Connexion
Introducing the November/December 2026 issue of The American Conservative.
One of the upshots of the globalist era is novel and surprising combinations. Immigrants from the deserts of Somalia concentrate in frigid Minnesota, where they have proceeded to pillage the welfare system (as Roger McGrath warned they would in a November 2002 issue of The American Conservative, when Nick Shirley was seven months old). And, as the Latin American right tries to ingratiate itself to its pro-Israel Yankee counterpart, the presidents of Colombia, Chile, and Argentina, among others, discover a fresh commitment to Zionism and deepening bilateral relations with Jerusalem. Juan Rojas is here to tell this strange tale in his cover story for the issue. As right-of-center parties surge in popularity and power across the Western Hemisphere, his findings will only grow in relevance.
The unintended consequences of American hegemony and how we have chosen to use it are a recurring theme in this issue. Jennifer Kavanagh presents a sober analysis of the United States’ continued exposure in the Russia–Ukraine War, and how we can extract ourselves in the coming year. Andrew Day, TAC’s senior editor, writes about how American policy, including our war advertised as a check on Iran’s nuclear program, has actually encouraged nuclear proliferation. Daniel DePetris examines how that very war may result in American retrenchment and a reorientation of foreign-policy priorities; Luke Nicastro, senior editor, surveys some new left-wing proposals for what form that reorientation might take. And our founding editor, Scott McConnell, reviews a new book on the Israel lobby’s continued influence on American politics and policy.
The world is, however, very large and very old, and not everything happens purely under the auspices of Washington. Jude Russo, managing editor, writes about the life and times of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the future of Turkish politics. Will Collins reports from a strange cultural festival in Hungary, where the fringe cultural theory of Turanism unites hobbyists from the Balkans to Mongolia.
Here at TAC, we are always honored by the support of our readership. If you think what we are doing is worthwhile, please consider a tax-deductible donation this holiday season. We do it for you, but we can only do it with you.
The post Uncle Sam’s Playground appeared first on The American Conservative.
TAC is committed to preserving the trust it has built up with its readership over a quarter-century.
IBM had a famous dictum in its 1979 training manual: “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”
As far as corporate training-manual maxims go, we think that’s a pretty good one, and generalizable to our own work. Journalism is useful insofar as it is trustworthy, and it is trustworthy only insofar as a person or set of persons are responsible for getting facts and analysis right. Failure must come at the risk of public shame and, in extremity, professional jeopardy.
The only way a journalist can be held responsible for the entirety of an article is for him to write the entire thing, including the background material that nonprofessionals may think is mere window-dressing for the central reporting or argument. Any reporter can regale you with war-stories in which perfunctory fact-finding for context or kickers brought new detail or insight to light, radically changing the entire premises, emphases, or framing of the article.
Journalistic writing is the artifact of the writer’s critical engagement with fact; if you are not engaging with the facts critically as you put words onto the page, you are not doing journalism. Putting your name on an article is an assertion that you have actually thought through what you have written, and will stand by it.
For this reason, The American Conservative does not accept stories containing AI-generated prose. While AI has opened exciting vistas of technical progress, including for the research and data-processing that go into journalism, it is not an appropriate tool for the replacement of human judgment, which is what bylined writing represents. A computer can never be held accountable. No matter how proficient AI tools become at generating aesthetically acceptable prose, they cannot supply authority and responsibility.
TAC’s editors and writers are not infallible, but we’d like to think that over nearly a quarter-century they’ve amassed a pretty good track record, and have earned a reputation for independence and honesty. We do not present you, our readers, with articles we have not thought through ourselves and we are not willing to stand behind. To maintain this standard of responsibility, our editors check every submission not only using their own judgment but also the best available tools for AI detection. We will not publish those we believe to be generated by AI.
We believe the American public is with us on this issue. Ninety-four percent of those surveyed by Pew Research think it is important for them to know whether a given piece of media is generated by AI. Just 10 percent believe that AI use will have a positive effect on journalism. Fifty-six percent say they are less confident in an article composed using AI. These are not ambiguous numbers. Americans understand that journalism is ultimately a matter of trust, and trust is a matter of human responsibility.
We here at TAC value your trust more than anything; it is the fundamental currency of our work. If you think our project is worthwhile, please consider making a tax-deductible donation. As always, we are deeply grateful for your support and your loyalty, which are remarkable.
Curt Mills
Executive Director
Jude Russo
Managing Editor
The post The American Conservative’s AI Writing Policy appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Conservative leader pledged to eliminate inheritance taxes on family estates.
Last week, Britain’s Prime Minister Andy Burnham, in his speech to the Labour conference in Liverpool, turned the political clock back to the 1970s, complete with nationalization, big social spending, and attacks on landlords.
The Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, at her own party’s conference Wednesday, went even further back—to the Second World War, after which many stately homes and expensive houses had to be sold to pay death duties, helping to kill the Downton lifestyle.
Badenoch promised that if the Tories come to power, “nobody” in the UK will ever have to pay inheritance tax on the family home, the death duty of the 21st century.
Presumably, Earl Spencer, the brother of the late Princess Diana, will be able to hand on the family pile at Althorp, worth some tens of millions of pounds. Not only that, he will be able to shelter another million or so under Badenoch’s additional proposals for family wealth transfer.
This looks highly regressive. Only the wealthiest 5 percent of estates actually pay inheritance tax in the UK, because families can usually shelter around £1 million under the present rules. Inheritance tax is levied at 40 percent on any estate above £325,000, plus an additional £175,000 for homes being passed down to direct descendants. This overall amount is doubled for spouses or where the home is passed to children, hence the potential £1 million shelter (around $1.3 million).
This is big money in today’s Britain. The average house price in the UK is less than £300,000. It is only in central London postcodes and country estates that homes are worth significantly more than £1 million. Labour has done the math and concluded the old class-war Tory party is back in action. The Labour-affiliated general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, Paul Nowak, remarked, “This is the same old Tory playbook: cutting taxes for their rich mates and leaving working people to pick up the bill.”
Badenoch’s move also undermines her promise to cut borrowing and pay down the national debt. Inheritance tax is scheduled to yield around £15 billion to the UK Exchequer by 2030. This would be vastly reduced by her asset exemption. Labour can legitimately ask where the money is going to come from to fill that black hole.
So, why has the Tory leader exposed herself to the charge that she has gone back to leading the “rich bastards’ party,” as the Conservatives used to be regarded in popular culture? Doesn’t she fear losing all those millions of voters who aren’t in the current inheritance-tax bracket?
Well, this is first of all a measure to shore up the core Conservative vote in the wealthier parts of the Home Counties of England. She is also banking on evidence that even people who don’t pay inheritance tax think it is unfair. People have already paid taxes on these assets, so why should they be robbed in death?
There is something in that. Yet the Badenoch giveaway is almost certain to perpetuate intergenerational inequality.
By far the biggest element of inheritance tax is the value of the family home. The inflation of this asset over the last 50 years has been a major contributor to wealth inequality in Britain. If this policy were implemented, inequality would likely be transmitted further down the generations by exempting this key asset from tax.
To repeat: Only people with very expensive homes are being rewarded under this plan. It is a major dilution of an asset tax that has been around essentially since the beginning of the last century, though under various different names: Estate Duty, Capital Transfer Tax and, since 1986, Inheritance Tax.
So, is class war back? It does kind of look like that. Until perhaps you look across the pond at the U.S., where the federal estate tax has an exemption of $15 million—$30 million for couples—which is 23 times the UK’s exemption. Moreover, inheritance tax does appear to be going out of fashion. It has been abolished in Canada and Australia and even in social-democratic Sweden and Norway (though the latter has a version of wealth tax).
This is partly because inheritance tax raises relatively little money and because it discourages saving and investment. Inheritance tax can force family businesses and farms to sell up just to pay the tax. This not only acts as a discouragement to entrepreneurship; it also means that the goodwill and commitment that are built into a family firm or farm are lost to society. The assets are often sold to corporations or to wealthy individuals who live abroad and don’t pay any inheritance tax in the first place.
Moreover, inheritance tax and the British tax regime generally have become a disincentive for rich people to remain in or move to the UK. According to Bloomberg, Britain has lost nearly half of its billionaire wealth since Labour came to power—around £121 billion. Entrepreneurs like steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal have left the UK, citing inheritance-tax risks.
Maybe Badenoch is hoping to lure them back so that the government can recover the lost income-tax revenues. One of the recent departures, Chris Rokos, had been among Britain’s highest individual taxpayers, contributing £330 million to the public purse. No longer. Britons generally seem to hate billionaires, but when they’re gone, they take their taxes with them.
Badenoch is also hoping that other measures outlined in her speech—like cutting the benefits bill, cancelling net zero, building new prisons, halting illegal immigration, and building British defences—will appeal to middle-class British voters.
