Commentary Culture Investigations

“What is a think tank?” is a question I get asked all the time.
The job of a think tank is to generate the ideas that politicians implement in office. If politics were the movie industry, those we elect would be the stars on the big screen; think tanks help write the script.
“But don’t politicians have ideas of their own?” I hear you ask.
Of course they do (though having spent 12 years in the House of Commons before running a think tank, I’d suggest they have them less often than you might imagine). Even with a clear goal — cutting taxes, improving childcare, encouraging growth — elected leaders often need help with the detail of how to make it happen.
Free-market think tanks have been enormously influential. Think tanks — or at least the free-market version of them — were more or less invented by an Englishman called Antony Fisher. He founded, among other institutions, the Institute of Economic Affairs in Britain in 1955, the Fraser Institute in Vancouver in 1974, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research in New York in 1977, and the Atlas Network in 1981.
Fisher was famously advised by Friedrich Hayek that, instead of seeking elected office in the House of Commons, he would have a greater impact if he shifted public opinion so that even the wrong people had to do the right thing.
It was think tanks — Fisher’s own IEA prominent among them — that made the case for privatization and helped Britain roll back the state (remember when Britain used to do that?). They drew up the blueprints for Reaganomics and Thatcherism, drove the sweeping welfare reforms of 1996, popularized school choice — now spreading across America — and powered the state-by-state push to abolish the income tax (Americans for Tax Reform, in particular).
Several decades on, the liberty movement has built a myriad of institutions — from giants like Heritage and AEI to state-based minnows such as MCPP in every U.S. state. The left has, of course, followed suit with its own think tanks (although progressive think tanks strike me as comparatively inert — perhaps because the left already owns so much of academia).
Given that ideas can change the world, I’ve never understood why some think-tankers feel the need to brand their organisations “do tanks” rather than think tanks. Done well, ideas possess such extraordinary agency that there is never any need to half-apologize for the suggestion that thinking alone is not enough. (If no one is reading the ideas in your research papers, it might be because the research papers are the problem, not the ideas.)
To be effective, a think tank, like a good journalist, should be friendly toward elected officials without becoming their friend. Never join the political club in the belief that doing so will buy you influence. Being friends with everyone might get you to the bill-signing ceremony; pushing hard is what ensures the bill being signed actually advances liberty.
Having spent over a decade in the House of Commons, I think it is rare for a politician to adopt the right policies because they see the light. More often it is because they feel the heat. A policy is taken up when it is presented in the right place at the right time and offers elected leaders a solution to a pressing problem.
Unless a think tank has a clear sense of mission, there is always a risk it begins to claim credit for things that would have happened anyway. Like a shaman performing a rain dance and then pretending to have produced the precipitation, it simply looks daft.
In a world where a handful of people with laptops can do extraordinary things, the size of your payroll is no longer a reliable proxy for output — if it ever was.
Alongside Fisher, few have done more to shape how think tanks work than Joe Overton. His great insight was that, at any given moment, there exists a range of politically acceptable policy options. Those we elect operate within that window of acceptable opinion — the Overton window — and think tanks should aim to shift it: making the once-unthinkable debatable, then sensible, and finally what everyone insists they always believed.
Over the past two decades, the digital revolution has made Joe Overton’s insights even more salient, as the established media has lost ground and think tanks have gained the means to reach people directly. Think tanks adapted to the advent of the internet, but that change will be as nothing compared with the transformation we are about to see with AI.
Consider, for a moment, policy research — a vital part of what a think tank does (in my view, a think tank that produces no original research is not thinking, but I digress).  Next month, here at MCPP, we will publish our annual Fat Cat report — a list of the highest-paid public officials in Mississippi. AI’s significance has little to do with using it to help write the report (we write it; AI polishes and edits it). Nor does its real importance lie in turning what was once a dry PDF printout into an interactive web tool (if no one is reading your research-paper PDF, take note).
What truly changes is that, once a report like our annual Fat Cat has been published, AI allows us to transform it into a self-regenerating report that “lives” online. The 2027 version will almost literally update itself as new data becomes available.
Two decades ago, when most people listened to music, they used CDs. It wasn’t that there was a shortage of digital music plastered all over the internet by the early noughties. It was just that you needed the technical know-how to find it (or a willingness to break copyright law). Then along came Spotify and others, and that sea of digital music could suddenly be accessed by everyone.
That is what is happening in the policy world. There is an ocean of digital data placed on servers by public bodies every day, but until now you needed to be a spreadsheet obsessive to make use of it.
