Karl Marx is usually viewed as the ultimate materialist, describing everything in brute physical and economic terms, while deriding intellectual, artistic, and philosophical and religious values as mere rationalizations for the economic status quo.

But we’ve already gotten hints that there is a kind of Romanticism lurking behind this materialist exterior. I’m referring to Romanticism in the philosophical sense: a longing to return to some imagined pure state of emotional freedom and communion with nature, unspoiled by the intellectual overgrowth of too much civilization. The unacknowledged influence of Romanticism on Marx is a major theme of Leszek Kołakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism.

Taking the Polish dissident philosopher as a guide, we have already puzzled over how it is that an ideology that claim to speak on behalf of industrial workers gave power to a bunch of intellectuals (and then, following the logic of absolute power, liquidated the intellectuals for the power-lust of a single ruler). But the biggest reason why Marxism was and remains more an ideology of the intellectuals than the workers is that its actual concerns are not material or economic, but spiritual and intellectual.

Marx’s big con was to describe his ideology as a form of materialism. Yet underneath all the talk about economics, underneath his insistence that the cultural “superstructure” of life is just determined by the brute materialist “base” of the means of production, Marx’s fundamental complaint against capitalism is a spiritual one.

I figured this out by reading Kołakowski’s explanation of what Marx meant by “alienation.”

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“Alienation” is a term Marxists have thrown around for a long time, but I’ve never really understood what it means. And there’s good reason for that, because what it means is weird.

As I observed before, the subversive thing Kołakowski did in this book was to go back into the deep sources of Marxism and into Marx’s early writings, many of which had lapsed into obscurity and had relatively recently been dug up and brought back into print in the decades before he wrote Main Currents of Marxism. As I noted last time, the study of these early works was not exactly encouraged, at least not on his side of the Iron Curtain, because the Soviet regime had engaged in a major effort to dumb down Marxism and reduce it to a state-approved dogma.

It’s in some of these early works that Kołakowski finds what Marx meant by alienation, which illuminates his later writings in Capital.1 What he finds is that the root of Marx’s philosophy is a rejection of the division of labor as such.

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with updates on an ongoing campaign of war crimes, the deportation state versus the Constitution, the MAGA kakistocracy, the fraud behind the $1.776 billion “slush fund,” and Ukraine’s emerging dominance on the battlefield.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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We Literally Hanged People at Nuremberg for This

The President Has Murdered 200 People Instead of Arresting Them. We Won’t Forget.

More than 200 people have now been killed in Trump’s campaign against “drug boats” since it began in early September….

If you don’t already, I want you to understand that this is not a close legal question, and it never was. I’ve been warning that this exact thing was coming for years because I sat in one of the rooms while the idea was first floated. The first time we showed Donald Trump the map of maritime drug routes into America in 2018, on a trip to Key West, his aides started chattering about ways to go “full Sicario” (the 2015 film about the CIA launching a cartel war) literally on the flight home. Stephen Miller asked whether armed US drones could simply fire on boats in international waters, and whether the people aboard were protected by the Constitution.

The answer back was simple. It didn’t require any legal consultation. It would be illegal, we told him. You cannot kill unarmed civilians because a president has decided to call them terrorists. Stephen Miller dropped it. Yet eight years later, he is reportedly one of the architects of the policy he once denied ever discussing….

Any person involved in this on the inside probably has their Google alerts turned on to notify them of each shred of news about this program. To see if Congress was opening a broader inquiry. To see if people are still talking about whether it’s “legal,” hoping the country will finally forget. Which is why there’s a real chance that someone tied to the drug-boat murders will stumble across this article.

So I want to address the final portion of this piece to them—the people participating in Trump’s deadly strikes.

Maybe you signed one of the pieces of paper that made this possible. Perhaps you stayed in the room when you should’ve walked out. Trust me, I’ve been there before. Or maybe you drafted a talking point you knew was a lie, or relayed an order you knew was unlawful. Right now, you’re telling yourself the comforting thing that everyone in your position tells themselves. They’ll forget about me. I’m too far down the list. I’ll keep my head down, and this will pass.

I’m going to break the hard news to you. We won’t forget.

The Borderline Constitution

The Borderline Constitution

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In the last installment of this series, I wrote about the weird philosophical idea which helped guarantee that a Marxist ideology centered around the “working class” of industrial factory-floor wrench-turners would end up being run by a clique of middle-class intellectual misfits who appointed themselves to administer The Revolution on behalf of the proletariat.

But the joke was on these intellectuals, because they didn’t really get the power. They were, in fact, the next to be crushed in their own machine.

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In Main Currents of Marxism, Leszek Kołakowski describes the pattern.

After the resistance of all social classes—proletariat, peasantry, and intelligentsia—had been overcome, after all forms of social life not ordained by the state had been crushed out of existence, and the opposition within the party had been destroyed, it was time to subdue the last element that might—though it did not in practice—threaten the completeness of totalitarian rule under a single despot: namely the party itself, the instrument which had been used to stifle and destroy every other rival force in the community. The destruction of the party was achieved during the years 1935-9, and established a new record in the conflict between the Soviet regime and its own subjects.

The idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was supposed to mean that the proletariat as a whole would just dictate production, directly, somehow. But of course there is no “somehow” for doing this, so a putatively representative institution, the party, had to be built up and given that dictatorial power. But there could be internal divisions within the party, disagreements about how to proceed, and it was easy to portray one side or the other of those disagreements as an attempt to thwart the rule of the proletariat and serve as a vehicle for bourgeois reactionary forces—all the more so since any sensible response to communist economic policies is probably going to looks more like capitalism.

Kolakowski describes the process by which dissent within the party and the jostling of opposing party “fractions” was suppressed. But what this implies, if the party is going to follow only one policy with no debate or dissent, is that ultimately one person is going to be dictating everything. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” inevitably becomes just the dictatorship of one guy.

