Bp Barron's New Book, What Do Their Deaths Demand?

Bp Barron's What Do Their Deaths Demand? Christian Persecution Today isn't really a full-fledged "book"; it's more of a longish essay in the same vein as his 2019 Letter to a Suffering Church: A Bishop Speaks on the Sexual Abuse Crisis. It's available from Amazon, Word on Fire, and used book dealers; I got my copy at a discount from Better World Books. I was able to complete a careful reading in a couple of hours.

His scope is scrupulously limited; he confines his discussion to specifically Christian martyrdoms -- primarily individual and mass murders -- in the 21st century, although he cites parallel historical cases like St Thomas More as well. He makes no attempt to disguise the fact that the vast majority of these martyrdoms are at the hands of Muslims in historic Muslim territory, but he also cites the case of Fr Jacques Hamel, a French parish priest, who was murdered by two 19-year-old Muslims.

During the struggle, Fr Jacques was heard to say to the men, "Va t'en Satan!" (Get away, Satan!) In short order, they slit his throat. The murdered priest's last words show thst he had a keen sense of the ontours of the struggle in which he was engaged. (p 6)

Nevertheless, the limited scope of his discussion, murder of Christians by non-Christians in the 21st century specifically for practicing their Christian faith, puts a limit on what larger questions can be asked. For example, he cites the case of the 2025 shooting at the Church of the Annunciation in Minneapolis, where Robin Westman, a former student at the school, fired through the stained glass windows at children attending mass, killing two and wounding 30. But even this is perhaps a little outside Bp Barron's severely limited scope:

What motivated the killer? As is often true in these cases, his reasons were an incoherent farrago, but it seems clear that he was, at least to some degree, motivated by hatred of Christianity and the Church. (p 24)

Nevertheless, he didn't shout "Allahu Akbar!" during the episode. Bp Barron doesn't mention another episode in the Twin Cities not much later, in which a group of anti-ICE demonstrators disrupted a service at Cities Church in St. Paul, at which Don Lemon was present filming and reporting events. Nobody was killed, although it was highly publicized, and it clearly carried anti-Christian implications, however vague. The distinction the bishop apparently draws among cases like these seems unnecessarily precise.

Take, for instance, another borderline case the bishop doesn't mention: on November 5, 2009, Nidal Malik Hasan, incongruously a US Army psychiatrist, shouted "Allahu Akbar!" and opened fire on troops preparing to deploy in Afghanistan at Fort Hood in Texas, killing 13 and wounding 30. This presumably wouldn't qualify for a strict definition of "martyrdom", because although Hasan idenfified himself as Muslim and expressed the purpose of furthering Islam, his victims weren't specifically Christian.

But must martyrs, or quasi-martyrs, in a situation like this be specifically Christian? For instance, the Catholic Church in CCC 121 maintains that the Abrahamic Covenant has never been revoked. The Old Testament is full of Jewish martyrs, and by extension we must infer that Jews can still be martyrs even in the Christian era. The Parable of the Good Samaritan extends the boundaries of the faithful, while robbers are robbers no matter who you are. Militant Islam is a problem for everyone.

This extends to another head of Barron's argument, that Christianity (and for that matter, Judaism) come from the Almighty Himself and are in the nature of creation, and thus the devil is at the root of opposition. How do we fight the devil? Bp Barron insists that the fight be nonviolent:

. . . Christianity was never a matter of a new moral teaching or a deeper insight into spirituality, or one among many ways to discover God. It was the declaration of a new king and an invitation to enter the nonviolent army of that king. I say nonviolent indeed, but this is not to imply that the warfare being waged by Jesus and his followers is not real and confrontational. (pp 34-35)

But this brings us to the question of how we react to modern martyrdoms. The bishop's prescription is:

1. Pray for the persecuted
2. Stay informed
3. Persuade the government to take action
4. Provide aid to the persecuted
5. Respect religious liberty at home
6. Resist "soft" religious persecution.

But these principles are somewhat in conflict with the situation on the ground. Bp Barron sees persuading the government to take action as something along the lines of writing your congressman to support sanctions against countries that tolerate persecution of Christians, but the principle of staying informed suggests different forces are at work: in Europe, there is an asymmetric invasion by Muslim "refugees" who establish themselves in large enough numbers to demand that Europeans follow Muslim customs of dress, food, abstinence from alcohol, and sexual morality, including rape.

Shouldn't it be also a Christian principle that citizens persuade their governments to take action in matters like border control, freedom of religion at home, and impartial law enforcement? To one exent or another, these all involve the coercive power of the state. Barron has limited his scope so far that he simply doesn't take these into consideration.