One of our jobs as think tanks is to build the policy equivalent of an MP3-player interface — like the OpenData tools we are creating at MCPP — so the public can finally see what has long been there but remained inaccessible.
Will AI transform think tanks? I’m certain of it. In a world where a handful of people with laptops can do extraordinary things, the size of your payroll is no longer a reliable proxy for output — if it ever was. Done competently, the bang for the donor’s buck will be extraordinary.
AI is going to allow think tanks to reaffirm their founders’ original vision. After decades of growth, it is only natural that some institutions may have drifted a little from that vision; the day-to-day pressures of running a large organization can take on a logic of their own. Perhaps if just occasionally the metrics some folk report have something of the old Soviet tractor production targets about them, now might be the time to change.
Freed from the need to grow simply for the sake of growth (or one might say the need to be seen to be growing for the sake of growth), we can stay sharply focused on what has always mattered most: generating the ideas that shift the Overton window and advance liberty.
The tools are here. The data is waiting. In a world where we can act almost as fast as we can think, the opportunities for idea-rich think tanks are without limit. The only constraint is the quality of our thinking — and for think tanks, that ought not to be much of a problem.
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Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

Modern Age editor Daniel McCarthy, writing in The Spectator, notes the phenomenon of young Republicans turning to Richard Nixon as a political icon. Scott Greer in The American Conservative writes that “a new generation of conservatives … see [Nixon] as the model Republican leader.” The Wall Street Journal marvels at the Nixon craze among young conservatives, labeling it “Nixonmaxxing.” Vice President JD Vance praised what he called a Nixon renaissance during a recent speech at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda. After a half-century of media and liberal vilification, Nixon is back.
This is yet another comeback for the much-maligned 37th president. His first political comeback was when, after suffering political defeats in 1960 and 1962, he won the presidency in 1968 and four years later won reelection in a 49-state landslide. The second political comeback was his emergence as a respected elder statesman after resigning the presidency in the wake of the Watergate “scandal.” Nixon accomplished this by writing a series of post-presidential books on foreign policy, including The Real War, Real Peace, Leaders, No More Vietnams, 1999: Victory Without War, Seize the Moment, and Beyond Peace. The story of that second comeback is told in Kasey Pipes’ After the Fall. (RELATED: Nixon Goes Viral)
The appeal of Nixon is not ideological; it is better explained as admiration for, and a defense of, the enemy of my enemy.
What is behind this third Nixon comeback? Some credit must surely go to Geoff Shepard, who has spent the last two decades exposing the myths of Watergate in his books The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President and The Real Watergate Scandal, in podcasts, interviews, and a documentary titled “How the Deep State Took Down Richard Nixon.” (RELATED: Murray on Rogan on Woodward)
It surely hasn’t escaped the attention of young Republicans that the deep state and the legacy media — which they rightly distrust — used essentially the same playbook in destroying Nixon’s presidency and in their efforts to destroy Trump’s presidencies. Vice President Vance made this very point at the Nixon Library: “If you look at the story of how the Deep State took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump.” (RELATED: How Richard Nixon Became Cool Again)
Another factor is likely young Republicans’ admiration for Nixon’s foreign policy achievements — from ending an unpopular war in Vietnam, promoting burden-sharing among our allies (the “Nixon Doctrine”), using skillful diplomacy to stabilize the Middle East in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, and brilliantly triangulating between the Soviet Union and China to set the stage for Ronald Reagan to end the Cold War. Even Nixon’s many detractors praise his foreign policy realism. (RELATED: Nixon–Mao, Trump–Putin, and Triangular Diplomacy)
Daniel McCarthy, Scott Greer, and other conservatives have noted that Nixon’s domestic policies were not very conservative. Young Republicans and conservatives would probably prefer Reagan’s domestic policies over Nixon’s. The appeal of Nixon is not ideological; it is better explained as admiration for, and a defense of, the enemy of my enemy. Young conservatives greatly distrust the groups that took Nixon down and who still revile him as one of our worst presidents. Theirs is a reaction to the Nixon hatred on the left — a hatred that has existed at least since Nixon exposed Alger Hiss as a communist and espionage agent for the Soviet Union. The young conservatives have come to the conclusion that, as the great British historian Paul Johnson noted, Watergate was a “media putsch” to overturn the 1972 election.
One hopes that someday some of these young conservatives will become historians, college professors, and journalists so that Richard Nixon will attain his rightful place in history as a great president.
