Last year, Peter Costello wrote “Alienation” and “disadvantage” simply cannot explain why jihadist Numan Haider tried to kill two Melbourne police officers:
The trouble with explanations like this is that the facts get in the way. The family of Numan Haider left Afghanistan to migrate to Australia. Under the Taliban, Afghanistan was a hardline Islamic state. Coming to Australia meant getting away from that.
And Australia was good to the family. They have a very nice house in a good suburb. The children received a good education. The taxpayers of Australia were pretty good to Numan Haider with schooling and services. The family lived in security and freedom — a lot more than Islamic State would ever give to a minority ethnic or religious group....
Deakin University student Tahmid Mirza, a jihadi propagandist and supporter of Islamic State, was quoted in the weekend press explaining why he has rejected this country, a country that gave him a home and an education: “… many Muslims have been harassed, betrayed and in fact lied to by the government and the so-called ‘security’ intelligence.”
In other words, he is a victim… The victims here are not the Yazidis of Northern Iraq facing genocide and extermination. The real victims are those who were taken in by Australia, given a home, healthcare, a free education and subsidised university places… This idea that Australia’s treatment of Muslims is to blame for terrorism is so fanciful you would wonder how anyone could believe it. But it is standard-issue opinion among university academics, ABC journalists and Greens senators. They act on the principle that “My enemy’s enemy is my friend”. Since they don’t like open liberal Western capitalist society, they feel natural support for those who regard themselves as at war with Western civilisation. The brutality of Islamic State does not seem to worry them nearly so much as the imagined “brutality” of the Australian Government.

Propaganda does not need proof. It needs a truth the other side already half-believes.

Caesar understood that. After Pharsalus he did not dedicate his temple to Venus Victrix, the obvious winner-goddess of a civil-war battlefield. He dedicated it to Venus Genetrix — Mother Venus, ancestress of Aeneas and therefore of the Julian house. The vow had been made when he was outnumbered. The dedication was made on the last day of a quadruple triumph. The opposition could sneer at the genealogy. They could not sneer at the victory. That is the whole trick: wrap the claim you want believed around a fact nobody can deny.

On that same late-September calendar, in 1087, a younger son was crowned at Westminster. William Rufus took England; Robert Curthose took Normandy. The Conqueror’s settlement was itself a piece of family propaganda — loyalty rewarded, primogeniture quietly set aside. Rufus held the island for thirteen years until a forest arrow ended the argument. Younger sons who win still need a story that makes the win look legitimate.

Drake’s story in 1580 is the same pattern in oak and silver. The Golden Hind crawled into Plymouth on 26 September after nearly three years. Magellan’s men had circled the world and buried their captain. Drake came home alive, the hold packed with Spanish metal, Chinese ware and cloves. Spain called it piracy. England called it a national triumph. Elizabeth took her cut and knighted him. The unanswerable fact was the ship in the harbour. Everything else — Protestant destiny, English sea-right, the humiliation of Philip — hung from that hull.

A century later the same week produced two sermons in stone and money. On 26 September 1687 a Venetian mortar found the Ottoman powder stored in the Parthenon. A building that had been temple, church and mosque for two millennia became a ruin in an afternoon. Morosini then tried to lift sculpture and dropped it. Later restorers fitted the pieces wrong. The explosion is not in dispute. What you say it means — Christian recovery, Ottoman barbarism, the cost of using a masterpiece as a magazine — is propaganda built on a crater.

That same late September, Amsterdam’s city council voted money for William of Orange’s descent on England. France had seized Dutch ships; that much was public. The vote mattered because Amsterdam held Holland’s purse. William landed in November. James fled. The Glorious Revolution acquired its adjective afterwards. The loan came first.

In 1777 Howe walked into Philadelphia on 26 September after Brandywine. Congress had already run to Lancaster and then York. Washington failed at Germantown and froze at Valley Forge while the British sat in the rebel capital. They left the next June, after France entered the war. Occupation is a fact. “The rebellion is finished” was the sentence the occupation was meant to carry. It did not survive the winter.

On 24 September 1789 Washington sent the Senate the first working map of the American executive and judiciary: Jefferson for State (still in France), Jay for the Chief Justiceship, Osgood for the post, Randolph for Attorney General. Hamilton was already at Treasury. The Judiciary Act passed the same day. Republics, too, need a founding tableau — not a myth of blood, but a slate of offices that looks inevitable once it exists.

