Commentary Culture Investigations

“Woke Smithsonian,” editorial cartoon by Yogi Love for The American Spectator on Jul. 28, 2026.

A France without Islamic headscarves on its streets is one of the Rassemblement National’s promises to its ever-increasing electorate. But with polls indicating that its presidential candidate Marine Le Pen could well enter the Elysée Palace in May next year, the lady should perhaps be careful what she wishes for. Even her young running mate, Jordan Bardella, has warned her against maintaining a promise that, if fulfilled, risks inflaming the largely Islamized suburbs.
French media have reported on the alleged split with astonishment, as the Rassemblement National (RN), formerly known as the National Front, passes for an authoritarian party of the radical right where challenging the leader is frowned upon.
French law already prohibits Islamic headdresses in public schools and for civil servants at their places of work. But the RN wishes to get rid of them “in the public domain,” where until now only burkas are banned, as well as other Islamic garments totally covering a woman’s face.
To be sure, Mr. Bardella also is in favor of a much larger ban, according to the magazine L’Express, which broke the story of the alleged spat at the top of France’s largest party. But he prefers a softly-softly approach, removing the issue from its list of priorities. Ms. Le Pen, who made Bardella leader of the party in 2022, gave the idea short shrift, however, when he put it to her at a recent gathering of RN brass.
If recent polls are to be believed, 66 percent of the French are in favor of a cityscape free of the veil…
Scrapping her traditional promise would be “disastrous,” she is alleged to have told him and others brave enough to challenge the 59-year-old up for her fourth attempt at the Elysée. Her voters may have forgiven her for abandoning earlier promises meant to make her party electable, such as reintroducing the death penalty and the French franc, dropped when France introduced the euro in 1999. She no longer vows to take France out of the European Union, a promise considered a threat by elderly conservatives loath to see their country lose its leading role in the EU, and the generous subsidies that go with it. Ms. Le Pen’s initial enthusiasm for Brexit never caught on in her own country.
But scrapping the idea, in the short term, of French cities, towns and villages shorn of the headdresses, niqabs and hijabs viewed by many as symbols on France’s creeping Islamization would be considered one concession or treason, according to the left-leaning newspaper Le Monde, which dislikes her and gets ever more jittery at the thought of a “right-wing extremist” taking over from President Emmanuel Macron. (RELATED: Power, Islamism, and the Crisis of Western Rationality)
So Ms. Le Pen has stubbornly entered the election campaign with the promise that, in case of victory, she will not introduce a bill in Parliament, but instead put the proposed headscarf ban to the public in a referendum.
If recent polls are to be believed, 66 percent of the French are in favor of a cityscape free of the veil, feared and loathed in equal measure. Unsurprisingly, 94 percent of RN voters yearn for it. Add to that the whopping 34 percent of the electorate which intends to vote for her, with centre-right politician Edouard Philippe in second place with a paltry 19 percent, and the hard-right’s dream seems on the verge of coming true.
Well, not so fast. It is far from certain that France’s highest Court, the Cour Constitutionnelle, considers the ban, essentially a dress code for women of an ethnic and religious minority, worthy of being put to the nation. Le Monde gleefully predicts that there is little chance of the Court’s approval, which also goes for the far more important promise by Ms. Le Pen: changing the Constitution so that autochthonous French are automatically prioritized over aliens in matters like social housing, benefits, filling of vacancies for jobs, and other measures judged scandalous and racist by the left.
Jordan Bardella, too, thinks that in time the headscarf must disappear from places like Saint-Denis, the northern Paris suburb where he grew up. But, according to French media, he considers implementing the ban by force a recipe for disaster. Marine Le Pen, leader of her party’s caucus in Parliament, would immediately get embroiled in a struggle with France’s highest court. A ban could also be at odds with the concept of freedom of religion, enshrined in the Constitution, and provoke the ire of the Arab and Islamic world.
On the condition of anonymity, Mr. Bardella’s supporters at the top of the party also vent their fears that in many Islamized suburbs and neighborhoods a ban would be considered a stigmatization of Muslims at best, a declaration of war at worst.
The recently elected mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, the son of immigrants from Mali, has predicted an “uprising” in towns like his if Le Pen becomes president. Others have accused Mr. Bardella of wanting to “tear the headscarves” off women’s heads in his former home town, where he witnessed Islamization and drug-related criminality at his doorstep. Mr. Bagayoko, a Muslim, is a prominent member of the ultra-left wing party La France Insoumise (France Unbowed). Its presidential candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is the most popular politician in many places where veils dominate the cityscape. He is sure to call for “resistance” as police officers in, say, Saint-Denis, try to enforce the ban. And run a serious risk of being lynched. A “save the veil” campaign risks literally enflaming the whole country; what kind of an impression would that give the world of an officially secular France? (RELATED: France’s Mélenchon and the Politics of Replacement)
Has the matter indeed driven a wedge between Le Pen and 30-year-old Bardella apart? The other day, he looked uncharacteristically uncomfortable on a walkabout with her in a small town in the west of the country, where she smiled, chatted with admirers and posed for selfies; he remained aloof and seemed in a hurry to get it over with.
Not only French people on the right think the veil has no place in their country, at least not as massively as in places like Saint-Denis and parts of Marseille and other cities. But they deem the subject too hot to handle, fear being branded Islamophobic, or balk at the consequences of a ban well-nigh impossible to impose. So, as a somewhat cynical French saying goes: It is urgent to do nothing…  Ms. Le Pen begs to differ. In her view, tolerance of a symbol of the subjugation of women and the growing influence of Islamists, who have done France so much harm, has gone too far. The buck stops with her; she has promised the French. (RELATED: Drug Gangs, Child Gunmen and Antisemitic Abuse — Welcome to Marseille)
Indeed, the creeping Islamization is ever more apparent in places like Saint-Denis, whose cathedral hosts the graves of French kings and that of the Frankish leader Charles Martel, venerated for beating back the invading Muslim armies at the battle of Poitiers in 732 A.D. In his book The Strange Death of Europe, British author Douglas Murray describes his visit to the town and its cathedral: “Today a visitor … may well wonder whether Martel did indeed succeed. To wander the district of Saint-Denis today is to see a district more resembling North Africa than France. The market square outside the basilica is a souk more than a market. Stalls sell different styles of hijabs and radical groups hand out literature against the state.”
READ MORE from René ter Steege:
France’s Mélenchon and the Politics of Replacement
The Netherlands Teetering at the Immigration Precipice
Is This the End of the Road for Marine Le Pen?