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As Yemen’s Houthis expand the Iran War by attempting to block the straits of Bab al-Mandeb in the Red Sea, our overstretched Navy struggles to keep both choke points open. Since the early 1980s, I have argued that the Marine Corps could play a key economy-of-force role both in blocking enemy ships and keeping straits open for free trade. From that time until 2019, the Corps had all the tools to do both missions. By occupying and defending allied territory in both the Bab al-Mandeb and the Straits of Hormuz, the Marines then conduct shore-to-shore amphibious landings to occupy and sanitize both Iranian and Houthi mobile missile launchers that they use to prevent freedom of navigation by U.S.-flagged and neutral shipping.
Unfortunately, the Marines no longer have that capability. Due to some poor decisions by the last Marine Corps commandant, and lethargic inaction by the present one, the actions described in the last paragraph can no longer be performed. General David Berger pronounced amphibious operations dead when he took over leadership of the Corps late in the last decade. Accordingly, he divested the Corps of the tanks and heavy engineering equipment necessary to conduct large-scale amphibious operations. Along the way, the Corps has lost much of the planning skills and expertise needed to conduct operations such as Guadalcanal, Inchon, or even the invasion of Grenada. (RELATED: Our Generals Are Failing Us)
Most amphibious experts I know believe it would take at least a decade to rebuild the kind of organic capabilities and experience lost seven years ago.
At the present time, Marine Corps amphibious expertise consists of small-scale raids, evacuation operations, and sea-borne humanitarian assistance. Thus far, the Marine contribution to the conflict has been limited to fast roping to the decks of merchantmen to capture or inspect them. That is of little help at the operational and strategic levels of war and does not justify the billions spent on maintaining the Corps. Most amphibious experts I know believe it would take at least a decade to rebuild the kind of organic capabilities and experience lost seven years ago.
However, as the six-week conflict evolves into yet another “forever war,” the generals and politicians may begin to search for new options to break the stalemate. Within three months, we could scrape together two Marine Expeditionary Brigades (MEBs) capable of amphibious landings in Hormuz and the Red Sea. If we could attach an Army tank and heavy engineer/bridging battalion to both MEBs, we could do much more than mere aerial bombing.
I use the three-month window as the minimum time needed to cross-train the soldiers on Marine Corps combined arms training and amphibious operations. As we learned at Gallipoli in World War I, you cannot just throw untrained soldiers on a ship and expect them to conduct this most complicated of military operations successfully against a hostile shoreline.
Also, it would take at least that long to prepare the staff to plan and logistically support multi-battalion landings. Since 2019, Marine Corps schools have drastically cut back the number of hours spent on amphibious theory and practice. This is particularly true of logistics, which is the key to operations ashore. The task would be somewhat eased if most operations are conducted shore to shore from the friendly side of the choke point. Even so, the Corps and Navy might have to employ retired logisticians and amphibious planners to both instruct and assist in planning for any contemplated amphibious foray. (RELATED: The Marine Corps Is No Longer Ready for Urban Warfare)
Before General David Berger came along and implemented his defensive missile-oriented Force Design concept seven years ago, the Marine Corps had been working to develop new tactics, techniques, and technologies that would enable the Corps to operate successfully in a modern shore defense system. Most of that work was temporarily halted with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and stopped entirely when Force Design began. To date, the Corps has not yet live-fired a single missile or sunk a target ship promised in Force Design. (RELATED: A To-Do List for the Next Marine Corps Commandant)
If the MEBs are properly task-organized, the admiral running Central Command would then have the option of attacking and seizing Kharg Island and/or sending ground forces to suppress or destroy mobile  Iranian and Houthi anti-ship missile and drone launchers. Marine aircraft armed with anti-ship missiles would ensure that the straits would remain clear of enemy warships. Whatever we have been doing with airpower alone is clearly not working.
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Our Generals Are Failing Us
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Gary Anderson retired as chief of staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. Earlier in his career, he lectured on amphibious operations at the Marine Corps University.

The main difference between a conservative and a libertarian is that the former is usually in a good mood, while the latter is usually in a bad mood. The former is more accommodating, while the latter is more irascible, because they believe (and it’s hard to say they’re wrong) that the great enemy of liberty is the government. And when your enemy is a giant six-headed monster, the least you can do is bare your teeth. There’s something romantic about conservatism that libertarianism lacks. And there’s something energetic and proactive about libertarianism that conservatism lacks. Now that enough time has passed, we can say that the balance Ronald Reagan achieved between these two currents was extraordinarily difficult to attain. It was almost a miracle.
Conservatives often complain about libertarians’ lack of morality and pragmatism, while libertarians criticize conservatives for their willingness to compromise with government, their flirtation with economic regulation, and, above all, their passionate interventionism in foreign policy. Conservatives accuse libertarians of always thinking with their wallets, while many libertarians believe conservatives place too much weight on God in their political decisions — which, if that were true, would probably have produced better results.