A week either side of that date in 1792, Marc-David Lasource told the new Convention that Robespierre wanted a dictatorship. Robespierre answered that he practised only “the despotism of opinion.” Both men were using the same fact: Robespierre’s hold on the Jacobins was real. Lasource made it a crime. Robespierre made it virtue. A year later Lasource went to the guillotine with the Girondins. The accusation had been propaganda. The scaffold was not.

The method does not change. Name the goddess mother, not victor. Crown the second son and call it the Conqueror’s will. Point to the ship, the crater, the occupied city, the signed commission, the dangerous man in the club. Leave the other side to deny the meaning while they cannot deny the event. That is why these late-September days still argue. The stones, the hulls and the appointments are still there. The story nailed to them is what men fight over.

They built the scaffold. Now they are standing on it, pointing at the carpenter.

There is no serious dispute about the first term. Prominent American media did not merely cover Donald Trump. They campaigned. “Russia collusion” was the product: Steele’s dossier, Fusion’s clients, Crossfire Hurricane opened without evidence of a conspiracy, FISA built on material the Bureau never corroborated. Durham later said the quiet part in official prose. The newsrooms that sold it as Watergate II did not wait for that report. They had a story that fitted the need. They ran it.

That is the original sin. Everything since is sequel.

In the second year of the second term the White House has ended a privilege, not a right. CNN, MS NOW and Politico can still publish, still interview, still stand on the pavement and call it journalism. What they lost is the desk, the hard pass, the pretence that a 92-percent-negative shop is a neutral utility the executive must house. Vance said it plainly: special access is not the First Amendment. The outlets answered with a lawsuit and the word “ban,” because “we lost the office” does not raise money. Their remaining readers will believe them. That audience was never the country. It was the parish.

The same week, the Washington Post put anonymous officials on a claim that the Pentagon was hiding American dead in the Iran war to protect Pete Hegseth. Hegseth called it a lie. Combat deaths are not a rounding error you bury in a database. If the numbers are wrong, say so with names and next of kin, not a smear dressed as casualty accounting. Using the fallen as a lever against a cabinet officer is not watchdog work. It is the old habit: wound the administration first, verify later, if at all.

Late-night television told on itself. The hosts who treated opposition as a format ran at a loss until the companies noticed. When the act stopped paying, the act ended. That was not censorship. That was a market discovering that partisan monologue is a niche, not a public utility.

Ukraine was never only a European war in the American press. In 2019 it was an instrument. A presidential call, a leaker, a theory that the issue was the asking rather than the facts asked about. Hunter Biden’s Burisma seat was real. The press knew enough to be careful and chose volume instead. They made a song and dance of process so they would not have to sit with the substance. First-term media used Kyiv to raise a president. Second-term policy is the hangover: Biden left a war wired to keep going — money, munitions, and a settlement so costly that Washington will not simply walk the minerals and the lab footprint to Moscow. Trump cut the gift economy. He has not cut the American interest. That is not betrayal of Ukraine. It is the end of writing blank cheques while calling the signer a traitor for noticing the bill.

Venezuela is the tell. Term one: a predatory petro-state, Cuban security architecture, Chinese and Russian leases on the ground. Term two: Maduro in a New York cell, the machine still in Caracas, oil terms rewritten toward the United States. The press discovered “corruption” at the exact moment American reserves and American companies entered the picture. They will concede Havana ran the security state. They will not concede that filling a depleted Strategic Petroleum Reserve from a hemisphere we just opened is preferable to leaving the barrels in Beijing’s and Moscow’s column. It was never about Venezuelan democracy for them. It was about who sits on the crude.

Iran was supposed to be Venezuela at scale: cut the head, force the apparatus, move on. It is not. The war is in month seven. A June memorandum died on the water in Hormuz. Khamenei is gone; the system is not. Russia and China have every reason to keep a wounded theocracy breathing, the way Europe has every reason to keep Ukraine in ammunition. The mullahs can read a calendar. Survive to the midterms, hope a weakened Washington blinks. Trump says a deal after November, or annihilation if there is none. That is a president talking in two registers at once. The press hears only the register that fits the frame.

