Eight of Ten — What the Count Shows, and Why Motive Cannot Settle It

A CONTEMPORARY CODA To the series Parties, Ideologies, and Systems Part 2 of 2

What Every Third Party Faces

In a previous article, we examined a current debate over the efficacy and the consequences of third-party politics in the United States. We drew on Victor Davis Hanson’s remarks from an episode of August 11, 2026, in which he set out his views on the ten-point plan for a new party offered by Tucker Carlson. That article addressed the myths and fallacies of the wasted-vote argument and the record of third parties in American history.

This second article takes up a more personal side of that same episode: the motivations Hanson ascribes to those currently aligned with Carlson’s movement. The conversation, though, is broader than two popular pundits and their opinions. Any third-party political movement faces the same kind of backlash Hanson exemplifies, and that includes the many minor parties and independent candidacies already operating outside the duopoly. The attack comes in two forms — an attack on the effects, which Part 1 answered, and an attack on the motivations, which is the subject of this one.

The Second Argument

Speaking with Jack Fowler, Hanson turned from the electoral case against third parties to the question of why these particular people were building one. His answer was that the platform is a rationalization and the grievance is personal.¹

Here is that case, assembled and put at its strongest.

Consider what each of the four had, and when they lost it. Tucker Carlson anchored the highest-rated program on cable news, drawing between three and five million viewers most nights and earning roughly twenty million dollars a year. He flew on the president’s aircraft during the campaign. He had the president’s private cell number. He went to Mar-a-Lago. His son was appointed within the administration by the vice president. Then he telephoned the president to say that a war with Iran would mean world war, and after that he was cut off completely.

Marjorie Taylor Greene was at Mar-a-Lago twice a month. She had, on Hanson’s estimate, eighty-five percent of the agenda she wanted, from a president releasing a million and a half Epstein files after a predecessor who released none. She turned on him anyway, and then she looked at Georgia polling and concluded she would not be renominated.

Joe Kent ran for Congress twice and lost twice. He would never have been appointed to a senior national security post without the president who appointed him. Now he objects continuously, senses that he is going to be removed, and faces returning to what he was before.

Thomas Massie believed himself unbeatable — the guru of the movement, the pure one, the man the others looked to. He was primaried.

Four people. Four losses. One platform, published afterward.

Marjorie Taylor Greene announced a new political 'movement' with a host of MAGA renegades, including Tucker Carlson and Thomas Massie (@FmrRepMTG, X)

And the platform, Hanson argues, is not the point, because eight of its ten planks are things the president has already delivered or is delivering. Border enforcement, deportations, the wall, an end to catch and release. A food and health agenda run by a man no president but this one would have appointed. Crime, where the alternative coalition offers cashless bail, thresholds that make shoplifting costless, and campaigns to defund the police. On Hanson’s count, eight of ten. The remaining two are foreign policy, and one of those is a proposal to pay restitution to noncombatants killed as collateral damage, which Hanson called crazy and illustrated with a ricochet in Fallujah.

So the arithmetic of the grievance does not work. If eighty to ninety percent of what you want is being delivered, and the opposing coalition offers you five percent, then burning the ninety to punish the ten is not a principle. It is a temper. Hanson put the reductio plainly: it amounts to saying that one supports the transgender movement, the Green New Deal, diversity programs, and the open border, because at least it is not Trump. Incoherent, he said. Sad.

He added one further observation, which is that the four have something else in common beyond personal disappointment, and that it concerns the Jews.

I will take the last of those separately and at length, because it is the one that requires the most care and gets the least. The rest I take up in order.

The Rule Underneath It

Strip the four biographies out and a decision rule remains. Hanson is not merely describing four people. He is telling every conservative in the country how to behave, and the instruction generalizes.

The rule is this: identify which of the two coalitions is historically closer to your commitments, calculate the percentage of your agenda it delivers, compare that percentage to what the other coalition offers, and stay if the first number is larger. Treat any remaining disagreement as a matter of proportion rather than of substance. Defection at eighty or ninety percent is not principle but temperament.

Stated that way, the rule has real force, and most Americans live by some version of it. It is why coalitions hold together at all. It is also, as Part 1 argued, a reasonable response to the incentives that plurality voting and single-member districts actually create.

But it makes two assumptions, and both are testable.

The first assumption is that the percentage is knowable — that a person can look at what a coalition has done and arrive at a number like eight of ten. Hanson did arrive at such a number. It can be checked against the document he was counting.

The second assumption is that the ten percent left over is small in more than an arithmetical sense. A rule that counts planks treats all planks as equivalent units. Nothing in the rule distinguishes a disagreement about tariff schedules from a disagreement about whether the executive may kill people without trial. If the residual ten percent contains the war power, the taxing power, and the question of who may be killed on the president’s say-so, then “ninety percent agreement” describes the length of the list rather than the weight of it.

The rest of this article tests both assumptions. It also tests a third thing, which is the rule’s own promise. A conservative who followed it for a decade was told he would get conservative government. That claim has a record now, and the record is available.

Motive Is Not a Refutation

Hanson’s argument is that the four have personal reasons for what they say, and that the personal reasons explain the statements.

The trouble is not that the premise is false. The premise is unknowable, and it is unknowable from all sides.

Hanson cannot see inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s mind. Neither can I. She may have had discouraging polling. She may have been dismayed by promises she believed were broken. Both may be true at once, and the presence of the first does not establish that it caused the second. Two facts standing beside each other are not a chain of causation, and treating them as one is not analysis; it is conjecture.

The same holds for the others, and it holds for me. I have my own reasons for the positions I take. Some of them are doubtless less noble than I believe. That is the condition of every person making a public argument, which is precisely why the convention exists that we argue about claims rather than about the people making them.

What is available is conduct and public statement. Greene resigned from Congress and left the party. She said the reason was that a president who campaigned against foreign wars had started one. Massie voted against the bill and then published the fiscal results. Kent resigned from the National Counterterrorism Center in March 2026 over the Iran war rather than waiting to be removed.² Carlson left the Republican Party in June 2026 and said he would help build an alternative but would not be its candidate.³ Those are actions with dates, and each of them cost the person taking it something.

Now the concession, because motive is not always irrelevant and pretending otherwise would be too convenient for my side of this.

Motive bears legitimately on credibility in a specific circumstance: when a claim rests on the speaker’s own testimony and cannot be checked any other way. If Carlson said he had been told something in private that no record confirms, his falling-out would be a proper reason to weigh his account carefully. That is ordinary evidentiary reasoning and every court applies it.

But that is not the situation. The claims at issue here are not about what somebody witnessed. They are about the federal debt, the text of a statute, the disposition of a Supreme Court case, the number of people killed in a bombing campaign, and the contents of a published document. Every one of them can be checked without reference to anybody’s feelings.