I can’t stand government, but I suppose a little government is necessary…
Like millions of right-wing voters, I consider myself somewhere between these two camps, unable to fully embrace either one. I can’t stand government, but I suppose a little government is necessary, and I see it the way the great P. J. O’Rourke taught us: “A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.”
I don’t believe faith should be imposed on anyone, but I do believe that a measure of Christianity in public life not only doesn’t make things worse — it makes them better. I also regard Christianity as one of the foundational pillars of the West, which makes its defense and respect by public authorities just as important as the defense of our culture, our way of life, and our values. (RELATED: The West Is a Superior Civilization (And I Don’t Care If That Offends You))
I don’t believe in total surveillance, and I think we live in an age when libertarians are right to demand some measure of privacy. The exception, perhaps, is in cases involving serious national security concerns.
When it comes to taxes, I consider myself the most libertarian of libertarians.
When it comes to abortion and euthanasia, I consider myself the most conservative of conservatives. Even if you want to set aside the moral dimension (however aberrant that may be), we face an enormous demographic crisis, with consequences for the economy and for the very survival of the welfare state. How on earth is the government going to promote abortion, sex reassignment, or anything else that further damages the birth rate? (RELATED: What Happened to ‘Do No Harm’?)
Some libertarians are uncomfortable with nationalism or with asserting national sovereignty. That’s not my case. The United States is, in the eyes of the world, the land of the free. Strengthening its sovereignty or promoting its nationalism is, in my view, a way of strengthening the very idea of freedom it represents.
On immigration, I’ve always thought the libertarian position is strangely naive. It’s as though they’re talking about the immigration of a century ago rather than that of 2026. Times have changed. Libertarians usually adapt quickly to changing circumstances. On immigration, they haven’t. (RELATED: Enforce Immigration Law Now)
Freedom of speech seems unquestionable to me, and on this issue there is, one way or another, considerable agreement between both camps.
The issue of drugs strikes me as the sort of distraction favored by people who don’t really want to have a serious debate about the differences and common ground between conservatives and libertarians. It’s as though, when considering a future military intervention abroad, the main point of debate were whether household pets might be frightened by the explosions.
If conservatives and libertarians made a greater effort to bridge their differences — instead of widening them — the American right would be stronger today, and so would the broader Western right. At a time when the right is on the rise, we should reaffirm that unity without requiring either side to surrender its differences. Reagan understood that what unites us is stronger than what divides us. And it is from those points of agreement that the policies emerge which make a nation strong, great, prosperous, and free.
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The Democratic Socialists of America don’t like being called Communists, though many members might echo the sentiment of leftist influencer Hasan Piker when he says, “I don’t have an issue with an end goal of communism.”Yet however the group self-identifies, its agenda is openly revolutionary.Its plans call for, among other things, abolishing the United States Senate and making the executive branch and the Supreme Court subservient to the House of Representatives.Like many a revolutionary organ, the DSA acts as a party within a party, and it increasingly represents the youth wing of the Democrats.Elected officials aligned with the group, like Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, look to be the future of the party.Yet DSA’s ideas are remarkably old-fashioned — so old, in fact, they were refuted by John Adams in 1787.That was the year he began publishing a multivolume work called “A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America.”It was so long ago Americans still spelled “defence” with a “c.”The book refers to “constitutions,” plural, because Adams hadn’t seen the new U.S. Constitution drawn up in Philadelphia that year.He was actually defending the state constitutions against French intellectuals who insisted they should be more radical.That was just two years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, with all the murder and mayhem it would bring.The old French versions of today’s DSA schemers condemned bicameral legislatures for the same reason Mamdani’s and AOC’s fans do now: their idea of “democracy” called for centralizing power in a single body.No checks, no balances, and certainly no federalism — the whole nation was to be personified in an omnipotent unitary legislature.Adams, who had been one of the first American revolutionary leaders to call for independence from Britain, was no enemy of popular self-government.But pure democracy would be as bad as any other kind of centralized despotism — so he defended the “mixed” constitutions of the states, almost all of which had separate upper and lower legislative chambers and divided legislative, executive and judicial power.The federal Constitution was drawn up on the same principles — and combined them with a division of powers between the states and national government. A glance at how the Constitution has performed for the last 239 years, compared to the