Connexion
Conversations in Copenhagen revealed what a life without financial terror would be like.
I was sitting in a coffee shop in Copenhagen, Denmark ruining my vacation. For about the hundredth time I found myself calculating how much the trip was costing, and whether, as a retiree, I had saved enough not to outlive my money. At the end of life, I was likely to face tens of thousands of nursing home expenses, with years of increasing medical expenses on the way down. Then there was inflation and the tottering Social Security and Medicare situations to worry about. My expensive coffee was getting cold.
I looked around the room full of Danes and realized something. No matter what else, not a single one of them could be worrying about anything close to what I was thinking about. Every Dane gets free universal health care, free public schools and universities, pensions, generous unemployment insurance, and more or less cost-free elder care. The mom looking at pastries enjoys heavily subsidized child care. The things that shadowed my life—such as paying for child care and then trying to figure out how to pay for my kids’ college without leaving them burdened with life-long student loans—were not a factor here. Was I going to doom myself to tax hell by withdrawing from the Roth IRA and traditional IRA in the wrong order? Do I have to pay someone to advise me on how to access my own money saved over a lifetime, decades in which I denied myself and my family so there would be something left over at the end? I was not a happy guy.
I approached the mom for someone to talk to. She was curious to meet a tourist, and like most people I met, friendly and open. The presumptions that govern a stranger approaching you in a big American city did not apply. I asked her if she was happy, and she replied that indeed she, and most Danes, were. I looked it up later; four of the five happiest nations on earth are Nordic countries, with Denmark at number two. (The U.S. is down at 24th, with Afghanistan understandably ranking globally as the unhappiest place.)
I wanted to know why Danes might be so happy. I turned the topic to one of my biggest worries, healthcare, attracting the attention of an older man nearby. (Of course everyone spoke English: Denmark consistently ranks among the world’s best non-native English-speaking countries, the product of an excellent public school system that starts foreign-language training in first grade). I practically had them in tears laughing as I tried to explain how healthcare works in America, with its HMOs, PPOs, Obamacare, Medicare, copays, deductibles, in- and out-of-network, and more. I told them that, after paying Medicare taxes all my working life, I still had to pay several hundred dollars more each month in retirement (plus a new form of income tax called IRMAA) for a health insurance system that covers most Americans so incompletely that those who can afford it have to buy private supplemental insurance, as well as paying copays for most doctor visits. And this is after you figure out the Medicare system itself, a complex mess that requires you to choose among Parts A–D. And if you don’t sign up for Medicare “on time,” you will have a penalty attached to your premiums for the rest of your life.
Then I tried to explain retirement. It starts with choosing when to start collecting your Social Security in America; if you take it at age 62 you get less money each month for more months, versus age 70 when you get more money but for fewer months, because you die. The cut-off age to balance the choices is somewhere around 80-something, so you have to make an irrevocable decision estimating your own death. There was a similar ghoulish calculation for my meager pension: I agreed to take less money each month betting I’ll die before my wife, leaving some for her as a widow.
In Denmark every person gets healthcare. They usually pay nothing. Some do buy supplemental insurance for faster access to specialists, but it is generally through a nonprofit organization. Old-age pensions are supported by a combination of taxes and mandatory occupational pension contributions. Together the entire multilevel retirement system typically replaces over 70 percent of former wages. In the U.S., the average worker sees roughly 40 percent replaced by Social Security, higher lifetime earners much lower. There are low rates of elderly poverty in Denmark. Significant retirement income comes from pre-funded, government-held occupational pension funds that you pay directly into while working, alleviating the burden on future taxpayers. This is wholly unlike the American system, which may soon run out of money or reduce benefits to stay solvent.
We pivoted to the big question of taxes. I’d read that if the U.S. tax code were made into an audiobook, it would take roughly 19 days of continuous listening to finish. The entire code and associated regulations is over 4 million words long. Americans spend hours doing their taxes themselves, usually with the aid of expensive software, or spend hundreds of dollars or more paying CPAs and tax professionals to do the task for them. For Danes, the tax agency prepares an annual tax assessment using the information it has already received from banks, mortgage companies, investment firms, and the like. Taxpayers log into the government’s online system and review the return, approving it electronically or, in rare cases, making changes. For most, the process takes only a few minutes and is stress-free. People, my tablemates told me, tend to trust their government, perhaps the most shocking thing I learned this day. Americans often don’t appreciate that trust itself can be an economic asset.
Like most Americans, I assumed the taxes must be crushing. I had to look up later how much Danes pay in taxes and try to compare it to the U.S. It is a complex question. But to try and bring some clarity to all this, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) calculations set the average tax wedge Americans pay at about 30 percent. For Denmark, the same OECD study shows a single worker earning an average wage faces a tax wedge of 36 percent. But in return, Danes receive all the benefits mentioned above and more. By contrast, Americans pay for all of those things after taxes—in addition to the anxiety of not knowing if things will work out. Most Danes also get five or more weeks of paid vacation per year. I think the Danes are getting a better deal, and that helps make them happy.
I was left angry about our system, our way of life actually, which places so much emphasis in the private sphere on making the right choices or personally suffering the consequences, and in the public sphere on paying much for the comparatively little that we get. It is easy to see why Americans carry such a high psychological burden, especially financial stress, right until our deaths relieve us. Most every financial decision seems to come with the possibility of ruining my future. That simply does not exist in the same way in places like Denmark, or the other Scandinavian countries, or to a lesser degree even in Canada or Japan. As our informal coffee club broke up, I wondered, why can’t we Americans live this way?
Walking back through rainy Copenhagen, I realized something. I hadn’t spent the afternoon envying Denmark’s architecture or museums or bicycle culture, all quite lovely. I envied something much simpler: the absence of constant financial fear. And one more thing: As I insisted on paying for my own coffee, I learned that tipping isn’t expected in Denmark. What a way to live.
The post America Can Learn from Denmark on Good Government appeared first on The American Conservative.
The congresswoman’s opportunism has led her back to the democratic socialists.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez officially rejoined the Democratic Socialists of America last month. While she’s long been the most famous associate of the left-wing group, her membership lapsed years ago. The congresswoman renewing her membership is a clear sign of the strategy she wishes to pursue ahead of a potential presidential bid.
Socialism has won Democratic primaries nationwide and will play a major role in the 2028 race. AOC is an opportunist. She knows that reaffirming her DSA credentials is a smart play for ‘28 and could give her the edge she needs to win. It also shows how much Democratic politics have moved closer to the DSA’s agenda. No longer do Democrats need to shy away from Israel criticism or calls to abolish ICE. They’re now within the mainstream of the party.
In spite of the close public association between AOC and the DSA, the two have a complicated relationship. The DSA rescinded its endorsement of AOC in 2024 over the congresswoman’s not being sufficiently supportive of the Palestinian cause. The New York lawmaker had participated in a panel that “conflated” antisemitism with anti-Zionism and voted for a House resolution that affirmed Israel’s right to exist. The DSA demanded that AOC, to regain its support, oppose all funding for Israel and support a boycott movement against the Mideast country. She failed to deliver, and thus lost the endorsement.
Although it was only two years ago, 2024 was a very different time. Back then, appearing too anti-Israel was a death sentence in Democratic primaries. Two of AOC’s fellow Squad members lost their primaries to AIPAC-funded opponents. A DSA endorsement didn’t help candidates much, if at all, in that election cycle.
Things changed. A number of AIPAC-backed candidates have lost to Israel critics in this year’s primaries, in spite of massive spending from the Israel lobby. In Michigan, pro-Israel groups spent $30 million on Haley Stevens in her battle with Abdul El-Sayed to become the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate race. Stevens lost. In California, the lobby spent $6 million supporting Melissa Hernandez against an Israel critic in a congressional race. Hernandez lost as well. These are just a few examples of AIPAC’s declining power in Democratic politics. The lobby is no longer guaranteed to squash Israel critics. It’s gotten so bad that even Republican Mike Rogers prefers AIPAC not give him explicit support in his battle against El-Sayed.