Hence the internal purge of the party to ensure loyalty to that one man above all—including above Marxism itself.

The passage above is from the beginning of Kołakowski’s chapter on Stalin’s Great Purge, and he provides the most interesting and convincing perspective on the purge that I have ever read.

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with items on the official abandonment of the most apocalyptic global warming projections, the permanent “vibecession,” the raid on the US Treasury, vindictive prosecutions and prosecutorial misconduct, the debacle in Iran, updates on the AI bubble—and an example of the stubborn persistence of progress.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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“A Saner Climate Debate”

RIP8.5

Last month, UN scientists announced publicly what climate researchers have known for years: the most extreme climate change pathway is now so implausible, it really shouldn’t be part of our climate debate. The culprit—known as the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5, or RCP8.5 to habitués—suffered a peculiarly nasty case of context collapse: a tool developed by a bunch of nerds was set loose on the world only to be wildly misinterpreted, generating mass confusion and buckets of activist dollars on the way to thoroughly disfiguring our climate debate.

Now the UN is mothballing it. Good riddance.

The “8.5” in RCP8.5 refers to the amount of added solar energy the atmosphere will trap by 2100—specifically, 8.5 watts per square meter. That’s very high—likely to bring about a shocking 5 degrees of global warming above pre-industrial levels.

RCP8.5 was the kind of climate scenario lurking behind Greta Thunberg’s accusation, in her September 2019 speech at the UN Climate Action Summit, that “we are in the beginning of a mass extinction.” It’s the kind of pathway young people in England were thinking about when they decided they needed to launch “Extinction Rebellion.” It’s been a fundraising bonanza for climate activist groups from Adelaide to Zurich, the main player in every single alarmist climate critique you’ve read in the last 15 years….

Perhaps belatedly recognizing how badly off the rails the discourse has gone, the scientists preparing the IPCC’s next assessment report have decided to pull the plug on RCP8.5. The new “high emissions” scenario to be used in climate modeling going forward is considerably less pessimistic than RCP8.5, less pessimistic even than RCP6, the second-worst case scenario in the old IPCC reports.

It’s a significant step towards a saner climate debate.

The Mind Is Its Own Place, and in Itself Can Make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

The “Vibecession” Is Over. The “Permacession” Is Here.

I have been covering the “vibecession” for a few years now, and I thought I mostly understood it. Headline economic statistics are failing to capture the fragility and strain that consumers are experiencing…. But seeing the latest consumer-sentiment figures and comparing them with hard economic data, I found that my usual explanations fell short.

Americans are expressing some of the deepest, broadest, and stubbornest economic pessimism ever recorded….

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with items on how Russia is slowly losing its war—there’s been a steady stream of news about this that hasn’t been featured much in American media—plus some new reporting on the bizarrely optimistic plans behind the botched Iran war, how we’re not going to like the alternatives to Pax Americana, a vindication of the Voting Rights Act, the most spectacularly corrupt act of this or any other administration, and a rundown of the numbers on the most bubbly IPO of the AI bubble.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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The Decline and Fall of the Russian Empire

After Syzran Strike, Only Two Major Russian Oil Refineries Remain Untouched by Ukrainian Drones—Media

Since the start of the full-scale war, Ukraine has attacked all major oil refineries in the European part of Russia except for two facilities beyond the Urals. In total, at least 158 strikes on Russian oil refineries have been recorded….

According to analysts, Ukraine has attacked 24 out of 33 Russian oil refineries with a capacity of more than 1 million tons of oil per year. The year 2025 became the most intense in terms of the number of strikes — 88 attacks were recorded then. In 2026, Ukraine has already carried out 32 strikes on Russian oil refineries, which is almost equal to the figure for the whole of 2024.

Reuters previously reported that due to drone attacks, almost all large oil refineries in central Russia either stopped or reduced production. According to the agency, processing volumes at 16 plants decreased by about 700,000 barrels per day compared to last year.

Has Putin Met His Marianas Moment?

The catastrophe for the Japanese was not just strategic. As the Japanese leadership very well knew, the fall of the Marianas destroyed the entire fantasy that they had been selling repeatedly to the Japanese people. Since Pearl Harbor they had described the Pacific War to the Japanese public as a series of smashing victories against the Americans, claiming to have inflicted so many losses on US forces that the Japanese home islands were safe and secure….

The loss of the Marianas, however, could not be bluffed away.

The Marianas brought most of Japan, including the capital Tokyo, in range of America’s newest bomber, the Very Long Range (VLR) B-29 Superfortress….

What happened over the last weekend was really notable in this war, and has shown to the Russian people, if they really were unaware, that their government has been BS-ing them about the course of the war. If you have not been paying attention, since the full-scale invasion, much like the Japanese of 1941-1944, the Putin regime has been protecting Moscow and encasing it in lies. They have done everything possible to assure Muscovites that the war was going to end up in decisive victory while insulating them as much as possible from economic harm. They even have made sure that there was no major troop raising efforts from Moscow and St Petersburg, focussing on more distant Russian imperial provinces to supply their cannon fodder.

The idea that Moscow can be protected has now been shown to be a myth. The attacks of the last few days demonstrate that for now, no matter how much air defense the Russians concentrate around the capital, the Ukrainians can find a way through. Moreover, as Ukrainian production of long range strike ramps up, unless the Russians can devise a counter, these attacks will get worse.

The Empire Putin Tried to Rebuild Is Coming Apart

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For now, I can’t write directly in this newsletter about electoral politics—but I can write about political philosophy and political theory, and in ways that tend to shine a light on what is going on in our contemporary politics.

There is a strain of American conservatism that I hadn’t previously been aware of, which has come to the forefront in recent years. I would say it is a somewhat obscure theory, except that it was very influential in its own time and has become influential again, so it might be more accurate to say it was submerged—it never went away, it just wasn’t out in the open.