Nobody wants to be stuck defending white people who use the N-word at black people. Since the 1970s, if not further back than that, to do so indicates poor breeding, poor manners, and poor character. We should all know better.
And in Rochester, Minnesota, last year, a woman named Shiloh Hendrix committed exactly that social transgression.

BREAKING: Shiloh Hendrix found guilty by a MN jury for “using the n-word” pic.twitter.com/CDdhhWvbuF
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 24, 2026

Yes, this is terrible. And why is it always the people with the arm full of tattoos?
Ms. Hendrix isn’t a particularly sympathetic defendant. On the video showing the incident for which she’s become infamous, she comes off as vulgar, unpleasant, and low-class. As such, she isn’t up for any civic prizes.
It’s the opposite end of the spectrum, actually.
Because last week, after a trial which — to be charitable — could have been better-run, Shiloh Hendrix was convicted on a misdemeanor count of disturbing the peace for having dropped an N-bomb on someone who was filming her.
And now we’ve got people talking about Shiloh Hendrix and having a debate over the use of the N-word and just how unacceptable it is.
Do we need this debate? Maybe a little more than we thought. And the vagaries of Minnesota’s judicial system and the people who populate it have foisted this on us. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: Minnesota Goes to Hell (Again))
The facts of the Hendrix case make for a bit more complicated story than that of the angry fishwife spouting invective at dark-skinned bystanders, which was originally pitched to the public by the corporate media.
The setting? A public playground, where Ms. Hendrix and her young child were enjoying an afternoon along with others in Rochester.
But a 9-year-old Somali immigrant boy, whom we’re told is autistic, was caught rummaging through Ms. Hendrix’ diaper bag for a portion of applesauce. It was alleged, and likely, though apparently not proven given the jury’s verdict, that she dropped an N-bomb on the autistic Somali kid as she chased him and recovered the stolen food.
This occasioned objections from the Somalis in the park, including one who turned his camera on Shiloh Hendrix and followed her around. It’s fair to say she didn’t handle that well, flipping him the bird and dropping N-bombs on him as well, as you can see on the video above.
She was the only one charged with disturbing the peace, in two counts — one for supposedly using the N-word on the applesauce thief, and the other for dropping it on the cameraman — and the jury convicted her in the second incident. The judge levied a 90-day suspended jail sentence, strict probation, a $1,000 fine, and 200 hours of community service; Hendrix’s attorney, the exceptionally colorful Brian Karalus, immediately vowed to appeal the case on what he said were multiple grounds, in one of the all-time greatest post-trial rants delivered outside of the courthouse…

Brian Karalus, defense attorney for Shiloh Hendrix, shares just some of his thoughts on the case. https://t.co/bT3o1HgQv8 pic.twitter.com/srh7N8l6gB
— Tom Hennessy (@Tomhennessey69) July 24, 2026

The GiveSendGo account for Hendrix’s legal defense has now run near $900,000, following word that she’s been doxxed and repeatedly harassed after the incident; that’s nearly triple the $330,000 the NAACP raised for the boy’s family.
Karolus’ post-trial explosion centered on the “victim” of the conduct Hendrix was found guilty of — namely, dropping N-bombs on the cameraman, a Somali named Sharmake Beyle Omar. As Karolus noted, Omar had set up his own GoFundMe, which would point toward a juicy little scam.