Image of Thomas Massie’s debt badge, a real-time calculator of the US National Debt

A man who has been humiliated can still read the debt clock. If the debt reads forty trillion dollars, his humiliation does not change the figure, and the fact that he had a reason to go looking does not make what he found untrue. The question of why someone raised an argument is separable from the question of whether the argument is sound, and the second question is the only one that can be settled.

So set the four aside. They are not the subject. The record is.

The Count, Once

Hanson said eight of the ten points Carlson mentioned were already in alignment with Trump’s GOP. Carlson’s document is public. It was published on August 5, 2026, in a ninety-four-minute livestream, and press accounts of it are consistent.⁴

Carlson organized it as ten qualities: fair, sovereign, productive, beautiful, healthy, honest, optimistic, wise, decent, and united.

Six can be granted to Hanson without much argument.

Healthy is aligned with the food and pharmaceutical agenda of a health secretary this president appointed, and Hanson’s point that no other president would have made that appointment is correct. Optimistic is a pronatalist argument about family formation, and the administration has moved in that direction. Wise is a critique of credentialing and a call for practical education, which is broadly the administration’s education posture. United calls for a pause in mass immigration and a common national identity, and on enforcement, deportation, and the border Hanson’s claim is not close to disputable. Beautiful and Productive are the two where the granting requires qualification, and I will come back to Productive.

That leaves four, and they are the four the rupture is actually about.

Fair is not a general appeal to equal treatment. It is specifically about the Epstein prosecution and what Carlson calls the Epstein class — the proposition that the law arrives differently for people with access.

Sovereign is not only about Israel, though that is how it has been reported and how Hanson answered it. As published, the plank is about freedom from outside influence generally, and it names foreign lobbying, corporate control of government, and predatory debt alongside the allegation that Israel pushed the United States into the Iran war.

Honest requires that officials face consequences for lying to the public and that most classified records be opened, including those on the Kennedy assassination and 9/11.

Decent rejects unnecessary wars and support for atrocities, calls for ending funding to Israel, and includes the restitution proposal Hanson objected to.

Four planks, at minimum, on which the count fails. Productive makes a fifth, contestable.

One item in Hanson’s count deserves separate notice, because it shows what happened to the exercise.

He said Carlson has a big thing about crime, and answered it with cashless bail, the nine-hundred-fifty-dollar shoplifting threshold, defunding the police, and the border. There is no crime plank. Crime appears inside Beautiful, where Carlson grouped violent crime with brutalist architecture, graffiti, and public drug use as things done to the shared physical environment of American cities. It is an argument about urban order and the built world. Hanson answered it with a criminal-justice record.

That is not a fabrication and I am not calling it one. It is what happens when a document is answered from memory rather than from the page — the reader supplies the version of the argument he already knows how to refute. Twenty seconds of the segment go to defeating a position nobody in Maine took.

Which is the general shape of the problem. On the six planks where the administration is delivering, Hanson is right and the count is real. On the four where the rupture occurred, the count does not reach. And a rule that instructs you to weigh eight against two has no way to notice that the two contain the war power, the taxing power, and the enforcement of a criminal transparency statute against the department that missed its deadline.

What the Rule Produced: The Economy

Hanson’s rule is a prediction as much as an instruction. Align with the coalition that is historically closer to you, accept the eighty or ninety percent, and the remainder will be a matter of temperament rather than substance. If the rule is sound, the eighty or ninety percent should be recognizable. A conservative who followed it for a decade should be able to look at the economic record and find the thing he was told he was buying.

So look at it.

The Case for the Record

The strongest version of the defense is not the one the administration’s critics usually engage.

Start with what is true. The tax rates set in 2017 were made permanent rather than allowed to lapse, which removes a recurring source of planning uncertainty for households and firms that had been budgeting against a cliff. Regulatory rollback has been real, and the administration argues the compliance burden on small firms has fallen with it. The reshoring argument has evidence behind it, and the administration cites its own: a survey it credits with finding that forty-two percent of Canadian manufacturers have already moved production to the United States or plan to.⁵ The tariffs collected real revenue against a real deficit. And the criticism of the previous administration’s inflation record is not manufactured — consumer prices rose sharply under Biden, and voters who ranked that first were not confused about their own experience.

The industrial-policy defense is stronger still, and it deserves to be stated the way its authors state it rather than the way its opponents caricature it. The argument is that critical supply chains — advanced semiconductors, rare-earth elements, refined critical minerals — are not ordinary markets. They are markets in which a single adversary state has spent two decades building a position deliberately, subsidizing below cost, and demonstrating a willingness to withhold supply for political leverage. A country that cannot make its own chips or refine its own rare earths does not have a trade problem. It has a war-fighting problem, and a purely market-based response to a non-market adversary is unilateral disarmament. On this reading the equity positions are not socialism. They are the price of getting private capital to build capacity that private capital would otherwise never build, because the returns are uncertain and the adversary can crush the venture at will. A conservative can hold that view without ceasing to be a conservative, and many serious ones do.

I think that argument is wrong. I do not think it is stupid, and the answer to it is not a slogan.

Forty Trillion

The federal debt crossed forty trillion dollars on August 18, 2026. The Treasury reported the figure the following day at forty trillion, forty-seven billion, four hundred twenty-six million dollars.⁶ It had crossed thirty-nine trillion in March 2026 and thirty-eight trillion in October 2025. Two increments of a trillion dollars in eleven months.⁷

Interest on that debt now runs approximately 1.1 trillion dollars a year, which is more than the government spends on national defense.⁸ The Congressional Budget Office projects a 1.9 trillion dollar deficit for fiscal year 2026, rising to 3.1 trillion by 2036. In the first ten months of fiscal 2026 the government ran a deficit of approximately 1.8 trillion dollars. July’s deficit of 432 billion dollars averaged roughly 13.9 billion dollars a day.⁹

Those are not projections of a coming crisis. They are the current operating condition.

The Bill and the Baseline

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act increased projected deficits over 2026 through 2035 by approximately 4.7 trillion dollars, after accounting for economic effects and the additional debt service they generate. The Tax Foundation’s dynamic estimate is approximately 3.0 trillion before additional interest, and close to 3.8 trillion including it.¹⁰

The numbers are not the interesting part. The scoring convention is.

For budget-enforcement purposes, Senate Republicans used and promoted a current-policy baseline rather than a current-law baseline. The Congressional Budget Office’s official estimate stayed on its normal current-law footing; the maneuver was in how the Senate counted the bill against its own rules, not in how CBO scored it. The distinction sounds technical and is not. Under current law, the 2017 rates were scheduled to expire. Extending them therefore costs money, and the score reflects the cost. Under a current-policy baseline, the analyst assumes the rates continue regardless of what the statute says, and extending them costs nothing, because the baseline already assumes the extension. Permanence becomes free by assumption.

