Month: July 2026

Chronicles  – “Will we remain a party of conservative beliefs, or will we follow the siren song of populism?” asked former Vice President Mike Pence in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed adapted from his dud of a new book, What Conservatives Believe: Rediscovering the Conservative Conscience. One could easily wonder what conservatives have to learn from a man who polled so abysmally in the campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination that he was one of the very first candidates to drop out as President Trump rode the “populist” wave all the way back to the White House.

The false dichotomy of Pence’s question, which rests on the dubious premise that “conservative beliefs” and the ideas he calls “populism” diverge to the point of incompatibility, reveals the sad truth: What Mike Pence does not know about conservatism could fill the vast plains of the Midwest.

Readers appear to agree. Less than two months after the release of What Conservatives Believe, according to its Amazon listing, which advertises it at a 42 percent discount, Pence’s book languishes in 73^rd place among books about conservatism, with overall sales registering below more than 56,000 other commercial titles. What Conservatives Believe has turned out to be considerably less popular than the former vice president’s first book, So Help Me God, a 2022 memoir that landed on the New York Times bestseller list at least in part because, as a spokesman later admitted, Pence’s associated PAC spent $91,000 to purchase thousands of copies of it.

This time around, the deficiencies of Pence’s analysis are readily apparent from his Wall Street Journal op-ed. The “siren song” of populism, he argues, “would replace our faith in limited government and traditional values with an agenda stitched together by opinion polls, personal grievances and performative outrage.” “Populists,” he says, “follow urges, not principles. They would erode our commitment to the Constitution and abandon U.S. leadership in the world.”

In the very next paragraph, however, Pence concedes that “the failures of big government and public officials who have broken our trust” generated populism’s rise. He gives short shrift to the kaleidoscopic range of perspectives that led Americans to reject establishment candidates of both parties in 2016 and 2024, but acknowledges that globalization, economic change, drug addiction, and attacks on traditional values played definite roles.

Despite his swipe at “populism,” Pence either fails to comprehend or willingly ignores that taking a stand on all these topics—and many others he did not mention—does and ultimately must rest on clearly discernible principles. Supporting economic measures to reshore domestic manufacturing, incentivizing job-creating foreign investment, placing U.S. interests ahead of foreign interests, seeking to end socially destructive drug abuse, and wanting one’s values upheld rather than cast down are fundamentally all positions of principle that follow from empirical analysis and rational evaluations of the common good. The true distinction is that those principles are not Pence’s principles—a motley and outdated assortment of priorities that both Republican and Democratic leaders adapted after World War II to refloat devastated foreign markets, buy Cold War foreign allegiances, and amplify economic issues that they believed vital in electoral politics.

Equally unconvincingly, Pence argues that Trump’s emphasis on “common sense” also departs from the “principles” he believes should lie at the heart of the conservative movement. Why Pence thinks it would be a good idea to dissociate his ideology from common sense is anybody’s guess, but once again his argument degenerates into an assertion of what he and the tiny minority of Republicans who support him believe to be correct principles over the contradictory or clashing ideas of the vast majority of Republicans who despise him and support Trump.

Ultimately, Pence’s hollow appeal to “principle” is far more about the power to shape American conservatism than to advance pretensions to unyielding ethical or philosophical truth. He felt the power dynamics perhaps more acutely than any other anti-Trump conservative on Jan. 6, 2021, when he resisted calls not to certify the 2020 election results by appealing in yet another case to “principles” that allowed him to avoid controversy. It did not help him in the long run.

When he ran for president in 2024, Republicans remained almost totally unconvinced and registered their resentment in his low polling. Nor was the country at large convinced. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released just weeks before Pence dropped out found that 57 percent of American adults viewed him negatively, while only 28 percent held a positive view.

Appealing to what he called “principle” on Jan. 6 is almost certainly what Mike Pence will remain best known for. His new book, which is endorsed by vocal but superannuated conservative figures such as George Will, Paul Ryan, Phil Gramm, Mitch Daniels, and other names ousted from prominence and influence in the GOP a decade or more ago, is but one prong in a strategy to build up think tanks, media posts, and other artifacts of outsized establishment influence to try to counter the populist tide favored by conservative nationalists now who control the commanding heights of electoral politics.