Her other objective was to paint the Tories’ main rivals on the right, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, as racists. “I don’t want to explain to my son when we’re watching our brilliant England team play football that some people don’t think our black players are English,” she said. It’s far from clear that Reform does define Britishness on the basis of race, but she is clearly rejecting any taint of ethnonationalism.
Reform UK has attacked Badenoch’s inheritance tax proposal as a desperate handout to a tiny wealthy elite, which they have characterized, Reform UK Shadow Chancellor Robert Jenrick’s words, as a policy for “the 2 percent.” Jenrick used to be Badenoch’s main rival for the Conservative leadership. Times change.
The post Is Kemi Badenoch Reviving Tory Class War? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Andrew Day and Luke Nicastro talk to Filip Gaspar, a political advisor and member of the Alternative for Germany, about the party’s recent election victory and the implications for European politics. Recorded September 8, 2026.
The post TAC Right Now: Germany’s Real Right Rocks Europe, w/ Filip Gaspar appeared first on The American Conservative.
In a 2011 Labor Day column, our co-founder Pat Buchanan described the transformation of the American social contract in the postwar period.
“What happened to this idea that made America a self-sufficient republic, producing almost all it consumed, a nation that could stay out of the world wars as long as she wished and crush the greatest powers in Europe and Asia in less than four years after she went in?” he asked.
As was so often the case, Pat had the answer: “A new class came to power that looked on tariffs as xenophobic, on economic patriotism as atavistic and on national sovereignty as an antique idea in the new world order it envisioned.”
The results have been clear: the hollowing out of the American industrial base, the immiseration of the American workingman, and the drift of political attention to faraway lands, where ever more recondite interests demand the use of military force. In short, globalism.
Will you stand with The American Conservative as we carry forward Pat’s legacy of fighting reckless globalism?
For over a decade, many have given lip-service to Pat’s diagnosis. But the Iran War has shown that the globalist project, which so often works in tandem with neoconservativism, is not going down without a fight.
Let me make the stakes clear.
The American Conservative is the only major conservative magazine taking a stand against this failed war and its consequences for ordinary Americans. We can do this only with your support.
Can I count on you to help TAC carry forward its mission, championing peace abroad and prosperity at home, with a tax-deductible donation?
Thank you, as always, for your help and consideration. We wish you and yours a peaceful, joyful Labor Day.
Sincerely,
Curt Mills
Executive Director,
The American Conservative
The post How Long Will the American Worker Pay for Endless War? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Who remembers the Texan’s skepticism of foreign adventurism?
Today, loudly and proudly, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is a staunch supporter of the Iran War, the state of Israel, and U.S.-led regime change in other countries; he is outspoken against what he sees as rising antisemitism in America, particularly on the right.
When he opposed a potential U.S.–Iran peace deal in June, the Washington Examiner reported that “Cruz, considered a possible 2028 presidential candidate” was “positioning himself as more hawkish than the White House.”
Other top 2028 Republican presidential prospects include Vice President J.D. Vance, who is considered less hawkish than other White House officials, and also Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who in the 2016 presidential election was the neoconservative choice.
Cruz is now clearly aiming to be the most pro-war, pro-Israel, and thoroughly neoconservative Republican presidential candidate.
A decade ago, he was aiming to be something else.
Cruz told Iowans in 2015 that their foreign policy choice shouldn’t be between “retreat from the world and be isolationist and leave everyone alone, or we’ve got to be these crazy neocon-invade-every-country-on-Earth and send our kids to die in the Middle East.”
Gearing up to run for president, Cruz criticized neoconservatism frequently back then.
Some “crazy neocons” didn’t like it.
“I’m not sure where the neocons wish us to invade (left my decoder ring at the last Elders of Zion meeting), but what exactly does this would-be Commander in Chief wish us to do?” wrote the American Enterprise Institute’s Vice President Danielle Pletka.
Pletka’s “Elders of Zion” quip implied that perhaps Cruz was leaning into antisemitism.
Labeling Cruz an “isolationist,” Pletka would also say, “Good for Ted Cruz for being honest. He doesn’t want to be anywhere in the world, doesn’t want America to lead, and harkening back to the likes of Pat Buchanan and Charles Lindbergh is truth in advertising for him.”
She wasn’t the only one upset with Cruz, nor was Pletka the only hawk to equate Cruz’s criticism of neoconservatism with Jew hatred.
“He knows that the term in the usual far-left and far-right parlance means warmonger, if not warmongering Jewish advisers, so it is not something he should’ve done,” said the former President George W. Bush National Security Council official Elliot Abrams.
The columnist Jonah Goldberg would add, “Abrams is right — and Cruz surely knows — that for many people ‘neocon’ has become code for suspiciously Hebraic super-hawk.”
The Bush State Department alumnus Eliot Cohen said of Cruz’s naughty word, “It’s an epithet. It’s always used pejoratively.”
If Cruz’s use of the term was jarring to neoconservatives accustomed to being gatekeepers of what foreign policy positions were acceptable on the right, including what rhetoric might be permitted, for non-interventionist conservatives it was not surprising.
Cruz was elected to the Senate in 2012 as part of a Tea Party wave of Republicans, which at the time meant cuddling up to the popular libertarian Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), who was attracting large audiences while running for president in 2012. It also meant cultivating ties with his senator son, Rand Paul, whose 2010 Kentucky primary race was in part a Republican intra-party war between the rising son of Ron and the neocon old guard. Dick Cheney would endorse Paul’s GOP primary opponent, but the Tea Party darling Sarah Palin gave the libertarian a major assist with her endorsement.
Cruz was definitely in, and actively wanting to be in, the Paul-Palin conservative camp and not the Dick Cheney one.
Both Pauls endorsed Cruz for senate. Though Cruz would eventually try to say he was somewhere between Rand Paul and the much more hawkish Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) on foreign policy, the popular spot in the GOP base at the time was the Tea Party and the Pauls and so, again, there was Cruz. (The future neocon star Nikki Haley also once embraced the Tea Party.)
When the former senator and hawkish GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum was asked in 2015 about Cruz’s use of the word “neocon,” he replied, “You don’t accuse someone of being a neocon if you see yourself as a Reagan conservative on national security. And he’s not.”
He added, “The Republican party, thanks to Ron and Rand Paul, have brought in different elements into the party, and I think Ted’s comfortable in those elements.”
Santorum did not mean this as a compliment, but he was right about Cruz seeming comfortable—or at least pretending to be—in “those elements.”
Which at the time also included praising the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden for his 2013 revelations about mass surveillance by the U.S. government.
“If it is the case that the federal government is seizing millions of personal records about law-abiding citizens, and if it is the case that there are minimal restrictions on accessing or reviewing those records, then I think Mr. Snowden has done a considerable public service by bringing it to light,” Cruz said at a 2013 event hosted by The Blaze.
Cruz said, while running for president three years later, that Snowden was a “traitor” who should be “tried for treason.”
As a 2016 Republican primary candidate, Rubio would say of his fellow competitor, “I never believed Edward Snowden was a good public servant the way that Ted Cruz once said that he had done a public service for America.”
Working for the Paul family in various capacities and coming from the libertarian right, this is my memory of Cruz’s chameleon politics; while I can only speak for myself, I don’t believe I’m the only libertarian embarrassed to have ever considered the man an ally.
We should all expect deception from politicians. But Cruz certainly went deep.
Cruz’s shapeshifting certainly didn’t stop here. As The American Conservative’s Curt Mills’ recently opined, “Could say a lot about Cruz, but have to almost admire his consistent shamelessness. At the dawn of his national career, he tried to destroy Obamacare, when that was impossible, Obama had just been convincingly re-elected, etc, just for attention.”
“Remember he spoke at Nat Con II, and in contrast to Rubio, he didn’t even try to placate the audience—just an open bog standard, old guard Republican speech. It was sort of impressive,” Mills added of Cruz’s speech at the 2021 National Conservatism Conference. “Now, he’s just going to run for president in 2028 on an open, Damned Proud demi foreign agent platform. It won’t win, but think it will have more legs than a lot of quisling Machiavels’ attempts will.”
Mills’s words were accompanied by a Cruz post with the senator gloating about Israel’s major investments in Texas.
Which is definitely Ted Cruz of the 2026 vintage: a full-fledged, neocon Zionist hellbent on painting others who question American wars or U.S.-Israel relations as being antisemitic. It’s hard to imagine the cast of neoconservatives quoted here having anything harsh to say about Cruz today.
It’s amusing to imagine what a 2013 or even 2015 Cruz would think of the “crazy” neoconservatism he’s so fully embraced today. Or even whatever he might end up becoming in the future as political winds shift with his ambitions. Cruz went through more changes and nuances than even this, but this column can only be so long.
So who is the real Ted Cruz? It’s a good question, but probably one that no one can truly answer.
Not even Cruz.