This is a familiar move in the history of unfunded federal expansion: the apparent cost is reduced by changing the baseline against which the policy is measured. A cost is removed from the ledger by changing the ledger. The party that spent a generation arguing that Washington hides the price of its promises adopted the technique and used it on the largest fiscal bill it has passed.

Thomas Massie put the results in five words on August 19, 2026: the results of the Big Beautiful Bill are in.¹¹ He was primaried three months earlier. Hanson’s account is that the primary explains the post. The debt figure published the day before does not require that explanation.

What Was Promised in 2016

On March 31, 2016, Donald Trump sat with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. The transcript was published April 2. Asked about the national debt, then 19.4 trillion dollars, he said it had to go. He said it could be done fairly quickly. He gave a timeline of eight years, and the mechanism was trade deals.¹²

On April 4, 2016, two days after the transcript appeared, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget published its analysis. Rather than eliminating the debt, they concluded, the plan would push it above thirty-eight trillion dollars.¹³

They were criticized at the time as alarmist. They were wrong. The debt passed thirty-eight trillion in October 2025 and forty trillion ten months later. Their projection turned out to be the optimistic one, and the threshold was crossed early.

Hanson’s question was who has come closer to enacting Carlson’s platform. On the specific promise Trump made himself, in his own words, with his own timeline and his own method, the answer is available and it is not a matter of interpretation. The promise was to eliminate 19.4 trillion dollars in eight years. Ten years later the figure is 40 trillion.

The Tariff That Could Not Be Levied

The trade record is where the rule fails most visibly, because the failure is not a matter of outcomes one might dispute. It is a matter of a judicial holding and what happened next.

On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump. By six votes to three, the Court held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act did not authorize the tariffs the president had imposed under it. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority. The holding was statutory rather than constitutional: because the tariff power belongs to Congress, a presidential tariff stands or falls on whether Congress delegated the authority, and IEEPA had not delegated this one.¹⁴

Within hours, the president announced ten percent global tariffs under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, and signed the proclamation the same day. Section 232 sectoral tariffs on steel, aluminum, automobiles, and lumber were untouched by the ruling and continued.¹⁵

A conservative movement that spent forty years demanding limits on delegated executive power received a Supreme Court opinion holding that IEEPA supplied no authority for the president’s global tariffs. The administration answered within hours by invoking a different delegation. The Court constrained one asserted power; it did not end the policy, because Congress had already handed over other tools broad enough to rebuild part of it.

The unwinding is its own accounting. The Penn Wharton Budget Model projected up to 175 billion dollars in refunds. On March 5, 2026, Judge Richard Eaton of the Court of International Trade ordered the refund process to begin, describing it at roughly 130 billion dollars across more than a thousand plaintiff companies. As of July 31, 2026, Customs and Border Protection reported approximately 128.68 billion dollars in potential and certified refunds accepted for processing, against more than seventy-five thousand filed declarations.¹⁶

The duties were paid to Customs by American importers and borne, in varying proportions, by those importers, by their customers, and by foreign suppliers. They are now being returned through a litigation process expected to run past the end of the year. The authority was not there. The refund is what that costs.

Canada

On the trade philosophy itself, the administration has published its own case, and it is worth reading in full because it is not ambiguous.

The White House indictment of Canada runs to eleven enumerated facts. Canada imposes twenty-five percent tariffs and company-specific quotas on American motor vehicles, applied to no other country, and American vehicle exports fell twenty-two percent in a year. Canada restricts American wine, beer, and spirits across nearly every province, and American alcohol exports collapsed eighty-one percent in a single year. Canada holds American dairy out with tariff-rate quotas more restrictive than those extended to Europe and over-quota rates approaching three hundred percent, among the highest agricultural tariffs in the developed world. Canada has run an average annual goods surplus against the United States of roughly fifty billion dollars over the past decade. Canada blocked the sale of four Gulfstream models while protecting a domestic competitor. And Canada has just announced an additional 27.6 billion dollars in tariffs on American goods, including fifty percent on steel and aluminum, twenty-five percent on fish, and twenty-five percent on tools.¹⁷

I will grant those are the administration’s claims and the administration’s figures. The underlying practices, though, are not in dispute, and a libertarian has no business defending any of them. Canadian supply management in dairy is one of the more indefensible protectionist schemes in the developed world. The provincial liquor monopolies are a cartel. The auto quotas are discriminatory by design. If the question is whether Canada practices mercantilism, the answer is yes, extensively, and Canadians pay for it first.

Read the document again for what it argues, rather than for what it alleges.

Every enumerated fact is a complaint that a foreign government has erected a barrier between its citizens and goods they wished to buy. The remedy proposed in each case is an American barrier between American citizens and goods they wish to buy. The theory of harm is that a trade deficit represents something extracted — Canada has “extracted” fifty billion dollars a year — which is the mercantilist premise in its original form, the one Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations against in 1776. A deficit in goods is a surplus in capital. It records that Americans obtained things they wanted and Canadians obtained dollars they then had to do something with. Nobody was robbed.

Then the closing. The president is quoted saying that Canada is the most difficult and unreasonable, that Canadians feel entitled, that they are not a State, and will be entitled no longer.¹⁸

Hold that sentence next to two others. In my conclusion of Empire of Liberty I recorded the president suggesting on multiple occasions that Venezuela might eventually be admitted as the fifty-first state.¹⁹ In March 2026 he said publicly that the United States could take Cuba.²⁰ Statehood is being used as a category of foreign policy — a status that may be extended to a country under occupation, withheld from a treaty ally, and invoked as a reason another country is not owed reciprocity. Whatever that is, it is not the conservatism of limited government and defined borders that Hanson’s rule promised would be delivered at eighty or ninety percent.

The Beef

On Friday, August 21, 2026, the president announced that for ninety days the United States would allow up to three hundred thousand metric tons of ground beef product to be imported free of out-of-quota tariffs. He added a sentence that repays close reading: there was a commitment that the beef would be sold at twenty-five percent below current market prices.²¹

A White House official said foreign exporters would provide the discount, to be passed to American consumers, in exchange for tariff relief, but declined to name which exporters had agreed. Asked directly where the beef would come from, the president said he did not want to say which countries.²²

Follow the sequence, because the sequence is the argument.

A tariff is imposed to protect domestic producers from foreign competition. The tariff contributes to a price American families cannot absorb — ground beef near seven dollars a pound, against roughly five dollars fifty-five at the start of the term. The tariff is then waived, which is an admission that the tariff raised the price. And the waiver is granted on the condition that unnamed private parties sell at a stated discount to a market price, with nothing disclosed about how that condition would be enforced at the retail counter.