We don’t know this to be the case, but the basic contours aren’t hard to spot: send a kid out to rob the white lady, and either she does nothing, and you make off with a little bit of swag, or she fights back. And if she fights back, you escalate the confrontation, a camera running, until you can get her to do something to incriminate herself — which Shiloh Hendrix did. Once that happens, you create a media incident you can monetize. Or, if she turns out to have any money, you extort or blackmail her using the video you have.
And when you find out who Sharmake Beyle Omar is, you realize that the scam is as likely as not to be the case here.
Why?
Per The Federalist’s reporting, in January 2022, a 16-year-old girl who had run away from foster care alleged that Omar and another man, Mohamed Hussein Omer, picked her up, brought her to a trailer, held her there for days, and sexually assaulted her — charges included third-degree criminal sexual conduct and use of coercion. The Federalist reports the Olmsted County Attorney’s Office dropped these charges “in the interest of justice” in March 2025 — about a month before the playground incident.
And Omar has raised some $40,000 from his own GoFundMe.
And while it’s usually poor form to make assumptions about people based on their heritage, let’s just say that it’s not unknown for Minnesota Somalis to exhibit dishonesty in pursuit of monetary gain. (RELATED: Keeping Up With the Congresswoman)
None of that made it into the evidence in the Hendrix case. Karolus and the judge, a woman named Christa Daly, clashed repeatedly over that refusal.
Karolus also vigorously objected to Daly’s refusal to include a jury instruction involving the First Amendment; namely, that … people do have the right to use words to express themselves…
Karolus also vigorously objected to Daly’s refusal to include a jury instruction involving the First Amendment; namely, that whether you think the racial slur Hendrix used is extremely bad manners or not, people do have the right to use words to express themselves, and that has to be taken into consideration in a legal case which could involve their physical freedom.
The question here isn’t whether Shiloh Hendrix was justified or upstanding in her actions. Hot debates generally don’t come from blameless conduct. At minimum, she’s an idiot for having said that word in front of somebody who was filming her.
But had she called Sharmake Beyle Omar an “asshole” or a “sonofabitch” while flashing her middle finger at him, there isn’t a person in America who would believe that to be plausible criminal conduct under the concept of disturbing the peace. The “fighting words” exemption to the First Amendment is, after all, exceptionally narrow in what’s fairly settled law.
No, it’s the presence of that magic word, a word which only carries magic when uttered by people vaguely resembling Shiloh Hendrix. And that, according to leftists like Judge Christa Daly, must be punishable at law. On the video which started this fiasco, Omar is also using the word.
Equal protection under the law either means everybody gets to use that word without judicial consequences, or nobody does.
Equal protection under the law either means everybody gets to use that word without judicial consequences, or nobody does. As the latter is impossible to enforce, it’s obviously the former which constitutes the correct outcome.
Which is absolutely not an endorsement of its use. We’ll be better off as a society if everyone agrees to leave off with the racial slurs.
And in this case, Sharmake Beyle Omar appears to be something a whole lot worse than the N-word.
It would be great if we don’t hear anything more about Shiloh Hendrix and her community relations exploits in Rochester, Minnesota. But it’s an excellent bet that this case will continue up the appellate process, and it might well impact our understanding of free speech in America.
Which doesn’t have as much to do with Shiloh Hendrix’s trashy playground behavior as it does with Christa Daly’s trashy performance as a judge.
READ MORE from Scott McKay:
Oprah: The High Priestess of American Cultural Malaise
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Morning Joe 7-28-26