The post Ted Cruz Is an Opportunistic Chameleon appeared first on The American Conservative.
Mass immigration is now wreaking havoc on both sides of the Atlantic.
Someone I know once told me his main marital problem was that whenever he had a row with his wife, his parents would blame him, and his wife’s parents would blame him, so it was always unanimous: It was his fault.
That’s how I see the “Which Is Worse?” question comparing immigration in the United States and Europe. Americans see countless videos of thousands of Muslims marching through London and Paris, and say, Europe is finished. Shocked at the unassimilable cultures being dumped on them, Europeans imagine no one has ever suffered so much.
So it’s unanimous. The U.S. is lucky by comparison!
The consensus opinion could not be more wrong. Europe has only just begun its experiment with “multiculturalism.” The U.S. is so far along on this journey, it would be a miracle for the country to survive another half century in any recognizable form.
In addition to being screwed by the sizable group of Americans always clamoring for cheap labor, the U.S. is uniquely screwed by its geography, as pointed out by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington 20 years ago. We are one of the only developed countries to share a border with a third world country—and that border is 2,000 miles long, protected by a picket fence. Moreover, the income gap between Mexico and America is among the largest of any two contiguous countries in the world.
But why not cheer for the U.S. becoming another Mexico, as the Wall Street Journal does? Think of all that cheap labor!
For starters, Latin American culture is wildly different from ours, in terms of corruption, submission to authority, and its Catholicism, which reveres the poor and abhors “income inequality.” Practically the only prosperous and stable democracies in all of Latin America are Uruguay and Costa Rica, each less than 50 percent Catholic and both overwhelmingly white European (83 percent to 88 percent).
By the way, what was Mexico’s contribution to defeating the Nazi war machine; ridding the world of polio, smallpox, malaria and other dread diseases; and the invention of the airplane, nuclear power, oil rigging machinery and the personal computer?
Good luck to the rest of the world when the U.S. is Mexico-Norte.
Which is happening faster than you might think. By now, America has taken in about one-third of Mexico’s entire population. And that’s to say nothing of El Salvador, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and the other poverty-ridden countries to our south.
Since 1980, the Hispanic population in the U.S. has exploded from about 14 million to 71 million—or 21 percent of the population. Add in the other dissonant cultures from places like Africa and the Middle East, and America is less than a generation away from white Westerners becoming a minority.
But Europe is still Europe. The insane immigration regime they’ve imposed on themselves is like dropping Ted Bundy into a sorority house. A few girls will be slaughtered, but the sorority house will survive, as will most of the girls. America is more like the sorority house being moved to the inner city and turned into a flop house for meth addicts.
Today, Western Europe is 85 percent to 90 percent white—or “European.” The gigantic population shift in the last few decades is the equivalent of trading the demographics of Maine (89 percent white Western European) for those of Montana (83 percent white Western European). Even the UK is 82 percent white—or the demographics of Iowa (81 percent). The doomsday scenario is that, in a few years, Britain may have the demographics of North Dakota (80 percent).
Meanwhile, the U.S. is hanging on by a thread at 56 percent white Western European. As the U.S. barrels toward becoming another failed Latin American country, we haven’t exactly been immune from the downsides of mass Muslim immigration, either. America had 9/11, the shoe bomber, the Boston Marathon bombing, the San Bernardino mass murder, the Pulse nightclub mass murder, the New York City truck attack, the New Orleans truck attack, and the Salman Rushdie stabbing.
Diversity just keeps making us stronger and stronger.
Europeans spent decades taunting America for our staggering crime rates, but instead of asking themselves why that might be, they mocked our gun culture. (High crime rates couldn’t possibly be related to America’s diversity, because diversity is a strength.)
Thus, in the 1970s, a top official in the British police force boasted that Detroit had more murders than all of Great Britain that year. He attributed that city’s murder rate to the U.S. being “an armed society.” Yes, Detroit—55 percent Our Greatest Strength in 1975. It’s probably a good idea for English bobbies not to carry guns.
In fact, the rate at which white Americans commit murder is about the same as the murder rate in Belgium, Finland and Scotland. Simply excluding murders committed by African-Americans cuts the U.S. homicide rate in half—more than half since the Year of Our Floyd. Today, black people commit nearly 60 percent of all murders in America. Throw in Somalis, Hmong, Afghans, Mexicans and Venezuelans and you’ve got yourself a party.
But on and on Europeans went, sneering about America’s shoot-em-up gun culture, and demanding ever more gun restrictions in their own countries, to avoid such a horrible fate. Maybe now they’re beginning to see why we needed to be armed.
If only Europeans had been less afraid of guns, and more afraid of multiculturalism! Before you could say “Rotherham grooming gang,” third-worlders were pouring into Europe, raping the indigenous population’s women and girls, committing random bombings and murders, all while being ferociously protected by government bureaucrats and the media.
After 50 years of Europeans’ “searing condemnation of U.S. gun culture,” as The Atlantic put it, it’s rather satisfying to see them lose their minds about the newfound violence as their countries edge down from 90 percent white Western European to 85 percent white Western European. I don’t know why any country, including my own, would do this to itself. It’s like injecting yourself with Ebola. But at the risk of sounding slightly hostile, how do you like it, now, Europe?
COPYRIGHT 2026 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY IMPOLITE DEBATES
The post Who’s in Worse Shape, Europe or the U.S.? appeared first on The American Conservative.
A by-election victory will not mean Reform UK’s mastermind is out of the woods.
Nigel Farage has just taken the biggest gamble of his decades-long political career. To try to draw a line on the financial scandals that have dogged him for the past few months, the Reform UK leader has asked the voters to decide his fate. He has resigned as the member of Parliament for Clacton and will face a by-election in August to try to win his job back.
The big gamble here is not really whether Farage will be returned to parliament. Barring some freak event, he can be reasonably confident of victory—his Clacton constituency, on the Essex coastline, is the most Reform-friendly seat in the country, and Reform is now polling even higher than in the 2024 general election. The other main parties have also made victory far easier for him by refusing to take part in the by-election, branding his resignation a “desperate stunt.” Other candidates who have declared they will stand include Count Binface, a satirical candidate who wears a bin on his head and claims to be from outer space; Piers Corbyn, brother of ex-Labour leader Jeremy and noted conspiracy nut; and Laurence Fox, an actor turned politician, leader of Reclaim, a right-wing microparty. Farage should have no trouble.
No, the gamble instead is that the Clacton by-election fails to reset the narrative in Farage and Reform’s favour. Farage has posed the battle to regain his seat as a straightforward contest between “the people versus the establishment.” This is made much harder when the other candidates on the ballot paper are a selection of weirdos and misfits rather than genuine contenders. What’s more, there is every risk that the questions around Farage’s finances start to make him look less like an insurgent, anti-system outsider, and more like the very political class whom voters so despise—as just another politician, in it for himself.
In a just world, these scandals probably wouldn’t come close to derailing Farage’s political ambitions, but they have undoubtedly provided Reform’s critics with plenty of ammunition. The first involves an undeclared donation of £5 million from Christopher Harborne, a cryptocurrency tycoon. Farage says this money has all gone towards his personal security. The tragic necessity of such security was recently brought home by last week’s murder of Ann Widdecombe—a prominent former Conservative MP and, more recently, Reform spokeswoman—in her home in rural Devon.
The other scandal concerns Farage’s long-standing relationship with George Cottrell, a Reform donor and aristocrat who was once convicted of wire fraud. Both are currently being investigated by parliament as possible breaches of transparency rules, although there is no suggestion that Farage has broken any laws, misused public money, or personally benefited from any ill-gotten cash.
The danger for Farage is that instead of silencing the allegations of impropriety, the by-election could place them under a harsher spotlight. Several more weeks of Farage’s financial scandals dominating the headlines could prove damaging in the long run. His personal approval ratings have already slid to their lowest point since the 2024 general election. The parliamentary investigations will also resume should Farage be returned to his seat.
Depending on how serious the investigations deem any breaches of the financial-reporting rules, he could end up being suspended from parliament—and then having to face another by-election to retake his seat. At which point, few would blame Farage if he opted instead for an early retirement. Even if the people of Clacton decide they would rather have him as their MP than a comedian who wears a garbage can for a helmet, this does not mean he is out of the woods.
If Farage were to be taken out of the picture entirely, this could easily represent the biggest setback for the British right since Tony Blair and New Labour cast the Tories out of power for 13 years. The Reform leader may be flawed, but he offers by far the best vehicle for the British people’s desire to overturn the status quo. A Reform party without Farage would not have been ahead in 300 near-consecutive opinion polls—and it would not have romped to victory in two sets of local elections (usually the best guide to success in parliamentary elections). This is not to say there are no other figures in Reform who could prove to be effective leaders—the home-affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf and the Treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick would be the favourites—but none has anything like the name recognition of Nigel Farage.
The Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch will no doubt be pleased by the Farage farragos. Although the Tories are second in most national opinion polls, Reform has been trouncing them in recent electoral contests.
In the Makerfield by-election, which allowed Labour’s Andy Burnham to return to parliament and plot his path to PM, the Conservatives finished in a humiliating fourth place on 2.2 per cent of the vote. The picture was even bleaker in Gorton and Denton, where Reform came second to the Greens, and the Tories floundered on 1.9 per cent of the vote. Britain’s so-called “natural party of government” now struggles to get into double figures in parts of the country where they were recently in contention. But could the political kneecapping of Farage reverse the Tories’ fortunes?
One reason to suspect not is that voters have still not forgiven the Conservatives for their recent stint in government. Despite promising to cut immigration, they allowed legal migration to explode to record numbers, while also surrendering the English Channel to the small-boat people-traffickers. Their (always questionable) reputation for sound economic management has also been left in ruins after years of stagnant growth, tax hikes and mounting public debt. This is why Badenoch’s high personal approval ratings—the best of any UK party leader—have never translated into a recovery for her party. The Conservatives’ natural voters do not merely feel let down; they feel a visceral sense of betrayal that may take many more years to heal. Should Reform stop looking like a party on its path to power, many of its voters would sooner opt for alternatives, like Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, than go back to the Tories.
The danger of a Reform slump leading to a divided, rudderless right can hardly be overstated. For all of Keir Starmer’s manifest flaws, he at least recognized Reform as the biggest threat to Labour maintaining its electoral base. The signs suggest that incoming prime minister Andy Burnham will be far more eager to chase the approval of the left than the country as a whole, which will be music to the ears of Labour party members and MPs. As bizarre as it may sound, many in Labour see Starmer’s real failure as his inability to withstand pressure from the right. In the parallel universe that is Labour land, Starmer would have lasted longer in the job had he flung open the borders even further, raised taxes and welfare, and turned on the public-spending taps.
The upshot of this is that some of the Labour government’s few sensible reforms are likely to be watered down or shelved entirely by the Burnham regime. Most notably, Shabana Mahmood’s plans to make it harder for new migrants to settle and claim welfare are rumoured to be on the chopping block. This would not only be financially ruinous but could also make it legally tricky for a future government to control the border, as more than a million migrants will be moved from temporary visas to having legal settlement rights.
The other trap being sprung on a future government for the right is in Burnham’s obsessive focus on ‘devolution’. The future PM, drawing on his time as mayor of Greater Manchester, is convinced that Britain’s problems stem from too much power being centralized in Westminster. But while handing greater powers to metro mayors and local councils sounds like it is boosting local democracy, the more likely outcome is that it empowers another layer of political apparatchiks—the exact type of activist-cum-bureaucrat who would be eager to frustrate a future government of the right, in whichever party-political form that takes. Reform or the Tories could win a general election promising to remake the country, only to find out they have far fewer means to do so than did any previous government.
The battle between the establishment and the people that Farage wants to set up in Clacton may well be happening right now in Westminster. The unelected Andy Burnham will be making decisions that could reshape the country profoundly, long before anyone can get a mandate to reverse them. That may prove to be the far bigger story of the summer than the by-election against Count Binface.
The post Farage’s Great Gamble appeared first on The American Conservative.
The prospective prime minister aims to “reform” Britain’s democracy—into a disguised permanent dictatorship.
Proportional representation is an extremely boring thing. Which is precisely why, if you want to destroy British democracy, it is such a very useful tool.
The mind-numbingly tedious voting system is even known by the initialism “PR,” which is ideal for a structure whose main public appeal really is a matter of pure public relations. Marching into Parliament wielding machine-guns is far too obvious a way to stage a coup. Instead, you could more effectively enlist polling companies like YouGov to go out and ask the general public a harmless-sounding, but very carefully phrased, question like the following:
Some people support a change in the British voting system to proportional representation (PR), where the number of MPs a party wins more closely reflects the share of the vote they receive. Other people support retaining our present voting system, first past the post (FPP), which is more likely to give one party an overall majority in the House of Commons and avoid a hung Parliament. Which system would you prefer?
Well, when it’s put like that, how can you possibly say no to PR? YouGov may as well have asked voters whether they would prefer the fair system, where voters get what they vote for, or the unfair system, where they don’t? All PR means is that, if a party gets, say, 36 percent of the vote, they will end up with precisely 36 percent of the nation’s MPs. At first glance, this does indeed sound fair. Examined more closely, it resembles a recipe for oppression.
Significantly, figures show an outright majority of voters for the UK’s main left-wing parties, Labour, Lib Dem, and Green, want PR, whilst only a plurality of Reform UK and a minority of the Conservatives, do. This is because, whilst superficially more democratic in principle, in truth PR would most likely help deliver a permanent majority for a multiparty left-wing coalition government. All these parties want only slight variations of the exact same open borders, DEI, LGBTQ, Net Zero, tax-and-spend agenda—thus PR would transform the UK into an electoral left dictatorship.
There are 650 MPs in the UK Parliament, and, under the current FPP system, the one with most votes in each individual constituency becomes that constituency’s local MP, even if only by a single ballot. If a party gets the magic number of 326 MPs, just one over the halfway mark, they can form a national government.
Generally, however, if you collate the sum total of votes gained by all the other opposition parties put together, it will represent far more votes than the actual new government got; under FPP a winning 30 percent share of national votes may equate to 60 percent of MPs. So, letting that same “winning” government with a 30 percent minority share of the ballot govern is in fact highly undemocratic, and it would be far fairer to let all the 70 percent of losers gang up into one big coalition and rule in their stead, right?
That certainly appears to be the opinion of the UK’s incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham—who, even more undemocratically, wasn’t really elected by 99.99 percent of the general public into his current role himself. In the run-up to his takeover, the left-wing Labour Party leader has spoken of the alleged need for “a different type of politics,” one based “less [upon] point-scoring, more [upon] problem-solving,” a more consensual, less oppositional way of doing things: less oppositional because, in practice, under PR there will be no meaningful non-leftist opposition remaining to stop him anymore, just to shout impotently from the sidelines.
In the past, Burnham has explicitly called for PR to be implemented, speaking of how alternative voting systems help build “collaboration, partnership and consensus-building”. But what he means by that is the building of an artificial consensus, one which does not in fact exist anywhere outside of the left-wing Westminster Uniparty bubble within which Andy blindly lives. PR will lead to a more “consensual politics” only in the sense that the politicians forming all future governments will fundamentally agree with one another on the core key issues beforehand, and undoing their legislation will be made impossible.
Burnham has called for as many UK parties as possible to fight the next general election upon a commitment to introduce PR for all future plebiscites. Then, he can claim he has a democratic mandate for it, when he knows most ordinary people won’t read said parties’ manifestos, or be aware the PR promise is even being made in them, just as many people were not aware of Labour’s manifesto promise to extend voting rights to 16-year-olds at the last general election—including the majority of 16-year-olds.
There is currently a left-wing cross-party agreement to bring in PR. Why? The ex-Green Party leader Caroline Lucas rather gave the game away:
Andy’s right that PR is a vital way of changing the wider political culture as well as better reflecting the wishes of the electorate [or one particular portion of it, anyway]. And, crucially, it’s also our best way of protecting our political system from a far-right government elected on barely a quarter of the national vote.
By this, Lucas actually means it is a better way of “better reflecting the wishes” of uniparty blobs like herself, forever. On issues like mass immigration, a large majority of the British public want less of it: but uniparty hydra-head offshoots like Labour, the Lib Dems, and Greens all want more of it, so under PR that is what they will get “democratically.” The only plausible party in existence at present who will try and change any of this is Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK—or a “far-right government” who could be “elected on barely a quarter of the national vote,” as Lucas would prefer to call them.
Reform has been leading national polls for the last year or more, generally with 25–30 percent of the vote; under FPP, they could plausibly form a government, or at least team up with the “right-lite” Conservative Party as a governing coalition. Under PR, this would be far less thinkable. The latest polls at time of writing give Reform 26 percent of the vote, equating to 169 PR MPs, and the Conservatives 19 percent, or 124 MPs, for 293 in total, 33 short of a majority. But add up the combined PR votes for the left-wing cabal of Labour, Lib Dem, Green and the SNP Scottish Nationalists, and you get precisely the magic number of 326 MPs, enough to form a coalition majority government. Throw in a few Muslim independents and Plaid Cymru Welsh nationalists for extra “stability” ,and you have a picture of the likely perma-junta of Britain’s PR-based future.