The DSA’s fortunes stand in stark contrast to AIPAC’s. An endorsement from the socialists is bound to give a boost to Democratic candidates, at least in primaries. Over a hundred DSA candidates have won their local, state, and federal primary contests nationwide. That includes 20 races for U.S. Congress.
A number of these DSA candidates espouse extreme views and problematic associations. A long list of candidates have been found to hate whites, America, the police, the free market system, and even Thanksgiving. These stances haven’t bothered Democratic primary voters that much. Some candidates lost their races after these comments came to light, but many didn’t.
One of the reasons why Democratic voters are willing to back the DSA is the group’s strong stance on Israel. Eighty percent of Democrats now have a negative view of Israel. The vast majority of primary voters in Michigan believe the Jewish state is committing a genocide in Gaza. Strong support for sanctions against Israel was found among primary voters in six states.
When given a choice between someone like Haley Stevens, who proclaimed that Israel comes to her in dreams, and a vocal Israel critic, it’s not surprising Democratic voters pick the one not fantasizing about Tel Aviv.
The strong shift against Israel among ordinary Democrats has made AOC more comfortable with the DSA’s stance. At an April DSA forum, the congresswoman pledged that she would vote against any military aid to Israel. She had previously supported “defensive” military aid to the country, but her new stance would exclude that as well. At the same event, she also promised to oppose enshrining an expansive definition of antisemitism, which included forms of anti-Zionism, into law. Her pledges won over many skeptical DSA members.
Israel isn’t the only issue on which Democratic voters have moved closer to the DSA agenda. Democrats now have a higher opinion of socialism than they do of capitalism. “Abolish ICE,” a position abandoned by the Democratic establishment in 2024, is now the majority position among rank-and-file Democrats, with 73 percent backing the idea.
These particular views may cause problems for Democrats among independents, but they’re assets in Democratic primaries. A DSA affiliation or endorsement is now a plus for aspiring candidates. That will likely still be the case in the 2028 presidential primary. There aren’t any other obvious DSA-aligned candidates to run in that lane besides AOC. Fully embracing the socialist party makes her stand out and gives her an advantage over her more “moderate” competition.
But Ocasio-Cortez’s membership renewal doesn’t guarantee her the support of the left-wing radicals. There is growing rancor within the DSA over supporting AOC’s possible ’28 bid, with many members still viewing her as a sellout who can’t be trusted. A summer meeting of the organization’s national committee voted for rules that would restrict local chapters from making their own endorsements, a move widely perceived as anti-AOC. The DSA’s Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Caucus explicitly opposes an AOC endorsement, calling her an “opportunist dilettante.”
While the DSA may face internal divides over an AOC presidential bid, the public will perceive her as the DSA candidate. It’s doubtful there will be any other Democratic presidential candidate who is more supportive of socialism, abolishing ICE, and the Palestinian cause. Those voters who’ve helped DSA candidates win primaries nationwide will most likely see AOC as their choice in the ’28 primary.
The Maoists are right that Ocasio-Cortez has shown a consistent pattern of opportunism. But that’s true of most politicians, especially the successful ones. What’s notable is that her opportunism has now led her back to the DSA. Now that the group’s agenda is popular with the Democratic base, AOC knows it’s to her benefit to openly proclaim herself a member.
In an extremely competitive and crowded field with few DSA-aligned candidates, that association may be the ticket for an AOC primary victory in 2028.
The post AOC Rejoining DSA Is a Smart Move For ’28 appeared first on The American Conservative.
Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, reached a settlement Wednesday to pay out nearly $16.7 billion over claims its social media platforms harmed children. Once approved by the court, this will resolve multiple federal cases brought by dozens of state attorneys-general, who alleged that Meta misrepresented its products’ effects on kids’ mental health, infringed privacy protections, and violated consumer protection laws.
Meta also agreed to product changes intended to limit the addictiveness of its apps, including two-hour daily limits, “nighttime blocks” for users under 18, and additional age verification and parental control tools. The company continues to deny wrongdoing.
Wednesday’s settlement is seen by many as a bellwether for the social media industry, whose products are increasingly being criticized as public health risks (a framing some have compared to that used in successful campaigns against Big Tobacco). It follows a judgment against Meta in a separate lawsuit earlier this year, which saw a New Mexico court levy a nearly $1 billion fine after determining the company’s apps had created a “public nuisance” by endangering children’s safety.
Other cases against Meta and similar social media companies are still pending in multiple jurisdictions.
The post Meta Agrees to Pay Out $16.7 Billion Over Alleged Social Media Harms appeared first on The American Conservative.
Democratic socialists haven’t learned hard lessons from their ancestral homelands.
As an immigrant who likes America and spent most of my career working to advance its interests and values overseas, nothing galls me more than seeing other immigrants try to overthrow our uniquely successful capitalist democracy and install Third World Marxism in the United States.
In local politics, there is Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York. In national politics, we have a whole new crop coming soon to Congress. The latest example is from the Soviet Republic of Colorado, where Ethiopian-born Melat Kiros beat Diana DeGette in the Democratic primary. DeGette had represented the Denver area since 1997. It’s a deep-blue district in a deep-blue state, so Kiros is bound to win in November.
U.S. schools fail to teach American, let alone world history. Only 13 percent of eighth graders scored at or above proficiency on the most recent national test results. That means they learn virtually nothing about how communism actually went in field trials. (In Cambodia’s case, those would be the “killing fields” where millions were shot to death by the communist regime in purges in the 1970s, while they destroyed the economy and agriculture). In country after country, socialism has ruined economies, stunted growth, and suppressed innovation, while rulers live in luxury.
Deficient in education, the current crop of Democratic Socialists is also too young to have lived through socialism in their ancestral homelands, and their parents don’t seem to have taught them.
Mamdani’s parents could have told him about India’s socialist economy that lasted from its independence in 1947 to around 20 years ago. In this “License Raj,” the government controlled who made what and how much it cost. That’s why, when I visited in 1991, you could buy only two types of “whiskey,” under the brands Ambassador or Diplomat. Both were equally awful. The economy was stagnant, and millions were unemployed or underemployed.
In 1991, there was only one car on the streets, the Hindustan Ambassador. In the 1950s, the government had bought the Morris Oxford model from a defunct British maker, and they kept making the same car for about 40 years. Only in the 1990s did they allow a competitor to start making the Maruti (Hindu god of wind), in partnership with Japanese carmaker Suzuki.
Today, you can buy the leading world as well as domestic brands in India, as the economy opened up starting in the late 1990s. The streets are still choked, but with a variety of local and imported cars. You can even buy drinkable brands of imported booze. The economy still doesn’t create enough jobs for the annual crop of graduates, but things are way better than under the License Raj.
The story in Kiros’s home of Ethiopia holds an even starker warning than the one in India. In 1974, military officers overthrew Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie. They formed a Marxist government called the Derg that ruled disastrously, leading to a famine in 1984-85 that killed millions (and forced “We Are the World” on our ears.) Things improved after the Derg was overthrown in 1991, but the country was still ruled by socialists in a “Revolutionary Democratic Front.” Ethiopia’s economy only took off after 2020, under the Ethiopian Prosperity Party, which focused on economic reforms.
In West Africa, tiny Guinea-Bissau quickly learned that revolutionary sloganeering is easier than effective economic management. After independence from Portugal in 1974, the Marxist dictator Luis Cabral nationalized industries and implemented central planning. Unsurprisingly, economic growth stagnated, and the economy languished. Even after the removal of Cabral, by the mid-1980s Guinea-Bissau’s per-capita income was $200, among the lowest in the world. The government finally implemented market reforms in 1987. Today, the GDP per capita is a more respectable $1,449 and growing at 4.9 percent.
Mayor Mamdani’s “warmth of collectivism” includes plans to implement city-run grocery stores across New York City. Despite there already being many large retailers and family stores all over the city, the new government-run groceries will be heavily subsidized on rent and other costs and will thus have a competitive advantage. Hard-working bodega owners are enraged.
Mamdani, born in Uganda, was perhaps inspired by neighboring Tanzania, where leader Julius Nyerere embarked on a collectivization crusade (Ujamaa) in the 1960s and 70s that uprooted millions of farmers and collectivized the fruits of their labor (literally) in the pursuit of egalitarian agricultural ideals. The resulting “equality” was one of equal food shortages for the country’s population of 15 million. By the mid-1980s, inflation had climbed to 30 percent and living standards had deteriorated significantly. Only after wreaking havoc on the population did Tanzanian statesmen quietly shelve collectivization in favor of market-oriented reforms.
