Dear Weekend Jolter,
It’s been a rough week on the right. Virginia, my state, showed that you can fantasize about killing your political enemies and wish death upon their children, and still count on Northern Virginia and Richmond Democrats to vote straight ticket to get you into office. Despite hopes of an upset, Jack Ciattarelli got trounced in the New Jersey gubernatorial race, as did Winsome Earle-Sears in Virginia (likely dragging down Jason Miyares in the process). And a meltdown at the Heritage Foundation continues apace — along with a hopefully salutary, public debate over antisemitism in the ranks of the right, a debate, it should be noted, that the left is not really having despite the obvious need for one.
But on the bright side for Republican strategists, if not for his hapless future constituents and the overall trajectory of the country’s political culture, Zohran Mamdani has just been gifted to them as their new campaign foil.
AOC, scooch over.
As Jeff Blehar writes, “Mamdani is going to run New York for the next four years, and residents are about to find out how well an avowed communist can manage the most complicated city on planet Earth.” Our guess is not very well. John Puri writes here about Mamdani’s many zany policies and why they threaten to cause more hardship should they come into effect.
If Tuesday’s results are any gauge, Republicans will need all the help they can get going into 2026. “If it is a harbinger of what the electorate will look like in next year’s midterms, it’s not too late for the GOP to panic,” Noah Rothman writes. But Democrats have their own set of problems: They are about to be up against a full-fledged effort to make Mamdani the face of their movement in competitive House races, a charge that will be difficult to parry.
Party leaders share at least some of the blame for his elevation to political stardom, even as strategists voice unease about the vulnerability he creates. Governor Kathy Hochul endorsed Mamdani. So did House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (though his Senate counterpart, Chuck Schumer, did not). Notably, Barack Obama called the future mayor last weekend and offered to be a “sounding board.” According to the New York Times, “Obama said that he was invested in Mr. Mamdani’s success beyond the election on Tuesday.”
To be fair, “If you like your bodega, you can keep your bodega” probably had a nice, familiar ring for the former president.
Noah warns that Democratic leaders will struggle from this day forward to put distance between themselves and the socialist mayor of New York City:
Every American will look to New York City to evaluate how its experiment with socialism is going. Whatever the results of that experiment, the Republican Party will frustrate Democratic efforts to maintain some plausible distance from the highest-profile mayor in America. . . .
He will almost certainly shelve the demure posture he’s adopted for the benefit of apprehensive Democrats in Washington. He will want to play the colossus bestriding left-wing politics, and the GOP will help their favorite foil secure that status.
The reality, as noted in last weekend’s newsletter, is that Mamdani and NYC’s politics are not representative of even New York State, let alone America. His victory was aided by an unholy confluence of flawed opponents, though he might have won anyway. Those asterisks won’t stop his comrades from attempting to use his victory to amass power in the party, something mainstream Democrats would be wise to resist, more forcefully. And they won’t stop Republicans from lumping them together every chance they get.
(By the way, we are still running our fall webathon on the site, so if you can contribute something to the cause, please do. It takes considerable resources to keep the gears of our operation turning, and as much as we wish that ad revenue and subscription fees would cover it all, the reality is we must turn to our generous readers to help narrow that gap. I just got back from the Buckley Prize Dinner in Florida, where I had the chance to connect with some of our subscribers and donors who keep us humming, which was a great time and great conversation. As always, to all of you — thank you.)
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Beware the After-Pelosi Era: Pelosi Was Bad. What Follows Could Be Worse
On Election Day: A Big Democratic Night
On the tariff case: Trump’s Taxing Supreme Court Argument
On the late vice president: Dick Cheney, R.I.P.
ARTICLES
Mark Antonio Wright: ‘Affordability’ Will Be Everything in 2026
Jim Geraghty: Gee, How Did Latino Americans Become So Alienated from the GOP?
