Long War

WHEN FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTEMPT:

Conservative Nativists Live Under the Cosmopolitanism They Claim To Despise: Revealed preferences help us understand the value of diversity. (Zaid Jilani, Jul 16, 2026, The American Saga)

In economics, there is a concept called revealed preferences. Consumers will tell you what they really like by their actual behavior. What they want is what they buy.

The pundits I discussed above all argue as if they feel that America will be doomed when it becomes majority minority. “Import the third world, become the third world,” has become their slogan de jure. If we have a country full of people from Mexican, Indian, or Haitian ancestral origin, we will transform into those countries and bring all their sociological and economic problems.

But through their revealed preferences, we can see that they may not be so confident in this thesis after all.

Walsh, for instance, lives in the thriving metropolis of Nashville, Tennessee. According to the local chamber of commerce, “over 35% of Nashville’s net in-migration from 2024 to 2025 was due to international migration”; around a third of downtown businesses are owned by minorities. While Walsh has been ranting about Somalis in Minneapolis, he would probably enjoy this Somali-owned tea shop in his city (I visited the last time I drove up). In a moment of clarity, Walsh admitted he loves Indian food.

Hemingway and Davis, meanwhile, are denizens of Metro Washington, D.C. A quarter of Northern Virginia’s residents are foreign-born. Kelly lives in and broadcasts from Houston, which was ranked by one measure as America’s fifth-most diverse city and second-most diverse large city (the top three most diverse cities were all in Maryland, also bordering D.C.). Webbon is in Austin, a very liberal and diverse city. Nick Fuentes, the charismatic racist streamer, lives in predominantly Hispanic suburb of Chicago. Brandon Gill, one of the most vociferous nativists in Congress who wants to stop even legal immigration, is married to an Indian American woman.

Speaking of marriage, it’s ironic that the nativists are led by President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Trump is married to an immigrant and the grandson of one himself. Vance is not only married to an Indian American woman, but he goes out of his way in his memoir to praise her family for its strong bonds.

Recall that while they generally cite which party supported Israel most, much of the Neocon turn to the right was driven by urban crime and racial quotas at elite institutions.

DISCONTENT IS MONSTROUS:

The Good Life According to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (Chandler Collins, July 13, 2026, Center for Faith & Culture)

The human quest for happiness and virtue is one of the most important themes of Shelley’s Gothic novel. Upon reflecting on his origin and purpose, the creature recognizes that he “was formed for peaceful happiness.” He says, “During my youthful days discontent never visited my mind, and if I was ever overcome by ennui, the sight of what is beautiful in nature or the study of what is excellent and sublime in the productions of man could always interest my heart and communicate elasticity to my spirit.” If you ask anyone if they desire to be happy, they will likely respond with a resounding “yes.” The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas pointed out that “man naturally desires happiness,” but what exactly does it mean to be happy? Shelley does not provide a clear definition of happiness in “Frankenstein,” but she does associate happiness with peace, contentment, and the sense of delight.

NAZISM:

When the Firewall Falls: What was once the world’s most welcoming country for refugees has become one of the strictest — an about face that could set the example for other democracies. (Kaiser Bauch, Jul 10, 2026, LEO)

For a long time, the political reaction to growing migration-related tensions looked like the archetypal European cordon sanitaire tale. In Sweden, the object of this cordon sanitaire — the term for parties deemed by the mainstream too extremist to be considered as part of a political coalition — was the Sweden Democrats.

Founded in 1988, the party’s roots were genuinely far-right, as it had connections with neo-Nazi circles. For a long time it was completely ignored by the rest of the Swedish political class, which was also not that hard to do, since in the first two decades of its existence the party did not garner strong electoral results.

The whole subject of immigration was treated as taboo, with those raising its negatives being predictably accused of racism. Furthermore, it being avoided was justified as not giving the Sweden Democrats “ammo” for potential electoral gains.

Yet, as is almost a rule in such cases, it had the opposite effect. The party came to be seen as one unafraid to tell it like it is, while the elites were seen as sweeping the issue under the rug.

In 2010, the Sweden Democrats got enough votes to enter parliament, and in 2018 they scored 17.5%, becoming the third-largest party. As the mainstream parties, including the Social Democrats, were forced to acknowledge the failures of Sweden’s immigration policy, the criticism of the Sweden Democrats — who had also systematically worked to break with their extremist roots —for pointing those failures out no longer made much sense.