Mamdani’s leftist professor father and filmmaker mother were Indian colonists in sub-Saharan Africa, like Mahatma Gandhi and millions of others. They were forced to leave Uganda by the dictator Idi Amin in the early 1970s but later returned, and Zohran was born in Kampala in 1991.
When the Mamdanis pulled up stakes in Africa for good, they didn’t go to ancestral India, or Britain, but to the United States. To have their son Zohran now tell Americans, builders and inheritors of the most successful economy in world history, how to run their country and premier city is a rich irony. Let’s see how New Yorkers like them apples in a few years.
The post Import Socialists, Get Socialism appeared first on The American Conservative.
New York socialists are done with these wars. So are America First conservatives.
Last week, POLITICO published a story about New York City’s recent congressional primaries, noting that “moderate Democrats fear they’re on the verge of losing the party’s ideological civil war to progressives.”
On X, Krystal Ball replied, “They already lost.”
The progressive Breaking Points podcast host was partaking in the left-wing jubilation that followed the victories of three insurgent candidates in New York’s closely watched primary races.
In NY-10, former city chief financial officer Brad Lander defeated incumbent Dan Goldman; in NY-13, student and activist Darializa Avila Chevalier won against incumbent Adriano Espaillat; and in NY-7, state assemblywoman Claire Valdez beat Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso. All are expected to win their deep-blue districts easily in November.
Each of these candidates has ties to the hard left Democratic Socialists of America: Valdez and Reynoso are current members, while Lander was a member until 2023. And all enjoyed the support of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (their opponents, meanwhile, were backed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries).
While various reasons have been given for these victories, one common thread is that the winning candidates all made intense, vociferous criticism of Israel a central part of their campaigns. Those who lost, on the other hand, pursued a softer line on Israel, more closely resembling establishment Democrats on foreign policy even while taking leftist positions on other issues.
In the NY-10 race, for example, the Democratic pollster Adam Carlson told Responsible Statecraft there was “very little daylight between Brad Lander and Dan Goldman ideologically, except when it c[ame] to Israel.” Yet Lander beat Goldman—who received significantly more funding—by a whopping 30 points.
Nor has the success of anti-Israel progressives been limited to New York. Earlier this year, similar candidates won Democratic primaries in Maine and California. And polling suggests that the issue resonates with Democrats nationwide. A June Quinnipiac poll showed that 66 percent of Democrats thought “the U.S. was too supportive of Israel,” while a May New York Times/Siena poll found that nearly three quarters of Democrats opposed U.S. aid to Israel and 60 percent of Democratic voters said they were more sympathetic to the Palestinians than to Israel. (By contrast, only 15 percent had more sympathy for Israel.)
A similar trend can be seen on the right. Just one month after President Donald Trump launched the U.S. war on Iran, slightly more than half of Republican voters answered “yes” when polled on the question of whether Israel had too much influence over American foreign policy. And although the majority of Republicans are still broadly supportive of Israel, multiple polls have shown significant drops in the country’s favorability over the past several years, particularly among younger conservatives.
There are even stirrings on Capitol Hill. Last summer, then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene became the first member of the congressional GOP to call the Gaza crisis a “genocide.” And Representative Thomas Massie attracted national attention—and lost a primary—in part because of his staunch opposition to U.S. aid for Israel.
Rather than debate their critics on the merits, many in the establishments of both parties have sought to dismiss any criticism of Israel as antisemitism, pure and simple. As Sen. Ted Cruz said last month during a diatribe against the popular commentator (and noted Israel skeptic) Tucker Carlson, “We are seeing a cancer on the right. It is rising antisemitism…. Here’s the scary thing: I’ve seen more antisemitism on the right over the last 18 months than any time in my life.” Cruz went on to try to tar opposition to Israel as an inherently left-wing position, claiming it was a “gateway drug to anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism.”
Leaving aside the histrionics, the Senator from Texas is right about one thing—both the hard right and the hard left have ended up in a similar place on Israel. And for similar reasons: opposition to American vassalage, disgust with the treatment of Palestinians, skepticism of the endless regional wars, and a conviction that our resources are better spent at home.
As the independent journalist Glenn Greenwald observed of the NY-7 winner on Thursday, “Note how Claire Valdez—when asked about Israel or foreign policy generally—emphasizes the need to stop burning American resources on Israel and foreign wars and instead invest them in American communities for the American working class: a potent MAGA political message not all that long ago.”
Exactly.
Right and left will disagree, profoundly, on how to use those resources (the progressives’ aim of building socialism in this country, for example, should be vigorously opposed by everyone who calls himself a conservative). But what we can and should agree on is the notion that America’s interests must be prioritized above those of foreign nations. And in this important respect, there is a natural and important alliance to be made.
The hard left House and Senate candidates of this cycle, current Israel-skeptic lawmakers like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), and journalists like Krystal Ball and Glenn Greenwald can work with America First conservatives in Congress (outgoing Representative Thomas Massie and current Senator Rand Paul, for example), in the media (Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Steve Bannon, etc.), and elsewhere. Such a partnership could speak to the majority of patriotic Americans much more effectively and authentically than either the Democratic or Republican establishments.
For the undeniable fact is that, when it comes to the U.S.-Israel relationship, most voters are ready for a new chapter. And the energy is clearly with the insurgents. This is especially true now that the administration is in peace talks with Iran. Both Trump and Vance have expressed frustration with Israel, with the latter recently articulating what few American politicians have been allowed to say openly: the two countries have different interests.
At the same time, many of our political elites are scrambling to save the pro-Israel consensus. The uniparty loves its wars, and will stoop to any low or call their political opponents any slurs in order to keep them going. Just ask Vance.
Hence the need for a left-right alliance.
We understand our differences. Conservatives will never acquiesce to wealth confiscation, abortion-on-demand, DEI, speech codes, open borders, or any of the other noxious policy priorities beloved of the left. And we certainly don’t expect our progressive counterparts to suddenly disavow their most deeply-held principles (no matter how wrong or ill-considered).
But should the America First right and the antiwar left unite to restore our national sovereignty, rein in the war machine, extricate ourselves from endless, far-off quarrels, and ensure that this country’s energies and resources are applied to its own problems?
The post America’s Hard Left and Right Have Had It With Israel appeared first on The American Conservative.
Melat Kiros, a candidate backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), defeated Rep. Diana DeGette in the Democratic primary for Colorado’s First Congressional District Tuesday evening
DeGette, a 30-year incumbent, received 41 percent of the vote to Kiros’s 51 percent, despite $2.3 billion in campaign spending from outside groups in the final month of the race.
The Kiros campaign framed itself as an explicit challenge to the Democratic establishment. Her victory comes not long after two DSA-backed candidates emerged victorious over two incumbent New York Democratic congressmen.
Kiros received endorsements from the prominent progressive Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD), as well as Justice Democrats, a progressive group that counts Kiros as its seventh primary victory of 2026.
Kiros will go on to face the Republican candidate, Christy Peterson, in the general election on November 3.
The post Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros Wins in Colorado, Extending Recent Streak appeared first on The American Conservative.
A new Democratic insurgency looks a lot like the GOP’s agitation of yesteryear.
The editors at the New York Post couldn’t hide their animosity.
“The Hateful Slate” read Wednesday’s screaming headline over an image of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani celebrating with Darializa Avila Chevalier, one of three Democratic Socialists backed by Mamdani who won their Congressional campaigns in New York state on Tuesday night. It was a clean sweep for Mamdani, who watched as Chevalier, Brad Lander, and Claire Valdez toppled establishment Democrats, signaling growing momentum for a progressive movement that first took New York City by storm when Mamdani overwhelmed the former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the 2025 NYC mayoral election. The sudden jolt of outsiders-turned-mainstream is reminiscent of another insurgent political movement, one that swept through the GOP in 2010 and reshaped the Republican Party in ways that later enabled Donald Trump’s takeover.
