gas supplies, and the chokepoints through which they pass while avoiding the ‘forever wars’ that bogged us down in that region at great cost.”

Iran is the adversarial power seeking domination of the region – backed, of course, by Beijing – and routinely threatens key energy flows and maritime chokepoints, as they are doing now in the Persian Gulf and did in 2023 and 2024 via their Houthi proxies in the Red Sea. An Iran-centric Middle East, long the goal of the Obama-era foreign policy establishment, would not only be detrimental to our interests, it would be disastrous for them, all while greatly aiding the Chinese. Ending the regime is the only real way to secure those interests and leave the region behind as a suck of American blood and treasure. The admonition against ‘forever wars’, a staple of the MAGA foreign policy outlook, is being carefully observed in this case. Operation Epic Fury has been a triumph of America’s maritime and aerospace dominance, focusing on limited, concrete objectives and allowing our ally Israel and the Iranian people to shoulder the burden of the most direct anti-regime operations. The National Security Strategy centers burden-sharing and capable, independent allies as critical factors in our global security posture; Israel has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that it fits both criteria as well as any partner we currently have.

The restrainer right does not need to abandon its principles to support Operation Epic Fury, it simply needs to read its own national security strategy. This operation is not a betrayal of the president’s foreign policy instincts and predilections, but their full flowering. It does not distract from the problem of China, but takes concrete action to help diminish it. Defeating Iran’s malign ambitions is good for our friends, bad for our enemies, protects our vital interests, and removes a serious, deadly threat from the geopolitical chess board. Operation Epic Fury is what America First was always building toward.

New York Magazine recently published an article initially titled “Pizza Gate Was Not Real. Right?”, where Dan Brooks ostensibly discusses the recent tranche of files. However, while the piece is concerned with the details of the theory and viral supporting evidence, the author himself is primarily focused on defending the liberal order against the “well-documented conspiracy of morons.”

In both this article and others concerning similarly inconvenient sex scandals, we see progressive authors act more upset that the ruling class has been discredited—and the so-called ‘far-right’ proven correct—than they are with the scandal itself. This trend reveals a flaw in progressive self-conception and undermines the moral legitimacy of the regime.

The columnist begins with a summary of recently published documents and a characterization of Pizzagate. While the purpose of this article is not to delve into John Podesta’s art collection or Hillary Clinton’s dining habits, it must be emphasized that Brooks is unconcerned with the veracity of these claims.

In any case, the writer accurately describes this theory, which is “[based] on the belief that references to pizza were code for children who were used for sex,” before pointing to excerpts from the file which lend credence to this narrative. After listing out the evidence, Brooks expresses his primary concern: the DOJ files will vindicate and empower conspiracy theorists and racists.

The author contends that this force is a far greater threat to the nation than a cabal of billionaire pimps, racketeers, and traitors.

“...Fear of such people is fundamental to the experience of being an educated liberal in Trump’s United States, more frightening than a syndicate of pedophiliac celebrities, [and] financiers, ...because it operates in greater numbers.

According to the author, the real scandal is the empowerment of a “well-documented conspiracy of morons,” and not that a powerful financier trafficked women and state secrets for decades. He is entirely correct when he admits that the ‘educated liberal’ is terrified of losing narrative control. In moments of narrative crisis, the archetypal progressive becomes aware of the precarious nature of his position.

Nor is the New York Magazine article the only instance of this selective outrage. Infamous progressive activist Nick Lowles, who works as the chief executive at perfidious left-wing NGO Hope Not Hate, argued that the worst effect of the Grooming Gang scandal, which involved the sexual exploitation of thousands of ethnically British girls, was the empowerment of the far right.

In the November 2012 edition of Hope Not Hate’s magazine, the progressive activist wrote an article titled ‘Grooming- an issue we cannot ignore.’ Much like the Brooks article on Epstein, the author begins with the expected moral pieties before pivoting to his main concern: the far right.