Noah Rothman: The Revolutionary Mood in America Is Getting Worse
Audrey Fahlberg: Speaker Mike Johnson Warns Tucker Carlson, Conservatives Against Amplifying Antisemitism
Audrey Fahlberg: Helena City Commission Candidate Wished Cancer on Senator Sheehy in Threatening Voicemail: ‘I Hope You Die’
Christian Schneider: The Nationalization of Elections Is Anti-American
Abigail Anthony: How Princeton University Hijacked a Free-Speech Event
Robert P. George: Why I Reject ‘No Enemies to the Right’
Brittany Bernstein: British Women’s Mag Devotes ‘Women of the Year’ Cover to Nine Men
Stanley Kurtz: We Need a New Renaissance
Maureen Ferguson & Asif Mahmood: Nigerian Girls Are Being Kidnapped
John Hood: The Virtue of Liberty: A Response to the NatCons
Jack Crowe: Dick Cheney, One of the Most Influential Vice Presidents in U.S. History, Dies at 84
Karl Rove: Dick Cheney’s American Life
CAPITAL MATTERS
“Why would a ‘progressive’ governor of one of America’s poorest states decide to allocate considerable resources to people at the highest income levels with a new child-care subsidy?” Paul Gessing explores the answer: New Mexico’s ‘Free’ Child Care an Attempt to Cover for Past Failures
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White reviews an Ibsen rewrite: Hedda for Dummies
I don’t know about you, but I had no idea a Ringling Museum existed until Brian Allen told us about it. Read about the “Big Top aesthetic”: A Visit to Sarasota’s Ringling Museum
READ THESE EXCERPTS BEFORE THEY BECOME LAST WEEK’S NEWS
Mark Antonio Wright offers some postelection advice:
Donald Trump and the Republican Party won the 2024 general election on three issues: (1) the general discontent with the Biden-era economy, inflation, and high interest rates; (2) the sense that Democrats were too Woke and hard left on immigration, trans issues, and DEI; (3) and the widespread belief that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and their allies in the Democratic Party had ignored and obfuscated Biden’s obvious frailties and then swapped a senile old man at the last minute for an incompetent apparatchik.
It was, of course, a recipe for success in November 2024 — but if you look closely, the 2024 election should have cautioned Republicans about over-reading their mandate.
The result in the House was razor thin: Republicans actually lost a seat on net, after winning the popular vote by just 2.6 percent. They began the 119th Congress in January 2025 with a mere five-seat majority.
Trump swept all seven swing states and the popular vote, as he constantly reminds us. That is a significant accomplishment. And it was, in my view, the most remarkable political comeback in American history.
But Trump won with just a plurality of the total vote (49.8 percent) and with a margin of just 1.5 points over Harris. Trump’s 2024 win wasn’t anything like George H. W. Bush’s 7.8-point win in 1988. It wasn’t even Barack Obama’s 7.2-point win in 2008.
Over the prism of a dozen years, one could very easily read the results of the last three presidential elections as a function of the American people firing the incumbent party and turning to the opposition party in a desperate attempt to get the economy moving again. . . .
After his victory in the New York City mayoral race, there will be an avalanche of attention on Zohran Mamdani and his Bernie Sanders-inflected “democratic socialism.” But are young Americans truly turning to socialism? Will we see AOC romp to the Democratic nomination in three years? Perhaps. There is certainly a rising popularity and energy around those kinds of politics.
But the better way to understand what happened in New York (and elsewhere in purple and even red states) is that Americans — whether they consider themselves Democratic, Republican, or independent — are once again frustrated by the state of the economy, and they’re taking it out on incumbents. Americans feel poorer — because inflation in the post-pandemic era remains stubbornly high (something like 50 percent higher than the 2 percent target set by the Fed as an acceptable standard) while their incomes have not kept pace.
What’s more, Donald Trump — via his “Liberation Day” tariffs — has taken political ownership of this economy. . . . The issue of affordability — high prices, high interest rates, inflation, sluggish wage growth — will be everything next year.
Abigail Anthony tells the inside story of a Princeton “free speech” event that the university’s president is now touting:
Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber recently published a book with an undeniably contrarian title, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. In his promotional media tour, he appeared on an NPR podcast hosted by Meghna Chakrabarti. During their discussion, Chakrabarti challenged Eisgruber by questioning whether universities have consistently promoted free expression. As an example, she cited that the class of 2025 at Princeton was required to watch an orientation video in which a classics professor argued that free speech is a merely instrumental good to be used in service of “anti-racist social justice.” She asked whether this video amounted to the university “sending a message” that some speech and ideas are acceptable while others are not, to which Eisgruber responded as follows:
“You know, that was one video that was shown as part of an orientation in one year with a number of different faculty on it expressing viewpoints with which students could engage. I disagree with Professor Padilla Peralta, about the things that he said about free speech, but part of what we do is expose students to different viewpoints that they’re going to agree or disagree with. What we’ve done actually in the wake of that particular video, and that orientation, was to create an orientation around free speech that we give every year, where I actually lecture to the students about the importance of free speech and the importance of civil discussion and respect. So I think that’s a better way of starting students off with a discussion of free speech. And we make mistakes. Sometimes we learn from those mistakes. . . . From my standpoint, that was not a particularly good orientation video. I think we’re doing a lot better now.” (Emphasis added.)