At first, this seems like a partial loss for Burnham. Being the mere head of a multi-party alliance, not a one-party Labour regime, should give him less power. But being voted out of office altogether will give him no power at all, an all-too plausible prospect under FPP. If he can only manage to persuade the electorate to vote for him this one final time come the next general election, giving him a “mandate” to impose PR, then he or one of his Labour Party avatars could be in office until Doomsday—towards which such a government would assuredly lead Britain. Thus, uniquely, the consequences of the next general election scheduled for 2029 will probably not be able to be subsequently democratically undone. How is that “democratic”?
Under FPP, a severe change of political course gained with about 30 percent of the vote is always at least theoretically possible. Under PR, contrariwise, a party like Reform would need to gain at least 50.1 percent of the vote to form a government, which is impossible in today’s fragmented political landscape—the last time that happened was 1931. Of the 22 general elections held in the UK since 1945, there was only a single one where the left-wing parties combined would have got under 50 percent of the vote. So, no FPP, no Thatcher or (postwar) Churchill—and certainly no Farage, ever. Under Burnham’s auspices, the main left-wing parties all recently came together in a “cross-party council” for the progressive majority, explicitly to plot how best to keep Nigel out of office: evidently, their answer was “use PR”.
All across Europe, PR is already in place, expertly preventing “unacceptable” and allegedly “Nazi” politicians like Holland’s anti-Islam and anti-immigration Geert Wilders from becoming leaders of their nations, even when, under FPP terms, they win general elections outright. Only the UK, post-Brexit, and with FPP still in place, can become potentially free from prevailing European-style liberal tyranny—Burnham’s “electoral reforms” are designed to cut off this last final path to liberty forever in the UK too. Upon his success, the only possible way any change to the uniparty regime can thenceforward be affected by a huge, disenfranchised portion of the population will be by violence. How very “consensual” Andy will have made everything become then.
Although largely forgotten, Britain did once have a referendum on changing the FPP system, back in 2011. It was lost, decisively, when voters decided they preferred the current way of doing things, as this would lead to fewer hegemonic coalition multi-party governments of the precise kind favored by the Burnhamite left today—but, as the Brexit vote was later to prove, when the public give the “wrong” choice in referendums, they can always easily be overruled.
To win public votes, those left-wingers campaigning for a change in 2011 planned to erect giant blow-up plastic buttocks of people like Andy Burnham all over the country, advertising how scrapping FPP would supposedly be the best way to “Kick [your] MP up the behind!” Under any future PR regime, that word “Kick” will turn out to have been a misprint for “Kiss.”
The post Burnham’s Disproportionate Misrepresentation appeared first on The American Conservative.
The influential newsman sat down with The American Conservative to discuss demographic change and other topics.
The podcaster and longtime newsman Tucker Carlson has emerged as the face of antiwar conservatism. Increasingly, that means Carlson appeals to progressives who agree with him on the Iran War. Yet Carlson remains not just a man of the right, but one willing to touch third rails and boldly challenge left-liberal orthodoxies. On no issue, perhaps, is that more apparent than mass migration and demographic change.
On Wednesday, Carlson sat down for an interview with The American Conservative. We discussed President Donald Trump’s latest threats against Iran, the sudden death of Senator Lindsey Graham, and Carlson’s plans to build a third party. Toward the end, I asked him a question that previously I’d posed to the author Ann Coulter and the immigration expert Mark Krikorian: Why has the Western world, and only the Western world, voluntarily transformed its demographic composition?
A transcript of our exchange is below:
You affirm the Christian and liberal view of the inherent dignity of all people while also saying, well, we don’t want mass migration from everywhere. We’re still a coherent people, and we shouldn’t change that. But, apparently, political elites in the Western world are not able to square that circle. Why do you think Western elites have transformed their populations through mass migration the past few decades, often against the wishes of their populations?
Well, it’s something I’ve obsessed over. And just to put it in perspective, the biggest and swiftest example of forced demographic change in recorded history, I think, were the Mongol invasions from the east to the west, famously across the steppe, these crazed, unwashed horsemen rolling through and raping everybody and killing all the men.
That caused massive demographic change. Massive. To the extent that you still look at self-identified Russians who have Asiatic features. So that’s the biggest demographic change that I’m aware of in all of history. And what we’ve seen since the end of the Second World War, which is 85 years, dwarfs it.
So, it is an understatement to say nothing like this has ever happened in history. No one has ever imagined anything like this could happen in all of history. You just end white-majority countries in a couple generations, in less than 100 years? And that’s what they’ve done.
So, why? I don’t know the answer. There’s been a lot of encouragement to do it by international bodies. There’s a lot of hostility toward Christian Europe, a lot. That is not acknowledged, but it is real.
But there’s also a sense in which this is mass suicide. I know on the internet it’s “the Jews did this!” or whatever. Well, sure, there are a lot of Jewish groups who were for it, but in the end, there’s a lot of white, nominally Christian people who love this stuff and went along with it…. And, you know, you can get all the encouragement you want from the UN or whatever, but in the end, if you’re allowing people from Africa to commit rape in your country, that’s on you, dude.
And so, what is that? There may be a self-destruct mechanism inside certain groups or cultures. It’s possible that after dominating the world for more than a thousand years, this group of people, white Christian Europeans, decided it’s time for us to exit the stage or something….
And I think you’ve not been allowed to talk about this because it’s “hate” or something to talk about the destruction of a racial group. Well, it’s actually not hate. What is happening is hate, right? But whatever. Because we haven’t talked about it, we haven’t really had a chance to think about it. But something very profound, and world-historic, is going on right now….
All of Europe and Canada and New Zealand and, unfortunately, the United States, have gone along with this. So I don’t know. It’s spiritual, obviously, but I don’t understand its outlines. Do you?
I don’t. I’ve asked Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, I’ve asked Ann Coulter, and now I’ve asked you. There’s something deeply psychologically mysterious here. Mark Krikorian actually suggested that it has roots in Christian theology. He’s a Christian, a deacon at his church, and he’s very opposed to mass migration, so he doesn’t think it’s inevitable that Christian theology leads to this open borders perspective—
Right.
But there might be a connection there—
Well, it’s a perversion. I mean, the most sophisticated and effective deceptions are all mimeographed copies, badly done copies of something real.
So, you saw this after the George Floyd riots, when you had all these Christian whites washing the feet of black people, who, by the way, all looked kind of confused and unsettled by it. You know, why are they worshiping me? But it was the whites who drove that….
And it had the aroma of Christianity, of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. Laying down your life for others is at the center of Christianity, of course. But it wasn’t Christianity….
Yeah, and Christianity has been around in the West for a long time. The chronology suggests it would probably have more to do with World War II and the shame that white people feel—
Well, obviously.
But why would the countries that lost hundreds of thousands or millions of their own men fighting Nazism feel shame about Nazism? It’s not rational….
I’m against the Holocaust, that’s for sure, but every Holocaust museum in the United States ought to have an exhibit and a tribute to the American soldiers who fought the Nazis. Why wouldn’t you? It’s in America….
I do think that we’re at a massive disadvantage in this country because we have grown up in a culture, the only one in all history, that from the beginning precludes the possibility of the metaphysical. Every conversation in the United States, in this scientism regime that we live under, begins with the hard declaration that nothing is real unless you can measure it in a lab.
And so once you start there, you miss a lot of the forces that drive actual events and real history and change the course of people’s lives and of nations, because it’s not all measurable in a lab, actually. Sorry, I mean, I wish it was, but it’s not. You can’t reason your way to a solution a lot of the time, because some of this stuff is pre-rational. It is, sorry, spiritual.
Editor’s note: This transcript excerpt has been lightly edited for length and readability. You can watch the full conversation here.
The post Tucker Carlson: The West Is Committing ‘Mass Suicide’ appeared first on The American Conservative.
I am delighted to announce that Luke Nicastro has joined The American Conservative as senior editor, effective July 1, 2026. Nicastro joins the magazine having most recently served as national security advisor to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO).
Nicastro will be known to close readers as a talented contributor to the firm for years; he now joins TAC full-time.
I have known Luke personally for close to two decades. In that time, I have encountered one of the most careful and charismatic intellects around.
Before working with the senator, Nicastro was a defense policy analyst with the Congressional Research Service, was employed at the Department of the Navy, and consulted for State Department clients. He has a masters in international relations from the University of Chicago and a bachelor’s from the College of William & Mary.
As with most of our full-time roster, Nicastro will be based in the Washington, DC metro area. You can look forward to his columns and contributions immediately.
The post Luke Nicastro Joins The American Conservative as Senior Editor appeared first on The American Conservative.
Congress has a fitness problem, and Kean is just the latest example.
Against the wishes of his doctors, Rep. Tom Kean (R-NJ) returned to Congress on Tuesday, his first appearance there in more than 100 days.
Addressing the House floor, Kean began by noting that he is a “private person” before explaining his multi-month absence from his duties in Washington, DC.
“Several months ago, due to health concerns, I entered the hospital for some testing,” said the 57-year-old Kean. “I was given the diagnosis of depression.”