Two years after Barack Obama’s generational victory, the Republican Party was reeling and directionless as it approached Congressional midterm races in 2010. Years of frustration had built up toward the establishment GOP as voters watched Republican politicians prioritize costly and unpopular wars in the Middle East over the ideological discipline that had driven the party to such great heights after the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s. What ultimately molded this inchoate dissatisfaction into a movement was Obama’s economic platform. For conservative voters who preferred the vision of small-government politics, the 2009 stimulus package, the continuation of Bush-era bank bailouts, and the passage of the Affordable Care Act were each a bridge too far.
In stepped the Tea Party. Featuring a rich cast of aggressive political characters, the Tea Party wasn’t so much built on one figure as it was a coalition of new faces on a mission to lower taxes, limit government spending, and grant greater authority to state governments in response to what many viewed as Obama’s federal overreach. Its champions prioritized anti-government ideas of decentralization and its electorate featured an impressive mixture of both suburban and rural voters.
Though prominent early figures such as Alaska’s former Governor Sarah Palin were eventually eclipsed by the MAGA project, politicians who absorbed the messaging of the Tea Party movement, such as Sen. Rand Paul and the current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have continued to shape the conservative movement under President Donald Trump. And while Trump’s unique brand of conservatism has increasingly embraced an activist use of federal power that would have been anathema to many early Tea Partiers, his rise was undeniably energized by the anti-establishment energy that the Tea Party used to transform the GOP in the 2010s.
Fifteen years ago, Republican voters revolted against a party they believed had abandoned its principles. Today, a similar backlash is unfolding inside the Democratic Party, where a coalition of young, highly-educated white voters and working-class minority communities is finding common cause in a socialist vision that rejects the party’s neoliberal consensus. For many of these voters, The Biden administration and its cadre of sycophants became synonymous with both an affordability crisis that eroded confidence in the Democratic establishment and a U.S. foreign policy toward Israel that helped enable violence in Gaza and beyond. Though economic concerns are the driving force behind what transpired on Tuesday, opposition to the Democratic Party’s open embrace of Israel has become an equally powerful organizing issue for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the group that worked to spearhead a slate of progressive candidates seeking midterm success in 2026.
Though the ascendancy of a more progressive Democratic wing has been building for two decades, between the financial crisis to the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, the election of 35-year-old Zohran Mamdani in the fall of 2025 is what really transformed a simmering ideological movement into a new political force. More than any left-wing electoral victory in modern American history, Mamdani’s triumph signaled that it could be done, that a socialist with a TikTok channel could challenge the party’s power brokers and capture one of the country’s most visible executive offices. In winning, Mamdani provided evidence that an insurgent Democratic movement is possible.
Worst of all for Republicans, Mamdani is now beginning to deliver on the kinds of platform planks they have long warned could upend America’s hyper-capitalist system. In one of his first headline governing victories, the city’s Rent Guidelines Board voted to freeze the rent for nearly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, a central campaign promise enacted early in his tenure. At the same time, Mamdani has moved forward with an expanded free childcare program backed by a state-city partnership with Gov. Kathy Hochul and the legislature in Albany. The initiative not only places a signature campaign promise into practice but it underscores a more pressing political reality, one in which Mamdani-aligned progressives are capable of finding common ground with establishment Democrats when governing power is at stake.
Though prominent billionaires such as Citadel CEO Ken Griffin warned that capital would flee as a result of Mamdani’s threat to install a progressive tax agenda, the mass exodus has yet to materialize in any meaningful way. And while conservative commentators predicted crime in the city would surge under his leadership, New York City is currently experiencing the safest start to a year on record: The murder rate has dropped by more than 20 percent compared to last year.
Mamdani’s New York has so far diverged sharply from the dire predictions. Speaking before millions of fans who flooded the streets of Manhattan following the New York Knicks’ first NBA title in over half a century, Mamdani struck a celebratory tone that underscored a broader political point. The city his critics had warned was on the brink of collapse was, at least in the immediate term, experiencing something closer to resurgence than decline. For supporters, the moment crystallized a growing sensation that great things are possible when the constraints of neoliberal orthodoxy begin to loosen.
Early indicators suggest the Democratic coalition may be entering a period of internal reconfiguration, shaped in part by figures such as Mamdani and his fellow New Yorker, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This shift has prompted concern among the Democratic donor class. Now, moderate Democrats are confronting questions that once defined the Republican Party’s internal struggle, when Trump’s rise culminated in his 2016 presidential victory and a fundamental realignment of the modern GOP.
“Who gets to determine who is a Democrat?” the progressive political commentator Emma Vigeland asked on Thursday’s episode of the Majority Report podcast. “If Democratic voters vote for somebody in a Democratic primary and decide that they’re a Democrat, doesn’t that matter a little bit more than the corporate lobbyists who want to gatekeep who gets to enter into the Democratic Party?”
Mamdani’s rise, the electoral gains of allied progressive candidates, and the early governing outcomes in New York City point to the emergence of a new and increasingly coherent Democratic insurgency. What began as a diffuse ideological movement, spanning the financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street, and the Sanders campaigns, is finally coalescing into a political force that could reimagine the Democratic Party for years to come in ways not dissimilar to the meaningful gains of the Tea Party movement within the GOP. The ripple effects are yet to fully reveal themselves, but as it stands, this is Mamdani’s wave. The question now is whether Democrats want to ride it.
The post The Mamdani Wave’s Republican Harbinger appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Daily Wire podcaster supported policies that boosted the hard left in New York.
The Democratic Socialists of America won big in New York’s Democratic primaries last Tuesday. By the time the ballots were tallied, conservative media had identified a scapegoat: white people.
Specifically, “overeducated, useless white people,” in the words of the Daily Wire podcaster Ben Shapiro.
Batya Ungar-Sargon—a pro-Trump leftist—wrote a Substack essay with this imperious headline: “Stop Calling Them ‘Socialists.’ They’re Over-Credentialed White Gentrifiers Driven by Resentment Ousting Working-Class Candidates.”
For those not in the know: “White gentrification” is when white people move into an area and make it nicer, “white flight” is when they move away, making it worse, and both phenomena prove how evil white people are.
Ungar-Sargon has some expertise in the evils of white people, having authored a PhD dissertation at U.C. Berkeley that examined “how rape and colonialism contributed to the development of modern English fiction,” according to Wikipedia. So, next time your mom’s snuggled up with a book by Jane Austen, let her know that rapey colonialism made the reading experience possible.
The New York Post also did some white-bashing after the shock elections. “The Young and the Clueless,” blared the cover headline on Thursday, above a photograph of triumphant-looking young people with fists in the air. The subheadline: “Just 7% of voters, mostly white and under 30, pick Israel-hating radicals to represent Dems.”
I’m trying to imagine Shapiro calling out “useless Hispanics,” Ungar-Sargon lamenting “Jewish gentrifiers,” or the Post doing a cover story on “mostly black” street criminals.
I can easily imagine Shapiro hating on Muslims. In fact, I don’t need to imagine. “Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage,” Shapiro once wrote on the hellsite formerly known as Twitter.
It’s pretty rich of Shapiro to blame white people for DSA victories. Any sentient being can see that the Democrats and hard left benefit from the country’s ongoing demographic transformation, i.e., from its becoming less white. Well, anyone but Shapiro can see that. “I don’t give a good damn about the so-called ‘browning of America,’” he wrote in 2017. “Color doesn’t matter. Ideology does.”
At least, that’s how Shapiro conceived of the relationship—or in his view, non-relationship—between ethnicity and nationhood in America. For Israel, things are different. “If you believe that the Jewish state has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper,” Shapiro wrote two decades ago. “It’s an ugly solution, but it is the only solution.”
Some might even call it the final solution.
While Shapiro’s rhetoric about Muslims may have softened, his views don’t seem to have changed. “I think Israel should have gone harder and faster in Gaza,” Shapiro told Vanity Fair in a profile of him published this week. Should have gone harder and faster in Gaza. Those repulsive words should disqualify Shapiro from ever again opining on U.S. foreign policy.