Finally, we have the overall question of resurgent Islam. Bp Barron here and there approaches the question of whether Islam is evil: he certainly makes the point that worldly forces like Islam are opposed to the divine order as expressed in Christianity and seek to destroy it for that reason. But sometimes it's necessary to fight evil with violence. What does he have to say about the Reconquista, for instance? Was that overall a good thing, or would it have been better just to leave the Muslims in charge in Spain? Was it overall a good thing to liberate the death camps, which saved Jews from martyrdom?

So far, Bp Barron isn't really giving us the ammunition to work on these bigger questions.

Let's Look At The 2026 LA Mayoral Election

There are several similarities between the 2025 New York and 2026 Los Angeles mayoral elections. Both cities rejected establishment Democrat candidates, Andrew Cuomo in New York and Karen Bass in Los Angeles, in favor of Democratic Socialists of South Asian heritage, Zohran Mamdani in New York and Nithya Raman in Los Angeles. More conservative candidates, Curtis Sliwa in New York and Spencer Pratt in Los Angeles, were also-ran contenders.

I started my tech career in the distant past working for the Los Angeles City statistical office, and the map above that breaks down the winning candidate in each precinct caught my eye: purple went for Bass, while yellow-orange went for Raman. Raman beat Bass overall 54.7% to 45.3%. (My wife and I live in just about the precise geographical center of the map, in a yellow-orange area.)

The purple areas on the map represent the current Democrat alignment, an alliance of the very wealthy and African-Americans. The large purple cluster at center-left is the prosperous West Side, including Brentwood, Bel Air, Westwood, Encino, and Pacific Palisades. Oddly, Pacific Palisades itself, vocally dissatsified with Karen Bass's handling of preparation for and recovery from the 2025 fire, nevertheless went overwhelmingly for Bass. The purple and purplish areas extending downward from the center of the map are African-American.

The yellow and yellow-orange areas in the upper left, center right, and very bottom of the map went for Raman. They are primarily working-class Hispanic, white, and Asian.

Comparing the November general election totals to the June primary, Bass won the primary with 34.3%; Raman made it to the runoff with 29%, and Pratt came in third with 25.5%. It's hard to avoid thinking that much of the Pratt vote went to Raman; the Pratt voters apparently wanted a change no matter what. In addition, Bass had been a highly influential member of the Pelosi House leadership, but this alignment with the traditional Democrat establishment did her no good.

What this may mean for LA's future is hard to determine. The mayoral positions in Los Angeles and New York aren't the same; Los Angeles is only a part of Los Angeles County, which is governed by a separately elected Board of Supervisors, and the city schools are controlled by a separately elected Board of Education. The county runs the public hospitals, mental health, and social services, as well as the jails, while the county district attorney prosecutes felonies. There are also major municipal enclaves within the city boundaries, including Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, and San Fernando.

Raman also has a problem with her city council. According to Politico,

Since Raman’s last-minute entry into the race against Karen Bass in February, council members have piled on the Democratic Socialists of America-aligned progressive. Not one of Raman’s 14 colleagues has endorsed her, and the shots against her have intensified as she’s climbed in the polls.

. . . To accomplish her ambitious agenda on policing, transportation and homelessness, Raman will need a council majority to go along with her, although there’s ample reason to expect she’ll encounter resistance and deeper tensions. Raman’s platform relies on her bucking longstanding deference to council members’ positions on matters in their own districts, something she has done repeatedly over her nearly six years in office.

Council members’ complaints about Raman range from assessments of her trustworthiness and effectiveness to what some describe as a brusque professorial persona, a waffling on policy stances and an indifference to others’ priorities.

Some of the criticisms are motivated by loyalty to Bass, some come from long-simmering tensions about Raman’s personality spilling into public and others are about her approach to housing — a central plank of her candidacy — which upends long-standing City Hall customs.

The open hostility Raman is now facing has stunned even City Hall veterans.

She also campaigned on replacing LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell, apparently on the basis that LAPD cooperates too extensively with ICE. However, since the election, she's been silent on McDonnell; they've had a call, and McDonnell has pledged to work with her. If McDonnell is in fact removed, there is a concern that many LAPD officers would leave as well.

As ballots were being counted, Los Angeles Police Protective League director Jamie McBride warned that Raman’s election could lead officers to leave the department.

“If Nithya Raman becomes the mayor, the city needs to prepare for Armageddon,” McBride told NBC Los Angeles.

He added: “She won’t have to defund the police; police officers will just leave the department.”

Following Raman’s victory, the union congratulated her and said its president, Ricky Mendoza, had contacted her to establish a dialogue.

The union continued to express concern about potential cuts but acknowledged Raman’s stated opposition to further staffing declines, describing that as a shared goal.

Raman's advantage in the election was that she was a fresh face:

“Coming out of the pandemic, when encampments lined our streets and businesses were trying to reopen — we got Angelenos off the streets, made our neighborhoods safer, built more affordable housing and created new opportunities for working families,” Bass said. “We stood together through devastating wildfires and protected our immigrant communities when Donald Trump sent federal troops into our streets to spread fear and intimidation. That progress belongs to all of us.”

