Late last year, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul vetoed a bill that would have required two-person operating crews on New York City subways, despite heavy pressure from transit unions. While the veto looked like a win for fiscal sanity, two-person train crews—and needlessly expensive transit systems—are likely here for the foreseeable future.
The bill, which would have mandated both a driver and a conductor on each train, cleared the state Legislature somewhat unexpectedly last year. It was pushed by the Transport Workers Union (TWU) to permanently codify more union jobs into state law.
Most NYC subway lines already operate with two-person crews under the current labor contract between the TWU and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Hochul’s veto stopped two-person crews from spreading systemwide, and it theoretically left the door open for the topic to be renegotiated in future labor talks, rather than being cemented into state law.
NYC’s two-person system is a global outlier. An analysis from New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management found that just 6 percentof the world’s commuter rail lines use two-person crews, with most operating safely with a single driver for decades.
Although unions insist two-person crews are essential for safety, evidence suggests otherwise. The Manhattan Institute’s Adam Lehodey has documented that London, which uses one-person crews, operates one of the safest rail networks in the world. Research from the Association of American Railroads, which compared one-person trains in Europe to America’s multiperson freight train system, similarly found no evidence of a safety impact.
But, as TWU President John Samuelsen told The New York Times, “It doesn’t really matter to us what the data shows,” adding that a driver and a conductor make trips “visibly safer.”
The fight over crew size extends beyond New York. Under President Joe Biden, the Federal Railroad Administration enacted a rule mandating two-person crews for freight trains nationwide. While one might expect this rule to be repealed in a Republican administration, the GOP’s continued bear hug with organized labor has muddied the waters.
President Donald Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and FRA Administrator David Fink both voiced support for the Biden-era two-person crew rule during their confirmation hearings. During his time in the Senate, Vice President J.D. Vance co-sponsored—along with numerous other Republicans, including Sen. John Hawley (R–Mo.) and then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.)—the Railway Safety Act, which would have legislatively mandated two-person freight crews.
The contradiction is especially stark in rail policy, as Trump recently fired numerous Surface Transportation Board members, presumably in an effort to greenlight railroad mergers—the type of pro-railroad stance that collides with the administration’s pro-union crew-size priors.
Beyond failing to improve safety, two-person crews are substantially more expensive. Switching to one-person crews would save the MTA $442 million a year. That money could fund real safety improvements, such as the installation of platform doors, which provide a physical barrier between passengers and the train until the train has come to a complete stop. After platform doors were installed in Seoul, South Korea, annual subway deaths dropped from 70 to two.
If anything, Hochul’s veto merely gives new NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani more flexibility in future labor negotiations between the TWU and the MTA. Based on the mayor’s track record, it’s unlikely he’ll be a voice for one-person crews.
Given likely political support from both City Hall and the White House, two-person crews appear entrenched—and riders will keep paying for them.
In this vacuum of meaning, the key Administration personalities have taken to network television and social media, offering their own post-facto theories of the case. They have been like the sweepers in curling, trying to coax a runaway stone onto an advantageous track. The runaway stone, in this case, being Trump’s decision to attack, and everything that will come after.
Among Trump’s advisers, Rubio’s vision is the clearest. His intent is anti-Communist. Cuban officials, Rubio told NBC, “are the ones that were propping up Maduro. His entire, like, internal security force, his internal security apparatus is entirely controlled by Cubans.” The previous day, at Mar-a-Lago, Rubio had said, “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned.” Was that a war plan for Havana? If so, the President didn’t exactly sound persuaded. On Sunday night, Trump told reporters on Air Force One that, when it came to Cuba, “I don’t think we need any action,” because the country was already “ready to fall.” Trump also made some critical comments about the Presidents of Colombia (“a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States”) and Mexico (“has to get their act together”), which suggested that his gaze might be less methodically trained on the region’s Communist regimes.
Stephen Miller, meanwhile, indulged a grander historical view, of a renewed imperial program. “Not long after World War II the West dissolved its empires and colonies and began sending colossal sums of taxpayer-funded aid to these former territories,” he wrote on social media. “The West opened its borders, a kind of reverse colonization, providing welfare and thus remittances, while extending to those newcomers and their families not only the full franchise but preferential legal and financial treatment over the native citizenry. The neoliberal experiment, at its core, has been a long self-punishment of the places and peoples that built the modern world.” Speaking with Jake Tapper on CNN on Monday, he declared that the U.S. could seize Greenland if it wanted. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
Are the President’s intentions actually colonial, or more simply a hostage-taking kind of gunboat diplomacy? According to the Financial Times, the brother of Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim leader, had held talks last year with officials in Washington, a detail which offered a whiff of Cold War client-statism and raised the question of what Rodríguez might have promised them. Trump himself kept talking not about anti-Communism or narco-trafficking but about oil. On Air Force One, he said that “oil companies are going to go in and rebuild this system.” (The companies themselves said that they hadn’t been consulted; flooding the market with new supply would not be in the interests of corporate profits.) The President told the public that the rebuilding of Venezuela’s oil industry would take “billions” in infrastructure investment—in Venezuela, not the U.S. Curt Mills, editor of The American Conservative, observed, “Democratic talking points writing themselves right now.”
Vance’s general absence from the Venezuela initiative has been taken as an expression of his ideological identity. He is a dove, at least in the relative terms of Trumpworld, and this has been an operation for the hawks. But his more salient position may be as Trump’s political heir, and the Venezuela adventure is beginning to look like a very hard political sell. A CBS/YouGov poll taken before the attack found that seventy per cent of Americans opposed military action in Venezuela; a snap poll taken by YouGov just after Maduro’s capture showed that only thirty-six per cent of respondents “strongly or somewhat” supported the operation. If Trump means to persuade the American people of the wisdom of the attack by trying to bring them cheaper Venezuelan oil, then that will mean a far deeper entanglement in a conflict that he might prefer to treat as a hit-and-run. And then there’s the tricky international question of why, exactly, the U.S. is entitled to just take oil reserves off of Caracas in the first place. Rubio may have achieved a long-standing anti-Communist goal. Miller can celebrate a blow struck against the liberal order. But the likeliest person to inherit the Trump mantle was the one staying out of the frame. Vance had noted that there is a national anxiety “over the use of military force.” Grant that there is a moral dimension to that anxiety. There is also a political one. ♦
No matter how low one’s expectations were for 2025, the most striking thing about the year when Donald Trump became President again is how much worse it turned out to be.
Did we anticipate that Trump would come back to office wanting to rule as a king, consumed by revenge and retribution, and encouraged by sycophants and yes-men who would insure that he faced few of the constraints that hampered him in his first term? Yes, but now we know that bracing for the worst did not make the inevitable any less painful. In the future, historians will struggle to describe that feeling, particular to this Trump era, of being prepared for the bad, crazy, and disruptive things that he would do, and yet also totally, utterly shocked by them.
New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
A partial catalogue of the horrors of 2025 that not even the most prescient Trump-watcher could claim to have fully predicted: gutting cancer research in the name of expurgating diversity programs from the nation’s universities. Shutting the door to refugees—except for white Afrikaners, from South Africa. Empowering the world’s richest man to cut off funding for the world’s poorest children. Welcoming Vladimir Putin on a red carpet at an American Air Force base. Razing the East Wing of the White House, without warning, on an October morning. Alienating pretty much the entirety of Canada.
Your list might be different from mine. There is so much from which to choose. And that is the point.
Yet the biggest disappointment of 2025 may well have been not what Trump did but how so many let it happen. Trump has always been a mirror for other people’s souls, an X-ray revealing America’s dysfunction. If this was a test, there were more failing grades than we could have imagined.
On the first day of his second term, the President pardoned more than fifteen hundred violent rioters who sacked their own U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in a vain effort to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat. Even his Vice-President, J. D. Vance, had said that this was something that “obviously” shouldn’t happen; Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, later admitted that she had lobbied him not to go that far. But Trump didn’t listen. He was putting America on notice. The first outrage was a sneak preview of those to come: if there was a choice to be made, he would invariably opt for the most shocking, destructive, or corrupt option. And who was going to stop him?
This is why any obituary for 2025 requires a special shout-out to those whose craven folding to Trump might well have proved to be among the biggest bad surprises of the year—the law-firm managing partners and corporate executives and technology tycoons who decided to pay protection money to the President rather than stand up for the rule of law that enabled their great success in the first place. Eight long years ago, the story of the first year of Trump’s first term was the rearguard struggle over control of the Republican Party; this time, with Trump having long ago won the battle for the G.O.P., he has extended his hostile takeover far beyond the realm of partisan politics, advancing a vision of breathtaking personal power in which the President claims the right to determine everything from what appears on the nightly news to the place names on our maps to which laws passed by Congress should be followed and which can be ignored.
Just a year ago, it was still possible to envision a different course for Trump’s second term—to imagine that, while the President himself might really mean to carry through with his most radical plans, there remained strong forces in society to resist him. Republican leaders in Congress and the Trump-appointed conservative majority on the Supreme Court may yet prove to be something other than the willing handmaidens of democracy’s demise, but they have so far failed to do so. This past year’s disruptions are as much their work as Trump’s; without their acquiescence, as passive or unwilling as it has been at times, many of Trump’s most extreme acts would not have been possible. Just think about Senator Bill Cassidy, of Louisiana, a medical doctor who made much of the “assurances” he extracted from Trump’s vaccine-denying nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Kennedy won his confirmation vote, then broke the pledges he had made to get it. Cassidy has, in the tradition of the Senate, been deeply concerned ever since.
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch are joined by Reason reporter Eric Boehm to discuss Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest and the GOP coalescing around Vice President J.D. Vance as President Donald Trump’s successor. They analyze Sen. Rand Paul’s (R–Ky.) opposition to endorsing Vance as the party’s next standard-bearer, and whether this signals he will challenge Vance for the nomination in 2028. Katherine also shares what it was like attending the conference, plus her debate over marijuana legalization as the Trump administration moves to reclassify marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III.
The editors then turn to the bipartisan backlash over the latest Jeffrey Epstein file release, in which more than 500 pages were completely redacted, prompting Reps. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) to threaten charges of “inherent contempt” against Attorney General Pam Bondi. The panel also discusses the Trump administration’s seizure of additional Venezuelan oil tankers, plus the announcement of new military strikes in Syria. They dig into Minnesota’s widening welfare fraud scandal, and whether conservative media is using it to scapegoat Somali immigrants. A listener asks whether Christmas expands our “socialist bubble” of family and community and what that says about capitalism, socialism, and human nature.