In sum: Shapiro supports the forcible displacement of non-Jews from Greater Israel, even as he welcomes the dilution of America’s European stock via mass migration. Set aside your own views on those matters: Does this not seem a rather bewildering instance of moral incoherence?
The browning of America about which Shapiro doesn’t give a “good damn” is well apparent in New York City, which was 90 percent white in 1950 and is under 30 percent white today. That Gotham’s immigrant newcomers hail mostly from places outside Europe probably pleases Shapiro, given his views on the superlative importance of ideology. He’s a big booster of David Harsanyi’s book Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.
Unfortunately, since color and ideology are more tightly correlated than Shapiro’s past comments would suggest, and not remotely in the direction he seems to believe, conservative candidates no longer stand a chance in the Big Apple.
In last year’s mayoral election, the moderate Gov. Andrew Cuomo won a majority of whites, yet the Ugandan-born, Indian-American DSA candidate Zohran Mamdani dominated the election thanks to overwhelming support from foreign-born residents, who make up around 37 percent of the city’s population.
From his new throne at Gracie Mansion, Mamdani played kingmaker in last week’s elections, as did the Turkish-American influencer Hasan Piker. They had endorsed the DSA candidates who unseated Democratic incumbents in the U.S. House: Darializa Avila Chevalier, a black Latina, and Claire Valdez, who describes herself as “a dual citizen of Ysleta del Sur Pueblo Nation and the United States.” Brad Lander, a former DSA leader backed by the mayor, also won; he’s Jewish. Mamdani and Piker supported candidates down-ballot as well, such as Aber Kawas, a Palestinian-American.
Sorry, why should white people be scapegoated for all this, exactly?
It would make more sense to blame Israel, since its assault on Gaza and out-of-control bellicosity across the Middle East has become a wedge issue within the Democratic Party, to the advantage of upstart socialists taking on an out-of-touch establishment. Given Israel’s plummeting favorability ratings among Americans, left-wing candidates may ride anti-Israel sentiment to more congressional seats and even the White House in the coming years.
Socialism really is on the rise in America, in part due to changing demographics, but in part due also to Israel’s unseemly belligerence. That’s hardly a surprise, though Ben Shapiro never had the foresight to give a good damn. If he’d gotten his way, socialism might have risen only harder and faster.
The post Ben Shapiro Blames ‘Useless White People’ for Socialism appeared first on The American Conservative.
Trump used authenticity to seize the country. Is Biden’s notorious son offering the newest vintage?
It finally happened.
Hunter Biden, the formerly drug-addled son of the former President Joe Biden, signed up for an account on the Elon Musk pain palace formerly known as Twitter. He’s been tweeting, relentlessly, in the throes of what can only be described as a dopamine-fueled binge for the better part of the week, and it’s been glorious. You know the big problem with big politics in the Year of Our Lord 2026? Authenticity, or the lack of it. Before he was president (and for most of his first term), Donald Trump had it, and now, many years later, the mantle has fallen to Hunter. As Kash Patel might say, “Rest now brother, we have the watch, and I’ll see you in Valhalla.”
I get it, I’m not supposed to like Hunter. In fact, I’d wager that my name is on some list in the catacombs of an FBI vault for purchasing the Marco Polo hardcover copy of Hunter’s laptop files in 2022, the darkest days. But what can I say? I do like Hunter. And I’m certainly not the only one. On X, many right-wing accounts, which usually spend their days defending the sleepiest of Sleepy Don’s final days, were mesmerized by the younger Biden’s fever dream this week, liking and resharing his honest accounting of the sort of drug addiction and degeneracy that was once used to attack the elder Biden’s shivering and quivering administration.
While the younger Biden was smashing away at a keyboard on Thursday afternoon, Trump was struggling to remain conscious as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin basked in the warm glow of the White House press corps. And who can blame Trump? These are literally some of the *dumest (without a B) and most boring (with a B) humans to ever exist. If I had to listen to any of these benchwarmers careen on and on about my own greatness, I too would willingly subject them to the sort of humiliation ritual that Trump puts these sandworms through on the daily.
Hunter embraced his role as the new hype man for the sort of brazen, unconstrained stream-of-thought posting that dominates the online social ecosystem that once supercharged Trump’s own political trajectory. When one account suggested a bag of cocaine found at the White House in 2023 during Biden’s presidential administration belonged to Hunter, the younger Biden flipped the tables, asserting on X that he would “never have forgotten” his drugs.
“Someone called me the MAGA whisperer and I’ll gladly take the title,” Hunter proudly wrote on Thursday morning. “Left, right, D or R, we all want the same things. We’re being divided on purpose by the Epstein Elite Oligarch class because as long as we’re at each other’s throats, they get fat and rich off of our misery.”
Hunter’s unabashed style has helped grow his account to more than 700,000 followers as of this writing. And don’t you get it? Can’t you see why he has become such a spectacle? Do you not hear the willing cheers of feeble men, imploring the reformed drug addict to seek out a longshot bid for the presidency in 2028? America has become one long-running joke and, for many, all there seems left to do is laugh and enjoy the showmen on the stage. Whether Trump or Biden, whether left or right, the audience demands a good show, knowing full well we’re all of five seconds away from cooked—or, as Gen X might prefer, the car-crash ending of Thelma & Louise.
The French philosopher Guy Debord saw this all coming. In his seminal 1967 text The Society of the Spectacle, Debord argued that authentic social life would be replaced entirely by its representation. That, in essence, social life would become a spectator sport filled with all-consuming images of living rather than living itself. What he couldn’t have predicted was that the spectacle would eventually eat its own critics, and that the only way to win inside the new arena of false idols would be to simply out-spectacle the spectacle. Trump understood much of this instinctively. Hunter also appears to understand it. And Debord, to his credit, would probably note that there’s no difference in that “authenticity” inside the spectacle is just a more seductive image of authenticity, not the real thing. The American artist Andy Warhol, who was far less tortured about the whole arrangement, would note that everyone gets 15 minutes of fame, and we’re watching Hunter’s very own clock ticking away.
You don’t have to take Debord’s word for it. Just open your phone. The evidence is everywhere. The stock market is exploding higher and higher each day. Why? Who is making money? The tech elite in Silicon Valley who promise a vision of a future that few want. That’s the new America. Sprawling data centers and artificial intelligence and less whiskey and clean living so long as the living is alone, on a screen, scrolling forever while Trump and sons score big on dirty drone deals with the Israelis and shadowy crypto boondoggles with crypto zealots. The Zoomers aren’t happy? Who could’ve seen that coming? As Trump struggles to stay awake in cabinet meetings, Hunter is the new, cool kid on the block. And who can blame anyone for embracing a real antihero in a time of such villainry? As Trump and his team argue with CNN anchors about whether his eyes were blinking or closed, Hunter’s busy pulling back his cape and revealing the hidden key that once led Trump to the promised land. This is the America Hunter is posting into; somehow, at least this particular week, he’s the most honest thing in it.
Authenticity is the only currency left in American politics, and it’s ideologically neutral. Trump proved that a decade ago. Hunter is proving it now from the opposite side. Trump’s authenticity was aggressive and acquisitive. It explicitly sought power. Hunter’s is confessional and self-destructive. It seeks nothing but to be seen. Yet they produce the same effect in the audience. The audience doesn’t care about the politics, they merely care about the unmediated person, and with Hunter, they’ve gotten the Full Monty.
Consider the alternative. California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has spent the better part of 2026 auditioning for the presidency, has attempted his own version of radical honesty. It has landed like a fat man’s cannonball into an empty pool. Newsom can’t be authentic because there is nothing there to excavate. While he was locking down California and state officials were counting the deaths of peasants, Newsom was enjoying tasting menus at the French Laundry. Newsom is a man whose entirety is the mask.
Hunter, on the other hand, has lived a life of genuine, spectacular failure and is now showing it off, totally unfiltered, for the world to revel in its distinct misery. Newsom has lived a life of careful, managed success and is now trying to talk like a guy who hasn’t. The audience knows the difference. They always do. You can borrow Trump’s language, but you cannot borrow his life.