That is not a price control in the formal sense. No published statute, rule, order, or disclosed agreement explained how the pricing commitment would be enforced. No order had been signed when it was announced, and the parties said to have made the commitment were not named. What it is, functionally, is administered pricing by executive discretion: a government official setting the price at which a good will be sold as the condition of a regulatory favor. The absence of a statute, an agency, and a named counterparty makes the arrangement less accountable than a formal control, not more.

The people it lands on said so immediately. Cattle futures fell to eight-month lows. The chief executive of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association said that flooding the market with government-subsidized, below-market beef is not the way to rebuild the American herd. The president of the United States Cattlemen’s Association said you do not put America first by putting American cattle producers last. Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana said he had advised the president against it.²³ The domestic herd stands at roughly 86.2 million head, the smallest since the early 1950s.²⁴

Now set the date against the platform. Carlson published on August 5, 2026, and his third plank calls for an America that rebuilds farming and craftsmanship instead of running an economy on finance and speculation. Sixteen days later the administration announced a program the cattle industry says will suppress the herd, in order to lower a consumer price that a previous intervention had raised, ahead of an election in which affordability is the governing party’s central exposure.

Hanson counted that plank as substantially delivered.

The State as Shareholder

The individual transactions have been reported one at a time, which is why they have not registered as a pattern. Assembled, they are one.

The Commerce Department holds a ten percent equity stake in Intel. The Pentagon holds a fifteen percent position in MP Materials. The government holds positions in Lithium Americas, in Trilogy Metals, and in ATALCO. In United States Steel the government holds a golden share carrying veto rights over plant closures and over relocation of the company’s headquarters; those rights are exercised by the president or his designee while he holds office, and pass to the Treasury and Commerce departments under his successors. Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices remit fifteen percent of their China revenue to the government as a condition of export licensing.²⁵

Take the last one on its own terms. A private firm pays the government a percentage of its revenue from a designated market in return for permission to sell into that market. The payment is not a tax, because no statute levies it. It is not a fine, because no violation is alleged. It is a share, negotiated case by case, and the consideration is a license.

The golden share is the one that matters most, and it is worth being precise about what it does. It does not transfer ownership. It moves a specific decision — whether a plant stays open, whether a headquarters moves — from the firm’s directors to the federal government, and for the duration of this presidency to this president or a person he names. The company remains privately owned. Two of the decisions that determine what the company is for do not.

The Name for It

Reason has described this program as Republican socialism, which is a fair description of the fiscal side and an incomplete one for the rest.²⁶ Socialism, in its ordinary meaning, is public ownership of the means of production — the state takes title, and the enterprise becomes a state enterprise answerable to a ministry.

That is not what has happened here, and the difference is the point. Title has not moved. Intel is still Intel, U.S. Steel is still U.S. Steel, and Nvidia still answers to its shareholders. Ownership and day-to-day management remain predominantly private. What the government has acquired is a financial interest in several of these firms and a defined say over particular decisions in others: conditions on operations, a share of designated revenues, a veto held by one office over two questions at one company.

The word for that arrangement is corporatism, and its most fully developed twentieth-century form is the economic organization of the fascist states — which is why I am going to use the word rather than talk around it. Fascistic, applied to an economic arrangement, means a system in which productive property remains in private hands while the state directs its use, allocates its output, and treats individual firms as instruments of national policy rather than as enterprises answerable to their owners and customers.

I want to avoid confusion or conflation and want the word and its mechanism to be unmistakable, so let me state what is not being alleged. Not a dictatorship. Not one-party rule. Not political violence, not a paramilitary, not the suppression of opposition parties, not the racial ideology that the fascist regimes carried and that constitutes their central historical crime. Nobody has been put in a camp. The comparison is confined to the economic mechanism, and outside that mechanism it does not hold and I am not extending it.

But the mechanism is the mechanism. Private title, political direction, negotiated shares of revenue, and a personal veto over a firm’s operating decisions vested in the head of state — that is a recognizable arrangement with a name, and the name is not conservatism, is not free enterprise, and is not the market economy that the coalition asking for loyalty has spent eighty years promising to defend.

Which returns the question to Hanson’s rule. He asks who has come closer to enacting Carlson’s platform. On the third plank, an economy that produces rather than speculates, the record is forty trillion dollars in debt, a tax bill counted against a baseline that made permanence free, a tariff program the Supreme Court held unauthorized by IEEPA and the executive rebuilt the same afternoon on a different delegation, a mercantilist trade doctrine published under the presidential seal, an opaque government-negotiated below-market pricing condition on imported beef, and a government portfolio of equity positions in private firms.

A conservative who followed the rule for a decade was told he was buying limited government. This is the receipt.

What the Rule Produced: The War Power

The full argument for non-intervention — strategic, constitutional, moral, and economic — is set out in the final article of Empire of Liberty, and I am not going to re-run it here.²⁷ One paragraph of it is load-bearing for what follows.

The founders lodged the war power in Congress for a reason they stated openly: executive war-making concentrates power in a way republican government cannot survive. The decision to kill is the gravest a state makes, and they placed it with the branch that is slowest, most divided, and most directly answerable at the next election. That was the design. Everything since has been the erosion of it, and the erosion has been bipartisan, continuous, and ratified after the fact in nearly every instance. Nothing in what follows is the invention of one administration. What is at issue is whether the coalition that promised to arrest the erosion has arrested it.

Here is the record produced under the rule.

The boat strikes. Beginning in early September 2025, American forces started destroying small vessels in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific on the assertion that they carried drugs. As of the strike of August 25, 2026, Southern Command — which is the command conducting them — reports at least 227 people killed in 68 strikes.²⁸ No charge was filed against any of them. No evidence has been produced publicly for any individual vessel. In documented cases, survivors clinging to wreckage were killed by a second strike.²⁹ Ten of the dead are counted as presumed lost at sea, eight of them people who jumped from three boats attacked on December 30.³⁰ Families of the dead, and the governments of neighboring countries, say many were fishermen.³¹

The one legal opinion the administration has released does not cover this campaign. The Office of Legal Counsel opinion on the boat strikes has not been published, and the Department has resisted publishing it. What was released, in redacted form on January 13, 2026, is a twenty-two-page memorandum signed December 23, 2025 concerning the proposed operation to seize Maduro.³²

It repays reading, because of how it reasons. It concluded that the operation would not rise to the level of war in the constitutional sense and therefore required no authorization from Congress. That conclusion rested on facts described to the office the day before, and on assurances: that no contingency plan existed for a sustained operation amounting to constitutional war, and none for occupying Venezuela if removing Maduro produced unrest. It stated that no definitive conclusion had been reached about how international law would apply. And unlike earlier opinions of that office, it did not decide whether the operation passed constitutional muster; it set out the arguments and left the determination to the president.