0:00—Debating marijuana at Turning Point USA
4:10—J.D. Vance is the MAGA heir apparent
14:47—Massie and Khanna react to Epstein file release
25:14—U.S. foreign policy in Venezuela and Syria
38:09—Listener question on socialism and Christmas
, addressing the label during an economic speech at Uline Inc. in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Vance said he sometimes embraces “crazy” conspiracies, citing that masking toddlers was foolish and that the media worked to cover up former President Joe Biden’s mental decline.
JACOB BOGAGE, WASHINGTON POST: Vice President Jacob Bogage from the Washington Post, it’s good to see you.
VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: Good to see you too.
BOGAGE: Merry Christmas.
VANCE: Thank you. Same to you.
BOGAGE: Unfortunately, I have to ask a bit of an off-topic question from Affordability because news events do intervene, and that is the interviews that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles gave to Vanity Fair, in which she’s quoted as referring to you as, excuse me, and again, not my word, sir, but a conspiracy theorist of a decade and described your transformation from someone who once opposed President Trump to now his vice president as an act of political expediency. And I’d like to give you the chance to respond to that, sir.
VANCE: Well, first of all, if Susie, like, I’ll trust what you said. I haven’t looked at the article. I, of course, have heard about it.
But conspiracy theorists, sometimes I am a conspiracy theorist, but I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true. And by the way, Susie and I have joked in private and in public about that for a long time. For example, I believed in the crazy conspiracy theory back in 2020 that it was stupid to mask three-year-olds at the height of the COVID pandemic, that we should actually let them develop some language skills.
I believed in this crazy conspiracy theory that the media and the government were covering up the fact that Joe Biden was clearly unable to do the job. And I believed in the conspiracy theory that Joe Biden was trying to throw his political opponents in jail rather than win an argument against his political opponents. So, at least on some of these conspiracy theories, it turns out that a conspiracy theory is just something that was true six months before the media admitted it.
And that’s that’s my understanding. Now, look, I do want to say something about Susie, though, because, again, having not read this article, Susie is a person I’ve come to know very, very well. And, you know, a lot of you probably ask yourself, what is it like behind the scenes?
What’s going on actually behind the scenes of the Trump administration? And I’ll tell you, the president is exactly in private who he is in public. Like, I’ll tell you a little story.
A few, maybe actually a week or so ago, I walk into the Oval Office and Marco and I are sitting there talking with the president about something. He says, stop. And he looks at our shoes and says, you guys have terrible shoes.
So he goes and gets a shoe catalog. And remember, this is the Christmas season. So the president’s got some holiday cheer.
He goes to get the shoe catalog and gets his favorite shoes and orders like four pairs of shoes for me and four pairs of shoes for Marco, because he’s like, you know, we need our vice president or secretary of state to look their very best. And, you know, then we went back to talking about whatever major international issue we were talking about. Again, he is exactly in private who he is in public.
That’s not true of most people in Washington, D.C. It’s not. And I’ve seen so many people who will say one thing to the president’s face, Democrats and Republicans, and then will do the exact opposite behind the scenes. You know why I really, you know what they are.
And you know why I really love Susie Wiles, because Susie is who she is in the president’s presence. She’s the same exact person when the president isn’t around. I’ve never seen Susie Wiles say something to the president and then go and counteract him or subvert his will behind the scenes.
And that’s what you want in a staffer, because as much as I love Susie, the American people didn’t elect any staffer. They elected the president of the United States. And what you want and what you want in a staffer is a person who understands they are there to effectuate the will of the American people, and they’re there to follow the orders of the duly elected commander-in-chief of the United States.
And Susie Wiles, we have our disagreements. We agree on much more than we disagree. But I’ve never seen her be disloyal to the president of the United States, and that makes her the best White House chief of staff that I think the president could ask for.
And the last thing I’ll say is if any of us have learned a lesson from that Vanity Fair article, I hope that the lesson is we should be giving fewer interviews to mainstream media outlets. So with that lesson internalized, I’m going to stop taking questions and just leave you with one final note.
And again, it’s just a note of gratitude. This is the coolest job I’ve ever had. Agree with us or disagree with us. I’m sure that every single person in this room made something happen to get me to this job. You went out there and voted. Maybe you persuaded one of your relatives to vote.
Maybe you even volunteered or knocked on doors or made phone calls for us. I will never forget that my job every single day is to make it so that you guys can have a safe and prosperous life in this country that all of us love.
Susie Wiles and the Boss. Photo: Eric Lee/The Washington Post/Getty Images
For all the chaos the second Trump administration has generated, it appears to be remarkably calm at its center, thanks largely to Susie Wiles. The current White House chief of staff differs dramatically from her four first-term predecessors precisely because of the lack of drama surrounding her. There have been relatively few leaks, high-level resignations, or credible reports of internal turmoil in the second Trump White House despite Donald Trump’s impulsiveness and the menagerie of outlandish characters in his orbit.
Considering her powerful role in the administration, it’s remarkable how much Wiles has kept herself out of the spotlight. Axios’s description of her at the beginning of Trump 2.0 has rung true:
Incoming White House chief of staff Susie Wiles tells Axios in an interview that she aims for the West Wing to be a no-drama zone for staff. If that works, it won’t be the chaotic den of self-sabotaging that stymied the early days of President-elect Trump’s first term.
“I don’t welcome people who want to work solo or be a star,” Wiles, whose boss calls her the Ice Maiden, said by email. “My team and I will not tolerate backbiting, second-guessing inappropriately, or drama. These are counterproductive to the mission.”
It’s intensely ironic, then, that Wiles is the source for the first explosive media exposé of the internal dynamics of this White House. On Monday, Vanity Fair published an article by Chris Whipple, the author of a book on White House chiefs of staff, who interviewed Wiles 11 times in the past year. While much of the material presents Wiles as a defender of the president’s motives, agenda, operating style, and historical significance, this paragraph has put her in a world of potential trouble:
One time we spoke while she was doing her laundry in her Washington, DC, rental. Trump, she told me, “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vance’s conversion from Never Trumper to MAGA acolyte, she said, has been “sort of political.” The vice president, she added, has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” Russell Vought, architect of the notorious Project 2025 and head of the Office of Management and Budget, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” When I asked her what she thought of Musk reposting a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, she replied: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.” (She says she doesn’t have first-hand knowledge.)
There are other problematic excerpts disclosing Wiles’s low opinion of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s handling of the Epstein files; her indulgent attitude toward her “junkyard dog” deputies, Stephen Miller, Dan Scavino, and James Blair; and her efforts to convince Trump himself to put a rein on his pursuit of personal vendettas.
Tellingly, in her initial public comment on the Whipple article, Wiles did not contradict any of the specifics but simply denounced it as a “hit piece” in which “significant context was disregarded” and lots of positive stuff she said about the president and his team was “left out of the story.” It’s a classic non-denial denial.
It’s unclear at this early juncture whether Wiles is in any trouble with Trump. But his initial reaction was to defend her “alcoholic’s personality” remark.
“No, she meant that I’m — you see, I don’t drink alcohol. So everybody knows that — but I’ve often said that if I did, I’d have a very good chance of being an alcoholic. I have said that many times about myself, I do. It’s a very possessive personality,” Trump told the New York Post.
The explosiveness of Wiles’s comments immediately reminded veteran political observers of a parallel moment early in Ronald Reagan’s presidency, as the New York Timesnotes:
The off-script comments felt reminiscent of a similar episode in President Ronald Reagan’s first term when his budget director, David A. Stockman, likewise gave a series of interviews to what was then called The Atlantic Monthly with candid observations that caused a huge stir.
Stockman was famously “taken to the woodshed” by White House chief of staff James Baker for revealing to the world the backstory of the struggle within and beyond the White House over Reagan’s highly controversial initial budget and tax proposals, which among other things depicted the well-meaning 40th president as being manipulated by his underlings. But the incident really wasn’t much like the one we are witnessing now. In his interviews, Stockman was mostly talking about intense policy disagreements within the administration and the Republican Party. Wiles doesn’t much engage with policy arguments; her interviews make it clear she shares some of Trump’s most controversial policy initiatives (particularly the assault on the deep state) while leaning over backward to rationalize his current warmongering toward Venezuela. And for all her casual slurs about Team Trump, she refers, incredibly, to his inner circle as “a world-class Cabinet, better than anything I could have conceived of.”
Stockman, moreover, was a huge celebrity in the early days of the Reagan administration and a living symbol of his domestic agenda; Wiles was a noncelebrity until now and apparently had no idea her talks with Whipple would create a stir, notes the Times:
While Mr. Stockman kept his interviews secret from the White House (and nearly got fired), the broader Trump team cooperated with Vanity Fair. Mr. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave interviews and along with top aides like Stephen Miller and Karoline Leavitt posed for glamour photographs by Christopher Anderson.
So the question now is whether Susie Wiles can go back to being a noncelebrity and dismiss her indiscretions as the product of a quietly malicious writer trying to disrupt the calm at the center of the White House. If she does survive this furor without significant damage to her position, then we’ll know she is even more powerful than anyone realized.
As if Donald Trump didn’t have enough on his plate this week with the recent Epstein emails release, South Park is continuing to roast the POTUS in this week’s episode.
On Wednesday, audiences reacted in disgust to the Season 28 episode ‘Unholy Birth’, which took aim at Open AI’s Sora featured some an unfortunate homoerotic sex scene between Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
“South Park is definitely going to trigger another White House response tomorrow bc holy s***,” one person wrote on X.
“Thanks for the nightmares I’m gonna have tonight South Park,” another posted.
“Watching south park,” read another tweet. “I’m now traumatized.”
Meanwhile, the episode featured appearances from other cartoons, including Bluey, Totoro and Droopy Dog. “Even Bluey ain’t safe from south park,” one fan wrote.
South Park co-creator Matt Stone previously praised Paramount for “letting us do whatever we want, to their credit,” as Trey Parker said of their reason for continuing to rip Trump and his political cronies, “There’s no getting away from this. It’s like the government is just in your face everywhere you look.”
“Whether it’s the actual government or whether it is all the podcasters and the TikToks and the YouTubes and all of that, and it’s just all political and political because it’s more than political,” added Parker. “It’s pop culture.”
Leo probably doesn’t envision Jesus in a MAGA hat. Photo: Maria Grazia Picciarella/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump and his team are currently working overtime to convince Americans that anyone who opposes his agenda represents a “radical left” full of “terrorists” who hate America, and for that matter, Christianity. The MAGA movement can’t be happy that one of the world’s oldest and most conservative institutions, the Roman Catholic Church, remains hostile to his mass-deportation program, his efforts to cut government assistance to poor people, and his militant opposition to climate-change initiatives.