Written just after the arrest of nine Pakistani Muslims for the systemic abuse of white British girls in Rochdale, Lowels laments how, “The British far right must be rubbing their hands in delight,” at the news of these horrible crimes. Later in the same piece, he adds:

“But if we are to prevent the likes of the British National Party, English Defence League and National Front benefiting from this then we need to prove to the public that we are concerned about these stories of grooming by both gangs and individuals...”

Seemingly, the British activist is more worried about losing political standing due to the poor behavior of left-wing client groups and the subsequent cover-up than the mass exploitation of native English girls.

Closing out the essay, the writer reiterates his claim. “If we continue to be too afraid to speak out then we are complicit in the on-going abuse of vulnerable young girls and we will only have ourselves to blame when racist groups benefit.”

Speaking years later, Lowles stated, “Child sexual abuse has long been a trope used by the likes of [far right activist] Tommy Robinson and the far right in their Islamophobic narratives about the Muslim community.” According to the progressive activist, the primary issue is the ascendancy of the supposed ‘Far-Right,’ and not the sickening abuse of minors.

Clearly, when these left-wing activists speak derisively of the ‘Far-Right,’ ‘racists’ or ‘conspiracy theorists,’ they are referring to the normal citizens rightfully outraged by both the relevant scandals and the excesses of liberal rule. Insults such as these are simply slurs used to punish political enemies.

This darkly ironic situation reminds me of a classic Norm Macdonald joke in which the now deceased comedian discussed the allegations against Bill Cosby with Jerry Seinfeld. As the pair drives along in Seinfeld’s vintage Porsche, Norm quips, “I mean, there’s a comedian, Patton Oswalt, he told me, ‘I think the worst part of the Cosby thing was the hypocrisy.’ And I disagreed. ... Yeah, I thought it was the raping.” While Macdonald delivered his line as a joke, we see the same issue at play: selective outrage over narrative embarrassment instead of the clearly monstrous abuse.

Assuming I am correct, the question arises, why do progressives react in this way? Progressives love to cast themselves as brave rebels against an indelible racist and “misogynist” system, but their self-conceptualization could not be more wrong. In other words, the two authors examined in this essay share the same politics as Chase Bank, General Electric, and the MI5. The progressive self-conception is a fabrication.

Brooks has written for some of the most prestigious media outlets in America, including the New York Times and the Atlantic. Nick Lowles and Hope Not Hate rake in millions of dollars in grants while policing British politics, in a role similar to that of the ADL. Neither one of these men is a renegade or genuine anti-establishment figure; they are slaves to power.

Therefore, an attack on institutions such as the DOJ or the British Constabulary is an attack on these men. However imperfect, the “well-documented conspiracy of morons” represents a genuine challenge to the regime. Not only is the ‘Far-Right’ critiquing the same system these men depend on, but the supposed racists are true enemies of the regime, highlighting a painful and obvious contradiction within the progressive mind.

Ultimately, both Lowels and Brooks are correct; both the Grooming-Gang and Epstein scandals have discredited the regime and lent credence to the right-wing critics of the ruling class. As their political enemies, we cannot allow the ruling class to escape their complicity in these horrific crimes.

J. Burden is a Gen Z podcaster and writer, best known for his eponymous interview show. The Virginia-based commentator has published over 430 discussions with a wide range of conservative, traditionalist, and dissident thinkers. His writing can be found on Substack, either on his personal page or at the Old Glory Club.

“the deepest bonds that nations [can] share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization”

The shared history and cultural identity that Secretary Rubio speaks of is an important point, and one that I think often gets framed incorrectly when we discuss the dangers of mass migration into Western countries. This conversation, often framed along racial lines, is better understood as a cultural and historical issue, and arguing from this vantage is the stronger position.

Generally, arguments against state-enabled mass-migration boil down to what would best be described as “racial essentialist” arguments. Purveyors of “Great Replacement Theory” put the issue as being an attempt to literally replace the White populations of Europe and The United States with people of other races, as a direct attack on White people as a racial entity.

This argument is unhelpful, as overtly racial arguments tend to be, because among other reasons, it assumes that races are a genetic monolith and that the “elites” (whose identity varies based on the preferred bugaboo of the conspiracy theorist telling the tale) are trying to wipe out the White folk because they hate them for being White and for their culture.