chaos and bloodshed that engulfed revolutionary France once the proto-DSA types started getting their way there, shows who was right.But DSA, not content with dreaming of an end to capitalism, wants to end constitutionalism as well.Revolutionary parties, like Russia’s Bolsheviks, have often had such farfetched goals — the point isn’t to achieve them so much as it is to wreck whatever already exists.DSA’s first step is to radicalize the Democratic Party, making previously outrageous ideas like packing the Supreme Court seem mild by comparison to the Democratic Socialist program.Abolishing the Senate may be politically impossible, but de-legitimizing it is a way to de-legitimize obstacles to centralized power — not just the Senate itself, with its equal representation for all states, large or small, but the very principle of federalism.Why should North Dakota have a government of its own?What gives the people of Idaho a right to govern their own territory?California has the largest absolute number of Republicans in the country, but because they live in what operates as a massive one-party state, they not only lack adequate representation, but what representation they have can be snatched away by the Democratic majority — as is happening now thanks to the congressional gerrymandering championed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.DSA wants to make the whole country like California, only worse. That’s their idea of democracy — the socialist version. It’s the revolutionary French version as well, and it’s as un-American as anything can be. Yet it’s a magnet pulling the Democratic Party hard to the left.Notoriously, DSA has a disproportionate number of members who are highly educated but low-paid or unemployed.Like the Marxists of the last century or the French philosophes of the century before that, they’re sophisticated enough to seem like they know what they’re talking about, if you haven’t learned how disastrous their ideas have proved to be in practice.But American education doesn’t teach much about the horrors of Communism or France’s Reign of Terror.Radicals occupied the educational establishment early on, and now they’re reaping political rewards for the ignorance they’ve fostered in the public.According to recent Cato Institute polling, Generation Z — Americans between ages 14 and 29 — favors socialism over capitalism by 53% to 45%, though the “Democratic Socialist” label polls less well.Despite having “democratic” in their name, however, DSA doesn’t need majority support to bring about revolutionary change for the worse: a motivated minority is enough when the majority is unaware of its danger.Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. To read more by Daniel McCarthy, visit www.creators.com.

NEWTON, Mass.—Rep. Jake Auchincloss spent some of his time and energy Monday night trying to dispel concerns from voters about a takeover of his party by the Democratic Socialists of America.
“We’re talking about 1 percent of primaries. One percent,” he said to a standing-room-only crowd of many hundreds at a synagogue here, mentioning recent DSA wins in New York City and Colorado. “Let’s not overindex to a couple of primaries in the media capital of the world.”
Yet on the vote he was there to defend—a July 15 vote for the Massie amendment to withhold $3.3 billion in foreign military financing for Israel—Auchincloss himself had joined about half of the House Democrats in taking the same position as the most extreme far-left members—Summer Lee, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Maxine Waters, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The amendment was sponsored by a Republican from Kentucky, Thomas Massie, who was defeated in a primary after repeatedly crossing President Trump and who Auchincloss himself acknowledged ran “a re-election campaign that featured antisemitic tropes.”
President Trump marvels regularly at how the Senate Democratic leader, Charles Schumer of New York, who used to be pro-Israel, has become “like a Palestinian.” Auchincloss is lower profile than Schumer and much younger (Schumer graduated Harvard College in 1971 and Auchincloss in 2010), but on the basis of Auchincloss’s performance Monday night, it’s pretty much the same pathetic story. The press will try to spin it as how Netanyahu lost America, but one can just as easily see it as the tale of how the Democrats ditched the Jews.
Auchincloss, a Marine veteran who was raised Jewish and whose mother, Dr. Laurie Glimcher, was CEO of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, had amassed a reputation as something of a pro-Israel moderate since winning election in 2020 to a seat that had been held by Joe Kennedy III and before that by Barney Frank. The district includes Newton, Brookline, and Sharon Massachusetts, which are dense with Jewish schools, congregations, bakeries, old age-homes and butcher shops.
The appearance at Temple Emanuel, a large and prosperous congregation that is part of the religiously centrist Conservative movement of Judaism, featured Auchincloss blaming Israel for what he called an illegal war against Iran in which 18 Americans have been killed.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump, they did cook up this catastrophic war together,” Auchincloss said, ignoring that Iran has been at war against America for 47 years. “Netanyahu zoomed into the situation room and made a direct pitch to the president.”
He said the Iran war featured some of the same problems he saw in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—”groupthink,” “sunk cost bias.” In other statements and appearances, he’s added the Vietnam War to the list. “I see all of the same mistakes being made,” he said.