Raman’s campaign, by contrast, was fresh and positive. She successfully positioned herself as an outsider to the mainstream of Los Angeles politics.

Running both as a member of the council and as the alternative to the status quo gave Raman the luxury of claiming credit for city progress — she boasted of the decline in street homelessness in her district last year — while also distancing herself from the city’s struggles. She did not run a perfect campaign — a few late gaffes gave the Bass camp room for optimism as Election Day approached and the mayor closed the polling gap on the council member.

. . . Homelessness will top the agenda, and Raman has made herself susceptible to clear accountability: She has promised to reduce street homelessness in the city by 50% over the next two years. That’s a measurable goal, and one she may find hard to meet. Bass, no less committed to solutions in this area, managed to bring down street homelessness about 17% over four years.

It seems to me that voters in the 2026 election mostly were looking for fresh faces, but their dissatisfaction with the status quo reflected Spencer Pratt-adjacent concerns as much as anything else. The new faces will need to deliver.

Islam Level-Set

The short clip above is from anti-woke comedienne Arynne Wexler. It illustrates the problem for feminists and women generally in joining any coalition with Muslims. But for several days, I've also been returning to a passage from William James's 1896 essay The Will to Believe that I first encountered as an undergraduate:

A live hypothesis is one that appeals as a real possibility to the person it is proposed to. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature—it refuses to sparkle with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. But to an Arab (even if he isn’t one of the Mahdi’s followers) the hypothesis is among the mind’s possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and aliveness are not intrinsic properties of an hypothesis but relations ·of the hypothesis· to the individual thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. /p>

. . . A living option is one in which both hypotheses are alive. If I say to you: ‘Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan’, it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: ‘Be an agnostic or be a Christian’, it is otherwise: given your education, each hypothesis makes some appeal—however small—to your belief.

You can quibble a bit with his choices of dead option -- theosophy and other forms of "spiritualism" were in fact common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- but he's probably more or less correct in saying belief in the Mahdi or Islam generally was not a living option, at least in the UK and US at that time. Now, things seem to be different; avowedly Muslim US politicians are somehow able to garner electoral majorities among non-Muslims. Something has changed.

The otbher day, without too much reflection, I put the period of European confrontation with Islam from the Crusades, starting in 1095, to the Siege of Vienna in 1683. Actually, it extended over a much longer period. It began in 711, when the Umayyad general Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the Straits of Gibraltar from North Africa into Iberia. At the Battle of Guadalete that year, Tariq's forces decisively defeated the Visigoth King Roderic, establishing Muslim rule on European soil.

The Battle of Tours (or Poitiers) in 732 turned back further Muslim advances into Europe, but the Reconquista, the gradual reconquest of Muslim territories in Spain, lasted from about 722 to 1492. Intriguingly, according to Wikipedia,

The conquest was followed by a series of edicts (1499–1526) that forced the conversions of Muslims in Castile, Navarre, and Aragon; these same groups were expelled from Habsburg Spain by a series of decrees starting in 1609. Approximately three million Muslims emigrated or were driven out of Spain between 1492 and 1610.

The 1683 Siege of Vienna was only the high water mark of an entirely separate Muslim incursion into Southeastern and Central Europe.

Beginning with the conquest of eastern Thrace in the mid-1300s, the Ottomans soon took Macedonia. They fought Serbian prince Lazar and his Balkan army at Kosovo in 1389, and defeated Bulgaria soon after in 1393. Along with military conquest, the Ottomans brought Muslim settlers from Anatolia to occupy main march routes and river valleys. In 1456 Athens fell to the Ottomans, followed by Bosnian and Albanian lands, and finally Belgrade in 1521.

. . . [A]s western European countries gained power in trade routes and military prowess, formerly the purview of the Ottomans, the Ottoman Empire weakened economically and the Austro-Hungarian Empire took territories from the Ottomans, including Hungary, part of present-day Croatia (1699), and later Bosnia (1878). The position of Muslim communities gradually declined as well until the breakup of Ottoman power in the Balkans left many of them vulnerable.

The following period in the history of Muslims in the Balkans, the time of growth of nation-states, began variably in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with southern Greece becoming independent in 1821, followed by Serbia (whose northern part had been autonomous since 1815), Romania, and Bulgaria, all in 1878, and later by Albania in 1912. During these times there were forced migrations, massacres, and expulsions of Muslims, especially from the eastern Balkans, for the new nation-states were largely conceived as ethnic units tied to language and a form of Christianity. In contrast, many Balkan Muslims, who did not fit in the new nation-state design, were seen as allied with the Ottomans who had been increasingly ineffective and oppressive in the last century of their rule. Thousands of Muslims were forced to flee to Turkey. This would continue throughout the twentieth century with Balkan Muslims from Greece, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Bulgaria emigrating to the safety of Muslim Turkey.

