November 19, 2025

Now, on to the news…

“The political Right is fracturing,” writes Christopher F. Rufo. On foreign policy, anti-interventionists spar with internationalists; on the domestic scene, establishment conservatives contend with provocateurs like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens. Meantime, President Trump has largely remained above the fray.

While this strategy has been helpful for the president and his administration, it has created a power vacuum on the right. Conservative institutions need a leader who can weave together the movement’s disparate strands and police its boundaries to exclude the politics of racialism and conspiracism. That person, argues Rufo, is Vice President J. D. Vance, who has both a “deep understanding of the MAGA base” and is “fluent in the language of conservative intellectual institutions.”

Vance can follow a useful historical example in undertaking this task. In the 1960s, Richard Nixon dealt with similar fractures on the right, sparring with the archconservative John Birch Society and eventually building a winning electoral coalition while marginalizing fringe elements.

“If Vance can stake out popular positions, maintain strategic distance from unpopular figures, and bring together the Right’s legitimate factions, he will have laid the foundation for a strong campaign,” writes Rufo.

Tucker Carlson’s new five-part video series, The 9/11 Files, mostly rehashes conspiracy theories and makes vague, unsubstantiated claims. Carlson doesn’t interview firsthand witnesses or reveal any physical evidence. He instead raises broad allegations rather than pointing to concrete descriptions of the conspiracies he’s alleging.

Carlson is “not trying to win over the undecided,” James B. Meigs writes. “He’s preaching to an audience predisposed to see the U.S., Israel—and, really, the West in general—as the ineluctable perpetrators of injustice in the world.”

Read more here.

Many Jewish New Yorkers consider Zohran Mamdani’s election a threat to their safety. The mayor-elect has refused clearly to condemn the phrase “Globalize the Intifada”—a slogan that effectively calls for anti-Semitic violence—and claimed that Israel is responsible for police brutality in New York.

Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League exist, in part, to combat anti-Semitism. But Liel Leibovitz argues that these organizations failed at an urgent task: stopping the rise of a mayoral candidate like Mamdani. In fact, Liebovitz claims, the ADL “contributed to Mamdani’s election” by embracing “critical race theory and other left-wing frameworks that consider Jews privileged aggressors.”

Read his article, which traces the ADL’s ideological transformation, here.

“The Hippocratic Oath should be renamed the Hypocritic Oath. The profession has sold its soul for money and Progressive virtue signaling.”

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AuldGuy, commenting on transgender health care

Photo credit: Anna Moneymaker / Staff / Getty Images News via Getty Images