It was brought back to my attention a few days ago when a colleague sent me an excerpt from Whittaker Chambers’s notorious negative review of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in National Review back in 1957. This might seem somewhat obscure, but it was a significant skirmish in the jostling of different ideological influences on the American right.

As we will see, it has a surprising relevance to today—and it’s probably not what you’re expecting.

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Here is the excerpt from Chambers.

The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure, with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit…. Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world’s atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In an age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers, however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.

One Big Brother is, of course, a socializing elite (as we know, several cut-rate brands are on the shelves). Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind). When she calls “productive achievement” man’s “noblest activity,” she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political bureau…. [I]n reality,… by contrast with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship…. Of course, Miss Rand nowhere calls for a dictatorship. I take her to be calling for an aristocracy of talents. We cannot labor here why, in the modern world, the pre-conditions for aristocracy, an organic growth, no longer exist, so that the impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship.

When I first encountered this review (about thirty years after it was written), I was mostly struck by how little Chambers understood about Ayn Rand’s novel—from getting plot points and character names wrong to missing major philosophical themes, such her rather pointed rejection of philosophical materialism. The review seems to be based on a rather hasty skimming of the novel, at most, rather than an actual attempt to read it, and his real complaint seems to be that Rand puts “man at the center of a godless world.” In other words, the whole thing is just “Atheist Bad.”

But in this passage, there is a theme I missed before. He creates a bizarre argument that Rand, as staunch an advocate of individual liberty as you could find, is somehow calling for dictatorship; the title of the review is “Big Sister Is Watching You.” The Orwell reference is ironic, since Chambers is the one basically arguing here that freedom is slavery.

But this passage indicates how he gets to that strange conclusion.

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with a heads-up on a building agricultural crisis and follow-ups on the latest news in Ukraine and Iran, and on the national gerrymandering spree, immigration, the conservatives movement’s adulation of Donald Trump, the state of the conservative media—and the grim impact of “MAHA” health quackery.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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Farmageddon

Steep Fertilizer and Fuel Prices Could Squeeze US Farmers for Months to Come, Economists Warn

The price of key agricultural necessities such as diesel and nitrogen fertilizer has soared since the Strait of Hormuz, a vital trade passageway, has largely been choked off amid the war in Iran.

The price of urea, a major nitrogen-based fertilizer, shot up to nearly $700 per ton in late April from $455 per ton on Feb. 27, the day before the war in Iran broke out. On-highway diesel prices clocked around $5.35 a gallon in late April, a hike from the $3.81 a gallon reported the week the war began….

A recent survey from the American Farm Bureau Federation found that about 70 percent of farmers nationwide who responded report they are unable to afford all the fertilizer they need.

In the Midwest, farmers are better prepared for the planting season than in other regions. The Farm Bureau survey found that 67 percent of farmers reported booking fertilizer in advance. In the South, the most affected region, only 19 percent of farmers reported pre-booking fertilizer….

Parum also warned that reducing fertilizer use may not be feasible for everyone and could lead to lower yields.

“We have pretty good storage right now across corn and soybeans, so it might not be that big of a deal, but depending on how long this conflict goes on, if we see really high reductions of yields, it could be a pretty big shock to global supply,” Parum said.

The Last Days of Butter Ridge

The Watsons had been dairy farming since before the Civil War—one of dozens of Watson farms that had spread across northern Pennsylvania over the generations, and then, like dairy farms everywhere, gradually disappeared. The number of dairy farms in the United States had fallen to fewer than 25,000 from a peak of nearly 700,000 in the 1970s. Milk prices had barely risen in half a century, held down by overproduction and a handful of large corporations that dominated the dairy market. The costs of running a family farm had skyrocketed by as much as 500 percent.

Brad had supported Donald Trump in 2024 in part because Trump promised to change all that by becoming “the most pro-farmer president you’ve ever had.” Instead, new tariffs had cut into Brad’s potential export market and the emerging war in Iran had sent gas and fertilizer prices surging by as much as 70 percent. He was losing thousands of dollars each month and falling behind on his feed bill, until he made the call he’d been dreading his whole career. He dialed up an auction house to arrange the Watson family’s final dairy sale last month….

Brad had believed that Trump might help them, and he appreciated the frustration in Trump’s speeches about America’s decline. Brian was more cynical. He’d seen generations of politicians riding tractors and pandering to rural America as more farmers went under….

Farm bankruptcies across the country had risen 55 percent in 2024, 46 percent in 2025, and another 70 percent so far in 2026 as nearly a third of the world’s fertilizer exports were impacted by conflicts in the Strait of Hormuz.

So How Are the Strongmen’s Wars Going?

Trump’s Abrupt U-Turn on a Plan to Reopen the Strait of Hormuz Came After Backlash from Allies

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You may recall that when I switched over the focus of this newsletter to accommodate my run for office, I started a series of articles sharing some of what I learned from reading Main Currents of Marxism, by Leszek Kołakowski. As I explained, it’s not exactly a page-turner, and this huge three-volume work helped me get to sleep at the end of a busy day for about a year. But it offers some fascinating insights into Marxism, and what went wrong with it.

This has taken longer to get back to than I expected. I now understand why politics tends to—how shall I put this?—it tends to select against deep thinkers. It’s a job that doesn’t leave as much time as I would like for just sitting down and doing prolonged thinking. For precisely that reason, I’ve decided to be extra stubborn about making sure I still do it. So even though I probably ought to be planning some campaign events right now, I’m going to take a half a day to return to that series for another installment. I also want to clear the decks of this project so that by July 4, I can switch over to my next planned series on what I learned from reading Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution—a good topic for the 250th anniversary of that revolution.

But first, back to the ideological origins of a revolution that had less happy consequences. And The Revolution is precisely where we left off.