It is, I would argue, the cultural aspect of this theory that actually has some teeth to it… but not necessarily for the reasons that Great Replacement theorists believe.

Where a new population comes from and what race they are shouldn’t matter. What matters is that as a new population, they aren’t beholden to the formative historical or cultural molding that the traditional “native” populations were.

Rather than viewing themselves as heirs to a Spanish or a French or an English (etc…) identity, these immigrants arrive fully formed into the nation as a separate cultural group beholden only to the governing entities that gave them citizenship. In the EU this government is often the EU itself, and what better population could a supranational organization looking to consolidate centralized power in itself and away from its constituent parts wish for than a large and increasing population that’s beholden to the EU itself for their continued presence in these lands?

The EU even positions itself as the protectors of these people, standing between them and the frustrated native populations who increasingly favor policies of deportation and a return to national sovereignty over continued submission to the EU. In the EU’s constituent countries, and in America as well, the extreme left similarly positions themselves as the “voice” of these outsiders, winning their allegiance once again as their protectors and benefactors.

In America, the dynamic is structurally similar, even if its institutions differ. There is no singular body playing a role on the scale of the EU, but the net effect is replicated by an extensive latticework of NGOs, local sanctuary policies, and the broader Democratic coalition’s infrastructure. Immigrants arrive lacking tangible roots in the revolutionary tradition, constitutional inheritance, and the broader cultural negotiation that produced the American identity. They are immediately claimed by political actors whose power depends on an ever expanding mass of people whose allegiances lie not with that American inheritance but instead with the governing apparatus that brought them in and propped them up.

The welfare state, the asylum bureaucracy, the nonprofit resettlement complex and other NGO shenanigans, these become the connective tissue between the newcomer and our country. They replaced the old civic and cultural integration mechanisms that once molded immigrants into Americans. The result here is the same as in Europe: a population whose loyalty lies not with a nation as a cultural and historic symbol but instead with the administrative state that lords over it.

So a replacement has happened, but its ethnicity is immaterial to the project. What has been replaced is the ties of which Marco Rubio spoke, ties to shared history, culture, and language that root a people in the legacies of their forebears.

When we allow the mass migration argument to be one centered on race rather than on history and culture, we both miss the true concern with the migration and make it all the easier to bat away the arguments against it as the mere ravings of racists.

People of all races can be heirs to western cultural ideals. We’ve seen many groups and people over the years successfully embrace them as their own and integrate both into America, and yes, into Europe too. But not all can or will, and as stewards of our individual national cultural heritages we must be ever watchful for those whose loyalties lie with larger supranational projects whose collectivist existences are mortally threatened by individual national cultural identities.

It is better, morally and philosophically, to understand that the replacement of a common western culture isn’t a question of race. It is a question of pride in culture and of place and a willingness to consciously exclude those who would work to drown it in the ocean of “Internationalism.”

It’s time to leave in the dustbin of history the crises of confidence that have led so many to take shelter in “Internationalist” dead-ends as protection from ourselves after World War II. Be proud of who you are not because of the color of your skin or of your grandfather’s skin, be proud of who you are because of the society and culture you were born an heir to… and of the grandfather who helped to build and shape it, who worked and fought to pass it on. Just as in the past, embrace those who “yearn to breath free”, so long as that yearning comes with understanding of the sacrifices and duties that created and nourish that air.

Jealously guard it. The alternative is a population rooted only in the now of the political landscape, a population unmoored from the hard-won lessons of history, beholden only to the present governing bureaucracy… a population utterly available to anyone who promises to protect their place in a country whose history they have no knowledge of or interest in.

Not San Francisco. San Antonio, a military town in a red state that hasn’t elected a Dem to statewide office in decades.

There has been minor hand wringing, but within the national conservative hivemind, not much noise about it.

Instead, Republicans are in a triumphalist moment. Trump 2.0 has delivered on foreign policy, immigration, and institutional reform at a pace that would have been unimaginable four years ago. The GOP holds the White House, has remade the judiciary, and forcefully driven the Democratic Party into the sea of identity crisis. The left appears broken, leaderless, and reduced to performative outcry.