In other words, the European confrontation with Islam took place over an extended period, often accompanying the development of nation-states, which allowed Christian culture to consolidate and assert itself, often militarily. One less-noted phase of this extended confrontation was the newly established United States' campaign against the Barbary Pirates:

In the late 18th century, the Barbary pirates were a well-known problem in Europe. These pirates—who came from Morocco, Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunisia—captured vessels sailing in the Mediterranean Sea and held their crews for ransom.

To free a captured vessel, European nations were forced to pay the ransom. Some European nations signed treaties with the four Barbary nations and paid tribute for safe passage of their vessels.

The Barbary pirates were not an issue for the American colonies while they were under the protection of the British Empire or during the Revolutionary War while they were under the protection of France. However, those protections effectively ended in September 1783 when the Treaty of Paris was signed, ending the Revolutionary War and freeing the United States from British rule.

In October 1784, the Boston brig Betsey was captured by Moroccan pirates. On July 25, 1785, Algerian pirates captured the Boston schooner Maria. Less than a week later, the Algerians also captured Captain O’Bryen’s ship, the Dauphin. Americans had a rude awakening to their hopes of free trade throughout the world.

. . . Congress didn’t approved a treaty with Algiers until September 1795. The final cost of the return of all 119 captives (other ships were captured after the Maria and Dauphin), and peace with Algiers was $642,000, plus $21,000 in annual tribute.

Piracy and the related slave trade weren't ended by the European powers until the mid-19th century. According to Wikipedia,

The number of slaves captured by Barbary corsairs is difficult to quantify. According to Robert Davis, between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured by Barbary corsairs and sold as slaves in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire between the 16th and 19th centuries.

The basic problem, which I want to go into at greater length when I get a copy of Bp Barron's What Do Their Deaths Demand? is the incompatibility between Islam and what are generally accepted as Western cultural norms, and the historicsl reality that this inmcompatibility must be resolved via the use of both military force and forcible relocation. What we're seeing currently with Muslim migration to Western countries is simply an asymmetric renewal of the same historic conflict.

In the UK, there are increasingly vocal demands that dogs not be kept as pets, because it offends Muslim sensibilities. Now, we're beginning to see the same thing in the US:

Two Muslim cops in New York stopped a nurse for no apparent reason other than that she was walking her dog. They cornered her and threatened to seize her dog. When confronted, they got angry and couldn’t say what law she had broken. This is what happens when you give these people power. All I can say is that she was lucky there were passersby, because it was 3 AM and things could’ve ended much worse. https://t.co/Dm2wFLcevm

— Dr. Maalouf ‏ (@realMaalouf) November 7, 2026

In the UK as well, we're beginning to see demands that pubs be eliminated, because alcohol offends Muslim sensibilties. This is going to have to be addressed, sooner or later. It goes beyond the problem that Muslims kill Christians, and it extends to the current condition that Islam is effectively being foced on the West as a living option.

"The Middle Finger To Millions Of American Voters"

There's absolutely nothing new in the UK Guardian's take on Trump's choice of Stephen Miller to replace Susie Wiles:

Donald Trump just gave the middle finger to millions of American voters.

Any other president who suffered the kind of drubbing at the polls that Trump did this week might have felt at least a sliver of humility – and perhaps even an obligation to work with the new opposition in Congress.

But not for the first time in his political career, Trump veered in the opposite direction. On Friday he made Stephen Miller, condemned by Democrats and civil rights groups as a white nationalist, one of the most powerful unelected officials in Washington by naming him White House chief of staff.

Miller is the architect of Trump’s far-right, nativist immigration agenda. He is, therefore, arguably the architect of the blue wave that engulfed Republicans in Tuesday’s midterm elections as voters – including many Latinos – expressed their disgust. Yet instead of firing Miller, Trump promoted him.

Actually, nobody is quite sure what caused Tuesday's losses. The immigration agenda certainly wasn't one of the factors in Vance's post-mortem; he blamed things on gas prices and the Iran war. Others suggest the Republicans in fact hadn't stressed the results of the deportration policy enough: there's no other explanation for the decreasing crime rate, nor the increasing above-the-board employment. But one thing I've been saying here for six years is that Trump has proven to be a remarkably talented and resilient political amateur. In my first post here, I said,

There's nothiing unique about Trump as a Republican. Abraham Lincon was regarded as an uncouth, insurgent, and divisive figure throughout his political career. The insurgent Republican tradition continues through Coolidge, Nixon, Goldwater, Reagan, and Newt Gingrich. In that context, there's nothing really new about Trump. I've tried to explain this to my Ivy League schoolmates to no avail. They won't even listen when I try to tell them how similar he is to Harry Truman.