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I wrote last time about a central debate among late-19th-Century socialists. On the one side were the revolutionaries who insisted the only answer was to sweep away capitalism entirely and create a totally new and different system whose structure they could only guess at, except that they knew it would be perfect. (This is pretty much literally how they put it. It’s hard to see what could possibly go wrong.) On the other side were the reformist “social democrats” who wanted, not to overthrow capitalism, but to introduce welfare-state programs and regulations intended to benefit factory workers and the poor. I noted that this second group, who laid the basis for most Western European governments today, achieved far better results.

Part of the reason The Revolution achieved such terrible results is that in addition to creating a totally dysfunctional economic system, The Revolution also created a brutal and tyrannical political system.

Those two results were closely connected. A system in which the government controls the entire economy provides a powerful enforcement mechanism for tyranny. As Leon Trotsky famously noted, after losing out to Stalin in a power struggle, “In a country where the sole employer is the state, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.”

By the same token, the guys who are most adept at climbing the greasy pole of insider politics in an oppressive regime do not have the skills to run large, complex industrial operations. Even if they did, the structure of the regime prevents them from doing it. Kołakowski notes that Lenin and Stalin kept complaining about the lack of initiative from lower-level officials, who would do nothing without explicit orders from above—yet if someone did make decisions on his own initiative, he could well find himself shipped off to the gulag as a “saboteur” the first time anything went wrong. No wonder everything got bogged down. The Bolsheviks believed in rule by fear, but fear is a paralytic.

From his own perspective some decades later, writing in the years after the death of Stalin, one of Kołakowski’s main concerns was the extent to which Marx’s theories could be blamed for this result. How did Marx’s own ideology explicitly plant the seeds for the dictatorship created by Lenin and consolidated by Stalin?

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, focusing on something that has gotten a bit lost in the background of all the other chaos: the war in Ukraine, where Ukraine seems to be slowly gaining the upper hand by becoming the world’s drone superpower. Before that, there’s a wry note about King Charles in America, and after it, some coverage of the recent Supreme Court arguments on birthright citizenship, an overview of the “vibes-based” SpacEx IPO, and a quick good riddance to Paul Ehrlich.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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Oh, the Irony

King Charles Urges Checks on Executive Power as Trump Hosts Royal Visit

During his first state visit to the United States as monarch, Charles stayed scrupulously nonpartisan over the course of a 28-minute address to a joint meeting of Congress. But he promoted what he described as centuries of common interests, including in areas where President Donald Trump has sought a sharp break from U.S. precedent in his drive to reshape American society and governance.

The U.S. and Britain should defend Ukraine, Charles said. An independent judiciary should deliver impartial justice. Diverse societies make countries strong. Societies must protect the natural world. And the U.S. and Europe should “ignore the clarion calls to become ever more inward-looking.”

Charles is officially barred from engaging in politics and mentioned no political leader in his speech. The vision of the American role in the world that he outlined, however, stood in stark contrast to that of Trump, who has declared that migration weakens societies, used executive orders to bypass Congress, attacked judges who rule against him, questioned the scientific consensus on climate change and declared his desire to wind down support for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion. The speech came on the day the Justice Department brought a new indictment against former FBI director James B. Comey, a longtime Trump target.

As the king spoke, the White House posted an image of Trump and Charles on X, calling it “TWO KINGS,” with a crown emoji….

“Executive power is subject to checks and balances,” Charles said, spurring bipartisan cheers and whistles from his audience at a time when the Republican-led Congress has greatly diminished its power largely by acquiescing to Trump’s demands.

The Global Drone Superpower

Ukraine Forces Russians to Surrender Using Only Robots

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, focusing on two main issues. The first is last week’s election defeat of Victor Orbán, who went much farther than Donald Trump in using authoritarian means to entrench himself in power for 16 years—but he still could not prevent a vast wave of rejection by the people of Hungary. The second issue is the Supreme Court’s growing use of a highly dubious “shadow docket” in which it makes often highly partisan decisions with no explanations. In between are a few notes about the Iran war; the corruption, mismanagement, and inebriation of Trump’s imperial court; and the actual effect his policies have had on immigration.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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“Never Again a Country Without Consequences”

How Viktor Orbán’s Hungary Eroded the Rule of Law and Free Markets

Hungary is a small country, but as Viktor Orbán has pointed out: “There is one thing that makes our country an important place: the fact that Hungary is an incubator, where experiments are being conducted for the conservative politics of the future.”…

The sociologist Ferenc Pataki talks about Orbán’s project as “a neo-collectivist, neo-communist experiment,” and similarly, the Fidesz oligarch Simicska has said that the party decided to pick up “the commies’ methods.” But while Fidesz is opposed to free markets and has used nationalization and state intervention to control the economy, it does not have an egalitarian ideology, and the party does not think it is necessary to place ownership in the hands of the state itself, as long as it is in the hands of friends.

Others have called it a fascist system, referring to how the government controls the economy and society through many different institutions and turns to nationalism and xenophobia to rally support. However, while Fidesz’s rhetoric is often aggressive, it refrains from the overt kinds of racist and anti-Semitic legislation that characterize fascist states.

These descriptions also ignore the ideological flexibility of Fidesz’s pursuit of power. Regarding the party, Orbán was onto something when he said: “It is not an organization based on one single coherent system of principles or an ideology—such an organization is incapable of expanding beyond a certain point.” Instead, he described the party as “reality without ideology.” He has been adept at transforming the party’s ideas whenever that helps it cling to power, saying that he has no need for his thoughts “to be forced into the cage of any ideology that can be summarized in a book.”

Bálint Magyar, a sociologist and former education minister, thinks that Orban’s Hungary has become another form of state altogether, a “mafia state.”…

It is not a case of “state capture” in which oligarchs draw the state under their control. Rather, it is a case of “society capture,” in which the government uses procurement, subsidies, regulations, and taxes to replace market actors with its own oligarchs who are offered protection and privileges as long as they stay loyal. If they are not, or cease to be useful, they are taken down and replaced. The primary concern is not principles and ideology but the consolidation of power and wealth for the ruling clique

This is just an excerpt from a much longer and more detailed report that is worth reading.