However…

Over the last two decades, America has moved further left than most Americans in 2004 could have ever imagined. Culturally, institutionally, legally, the transformation has been enormous and largely irreversible. Same sex marriage, DEI policy, the Overton window, even our perception of the role of government has shifted so far that Bill Clinton in the 90s would be well to the right of current Democrats.

This is no accident. Behold the progressive project, and it worked. Over two decades, the only meaningful speedbump has been President Trump.

National transformation, however compelling, isn’t the whole story. Underneath the federal back-and-forth, there is a local project expanding that almost no one is talking about.

The socialists understood something that the rest of the left is still learning and that the right rarely considers at all. The federal government changes hands, but city councils are mostly ignored. Housing policy is local. Zoning is local. Policing, transit, schools, public budgets—all local. Decisions are being made in rooms that most voters never enter and most conservatives have abandoned entirely.

DSA strategy isn’t new, but the results are accelerating. In 2017, thirty-five DSA members held elected office in the United States. Today that number exceeds 250, a sevenfold increase in eight years, with nine out of every ten elected after 2019. San Antonio is part of this national pattern. So are the seven DSA aldermen in Chicago, the four in Portland. Small wins individually. Collectively, a growing footprint in precisely the places the right has retreated from.

Then there’s New York.

Mamdani’s election was the Big Thing. Within weeks of taking office he canceled a planned expansion of 5,000 NYPD officers, let some dozen homeless die in a cold snap, and began restructuring city agencies around an affordability agenda drawn straight from DSA priorities.

The right treated this as an alarming curiosity, a blue-city novelty and the predictable result of Curtis Sliwa splitting the vote. Now he’s the cable news boogeyman for an abandoned metro we have no intention of fighting for. But he’s part of the pattern.

The DSA is not running a national campaign. It is building municipal infrastructure, city by city. It is doing precisely what the right has failed to do for a hot minute.

As a movement, the left has not aged out of the end of history. The mainstream Dems still believe in demographic inevitability, national elections, and a focus on federal power. But that faction is increasingly exhausted. They lost to Trump twice in the popular imagination even when they won the electoral college once. Their national bench is thin and they can’t decide on whether they’re the party of the working class or the party of institutional progressivism.

But the DSA wing has moved beyond all of this. Not all of them yet, but the ones who are building in San Antonio and are running New York City have figured out something that the DNC has not. Durable power can be built from the bottom, where it’s cheaper and where the right pays far less attention (and where the DNC is probably less territorial.)

The conservative response to this has basically been nonexistent, because the conservative media ecosystem rarely gives a shit about local political infrastructure beyond scary stories for our Beltway magazines. We fight over congressional seats, build think tanks in D.C. to write white papers read only by ourselves, and argue about whether Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens are warriors for truth or crazy and compromised. Meanwhile, we leave city councils, school boards, and municipal elections to whoever shows up.

I wrote last year about the broken windows of American government. The thousands of small civic failures and local institutional collapse. The argument was that American national decline is rooted in the cumulative neglect of local governance.

What San Antonio and New York and Chicago and countless other places have made clear is that those broken windows don’t stay empty. Someone is filling them, and the people filling them are increasingly DSA members who understand that a city council seat in red Texas is worth more than 100 op-eds about “The future of the left.”

The right needs to seriously reckon with whether it wants to actually contest the ground where Americans live or whether it's content to win the presidency every eight years and wonder why the country keeps moving left even when Republicans are in power.

The DSA has made its decision.

President Trump awarded the Medal of Honor to one of the servicemembers who captured Maduro. He gave the Legion of Merit to a Coast Guard rescue swimmer who pulled Americans from floodwaters in Texas. He honored the family of Iryna Zarutska. He presented the Purple Heart to the National Guardsman attacked in D.C. And he concluded by placing these individual acts of courage within a civilizational narrative stretching from our founding to the present day.

The speech painted the picture that the national project is the sum of individual productive ambitions directed toward something greater than the self. The servicemember, the Olympian, the rescuer, the worker—these are the people who built “thirteen humble colonies into the pinnacle of human civilization and human freedom.” Their patriotism is doing hard things well.