In fact, I've always thought he's even closer to a founding Democrat, Andrew Jackson. Maybe I wasn't paying attention in history class, but I've always thought the conventional narrative on Jackson starts with the Battle of New Orleans and then fast-forwards to the second Bank of the United States, skipping the most interesting parts:

Following the [War of 1812], Jackson remained in command of troops in the southern half of the United States and was permitted to make his headquarters at the Hermitage. Appointed as Indian commissioner plenipotentiary, Jackson continued to displace the Native Americans in areas under his command. Despite resistance from Secretary of the Treasury William Crawford, he negotiated and signed five treaties between 1816 and 1820 in which the Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee and Chickasaw ceded tens of millions of acres of land to the United States. These included the Treaty of Turkeytown, Treaty of the Chickasaw Council House, Jackson and McMinn Treaty, Treaty of Tuscaloosa, and the Treaty of Doak's Stand.

Jackson soon became embroiled in conflict in Florida. The former British post at Prospect Bluff, which became known to Americans as "the Negro fort", remained occupied by more than a thousand former soldiers of the British Royal and Colonial Marines, escaped slaves, and various indigenous peoples. It had become a magnet for escapees and was seen as a threat to the property rights of American enslavers, even a potential source of insurrection by enslaved people. Jackson ordered Colonel Duncan Clinch to capture the fort in July 1816. He destroyed it and killed many of the garrison. Some survivors were enslaved while others fled into the wilderness of Florida.

White American settlers were in constant conflict with Native American people collectively known as the Seminoles, who straddled the border between the U.S. and Florida. In December 1817, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun initiated the First Seminole War by ordering Jackson to lead a campaign "with full power to conduct the war as he may think best". Jackson believed the best way to do this was to seize Florida from Spain once and for all. Before departing, Jackson wrote to President James Monroe, "Let it be signified to me through any channel ... that the possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States, and in sixty days it will be accomplished."

Jackson invaded Florida, captured the Spanish fort of St. Marks, and occupied Pensacola. Seminole and allied Native resistance was effectively ended by May 1818. He also captured two British subjects, Robert Ambrister and Alexander Arbuthnot, who had been working with the Seminoles. After a brief trial, Jackson executed both of them, causing an international incident with the British. Jackson's actions polarized Monroe's cabinet. The occupied territories were returned to Spain. Calhoun wanted him censured for violating the Constitution, since the United States had not declared war on Spain. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams defended him as he thought Jackson's occupation of Pensacola would lead Spain to sell Florida. Spain ceded Florida in the Adams–Onís Treaty in exchange for the United States assuming all claims against Spain by American citizens and renouncing all claims to Texas west of the Sabine River. In February 1819, a congressional investigation exonerated Jackson, and his victory was instrumental in convincing the Seminoles to sign the Treaty of Moultrie Creek in 1823, which surrendered much of their land in Florida.

Ever wonder how Jacksonville, FL got its name? Trump's appointment of Miller strikes me as yet another Jacksonian stroke. Jacob Heilbrunn writes in The Spectator behind a paywall, but text courtesy of Instapundit,

No one is more loathed among Democrats – and no one is more apt to do battle against them – than Miller. Or so apparently goes Trump’s own thinking. Sam Tanenhaus, the author of a perspicuous new biography of William F. Buckley, Jr., reminded me that Trump’s ghostwriter Tony Schwartz declared to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

According to Tanenhaus, “Miller is the virtual version. The Don is going nuclear.”

He is indeed. But it’s also the case that in turning to the architect of his hardline policies on immigration, Trump may well accelerate the meltdown of his presidency. Confronted with a crushing midterm defeat, Trump’s impulse has been to wish it out of evidence. He’s spent the last few days mostly talking up the vanity building projects in Washington that irked voters.

The appointment of Miller is the latest sign that Trump has no intention of attempting to placate an angry electorate, let alone reach an accommodation with the Democrats that he has deemed communists. As it happens, this is the very language that Miller himself has sedulously employed for several decades. He is the protégé of the late David Horowitz, a lapsed communist who moved right during the Reagan era and who pioneered a new smash-mouth politics that branded Democrats as traitors. Like his mentor, Miller is in word and deed a Leninist who believes that there can be no accommodation, no quarter given to the enemy. After his old mentor Jeff Sessions, who briefly served as Trump’s attorney general during his first term, fell out of favor, Miller didn’t hesitate to abandon him.

Is Miller a closet Leninist? So far, unlike Lenin, he hasn't established a system of gulags, so whatever ruthlessness he may possess hasn't reached that level. Does Miller's appointment signify the meltdown of Trump's presidency? Trump has been written off time after time. My conclusion after Tueaday, though, is that Trump has recognized he's one of the few people who doesn't need to worry about 2028 -- but another one who doesn't is lame-duck Sen Thom Tillis:

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) blasted President Trump’s Friday decision to replace outgoing White House chief of staff Susie Wiles with top adviser Stephen Miller, saying the president “needs to rethink” his decision.