Eleven days later American forces were in Caracas.

On the campaign’s own terms it has not worked. A senior defense official told Congress in March 2026 that vessel traffic in the Caribbean had declined by roughly twenty percent. Asked whether the quantity of drugs entering the United States had gone down, the answer was no.³³ In August 2026 the campaign was extended onto land: the defense secretary announced in Panama that Colombia, Guatemala, and Honduras had agreed to joint operations against criminal groups on their territory, following Ecuador in March. Guatemala denied that any such agreement existed.³⁴

Venezuela. On January 3, 2026, American forces struck Caracas and seized Venezuela’s de facto president, who was flown to New York to face criminal charges. The Senate advanced a war powers resolution on January 8 by fifty-two to forty-seven, with five Republicans joining every Democrat. Six days later a point of order blocked it from proceeding, fifty-one to fifty, with the vice president brought to the Capitol to break a tied chamber. Two of the five had reversed under pressure from the president.³⁵

Note what that means procedurally. The Senate never voted on the resolution itself. The measure was kept off the floor on a point of order, and the tie was broken by the sitting vice president of the administration whose war power was in question. The congressional war power was tested directly, in the clearest case available, and it did not hold.

Cuba. A de facto oil blockade took effect on January 29, 2026 — not a naval blockade, but a framework of tariffs and sanctions built to deter third countries from supplying Cuban oil. By May 13 the Cuban energy minister reported that the country had no fuel oil and no diesel, with blackouts in Havana running past twenty hours a day. Cuba’s energy crisis predated January and had several causes, including decades of its own mismanagement. The Venezuela operation sharply intensified it: Venezuelan shipments ended, and Mexico was pressured under threat of tariffs to end its own.³⁶ Whatever one concludes about the Cuban government, the people without power are not the Cuban government.

Somalia. The United States has bombed Somalia at least 78 times in 2026 as of August 7. In 2025 it bombed Somalia 124 times, more than twelve times the 2024 total, and by New America’s count more strikes in that single year than during the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations combined. AFRICOM has stopped publishing casualty estimates and civilian-harm assessments. A Guardian investigation found that a November 2025 strike on Jamaame killed twelve civilians, eight of them children.³⁷ The claimed authority is the 2001 authorization to use force against those responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Al-Shabaab was founded in 2006, and administrations of both parties have bridged that gap by designating it an associated force of al-Qaeda. That reading is not frivolous — the group has claimed affiliation itself. But it extends a statute to an organization that did not exist when Congress wrote it, on a determination made by the executive, and no Congress in twenty-five years has been asked to ratify the extension or given the chance to refuse it.

Iran. American and Israeli strikes opened the war on February 28, 2026. As of late August, thirty-one percent of Americans support the military action, down from thirty-seven in March, with Republican support falling from seventy-seven percent to sixty-nine. Eighty-three percent expect the fighting to continue for an extended period.³⁸

That is the record. Now the plank.

The Sovereignty Plank and What Was Done to It

Carlson’s second plank says a country should be free from outside influence — free to make its own decisions without being told what to do. As published it names foreign lobbying, corporate capture of government, and predatory debt, and it names one specific allegation: that Israel pushed the United States into the war with Iran.³⁹

Hanson’s answer was to say that the four have one further thing in common, and that it is the Jews. He then listed what Israel was not dictating: the operation against Maduro, support for Ukraine, policy toward China, the Panama Canal standoff, and the Moroccan incursion into the Spanish enclaves.

Take the strongest version of what he might mean, because there is one and it deserves stating.

Claims that a foreign state controls American foreign policy have a long and genuinely ugly history. The specific charge that Jewish influence directs a nation’s affairs from behind the scenes is the load-bearing element of the most murderous conspiracy theory of the twentieth century. A historian who has spent his career on the classical world and on the wars of the last century has better reason than most to recognize the pattern and to say so early rather than late. If a movement is drifting toward that, someone ought to name it, and the fact that naming it is uncomfortable is not a reason for silence. Hanson has earned the standing to make that call.

Now look at what the passage actually does.

The plank alleges Israeli influence on one decision: the Iran war. Hanson’s list answers a claim of Israeli influence over American foreign policy generally — Venezuela, Ukraine, China, Panama, Morocco. Every item on his list is a decision the plank never mentioned.

And the one decision the plank did name does not appear on the list at all.

So the sequence runs: a specific allegation about a specific war is widened into a general allegation about all foreign policy; the general allegation is refuted with counterexamples; and the specific allegation, which was the only one made, goes unaddressed. That is a straw man in its textbook form, and the substitution is visible on the page without any need to characterize the man who made it.

There is a second substitution stacked on the first. The plank is not only about Israel. Foreign lobbying, corporate control of government, and predatory debt are in the same plank, and none of them was mentioned.

Here is my own position, and it is not Carlson’s, though it overlaps his at one point.

The question of whether American foreign policy serves American interests is a legitimate question, and it does not become illegitimate when the country under discussion is Israel. My position is indifferent to which country is named. An American official owes his advocacy to the American people. When a decision is made, the citizen is entitled to ask whether it serves them, in the short term and in the long term, and to weigh those two horizons against each other. Sometimes an alliance obligation is worth the cost. Sometimes it is not. The answer is contestable in both directions and reasonable people land in different places.

What is not legitimate is an ad hominem attack, answering that question by assigning a motive to the person asking it. That move does not engage the argument. It relocates the argument to the arguer’s character, where nothing can be verified and nothing can be settled, and it does so in a way calculated to make the question too expensive to ask again. It is the same error as the motive argument, applied at the level of a whole coalition instead of four individuals — and it is a heavier version of the error, because the charge is not vanity but bigotry.

I have no interest in defending everything said within the movement Carlson is building. There are people around it whose views on this subject I am not aligned with, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But the question of whether the Iran war served American interests is not one of those views. It is a question, and on the evidence available — the war in its seventh month, thirty-one percent public support, Republican support down eight points since March, and eighty-three percent of the country expecting no end — it is a question a great many Americans are asking.

Calling the question antisemitic does not answer it. It only guarantees that the people asking will stop asking Victor Davis Hanson.

What Was Promised About the Files

The transparency plank has the cleanest record of any of the ten, because it does not turn on interpretation. There is a statute.

Hanson’s rebuttal to Greene was that Biden released not one file in four years while Trump is releasing a million and a half. The first half is a fair criticism of the previous administration. The second half omits how the release came about.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act became Public Law 119-38 on November 19, 2025. It requires the Department of Justice to release all Epstein-related records, permits redaction to protect victims, and requires that each redaction be explained. It passed by margins that left the president little practical choice about signing it.⁴⁰

It was introduced by Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, and Massie led the discharge effort that forced it onto the floor over the leadership’s objection. The transparency Hanson credits to the president exists because the congressman Hanson describes as acting from wounded vanity co-wrote the law compelling it and made the vote happen.