This is the most interesting thing the Republican Party has said in a long time.

Trump did not argue that America is great because it holds the right opinions, he argued that America is great because Americans “ventured out across a daunting and dangerous continent,” “mastered the world’s mightiest industries,” “shattered history’s monstrous tyrannies,” and “lifted humanity into the skies on the wings of aluminum and steel.” Achievement is the unifying idea. It is the claim that productive contribution to the national enterprise is itself the highest form of civic life.

Then came: “For years, they were forgotten, betrayed, and cast aside. But that great betrayal is over.” The previous regime’s failure was not incompetence or bad governance but a failure of honor. Refusing to recognize the people who actually build and sustain the country unless they bought in to the ideological ponzi scheme.

Under the Republican framework presented Tuesday night, you are a patriot if your individual excellence serves the nation. The soldier, the astronaut, the factory worker, the rescuer—these people are honored for what they do and what they accomplish. Their productive ambition is the substance of American greatness. The national project is built, brick by brick, with their hard work.

What we have seen from the left for many years is a conditional patriotism. Though you may accomplish extraordinary things, your reputation depends on your alignment with a specific set of political commitments. The activist is elevated above the builder and the correct opinion outranks the accomplishment. You are welcome in the national project only insofar as you are subservient to its current ideological demands, and those demands shift frequently enough that compliance may be never quite achieved.

You need not take my word for it. The proof arrived mere hours before the speech from our dear friends at The Athletic, the New York Times’ national sports arm.

Twenty members of the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team—fresh off a gold medal victory that had, for one brief afternoon, united America by beating the perfidious Canadians at their own game—accepted an invitation to attend the State of the Union. They had just won for the United States on the world stage, the most patriotic thing an athlete can do. Hours later, The Athletic ran a column arguing that the players had been reckless in choosing to stand in the House Chamber next to the wrong president.

The article conceded the gold medal was real and the victory was thrilling. But it argued the players had “handed over the power of unity” and become “pawns” by celebrating in proximity to Trump. Their historic triumph, readers were informed, now “must compete for attention with their reckless after-party.” The piece asserted that athletes must understand that “who’s celebrating you, and why they’re doing it and how they’re doing it, matters more” than the achievement itself.

This is the left’s model of patriotism: You won gold for your country, but you celebrated with the wrong people, so your civic standing is diminished. The victory only matters if you maintain proper ideological distance from the president. The president! You were supposed to be a symbol of unity, but unity of what? Unity in their ideology, apparently.

We see in all of this a disagreement about whether the country is built by people who do things or by people who believe things.

Maybe productive individualism alone does not generate the solidarity a nation needs, or “be excellent and the country benefits” is thin for a governing philosophy. But notice that everyone Trump honored was someone whose individual excellence was directed outward: toward fellow citizens in an emergency, toward soldiers on a battlefield, toward a country that needed defending. It is a post-libertarian conservatism that focuses on the honor of useful work for your fellow citizens.

Think about the two visions for America on display last night. One party showed you servicemembers, Olympians, and rescue swimmers and said: this is what matters. The other party says that what matters is saying the right things.

There have always been small-l libertarians and capital-L libertarians. Small-l libertarians say nice things about individual liberty, economic freedom, and small government. They may emphasize the libertarian-nature of the U.S.’s founding documents and the Framers’ philosophy. Some will indicate affinity for libertarianism in public opinion surveys, which puts their numbers at about one-in-ten Americans.

Small-l libertarians, however, are distinct from capital-L libertarians. The capital-L is reserved for those of us who participate in the libertarian movement and support its political organization, the Libertarian Party (LP). Even here, however, there are splits: Not everyone involved in the libertarian movement thinks the LP is a worthwhile enterprise. There are, of course, other libertarian organizations that seek to translate libertarian ideas into tangible policy results: the Cato Institute, Stand Together, and the Reason Foundation (where I work as a senior editor) are a few of them. But for those who wish to elect actual libertarians to positions of power in the government—so that they can take a hatchet to it directly—the LP is the only game in town.