Joe Scarborough donned his Democrat-strategist sombrero on Tuesday’s Morning Joe and pleaded with his party of choice to reject DSA lunacy now, or suffer the consequences in the fall.Scarborough opened by cueing up Shannon Bream’s exchange on Fox News Sunday with DSA national co-chair Megan Romer in which she enthusiastically embraced these items in the DSA platform:  Abolishing the Senate.Replacing the presidency and the Supreme Court.Abolishing ICE.Abolishing borders and giving amnesty to anyone currently in the US illegally.Defunding the Pentagon.Abolishing prisons, at least in large part.Government or public ownership of most large corporations.Although items like abolishing borders and defunding the Pentagon might stand out, let’s focus on the plan for the government to seize most large corporations. That’s not democratic socialism. Government ownership of the means of production is the essence of Marxism. So don’t tell us the democratic socialists don’t have a communist tint — it’s right there in their platform.Scarborough then reached for a very tired liberal trope — Maya Angelou’s line about believing people when they show you who they are. He summarized the Fox quiz: “All questions answered with complete conviction, and all those responses completely disqualifying for a party that likes to tell people they’re really just about health care and tax reform.” 

Joe Scarborough dons his strategist sombrero and pleads with Democrats: reject DSA lunacy now, or be punished with it in November! pic.twitter.com/eEuSRxpsjO— Mark Finkelstein (@markfinkelstein) July 28, 2026