“I’ve criticized a lot of the president’s advisors for bad advice that I think … created some of the environment on Tuesday, but the president made this decision, and the president needs to rethink it,” Tillis told CNN’s Jake Tapper Friday.

“It is a colossal mistake, and the last thing we need 72 hours after the a– whooping we got on Tuesday,” he added.

As I noted yesterday, Trump has hos own agenda; he's had it at leaast since 2016. Republicans have only occasionally been cooperative, but that's not going to stop him from continuing to push it.

Republicans Wishing There Had Been Some Kind Of Act They Could Have Passed To Save America https://t.co/dSeYH5awVJ

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) November 6, 2026

Let's Take A Closer Look At Vance's Election Post-Mortem

There's been a lot of reaction to J D Vance's election post mortem, given in an X post Wednesday, much of it negative. Here's the key passage:

Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:

1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel

. . . The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.

If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.

In general, US presidents of both parties from Truman onward haven't done badly by supporting Israel, or at least appearing to do so, whatever they were actually doing behind the scenes. If we allow them the wiggle room they've always had, I don't see how it serves anyone to make any visible major change, which it seems to me Vance is expressing here. In my view, it's a bad idea to go against scripture, and in the view of the Catholic Church, to which Vance subscribes, the Abrahamic Covenant is still in force (Genesis 12:2-3):

I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you. All the families of the earth will find blessing in you.

I like Eric Florack's answer at PJ Media, Vance Wants an ‘Honest Conversation'? Fine, Here’s One.

Look, Vance is correct that the war was in fact a major voting issue. But let’s also acknowledge most of that is being driven by the Left still scrambling to tack anything they can onto President Trump. However, protection of the country, and frankly the whole of the West, transcends politics. Someone wanting to sit behind the Resolute Desk should understand that as a matter of instinct. Vance's comments are a clear indication that he doesn't and that his priorities are backward.

. . . You don't judge a war to keep a nuclear weapon out of the hands of men who chant "Death to America" by how it moved one midterm. You judge it by what happens if you lose it, or if you never fight it.

Vance dared someone to argue the war was worth the cost. Challenge accepted, and his boss beat me to it. Asked whether he'd do it again, Trump didn't flinch: "Because long term, it's the only answer. You can't let Iran have a nuclear weapon."

. . . Here's the irony Vance walked right past. His own pollster's list includes "put America first." Keeping a nuke away from a regime that has spent 47 years calling us the Great Satan is about as America First as policy gets. You can't put America first while letting its sworn enemy build the bomb.

Leadership sometimes means taking a beating for doing the right thing. History has a long list of men who did, and they are among our most celebrated figures, though in their day, they took an electoral beating for their positions.

Scott Pinsker, who is frequently insightful, and who like me has a backgound in crisis management, has a take in a different direction:

Vance’s statement directly undermined the White House’s communicative goals. Instead of putting the “defeat” storyline to bed and flipping the page to something unifying and positive, he gave it a shot of adrenaline: The Iran War is now a MAGA litmus test. If you supported the war, you’re why we lost. And going forward, “changing our relationship with Israel” will be a pillar of the new MAGA mission.

Neither was necessary. Neither will mend fences, foster unity, or rally the troops.

. . . Vance’s wording — “change our relationship with Israel” — was awfully interesting, because it’s a suspiciously open-ended phrase: Moving closer to Israel would also be a change, yet somehow, I doubt that’s what Vance intended.

Fox News’ politics editor, Katelyn Caralle, also doubts it. She wrote, “A source familiar with post-election schedules said the Vice President’s X post today was made after a White House meeting on aligning messaging following Tuesday’s Republican bloodbath. Instead, [Vance] took control of his own response. One Trump official described Vance’s post as a rallying cry to the “new right” — a coalition of Republicans that align with Trump’s “America First” movement but believe the president is too aligned with Israel on foreign policy.” [emphasis added]

JD Vance’s 2028 strategy is clear: He’s not looking to inherit Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. That’s why he’s not even trying to reunite it.

He’s building a brand-new movement — the “new right” — and it’s significantly closer to Tucker Carlson’s worldview than to Ted Cruz's or Ron DeSantis's.

The unashamedly Jewish commentator in the Global Jewish Channel YouTube post embedded above has a pragmatic take at 6:50:

I just want to pick up on that "change our relationship to Israel". What exactly do you mean by that? What about the relationship bothers you? He knows that there are these people who are saying Israel bascially dictates American foreign policy, which is so absurd. It was literally Trump that said to Israel last year, in summer of 2025, "Stop it!" after the 12-day war. By the way, had Israel kept going, you might have had a lot of the aims of Trump's new war with Iran achieved by Israel.