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, following up on Donald Trump’s very dramatic backdown tonight in which he went from threatening vast war crimes against Iran to conceding all of America’s strategic objectives. Also, there’s some better news from Eastern Europe, more updates on the cruelty of the mass deportation state, one item which seems to require an apology in advance (you’ll know it when you see it), news on the ridiculous architecture of Trump’s ridiculous ballroom—and the usual antidote: more news from Artemis II on the far side of the Moon.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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Strategic Defeat, Completed

Trump Finds Offramp After a Day of Apocalyptic Threats

Mr. Trump had been under increasing pressure to find a way out of a confrontation after setting an 8 p.m. Eastern deadline for the strait to open, and after declaring on social media early Tuesday that if he is defied, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” It was a classic example of Mr. Trump’s chaotic, high-pressure negotiating style, where he creates a crisis and then uses his leverage to strike a deal.

In this case Mr. Trump appeared desperate for a way to escape his own threats and rhetoric, and to engineer a Pakistani proposal that he would then sign on to….

The temporary cease-fire does nothing to address the fundamental issues that led to the outbreak of the war on Feb. 28: Iran’s refusal to give up its stockpile of nuclear fuel; American and Israeli demands that it limit the size and range of its missile arsenal; and Iranian demands that it retain the right to enrich uranium and, more recently, for war reparations….

[I]t also raises the possibility that the war will end—or at least come to an uneasy truce—without Mr. Trump having accomplished many of the goals he laid out.

Tehran’s ‘Toll Booth’ System Is Now Controlling Hormuz Traffic

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, mostly covering the various ways in which the US has failed to achieve any of its strategic goals in Donald Trump’s war in Iran—but as an antidote to that, there is the event depicted above: the launch of Artemis II, the next stage of America’s return to the Moon.

A reminder on this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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Short Attention Span Theater

Inside Trump’s Daily Video Montage Briefing on the Iran War

Each day since the start of the war in Iran, US military officials compile a video update for President Donald Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, three current U.S. officials and a former US official said.

The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up.”

The highlight reel of US Central Command bombing Iranian equipment and military sites isn’t the only briefing Trump gets about the war. He’s also updated through conversations with top military and intelligence advisers, foreign leaders, and news reports, the officials said.

But the video briefing is fueling concerns among some of Trump’s allies that he may not be receiving—or absorbing—the complete picture of the war, now in its fourth week, two of the current officials and the former official said.

They said the videos are also driving Trump’s increasing frustration with news coverage of the war. Trump has pointed to the success depicted in the daily videos to privately question why his administration can’t better influence the public narrative, asking aides why the news media doesn’t emphasize what he’s seeing, one of the current US officials and the former US official said.

Trump Had No Plan B for Iran

Three weeks into Donald Trump’s war against Iran, the president has still refused to define victory other than to say the war will soon be over. From the moment he launched hostilities, he offered many rationales for the war, choosing among them like he’s picking hors d’oeuvres from a buffet at one of his golf resorts: It’s about nuclear weapons, it’s about terrorism, it’s about ballistic missiles. As the media, and the world, press him for explanations, he continues, as Pegah Banihashemi and Paul Poast wrote in The Atlantic on Wednesday, to “careen” between demanding “unconditional surrender” from Tehran and signaling “that he might abruptly declare victory and leave.”

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I come across an occasional statement that our society runs on “enlightened self-interest”—I’ve noted it before in a conversation with Tom Nichols, and also in reading Stephen Pinker, and they’re not the only ones. But as I noted in response to Pinker, “It is an approach to morality that is widely accepted in practice, often acknowledged in passing, as Pinker does here, but is rarely taken with the seriousness it deserves or developed to its logical conclusions.”

This is important, because it is undoubtedly true that our society does run on some conception of “enlightened self-interest.” We recognize that it is natural for people to want to be prosperous and happy, to be able to find a nice place to live, to find work that is enjoyable and pays the bills, to be able to go out and enjoy all the good things that are available to us, particularly in wealthy, developed societies. So we’re not asking people to live in Altruria, an imagined altruist utopia in which no one looks to his own well-being and everyone works only for the good of others. And we’re definitely trying to avoid living in the actual, real-world versions of this ideal, in which the individual has no rights and exists only to serve the state.

But we rarely take much time to define what “enlightened self-interest” means, what are its rules, how it serves our self-interest, and what it is that “enlightens” it.

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Enlightened Self-Interest

At various times, this idea has gotten a little more attention.

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The latest weekly round-up of links, covering: our mercurial Iran strategy (or lack thereof); global democratic backsliding; an agenda so conservative it’s bringing back everything bad about the 1950s; some enlightening articles about immigration and assimilation; hope for a pro-growth liberal agenda; and re-animating dead brains, but in a good way.

This format is new, so below, the main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles. And please follow through on the link to go the original sources, because each of them is worth reading.

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The Iran War: What Is It Good For?

Trump Threats, US Troop Build-Up Raise Specter of Battle for Hormuz

Reopening the strait—a critical conduit for global energy supplies—has emerged as perhaps the paramount objective of a war that security officials now believe is unlikely to achieve goals that briefly seemed possible at the outset of the US-Israeli military operation, including overthrowing Iran’s theocratic regime and putting a nuclear weapon permanently out of Tehran’s reach.…

At the same time, Trump’s unusual decision to lift oil sanctions on Iran, potentially giving his enemy access to a windfall of revenue, has prompted a handful of Republicans to raise concerns about the war’s direction and merit….

US strikes have pounded Iranian positions along the Gulf waterway, destroying missile launch sites, suspected mine-laying vessels and small watercraft capable of racing toward vulnerable tankers—but that has done little to ease the near-shutdown of tanker traffic.

Israeli officials said that a perceived US reluctance to send its own ships into the strait and Trump’s efforts to outsource that mission to European allies or China underscore its danger and complexity. “The fact that they are slow going to Hormuz shows that it’s more complicated than expected,” a former senior Israeli security official said.