And that is the point they will not admit. They are not inserting themselves to explain the administration. They are inserting themselves to replace it — commentary as policy, framing as fact, access as birthright. When the access goes, they cry liberty. When the ratings go, they cry culture. When the dossier collapses, they cry that the question is rude.

A free press that reports what happened does not need a briefing-room lease. A partisan press that spent a decade calling the other side illegitimate should not be shocked when the other side stops subsidising the pulpit. They hoisted themselves. The rope was their own copy.

Created in politics, meant to stand above it

The Supreme Court was born of politics. It was never meant to live as politics.

On 24 September 1789, George Washington signed the Judiciary Act that turned Article III from a sentence into a system. Congress set a six-member Court, district courts, circuit courts, and the office of Attorney General. The most contested piece was Section 25: the power of the Supreme Court to review certain state judgments when federal law or the Constitution was at stake. That was not a decoration. It was the claim that the Union would have one last word on the meaning of the federal compact. John Jay sat as the first Chief Justice. The Court first convened in February 1790. Politics built the machinery. The machinery was supposed to restrain politics.

One hundred and sixty-eight years later, on the same calendar day, that claim was tested in the street.

Three years after Brown v. Board of Education, Arkansas treated a Supreme Court judgment as optional. Governor Orval Faubus used the state National Guard to keep nine Black students out of Little Rock Central High. A federal court had ordered them in. A mob formed. The mayor asked Washington for help. On 24 September 1957 President Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas Guard and sent about a thousand soldiers of the 101st Airborne from Fort Campbell. That night he spoke from the White House and refused to dress the order as a personal crusade. He called it the enforcement of court orders and the prevention of mob rule. The next morning the Little Rock Nine walked in under Army escort. The point was not that Eisenhower had become a civil-rights theologian. The point was that a state could not play “states’ rights” as a veto of federal law once the judiciary had spoken and the executive chose to enforce it. Contemporary coverage treated the troop movement as controversial. The constitutional question was older than the controversy: who prevails when a state defies a federal judgment?

That is the Court the Founders sketched and the First Congress built: a check, not a faction with robes.

The later record is harder to praise without qualification. For a long stretch the Court did not merely umpire disputes; it nationalized moral settlements that legislatures would not, or could not, finish. Abortion is the cleanest example of the inversion. For most of American history the matter sat with the states. In 1973 Roe v. Wade removed it from ordinary politics and declared a constitutional right the text does not name. Whether one welcomed the outcome or despised it, the method was the same: nine justices, then seven in the majority, substituted a nationwide rule for fifty argumentative electorates. Dobbs in 2022 returned the question to the states. That was not “the Court becoming political.” It was the Court admitting that a political question had been dressed as a constitutional command. The honest debate is whether that undoing restored federalism or merely swapped one coalition’s victory for another’s. Both charges can be made. Only one of them can be true about the 1973 method: it was judicial lawmaking.

Other distortions followed the same pattern. Issues that belong in Congress — or in statehouses — arrived at the marble building already earmarked. Oral argument became a ritual around conclusions that ideology had already ranked. Foreign policy, which the Constitution lodges principally with the President and the Senate, has been tugged into litigation strategies that treat district courts as a second State Department. That is not “balance.” It is forum-shopping with a flag.

None of this requires pretending the Court was once a monastery. Nominations have always been political. Marshall was political. The 1930s Court was political. The Warren Court was political. What changed was the habit of treating the bench as the place where unfinished culture wars are finished. A Court that is only a prize for the last election cannot be a check on the next one.

Little Rock is the rebuke to the cheap version of “states’ rights.” Faubus was not defending a reserved power. He was nullifying a federal judgment with soldiers wearing state colours. Eisenhower answered with soldiers wearing national colours. That is ugly. It is also what supremacy looks like when words on paper meet a mob. The Judiciary Act of 1789 anticipated the need. Section 25 was written because the authors did not trust every state court to prefer the Constitution to local passion.

The opposite error is just as real: a Court that confuses supremacy with invention. Protecting the Constitution is not the same as enlarging it until the political branches become spectators. If every urgent cause must be a holding, then elections are theatre and statutes are first drafts.

The Court was created from politics. It has been mired in politics. It was supposed to protect the country from the worst of politics — faction, nullification, and the permanent campaign. It does that only when it does less: enforce the text, police the boundaries between governments, and leave the rest to people who can be voted out. That is a colder vocation than prophecy. It is the one the Act of 1789 actually authorized.