In 2019, Christian Democrat leader Ebba Busch announced her willingness to negotiate with the SD, as did Moderate leader Ulf Kristersson. The culmination came with the Tidö Agreement after the 2022 election. Four leaders of parties on the right conferred at Tidö Castle and signed a 62-page contract that established the current government and a fundamental shift in crime and migration policy.

Warehousing natives was disastrous too.

WAIT, I CAN’T HATE MY NEIGHBOR?:

J. D. Vance’s Contemptuous Conversion Memoir (Jessica Winter, June 19, 2026, The New Yorker)

The invocation of “explicitly Christian arguments” is one of several instances in “Communion” when Vance’s approach to political campaigning and governance can seem borderline theocratic. One of his everyday challenges as Vice-President is to figure out “how to take an accepted moral principle and apply it in the real world as a Christian leader.” This conflation of public service with puffed-chest religious crusading is especially jarring when he writes, at length, about his 2025 visit to the Vatican, shortly before the death of Pope Francis, and his tense interactions with officials there, mainly over U.S. immigration policy. “Here I was, the most senior Catholic in the United States government,” Vance recalls, affronted, “and the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes.” He goes on, “I’m one Christian statesman who would welcome an institutional faith less focused on platitudes and more focused on reality.”

It’s hard to imagine a reality-based conversation about the intersection of Catholic ethics and immigration policy with a man who campaigned for the Vice-Presidency by spreading calumnies about Haitian immigrants eating the pet cats and dogs of their neighbors in Ohio. Or who, after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a mother of three during the agency’s siege of Minneapolis, condemned the victim as a “deranged leftist” whose death was a “tragedy of her own making.” Or whose career has been largely bankrolled by the co-founder of Palantir, which has a thirty-million-dollar contract with ICE to provide A.I. surveillance and data-mining technology for hunting and deporting immigrants. Or who uses Elon Musk, the tech trillionaire and former Department of Government Efficiency overseer whose cuts to public-health agencies and infrastructure are projected to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, as an exemplar of how “immigration can bring benefits to the host country in its own right. Just think of Elon Musk and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that trace directly to his decision to come to the United States.”

TOO EXTREME FOR FELLOW EXTREMISTS:

Frustrated by Courts, Trump Weighed Suspending a Constitutional Right (Maggie HabermanJonathan Swan, 6/15/26, NY Times)

The man who outlined his concerns in the memo, Mr. Scharf, was no resistance figure. A trim, balding, Harvard-trained lawyer who had run for office in Missouri, he had bemoaned John McCain as too moderate for the 2008 Republican nomination, and believed Mr. Trump had been vindictively prosecuted after his 2020 election loss.

He had helped develop the Trump team’s legal arguments behind the successful effort to get the Mar-a-Lago classified documents indictment thrown out, as well as the arguments behind the presidential immunity case that prevailed at the Supreme Court. He had embraced the most contentious elements of Mr. Trump’s agenda, but was quickly coming up against the limit of what the Constitution, in his reading, could be made to bear.

The Constitution, Mr. Scharf wrote in his memo to Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, permits suspension of habeas corpus only in cases of rebellion or invasion. Courts have almost uniformly held that only Congress can do it.

He added: “Even where Congress has explicitly suspended habeas corpus rights, the Supreme Court has held that some alternative process must be provided to defendants, with procedural safeguards akin to a habeas corpus action.

“It prevents, in effect, governmental actors from detaining, imprisoning or executing individuals arbitrarily,” Mr. Scharf wrote.

Always bet on the Deep State.

MAGA IS LEFT:

What the World Cup tells us about free trade (Ben Ramanauskas, 11 June 2026, CapX)

The negotiations and enactment of NAFTA were mired in controversy and were bitterly opposed by mainly those on the left of politics as politicians, NGOs, and trade unions raised concerns about its potential impact on the environment and labour standards. NAFTA was controversial and consequential, but it was also a remarkable achievement.

The most immediate and unambiguous success of NAFTA was the sheer scale of trade it unlocked. Given that it was a Free Trade Agreement, this sounds obvious, but regional trade among the three countries grew from approximately $290 billion in 1993 to more than $1.1 trillion by 2016. This represents a near-fourfold increase that outpaced US trade growth with the rest of the world. By 2019, total trilateral trade had reached $1.23 trillion, with the United States exporting $549bn in goods to Canada and Mexico combined, making them America’s top two export markets.