What has followed is the part that matters, and it needs to be stated in two registers, because one part is established and the other is contested.

Established: the Department did not complete the release the statute required within the thirty days the statute allowed.

Contested, and alleged by the law’s authors rather than found by a court: that what the Department has done since violates the Act. On February 13, 2026, a member of Congress reviewed the supposedly unredacted files at the Department and reported finding hundreds of pages blacked out.⁴¹ On February 9, Massie and Khanna alleged that the Department had concealed six names they believed were materially implicated in the underlying material — an allegation of concealment, not a finding about the six men, and appearing in investigative files establishes nothing about anyone’s conduct.⁴²

In July 2026 Massie and Khanna introduced a second bill. Massie’s statement on introducing it: since the Act was signed into law on November 19, 2025, the Department of Justice has flagrantly and consistently ignored its disclosure requirements, continues to unlawfully withhold over three million files, and is unlawfully maintaining heavy redactions on what it does release.⁴³ The second bill exists to create something the first did not contain — the standing for state attorneys general, victims, and members of Congress to sue the Attorney General. Massie explained the omission directly: they had not anticipated that the chief law enforcement officer of the country would decline to follow the law.⁴⁴

Set the pieces beside each other. A president signs a transparency statute. His Department of Justice misses the deadline it sets, and the statute’s authors say it is still not meeting the requirements. One of those authors — a member of the president’s own party — is primaried, loses, and continues pressing for enforcement. And the argument offered against him is that his complaint is really about the primary.

The Kennedy and 9/11 records under the same plank are in a similar condition. Releases have occurred. The categorical opening the plank calls for has not.

This is the plank Hanson counted as delivered.

The Machine Is the Man

Part 1 spent its longest section on 1912, and the point of it was this. Republican voters chose Theodore Roosevelt in nine of the twelve states that held primaries. Republican officials nominated William Howard Taft anyway, awarding him all ninety-two contested delegate seats. The defection came second. The exclusion came first.

The reflex is to look for the same pattern now — to find the officials overriding the voters. That reading does not fit, and getting it wrong matters.

In 2026 the machine and the popular choice are the same thing. The president is not fighting the party committees, the endorsements, and the money. He is those things, and they are being used the way a party has always used them: against members of the coalition who have stopped being useful to it.

The record of that is short and recent.

Thomas Massie lost the Kentucky fourth district primary to Ed Gallrein on May 19, 2026, after the president’s political operation worked against him.⁴⁵ In South Carolina on August 25, 2026, Darline Graham defeated Ralph Norman in the Senate runoff, with the reported result at approximately 52.5 to 47.6. The president recruited her, endorsed her, and rallied for her in Myrtle Beach four days before the vote, and MAGA Inc spent more than $800,000. Norman, a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, said he never understood why the president entered the race at all.⁴⁶

That is coalition politics working exactly as Part 1 described it. A coalition assembles winning combinations, and it revises itself according to the combinations it finds it can assemble. Factions that stop being electorally valuable get dropped. There is nothing sinister in it and nothing unusual. It is what coalitions are for.

It also means the loyalty argument runs in one direction only. Hanson asks the defectors what they owe the coalition. The coalition, meanwhile, has been asked nothing, and it has spent the year removing the people who were most insistent about the planks in dispute — the fiscal hawk who voted against the bill and then published the arithmetic, the constitutionalist who wrote the transparency statute the department is ignoring. Both of those are the same man.

He is out of Congress in January. The debt is at forty trillion. Hanson’s rule says the fault lies with him.

Why I Do Not Work Inside the Republican Party

This part is personal, and I should be crystal clear about where I am standing.

A word first, because it gets used loosely. The Overton window is the range of positions that can be held in public without the holder being treated as unserious. It is not a measure of what is true or of what most people want. It is a measure of what may be said without cost. The window moves, it is moved deliberately, and a position can sit outside it while commanding majority support — which is why “nobody serious believes that” is a claim about a conversation rather than about a country.

I have spent my adult life closer to the Republican coalition than to the Democratic one, and on the ordinary axis of American politics that has not changed. What changed is the window.

The record of what the coalition has settled for, in my time, reads as a sequence.

George H. W. Bush and then Bob Dole over Patrick Buchanan, which settled that a non-interventionist critique of American foreign policy would not be entertained inside the party.

Mitt Romney over Ron Paul, which settled that the monetary and fiscal critique would not be either.

Ed Gallrein over Thomas Massie, this May.

Darline Graham over Ralph Norman, yesterday.

The first two were losses to the coalition’s center by candidates who never had the votes, and I do not claim otherwise. The last two are different in kind. They were not the center defeating an insurgency. They were a sitting president expending his own political capital to remove members of his own party who had voted against him on spending and on war.

That is what tells me the window has moved and that I am no longer inside it. Not a disagreement about a bill. The demonstrated proposition that the positions I hold are the ones the coalition removes people for holding.

The standard I am applying is the one I published in October 2025, in the last paragraph of an article about what parties are: work within parties when coalitional membership serves your goals, and work outside them when it does not.⁴⁷ That rule cuts both ways and I have tried to apply it honestly. There were years when working inside was the right answer. On the evidence of this year it is not, because the way to move a coalition from within is the primary, and the primary is what the coalition now uses to remove people who try.

None of which is an endorsement of what Carlson is building. I do not know what it will become, several of the people around it hold views different from my own, and Part 1 gave the reason to be skeptical of the whole enterprise: any successful new party is the next duopoly, with the same incentives and the same eventual disappointment.

What I defend is narrower. It is the legitimacy of the critique, and the freedom to try something else. A citizen who concludes that a coalition has stopped delivering is not required to keep voting for it, and he does not owe anyone an account of his emotional state before he is permitted to say so.

Defense and Counterargument

The strongest objections to this article are not the ones Hanson raised.

The comparison is unfair because the alternative is worse. This is the real force of Hanson’s position and it survives everything above. On the axis of the ten planks, the opposing coalition offers less — arguably far less. A voter choosing between two governments, rather than between a government and an ideal, may reasonably conclude that forty trillion dollars in debt under one is preferable to what the other would do, and that a war he opposes is preferable to the domestic program he would get in exchange. That is not incoherent. It is triage, and Part 1 conceded that the trade is real. What I dispute is not the calculation. It is the claim that a citizen who runs it differently has failed a test of seriousness.

Presidents inherit more than they choose. Also true. The Somalia campaign runs across five administrations. The boat strikes are an extension of a maritime interdiction posture that predates this president. The debt trajectory was set by demographics and by statutory commitments that no president has been willing to touch. Attributing the whole of it to one man would be the same error I am objecting to elsewhere in this piece. The narrower claim is the one I hold: these were the specific commitments made, in public, by this coalition, about these specific things, and the record is the record.