During the tenure of the late Pope Francis, Trump allies and many traditionalist Catholics viewed the pontiff as fundamentally misguided (in all but his hard-line position opposing abortion). They hoped his American-born successor would be more “reasonable,” from their point of view. Indeed, as the Washington Postreports, Leo IV “has comforted traditionalists by embracing formal vestments and other reverent trappings of his office more than Francis did.” But in the last week he’s sent a series of signals that he shares Francis’s position on many of the issues that grated on MAGA Republicans, as the Post notes:
At an Oct. 1 Vatican summit, Leo condemned deniers of global warming and issued a blunt call to climate action. And last Sunday, in St. Peter’s Square, he declared a new “missionary age” against the “coldness of indifference” to migrants.
On Wednesday, he met privately with Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, a critic of the Trump administration’s migrant crackdown, along with other U.S. pro-migrant activists, to receive letters and testimonies from those living in “fear” of detention and deportation in the United States.
Leo “was very clear that what is happening to migrants in the United States right now is an injustice,” said Dylan Corbett, executive director of the Texas-based Hope Border Institute, who attended the meeting. “He said the church cannot remain silent.”
In the middle of this drumbeat of events, the pontiff intervened in an American church dispute over the proposed presentation of an award to pro-choice Catholic Senator Dick Durbin, with these words:
“Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion but says I am in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life,” he said Tuesday. “Someone who says that ‘I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”
Then today, the pontiff released his first major teaching document, an “apostolic exhortation,” as the National Catholic Reporterexplains:
“In a world where the poor are increasingly numerous, we paradoxically see the growth of a wealthy elite, living in a bubble of comfort and luxury, almost in another world compared to ordinary people,” the pope wrote. “We must not let our guard down when it comes to poverty.” …
While the document’s pastoral tone urges a renewed spiritual concern for the marginalized, it also carries sharp edges. For example, it denounces people who internalize indifference by placing their faith in the free market instead of allowing themselves to be consumed by compassion for their neighbor.
[The papal document] calls out Christians who “find it easier to turn a blind eye to the poor,” justifying their inaction by reducing faith to prayer and teaching “sound doctrine,” or by invoking “pseudo-scientific data” to claim that “a free market economy will automatically solve the problem of poverty.”
Sounds “radical left” to me, or perhaps even communist.
The Vatican acknowledged that preparation of this document began under Francis, and those who didn’t like its tone and scope probably hope it was more of a tribute to Leo’s predecessor rather than a statement of his own views. But as the Postnoted, there’s another possibility:
Leo holds Peruvian nationality from his years as a missionary there in addition to U.S. citizenship. His critique of market capitalism in particular suggests that in key ways, those who thought they were getting the first American pope are actually getting the second Latin American, one whose stances, like Francis, echo perceptions common in the Global South.
Vatican hostility to Trump could have a limited effect on American Catholics, who, after all, widely disregard church teachings on contraception and other matters. But one of the under-discussed success stories of the president’s 2024 campaign is that he carried self-described Catholics by a 12-point margin over Kamala Harris after splitting this vote right down the middle with Joe Biden four years earlier. Regular criticism from a pontiff who is (so far) wildly popular in the U.S. won’t help Trump’s own flagging popularity. And it’s particularly noteworthy that for the most part America’s conservative-leaning Catholic bishops are in lockstep with the Vatican on the duty owed to immigrants even if they disagree on other issues. Vice-President J.D. Vance was very isolated in his effort to provide a Catholic doctrinal defense of his administration’s mass-deportation effort. And Francis, near the end of his earthly journey, pretty much handed Vance’s ass to him in an exchange on the subject.
As Trump’s armed and masked agents begin assaulting Pope Leo’s home town of Chicago in search of brown people to terrorize or deport, they might want to keep in mind the Vatican is watching and isn’t particularly afraid of MAGA.
“I became the most subpoenaed person in American history for doing absolutely nothing wrong,” Eric Trump said. “They did everything they could to destroy our family. That’s why I called it Under Siege.”
“They took him off the ballot in Colorado. They took him off Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. They indicted him 91 times. They kept us locked in a courtroom every single day. They de-banked our entire organization — Capital One, Bank of America, JP Morgan.”
“This was the worst of government. It’s a great ending to the story that we won in a spectacular fashion. I couldn’t be more proud of that, but I had to write the story of the viciousness of politics.”
“If my father wanted vengeance, he could have thrown Hillary Clinton in jail for deleting 33,000 emails, right, and a whole host of other things,” Eric Trump also said. “Did we ever raid Biden’s home? Did we raid Hunter’s? Did we put gag orders on him? Did we subpoena him 112 times? The difference between me and Hunter is that I’m actually a clean human being. I don’t have a laptop from hell. Did we ever make up a dirty dossier against Biden? No. So it’s not vengeance. If Comey lied, he’ll have his day in court.”
“I would’ve told you eight years ago there wasn’t an heir apparent” to the MAGA movement, he said. “Unlike the Democrats, we’re actually going to have a process… JD Vance has a leg up being vice president: right age, temperament, he would have my vote, I love the guy. But we’re going to go through a process, and the people who are actually chosen by Republicans will be the person who stands on the ballot against the Democrats.”
“If there’s one thing we can all agree on, my father will probably play a large role in that process,” he joked. “And frankly, as kind of the founder of the new Republican Party, he probably deserves to be a big part of that.”
Last week, a gunman in Utah shot and killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk. It was a brutal and tragic event, regardless of one’s politics. And yet the fallout of Kirk’s murder has revealed a disturbing hostility toward free speech on the political right.
Republicans have long cast themselves as defenders of free speech against cancel culture and the censorial impulses of the political left. And there was merit to the argument—Reason has covered many cases of overreach.
But over the last week, MAGA Republicans have scoured social media for government employees posting about Kirk’s murder, contacting employers in an attempt to get them fired. “Kirk’s online defenders have snitch-tagged the employers of government workers over social media posts saying they don’t care about the assassination, that they didn’t like Kirk even as they condemn his assassination, and even criticizing Kirk prior to his assassination,” Reason‘s Christian Britschgi wrote this week. Even for nongovernmental employees, social media detectives apparently compiled a database with tens of thousands of people who criticized Kirk, including their names and employers.
Of course, that’s just people online. It’s not like those with government power are advocating such a thing, right?
“I would think maybe their [broadcast] license should be taken away,” President Donald Trump told reporters this week on Air Force One, about TV networks. “All they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that.”
“When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. And hell, call their employer,” Vice President J.D. Vance said while guest-hosting Kirk’s podcast this week. “We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.”
Vance’s argument bears a striking resemblance to the comments made just a few years ago by his ideological enemies. When certain public and not-so-public figures received backlash for offensive statements, some commentators noted that this was not cancel culture, it was “consequence culture”—people merely experiencing the consequences of their actions.
It’s no surprise that Trump has no principles on free speech—from the beginning of his first term, he called the press the “enemy of the American people.” But Vance’s position marks a notable pivot from just a few months ago.
“Just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite,” Vance said in a speech at the Munich Security Conference in February. “Under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer them in the public square, agree or disagree.”
Now, Vance seems less keen on defending someone’s right to offer views that he personally disagrees with. Unfortunately, he’s not alone.
This week, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr criticized TV host Jimmy Kimmel for comments made about Kirk during his show. Carr openly intimated that ABC should take action or potentially face reprisal; within hours, the network suspended Kimmel’s show indefinitely. (Trump later praised Carr as “outstanding. He’s a patriot. He loves our country, and he’s a tough guy.”)
Of course, when the opposing party was in power, Carr recognized the error of such a threat. In 2022, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that during the 2020 election, Facebook artificially decreased the spread of a story about Hunter Biden in response to a request from the FBI.
“The government does not evade the First Amendment’s restraints on censoring political speech by jawboning a company into suppressing it—rather, that conduct runs headlong into those constitutional restrictions, as Supreme Court law makes clear,” Carr posted on X in response. Now that government power is in his hands, Carr apparently has fewer qualms about wielding it like that.
Other officials have made their shifting beliefs more blatant.
“Under normal times, in normal circumstances, I tend to think that the First Amendment should always be sort of the ultimate right. And that there should be almost no checks and balances on it. I don’t feel that way anymore,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R–Wyo.) told Semafor on Thursday. “We just can’t let people call each other those kinds of insane things and then be surprised when politicians get shot and the death threats they are receiving and then trying to get extra money for security.”
Lummis’ complaint sounds like a more aggressive version of the heckler’s veto, a “form of censorship, where a speaker’s event is canceled due to the actual or potential hostility of ideological opponents,” wrote Zach Greenberg of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. In Lummis’ telling, the government must punish people for saying offensive or inflammatory things because of how others might respond.
That’s not only completely wrong, it’s unconstitutional.
“The First Amendment to the Constitution protects speech no matter how offensive its content,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union. “Speech that deeply offends our morality or is hostile to our way of life warrants the same constitutional protection as other speech because the right of free speech is indivisible: When we grant the government the power to suppress controversial ideas, we are all subject to censorship by the state.”
Lummis, Vance, and Carr apparently see no problem policing offensive speech, at least when they’re the ones who are offended.
When Vice-President J. D. Vance skipped this year’s 9/11 commemoration ceremony, in New York, and instead spent the day escorting Charlie Kirk’s casket from Utah to Arizona on Air Force Two, the decision seemed to make sense, both in terms of substance and in terms of spectacle. Kirk, of course, had just been murdered—a horrific act of political violence that set the country on edge. President Donald Trump, unlike his predecessor, has never shown much aptitude for serving as Mourner-in-Chief. “My condolences on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk,” a reporter said to Trump, on the White House lawn. “How are you holding up?” The President responded, “I think very good. And, by the way, you see all the trucks? They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House.” So it fell to Vance, who actually was Kirk’s friend and appeared genuinely shaken by his death, to be the Administration’s chief eulogist.