Scarborough praised progressives for bringing all the energy to the party, but insisted Democrats can still put the issue behind them — but only if they act now:If you’re for what she said, and she’s the head of your party, so you can’t dismiss it. Are you for what the head of your party said? This is a very simple question, and the reason I’m talking about it today is because Democrats can put it behind them today, or we can still be talking about this in early November. … Don’t brush this off. Take care of it in July, get rid of the issue in July, or you’re still going to be dealing with it through late October and early November. Don’t be a Democrat, don’t do that. Take care of it now. Don’t make the same mistakes you made in 2024. Nip this one in the bud.For a host who spent yesterday screaming for DNC Chair Ken Martin’s head over the party’s empty bank account, today’s performance was pure strategist mode: identify the vulnerability, demand the party confront it before Republicans turn it into a cudgel, and hope the base listens.Will the Democrats heed Scarborough’s warning? Or, come fall, will we be relaxing in our Barcaloungers, munching the proverbial popcorn, as we watch Dem candidates and leaders squirm in explaining away the communists in their midst?Here’s the transcript.MS NOWMorning Joe7/28/266:04 am EDTJOE SCARBOROUGH: We got a ton to talk, talk to him about, but I just got to start with something that was, all over, social media and the news yesterday. And before we got all the big events in Washington, across the world, I wanted to show everybody a notable clip from one of the Sunday shows. A national co-chair for the Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA, was on Fox News Sunday, and here was one of her exchanges with host Shannon Bream.SHANNON BREAM: Okay, so we’re gonna put up on the screen a few of the things that are part of your platform, and I wanna ask you, just give me sort of a true or false on these. Abolish the Senate.MEGAN ROMER: True.BREAM: Okay. Replace the presidency and Supreme Court as we now know them.ROMER: Yep.BREAM: Abolish ICE.ROMER: Absolutely.BREAM: Abolish borders and give amnesty to anyone currently in the US ROMER: As a long term plan, yep.BREAM: Defund the PentagonROMER: Absolutely.BREAM: Abolish prisons, at least in large part.ROMER: Yeah, again, that as part of a long term program, yeah.BREAM: Okay, so no prisons. Government or public ownership of most large corporations.ROMER: Yeah, absolutely.SCARBOROUGH: Democrats, Democrats, Democrats. MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Oh my God.JOE SCARBOROUGH: Let those with ears hear. Maya Angelou said, “When somebody shows you who they are, believe ’em the first time.” People know themselves much better than you do, and well, what’s true of people is also true of political parties. And as you just saw, the national co-chair of the DSA went on television and showed us exactly who she is and what her party believes. Abolish the US Senate, the presidency as we know it, the Supreme Court as we know it? True. Abolish ICE? Absolutely. Open the borders? Defund the Pentagon? Empty the prisons? Have the government seize private companies? Absolutely, absolutely, yeah, absolutely! All questions answered with complete conviction, and all those responses completely disqualifying for a party that likes to tell people they’re really just about health care and tax reform.. . . JONATHAN LEMIRE: And then Mika, the other part of this, of course, is that even if there actually aren’t many Democrats who believe this, it’s a gift to Republicans. Talking like that allows Republicans to label the entire party, the GOP, like, on their heels right now, and this is a, a life preserver, they can hang onto. And then turn it into a cudgel.MIKA: Exactly. Exactly. They’ll use it.SCARBOROUGH: But, but, but here, here’s the thing though, again, For those candidates out there that identified themselves as DSA, this is the head of their party. Right? So this isn’t just about Democratic energy. Yes, I, I think Democratic energy is great. I’ve always said, it’s the progressives not the centrists, it’s the progressives who knock on doors, it’s the progressives who do phone banks, it’s the progressives that get out and march, it’s the progressives that provide the energy to the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party’s big enough to have progressives, to have moderates, to have members of the DSA party. But those members of the DSA party have to tell us, are you for affordable health care, are you for this, are you for what she said? ‘Cause if you’re for what she said, and she’s the head of your party, so you can’t dismiss it. Are you for what the head of your party said? This is a very simple question, and the reason I’m talking about it today is because Democrats can put it behind them today, or we can still be talking about this in early November. Did you hear what I just said? Don’t brush this off. Take care of it in July, get rid of the issue in July, or you’re still going to be dealing with it through late October and early November. Don’t be a Democrat, don’t do that. Take care of it now. Don’t make the same mistakes you made in 2024. Nip this one in the bud.

Atlantic Americans and Europeans tend to have very different ideas about physical suffering and sacrifice.

“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.
READ MORE from Douglas Carswell:
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Y’all Street Is Eating Wall Street’s Lunch
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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The New Terror Network
China, Chokepoints, Blockades, and the Mahanian Revival

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.
READ MORE from Gary Anderson:
Our Generals Are Failing Us
Let’s Get it Right This Time
The Washington Post Occasionally Gets It Right
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.
READ MORE from Itxu Díaz:
Forest Bathing for Idiots
The New Reconquista: World Champions — and Something More
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