Auchincloss acknowledged that support for Israel among Democrats is “getting shaky,” but insisted that he himself still supports a qualitative military edge for Israel and American diplomatic backing for the Jewish state. He said he supports the Abraham Accords. He tried to downplay the significance of his vote on the grounds that even Prime Minister Netanyahu has said he wants to eliminate U.S. military aid to Israel when the ten-year memorandum of understanding reached with President Obama expires. He said he doesn’t favor an embargo on U.S. arms sales to Israel, but in the context of the war, he wanted to say, “we’re not paying for it, the American taxpayer.”
The flaws in the logic came out in the question and answer session. Auchincloss told Michael Segal, a member of the congregation, that he supported continued aid to Jordan.
One audience member announced “We feel abandoned. What do you say to the liberal Jews who are feeling lost?” Auchincloss told them to get involved in state and local politics, not just federal contests.
To a Newton-born U.S.-Israel dual citizen who said Auchincloss’s vote made her less safe, the congressman bristled: “I’m a United States member of Congress,” implying that she was somehow suggesting he should put Israel first. “I want our ally Israel to be able to defend itself. Defend itself.”
One audience member asked how Auchincloss proposed instead to deal with Iran and its nuclear threat. He did not answer. No one at all mentioned the pro-democracy protesters—30,000? 50,000?—murdered by the Iranian regime. No one asked what message the rest of the world, from Tehran to Taiwan, might draw from the suggestion that America would abandon Jerusalem.
One of the most telling moments in the evening came when the former vice chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party, Tom Mountain, rose after Auchincloss’s initial remarks and attempted to offer a Republican response. He was ejected by a trio of security guards.
Not that long ago, if a Massachusetts Democratic member of Congress in a heavily Jewish district threw Israel under the bus, he might expect a public rebuke from a Republican politician such as Governor Mitt Romney or Governor Charlie Baker or Senator Scott Brown. Yet Massachusetts has become functionally a one-party state.
Instead of Republican-Democratic political competition, the main political action now consists of liberals versus progressives, the descendants of the Michael Dukakis-Ted Kennedy-Paul Tsongas Democratic Party against the radical teachers union communist-Hamasniks-Zohran Mamdani types. The moderates see a primary threat from the left as a much bigger danger than a challenge from a Republican. Everyone remembers Ayanna Pressley defeating Rep. Michael Capuano in a 2018 Democratic primary. Some of it is race- and gender-driven but a lot of it is ideological.
It took years after Vietnam for the Democrats to embrace the use of military force in Bosnia and Kosovo. Even then, during the Clinton years, the action against Al Qaeda was perfunctory enough that it was insufficient to avert the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.
Auchincloss offered up the analysis that the Iranian revolution “rests on the idea of martyrdom … They want to die.” Better them than us. Observing the approach of congressional Democrats toward U.S. national security policy, you can see why Ayatollah Auchincloss is so perceptive about at least that particular dynamic.
The post In Packed Synagogue, a Democrat Scrambles to Defend Vote Against Arms for Israel appeared first on .

MS NOW/SnapStream

Amid the notoriety and rise of Democratic Socialist candidates in primaries ahead of the midterm elections and growing Democrat establishment panic, Tuesday’s Money, Power, Politics with MS NOW host Stephanie Ruhle tried to join the discussion with a minimization of Republican communism. The segment was accompanied by a chyron that read “GOP Ramps Up ‘Communism’ Attacks Ahead of Midterms.”Ruhle started and highlighted a post from Republican Speaker Mike Johnson that proclaimed, “a battle between common sense and communism.”She then decided to give a history lesson, with an accusation of authoritarianism: “And I would point out that we’ve made a lot of moves that you could liken to an authoritarian regime, and that is how you end up with communism. But alas, history and the truth don’t matter.” On Tuesday, MS NOW host Stephanie Ruhle tried to minimize Republican claims about the rise of communism with the DSAShe read a post from Speaker Johnson on communism, but blamed the alleged rise on Trump and “moves that you could liken to an authoritarian regime.” pic.twitter.com/KB4fBaqZ9v— Nick (@nspin310) July 28, 2026 Ruhle asked, “What do you make of this argument Republicans are making?” as she stated the communism claims were “one thing that their diehard supporters are hanging on to.”Former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina responded to Ruhle’s authoritarian claims with praise and agreement, “Well, this is why you’re the best in journalism, because, as you pointed out, they’re actually doing the authoritarian stuff, but they don’t have anything to talk about. “Messina did have some pushback for some of the radical DSA policies, as showcased by a DSA figure’s recent appearance on FOX News Sunday. He said some DSA policies were “way out of touch”: “And, you know, some of this stuff, let’s be very clear, Stephanie, is way out of touch. We shouldn’t