And that’s where the frustration comes in, since at an organizational level, the LP has struggled greatly in recent years to present itself as something that appeals to libertarians, let alone to persuadable voters of other stripes. Fresh off a bout of considerable unpleasantness that has undeniably weakened the party—some would say sabotage is a more accurate term; bear with me—it’s clear the LP should re-position itself as an organization that sticks closely to libertarian principles and genuinely offers something distinct to gettable voters who are disenchanted with the major parties.

Yes, Republican and Democratic candidates should fear that they are about to lose votes to the LP and adjust their own positions accordingly. If the LP plays a role in forcing unwilling major parties to recalibrate toward liberty even slightly, that’s a win for the movement—but it is not by itself a win for the LP, which should focus on its own metrics: ballot access, electing state and local candidates, and general election performance in big campaigns.

What the LP cannot and should not do is sell out its own candidates to advance the interests of the plausibly more freedom-friendly major party figure, which is usually presumed to be the Republican. You may think that goes without saying; of course a political party should make electing its own candidates the highest goal by default. Sadly, this was not the view of the LP during 2024 presidential campaign.

A brief history lesson: The party was founded in 1971 and experienced its biggest success in 1980, earning just over one percent of the vote. The LP did not improve its performance in the subsequent decades, but by 2012, it had found a respectable-seeming standard-bearer: Gary Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico. When Johnson re-ran in 2016—selecting as his running mate another socially liberal former Republican governor, Bill Weld of Massachusetts—it seemed like the stars had finally aligned.

Unfortunately, the Johnson-Weld ticket was in many ways disappointing, despite the historic opportunity to capitalize on dissatisfaction with the major party options: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Johnson developed a reputation as gaffe prone—even if the Aleppo moment was frankly unfair to him—and Weld’s contempt for Trump was so great that he seemed to fear that his own ticket’s success might hurt Clinton too much. (Note to Libertarians running for office: Do not evince a preference for Republicans or Democrats—when you do that, you are making the case for a candidate other than you.)

Despite these issues, Johnson had the best showing for an LP presidential candidate in history: 4.5 million votes, and more than 3 percent of the overall popular vote.

The 2020 campaign, which took place in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, was always going to be a challenge for third party candidates, who suffer horrible difficulties in drawing attention to their activities. Nevertheless, candidate Jo Jorgensen—who was virtually unknown except to party insiders—managed a respectable 1.8 million votes, and better than 1 percent of the popular vote.

Yet here the seeds of destruction were sowed: A faction of the party convinced itself that its nominees had not been libertarian enough. This was a fair knock against Johnson and Weld; it was not fair to Jorgensen whatsoever. The faction believed it earnestly, however. They called themselves the Mises Caucus. They got organized, and in 2022, they seized control of the LP and installed one of their leaders, Angela McArdle, as chair.

In the years that followed, the LP’s social media feed became more eager to engage in the kind of culture war battles that so animate the American right, and more favorable to Trump. For her part, McArdle seemed smitten with independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who opposed COVID-19 era mandates but was otherwise not particularly libertarian. McArdle eventually invited Trump to speak at the 2024 Libertarian Convention, and allegedly bartered with him for the party’s tacit support, securing his pledge to free Ross Ulbricht—a libertarian cause célèbre—from prison.

Freeing Ross was an historic accomplishment for the LP. But in most other respects, the 2024 results were a huge disappointment. Having cozied up to Trump and RFK Jr.—and having worked behind the scenes to subvert the party’s own presidential candidate, Chase Oliver—the LP lost significant ground. Oliver came in fifth place, after Trump, Kamala Harris, RFK Jr., and Green Party candidate Jill Stein. This was the party’s worst ever placement. Moreover, the LP failed to qualify for the ballot in all 50 states, a major blow for the party’s organizational effort.

For McArdle, however, it was all part of the plan: Trump did free Ross, and he also promised to put a Libertarian in his Cabinet (with a capital-L!). When I interviewed her on Rising, the news show I co-host for The Hill, she seemed ecstatic about the results, and suggested she might try to do something like this again in the future.