Where does this leave Trump? The man who built his empire on being the loudest man in the room is losing his voice at its most critical juncture. We’re learning, in real time, that you simply can’t out-spectacle spectacle forever. The era has left our president struggling to keep pace in an arena he explicitly manufactured. Like that in Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Trump’s Zone is a type of surreal, lethal, and constantly shifting temporal geography that is now eating away at its own creator. As Trump attempts to navigate an end to the war he started, the man who was once prized for his open honesty has struggled to keep straight a list of compounding lies. After all, nothing can be the “biggest” or the “greatest” when every single line item is meant to outdo the last. Eventually the audience stops believing the superlatives and begins looking for someone who’ll just tell them the truth. Even if that someone is a recovering crackhead with a Twitter account.
The post Hunter Biden’s New High: ‘The MAGA Whisperer’ appeared first on The American Conservative.
The alliance is not only ideologically congenial, but electorally valuable.
The administration is not popular. After being elected on a platform of avoiding unnecessary wars, President Donald Trump and the GOP made the decision to risk a global recession and a potential Democratic sweep in the midterms by starting a war in the Middle East. Predictably, the Republicans are now the electoral underdogs and need to do some hard thinking about the future of the party and its policies.
One potential coalition, which would be healthy for both the party and the country, would be between social conservatives and antiwar voters. Both of these groups played a significant role in the coalitions that swept Republicans back to power in 2024, and were subsequently let down by the second Trump presidency. Trump won the presidency a second time by focusing on the extremism of the Biden administration on social issues, whilst also explicitly running as the “pro-peace ticket.”
In the time since the election, both of these groups have been repeatedly disappointed by the Trump administration, especially by the administration’s war with Iran and its approval, through the FDA, of a new form of mifepristone, a dangerous abortion pill. As a result, both groups have become increasingly critical of the Trump administration.
These two disappointed factions are naturally complementary coalition partners, particularly on the pro-life issue. There is a natural connection between the defense of innocent human life at home through pro-life policies and protecting it abroad by avoiding unjust wars. There’s also a historical through-line; America’s embrace of social liberalism followed our nation’s abandonment of our Founding principles of geopolitical neutrality and nonintervention, and the rise of an increasingly insatiable appetite for empire abroad and foreign wars on the part of our leadership class, during and in the aftermath of the Second World War.
The observation that disregard for human life in war leads to moral decay at home is not a new one. In 1974, Fulton Sheen, a prominent Catholic bishop and speaker, connected the moral issues with America at home in particular to the tolerance of the dropping of the atomic bombs:
See how much the world has changed? Now, what made it change? I think maybe we can pinpoint a date: 8:15 in the morning, the sixth of August, 1945. Can any of you recall what happened on that day? … It was the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima in Japan. When we flew an American plane over this Japanese city, and dropped the atomic bomb on it, we blotted out boundaries.
There was no longer a boundary between the civilian and the military, between the helper and the helped, between the wounded and the nurse and the doctor, between the living and the dead—for even the living who escaped the bomb were already half-dead.
Sohrab Ahmari, the U.S. editor of UnHerd, believes the connection between unjust wars abroad and tolerance for abortion at home is as evident as it was in Sheen’s time. “While plenty of ‘pro-life’ states and non-state actors have waged unjust war down the ages, there’s a particular moral indifference that links modern states that kill the unborn unjustly and wage war willy-nilly,” he told The American Conservative. “And there’s a link, too, with what our beloved Pope Francis called ‘an economy that kills.’”
“They don’t think about killing the unborn or risk to civilian lives in terms of whether it is intrinsically wrong, but about whether there are good consequences that would make the loss of those lives an acceptable trade-off,” Edward Feser, a prominent Catholic philosopher, told TAC. “I would guess that that is the sort of thinking that leads Trump to decide both to keep abortion pills accessible, and to threaten to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure.”
Per Feser, an alliance between the camps would create a more durable ideological configuration. “Each side should heavily emphasize the connection between the issues,” he said. “There is too much inconsistency or cognitive dissonance in both the pro-life and antiwar camps, and now is a good occasion to emphasize this and try to get more people to think more consistently.”
Such a coalition also is likely to be electorally viable and could benefit either party, although the Republicans are better positioned to take advantage of it. Currently, 37 percent of Americans identify as pro-life, including 69 percent of Republicans. This 37 percent can be considered to be the core of the Republican base. Massive majorities of voters likewise oppose the ongoing Iran war; the bulk of these voters tend to be Democrats and Independents. Many of these voters can be won by Republicans, should Republicans ditch the foreign wars and invest in becoming the pro-restraint and antiwar party, as they appeared to do in 2024. It is electorally wise for Republicans to ditch the foreign wars and adopt a pro-restraint stance on foreign policy, as to help grow its pro-life base and turn it into a governing antiwar and socially conservative party.
The post A Durable Coalition: Social Conservatives and Antiwar Voters appeared first on The American Conservative.
Despite an interesting thesis, Freya India’s GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything falls flat.
Painters think in brushstrokes. Directors think in scenes. Women under 30 think in Instagram stories. Young women’s travel, clothing, hobbies, and even their romantic relationships are subconsciously selected based on what would look best photographed, filtered, and ironically captioned. Digital life and real life are not in competition; they’ve melded.
Social media isn’t a hobby or a distraction for young women; it is their medium of self-creation and, in some instances, self-destruction—and it has ruined girlhood, Freya India writes in her debut book GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything. India, herself a 20-something, surveys the online activity of young women in the United States and United Kingdom to issue a dire warning: Girlhood as we know it is over. The oldest women of Generation Z are turning 30 after spending their teenage years toggling between Tumblr and Twitter. India cites statistic after statistic showing that the kids are not all right, such as a 2022 survey that found that around 37 percent of U.K. teens ages 12 to 18 had been prescribed antidepressants at some point in their lives. Girls have “always felt anxious, insecure, and unsure,” but modern life has amplified these feelings to an untenable level, India writes.
A combination of corporate greed, family breakdown, and therapy culture has turned girlhood into a minefield, and the generation of women that have emerged are utterly broken and, India seems to imply, less human. India hits all the expected notes—she makes references to Euphoria, OnlyFans, and Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism—but the arguments in GIRLS® fall flat not because India’s thesis is wrong but because she overstates the problem.
Yes, it seems that something is off when young men are more likely than young women to want children, or when headlines declare young people are in a “dating recession.” But India flattens the Gen Z experience into a monolith: “We never had places to practice being good people… We had so few opportunities to practice selflessness. No neighbors to try kindness with. No bonds we couldn’t easily break. No obligations to learn loyalty. We grew up in a world of strangers, with so few expectations of each other, so little accountability.” Might I say—not all zoomers?
Most members of Generation Z are no longer teenagers. I’m a so-called elder Zoomer—born in late 1997—and I have an SUV, a mortgage, and two children. Like many women my age, I know next to nothing about today’s TikTok trends or Twitch streamers. But unlike many women of my generation, I didn’t get a smartphone until I went to college. I came of age just as the tide was turning from play-based to phone-based childhood, as author Jonathan Haidt puts it in his book The Anxious Generation, which focuses on young adults’ mental health issues.
Haidt is one of the scholars at the heart of the iPhone wars, and India is his protégé, having written for his site After Babel. Haidt and his allies say that data shows that the advent of the iPhone has ushered in societal decline. Haidt’s critics say he is standing in the way of progress and freedom. Reason accuses him of “bad science,” and the Guardian says the first half of The Anxious Generation “reads as sensational generalization.” It is into this fray that India jumps, zeroing in on what she and her peers have experienced. Gen Z is now old enough for us to observe how adolescent social media use has affected them in adulthood, and India divides her observations into six sections: “Filtered” covers how social media made girls hate how they look; “Diagnosed” covers how social media companies pushed girls to make mental health issues part of their identities; “Documented” covers how girls began living life for approval on social media; “Disconnected” covers how the breakdown of family and community has affected girls; “Detached” covers how social media has warped gender relations; and “Empowered” covers what value systems have filled the vacuum as religion fades from Western life.
“Empowered” is the last section of the book, and none of the other sections make sense without it. Instead of Christianity, Gen Z women have manifesting, therapy, and social justice activism. India identifies Gen Z as the “least religious generation in history” but stops short of recommending returning to organized religion en masse as a possible solution for their problems.