So, what exactly bothers him about the relationship? I know whsat the Jew-haters are saying about the relationship, but what bothers him? Let's be clear. America gains far more, actually, from its relationship with Israel, both from a security standpoint -- what they would have to spend compared to what they actually do with Israel there -- by Israel providing them with the military edge, security edge, intelligence -- understand, if Israel was not there, all these Islamists, the regimes, wouldn't just say, "OK, we're happy now, we'll get on with our lives," they would set their sights on America and the West next.

I think the issue is actually what I raised Wednesday, that re-confronting Islam will likely be a task for some generations to come in the West. Trump seems to have had a pretty comprehensive to-do list for his second term, and major items there appear to have been Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba, not to mention Greenland and Canada. So far, Trump's reaction to the midterms has been to see them as a minor bump in the road, and compared to his agenda and the fact that he still has over two years to work on it, that probably reflects his vision and determination.

By the way, I noted that Bp Barron in his new book on Christian persecution is tacitly taking up the issue of Islam as well, even if that word doesn't even appear once in the text. I've ordered a copy and will have more to say when I've had a chance to read it over.

Given his overall agenda, it's likely Trump sees the midterms as simply a justifiable cost. I can't really disagree. But then, he's pretty much the one guy who doesn't have to think about 2028.

So Is The Sky Falling?

If nothing else, Tuesday's results reflect well on current Democrat leadership, who selected and supported candidates who did surprisingly well. So naturally, those same candidates have been demanding the replacement of those leaders:

Now, less than 24 hours after the elections, various Democrats, including some of the newest ones, are calling for Schumer to be replaced. Some members of the party were already talking about this before the midterms.

. . . Schumer will be seen as an obstacle by many of the candidates he supported in the midterms and they will all turn on him if they think it will be better for them. There will be no loyalty at all.

Schumer should celebrate now, while he still can.

In the House,

Disney’s Marvel movie star Mark Ruffalo is crashing the Democrats’ midterm party, pushing a petition meant to put pressure on U.S. House Democrats to not vote House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) as House Speaker.

The Brooklyn, New York-born Jeffries has long been a staunch supporter of Israel and its right to exist as a democratic Jewish state.

. . . Ruffalo finds this unacceptable.

The Disney Avengers star is now promoting a petition to call for Jeffries to be removed from consideration and denied the Speaker of the House position, an opportunity that has arisen courtesy of the Democrats overturning the majority in a blue wave in the Nov. 3 midterms.

Then there's the Abdul El-Sayed​ problem. He's loud and confrontational, and he's a concrete manifestation of the theoretical problem that now confronts Democrats, expressed in the question someone wished could have been put to James Talarico: is Allah non-binary? Let's recognize that Nancy Pelosi spent her political career building a Democrat coalition that embraced sexual deviants, feminists, blacks, Hispanics, Jews, labor, and rich white leftists.

Adding militant Muslims to this mix runs the serious risk of throwing sexual deviants, feminists, and Jews out of the coalition, along with labor-oriented centrists uncomfortable with the general post-Pelosi drift of the party. Jonathan Turley gets this only partly right:

Like a nation of Madame Defarges, activists are eagerly knitting the names of targets into the lists of the walking dead, starting with Haley Stevens, who decided to test the “big tent” claims by splitting her ticket to vote against Abdul El-Sayed.

Various sites are running lists of targets as influencers such as Hasan Piker is posting on “WE’RE GONNA PUT YOUR ASS IN JAIL EVERYONE GET MORE WOKE RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

The conditions on the Hill are only likely to make such rage politics more appealing with the new Congress.

. . . The most immediate likely target will be Stevens, with many demanding her expulsion from the Democratic caucus. She will certainly be denied plum Committee appointments. She is now an object lesson to others not to stand in the way of the mob.

But here's where I think he gets things wrong:

The Democrats ran on fighting corruption and will now work to prove the point. They will have to fulfill the narrative and parade a line of targets before these Committees. Pundits like Jennifer Welch have even demanded calling in Barron and Tiffany Trump in this cathartic crackdown.

What is clear is that a tsunami of subpoenas will follow, and it will be a bonanza for lawyers in Washington.

These aren't the Democrats of 2018. Impeachment is a feckless option in any case, and it's a waste of everyone's time. Traditionally, newly minted senators and representatives were taken under more senior mentors' wings and told they had to "go along to get along". I suspect the new crop of Democrats will be far more confrontational and unwilling to work within a traditional system, and they'll reject leaders who've risen under the Pelosi regime. Thus current DSA-oriented Democrats now reject AOC as too moderate:

The Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) Liberation Caucus is rejecting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., as a potential candidate for Democrats in the 2028 presidential election, arguing she is too far removed from the socialist agenda.