Trump Postpones Deadline for Strikes on Iran’s Energy Infrastructure

Mr. Trump said he was postponing any American attacks on Iranian power plants by five days while the talks take place. However, at least publicly, Iran appeared to reject any progress in ending the US-Israeli war on the country, now in its fourth week.

American, Israeli, and Iranian officials have frequently given clashing prognoses throughout the war as they seek to advance their competing agendas and motives.

Mr. Trump himself has often issued contradictory pronouncements about his plans for the next steps in the conflict, sometimes on the same day. On Saturday, Mr. Trump had threatened to bomb Iran’s power plants after 48 hours unless Iran agreed to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a critical oil shipping route in the Persian Gulf.

Iran Floats Hormuz Transit Tolls as Persian Gulf States Warn of Military Response

Iran is considering charging transit fees on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, a lawmaker said on Thursday, as officials in Tehran stepped up rhetoric over the strategic waterway after this week’s attacks on energy sites in the Persian Gulf….

Mohammad Mokhber said one of the most important opportunities created by the war was the possibility of reshaping Iran’s role in the Strait of Hormuz. “After the imposed war, by defining a new regime for the Strait of Hormuz, Iran will move from being under sanctions to a powerful position in the region and the world,” Mokhber said.

Who Has the Cards Now?

Washington Should Jump on Ukraine’s Outreach to the Middle East

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While I’m campaigning, I have to restrict my comments in this newsletter to philosophy and history and other topics, rather than to current political events.

But occasionally, a seemingly obscure philosophical issue pops right up in the newspapers in a way that invites immediate commentary.

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Occasionally you come across an intellectual eating a chicken sandwich and “ruminating darkly about the existential quandaries of semi-literate farm animals.” Or you encounter in the wild a direct connection between Plato’s theory of concepts and Modern Monetary Theory, the crackpot economics to which we partly owe the burst of post-pandemic inflation. And of course, one of the most abstruse areas in philosophy, the philosophy of mind, is directly relevant to our evaluation of the potential and limits of artificial intelligence.

In the past few weeks, I came across another example, a weird lamentation in the Washington Post, of all places, that “Your Salted Caramel Mocha Latte Is Destroying Society.”

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The latest weekly round-up of links, covering: accountability everywhere but here, Trump suddenly needing help on Iran from people he treated like dirt (and getting treated like dirt by people he helped), Trump’s dictator’s clubhouse, a strangely conditional meaning for “unconditional surrender,” a collapse in trust but also a mysterious collapse in violence, and: the public is sick of our twice-annual time change.

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Why Can’t We Do This, Too?

Bolsonaro to Start Serving 27-Year Sentence Over Coup Plot

After the nation’s top court rejected an initial appeal by Mr. Bolsonaro’s lawyers challenging his sentence, the court ruled that he will begin serving his sentence at a federal police facility in Brasília, the capital.

The court’s ruling brought to a close a multiyear effort to hold Mr. Bolsonaro accountable for his role in a far-reaching plot to overturn the results of the 2022 election and remain in power following his loss at the polls.

The case became a severe test of Brazil’s young democracy after President Trump tried to help his political ally by imposing punishing tariffs and sanctions in an attempt to pressure Brazil into dropping the case. But Brazilian authorities did not cave and Mr. Trump appears to have moved on.

South Korea’s Former President Yoon Suk Yeol Jailed for Life for Leading Insurrection

A South Korean court has sentenced the former president Yoon Suk Yeol to life imprisonment with labour over his failed martial law declaration in December 2024, finding him guilty of leading an insurrection and making him the first elected head of state in the country’s democratic era to receive the maximum custodial sentence.

The Seoul central district court found that Yoon’s declaration of martial law on 3 December 2024 constituted insurrection, carried out with the intent to disrupt the constitutional order.

Judge Jee Kui-youn said the purpose was “to send troops to the national assembly to blockade the assembly hall and arrest key figures, including the assembly speaker and party leaders, thereby preventing lawmakers from gathering to deliberate or vote.”…

In a historical digression, the judge traced the history of insurrection law and cited the 1649 execution of England’s Charles I, who led troops into parliament, to establish that even heads of state can commit insurrection by attacking the legislature.

Ex-Prince Andrew “Basically Under House Arrest” After Royal Downfall

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor may soon find his world limited to a quiet corner of the Sandringham estate. According to palace insiders, the disgraced royal is expected to move into a heavily secured farmhouse on the property.

Sources say the setup reflects the monarchy’s latest effort to keep the disgraced former prince away from the spotlight while his legal troubles continue to play out.

The relocation follows Andrew’s February 19 arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office. Authorities are now examining claims that he may have shared sensitive information with financier Jeffrey Epstein while serving as Britain’s trade envoy. He was taken into custody and released a few hours later. However, the investigation is still ongoing….

One source put it bluntly. “Effectively, Andrew is now under house arrest and will remain so for the rest of his life, as, in exchange, his brother will fund his comfortable lifestyle.”

The Epstein Scandal Is Taking Down Europe’s Political Class. In the US, They’re Getting a Pass.

Across the Atlantic, heads are rolling over the Jeffrey Epstein revelations.

In Norway, one prominent diplomat has already been suspended and a police investigation has been opened into a former prime minister. In the U.K., the former ambassador to the U.S. has been fired; on Tuesday, he resigned from the House of Lords. Police are reviewing reports he shared market-sensitive information with Epstein….

But as Europe’s political class moves to clean up its mess and address its shame concerning ties with the convicted sex offender, it’s inadvertently highlighting something else—the comparative lack of accountability in the U.S.

No prominent politicians have taken a fall. Consequences have been limited. Wagons have been circled around the most prominent political figures whose names have surfaced in the legal document dumps.