But what hope does this fading GOP establishment have? Its neoconservative leaders never bothered to mentor protégés, cultivate acolytes, or delegate power. Now they find themselves without successors as real power in the GOP fluctuates with no reference to them between different strands of Trumpism. “It’s become clear to me: This is not my time,” Pence said when he withdrew from the 2024 primary after less than five months of campaigning. In all likelihood, it never will be.

Chronicles – Christopher Nolan’s Long, Woke Voyage to Nowhere

The Odyssey (2026) 

Directed by Christopher Nolan ◆ Screenplay adaptation by Christopher Nolan ◆ Produced by Universal Pictures and Syncopy ◆ Distributed by Universal Pictures.

“Hahaha. Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!” Lawrence, Massachusetts, high school teacher Heather Levine tweeted in 2020, responding to a post from a fellow “scholar-educator” who called Homer’s epic poem “trash.” The Wall Street Journal reported that the teachers were part of an online group of left-wing activist educators who tried to get Homer’s epic and other classics of Western literature banned from classrooms because of their supposedly racist, sexist, and ableist contents.

These undoubtedly enlightened purveyors of knowledge have yet to register any reaction to this summer’s blockbuster release of Sir Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s epic. Nolan’s film, which he co-produced with his wife Emma Thomas and for which he wrote the script, debases The Odyssey so cheaply that Hellenophobic New England schoolmarms might well be pleased, assuming they are not too triggered to see the film.

Nolan was on tap to direct Troy, an adaptation of Homer’s Iliad executed more than two decades ago by Wolfgang Petersen, but the studio eased Nolan out of the project, giving him Batman Begins as a consolation prize. Nolan has said in interviews that at the time, he felt ill-prepared to tackle The Iliad. He only conceived his Odyssey project in 2024, after the stunning success of Oppenheimer, his disjointed biopic of the troubled atomic bomb scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, which won seven Academy Awards. According to interviews, Nolan kept the subject of his next film secret for nearly a year while he read several translations of Homer’s epic, along with various related media, apparently including comic book adaptations.

Perhaps naturally, Nolan contextualized The Odyssey within his larger oeuvre of feature films, many of which, including Memento, Interstellar, and his Batman trilogy, relate existential quests involving emotionally tortured men who suffer from familial loss. From that perspective, Homer’s epic—a hero’s 10-year voyage home from a distant battlefield to a faithful but beleaguered family—may have seemed a natural fit. Nolan had the time, money, and opportunity to make a stirring and searching literary adaptation of great significance, if for no other reason than that a serious film adaptation of The Odyssey hasn’t been undertaken since Italian director Mario Camerini’s flawed 1954 attempt in technicolor, Ulysses, starring Kirk Douglas.

Much work certainly went into Nolan’s version of The Odyssey. Notably, it is the first feature film to be made exclusively with IMAX cameras. IMAX cameras have the highest possible resolution, but they are also limited to shooting segments of about three minutes, separated by breaks to reload the next sequence. The film’s acting, such as it is, looks seamless to anyone unaware of this technical challenge. On-location filming spread across much of the globe, including Greek and Italian settings identified with the epic as well as remote locations in the United Kingdom, North Africa, and even Iceland, which was the setting for Odysseus’s sojourn in Hades. Nolan took great care to capture the gritty experience of soldiers at war and returning from it. His production and costume designers, both Oppenheimer veterans, invested a great deal of time and energy into recreating Bronze Age clothing and weapons to capture as much authenticity as possible from the extant material record.

Although it has gone largely unnoticed, the film also incorporates recent archeological scholarship to situate the time of the Trojan War and its aftermath within the so-called Late Bronze Age collapse, a period of several decades around 1200 BC, when a series of cataclysms around the Mediterranean littoral caused several powerful civilizations to disappear or decay. Nolan’s dialogue makes ominous references to the “Sea Peoples,” marauders of theorized provenance who are believed to have wrought havoc in the region around that time.

Indeed, the film concludes with Odysseus musing that his civilization stands on the verge of a “dark age”—a period of several centuries following the collapse—in which his deeds will only be sung, because writing will become a lost art amid general cultural degradation.