"Liberation condemns Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's continued retreat from socialist politics and rejects any effort to present her as the future presidential standard-bearer for DSA, or for the broader socialist movement," the DSA Liberation Caucus wrote in the statement.

DSA slammed Ocasio-Cortez as an "opportunist" and condemned her vote to defend Israel’s right to exist and for not holding firm as an anti-Zionist.

The biggest problem is that current Democrat leadership, as Pelosi ages out, has neither the charisma nor the vision to hold a post-Pelosi coalition together, and a great deal of time and energy is going to be spent on intra-party disputes.

Quick Takes On The Midterms

@LeaderJohnThune Hello Senator Thune... https://t.co/lPMAETqwcn

— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) November 4, 2026

There are several countertrend results from last night:

• Republicans won both the Senate seat and the governor's race in Florida
• Ditto for Arkansas
• Republican Kelly Ayotte won reelection as New Hampshire governor.

The immediate takeaway is that DeSantis's presidential prospects aren't dead, while if Vance proposes to be more of Trump, that may not be a winning formula.

The conventional wisdom is that the Iran war was responsible for the Republican defeat.

President Donald Trump says the Iran war will end “soon,” a promise he’s been making most of this year.

Eventually he will be right, but it hasn’t happened in time for the midterm elections — and his party is bearing the brunt.

If Republicans get thumped Tuesday, all the polling suggests that prices will be one of the main reasons, with the Iran war’s contribution to higher costs looming large.

I'm not sure about this. As a public policy matter, Islam looks to become a major problem for the West. Sooner or later, it will be necessary to re-confront it, as European powers did from the Crusades to the Siege of Vienna. Iran is one of its worst modern manifestations. Trump is visionary enough to recognize this, although I'm not sure if he pursued the Iran war in the best way -- I think he underestimated the willingness of the hardliners to go against their own interests to stay in absolute power, and the result has been the same counterproductive pauses we saw in Viet Nam.

But isn't Islam the subtext of the dispute between Bp Robert Barron and Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco? Vesco's seat is in Algeria, a largely Muslim country, and his position is that the Church in Algeria should not seek conversions, but rather become part of Algerian society through coexistence and fraternity.

But the problem is that Muslims simply don't believe in coexistence and fraternity. Cdl Vesco is seeking to temporize with people who don't temporize. Bp Barron has already taken this issue on:

Bishop Robert Barron, bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester (MN) and founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, today [April 14] announced the release of his latest book, What Do Their Deaths Demand?: Christian Persecution Today.

. . . “The global persecution of Christians is not a matter of distant statistics, but an unconscionable violation of human rights that transcends political divisions,” said Bishop Barron. “This is not a partisan or peripheral concern. It is a defining measure of any just society. Every person possesses an inviolable dignity, and with it the right to seek the truth and to worship God according to conscience.”

Reflecting this call for unity, the book has received formal endorsements from both Republican and Democratic members of Congress. Bishop Barron, who serves on the President’s Religious Liberty Commission, offers the work as a resource to help awaken the public conscience and encourage solidarity with those who suffer for their faith.

Re-confronting Islam is simply a major agenda item for the West. Trump is one of the few people in leadership positions who recognize this clearly, even if his ideas on how to do this are inchoate -- as, I suppose, are Bp Barron's as well. It's also worth considering that re-confonting Islam will likely be a task for some generations to come, and neither Trump nor even Bp Barron will be the ons to lead it. So it's worth focusing on other explanations for last night's performance:

There are a lot of things to say about how poorly the Republicans did last night, and no doubt every single one of them — perspicacious or not — will be said in every way possible and far too many times for comfort.

But I want to keep my focus on one big point: Donald Trump's political instincts, at least when it comes to choosing candidates to run for office, are absolutely atrocious. He seems to have an almost uncanny ability to choose the wrong person to back.

This election cycle, Trump's biggest whiff was Darlene Graham, who managed to lose a Senate seat in South Carolina, which you have to admit takes an unbelievable amount of negative charisma. Or maybe you think Ken Paxton was the worst choice, and you could be right about that one too.

On the other hand, Trump had little choice but to endorse Darlene Graham after her brother's sudden demise, but Lindsey was an old-fashioned Republican who'd reluctantly aligned himself with Trump. Susan Collins was a similar case; neither is the future of the party, but Trump would naver have been able to force them out and find more attractive replacements for them no matter his instincts.

I think the most productive result of the midterms will be to rethink candidates and strategy for 2028. I suspect Rubio's and DeSantis's prospects are up, while Vance's are down; it will be a bad idea to run on a platform simply of more Trump.

UPDATE: Analysis from Vance:

One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up. So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us." Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026. There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true. But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone. Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were: 1) End the war 2) Focus on cost of living/inflation 3) Put America First 4) Change our relationship to Israel Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.) In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you. The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night. If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest. But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there. I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.

— JD Vance (@JDVance) November 4, 2026