Last year, when Trump selected Vance as his running mate—a long-shot pick engineered by a small circle of Republican Party insiders, including Kirk—it was in part because Vance was supposed to represent a break from the bygone bipartisan consensus often associated with 9/11 memorials: Bush-era neoconservatism, Clintonian neoliberalism, the forever wars. (In October, 2024, during an onstage interview with Kirk in North Carolina, Vance told the crowd, “Don’t reward the party of Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney and Kamala Harris,” and also called Harris an “empty vessel” for “the prevailing ideas that are governing in Washington, D.C.,” including “that we should use our young people as cannon fodder for foreign military misadventures.”) Besides, any politician can show up at a September 11th ceremony, a ritual that members of both parties have observed for twenty-four years. Kirk’s death was a much fresher outrage, not yet twenty-four hours old. If Vance wanted to soothe the nation’s nerves, perhaps this seemed like a better way.
It soon became apparent that soothing the nation was not Vance’s top priority. “Unity, real unity, can be found only after climbing the mountain of truth,” Vance said on Monday, speaking into an Electro-Voice RE20 microphone mounted on a polished wooden desk. “There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk’s assassination.” Kirk had idolized Rush Limbaugh, and one of his many jobs was hosting “The Charlie Kirk Show,” on the Salem Radio Network, every weekday afternoon. Now, five days after Kirk’s death, the show was going out live on radio stations around the country, and on YouTube. Guest host: J. D. Vance, broadcasting from the Vice-President’s Ceremonial Office.
On the accompanying video feed, Vance sat in a high-backed armchair in front of a gilded mirror. A chyron identified him as a “Longtime Friend of Charlie Kirk.” In the tradition of Limbaugh—and of all red-meat talk-show hosts since the demise of the monoculture—Vance seemed less interested in pastoring the nation than in preaching to the choir. He was also, presumably, thinking of his own political future. Kirk, a successful activist who was quickly turning into a martyr, commanded an audience that will be crucial to whoever wants to inherit the Trumpist movement in 2028. “I am desperate for our country to be united,” Vance said, with grim determination, planting two open palms on his desk. But “we can only have it with people who acknowledge that political violence is unacceptable.” “AMEN,” a YouTuber called American Dreamer commented in the live chat. “Yes!” YourLatexSpouse added. A user named stainofm1nd made the stakes more concrete: “JD VANCE 2028 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸.”
It’s hardly a novel observation that everything is mass media now, including politics. Anyone who didn’t understand this fact a decade ago was forced to grapple with it when Donald Trump, known for dishing about his sex life to the New York tabloids and playing himself in walk-on appearances on sitcoms such as “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” became the President of the United States. But the phenomenon has always been broader than Trump. Everyone in national politics—that is, everyone who wants to win—must be able to perform a version of authority and authenticity onscreen. This was true in the fifties and sixties, when the telegenic Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy beat the eggheaded Adlai Stevenson and the shifty-eyed Richard Nixon, respectively; it has become only more true with every passing year, as the time politicians spend mugging for the cameras has expanded to fill every minute they spend outside, and sometimes starts before they leave the house. Earlier in his career, Vance took what was once considered a more prestigious path to fame, by way of the best-seller list and the Aspen Ideas Festival. But he ended up more or less where Trump did—appearing on Fox News to discuss the great-replacement theory; telling a fringe podcaster that America was “in a late republican period,” and that, “if we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty, pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
A few weeks after Vance joined the Presidential ticket, the base briefly lost faith in him, not because of his inconsistent policy views, or his well-documented history of disloyalty to Trump, but because of his shakiness as a political performer—his apparent inability to get a laugh from a friendly crowd at a rally, or to conduct a normal human interaction in a donut shop. Vance outlasted his doubters, therefore, not by changing the substance of his views but by continuing to show up on camera and portray himself, more and more convincingly, as a relatable person. He hung out with the pro-Trump influencers the Nelk Boys, venting to them about the downsides of his son’s Pokémon phase. He spent the requisite three hours on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” praising a movie that he considered “extremely influential to my entire political world view.” (For those who weren’t watching the interview the moment it dropped, as I was: he meant “Boyz n the Hood,” the John Singleton classic from 1991.) In June, he sat with Theo Von, perhaps the least predictable interviewer this country has yet produced, who threw curveball after curveball—raising the possibility that Donald Trump was in the Epstein files, that the assault on Gaza was a genocide, and, in an inscrutable recurring riff, that Frederick Douglass was gay—and Vance hit them all, or at least fouled them off consistently enough to stay alive. On Monday afternoon, as he anchored “The Charlie Kirk Show” from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Vance completed the politics-as-talk-show singularity.
A billowing American flag filled the screen, and bagpipes played “Amazing Grace.” “Fear not,” a voice-over announcer said, as some slogans (“Big Gov Sucks”; “Warning: Does Not Play Well with Liberals”) flashed across the screen. “You’ve found the place for truth.” Vance’s first guest was Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff and arguably the Administration’s chief ideologist. “The last message that Charlie sent me was—I think it was just the day before we lost him—was just that we need to have an organized strategy to go after the left-wing organizations that are promoting violence in this country,” Miller said. “Blind rage is not a productive emotion. But focussed anger, righteous anger, directed for a just cause, is one of the most important agents of change in human history.”
Call their employer? “If we want to stop political violence like what happened to Charlie Kirk, we have to be honest about the people who are celebrating it and the people who are financing it,” wrote Vice President J.D. Vance on X, promoting his guest hosting of Kirk’s show, following Kirk’s killing. “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. And hell, call their employer,” he said on the program.
“I’m desperate for our country to be united in condemnation of the actions and the ideas that killed my friend,” Vance added. “I want it so badly that I will tell you a difficult truth. We can only have it with people who acknowledge that political violence is unacceptable.”
The Reason Roundup Newsletter by Liz Wolfe Liz and Reason help you make sense of the day’s news every morning.
At East Tennessee State University, two faculty members were placed on administrative leave, allegedly due to comments such as “you reap what you sow” and “[Kirk’s killing] isn’t a tragedy. It’s a victory.” Oklahoma’s state superintendent is investigating at least one middle school teacher for her posts (calling Kirk a “racist, misogynist piece of shit,” which seems nasty, but not actually advocating political violence). The Texas Education Agency is reviewing 180 complaints filed against teachers for comments related to Kirk; some of those are surely murder cheerleading, while others are scathing criticism that should probably be tolerated. Four different high school teachers were placed on leave in Massachusetts for their commentary. One elementary school teacher in that same state has been placed on leave for her TikTok video mocking Kirk’s death. Both Delta and American Airlines have axed a few employees each for social media posts on Kirk. Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the University of Miami’s health care system fired one worker each. An Office Depot worker at a store in Michigan was fired after allegedly refusing to print flyers about a Kirk vigil for a paying customer—which makes an awful lot of sense, given that printing flyers is literally their job. These cases are all different, and some seem like they do actually call for or celebrate political violence, whereas others are just tasteless expressions of hatred for Kirk that don’t violate that norm.
So let’s back up for a moment. Why did cancel culture of the 2010s strike so many of us as so bad and wrong?
Some of it surely had to do with proportionality: The punishment rarely fit the “crime” (which was almost always debatable).
Some of it surely had to do with changing sensibilities and sensitivities, and a sense that the orthodoxy being enforced was invented yesterday, not a reflection of prevailing sentiments. Thus it was unpredictable: You couldn’t really be sure you weren’t running afoul of the new tyrannical enforcers, because the shift in pieties (or language) had happened practically overnight.
But there was something undergirding it that felt especially stupid: The kids were the enforcers, overthrowing the adults. Not because the adults had exercised bad judgment or shown themselves to be incapable of faithfully executing the roles they’d been given. In some cases, they were canceled as they exercised good judgment: Consider the case of Mike Pesca, a Slate journalist (and, disclosure: my friend) who had been discussing how the publication ought to cover the firing of New York Times writer Donald McNeil, who referred to a racial slur in context on a trip to Peru with high schoolers; could a white person ever write or say nigger in context? Don’t we make a use/mention distinction? Some vocal portion of his workplace apparently disagreed, and he was dismissed after he’d worked there for seven years. It was never about morals, it was never about quality of product being produced; it was about power in the workplace, wrapped up in something that, to the young, resembled morals enough to give them plausible deniability.
Now, something a little different is happening, for which people are using the same name. Professors, teachers, nurses, and doctors who have celebrated the assassination of Kirk are being purged from their workplaces. It’s conservatives swarming this time, phoning employers, making them aware of the misdeeds, asking for their scalps.
Most of me thinks it’s wrong and bad on principle—since I don’t ever want to be fired for my own speech (and thus want to maintain a very wide sense of what we societally tolerate)—but also as a strategy, since I don’t believe conservatives gain very much by weeding out the people with dumb beliefs who are in positions of relatively little power and importance. People have little impulse control and use social media like a diary; I’ll never understand the crying-in-a-car TikTok woman genre, but I’m fine living in a society with people who get off on that. (Also: What even is a position of relatively little power and importance? Teachers and professors are entrusted with impressionable minds. Isn’t this extreme power?)
But a not-that-tiny piece of me sees this as substantively different: Cancel culture grievances were mostly petty and minor, issues that could have been resolved if participants were willing to be 10 percent more charitable toward their perceived opponents, and if bosses were willing to instruct their inferiors to get over themselves. James Damore’s Google memo about heritability of certain traits and brain differences between genders and how to reduce the gender gap among engineers is a good example; anyone who claims to have felt threatened was being an opportunist, looking to amass power and get the hit of collective effervescence that comes from vanquishing an opponent.
Of course, there were also the “offensive” acts that were not really relevant to the workplace, but that the 2010s cancelers implied indicated something about the tainted souls of the powerful: Adam Rapoport, the Bon Appetit editor in chief, who in 2020 handed in his resignation after colleagues dug up a boricua (Puerto Rican)/durag Halloween costume from 2013. Rapoport’s photo was “just a symptom of the systematic racism that runs rampant within Conde Nast as a whole,” said one chef/editor who worked at the magazine, while others alleged black women had been systemically mistreated under Rapoport’s leadership.
With Kirk’s killing, the posters who lose their jobs are saying something actually bad, something that society has long seen as beyond a crossed line; we don’t cheer the killing of people with whom we disagree. This isn’t the Cultural Revolution. We don’t flog people. We don’t put them in stocks in the town square. And we don’t get titillated when a bullet flies into their neck and they spurt out blood and crumple to the ground; it’s gruesome and awful and it happened as a thousand impressionable young people looked on. Looked at one way, this was an insane person committing an extrajudicial act of violence. Looked at another, this was a public execution for the crime of being conservative—which is, apparently, judging by their reactions, what a lot of people had been wanting.