The Definition of Chutzpah

Trump Calls on Kurds to Aid US Effort in Iran, Offers Support

The Trump administration, bracing for more US casualties and considering whether to put troops on the ground in Iran, has begun reaching out to Tehran’s domestic opposition as potential allies to foment an uprising against the regime.

In calls this week to Kurdish minority leaders in Iran and neighboring Iraq, President Donald Trump offered “extensive US aircover” and other backing for anti-regime Iranian Kurds to take over portions of western Iran, according to multiple people familiar with the effort….

The Kurds, in Iran numbering about 10 million across five western provinces, are also among the largest minorities in Iraq, Syria and parts of Turkey. In each of those countries, they have fought politically and sometimes physically—often with U.S. support when it coincided with American objectives—against systematic marginalization and for the right to self-determination.

But they have just as often felt abandoned by Washington. Most recently, the U.S. lifted its support from the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish group that had been America’s long-standing partner in countering the Islamic State in Syria as the Trump administration moved to partner instead with the new regime in Damascus.

US Asked Ukraine for Help Fighting Iranian Drones, Zelensky Says

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There is a great deal of work left to do to turn the completed draft of The Prophet of Causation into a published book, including sorting through all the typos you all found, looking at feedback from several reviewers, and deciding how to publish it. In the meantime, I wanted to share a snippet from some correspondence I had with Neera Badhwar, an academic philosopher who co-wrote a generally accurate overview of Ayn Rand’s ideas for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

She gave me permission to reproduce her original note, which prompted some responses that I thought my readers might find interesting.

Approaching various aspects of Rand’s philosophy through the idea of causation seems really interesting. However, I think that Rand’s central idea that the ultimate goal, and source, of all our values, and the foundation of ethics, is survival is mistaken. If you interpret survival thinly, then it’s just false. If you interpret it thickly as happiness in a moral life, then it’s plausible as a goal, but it can’t be the foundation of ethics without circularity.

I discuss this in the latest version of my and Roderick’s Stanford piece on Rand, which I’m attaching if you’re interested. (It has still to appear in the SEP, as the referee sent us additional comments.)

Just two comments on two statements you make:

“The basis of morality is “take what you want.” We are goal-directed beings who assert the needs of our survival and go after them.”

Without context, this actually sounds terrible! Even worse than Trump’s policy.

“Morality, in this view, is a body of factual knowledge about the causal connections between our choices and their effect on human survival—looked at from the perspective of our need to make those choices.”

I suppose you mean that it’s a body of hypothetical imperatives, but I don’t think [hypothetical imperatives] are entirely factual. They depend on what we want or value, and knowing what we ought to value is not a purely factual issue.

I found all of this very interesting, and it led to some interesting new formulations. Here’s my response (with a few minor additions I came up with while preparing it for publication here).

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The latest weekly round-up of links, covering: the evil of the Iranian regime, mixed feelings about our vague and directionless policy on Iran, presidential and congressional war powers, the battle for who counts the mid-term ballots, China’s military purge, and what comes after immigration.

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Context for Iran

How Iran Crushed a Citizen Uprising With Lethal Force

On Friday, Jan. 9, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered the Supreme National Security Council, the body tasked with safeguarding the country, to crush the protests by any means necessary, according to two Iranian officials briefed on the ayatollah’s directive. Security forces were deployed with orders to shoot to kill and to show no mercy, the officials said. The death toll surged….

“This is not merely a violent protest crackdown,” said Raha Bahreini, a lawyer and an Iran researcher at Amnesty International. “It is a state-orchestrated massacre.”

“‘Pools of Blood, Hundreds of Gunshots’: I Am a Surgeon in Iran—This Is the Horror I’ve Witnessed in the Crackdown”

There was no pause. No moment to step back and assess. You moved from one patient to the next, from one operating room to another. I have worked through earthquakes and seen mass casualties after major accidents. I have never experienced anything like this. Even in disasters, you might receive 20 or 30 injured patients over several hours. That night, and the night after, it was hundreds: gunshot wounds; severe trauma. One after another.

The exhaustion was total. Physical exhaustion, yes, but more than that, mental. As surgeons, our job is to save lives. That night we were saving people who had been shot by their own government. That contradiction stays with you. You keep operating because you have no choice, because people are still arriving, because stopping is not an option; but part of you is breaking.

While in the operating room, I heard weapons that do not belong on city streets. I heard the sound of DShK [Soviet designed] machine guns. Later, I saw them mounted on the backs of pickup trucks moving through the city. I am describing what I heard and what I saw, not what caused specific injuries, but the atmosphere was unmistakable. This was not policing. This was something else.

As the night went on, it became impossible to even think about counting the dead. There was no way to collect accurate numbers. The volume of casualties far exceeded the capacity of the hospitals, the staff and the infrastructure.

The Monkey’s Paw in Tehran

Initial Israeli Strikes Targeted Some 30 Key Iranian Leaders; 30 Bombs Said Dropped on Khamenei’s Compound

Israel’s initial strikes on Iran this morning reportedly targeted some 30 key Iranian regime leaders and military chiefs, headed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Israeli officials have been widely quoted asserting that Khamenei was likely killed—in what is believed to be the first time Israel has directly sought to kill a serving head of a sovereign state — but there has been no official Israeli comment on this. Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi has said Khamenei is alive “as far as I know.”

An unsourced Channel 12 news report says Israel, having coordinated with the US, dropped some 30 bombs on Khamenei’s compound, and that Khamenei was underground at the location, but not in one of the two deepest bunkers that only US bombs could have penetrated. This report also claims Khamenei’s military secretary was killed, and unspecified members of Khamenei’s family. Satellite imagery has shown the compound largely destroyed.

Tehran after Khamenei’s Death: Rallies of Mourning But Also Dancing in the Streets

“It’s a mixed feeling. On the one hand, yes, we’re happy about the decapitation strikes and Khamenei’s death. But the surviving officials and commanders aren’t just going to raise their hands and give up,” said Hassan, a barber in Tehran who, like many interviewed, did not want to be named to avoid reprisals….