“I think we need to find faith. Not necessarily religious faith but faith in something more,” India writes. She doesn’t identify herself with any religion, and Haidt identifies as an atheist, which gives an interesting flavor to their moralizing—under what moral system are they operating, exactly? Haidt can’t escape biblical imagery—the name of his Substack, After Babel, comes from Genesis 11, and Haidt describes the Tower of Babel as “the best metaphor I’ve found for making sense of the momentous sociological, cultural, and epistemological changes that occurred in many nations in the early 2010s.” Perhaps the solutions Haidt and India search for are right under their noses.
The big question that India tries to answer is whether the problems Gen Z girls face are on par with what other generations of girls have faced, or whether something far worse is happening. Gen Z has been decried for being too sensitive, needing safe spaces and trigger warnings. In 2022, author Paul Fairie’s post called “A Brief History of Kids Today Are Too Soft” went viral on X-formerly-known-as-Twitter. Fairie cited newspaper stories handwringing about “kids these days” from 1921, 1931, 1942, 1955, 1961, and on and on. The collective response was a virtual wiping of the brow while uttering, “Phew!” If past generations also called youngsters “too soft,” then surely Gen Z would emerge into adulthood unscathed, too.
India doesn’t buy that logic. “What girls and young women are going through today is something new,” she writes. “We see this most clearly in the complete collapse of their mental health. Since the early 2010s, Generation Z—those of us born between roughly 1996 and 2011—has been falling apart, with adolescent girls hit hardest.” If Haidt’s and India’s detractors are correct, then the challenges Gen Z girls are experiencing will have solutions that don’t require society-wide solutions. The girls just need to get through it. But if Haidt and India are correct, then society must be reordered on a multitude of fronts, from how students learn to how corporations advertise.
As its subtitle suggests, GIRLS® is about the “commodification of everything.” Corporations marketing to teens and 20-somethings is nothing new—but having almost 24/7 access to their young customers’ attention, data, and insecurities is. In The Culture of Narcissism, published in 1979, Lasch said the advertising industry “flatters and glorifies youth in the hope of elevating young people to the status of full-fledged consumers in their own right, each with a telephone, a television set, and a hi-fi in his own room.”
If only he had seen Instagram. Social media is the ultimate selling machine, and much of its power comes from the parasocial relationships that consumers have with influencers. What are parasocial relationships? They’re “one-way, screen-mediated, ersatz intimacies,” as Eddie LaRow puts it in First Things. And they’re worth a lot of money to brands. Influencers convince women that their teeth aren’t white enough, their hair isn’t soft enough, or their body isn’t attractive enough, and then they provide links to the exact product their followers must buy to fix these problems they didn’t know they had.
The “bestie-fication” of influencers is part of that power. “By being vulnerable with their ‘besties,’ influencers rack up views. By encouraging comments from their ‘friends,’ they boost engagement. And by sharing solutions and discount codes with their ‘family,’ they earn commissions,” India writes.
India’s points about how influencer culture encourages girls to think of themselves and others as products are probably the strongest in the book. “Social media teaches us to each see ourselves as individual profiles, rival brands, competing products,” she writes. “This is the most painful part of looking back at my own girlhood, the realization that we weren’t simply turning into products. We were being trained to treat each other like products, too.”
Throughout the book, India gives us glimpses of her girlhood but never enough for a detailed picture. We learn that her parents divorced when she was young, that social media was a big part of her adolescence, and that it’s something she’s now come to view as not only a waste but a harm. India is the only recurring character in GIRLS®; in every section of the book, she quotes girls’ posts and videos to illustrate her points but rarely returns to them. By choosing not to interview any of the influencers or posters she quotes and relying only on what they put online, India undercuts her own argument that the Internet is not real life. If social media distorts everything it touches, and everything a girl says or does online is not necessarily an expression of her true self but a way of packaging her personal brand, then why doesn’t India dive deeper into what these girls were thinking and feeling when they made these posts? The book is more of a survey of what’s being said online rather than a holistic look at how Gen Z women are developing. She summarizes TikTok videos and Reddit posts on topics like pornography and social anxiety, but the reader never learns what motivated the unnamed social media users to post about their challenges or whether they overcame those challenges.
GIRLS® was released in India’s native U.K. in February 2026. Her fellow Brit Louis Theroux released his documentary Inside the Manosphere via Netflix a few weeks later. Inside the Manosphere touches on many of the same themes as GIRLS®: the attention economy, the breakdown of the nuclear family, and hyperreality. Unlike India, Theroux meets the people behind the posts. He interviews so-called redpill influencers in their daily lives, inviting the viewer to see past the machismo and recognize that each muscled, manly social media star is really just a little boy from a broken home. India chose to focus on girls at a time when it’s more fashionable to worry about boys and their diminishing expectations, but it’s naive to think that men’s and women’s problems are discrete issues. One redpill influencer interviewed by Theroux, Harrison Sullivan (alias HStikkytokky), promotes OnlyFans actresses on his platform but says he personally thinks porn is bad for men. Theroux tells him that his decision to promote OnlyFans is like inviting a friend to work out at the gym and then meeting him at the door with a dozen donuts. Sullivan says it’s not his fault if his followers get addicted to porn—they should have resisted the donuts. His response smacks of the narcissism that Lasch says is endemic to our culture.
This theme, responsibility, is woven into both the manosphere documentary and India’s book. Throughout GIRLS®, India lists all the harms that Gen Z girls had done to them, but she seems unsure of what the consequences of these harms should be. “The very companies that hollowed out our friendships have the nerve to sell us their substitutes,” she writes. Who let the companies do this hollowing? Are corporations solely responsible for the hollowing out of community in the Western world? It’s hard to blame Gen Z’s parents—the pace of technological and cultural change has been so fast. Paradoxically, parents en masse didn’t create the problem, but they must create the solution. As Clare Morell wrote in her 2025 book The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones, parents are the linchpin. In addition to setting habits at home, they can influence state legislators and school board members. Morell interviews parents who intentionally raised their children tech-free and couldn’t imagine life any other way.
India doesn’t offer many solutions for Gen Z women who feel social media harmed their development (besides an underbaked plea for readers to consider “sincerely trying to be good,” the kind of thing Lasch would have called a “superficially optimistic” hymn to growth), but if there is one takeaway for readers of both books, it’s that parents must go against the cultural grain. Parents can’t assume educators know best when they tout trading textbooks for Chromebooks. Parents can’t assume that Meta’s Instagram Teen Accounts are anything but a savvy marketing gimmick. GIRLS® contains some solid insights into the information overload aimed at the average twenty-something woman, but there’s still an opening in the market for a book that tells the real, raw story of what happened to Gen Z.
The post Did Social Media Kill Girlhood? appeared first on The American Conservative.
What’s it like being the child of an oversharing mom or dad with millions of social media followers?
Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online, by Fortesa Latifi. Gallery Books, 288 pp.
Last Halloween, a clever costume “won the Internet,” as the saying goes. Kate Snyder of Brooklyn posted a picture of herself in a tiny smocked dress, knee-high socks, and a white cardboard heart surrounding her white-painted face. Her caption reads “[I’m] the toddler of a celebrity mom who wants to protect my identity but she also want[s] to post my outfits.”
Snyder’s post received thousands of likes on Instagram and even made its way over to a Reddit snark page (more on what that is later). The costume poked fun at the concept of “mindful sharenting,” one of many quickly-emerging social media trends examined by journalist Fortesa Latifi in her new book Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online. In Like, Follow, Subscribe, Latifi interviews parent and child influencers to pull back the curtain on how the industry uses parasocial relationships to sell everything from dining tables to diaper cream, and how growing up in a home that’s essentially a 24/7 reality television set negatively impacts a child. Latifi cites books like Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture by Sara Petersen and zeroes in on the effects on child influencers specifically.
Social media is a huge part of how contemporary Americans shop, work, and play. It’s also a huge part of how they parent—both what they share and consume. “Mindful sharenting—which can include photographing a child from the back or putting an emoji over their faces—can be a way to navigate the perceived risks of sharing your child online while still showcasing your experience of parenthood,” a communication studies expert tells Latifi in the book. “Mindful sharenting” is an approach that’s trickled down from influencers like Brooklyn McKnight (who has millions of Instagram followers and is herself a former child influencer) to normal parents who say they value privacy for their children.