When a working professional can’t manage to exercise self-control and refrain from posting in public about how grateful they are that the assassin had the balls to shoot their shot, you have to wonder about their judgment. It’s perhaps especially odd for professors to say as much. (Don’t they spend their time…speaking their mind…in public?) And is there perhaps some value in maintaining or enforcing a consensus of what types of things lie beyond the pale? I don’t want pedophilia apologists as kindergarten teachers, to use an extreme example; I also probably don’t want a doctor treating me who cheers on the murder of people who think like Kirk.
In general, I trust that reputable employers have done some amount of quality/maturity/professionalism/judgment vetting. Surely celebrating political violence runs afoul of these basic expectations, and that’s what they’re responding to when they fire someone who posted gleefully about Kirk, which is materially different than the made-up social justice dogma that was being enforced before. (It would be better if employers self-policed rather than succumbing to the demands of angry mobs.) We’ve always had taboos, and the taboo against political violence is a strong one worth keeping, not one we should constantly have to renegotiate.
Scenes from New York: Gov. Kathy Hochul, a sort of forgettable, generically bad Democrat who inherited the spot when Andrew Cuomo left in a hurry, endorsed Zohran Mamdani; nobody followed her lead. lol.
QUICK HITS
Meanwhile, Attorney General Pam Bondi is saying utterly wrong things about hate speech. “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society…We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” Does Bondi need a reminder?
Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech.
And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.
“President Donald Trump approved a National Guard deployment to Memphis, expanding the federal government’s efforts to crack down on what he has cast as out-of-control crime in Democratic-run cities,” reportsBloomberg. And Chicago will probably be next after Memphis, signaled the president.
The U.S. military struck a second boat carrying Venezuelan narcotraffickers, killing at least three. The first strike of this variety was ordered and carried out earlier this month, killing 11. More strikes are planned; congressional approval has not yet been sought.
“Israel unleashed a long-threatened ground assault on Gaza City on Tuesday, declaring ‘Gaza is burning’ as Palestinians there described the most intense bombardment they had faced in two years of war,” reports Reuters. “An Israel Defence Forces official said ground troops were moving deeper into the enclave’s main city, and that the number of soldiers would rise in coming days to confront up to 3,000 Hamas combatants the IDF believes are still in the city.”
The Washington Post fired journalist Karen Attiah; Attiah claims it was for her social media posts on Kirk, including one in which she says Kirk once said, “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.” This was a botched quote. From Reason‘s Robby Soave: “What he said was that the achievements of four specific black women—former First Lady Michelle Obama, former MSNBC host Joy Reid, Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and former Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D–Texas)—were suspect because of affirmative action; the existence of racial preferences casts a pall over their selections for various positions. One can certainly criticize the point or disagree with how he worded it (Michelle Obama, diversity hire?), but he did not say the words attributed to him by Attiah. And she put it in quotes, which is journalistic malpractice.”
It’s not an accurate quote though; why insist that it is? Kirk’s actual quote is dickish, ignorant & can certainly be argued is racist. Attiah *changes it* into something undeniably racist. The distinction matters if you think journalists have a duty to deal in facts. https://t.co/a8CrZs1NCJpic.twitter.com/JXWIxm3CRD
Vice President JD Vance ramped up the divisive rhetoric following the killing of Charlie Kirk as he hosted the late conservative activist’s radio show and podcast.
Vance took charge of “The Charlie Kirk Show” from the White House on Monday, with administration officials who knew Kirk featuring in a two-hour broadcast that made repeated calls for retribution.
The vice president continued in a similar vein during his outgoing monologue as he made claims about left-wing violence and implied, without evidence, that Kirk’s killer was motivated by far-left ideology.
In a sign that the Trump administration is preparing for a crackdown on liberal and leftist groups, Vance said unity in America would only emerge “when we work to dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country.”
Among many pointed remarks, Vance falselyclaimed it was a fact that “people on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence.”
“This is not a both-sides problem. If both sides have a problem, one side has a much bigger and malignant problem, and that is the truth,” he said.
He went on to argue that “while our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far left.”
Vance also attacked The Nation, a progressive magazine, and accused it of misquoting Kirk.
He blasted the “well-funded, well-respected magazine whose publishing history goes back to the American Civil War. George Soros’ Open Society [Foundations] funds this magazine, as does the Ford Foundation and many other wealthy titans of the American progressive movement.”
“Charlie was gunned down in broad daylight, and well-funded institutions of the left lied about what he said so as to justify his murder,” Vance claimed.
Vance noted the Ford Foundation and the nonprofit run by Soros, a Democratic megadonor, receive “generous tax treatment,” suggesting they could be targeted in any crackdown.
Bhaskar Sunkara, president of The Nation, made clear the magazine is “not funded, not one dime, by Soros or Open Society Foundation.”
In his broadcast, Vance also asked his followers to identify anyone rejoicing in Kirk’s death to get them fired from their jobs.
“When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out, and hell, call their employer,” he said. “We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.”
Earlier in the show, Trump aide Miller promised to “use every resource we have” to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy” left-wing networks and “make America safe again for the American people.”
“It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name,” he added.
PowerOurJournalism
Your SupportFuelsOur Mission
Your SupportFuelsOur Mission
Your membership fuels reporting that informs, inspires, and holds power accountable. Stand with us in this work – become a member now.
Join, Read, Impact
We remain committed to providing you with the unflinching, fact-based journalism everyone deserves.
Thank you again for your support along the way. We’re truly grateful for readers like you! Your initial support helped get us here and bolstered our newsroom, which kept us strong during uncertain times. Now as we continue, we need your help more than ever. We hope you will join us once again.
We remain committed to providing you with the unflinching, fact-based journalism everyone deserves.
Thank you again for your support along the way. We’re truly grateful for readers like you! Your initial support helped get us here and bolstered our newsroom, which kept us strong during uncertain times. Now as we continue, we need your help more than ever. We hope you will join us once again.
Vance: “While our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far-Left.” pic.twitter.com/EmNTQ9o0nD
John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser for a little over a year in the President’s first term, is under investigation for illegally possessing and/or sending classified files
Former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton arrives at his Maryland home August 22, 2025Photo: AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
According to NBC News, F.B.I agents began to search Republican former Trump national security advisor John R. Bolton’s Maryland home on Friday at 7 a.m. The attorney and Trump critic is being investigated for illegally sharing or possessing physical classified files, which prompted the F.B.I. to search his home and Washington office. Donald Trump incited an investigation against Bolton after the genesis of his 2020 book, “The Room Where it Happened”. During his first term, President Trump tried to block the publishing of the manuscript, which was rejected by the courts. Now, Bolton is under investigation once again, not only for the materials that he collected for his book, but for his actions in the past four years.
Trump was the fourth president for whom Bolton was a national security advisor, and he was fired, according to Trump, or resigned, according to Bolton, based on disagreements regarding military action. One of Trump’s first actions in his second term was to remove security detail from Bolton, meaning that the Secret Service agents who kept a round-the-clock surveilled eye on Bolton’s home were removed. Now, federal law enforcement is back at the Bolton residence, but it may be retaliatory, rather than protective.
John Bolton recently criticized Trump’s Alaska summit with Putin in a Tuesday CNN “Situation Room” interview. He stated that he believes that Putin strategically crafted a deal proposition that appealed to Trump’s desire to win a Nobel Peace Prize by ending Russia’s war with Ukraine.
“That’s the way to Trump’s heart,” Bolton stated.
Current Republicans in the White House have added to the conversation on Bolton since the raid. As F.B.I. agents descended on the former national security advisor’s residence, Kash Patel posted a message on X that alluded to the F.B.I. raid on the home.
“NO ONE is above the law… @F.B.I. agents on mission”, Patel posted.
— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) August 22, 2025
Scroll to continue reading
Patel was publicly clear about his mistrust of the former security advisor. In his 2023 book, “Government Gangsters”, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation named Bolton as one of the 60 federal government officials that are allegedly a part of the “deep state”, a group that is a secret conspiracy against Trump. During Patel’s confirmation hearing for his new position as Director of the F.B.I., Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar called this an “enemies list”, a phrase that has been repeated by other Democratic critics as well on Patel’s new position. Patel vehemently denies that the list of names in his book’s glossary is an enemies list.
Another Republican voice in office surrounding Bolton was J.D. Vance, in his Friday exclusive interview with NBC News. Vance stated that the former national security advisor was not targeted due to his criticism of Trump, and is instead being investigated under fair pretenses.
“We are investigating Amb. Bolton, but if they ultimately bring a case, it will be because they determine that he has broken the law,” Vance stated. “We’re going to be careful about that. We’re going to be deliberate about that, because we don’t think that we should throw people — even if they disagree with us politically, maybe especially if they disagree with us politically — you shouldn’t throw people willy-nilly in prison. You should let the law drive these determinations, and that’s what we’re doing.”
For this week’s Fault Lines column, Jon Allsop is filling in for Jay Caspian Kang.
If one lesson has emerged this travel season, it’s that you really, really don’t want to be on vacation in the vicinity of Vice-President J. D. Vance. Last month, with the Trump Administration continuing to conduct sweeping immigration raids in the Los Angeles area, Vance and his family went to Disneyland, where, apparently, parts of the park were shut down for them. “Sorry, to all the people who were at Disneyland, for the longer lines,” Vance said, on a new podcast hosted by Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff. “But we had a very good time.” Earlier this month, the Army Corps of Engineers altered the outflow from a lake in Ohio to raise the water level of a river where Vance would be boating. A source told the Guardian that the change would create “ideal kayaking conditions,” though the Secret Service said that the intention was to facilitate Vance’s security detail; Vance’s office denied advance knowledge. Miller, on her podcast, asked Vance if there’s anywhere else he’s dying to go. “Hopefully we can find some excuse, as Vice-President of the United States, to go to Hawaii,” he replied.
Last week, Vance and his travelling circus touched down in the U.K. He visited David Lammy, the country’s Foreign Secretary, at the latter’s residence in Kent, before heading on to the Cotswolds, a scenic area west of London that looks like what an A.I.-image generator might spit out if you asked it to conjure the British countryside. (If you’ve seen the Disney+ adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s steamy book “Rivals,” you get the idea.) Vance and his family reportedly stayed in a lavish Georgian manor owned by a light-bulb magnate, obliging me to ask whose bright idea that was. Residents complained to the British press about the associated inconvenience, recounting road closures (leading to, gasp, wet crops), bad American driving, and an indiscreet Secret Service presence. (One local official likened the profusion of agents to a scene from “Men in Black,” adding, “It was a bit over the top really.”) Jeremy Clarkson—the cantankerous former host of the car program “Top Gear,” who recently called Vance “a bearded God-botherer”—suggested that a no-fly zone had obstructed drone filming for a show about a farm that he owns nearby. This led to headlines claiming that Clarkson had joined, or was even leading, a “backlash” against Vance—though he subsequently mocked the claims of chaos by posting a video of a peaceful pastoral vista.
