The weaponization fund is a disgrace, and Noah Rothman is right to be angry about it. In his National Review column this week, “Economists Against Economics,” he catalogs the administration’s effort to compensate violent insurrectionists and its attempt to rehabilitate their reputations, then hangs the whole thing on a televised presidential meltdown. The piece is a thorough, justified denunciation of a misuse of public money. What Rothman carefully omits is that his own political coalition operates a far larger and more lucrative weaponization of government, one that he has never called a scandal.
I’ll grant the true half: the fund is a real misuse of taxpayer dollars. The spectacle of a president defending people who assaulted police is genuinely corrosive. Rothman is right that the administration’s law-and-order posture is a lie. But that’s not the suppressed variable. The suppressed variable is the selective outrage. Rothman’s column treats the weaponization fund as an isolated moral failure, while the Republican Party he has spent his career defending has built an entire architecture of government spending that transfers wealth upward, and he has never once called it a weaponization of the state. The same party that is outraged about a few million dollars for criminals just passed a permanent extension of the Trump tax cuts—costing roughly $4 trillion over a decade, with the benefits concentrated at the very top, as every nonpartisan score has shown. The same party that screams about deficits when a child tax credit cuts poverty in half suddenly finds unlimited borrowing capacity when the money is flowing to shareholders and private-equity managers. That is not a minor hypocrisy. It is the entire game.
Rothman’s argument depends on the reader never asking the obvious question: if misusing government power to reward political allies is the offense, why doesn’t the ledger include the carried-interest loophole, the pass-through deduction, the special treatment of real-estate moguls, the oil-depletion allowance, the Medicare Advantage overpayments, the federal contracts handed to donor-class firms? The weaponization fund is a petty-cash drawer next to the wholesale looting Rothman’s party has normalized. His column is an exercise in category construction. It defines “corruption” as anything that helps Democrats or the “wrong” kind of victim, and defines “sound fiscal policy” as anything that cuts taxes on capital gains. The technique is familiar. It is the same one the Journal editorial page uses when it denounces “government waste” while ignoring the biggest waste of all.
So what do we build on the ground where this selective-outrage tantrum stands? We don’t need another fund for political friends. We need a government that spends public money on public goods, transparently, and that applies the same standard to every program. The child allowance we ran in 2021 cost less than the Trump tax cuts and lifted nearly three million children out of poverty. That isn’t a radical proposal—it’s an existing American policy, briefly turned on, that worked exactly as predicted. The Bank of North Dakota, a state-owned bank, has been profitable for over a century and returns its earnings to the state’s general fund. The Alaska Permanent Fund sends an annual dividend to every citizen from oil revenue, and it’s popular in the reddest state in the union. These are not exotic Nordic fantasies. They are American institutions, sitting right in front of us, that use public money to build shared prosperity instead of to reward a faction.
The weaponization fund should be abolished. But the conversation Rothman refuses to have is the one about where the rest of the money goes. The selective outrage is the real corruption. Apply the same standard to every program, and suddenly the ledger looks very different. The theft isn’t the fund for criminals. It’s the permanent, bipartisan looting of the public treasury by the donor class, conducted with the full editorial support of the people who only scream about waste when the beneficiaries are their political enemies.