With such a response, Eisgruber implicitly credits his administration by obscuring the origins of this particular orientation event, thus allowing himself and the university to appear as virtuous guardians of free expression who detected a problem and developed a solution. But that is inaccurate. I know because I helped design the event in question.
A fellow conservative undergraduate and I fought relentlessly to reform freshman orientation. In 2021, we co-authored a letter that illuminated how the freshman-orientation programming was strikingly ideological and failed to acknowledge — let alone defend — opinions that lean conservative. . . .
Initially, I was immensely proud and considered the event to be a rare victory. After all, how many conservative students can say they actually prompted their institution to undertake a sizable change in such politically contentious areas as free speech and viewpoint diversity? I was optimistic that the event would have significant downstream effects on the campus culture, and indeed, some fruitful outcomes were immediately obvious. For months afterward, students debated the merits of the event in our campus newspaper, which represented open discussion in action. I heard individually from students who said that the event discouraged self-censorship and inspired them to voice unpopular views, in part because knowing the free-speech policies offered a degree of reassurance and protection. Unfortunately, in the midst of all this positive feedback, I failed to see the problem: Our event was too successful, and it became a liability for Princeton.
The university castrated the event the following year. The subsequent iteration of the free-expression session featured Eisgruber and Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Then–Princeton undergraduate Matthew Wilson called the event an “embarrassment” in National Review, explaining that Romero “repeatedly urged [students] to embrace progressive ideas and badly misrepresented the importance of free speech by rooting its value in its ability to advance socially progressive causes.” When asked about “cancel culture,” Romero said that it has a “positive” element because “we shouldn’t put up with,” for example, “heteronormativity” and “the patriarchy that’s just bludgeoning people’s gender identities.” So, in plain analysis, the event designed to distill institutional policies and promote academic freedom in a nonpartisan fashion became yet another progressive indoctrination campaign, betraying its initial aim and actually suppressing free speech by defending only the types of expression that satisfy left-wing activists.
From NR’s editorial on former VP Cheney:
To his fans and detractors, Cheney will be most known for the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. On that fateful day, as Bush zigzagged back from Florida on Air Force One, Cheney took charge from a bunker underneath the White House, having been given the authority to order the shooting down of civilian aircraft that posed a threat, though it never came to that.
For the remainder of the administration, Cheney was a key architect of the strategy for combating terrorism that successfully weakened al-Qaeda and prevented another large-scale attack but that also included the launching of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both wars enjoyed popular support at the outset but gained critics as they dragged on and the costs in lives and treasure swelled.
While Cheney stayed out of office after leaving the vice presidency, he did occasionally weigh in on political controversies of the day, offering blistering criticism of Barack Obama, who he said was the worst president in American history.
“I vacillate between the various theories I’ve heard, but you know, if you had somebody as president who wanted to take America down, who wanted to fundamentally weaken our position in the world and reduce our capacity to influence events, turn our back on our allies and encourage our adversaries, it would look exactly like what Barack Obama’s doing,” he said in 2015.
As Republican voters came to sour on the legacy of the Iraq War and they moved to embrace Donald Trump, Cheney fell out of favor with the party. His daughter Liz, who was elected to the seat in which he once served, became a lightning rod because of her staunch opposition to Trump. In 2024, Dick Cheney joined his daughter in endorsing Kamala Harris.
Cheney lived a full life, serving the country for decades, and his legacy will be long debated. May he rest in peace.
Honorable Mention
A message from our good friends at National Review Institute:
The Burke to Buckley Fellowship program is back in New York City and Miami this spring. Burke to Buckley is intended for mid-career professionals from a variety of professions and industries. Over seven sessions, your cohort will gather to discuss key subjects in American conservatism through foundational texts. Upon completion of the program, you will join a network of hundreds of alumni across the country.
Experts from academia and National Review guide the conversation on topics including Burke, prudence, and the spirit of conservatism, economic freedom, and political freedom. For more information and to apply, click here. Apply today! Applications close November 30.
CODA
I’ve mentioned bluesman Marcus King in this space before but mainly to highlight a couple live appearances. Since then, I came across and picked up his debut solo album, El Dorado, at a record store in Richmond. It’s produced by the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, whose influence is appreciable in the songs’ polished sound. King’s is a singular voice, calling back to a musical heritage he honors and carries forward. Just listen to “One Day She’s Here.”
Have a fine weekend, and thanks for reading.