The theorized historical dimensions of the epic are thoughtful, if debatable, and Nolan might have made more of them. Alas, the drama does not rise to the intellectual challenge. Most of his nearly three-hour film falls flat, with visually impressive but poorly scripted action scenes alternating with tedious meditations on the characters’ misfortunes. Their hurts and losses are acute, not because they represent the moral messages of The Odyssey, but because they myopically miss its timeless messages about the nature of courage and hubris, duty and ambition, fate and resignation, heroism and triumph.

The ensemble dialogue was so trite and peppered with hackneyed American slang that I found myself rooting for the Cyclops and the sea monster Charybdis. Matt Damon’s wooden Odysseus plods through the character’s tasks and challenges, but he never seems to care much about returning home to Ithaca. Even when he uncovers the nymph Calypso’s ruse—feeding him lotus leaves to keep him sensual and sedated—he reacts like it was a schoolgirl’s trick and departs with all the conviction of someone leaving a bad party. Ironically, it is Charlize Theron’s performance as Calypso that is the film’s most alluring. Her charms are lost on the unemotive oaf she keeps around, if not on the viewer who witnesses their drama.

It is often said that contemporary films about the past inevitably say more about our own times than the times they are meant to relate. In Odysseus’s occasional meditative moments, Nolan imagines him guiltily dwelling on the destruction of Troy—an action that, for most of world history, was regarded as a heroic deed. Nolan casts it as a crippling source of “trauma” that Odysseus spends much of his 10-year voyage home trying to reconcile with the ethics of a culture he believes he has betrayed. In the process, our “hero” emerges more as an “anti-hero,” and a guilty white male one at that.

If Odysseus is dogged by self-doubt, his ancient civilization certainly has far more room for notions of female and minority empowerment than I recall from my childhood reading of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of the poem. In Nolan’s film, a reminder of Odysseus’s chronic guilt emerges in frequent visits—or are they hauntings?—from the goddess Athena, whose corporeal vision turns out to be that of a Trojan woman executed at the goddess’s altar when her city fell. The specter of gender-based violence sweeps away any notion of martial achievement.

Perhaps to strengthen the point, Athena is played poutingly by Zendaya Coleman, a biracial actress whose appearance recalls the late political scientist Martin Bernal’s thoroughly debunked 1987 thesis—presented in a controversial work titled Black Athena—that the ancient Greeks were really of African origin. Odysseus’s crew and other actors have Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern heritage, but seemingly as a matter of course, the work’s foundational victim—Helen of Troy—is played by black actress Lupita Nyong’o.

In Odysseus’s absence, his wife Penelope—played with grating stridency by Anne Hathaway—must manage the household of suitors who abuse ancient hospitality laws to court her. They intend to win Ithaca’s throne on the assumption that Odysseus has died and that she is now an available widow. Led by Robert Pattinson’s hissable Antinous, they are an obnoxious lot. But does confounding them really require an anti-patriarchal screed against a system that denies a woman’s right to rule even as she claims to do all the work of a king?

Between Athena and Penelope, Odysseus must also grapple with Circe, a Homeric siren whom Nolan reimagined as a liberal white woman. The men she has transformed into pigs, she explains with passive-aggressive rage, are not victims of diabolical witchcraft but merely realizing their true nature. According to woke Hollywood, the true nature of men is that of bottom-feeding predators who must be neutralized—and, one might presume, eliminated—for the good of the world. Samantha Morton’s plain features and disheveled appearance make Circe look like she just returned from the nearest protest march. Odysseus instructs his rescued men to leave her be, essentially mandating that they validate her “truth.” Even in ancient Greece, apparently, we must “believe all women.”

This appears to include when they claim to be men. Nolan lifted a small episode from Virgil’s Aeneid—the Latin epic that chronicles Rome’s founding by Trojan survivors—to present the audience with Elliot Page, a biological woman who started her life and career as Ellen Page, in the small role of Sinon. She/he announces the “gift” of the Trojan Horse that will carry Odysseus and his warriors into the walled city. One can only wonder what the real infiltration is.