abolish the United States Senate. We shouldn’t rewrite the Constitution. “But Messina also said voters “don’t care about that stuff” and instead wanted to know who’s going to make their prices go lower. He warned, “Democrats can’t get pulled into a fight on communism and have to stay where they are right now, which is cost of living.” Ruhle continued, “Republicans are going to hang on to this idea of abolishing the police and open borders, and so on and so forth,” and said Dems cannot denounce the DSA because their candidates and “a lot of these ideas” on issues like affordability “do appeal to people.” pic.twitter.com/pbwQQrqdX1— Nick (@nspin310) July 28, 2026 Ruhle asked, “How specifically do Democrats combat it?” as she seemed to complain that “Republicans are going to hang on to this idea of abolishing the police and open borders, and so on and so forth.”Somewhat surprisingly, she defended DSA economic policies and said Democrats “certainly don’t want to say ‘We’re denouncing DSA,’” and continued: “DSA and a lot of those candidates and a lot of these ideas, which are about affordability and busting down a system that does not work for millions of Americans, does appeal to people.”Messina’s response turned to cost of living and said the issue “unites both sides of the Democratic Party. And that is where we win.”Ruhle now seemed to realize, despite her minimization, the new notoriety of the DSA, a group which she previously called just a “small group of people” when she mocked frequent MS NOW guest Donny Deutsch earlier this month for his fears over the group’s possible antisemitism.The transcript is below. Click “expand”:MS NOW’s Money, Power, PoliticsJuly 28, 202609:44:55 AM Eastern(…)STEPHANIE RUHLE: Republicans have been attacking the Democratic Socialist movement. It’s their number one target. Speaker Mike Johnson called it a battle between common sense and communism. And I would point out that we’ve made a lot of moves that you could liken to an authoritarian regime, and that is how you end up with communism. But alas, history and the truth don’t matter. What do you make of this argument Republicans are making? Because it’s one thing that their diehard supporters are hanging on to.JIM MESSINA: Well, this is why you’re the best in journalism, because, as you pointed out, they’re actually doing the authoritarian stuff, but they don’t have anything to talk about. They can’t talk about gas prices. They can’t talk about utility prices. They have complete control of Washington, D.C. All three levers of power. And so, of course, they’re going to move to communism. And, you know, some of this DSA stuff, let’s be very clear, Stephanie, is way out of touch. We shouldn’t abolish the United States Senate. We shouldn’t rewrite the Constitution. However, voters don’t care about that stuff. They want to know who’s going to make their prices go lower. They want to know who understands that 66 percent of voters are living paycheck to paycheck. That’s who they’re going to vote for. And Democrats can’t get pulled into a fight on communism and got to stay where they are right now, which is cost of living. This weekend, the future Speaker of the House, Hakeem Jeffries, laid out his plan of what he wants to do in the first 100 days if he takes over, and it was all costs and accountability. That’s where they have to fight.RUHLE: So, how specifically do Democrats combat it, as Republicans are going to hang on to this idea of abolishing the police and open borders, and so on and so forth? How do they stay in the zone? Because they certainly don’t want to say “We’re denouncing DSA.” DSA and a lot of those candidates and a lot of these ideas, which are about affordability and busting down a system that does not work for millions of Americans, does appeal to people.MESSINA: I think it’s very clear you stay focused on cost of living. And, you know, Mayor Mamdani ran on that. Moderates like Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger won governorships on that. That’s what unites the party right now. The party is united on making things cheaper, getting the gas prices down, figuring out how to get things down in the grocery stores, and freezing utility rates. That unites both sides of the Democratic Party. And that is where we win.(…)

Left-wing Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who is running as a crusader for the working class, owns a rental property in Dubai, according to his latest financial disclosure. While the property’s exact location is unknown, the disclosure provides a clue, listing an outstanding debt of as much as $100,000 to the luxury developer behind a “resort-style” community located in “the heart of New Dubai,” complete with a “stunning lagoon and white sandy beaches.”
El-Sayed released the disclosure on Monday afternoon, shortly before the final debate against his primary opponent, congresswoman Haley Stevens, who had criticized El-Sayed for requesting an extension allowing him to delay the disclosure until after the Aug. 4 election. El-Sayed said he did so because his “wife and her family own property abroad,” making the disclosure “complicated” to complete.
Indeed, the disclosure lists “Rental Property 3,” a “Single Family Home” in “Dubai, U.A.E.,” adding to El-Sayed’s rental properties in Ann Arbor, Mich. and Bangalore, India, which he disclosed in 2025. It also lists a liability of between $50,000 and $100,000 to a Dubai-based company, Majid Al Futtaim Tilal Al Ghaf Phase A LLC.