It was a stark admission for a politician whose critics have long questioned his absence but were met with silence. Though depression is not disqualifying in and of itself, the lack of transparency from a person who was elected to provide it is worrying. Furthermore, if a disability keeps you off the job for four months, especially a job as important as serving in Congress, then the job likely isn’t compatible with the disability Kean is currently navigating.
More worrying yet is how the rollout of Kean’s diagnosis was handled. Kean gave his speech to a largely empty House chamber, then breezed past CNN’s Manu Raju as the reporter peppered him with questions after four months of silence. Kean has also yet to hold the kind of press conference his absence warrants, one which would allow the Congressman to address questions regarding the current state of his recovery or the treatment plan given to address his diagnosis.
In the nearly four months since he stood before the public, Kean had reported expenses for personal travel in San Francisco and staff travel in Las Vegas. He also submitted his personal stock trading activity. But as the weeks turned into months, and with little details provided by staff members, questions arose as to the whereabouts and condition of the U.S. representative for New Jersey’s 7th congressional district.
Though Kean has framed his return as an act of courage, a man who had time to file expense reports and disclose stock trades but not to answer a single question about his condition is not a man who is simply managing an illness, but one who is more concerned with managing his image. Furthermore, both Kean and his staffers chose silence over a press release, statement, or a single tweet that could have addressed the issue directly.
Speaking with reporters outside Congress on Tuesday, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) refused to apologize for what she characterized as fair criticism of her Republican colleague. “I think not showing up for work is discounting the voters,” Boebert told TMZ. “That’s literally taxation without representation. It’s awful. We were elected to be here to work, and it’s unacceptable.”
And then there’s Kean’s voting record on paid sick leave. During his time in Congress, he has repeatedly voted against the sort of relief he was granted as a member of Congress. In 2018, Kean, then a member of the New Jersey Senate, voted against the Earned Sick Leave Act, a piece of legislation that mandated five paid sick leave days per year for New Jersey workers. “He’s been able to rely on things he directly voted against,” said Yarrow Willman-Cole, a member of the nonprofit New Jersey Citizen Action, the group who organized the legislation.
But despite Kean’s failure to support legislation that would’ve provided New Jersey workers with protections similar to the ones he took advantage of as a member of Congress, other congressional colleagues were sympathetic to Kean’s condition. Responding to Boebert’s claims that Kean took off four months from work because he was “sad,” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) suggested the high-octane representative from Colorado should “educate herself about mental health.”
“Depression is not an emotion, it’s a condition,” Torres told TMZ. “You should no more blame someone for their depression than you would blame a diabetic for the inability to generate insulin. It’s a condition beyond their control. When someone comes out as struggling with depression, the proper response is empathy and sympathy, not disdain and dismissiveness.”
Though Torres makes a fair point, it’s not beyond the pale for Boebert and others to point out that across the political spectrum in Congress, several politicians have suffered or are currently suffering from ailments that keep them from performing to the sort of standard expected of federal legislators. Whether it’s Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) freezing on camera or Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) suffering a stroke and being treated for depression in the aftermath, both political parties feature notable examples of lawmakers who have battled debilitating illnesses without resigning to address health concerns.
None of this is an argument that sick people don’t belong in public life. It’s an argument that Congress currently has no real standard for when illness—whether physical or mental—makes the job impossible to do, and lawmakers are left to police themselves, which mostly means they don’t. Kean didn’t create that problem. But his four months of silence, followed by a return with no real accounting for them, is exactly the kind of case that should force the question: not whether depression disqualifies someone from serving, but whether an institution this important can keep functioning on the honor system.
Until Congress builds something better, the least voters can ask of Kean and others is the transparency he’s so far refused to give them. If he can’t offer that, he should do the honorable thing and step down.
The post The Tom Kean Question appeared first on The American Conservative.
Dear Reader,
As we head into a pivotal holiday weekend, I wanted to highlight two pieces of news about The American Conservative and our commitment to providing you high-quality audiovisual content in addition to our excellent web and print activist journalism.
First, we have recently moved our long-running flagship podcast, TAC Right Now, into an in-person studio. We invite you to check out our YouTube page for high-quality video recordings. Audio recordings are still available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and RSS.
Second, we are pleased to introduce TAC Morning Digest, a short daily podcast featuring our top stories from the last 24 hours. You can subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or RSS.
Initiatives like these are possible only with your help. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation so we can continue producing cutting-edge reporting, analysis, and commentary in the cause of foreign-policy restraint, immigration sanity, and economic strength.
Your support for our humble work matters more than you can know.
Happy Independence Day,
Curt Mills
Executive Director
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The Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship in a 6-3 ruling on Tuesday.
Three conservative justices––John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett––joined Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in finding that the children of illegal aliens and temporary visitors are citizens under the 14th Amendment.
President Donald Trump had signed an executive order on January 20, 2025 instructing departments and agencies not to issue U.S. citizenship to those born to temporary visitors or to those unlawfully present in the United States. The administration argued before the court that illegal aliens and temporary visitors were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States—a phrase from the 14th Amendment—because they did not meet the original standard of complete, undivided allegiance to America.
The court upheld its ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) that the children of non-citizens received citizenship by fact of being born in the United States.
Justice Clarence Thomas, in a 91-page dissent, argued that the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment was provided in the context of newly freed black slaves who “had no other homeland, owed no allegiance to any foreign power, and were subject to no other authority . . . The same could not be said for the children of foreign temporary visitors.” Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “the Court has made a serious mistake.”
The post Supreme Court Upholds Birthright Citizenship appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Supreme Court issued rulings Monday morning in three high-profile cases as it approaches the end of its current term, siding against the Trump administration in two of the decisions.
The court ruled 5–4 in Watson v. Republican National Committee that Mississippi’s grace period for mail-in ballots postmarked by election day but received within five days afterwards will be allowed to stand through at least the midterm elections. The Trump administration had challenged the law, passed by Mississippi’s GOP-controlled legislature. The court found that the Constitution places election regulations in the hands of states rather than the federal government.
It also blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to remove Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook prior to the conclusion of litigation challenging the dismissal. The Trump administration has alleged that Cook committed mortgage fraud, and the president cited this allegation as cause for firing her. In an opinion written for the 5–4 majority by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court found that the Trump administration’s position “would in effect transform the Federal Reserve’s for-cause protection into at-will employment—an interpretive leap out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our Nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference.”
However, the court did rule 6–3 in the Trump administration’s favor in one of the cases, striking down a federal law that prevented the president’s removal of Federal Trade Commission officials except “for cause.” The ruling—a major win for advocates of the “unitary executive” theory—overturns a prior Supreme Court decision that had insulated dozens of independent agencies from executive control.
Rulings on birthright citizenship, transgender athletes, and campaign finance are expected on Tuesday.
The post Supreme Court Curbs Presidential Power in Major Rulings appeared first on The American Conservative.
Consumer sentiment rose in June from a historic low in May, according to the University of Michigan’s Survey of Consumers. The index rose to 49.5 from 44.8 in May, which was the lowest report since the survey began in November 1952.
The survey’s inflation expectation declined from 4.8 percent expected next year in May to 4.6 percent in June, still indicating elevated inflation expectations in the general public. Five-year inflation expectations remain elevated at 3.3 percent, above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target and projections of 2.5 percent next year.
The partial rebound in consumer sentiment coincides with the Trump Administration’s signing of a memorandum of understanding ending the war in Iran, as well as sanctions relief being granted for Iranian oil.
The post U.S. Consumer Sentiment Rebounds From Record Low in June appeared first on The American Conservative.
Professional players once were heroes, not celebrities.
Americans, like Indians, have largely been immune to the charms of soccer, or what we in Europe call football, and so am I, though in my case it was not always so. Whether the current World Cup changes that remains to be seen.
When I was a boy, I thought soccer was important, though never quite as important as Bill Shankly, the manager of Liverpool Football Club, thought it. He said that football was not a matter of life and death—it was much more serious than that.
The sport has changed out of all recognition since I first attended a professional match in England more than sixty-five years ago. The changes have been both for the better and worse: the changes for the better tangible, those for the worse intangible and therefore giving rise to nostalgia, an emotion that these days is much, and wrongly, deprecated. Past a certain age, if you feel no nostalgia, you must have led a miserable existence.
I look back almost with astonishment at the conditions of the game when I was very young. The stadiums were uncomforting and dilapidated, with terraces on which the majority of the crowd stood, not sat. If the stand was covered, which often it wasn’t, it was by a corrugated iron roof. The pitch was of real grass, and when it rained, as often it did (soccer being a winter sport), the ground turned to gloopy mud through which the players struggled as if in the trenches of Flanders during the First World War. The leather ball became heavy and sodden, and kicking it must have been like kicking a cannonball. Many were the players who must have suffered later in life (but not so very much later) from a form of dementia pugilistica from having repeatedly headed such a ball.