The industrial policy might work. Possibly. If the equity positions produce a domestic semiconductor and rare-earth capacity that survives without subsidy, the argument I made will look narrow and legalistic in twenty years. I do not think that is how it goes, for reasons the Austrian tradition has spent a century laying out, but I am not entitled to certainty about a counterfactual, and the people making the opposite bet are not fools.

And the objection I have the hardest time with. If the count in in this article is correct, and four of ten planks are unmet, then Hanson’s rule still returns the same answer — because six of ten is a majority, and no other coalition on the ballot offers six. A person could accept every factual correction in this article and rationally conclude that he should stay. I think he would be wrong about the weight of the four. I cannot show that he is wrong about the arithmetic, because he is not.

The Liberty Test

Every episode of Self-Evident ends against a single question: did this leave Americans more free, or more governed? The honest limit comes first, and it is the same one Part 1 stated. The test does not settle close calls, and it does not tell anyone how to vote.

It does settle something narrower here.

The rule under examination tells a citizen that his agreement is to be counted rather than weighed, that the residual disagreement is temperament, and that the correct response to a coalition that has not delivered on the residual is continued support. Run the year’s record against that instruction. The debt at forty trillion. A tariff program the Supreme Court held IEEPA did not authorize, rebuilt the same afternoon on a different delegation. An announced commitment that qualifying imported beef would be sold at a twenty-five-percent discount. Government equity positions and a veto over two decisions inside a private firm. Two hundred twenty-seven people killed at sea without charge. A war powers resolution that advanced and was then blocked on a tie. A transparency statute whose deadline the Department of Justice missed and whose authors say it is still not meeting.

Taken together, those actions concentrate unusually consequential discretion in the executive branch — often through authority Congress delegated, declined to reclaim, or proved unable to enforce. That distinction matters, and it does not soften the finding. A power surrendered is as gone as a power seized, and it is harder to get back, because there is no one to blame for taking it.

Americans are not more free at the end of that list. They are more governed, and the rule that told them to accept it is how the acceptance was obtained.

Close

Hanson asked what would make these people do this.

It is a fair question and I have tried to give it the only answer available, which is that we cannot know and do not need to. What can be known is what happened, and what happened is on the record: a document published on August 5, a count that reaches six of its ten planks, and four planks containing the taxing power, the war power, the transparency statute, and the question of whether a government may kill people it has not charged.

I would put a different question back, and I would put it to the people still applying the rule rather than to Hanson, who has answered enough for one article.

If a coalition delivers most of your commitments while the remaining ones are not merely deferred but demonstrated to be unreachable — because Congress has delegated enough authority that an executive can replace one invalid statutory theory with another before a court can catch up, because a war powers vote can be kept off the floor and broken by the administration’s own vice president, and because a disclosure statute can pass, be signed, and still not be met — how many more years of eight out of ten does it take before the two are gone for good?

That is not a question about Tucker Carlson. It is a question about arithmetic, which is where this started.

Self-Reflection Prompts

1. Hanson explains four people’s public positions by reference to what each of them lost. Think of a position you hold that someone could explain the same way. Does the explanation, if true, make the position wrong?

2. The count in this article grants six of Carlson’s ten planks to the administration and disputes four. Before reading it, what number would you have given? What would you need to see to change it in either direction?

3. Thomas Massie co-wrote the statute requiring release of the Epstein files. The Department missed its deadline, and the statute’s authors allege that it remains out of compliance. If the authors of a transparency law cannot compel its enforcement, what remedy is left, and who holds it?

4. The Supreme Court held that IEEPA did not authorize the president’s tariffs, and a replacement tariff was announced under a different congressional delegation the same day. What would have to happen for a judicial ruling to constrain an executive that can invoke a different delegated authority before the replacement policy can be separately reviewed?

5. 227 people killed at sea without charge. If you believe some or all of them were guilty, what process would have established that, and what is lost by not having run it?

6. This article argues that motive is unknowable and that only conduct and public statement are available as evidence. Apply that rule to the argument you have just read. What in it would survive if you concluded the author had a personal grievance?

7. Did the year examined here leave you more free, or more governed?

Sources and Further Reading

Victor Davis Hanson, in conversation with Jack Fowler, The Victor Davis Hanson Show, August 11, 2026.

Tucker Carlson, “Ten Things America Should Be,” August 5, 2026.

Epstein Files Transparency Act, Public Law 119-38 (November 19, 2025); H.R. 9694, Epstein Files Transparency Act II (2026).

Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, No. 24-1287 (February 20, 2026).

Congressional Budget Office, budget and economic outlook, 2026; Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, analysis of April 4, 2016.

Penn Wharton Budget Model, “Supreme Court Tariff Ruling: IEEPA Revenue and Potential Refunds,” February 20, 2026.

United States Southern Command and United States Africa Command press releases, 2025–2026; New America, tracking of American airstrikes in Somalia.

Reuters and Ipsos national survey, August 21–24, 2026.

Jeff Kellick, “Parties: The Coalitions That Seek Power,” Consequential Actions, October 21, 2025.

Jeff Kellick, “Republic or Empire — Where Do We Go From Here?” Consequential Actions, 2026 (Empire of Liberty, Article 20).

Jeff Kellick, “The Arithmetic of the Wasted Vote,” Consequential Actions, 2026 (Part 1 of this coda).

Endnotes

1. Victor Davis Hanson, in conversation with Jack Fowler, The Victor Davis Hanson Show, “Victor Davis Hanson: The FBI’s Secret Trump Probe, Birthright Citizenship, and the WNBA’s Race War,” August 11, 2026, at 1:05:01–1:18:13.

2. On the resignation of Joe Kent as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, NPR, March 17, 2026.

3. Tucker Carlson, interview, Columbia Journalism Review, July 1, 2026.

4. Tucker Carlson, live program, August 5, 2026, running 94 minutes; the ten points as posted to X, August 6, 2026. For contemporaneous summaries, see Axios, August 6, 2026, and TIME, August 6, 2026.

5. KPMG Canada, “Canadian Manufacturers Eye U.S. Production Move,” July 2026, reporting a survey of 275 Canadian manufacturing owners and senior decision-makers conducted through the Angus Reid Group panel, May 11–29, 2026. Twenty-nine percent reported having moved some or all production and a further thirteen percent said they planned to; the forty-two percent figure is the sum of the two and combines completed relocations with stated intentions.

6. United States Department of the Treasury, Debt to the Penny dataset, gross federal debt of $40,047,426,000,000 at the close of business August 18, 2026.

7. Treasury, Debt to the Penny dataset, on the $38 trillion threshold in October 2025 and the $39 trillion threshold in March 2026.

8. Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036, on net interest outlays of approximately $1.1 trillion. Rankings among budget categories vary with how the categories are grouped and are not asserted here.

9. Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036, on the projected fiscal year 2026 deficit of approximately $1.9 trillion rising to approximately $3.1 trillion by 2036. Monthly and fiscal-year-to-date deficit figures are from the Monthly Treasury Statement and are not identical to the change in gross federal debt.

10. Congressional Budget Office, estimate of the enacted reconciliation law, publication 61882, finding an increase in projected 2026–2035 deficits of approximately $4.7 trillion inclusive of economic effects and additional debt service. Tax Foundation, “OBBBA Debt, Deficits, and Tax Revenue,” giving a dynamic estimate of approximately $3.0 trillion before additional interest and approximately $3.8 trillion including it. The two estimates use different methods and windows and are not interchangeable.

11. Thomas Massie, public statement, August 19, 2026.

12. Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, interview with Donald Trump, March 31, 2016; transcript published in the Washington Post, April 2, 2016.

13. Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, analysis published April 4, 2016.

14. Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, No. 24-1287 (February 20, 2026), Roberts, C.J., decided 6–3. The holding was that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act did not authorize the tariffs imposed under it; the Court did not hold the tariff program unconstitutional and did not address tariff authority delegated by Congress under other statutes.

15. Proclamation of February 20, 2026, “Imposing a Temporary Import Surcharge to Address Fundamental International Payments Problems,” invoking Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. Section 232 sectoral tariffs on steel, aluminum, automobiles, and lumber were unaffected by the ruling.

16. Penn Wharton Budget Model, “Supreme Court Tariff Ruling: IEEPA Revenue and Potential Refunds,” February 20, 2026. Order of Judge Richard Eaton, United States Court of International Trade, March 5, 2026. United States Customs and Border Protection, refund processing figures as of July 31, 2026.

17. The White House, published statement on Canadian trade practices, August 2026. The figures in this paragraph are the administration’s own and are presented as its claims rather than as verified findings.

18. The White House, same statement, quoting the president.

19. Kellick, “Republic or Empire — Where Do We Go From Here?” Consequential Actions, 2026.

20. The Guardian, March 17, 2026.

21. Announcement of August 21, 2026 on ground beef import quotas and the stated pricing commitment.

22. Reuters, August 21, 2026.

23. On the reaction of cattle producers, statements of Colin Woodall, chief executive of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the president of the United States Cattlemen’s Association, and Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana, August 2026.

24. United States Department of Agriculture, cattle inventory of approximately 86.2 million head entering 2026. Bureau of Labor Statistics, average retail price of ground beef.

25. On the government equity positions and the United States Steel golden share, Associated Press, 2025–2026. Each position, percentage, and date requires separate confirmation.

26. Reason, on the characterization of the program as Republican socialism.

27. Kellick, “Republic or Empire — Where Do We Go From Here?” Consequential Actions, 2026, sections titled “The Case for Non-Intervention” and “Pillar 2: Restoring the War Power to Congress.”

28. United States Southern Command, figures reported August 25–26, 2026. All casualty figures for this campaign originate with the command conducting the strikes; no independent count exists.

29. On the follow-up strike of September 2, 2025 against two survivors of the first vessel attack.

30. United States Southern Command, on the ten deaths recorded as presumed lost at sea.

31. The Guardian, June 30, 2026, on the case of Ricky Joseph of Micoud, Saint Lucia. Associated Press, February 26, 2026. These are accounts from families, regional press, and national officials; United States Southern Command has not acknowledged that any fisherman has been killed in the campaign.

32. T. Elliot Gaiser, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, “Memorandum for Legal Adviser, National Security Council, Re: Proposed War Department Operation to Support Law Enforcement Efforts in Venezuela,” December 23, 2025, released in redacted form January 13, 2026. On the memorandum’s reliance on the legal framework developed for the 1989 Panama invasion, see National Security Archive, briefing book, January 16, 2026. Kellick, “Republic or Empire — Where Do We Go From Here?” dates this memorandum to December 22, 2025 and describes it as the opinion authorizing the boat strikes; both descriptions are mistaken and should be corrected there.

33. Testimony of Joseph Humire, House Armed Services Committee, “U.S. Military Posture and National Security Challenges in the Western Hemisphere,” March 17, 2026.

34. On the announced agreements with Colombia, Guatemala, and Honduras, and the Guatemalan denial, Associated Press, August 2026.

35. S.J.Res. 98, Kaine War Powers Resolution (Venezuela), advanced 52–47 on January 8, 2026; point of order raised by Senator Risch against the motion to proceed sustained 51–50 on January 14, 2026, with Vice President Vance voting in the affirmative to break a 50–50 tie. Senate Periodical Press record, January 14, 2026. Kellick, “Republic or Empire — Where Do We Go From Here?” records this vote as 51–49 and omits the tie-breaking vote; the figure should be corrected there.

36. Statement of the Cuban minister of energy and mines, May 13, 2026, reported in the New York Times, May 14, 2026. On the visit of the Director of Central Intelligence to Havana, CNN, May 14, 2026. On the president’s statement regarding taking Cuba, The Guardian, March 17, 2026.

37. United States Africa Command, airstrike figures for Somalia, 2024–2026. New America, tracking of United States airstrikes in Somalia. On the strike at Jamaame of November 2025, The Guardian; Africa Command has not accepted that casualty finding.

38. Reuters and Ipsos, national survey of 1,215 United States adults, August 21–24, 2026, margin of error 3 percentage points. Reported by Jason Lange, Reuters, August 24, 2026.

39. See note 4.

40. Epstein Files Transparency Act, Public Law 119-38, enacted November 19, 2025, introduced as H.R. 4405 by Representative Khanna, for himself and Representative Massie. The House passed it 427 to 1 on November 18, 2025; the Senate passed it by unanimous consent on November 19, 2025.

41. Representative Laura Friedman, letter to the Attorney General and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, March 6, 2026, reporting on her review of the materials at the Department on February 13, 2026.

42. Representatives Massie and Khanna, statement of February 9, 2026. The contention is theirs; no court has found, and this article does not assert, anything concerning the conduct of the individuals whose names were withheld.

43. Thomas Massie, statement on the introduction of H.R. 9694, the Epstein Files Transparency Act II, July 15, 2026. The characterizations of unlawful withholding and unlawful redaction are his allegations and have not been adjudicated.

44. Thomas Massie, television interview, July 2026.

45. On the Kentucky fourth district Republican primary of May 19, 2026, Associated Press.

46. On the South Carolina Senate runoff of August 25, 2026, The Guardian, August 25, 2026. The result was not certified at the time of writing.

47. Kellick, “Parties: The Coalitions That Seek Power,” Consequential Actions, October 21, 2025, closing paragraph.