A subsidiary of the Emirati real estate conglomerate Majid Al Futtaim Holdings, the company was registered in 2018 to launch Tilal Al Ghaf, a gated community “nestled in the heart of new Dubai, with a stunning lagoon and white sandy beaches” that offers “luxury resort-style living with a fresh urban feeling,” according to its promotional page. The community is separated into distinct “neighbourhoods” that include different types of homes, from “duplex townhouses” and “top-tier twin villas” to “bespoke mansions,” including some that sit on a man-made island that provide private access to a lagoon the size of 18 football fields that runs throughout the community.

Majid Al Futtaim is not without controversy. In 2024, the company was accused of exploiting migrant workers in Saudi Arabia, according to Amnesty International, which alleged in a 2024 report that Majid Al Futtaim may have “directly caused human rights abuses – including treatment which could amount to forced labour – by managers reportedly coercing contracted staff to work unpaid overtime hours, and denying them rest days, under threat of being ‘fired.'”
While there are hurdles to foreigners owning property in the United Arab Emirates, they can purchase homes in government-designated areas, known as freehold areas, and Tilal Al Ghaf falls within one of those zones.
El-Sayed’s Dubai property is a reflection of the wealth the Democrat has accumulated since his unsuccessful gubernatorial run in 2018.
The tax returns he released during that campaign showed $237,000 in gross income. That’s nearly $450,000 less than the $686,000 in total income he brought in last year, according to his 2025 tax return, a portion of which El-Sayed released on July 15. That places him in the top 1 percent of Michigan earners, though El-Sayed has billed himself as a crusader against the oligarchy and a champion of the working class.
Some of the money stems from rental income El-Sayed and his wife, psychiatrist Sarah Jukaku, generated from their three rental properties. El-Sayed’s latest disclosure lists up to $50,000 in rental income from the Ann Arbor property, up to $15,000 in rental income from the India property, and up to $15,000 in rental income from the Dubai property.
El-Sayed’s campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The exact details of El-Sayed’s Dubai property—including its address, purchase price, and purchase date—are unclear, and El-Sayed is not required to disclose that information. The city of Dubai does not release real estate records containing buyers’ names to the public.
The liability listed on El-Sayed’s disclosure, however, is classified as a “Developer Credit Balance,” which could refer to a payment plan Majid Al Futtaim has advertised for its Tilal Al Ghaf properties in which the buyer of a new development pays 40 percent of the purchase price over a two-year period after the property is complete. The plans are interest-free, and El-Sayed’s disclosure lists an interest rate of 0 percent.

The disclosure also states that El-Sayed took on the debt in 2025. Majid Al Futtaim began selling Tilal Al Ghaf properties to the public in 2020, and the first 900 units in the community were completed in 2023, corporate records show. At least 913 units in the community have been rented, according to the Dubai real estate database PropertyIndex, which aggregates data from Dubai’s land department.
If the property listed on El-Sayed’s disclosure is indeed within Tilal Al Ghaf, he is likely not the only owner. The disclosure indicates that the asset is worth between $100,000 and $250,000. Smaller units within Tilal Al Ghaf’s least expensive townhouse neighborhood, “Elan,” typically sold for between $300,000 and $400,000 when they launched in 2020 and now sell for roughly double what they did then, according to PropertyIndex.
All Tilal Al Ghaf residents, regardless of neighborhood, have access to the community’s swanky amenities. They include “Lagoon Al Ghaf,” the “recreational lagoon” where residents can lounge on “spectacular white sandy beaches” and “indulge in swimming in crystal clear waters”; a park complete with “beautifully crafted green spaces and crystal-clear lakes”; and walking and cycling trails “winding throughout the entire Tilal Al Ghaf community.” The Royal Grammar School Guildford Dubai, an elite British day school, is also located within the community, as is a Montessori nursery and the Majid Al Futtaim Mosque. Tilal Al Ghaf’s Distrikt shopping mall includes a gourmet restaurant, a grocery store, a hair and beauty salon, and a pharmacy.

El-Sayed has lashed out at critics of his foreign properties, saying after Monday’s debate, “I wonder why they’re so focused on ‘foreign’ properties for somebody with a name like mine. Do you think it might fit with a well-worn trope?” He also said his wife’s family “inherited” the properties “and then put in their and all their kids’ names, and then sold,” though El-Sayed reported rental income from all three properties in his disclosure, which covered 2025 through July 2026, indicating that he and his wife still own the properties.
Chuck Ross contributed to this report.
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