But by February of 2025—just a few weeks into Trump’s second-term—McArdle resigned as chair following accusations of financial mismanagement. Michael Heise, her designated successor, failed to win the race to replace her, and the Mises Caucus abruptly lost its hold over party leadership. The new folks in charge have a lot of work to do in terms of restoring previous funding levels, qualifying for the ballot in all 50 states, and recruiting quality candidates who were scared off by the Mises Caucus.

Yet this must be their goal. It’s the only way forward for the party.

Under Mises Caucus leadership, the LP became far, far, far too friendly with the right, the Republican Party, and the Trump administration. It would be one thing for the LP to pull its punches if it were up against a truly libertarian-leaning Republican, like Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) or Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.). Quite obviously, the LP should not run against either of those two, and if Paul or Massie were somehow to become the GOP presidential candidate, then the LP should cross-endorse.

But except for that astonishingly unlikely situation, the LP should robustly challenge the two party duopoly by running its own candidates and standing by them.

Robby Soave is a senior editor at Reason magazine and the host of Rising for The Hill.

The traditional symbols of sovereignty are monopoly of violence, control of territory, taxation and economic power, service provisions, and international influence. CJNG and other cartels operate with all of these. They field a paramilitary force with drones, anti-tank weapons, armored vehicles, and a willingness to engage the Mexican state military directly. They operate as the dominant authority in their territory, controlling all elements of daily life. Extortion networks parallel a tax system. They distribute food and provide security. They operate in dozens of countries. These cartels are not criminal gangs, they are multinational enterprises with foreign policy and institutions. They are nationlike.

The frameworks we have would call this a state. What do you do when a sovereign country exists with a litany of national tumors, these cartels? You get Mexico. The only reason we engage with Mexico as a legitimate country is out of diplomatic convenience and a fear of intervention. It’s a fiction that persists out of our cowardice and in support of our convenience. We treat the border as a demarcation between two sovereign countries when, on the southern side, the operating authority is, in places, not a true state but instead a designated terrorist organization generating billions from a trade that kills tens of thousands of Americans annually.

The truth is, the cartels are their own nations. Bastardized, corrupt, disfigured ones perhaps, but nations nonetheless. And they are de facto at war with the United States.

The death of this cartel leader will be celebrated, but it is no victory for us. It is the kind of defeat that has been mistaken for victory for twenty years.

Cartel decapitation has done nothing to upset the “cartel equilibrium” in Mexico. There is no reason to believe this will be any different, and strong reason to believe that things will get worse. These organizations, while resilient, are prone to violent fragmentation. Each disruption in equilibrium results in a conflict for existence, relevance, and control. You do not see a succession war, rather thirty fought simultaneously across multiple territories.

This does not mean that decapitation fails because leaders are unimportant. Instead, decapitation assumes that these cartels are simply weeds to be trimmed rather than threats to be destroyed. You can kill every kingpin one at a time for the next fifty years and you will be no closer to solving the problem. You must destroy the ecosystem that produces them: uncovered territory, limitless revenue, a corrupt Mexican state, and the absence of a superior force to restore order.

We should not invade and occupy Mexico. It is not Iraq or Afghanistan. Those were distant wars fought for abstract goals in faraway, foreign lands, sustained by optimistic theories of democratic transformation where it may not belong. Every honest conservative has reckoned with this and drawn the correct lessons.

The lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan are not that American power must be restrained, or that its use is inherently foolish. The lesson is that American power must be applied in the service of concrete American interests, against real threats, with achievable objectives. By every one of these metrics, we must destroy the cartels.

The Mexican drug trade has killed tens of thousands of Americans every year. It is persisted by designated foreign terrorist organizations. No one disputes this dynamic. The only dispute is what to do.

We do not have to rebuild Mexican governance. We merely have to destroy the operational abilities of a designated terrorist organization operating inside, on, and beyond America’s border. We have spent decades developing the most sophisticated counter network capabilities in human history. We built the hammer to break Al-Qaeda and ISIS. The tools exist, but we have refused to act. It is time we turned that hammer on our enemies down south.