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The latest weekly round-up of links, covering: Trumps’ directionless Iran policy, the unwavering direction of his lawless tariff policy, how mass deportations have redefined the immigration issue, the vanishing Republican majority in Congress, economic “slopulism,” a few stories on medical innovation, and a quality old man rant on making the kids these days do the work.

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“‘Do What Thou Wilt’ Shall Be the Whole of the Law,” But in a Bad Way

As Trump Weighs Iran Strikes, He Declines to Make Clear Case for Why, or Why Now

Though Mr. Trump is largely fixated on the nuclear weapons program, at various moments he and his aides have cited a range of other rationales for military action: protecting the protesters that Iranian forces killed by the thousands last month, wiping out the arsenal of missiles that Iran can use to strike Israel, and ending Tehran’s support for Hamas and Hezbollah.

Then there is the question of whether military force, the hammer Mr. Trump reaches for so quickly, can even accomplish those ends. Most of Iran’s near-bomb-grade uranium is already buried from the last strike, in June. And it is not clear how airstrikes would immediately aid protesters around the country or persuade Iran to stop funding terror.

Mr. Trump has never consistently described his goals, and when he talks about them it is usually in a haze of brief, offhand comments. The president has given no speeches preparing the American public for a strike on a country of about 90 million people, and sought no approval from Congress….

And when pressed on Iran, Mr. Trump regularly deflects questions about whether regime change is his true goal, leaving unclear what kind of end-state he seeks.

Trump Has Other Means to Make Tariff Mischief

The administration’s rapid pivot to Section 122 reflects necessity, not legal strength. It rests on redefining a “balance-of-payments crisis” beyond recognition, disregarding its own recent legal positions, and assuming that courts will decline to examine economic realities too closely. That is a fragile foundation for a policy affecting hundreds of billions of dollars in commerce and millions of consumers. And it’s possible he will get away with it.

Ultimately, this episode underscores a constitutional reality that no statutory workaround can erase: trade policy belongs to Congress. And unless Congress takes it back, it will not be able to put a definitive end to his tariff mischief.

Temporary emergency tools were never meant to substitute for democratic accountability. If tariffs are to exist, they must be enacted through legislation, debated openly, and owned politically by the representatives who approve them. Until then, each new Plan B will be an effort to outrun the limits of the law.

Trump’s Challenge to Free Market Capitalism

Ultimately, many economists say, it is a mistake to try to understand Mr. Trump’s actions through the lens of state capitalism, industrial policy or other clearly defined economic philosophy. Mr. Trump’s approach to policymaking is transactional and personal, not ideological….

But it may prove harder to persuade a future president to cede the power over the private sector that Mr. Trump has worked to build.

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A weekly round-up of links on immigration, the lawlessness of mass deportations, officially sanctioned tolerance of racism, state-level constitutionalism, the Trump economy, the dysfunction of our royal court, and the AI bubble.

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The Big Immigration Lie

Immigrant and Native Consumption of Means-Tested Welfare and Entitlement Benefits in 2023

Differences in welfare consumption by immigration status largely reflect life-cycle effects, as immigrants arrive younger, age into entitlement programs later, and often naturalize only after many years in the United States. Overall, immigrants consumed about 24 percent less welfare and entitlement benefits than native-born Americans. All immigrants were 14.8 percent of the US population and consumed just 10.4 percent of all estimated benefits in 2023; noncitizens were 7.5 percent of the population and consumed 3.2 percent of all benefits; and naturalized immigrants were 7.2 percent of the population and consumed 8 percent of all benefits. Native-born Americans consumed more than $3 trillion in means-tested welfare and entitlement benefits in 2023, compared with $401.6 billion consumed by all immigrants, $125.2 billion consumed by noncitizens, and $310.1 billion consumed by naturalized immigrants. If native-born Americans had consumed the same per capita dollar amount of means-tested welfare and entitlement programs as all immigrants, the total expenditures on these programs would have been about $715 billion less in 2023.

Immigrants Use Less Welfare at Every Income Level

An astute reader of our recent Cato policy brief on immigrant welfare use suggested stratifying our data by income since many welfare programs are intended to help the poor. Doing so would be a return to how we used to report immigrant welfare use in the olden days. We do that below and find that immigrants consistently report lower welfare use for nearly every program, regardless of poverty or income….

Whatever one’s views on immigration policy, the claim that immigrants systematically consume more welfare than native-born Americans isn’t supported in the data.

Less Than 14% of Those Arrested by ICE in Trump’s 1st Year Back in Office Had Violent Criminal Records, Document Shows

For example, while Mr. Trump and his aides often talk about immigration officials targeting murderers, rapists and gangsters, the internal data indicate that less than 2% of those arrested by ICE over the past year had homicide or sexual assault charges or convictions. Another 2% of those taken into ICE custody were accused of being gang members.

Nearly 40% of all of those arrested by ICE in Mr. Trump’s first year back in office did not have any criminal record at all, and were only accused of civil immigration offenses, such as living in the U.S. illegally or overstaying their permission to be in the country, the DHS document shows. Those alleged violations of U.S. immigration law are typically adjudicated by Justice Department immigration judges in civil—not criminal—proceedings.

“Absolute Hell”

“Absolute Hell”: Irishman with Valid US Work Permit Held by Ice Since September

Originally from Glenmore, Co Kilkenny, Seamus Culleton is married to a US citizen and owns a plastering business in the Boston area. He was arrested on September 9th, 2025, and has been in an Ice detention facility in Texas for nearly five months, despite having no criminal record, “not even a parking ticket”. In a phone interview from the facility, he said conditions there are “like a concentration camp, absolute hell”.

Culleton said he was carrying a Massachusetts driving license and a valid work permit issued by the US government when he was pulled over by Ice on the way home from work in September.

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