Cotswoldians are used to celebrity visitors and residents: Clarkson, for starters, but also Piers Morgan, Ellen DeGeneres, and the former British Prime Minister David Cameron, who has a home in the hamlet where Vance posted up. (Kamala Harris also visited, shortly before Vance did.) Nor is Vance the first politician to vacation with an irritating retinue in tow. But his trip was unusually fraught. Protesters rallied in a local park, toting signs with slogans like “COTSWOLD CHILDLESS CAT LADIES SAY GO HOME” (brandished, reportedly, by a woman who does have children and does not have cats), “WAR CRIMINAL,” and (my personal favorite) “JD VANCE CLAPS WHEN THE PLANE LANDS.” A van drove around the area displaying a meme of Vance with a shiny bald head, which went viral after a tourist claimed that he was turned away from the U.S. for having it on his phone. (Homeland Security officials have denied that this happened.) According toreports in the Observer and the Wall Street Journal, police went door to door, asking residents to identify themselves and disclose details of their social-media accounts. In fairness, Vance did recently warn Britain’s government against advancing down a “very dark path” of online censorship. (His office denied any advance knowledge of the social-media questioning; a British police spokesperson said that it had not taken place.)
If the otherwise silly story of Vance’s vacation has a serious side, then his choice of destination has curious symbolic connotations, too. The Cotswolds have a rich association with a vein of upper-class establishment conservatism that is in retreat around the world. In many ways, Vance’s rise has been a compelling manifestation of that retreat. Whether Vance has left this sort of politics behind entirely, however, might be another matter.
For a man-of-the-people politician, Vance certainly seems to go on a lot of vacations. If he were a public official in the U.K., as Marina Hyde rightly noted in the Guardian last week, “he’d have been fitted with an unflattering holiday-related nickname months ago, and no one would take him remotely seriously.” (“Vance-cation” has a nice ring to it.) But, on this recent trip, he also attended to political business. There was the meeting with Lammy, the center-left Foreign Secretary, who has become friendly with Vance—somewhat improbably, given the gulf between their politics. It may have helped that, as Politico put it, Lammy “let Vance beat him at fishing” during their Kent sojourn; Vance’s kids caught carp, while Lammy caught nothing. (Lammy apparently lacked the requisite fishing license, and has since reported himself to an official watchdog.) Since arriving in the Cotswolds, Vance has mingled with various right-wing politicians, including Robert Jenrick, a plummy Conservative lawmaker with growing populist pretensions, and Nigel Farage, the Brexit architect, who has a very real chance of becoming Britain’s next Prime Minister. Because Vance is terminally online, he also met with Thomas Skinner, a former candidate on the British version of “The Apprentice,” who now seems to spend much of his time posting the word “Bosh” on X. Vance recently defended him after Skinner said that a parade of left-wingers had called him a racist when, in his telling, he was just a “normal man who loves his family and this country.” It’s been a big week for Skinner: yesterday, he was named a contestant on the British version of “Dancing with the Stars.”
In the British political imagination, the Cotswolds have been most closely linked not with the Farages of the world but with the likes of Cameron, who was part of what came to be known as “the Chipping Norton set”—an élite social circle named for a town that’s a ten-minute drive from Vance’s bolthole (albeit longer with motorcade traffic). The set became infamous in the early twenty-tens, shortly after Cameron took office, when another of its members, Rebekah Brooks, a lieutenant for Rupert Murdoch, was criminally charged in the phone-hacking scandal that engulfed Murdoch’s British newspaper empire. (Brooks was acquitted, and now works again for Murdoch.) Cameron styled himself as a modernizer keen to dispel the hard-edged image of the Conservative Party—in one famous stunt, he went to the Arctic and hugged a husky in order to prove his environmental credentials—and as a committed internationalist. Indeed, he resigned as Prime Minister, in 2016, after voters rejected the case he had made for Britain to stay in the European Union. Around the same time, he criticized Donald Trump’s proposed Muslim travel ban as “divisive, stupid, and wrong.” In a 2019 memoir, Cameron wrote that he had been depressed by Trump’s brand of protectionist, xenophobic politics; that he “couldn’t have agreed more” with a speech in which President Barack Obama warned that Trump’s rhetoric was a slippery slope toward demonizing “whole nations, races and religions”; and that Trump’s references to “Islamic terrorism” were crude and unhelpful.
Cameron’s school of conservatism now appears to be dead—at the hands of Vance, among others. (Last year, Vance described the U.K. as perhaps the world’s first nuclear-armed “Islamist country.”) His trip to the Cotswolds can be read, even if unintentionally, as dancing on the grave of this world view. Not so long ago, however, Vance appeared to be closer to Cameron politically. Shortly after the publication of his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance dismissed Trump as “cultural heroin.” In the book, he also made the case that post-industrial and rural poverty in largely white, Rust Belt communities was a result, in part, of a deficit of personal and collective responsibility. Such ideas echo rhetoric that Cameron used to indict what he saw as a “broken” British society. In 2016, George Osborne—who, as Cameron’s finance minister, oversaw a program of fiscal austerity that shredded Britain’s social safety net—described “Hillbilly Elegy” as one of his books of the year. After reading it, Osborne has said, he reached out to Vance, who, in turn, apparently complimented the Cameron government. The two men are still friends; according to the Financial Times, it was Osborne who sorted Vance’s accommodation ahead of his Cotswolds trip, and the pair dined together this week.
As has been endlessly chronicled, Vance has been on quite a political journey since 2016. Some aspects of his embrace of Trumpism—and, with it, an insistent economic populism and anti-corporate posture—strike me as sincere, and others less so. If there’s one clear through line of Vance’s politics, however, it is how he has, albeit with differing emphases, styled himself (or, at least, allowed himself to be styled) as a voice for the poor and downtrodden masses far from the madding crowds of big coastal cities. Whatever Vance’s real views, this image is hard to square with, say, serving in an Administration that has just passed a huge tax cut for the ultra-rich, or with getting special treatment on a kayaking trip, knowingly or not. It seems hard to square, too, with his Cotswolds visit.
This, at least, is true in the sense that the Cotswolds, which have become a playground for London’s élite, is not typically associated with hardscrabble imagery. But there is poverty there, of the rural kind that tends to be less visible—certainly if you stay in your country pile, with its tennis court, gardens, and orangery. “There is real hardship and deprivation behind the media stories of the area whose latest description, apparently, is the ‘Hamptons of England,’ ” one local told the Telegraph, a conservative British newspaper, this week. In 2013, in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal, a reporter from the New York Times visited the area and heard something similar. “This is still a working-class town, and this is a working-class pub,” one man said, over a pint, at least until “these tall people named Giles and Pippa show up.” And, now, J. D. ♦
Pick your poison: Over the weekend, depending on your political flavor, you could have chosen between listening to a comedian hurl insults on stage at Madison Square Garden as part of a campaign rally; watching a sitting U.S. representative and a vice-presidential contender play video games and talk about scrapping the filibuster via Twitch; hearing a presidential candidate’s thoughts on whale psychology; or listening to a vulnerability researcher (?) and a presidential candidate gab about birth order.
Our sharpest political minds these are not.
It’s almost like everyone is avoiding talking about the actual issues—things like how to reduce inflation, how to bring government spending under control, how to make Social Security solvent, how to create an orderly and just immigration process, or how to improve the quality of our schools. The podcasting industry has, between the last election cycle and now, taken a glorious wrecking ball to cable news, creating a whole bunch of scrappy independent upstarts that presidential candidates (and their political consultants) finally understand to be an important way voters are receiving news and commentary. Unfortunately, the candidates themselves appear to have their heads filled with little more than fluff.
First, a predictable scandal: Tony Hinchcliffe, an insult comedian known for his off-color jokes, took to the stage to open for Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden yesterday. He made jokes about the Clintons, Diddy, and Latinos “making babies” and how they love to “come inside“—”just like they did to our country!”
He also said, “I don’t know if you guys know this but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” This became a political scandal, possibly jeopardizing Trump’s ability to win Puerto Rico’s electoral college votes. (Oh, wait…)
“When you have some a-hole calling Puerto Rico ‘floating garbage,’ know that that’s what they think about you….It’s what they think about anyone who makes less money than them,” said New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a response livestream with the Democrsats’ vice-presidential candidate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. (They’re apparently quite chummy now, or so they want voters to believe.)
“Can’t get over this dude telling someone else to change tampons when he’s the one shitting bricks in his Depends after realizing opening for a Trump rally and feeding red-meat racism alongside a throng of other bigots to a frothing crowd does, unironically, make you one of them,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X. “You don’t ‘love Puerto Rico.’ You like drinking piña coladas. There’s a difference.”
Can’t get over this dude telling someone else to change tampons when he’s the one shitting bricks in his Depends after realizing opening for a Trump rally and feeding red-meat racism alongside a throng of other bigots to a frothing crowd does, unironically, make you one of them. https://t.co/kr82avveYs
Were Puerto Ricans in attendance at the rally offended by this? Not really, or so it seems. But this whole saga is actually pretty emblematic of how this whole election has gone: We’ve almost entirely neglected to talk about actual issues. The Trump campaign keeps courting controversy, again and again and again, while the Harris/Walz campaign frequently defines itself in opposition to the Trumpists, reactive and apoplectic but rarely proactively defining what it is they would actually do.
Trump did Rogan: The most unhinged, meandering, and occasionally entertaining presidential candidate met his match in the most unhinged, meandering, and occasionally entertaining podcaster, and it was wild. Donald Trump and Joe Rogan talked about whale psychology. They talked about how Trump staffed his administration. They talked about the CHIPS and Science Act—which aimed to reduce reliance on Asia-manufactured chips, handing out subsidies for companies to produce semiconductor parts here at home—which Trump called “put[ting] up billions of dollars for rich companies,” saying he instead favored slapping large tariffs on the companies to try to boost growth of American manufacturing capacity. He explained his comments about the “enemy from within” and how he takes it to mean that there are “people that I really think want to make this country unsuccessful.” He, at times, got quite catty toward the ladies on The View.