But children’s online privacy encompasses much more than just the decision to show their faces on parents’ social media accounts. Latifi, herself a mother, traces the history of blogging and vlogging about family life from text to image to video. At each step, the financial incentives grew, and so did the invasiveness. “The amount of money in the mom influencer and family vlogging world is almost unbelievable,” Latifi writes. “Whatever you’re thinking, it’s more than that. According to Goldman Sachs research, the creator economy is expected to reach $500 trillion by 2027, and the highest echelons of mom influencers and family vloggers make hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars a year.”
That money—much of which goes to Big Tech companies’ bottom lines—is life-changing for families, but it also turns them into “something more resembling a business arrangement,” in Latifi’s words. Family influencing encompasses a spectrum of experiences. Latifi interviews child influencers who say they love what they do; after all, “they’re living the dreams of the 86 percent of young Americans who want to be influencers,” she writes. She also interviews and writes about children who have been hurt, betrayed, and even abused by parents chasing fortune and fame, the most extreme example being momfluencer Ruby Franke, who is in prison after pleading guilty to aggravated child abuse.
Latifi talks to YouTuber and mom of eight Julie Jeppson, who lets her in on a dirty little secret of the business: content with sick or injured kids performs the best. It’s the content “that you’re not supposed to post,” in Jeppson’s words.
“People would be like, ‘Oh my gosh, your kids are always sick, and I swear that she’s doing this on purpose and blah, blah, blah.’ They can think what they want,” she tells Latifi. “Humans are curious, and they want to know what is happening and why is this kid in the hospital? So they click on it.”
Latifi is skeptical but sympathetic toward her subjects. She acknowledges the constraints of raising a family (especially as a single mom, as Jeppson identifies herself) under late-stage capitalism. But she also exposes the lies that influencer parents tell themselves and others. Latifi talks to Jeppson about a video of her daughter India crying because of Father’s Day songs at a sacrament meeting (the Jeppsons are Mormon). Jeppson and her husband were separated at the time, and India needed to step away to process her emotions. Jeppson says she got consent from India, who understands that the family’s videos can help other children going through similar situations.
Latifi isn’t buying it. “I’ve read comments on Jeppson’s videos that thank her for her unpolished content and describe how it’s helped other people get through their own difficulties. I just don’t understand how that is more important than allowing India to experience such an emotional moment privately,” she writes. “Sure, it might help other kids who are missing their dads, but in my mind, other kids aren’t Jeppson’s concern. India is.”
Latifi has a similar conversation with a family vlogger who chooses to be identified only as “Sam” in order to protect his or her identity. “Any parent influencer is constantly fighting feelings of guilt, feelings of questioning, second-guessing yourself. But you learn to bury it and silence it with justifications,” Sam tells her.
Sam is not alone. Latifi dedicates an entire chapter of Like, Follow, Subscribe, titled “From Content to Consent: The Parents Who Changed Their Minds,” to parents who built huge followings thanks in part to their young children, then reversed course. Aspyn Ovard, who transitioned from teenfluencer to momfluencer, stopped posting her children’s faces in 2023 to protect the children’s privacy.
“Aspyn explains [in a 2024 video] that she’s gone back to delete old content featuring her kids, but when it comes to sponsored content, she hasn’t been able to, because featured in some of the contracts is the understanding that the content will live on her platform indefinitely,” Latifi writes. She points out that many influencers build lucrative platforms using their kids then choose to stop posting their children once they’ve already inked brand deals—in other words, those influencers are still benefiting from the choice to post their children.
Family influencing is uncharted territory, and a couple of states have passed legislation around it. Such regulations on child influencers can be complicated and quickly outflanked by the rate of technological change, so Latifi is circumspect. “The exact nature of family influencing is what makes it so difficult to legislate…. The labor of a child influencer is so different than that of child actors, to whom they are often compared,” she writes.
Like, Follow, Subscribe poses many thought-provoking questions about parental rights as the conservative parental rights movement grows. Currently, the conservative parental rights movement is focused on things like parents’ ability to say no to vaccine schedules pushed by pediatricians or sexually graphic books assigned by public school teachers. But how should conservatives respond to children being exploited online by their parents and corporations when appealing to “parental rights” plays right into Big Tech’s hands?
Latifi is right that parents know best, until they don’t. In an especially disturbing chapter, she talks to a mom who rationalizes posting videos of her young daughters’ dance routines even though she knows such content appeals to pedophiles. Some of Latifi’s commentary—her priors include Teen Vogue and Rolling Stone—is sure to rankle readers on the right. She cites a researcher who includes homeschooling and/or frequent relocating as one of eight potential harms to child influencers. She ponders the tradwife-versus-girlboss dichotomy and American feminism. “As I’m writing this, Donald Trump is president for the second time, and the experience of American motherhood has never been more threatened,” she writes, referring to the patchwork of post-Roe abortion laws. But such a claim does a disservice to Latifi’s important work on child safety that is sure to be a huge issue long after Trump leaves office. Our collectively commodified online existence is threatening American motherhood and many, many other aspects of American life, and this issue won’t leave office in 2029.
Should children have a right to online privacy from birth, or should parents have the right to determine a child’s online profile when he or she is young? These are questions that seem black-and-white but turn much grayer as you look more closely. At a minimum, the evidence in Like, Follow, Subscribe should push conservatives to think through what they really mean when they discuss parental rights. There’s no perfect solution to preserve all parents’ autonomy and protect every child from every potential harm. Which compromises are conservatives willing to make? What outcomes are they willing to accept?
As for the abovementioned snark pages—this may be some of the most interesting digging that Latifi does in the book, because it involves not influencers and wannabe celebrities but everyday people. Look up any major influencer’s name plus the word “snark,” and there’s probably a page dedicated to tearing him or her apart on Reddit. A subreddit dedicated to Aspyn Ovard snark has more than 30,000 weekly visitors. Latifi writes,
There tends to be this idealized vision of snarking, where, [digital culture expert Jess] Rauchberg explains, ‘We’re not gossiping, we’re not shit-talking, but we are doing a secret third thing.’ One of the ways snarkers define their role is by instituting rules around their snark… This is what separates snarkers from haters – snarkers have embarked on what they see as a moral crusade. When you read through snark pages, the posters are adamant that they’re not just hating – they’re raising awareness about whatever issue they think the influencer they’re talking shit about exemplifies.
The most interesting revelation? Many “snarkers” are former fans who have soured on the influencers they once idolized. They still consume, analyze, and share the influencers’ content, just with a different purpose. But they’re absorbing it and being affected by it just the same.
Social media is a digital double-edged sword. It creates connections, spreads ideas, and enforces accountability. But all Americans, whether they’re parents or not, need to remember that if something’s free, then they’re the product. Your data, your time, your purchasing power—the more time you’re on social media, the more multinational corporations benefit. Instead of relying on momfluencers to tell us how to parent and what to buy, ask a friend or family member for help, no affiliate link or promo code needed.
The post How the Influencer Economy Ruined Childhood appeared first on The American Conservative.
A Los Angeles jury delivered a landmark verdict against Meta and YouTube, finding that the companies knowingly designed addictive platforms that harmed a young woman’s mental health after she began using them as a child. Kaley (her last name has been withheld from public filings for privacy), now 20, was awarded $3 million, with jurors assigning 70 percent of the blame to Meta and 30 percent to YouTube. Punitive damages are still pending and could raise the total sharply.
The decision could impact hundreds of similar lawsuits moving through U.S. courts. Meta said it “respectfully” disagreed and is weighing its legal options, while Google said it plans to appeal, arguing YouTube is a “responsibly built streaming platform.”
Kaley testified she started using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at age 9 and developed anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia as a result. Her lawyers said features such as infinite scroll were built as “addiction machines.” The social media companies deny that their products were responsible for her struggles.
The post Meta and YouTube at Fault for Social Media Addiction, Jury Finds appeared first on The American Conservative.
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