It was not even as if they, the players, had been well-rewarded for their efforts. Astonishing as it may seem, the professional players were subject to a maximum, not a minimum, wage, which was about that of a skilled factory worker (in those days, there were still factories in England that made things). No club was permitted to pay its players more than this, so no team, or small group of teams, could monopolise the star players, many of whom were local to the teams. This meant that the competition between teams was more open: trophies and championships were not shared out monotonously between three or four teams at most.
The players were heroes, not celebrities. After the match, they went home on the bus, not in Ferraris. They gave their signatures to adoring schoolboys, but their lives were otherwise a blank page to the public. Their pictures appeared on little cards in cigarette packets or in packets of tea, avidly collected and swapped by boys (not girls). They were not multi-millionaires by the age of twenty-two.
I met a professional footballer when I was seven or eight. It was in a place called Sennen in Cornwall, where I had gone with my mother and brother on holiday. His name was Johnny Rainford, and he played for a team—Brentford—which was not one of the most famous of teams, but nonetheless respectably good enough. He would have been about 27 at the time, a gentleman, by no means dazzled by his own status. Of course, we were in awe of him, my brother and I, but he played patiently with us on a beach, his skill with the ball astonishing to us. It probably bored him to play with two young boys who had no skill at all, but (if I remember well) he exuded a kind of decency, patience and good-humoured modesty. We even ate with him once or twice in our hotel.
Of his subsequent life I know nothing, except that he died, alas, at the now comparatively young age of 70, a quarter of a century ago, in 2001. Peace and honour be to his memory! Strangely enough, I think of him, though I doubt that he was high-born, whenever (which is rarely) the subject of gentlemanliness comes up.
Since then, of course, professional footballers have undergone a process of celebrification. They are heavily tattooed, wear diamond studs in their ears, crash Lamborghinis into trees, and then go out and buy another one the next day.
But the fact is that they are remarkable athletes, who run up and down a pitch about 110 yards long for ninety minutes without apparent exhaustion (players used to be much more exhausted after a game, possibly because they did not follow so strict a regime). Their strength and skill are astonishing, and even someone who hardly knew the rules of the game would be able to see that they were supremely good at what they did. Their skill is vastly superior to that of the players of my childhood, no doubt in part because the conditions under which they play are more propitious for the exercise of such skill. The ball is light, the ground is firm, their boots are soft and supple compared with the agonising clodhoppers that I remember. As a spectacle, the game has improved out of all recognition—though, of course, we couldn’t have known all those years ago that it would do so, and thus we were satisfied with what we saw.
The sport was a cheap entertainment, easily within the means of the ordinary working man, requiring no great financial sacrifice on his part to attend regularly. Now, he must either pay a ridiculously large portion of his disposable income to do so or cede his place to a member of the middle class.
Our psychology and our culture have changed remarkably in the interval. Looking at films of old matches, I hear ordinary applause— clapping—when a goal is scored, and the players pat the scorer on the back in a relatively restrained way, rather than pile on top of him, embracing or even kissing him for what seems like an eternity. The scorer evinces no vainglory, as if he were a conquering hero, no excess of joy, only pleasure.
The game is better, the game is worse: I suppose a metaphor for life itself.
The post The Lost Charms of ‘Football,’ and of Life appeared first on The American Conservative.
The voters are in a state of electoral ataxia that makes political forecasting impossible.
Britain has had six prime ministers in the last decade and is about to install a seventh. This seems inevitable following the stunning victory of Andy Burnham, the erstwhile mayor of Manchester, in the crucial Makerfield by-election Thursday night. He received 55 percent of the vote and crushed the life out of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
The Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, is now under intense pressure to hand over the keys of Number Ten Downing Street to wannabe Burnham tout de suite. Around 81 MPs are needed to trigger a leadership election under Labour’s rules. Burnham’s people claim they will have over 200 names by Sunday.
Starmer insisted as recently as two days ago that he was not going to quit, whatever happened in Makerfield. He had a job to do and he was going to finish it, having won a thumping general election victory only two years ago. If a leadership election happened, he said, he would be a candidate in it—as is his right.
But that now seems a forlorn hope, even a state of delusion. The political reality is that Andy Burnham’s momentum is unstoppable. Last weekend, a succession of senior Labour MPs, led by the Energy and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband, will be lining up to persuade Sir Keir that he should agree to an “orderly transition” to avoid a damaging leadership election that would only extend the crisis.
Starmer can reasonably claim that this is not a crisis of his own making. It is ambitious politicians like Burnham, former Health Secretary Wes Streeting, former Defence Secretary John Healey, and others who have plunged the government into chaos by resigning serially from his cabinet. He has a point.
Starmer won Labour’s biggest election victory in twenty-seven years in July 2024. “People have said to me it’s not possible, it’s not possible to turn the Labor Party around,” he noted earlier this week. He points out that some things have been going right under his watch: Immigration is down, inflation is down, GDP is up, and wages are rising. Starmer took the wise decision not to get involved in Donald Trump’s Iran adventure. He has been gradually removing trade barriers with Europe. Only this week, he took on the tech billionaires with his plan to ban children under sixteen from using social media. (Not that many people believe it will work.)
However, the first priority of an MP is not policy success but job security—his own. Starmer’s unpopularity has plunged in recent months and has been as low in polls as any of his unloved Tory predecessors. Burnham is much more popular, though whether that will last once he is in the top job remains to be seen. To paraphrase Tony Blair, Starmer was the future once.
The apparently irresistible rise of Reform UK is what has induced a state of panic on the Labour benches. The party lost 1,100 seats in the May council elections, mostly to Farage’s people. Northern MPs, often in vulnerable constituencies, feared that Labour, and their seats, were doomed under Starmer.
Reform has been leading Labour in the national opinion polls for the last thirteen months and Farage had been drawing up plans for his first government. Now suddenly all that has changed.
After Makerfield, Reform looks to have peaked, says Labour-supporting commentators. Farage is back in his box. Andy Burnham is the Reform killer and looks Labour’s best bet to win the next general election.
Well, maybe. We have been here before. The Tories changed their leaders like football managers five times in eight years and they just got more unpopular each time. There is no particular reason why Andy Burnham should be able to turn Labour around.
He stood for leader twice in the past and was rejected. He has been dubbed Andy U-turnham for his policy flip-flops on immigration, borrowing, benefits, and Brexit. It’s hard to know what Burnham’s appeal is beyond the fact that he is not Keir Starmer, whose very speaking voice has been a turn-off for many voters.
It’s not really about personalities anyway. The Brits are angry and alienated. There is widespread discontent at the rising cost of living, illegal immigration, unaffordable housing, NHS waiting lists, the benefits culture. “Alarm clock Britain,” as middle- and lower-level wage earners are called, is getting poorer. Petrol prices, energy bills, groceries all seem to be racing ahead of the official inflation figures. Many blame mass migration, welfare claimants, and environmental policies like Net Zero.
British voters seem somewhat lost politically. Old class loyalties have disintegrated. Cynicism reigns. Politicians are thought to be “in it for themselves,” like the SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, who recently admitted embezzling £400,000, or the Labour Lord Peter Mandelson, who was hand in glove with Jeffrey Epstein.
This alienation has led to apparently contradictory results in elections. Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election with 55 percent of the vote—more than all the right-wing parties (Reform, Restore and the Conservatives) put together. Yet only six weeks ago, Nigel Farage’s Reform won around 50 percent of the votes in this very northern English town in the local elections. What are we to make of this?
Nigel Farage is claiming that many potential Reform supporters voted tactically for Labour in order to get Starmer out. That is a clever piece of spin, but somewhat improbable. Andy Burnham has been trimming his left-wing policies, but he is still a self-styled “socialist” and is more pro-immigration and “woke” than the prime minister. Burnham is expected to install his main backer, the left-wing Miliband, as chancellor. The Energy and Net Zero Secretary is everything white working-class Reform voters are supposed to hate: a green zealot who opposes immigration controls and wants, if anything, to increase spending on welfare. Burnham is on record as saying he wants the UK to eventually rejoin the European Union, so why would Reform voters, who invariably backed Brexit, lend their votes to him?
It makes little sense. Nor does Farage’s claim that Reform were robbed by the intervention of the far-right ethnonationalists of Rupert Lowe’s Restore UK, which supports remigration and a restoration of the death penalty. Adding Restore’s 3,000 votes to Reform’s 16,000 still leaves them far short of the almost 25,000 received by Burnham.
Voters are just mad as hell, to echo Howard Beale in Network, and won’t take it any more. They lash out in all directions. It is a state of electoral ataxia that makes predicting election results almost impossible.