This would send a hemispheric message. For two hundred years, American strategic doctrine has rested on the idea that the Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood, and our responsibility. We do not tolerate hostile powers operating in it. President Monroe declared it, Teddy Roosevelt operationalized it, now Donald Trump resurrects it. The cartels are the most dangerous hostile power in our hemisphere since Soviet missiles were emplaced in Cuba. It is past time to act accordingly.

Until we act, the machinery of death will continue unabated. The drug trade will continue to flow north, and tens of thousands of Americans will lose their lives every year.

The United States is the most powerful nation in the history of the world. We possess the most capable military ever assembled by human civilization. Our intelligence can track a single human being across the surface of the earth. We have the legal authority, the moral standing, and the strategic imperative to act. America has spent two decades watching a network of narco-states consolidate power on our doorstep, killing Americans by the thousand, while Washington furrows its brow and murmurs about restraint and patience.

This is the failure of empire. Paralysis. Cowardice pretending itself prudence.

The cartels are not a Mexican problem that inconveniences America. They are an American problem that wears Mexico like a skin suit. We don’t need to ask permission, we’re the United States of America. It’s time to act like it.

El Mencho’s death should be the beginning.

Early coverage is proceeding along expected lines. Rubio “offered a more supportive message than Vance.” He drew “one red line” on European decline. He “reassured” world leaders. Meanwhile, the contrast between Rubio and Vance is already being painted by social media pundits building up their guy for 2028.

The real story is more important and more durable than any of these details.

Since Trump emerged as the driver of conservative priorities, the right has been caught between two positions. One camp wants to preserve the post-1945 alliance-heavy consensus and the assertive American role abroad. The other views that system as a relic and wants to turn America’s focus inward. Neither side has found a resolution.

Rubio offered one on Saturday. And it is likely to become the anchor of the party’s foreign policy rhetoric going forward.

The substance of his speech was populist-right. Rubio called the post-Cold War consensus a “dangerous delusion.” He attacked the “climate cult.” He called mass migration a civilizational threat. He framed national security as an existential issue, not merely a budget outlay.

“Armies do not fight for abstractions,” Rubio said. “Armies fight for a people, a nation, a way of life.”

No secretary of state has spoken in these terms in modern memory. This was the populist right’s civilizational language delivered from Europe’s premier security forum.

But, unexpectedly, Rubio did not follow the diagnosis to its usual conclusion. He did not tell the Europeans they are on their own and that America will retreat into isolation across the Atlantic.

Instead, he called America “a child of Europe” and he said a transatlantic divorce “is neither our goal nor our wish.”

Vice President Vance’s 2025 Munich speech offered no such reassurance. Vance lectured the room on censorship and European moral failure and the audience heard hostility. Rubio delivered a similar civilizational critique but without the harsh isolationist framing. In line with the administration, but with the right touch of diplomacy.

Importantly, Vance's confrontation last year was necessary to make Rubio's partnership offer credible. You cannot extend a hand until the other side believes you are willing to walk away. Rubio delivered the finished product.

He told Europe to spend more, defend its own civilization, and stop managing its decline. But, critically, he promised to stay.

The most telling detail is how the Europeans responded. To a degree not yet seen with a Trump administration, they bought in. Rubio was met with a standing ovation. Von der Leyen called the speech “reassuring.” Merz and Macron both declared the old world order finished—in implicit concession to Rubio’s framing.

British Prime Minister Starmer agreed the West should not sit in “the warm bath of complacency.”

They heard a secretary of state open to working together, not abandoning our partnership. And, more so than ever, they accepted the terms.

This is the way forward that can hold the Republican coalition together and secure wins abroad. That is why Munich matters beyond the headline and beyond the moment. Rubio delivered a diplomatic address that threaded the needle between two of the most combative factions on the Right. Indeed, he has shown us what the future of Republican foreign policy looks like.

Civilizational confidence abroad, reasonable commitment to our allies in Europe, and an end to the post-Cold War assumptions that the entire West clung to for too long.

The Republican foreign policy debate is not over, but now we know what direction it moves in. And the Europeans, for the first time in years, seem ready to agree.