Alas, even a woke film is not immune from ideological error. At least one scene was filmed in Western Sahara, a United Nations-designated “non-self-governing territory” that Morocco has occupied since 1975. Angry commentary published in The Guardian on the eve of the film’s release accused Nolan and his production team of cultural insensitivity because the indigenous population claims to be oppressed and facing “erasure” while also suffering severe limitations on self-expression, including in filmmaking. A boycott of the film has been demanded. Apparently, the human struggle can only continue.

Throughout the 16 years of former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s second premiership, which lasted from 2010 until his Fidesz Party’s devastating defeat in April, liberals on both sides of the Atlantic derided his government as “authoritarian” and even “autocratic.” In the end, however, it proved neither “authoritarian” nor “autocratic” enough to avoid losing, in what were universally recognized free elections, to the opposition Tisza Party. Tisza, which was formed and led by Orbán’s former acolyte Péter Magyar, ran on an anti-corruption platform and captured a supermajority large enough to change Hungary’s constitution.

The left was ecstatic to see the world’s flagship national conservative government fall, but recent developments have begun to make Orbán’s international critics think twice. For one thing, upon Magyar’s assumption of office on May 9, he demanded the resignation of Hungary’s constitutionally elected president Tamás Sulyok. Sulyok was an Orbán ally and as president, he had the power to veto parliamentary legislation. Magyar also asked for the resignations of several appointed judicial officials. Tisza, Magyar’s party, has abolished government agencies that promoted Fidesz civil society initiatives and it established government conservatorship over NGOs and educational institutions perceived as being too closely affiliated with people sympathetic to Fidesz.

Magyar’s government has taken decisive steps to prevent Orbán personally from ever returning to power. In June, Tisza passed term limits barring any individual from serving as Hungary’s prime minister for more than a lifetime total of eight years. The legislation is retroactive to 1990, the first complete year after Hungary emerged from communism, and applies only to Orbán, the sole person in the country who has exceeded the newly imposed maximum.

Magyar’s supermajority is only getting bolder. On July 13, it passed a constitutional amendment, part of a reform the new prime minister calls “Operation Purgatory Fire,” to remove Sulyok from Hungary’s presidency, as well as Hungary’s constitutional court president and three other judges serving on that body. The amendment also limits all members of parliament to serving a maximum of three four-year terms. This measure, which is also retroactive, will indefinitely bar more than half of Fidesz’s remaining deputies from standing for reelection. Tisza’s deputies, all of whom were just elected for the first time, have another 12 years before the term-limiting legislation applies to them. No wonder the government block greeted the winning vote with a standing ovation.

Critics have argued that removing Sulyok in this way would violate the rule of law. Magyar dismissed such concerns, deriding the president and other Fidesz-aligned officials as “puppets” of “the political and economic mafia that has ruled our country for the past 16 years”—suggesting that Fidesz officials were unworthy of legal niceties. According to the letter of the amendment, the constitutional court jurists are being retired because they are over the age of 70, but all four of the ones affected are allegedly aligned with Orbán. Notably, in 2011 Orbán introduced a similar age limit on Hungary’s constitutional court judges but backed down after the European Union’s Court of Justice ruled the move unlawful.

EU institutions, in contrast, have offered no criticism of Magyar’s unfolding reforms. To the contrary, on the day parliament passed the new amendment, the European Commission approved a $2.3 billion cash infusion to Hungary’s government-owned national development bank as a reward for improving on Orbán-era governance issues. On July 10, the previous business day before the amendment vote, the EU unfroze an even larger $11.5 billion package of grants and loans long withheld from Orbán that was originally meant for post-COVID pandemic recovery.

Under Hungary’s constitution, the recent amendment could not be adopted without Sulyok’s signature, effectively requiring him to consent to his own removal from office. Fidesz leaders had the option to refer the amendment to the constitutional court, which could have reviewed it for possible procedural laws, but Magyar argued that passing the amendment alone is sufficient to make it legal and threatened to bring impeachment proceedings against Sulyok if he refused to sign it.

On July 18, Sulyok, who described the amendment in a somber video posted to X as “unconstitutional,” a “grave and shameful example of abuse of power,” and a “serious blow” to the rule of law, signed it to avoid a political crisis. The Tisza speaker of parliament will now replace him. Orbán took to X to declare that “today, the final barrier fell. Arbitrary rule is no longer a looming threat; it is a reality. If they can do this to the President of the Republic, they can do it to anyone.”