Four months ago, in the Gorton and Denton by-election, Labour’s vote collapsed and they lost one of their safest seats to the Green Party. In Makerfield, the once-mighty Conservatives returned 2.2 percent of the vote. Yet on the same day they won their first by-election gain in half a century in Aberdeen South—formerly a Scottish National Party stronghold.
What goes around doesn’t come around any more in British politics. It is here-today-gone-tomorrow politics, as this once-great imperial power learns to live with economic and geopolitical decline—and really doesn’t like it.
The post Angry Brits Could Make Burnham PM—Then Turn on Him appeared first on The American Conservative.
Here at The American Conservative, we realize that the world is very large and very strange, and that there are many things worth writing about in newsmagazines. That is to say, we try to avoid repeating ourselves too much.
But our readers may pardon us for publishing back-to-back issues that feature stories about the Iran War on the cover. Despite President Donald Trump’s oft-repeated promises that the war is just an “excursion,” peace has failed to heave into view three months on. Jennifer Kavanagh addresses the damage already done to American military policy. It makes grim reading, and emphasizes the need to end the war as soon as possible. Harrison Berger writes about one of the thorniest obstacles to such a conclusion: the war’s Lebanese front, which has proven a consistent sticking point in the on-again, off-again negotiations between Washington and Tehran. Andrew Day examines the political casualties of the war, and, specifically, the future of the notional mascot of the peace wing of the Republican coalition: Vice President J.D. Vance.
But there is much else in this big old world, good and bad. Theodore Dalrymple reminisces on his time in a recrudescent arena of turmoil, Mali. Nic Rowan reviews a new and apparently rather bad book about the elderly. Indian historical controversies, banned books, urban planning, the Cold War, stories about animals—let it not be said that TAC doesn’t cast the net wide.
In Washington, the weather is fine—unusually fine—and, despite the travails of the country and the world, the prevailing mood at TAC’s offices is good. Putting together these issues is a daunting task, but a happy one; your readership and support make it possible. While we are always deeply grateful for financial contributions, we are at heart journalists, not fundraisers. We want our magazine to be read. It is our audience that animates our work, and, in the dreary moments, the idea that you continue to let us entertain and inform you lightens the load. Happy summer, America.
The post The Three-Month Excursion appeared first on The American Conservative.
Accusations that the group is antisemitic don’t hold up.
On March 14, the University of Florida announced it was disbanding its College Republicans organization, saying the action was due to an “antisemitic gesture” by a member of the club. However, this explanation was immediately called into question, with the club stating that the student responsible for making the gesture (a Nazi salute) was not a member.
Many began to suspect that the university was attempting to use the episode as a pretext to target a conservative club for its commitment to a principled non-interventionist, America First foreign policy. Additionally, it became unclear whether the university even had the proper authority to shut down the group, which filed a lawsuit against the university to prevent its disbandment.
The allegations of antisemitism against the University of Florida College Republicans (UFCR) originated with Sloan Rachmuth, a Laura Loomer-esque activist known for attacking populist-conservative figures such as Charlie Kirk, J.D. Vance, and Tucker Carlson (as well as Carlson’s family). On March 12, Rachmuth tweeted several images, including a picture of two people doing a Nazi salute, including the individual at the center of the controversy; a picture of a UFCR meeting (which was open to the public) in which that individual seemed to be present; and a third image purported to show that the individual is on the board of an entirely separate UF club, “Uncensored America.” None of these images points to antisemitism being rife within UFCR. Nevertheless, these allegations ostensibly motivated the university to take punitive action against the group.
Not only were these allegations of antisemitism against UFCR flimsy at best, but there is ample evidence that the group’s members are not antisemitic. The vice president, Evan Weinzimer, is himself Jewish. Asked for comment by The American Conservative, Michael Andre, the president, condemned antisemitism whilst affirming the importance of free speech. The group reiterated that the student who made the Nazi salute is not a member.
Compounding the spuriousness of the allegations against UFCR was the sloppiness displayed in disbanding the club. One needs to understand recent disputes among college conservatives across America to see the problem.
Following the near-collapse of the historic College Republican National Committee, several national College Republican organizations have competed to become its official successor. The two largest of these organizations are the College Republicans of America (CRA) and the National Federation of College Republicans (NFCR). Of these two, the CRA has a reputation for being more populist in its domestic views and non-interventionist in its foreign policy views, and it has historically been very supportive of Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the NFCR has been viewed as much more representative of the pre-Trump GOP, and it is alleged that the group’s leader, Rachel Howard, campaigned for Nikki Haley in 2024, based on a picture of her amidst Haley supporters during the 2024 Iowa caucus.
This split is relevant to the UF–UFCR dispute, as when the university shut down the group, it cited the Florida subgroup of NFCR, which would have the authority (under certain circumstances) to close affiliated chapters. However, UFCR is affiliated with the CRA, not NFCR, so it is unlikely that the university and the NCFR had the authority to shut it down. On these grounds, UFCR is currently engaged in litigation against the school.
Since the allegations of antisemitism made against the UFCR are spurious, and considering that the attempt to shut down the club was sloppy and possibly illegal, one wonders why exactly UF felt the need to act as dramatically as it did. Were there other issues at play?
An obvious one pertains to foreign policy, specifically the internal debate occurring within the Republican Party about whether to take an internationalist approach to foreign policy or an America First and non-interventionist approach. This debate is intricately connected with the subject of Israel and the American–Israeli relationship, which conservatives increasingly see as deleterious to U.S. interests and America’s model of republican self-government. These debates have been turbocharged by the start of the Iran War and the perception of many that the White House launched the war for Israel or due to Israeli pressure.
Within the GOP, the divide on foreign policy is generational, with polls revealing that young Republicans stand out as particularly non-interventionist and critical of Israel compared to older party members, causing visible apprehension among GOP leaders. At the same time, many young conservatives feel that the party leadership is using their votes to promote a foreign policy at odds with their views and America’s national interest.
This non-interventionism and criticism of the U.S.–Israel relationship can certainly be found among members of the UFCR, leading to speculation that these views, rather than non-existent antisemitism, were the cause of UF’s decision to disband the club. “The club has a reputation of being anti-war, anti-interventionist, and having a negative view of Israel’s current actions and, yes, their involvement with our government,” Andre, the president, told TAC. “Having that reputation, it would be extremely hard for us to dismiss any claims that our foreign policy stances are part of our deactivation.”
This view—that the foreign policy views of the club led to UF’s actions against it—is bolstered by UF’s initial statement announcing its intent to disband the club. “When the FFCR is ready, the university will also assist it with reactivating the Local CR under new student leadership,” the university announced, suggesting that it would attempt to reconstitute the College Republicans club at a future date under new leadership amenable to the Florida subgroup of the more hawkish and establishment-linked NFCR, rather than under the aegis of the more dovish and populist CRA. Such a move would represent a state-funded university weighing into the debate between different College Republicans organizations on the side of the more hawkish faction.
Anthony Sabatini, a Lake County commissioner and lawyer representing UFCR in the suit against the university, seemed to indicate that there is evidence pointing to UF acting against the club due to its stances on foreign policy. “I’m not at liberty to disclose publicly everything we had, but we basically already have evidence confirming that this was a plot that they put together in conjunction with both the university and some outside influence, some outside entities to try to shut them down based on them having an America First viewpoint,” Sabatini told TAC.
If this is indeed the case, and as UF is a state university in a red state, the deactivation of the UFCR would represent the best example of what is referred to as the “Republican Samson Option,” wherein hawkish Republicans would rather destroy the party and the conservative movement than concede defeat to younger, more dovish elements (the name is a reference to Israel’s nuclear doctrine of massive retaliation in the event of an acute security crisis). Many younger conservatives justifiably feel, due to both the outright hostility shown by many higher-ups in the party to their foreign policy views and the liberality with which hawkish voices throw around accusations of antisemitism at critics of the contemporary U.S.–Israel relationship, that hawks within the party view them, rather than the left, as the enemy.
Navigating this generational transfer of power within the Republican Party, and with it the transformation of the Republican Party into a non-interventionist party, will certainly be a challenge for many conservative organizations. However, if hawkish factions of the right are willing to use state power (in this case, through a state university) to try to silence Republican doves, it suggests that conservative hawks may indeed try to execute a “Republican Samson Option” to prevent non-interventionists from inheriting the conservative movement and moving the country in an America First direction.
Of course, if UF’s actions were indeed taken for reasons concerning foreign policy, it would not be the first example of state-backed pro-Israel censorship on behalf of the foreign policy establishment. “First they came for Columbia Palestine activists, and I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t a Columbia Palestine activist,” a libertarian Florida college student wryly remarked to TAC. “Then they came for the College Republicans.”
When asked for comment, the University of Florida said that it does not comment on ongoing litigation. The final hearing for a preliminary injunction will be held on April 31.
The post Is the University of Florida Shutting Down College Republicans over Israel Criticism? appeared first on The American Conservative.
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