Meanwhile, you have J.D. Vance—ostensibly the policy guy of the Trump campaign—talking about globalization on comedian Tim Dillon’s podcast. Vance said “London doesn’t feel fully English anymore,” while “New York of course is the classic American city. Over time, I think New York will start to feel less American.” (Is he saying that large cosmopolitan cities are adopting a certain sameness over time? What exactly is he predicting or talking about?)
Between Trump’s protectionism, Hinchcliffe’s off-color jokes, and Vance’s unclear issues with globalization, it all comes together to paint a portrait of a campaign with very different values and priorities than, say, what I have.
Then there’s Kamala: The Democratic presidential candidate went on vulnerability/empathy/shame researcher Brené Brown’s podcast and it was…kind of full of nothing. Brown asked Harris plenty of questions about her background—birth order! Harris’ nickname given to her by her sorority!—but never did they ever get to anything serious. They talked about the core values of “daring leaders.” If you had been playing a drinking game where you take a shot every time someone says “lived experience” or “Venn diagrams,” you would be face down on the rug.
Maybe we don’t deserve better from our leaders. Maybe our politics were always fated to be ground down to this. But boy is it depressing to see it all laid out before you, via hours and hours of longform content on different podcasts, consumed by polar-opposite portions of America who increasingly seem to believe they have very little in common with one another.
Scenes from Miami: I’m in Miami for an event run by Founders Fund, and I went to a Catholic Church yesterday that is coming out in full force against Florida Amendment 4, which would add abortion protections to the state constitution, including the text: “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” (More on Amendment 4 here.)
Currently, Florida outlaws abortion after 6 weeks, and doctors and activists have been engaged in a campaign to draw attention to edge-case stories where women have been forced into medically difficult situations because the law purportedly does not make it clear that doctors are allowed to abort in life- and health-threatening circumstances. Proponents claim Amendment 4 will clarify this. The bishops of Florida, on the other hand, write: “We urge all Floridians of goodwill to stand against the legalization of late-term abortion and oppose the abortion amendment. In doing so, we will not only protect the weakest, most innocent, and defenseless of human life among us but also countless women throughout the state from the harms of abortion.”
QUICK HITS
On Saturday, Israeli fighter jets hit multiple “air-defense systems, missile-making facilities and launchers” in Iran, reportsBloomberg, in response to Iran’s attack on Israel earlier this month. The attack was not extremely damaging in terms of lives lost—four Iranian soldiers have been reported killed—but it showed critical vulnerabilities in Iran’s weapons and nuclear-development infrastructure. An American military official, “speaking to reporters on the condition of anonymity, said President Joe Biden’s administration had worked with Israel to come up with a ‘proportional’ response and urged Iran not to retaliate again,” per Bloomberg.
On a campaign stop in West Philadelphia, Kamala Harris “announced a plan to boost Puerto Rico’s economy and power grid,” again perBloomberg.
“Egypt has proposed an initial two-day ceasefire in Gaza to exchange four Israeli hostages of Hamas for some Palestinian prisoners, Egypt’s president said on Sunday as Israeli military strikes killed 45 Palestinians across the enclave,” reports Reuters.
Interesting trend piece on how younger women are eschewing wearing their engagement rings and wedding bands daily; as a surfer, I am precluded from wearing mine for much of the summer, but I didn’t realize all the others were copying me.
This “coach in chief” New York Times article is the most cringe thing I’ve read in a long while. Consume with caution.
After Donald Trump’s ill-fated debate against Kamala Harris where vigorously defended his crowd sizes and lied about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio eating pets, the bar was relatively low for J.D. Vance during Tuesday’s debate with Tim Walz. However, he not only exceeded it but surpassed it among Republican operatives I spoke with. One in Vance’s orbit texted a GIF of a baseball player hitting a home run when asked for an assessment of the debate shortly after it ended.
Other operatives from across the party kvelled about the Ohio senator’s performance, which they thought seemed particularly outstanding when compared to an at times stumbling performance from his Democratic rival, the Minnesota governor. Some couldn’t help but spent the aftermath of the debate glued to their social media feeds and CNN, reveling in what they perceived as Democratic bedwetting
Another Republican in Vance world said simply “We killed it.” The one moment Democrats celebrated during the debate was Vance’s refusal to answer a question about whether Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Republicans brushed that off. “They will make it all about Jan 6. But that doesn’t move the needle.”
Walz was surprisingly underwhelming on the debate stage—-particularly his rambling answer when asked about his repeated statements that he had been in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in 1989. Walz initially described himself as a “knucklehead” before eventually conceding that he misspoke at times.
One establishment Republican hoped Vance’s performance would boost Trump among wavering voters. “I do think there are people who aren’t psyched about Trump’s performance or the idea of voting for him who will like what they saw tonight,” they said. After all, Vance’s rollout as Trump’s running mate had been notoriously bumpy as he was forced to defend a series of inflammatory comments that he had made on right wing podcasts over the years including one in 2021 when he complained about the influence of “childless cat ladies” running the country.
The Ohio senator’s image hasn’t notably softened since then as he has adopted the traditional role of running mate as an attack dog. However, on Tuesday, he was the one that pulled his punches—-at least compared to Trump who was repeatedly deriding Walz as “Tampon Tim” on social media. Instead, he came across as “exceptionally competent and conspicuously congenial,” in the words of the establishment Republican, especially compared to the public perception of him prior to the debate when he was viewed less favorably than any other candidate on a national ticket.
There is uncertainty though whether any of this mattered. It is a vice presidential debate and voters don’t vote for the number two on the ticket. Traditionally, vice presidential debates have almost no impact on the presidential election. After all, the most memorable moment in any vice presidential debate was Lloyd Bentsen’s withering putdown of Dan Quayle in 1988 where he mocked Quayle’s comparison of himself to John F. Kennedy. “I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy,” said Bentsen. The moment has gone down in history but Bentsen, and his running mate, Michael Dukakis, lost the election by a hefty margin.”
As one senior Capitol Hill Republican pointed out “One can debate without any proof as to whether or not the needle moved tonight. What is clear is that this was a best case scenario for Trump and a worst case scenario for Harris.”
Both candidates at tonight’s vice-presidential debate agreed that housing costs are too high. And both Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz had their favorite scapegoats to blame the problem on.
For Vance, it was immigrants.
“You’ve got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes,” said the Republican vice-presidential nominee.
Instead of “blaming migrants for everything on housing, we could talk a little bit about Wall Street speculators buying up housing and making them less affordable,” responded the Democrat.
Neither candidate’s answer is particularly surprising. Vance has blamed immigrants for raising housing costs throughout the campaign. The GOP party platform claims that deportations will help bring housing costs down.
Meanwhile, the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, has repeatedly blamed “corporate landlords” and “Wall Street” for rising rents and home prices. As a solution, she has endorsed capping rents at properties owned by larger corporate investors and using antitrust law to stop landlords from using rent-recommendation software. Walz was merely aping his running mate’s rhetoric.
Vance, to be sure, has also repeatedly blamed institutional investors for raising Americans’ housing costs.
There’s a straightforward logic to both candidate’s claims. Increased demand for housing, whether from immigrants or corporate investors, would be expected to increase prices.
But increased demand should also be expected to increase supply, bringing prices back down.
Corporate investors and immigrants also play an important, direct role in increasing housing supply. Investors supply capital to build new homes. Immigrants supply labor for the same.
At least one study has found that the labor shortages caused by immigration restrictions do more to raise the cost of housing than they do to lower it through reduced demand.
Higher demand fails to translate into supply when the government restricts homebuilding through regulations that limit where and how much housing developers can build.
California and New Jersey have the same percentage of foreign-born residents. California also has a lot more regulatory restrictions on home building than New Jersey. The medianhome price in New Jersey is 30 percent cheaper as a result.
Vance cited a Federal Reserve study showing that immigration increased housing costs, promising to share the paper later on social media. (The campaign has thus far shared remarks, not studies, from Fed officials, to the effect that immigration has increased demand for housing, which duh.)
Contra Walz, one study has found that restrictions on investor-owned rental housing raised rents and raised the incomes of residents in select neighborhoods by excluding lower-income renters. Studies on the effects of rent-recommendation software have found mixed effects on housing costs. In tight markets, such software raises rents. When supply is loose, it lowers them.
As always, the ability of builders to add new supply is what sets the price in the long term. Both candidates gestured at this in their own way, although Walz was more explicit about the relationship.
“We cut some of the red tape,” he said, referencing Minneapolis’ experience of liberalizing zoning laws and seeing housing costs fall. Walz’s pro-supply remarks were nevertheless sandwiched between calls for spending more on affordable housing and down-payment assistance.
On the supply side of the equation, Vance referenced Trump’s plan to open up federal lands for more development, saying the feds own lands “that aren’t being used for anything. They’re not being used for national parks. They’re not being used and it could be places where we build a lot of housing. And I do think that we should be opening up building in this country.”
In some Western states, the federal government is the largest landowner and its undeveloped lands act as a de facto urban growth boundary. Vance is right that opening up those lands for development would add supply and lower prices.
Unfortunately, his support for residential development on currently federal-owned land was immediately succeeded by a call to kick out the illegal immigrants who are competing for homes.
So there you have it. Both candidates recognized the role that home building and home supply plays in reducing housing costs. But both were also keen to single out scapegoats—immigrants for Vance, Wall Street for Walz—for increasing demand and prices.
Walz acknowledged tonight that there’s not a lot the federal government can do to reduce locally set land use regulations. He’s right. But the federal government does have a lot of other levers they can pull to make housing costs worse, from immigration restrictions to nationwide rent control.
And both candidates indicated that they’d pull those levers.
When J.D. Vance converted to Catholicism five years ago, he came into contact with what the Associated Press recently called “a Catholic intellectual movement, viewed by some critics as having reactionary or authoritarian leanings.” Vance has called himself a “postliberal” Catholic in the past and has endorsed policies and tactics favored by adherents of the label, such as purging the administrative state and his rhetorical promotion of “pro-family” policy. (His actual legislative record on this subject leaves much to be desired.)
His rise as a national figure has carried relatively obscure ideologies closer to political power, including what the AP called a “subset” of postliberalism, known as integralism. What is integralism, then, and could it influence our would-be vice-president? As held by prominent thinkers like Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School, integralism imagines a future when the state may punish the baptized for violations of ecclesiastical law. Kevin Vallier, an associate professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University and the author of All The Kingdoms of the World, spoke with me about Vance, integralism and the political order that integralists seek to create.
I wanted to start by defining our terms. Briefly, could you tell me what is integralism and how it differs from views held by prominent conservative Catholics like J.D. Vance or someone like Leonard Leo?