Orbán may well be right, since Tisza’s parliamentary supermajority can alter any aspect of national law, and now can do so with little or no prospect of a presidential veto. International leaders, particularly EU officials who spent more than a decade and a half excoriating Orbán, have yet to say anything critical of Hungary’s apparent democratic backslide under Magyar. But some cracks may be forming in the united front against him. In June, Human Rights Watch, a longtime Orbán critic, issued a report arguing that Magyar’s “rushed constitutional changes undermine the rule of law.” In response to the amendment’s passing on July 13, Amnesty International, one of Orbán’s harshest critics, stated on social media that “we think the government’s current solution is not okay” because it “ignores the fact that Tamás Sulyok has the right to fair proceedings” that observe “appropriate legal guarantees.”

In April, Hungarians voted decisively for change and were motivated above all by an animus against perceived corruption. But if Magyar continues to act in fact the way his old boss was only accused of acting, they may regret their choice.

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” states the Fourteenth Amendment.

But are those whose parents are here temporarily as tourists or illegally because they have snuck across the border or overstayed a visa really “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”?

To the Supreme Court, yes.

The bench ruled in a 5-4 decision that the clause grants unrestricted citizenship to virtually all individuals born on American soil. Practically speaking, the only newborns excepted are those of foreign diplomats.

The ruling voids President Trump’s executive order barring citizenship to children born of parents present illegally or on a lawful but temporary basis. That includes as many as 250,000 babies a year.

Conceived in the aftermath of the Civil War, the citizenship clause was written to ensure that freed slaves and their children counted as citizens. It was not written to enable “birth tourism” or the barbarous “surrogacy networks.” These schemes cater to foreigners specifically to produce American citizens — or worse, to sneak in children of hostile foreigners.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson used hip-hop slang in her opinion favoring this travesty of a ruling. The creators of the Fourteenth Amendment “understood the assignment,” she wrote, referring to a song by the rapper Tay Money. The “assignment,” in Jackson’s view, appears to be to import as many new Democratic voters as possible, since the Left can’t seem to win with the native-born population.

Justice Clarence Thomas has a better understanding of the citizenship clause. He notes that it gives lustre to the idea of American citizenship. Unfortunately, as he adds in his dissenting opinion, the court’s ruling “devalues” that very citizenship.

The Supreme Court’s ruling runs against the prevailing sentiments of most Americans. A May Harvard/Harris poll shows 56% of the country favors the deportation of all illegal immigrants. Some thinkers who believe America should be allowed to protect its own borders are predicting the end of America as we know it. “If your ruling requires you to suicide your civilization,” White House adviser Stephen Miller told Fox News, “your reading of the Constitution is wrong.”

But solutions can be found. The most obvious move — though it’s a long shot — would be for Congress to adopt an amendment redefining citizenship eligibility in unambiguous terms to exclude those who come here illegally or temporarily. Sen Rand Paul (R-Ky.) proposed such an amendment in April. If adopted, his amendment would narrow the category of individuals “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” to US citizens and foreign nationals who have permanent and active residency or who serve in the military. Thus, only the children of those people would get birthright citizenship.

This more focused definition would align US policy on birthright citizenship with that of about 170 other countries, including all of our adversaries, who do not allow it.

Simpler solutions are possible too. President Trump has suggested he would support legislation to make the circumstances that allow for birthright citizenship harder. This already includes, for example, limiting illegal border crossings, which have been practically eliminated in his second term. You can’t drop an anchor baby here if you can’t get here in the first place. And he has overseen some 3 million repatriations — voluntary or otherwise — since returning to office and promises more.

And more can be done. On the same day as the Supreme Court’s ruling, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) announced his “Anchors Away Act.” This would prohibit pregnant foreigners from entering the country. There’s already precedent for such a move — immigration officers can deny a woman entry if they believe her reason for entry is birth tourism. The Justice Department issued a memo the same day urging the prosecution of unlawful birth-tourism schemes.

The Supreme Court’s ruling may have sold out the country’s national interest. But Republicans should understand their assignment.