J.D. Vance is friends with many of the leading integralists, so it’s not entirely clear to me how far away he is from thinking that this would be the best system of government. It’s just unknown. He’s called himself a Catholic postliberal, which, in my view, is less radical than a Catholic integralist. But he’s been to one of their conferences as a speaker.
Integralists think church and state should be integrated for the entire common good of the people, not just in this life but also the next. But the way that it works is that the Church is the primary mode of social organization that’s guiding people into the next life. In certain cases, the Church can deputize the state to help enforce some of its spiritual policies.
An integralist regime doesn’t necessarily have to be at all violent or super oppressive. It just depends on what the Church directs the state to do. Still, we’re looking at heresy laws. We’re looking at apostasy laws. If someone leaves the faith, there’s some kind of penalty. If you teach heresy, and you’re condemned by the Church and so by the state, something happens to you. You distribute banned and heretical books, something happens.
Can we fit integralism under the broad rubric of Christian nationalism, or is it somewhat distinct?
Christian nationalism is usually very Protestant, and also, integralism is not nationalist. Christian nationalism to me is like bargain-basement integralism. Integralists are very intellectually sophisticated. Christian nationalism, frankly, I think it began as a way for the right to troll the left four or five years ago. It was kind of to scare Democrats. So it doesn’t really cohere intellectually very much, which is why you hear Marjorie Taylor Greene talking about Christian nationalism, but you have Catholic theologians talking about integralism.
Obviously, integralism is not a new idea, so when did its resurgence begin, and why did it begin?
The story’s pretty interesting. There was an informal group of American intellectuals who were thinking of these things before Trump — some of whom considered themselves on the left, and some of them considered themselves on the right. They opposed everything they thought of as liberal. They opposed theological liberalism, any kind of looser, more ecumenical or less miraculous understanding of religious texts, political liberalism in terms of stressing the dignity of the individual and sharply limited government, along with the market economy and the separation of church and state.
The right-wing people wanted to bring Catholicism back to public life and even some control on the grounds that it would have better family policy in many cases. When Trump was elected, though, it really divided them because the Catholic left were less extreme on church/state stuff, but they really just thought Trump was as un-Catholic as a leader could be. The right-wing integralists thought that Trump was a way of destroying liberal elites and hoped that is what he would do. They just didn’t see much social progress unless there was a new elite.
I’ve been told that by 2020 any semblance of left-wing integralism was gone. The right-wing integralists spent a large amount of time building connections with Viktor Orbán, whom they’re very big fans of. He’s a Calvinist, but because he’s enforcing cultural Christianity in some way, they think that’s better than nothing. He’s trying to grow families. So the history, like any early radical sect, is full of strong, crazy personalities and weird fights and stuff.
It’s a small community, as you note in your book.
Yes, it is. It’s weird because you would think it would have no influence at all. Catholics over 50 tell me that this is a joke. There’s nothing to it. But then I meet all these Catholic graduate students at different universities, and they’re super excited about it. Maybe they’re not fully integralists, but their friends are, and they’re like, “Oh, I don’t know what to think.” It’s in the air. I had a blast last year just going to different students all over the place and talking to them about it.
But the biggest thing I think that will change things is that there are lots of priests that are becoming integralist and that can really matter because people go to their priests. A lot of these younger Catholic priests, if they say Latin Mass, they’ve got growing churches. This isn’t a dwindling church somewhere. So they’re influencing people. They’re shaping minds and spirits and so on. So that could matter, but it’s very hard to know how much it matters.
It ebbs and flows. I thought last year, the only way that integralism was going to have a future after all the infighting was if J.D. Vance became VP nominee, and then he did.
You go over this at length in your book, but could we discuss how integralists propose capturing the state and enforcing their agenda?
What Vermeule gets is that you’re not going to be able to do this with a small government. You’re going to need a very powerful executive branch, and you’re going to need a very powerful administrative state. Then the question is just going to be how you prepare a large pluralistic society to submit to a religion that they don’t all share. So the first thing you have to do is you have to think you know that liberalism will collapse.
While liberalism is collapsing of its own weight, you get the right reflective, deeply committed Catholic people into those bureaucracies, into the judiciary, into the executive. It’s like, history will hand you this opportunity. You have your small group. They’re training their own people. They’re ready to go.
So getting there requires a large state. It requires the intellectual discrediting and collapse of liberalism and having the right place and the right time for a new elite to take things in as integralist direction as possible as they can, hopefully with relatively little bloodshed.
It doesn’t seem like they’re necessarily planning some civil war where they take over and crush dissent violently in the streets. But is it possible to do what they want to do without engendering violence in some way?
Well, the engendering is the key because it depends on who controls the levers of government. If it’s still controlled by the left, or however you want to think about it, yeah, it’s going to require bloodshed. So they’re not going to say, “Yeah, let’s do that.” I don’t think these are bloodthirsty people. I think some of them are mostly nerdy intellectuals, then some of them are really politically obsessed nerdy intellectuals.
There are two groups of people. There are people who want to argue theology all day. I like them. They’re weird, but I like them. Then there are people who are obsessed with politics and are hanging out in Hungary, making sure Orbán has an audience with DeSantis and all this kind of stuff. They’re the first ones to really grease those wheels. They like Orbán because they can see him as destroying the elite power of the Hungarian left, although Orbán’s benefited tremendously from the left being completely fragmented there, and so he can create a coalition that wins fair and square.
So I don’t think they’re eager to hurt people. I just think they believe today’s society, and liberal society generally, is just so profoundly corrupt that you’re just not going to make life better for people without what they call a postliberal order. You’d have to fundamentally change the terms on which a modern society operates. They’ve told us almost nothing about how that is, as opposed to banning some stuff.
What would religious freedom look like under an integralist regime?
That’s actually one of the most complicated questions, and it’s one of the ones that got integralism started in the first place. The quick answer is you have to have religious freedom for the unbaptized. You can’t force them into the Church. But if they are baptized, if they’re members of the Church, then they’re subject to the Church’s jurisdiction, which means that in an integralist state, of which all the baptized were members, the Church could direct the state to control but usually to punish the baptized for culpable sins.
Thomas Pink, a philosopher emeritus at King’s College London who’s its chief intellectual but perhaps rejects its politics, has said integralism isn’t going to happen. People disagree too much now. You can’t get the kind of uniformity that you would need for this kind of ideal society.
But you can imagine a very Catholic society. Then people know a lot more about Catholicism, and they know what’s bad about defecting from it. In those cases, you could punish them. The same way that in some Muslim countries, where Christians and Jews are people of the book, and so they’re to be tolerated. At least in principle. But if you’re Muslim, then the policies can apply to you. Now, there are modern Muslim societies. There are much more conservative ones. So I’m not talking about a general tendency of Islam. I’m just saying if you’re trying to get a sense for this, with integralism you’re going to use coercion against your co-religionists to keep them on the straight and narrow. That’s the main kind of coercion that would be introduced.
I’m curious about their view of racial and gender equality.
They’re fine with racial equality. Most of the time they’re trying to deflect worries about antisemitism, which is complicated. Gender, on the other hand, is completely different. They reject LGBT equality in every way that one can. They’ll say, “Look, there are certain gender roles that are appropriate.” Most of the new right factions have this masculinist component.
They would definitely get rid of same-sex marriage. They would ban pornography of every kind. In many cases, they are associated with very patriarchal views of marriage. They don’t talk about that a lot, but it’s there.
Two of Florida’s top Haitian American lawmakers, Democratic U.S. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick and North Miami state Democratic Rep. Dotie Joseph, joined in with other Haitian American lawmakers around the country on Thursday to denounce the false allegations by former President Donald Trump and Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, that have put a target on that immigrant community.
Vance and Trump have repeatedly alleged over the past two weeks that Haitian immigrants in Springfield have stolen and eaten dogs and cats, despite insistence by local and state government officials in Ohio that they are baseless.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Bryan Heck, the Springfield city manager, told a Vance staff member last week that there was no truth to the rumors of pets being taken and eaten. But by then, Vance had already posted the rumors to his 1.9 million followers on X, and Trump advanced the claim the next evening during the presidential debate viewed by more than 67 million people.
Since then, more than 30 bomb threats have been made against schools, government buildings, and city officials’ homes, forcing evacuations and closures, the Associated Press is reporting. The city of Springfield cancelled its annual celebration of diversity, arts, and culture due to the threats, and state police were deployed to city schools earlier this week.
“Today we stand united in condemning the dangerous and xenophobic rhetoric spread by former president Donald Trump and J.D. Vance,” Joseph said on a Zoom conference call organized by the National Haitian American Elected Officials Network.
“Their words not only target the Haitian community, which is experiencing increased tension and accusations and problems around the country, but particularly in Springfield. The entire community is impacted by their spreading fear and division.”
Joseph was born in Haiti and raised in Miami. She went on to graduate from Yale University and has represented her district in North Miami in the Florida House since 2018.
Joining her on the call was Broward-Palm Beach County U.S. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, the first Haitian American Democrat elected to Congress after winning a special election to succeed the late Alcee Hastings in January 2022.
‘It’s not racist’
Cherfilus-McCormick, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, not only criticized Trump and Vance for spreading the false narrative about Haitians in Ohio, but also Donald Trump Jr. for his comment last week that Haitian immigrants were less intelligent than people from other countries.
“You look at Haiti, you look at the demographic makeup, you look at the average I.Q. — if you import the third world into your country, you’re going to become the third world,” the younger Trump said in an interview with Charlie Kirk on Real America’s Voice, a conservative broadcasting network, according to The New York Times. “That’s just basic. It’s not racist. It’s just fact.”
“When you start talking about low IQs and genetic inferiority, what you’re really doing is blowing the whistle to call out white supremacy organizations to become active and engage,” Cherfilus-McCormick said. “It’s not surprising that we have so many threats and so much violence that is potentially about to ensue, and so, as Americans and as electeds, we have to stand up strong and make it very clear that there is no place for hate in our country.”
She went on to say that many of the Haitian migrants living in the United States came through a humanitarian parole program created by the Biden administration that allows Haitians, Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans to enter legally as long as they have a financial sponsor and pass background checks. The program first was launched for Venezuela in October 2022 and expanded to Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua in January 2023.
“They are vetted for health and they are also vetted for social and criminal backgrounds,” Cherfilus-McCormick said. “That’s the only way that they’re able to come into the U.S. And so, once they’ve passed this, they’re able to come in get their working papers. These people are not illegal, but actually came into this country legally.”
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: [email protected]. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and Twitter.
