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The Obama Presidential Center, located on Chicago’s South Side, opened in June 2026, nine years and five months after Barack Obama’s term in office concluded. The politicians who build these centers force themselves to run one final fundraising gauntlet, not to finance an election campaign but to leave behind an edifice that makes an enduring case for their probity, sagacity, and historical importance.

What sets Obama apart is that he began publicly discussing the greatness he hoped for prior to occupying, winning, or seeking the nation’s highest office. “My attitude about something like the presidency is that you don’t want to just be the president,” Barack Obama told journalist Jacob Weisberg in 2006. “You want to change the country. You want to make a unique contribution. You want to be a great president.” Later in the interview he said, “There are, what, maybe 10 presidents in our history out of 40-something who you can truly say led the country? And then there are 30 who just kind of did their best.”

From a young age, we ask kids what they want to be when they grow up. Firefighter, doctor, president, mechanic, astronaut, teacher, actor—the list goes on.

Dreams shift as children discover their gifts, what they enjoy, and where the two overlap. The kid who wanted to be a doctor might change his mind after finding out he can design spaceships and likes math better than anatomy.

Allowing people to follow their dreams has always been an American aspiration and part of what makes our country exceptional. Yet today, one group of Americans—young men—is at risk of being shut out from their dreams, largely through no fault of their own.

Mountains of evidence show that our education system and economy are increasingly leaving boys and men behind. This is a national crisis our political leaders must urgently acknowledge and address.

For Exhibit A, simply look at the last 50 years of wage trends. Although earnings for women have steadily increased, nearly doubling in the last half-century, men’s wages have remained largely stagnant. Indeed, while the inflation-adjusted median full-time wage for women has grown by $21,750 since 1976, it has increased for men by only $7,570.

America came closer to going net zero than many realize. To explain its rise, we need to consider a prophetic 1983 essay, “Risk and Culture,” by British anthropologist Mary Douglas and American political scientist Aaron Wildavsky. They argued that the risks a society deems most serious are a product of culture. “Each social arrangement elevates some risks to a high peak and depresses others below sight. This cultural bias is integral to social organization,” they wrote.

Douglas and Wildavsky observed the rise of the environmental movement as an insurgent political force, or what they termed the “border.” Led by white Boomer liberals inspired by the African Americans’ fight for civil rights, environmentalists appropriated the movement’s moral absolutism and refusal to compromise.

The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Europe Lurches Leftward Toward Disaster. Can It Recover? | The American Mind Podcast

I really am—honest—trying to write a rather long and complicated book and don’t have time for things like this. But when one’s good name is impugned, sometimes thumos (to coin a phrase) gets the better of one.

Professional X Troll James Lindsay keeps dragging me into his every little fever dream. I almost always let it pass, though I did once demonstrate that he knows nothing about Plato, Carl Schmitt, or political philosophy generally.

Now he has committed yet another disastrous unforced error, on some level realizes it, and is spinning frantically to direct fire outward at everyone who has shown that he has once again made an utter fool of himself.

The nub is—literally—this: Amanda Milius, a filmmaker and former State Department official, recently gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Jerusalem. For the record, I was not there and did not watch or read the speech. But I have known Amanda for eight years and doubt I would be surprised by the content.

I came here because supposed friends on the Right, as well as enemies on the Left, are slandering the great realignment that the American Right has been undergoing over the last decade, which led to the coalition that put Trump in office for the second time in 2024.

I noticed that by merely announcing online my plan to attend this conference, I have since been called both a Nazi and a sellout to the Zionists. This dual claim may not make logical sense, but it does give us a sense of what’s happening right now. People are trying to rip our coalition apart.

Many are now being encouraged to conclude that the New Right, the coalition that helped put President Trump back in the White House, and a whole generation of young conservatives have gone mad. And that story is no doubt very useful to the people telling it. The problem is that it’s just not true.

The National Security Strategy released last year describes President Trump’s foreign policy using these words: “realistic,” “pragmatic,” “principled,” “muscular,” and “restrained.” To quote: “It’s not grounded in traditional political ideology. It is motivated above all by what works for America—or, in two words, America First.”

Arizona law does not permit the state to require an employee to undergo training that presents blame or judgment on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex. The wording is not obscure. It addresses the state and its subdivisions, identifies the protected employees, and forbids a particular act. Yet when I sought to enforce that prohibition against Arizona State University for required DEI training, the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) maintained that I had no right to be in court. The legislature may have enacted a command, its argument runs, but it gave the people protected by that command no means of enforcing it.

I have taught philosophy and religious studies at Arizona State University for more than two decades. In 2022, ASU began requiring its employees to complete an online program called “Inclusive Communities.” Arizona had enacted A.R.S. § 41-1494 the previous year. The statute provides that the state and specified political subdivisions “may not require an employee to engage in training, orientation or therapy that presents any form of blame or judgment on the basis of race, ethnicity or sex.” It separately forbids spending public money on such programs.

I have spent the last several years learning—the (very) hard way—a lesson that most Americans still have not learned: the courtroom has become the principal battlefield of American politics. And on that battlefield, the Left arrived with an army. The Right brought a checkbook and a prayer. That ends now.

Last week, the Oversight Project announced the launch of a new law firm—a salaried, in-house, battle-ready legal outfit whose mission can be stated in just ten words: defend our friends, and go on offense against our enemies. Backed by a generous philanthropic seed investment from Tom Klingenstein, the chairman of the Claremont Institute, the firm is designed to do what the conservative legal ecosystem has refused to build for 50 years: an institution that treats the legal defense of patriots as a standing obligation rather than a series of one-off charity bake sales.

The Problem Goes Deep

The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Beasts, Gods, and Bots: Facing down the Specter of a Post-Human Future | The American Mind Podcast

The morning after you win, the National Governors Association will call. They will offer a seminar, a binder, and a roster of former governors prepared to explain why you should slow down. Take the meeting if you must—but do not buy their theory.

The midterms may cost Republicans the House, and possibly even the Senate. But they will not lose the states. Thirty-six governorships are on the ballot, and the incoming class, with open seats in Ohio, Alabama, Iowa, Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and others, will likely yield the most conservative slate of new governors in a generation. The federal government will likely be deadlocked in 2027, but the states offer hope for advancing a bold and transformative national agenda.

To carry out such an agenda, incoming governors must reject the advice found in the NGA’s transition manual, which is an apologia for paralysis. On page 39, a former governor offers what the association presents as wisdom: “As a businessman, I spent 90 percent of my time on process and 10 percent on policy. As governor, I find I spend 90 percent of my time on policy and 10 percent on process.” This advice comes from a man who once controlled his own calendar but learned to let someone else control it. Unsurprisingly, he did not transform his state during his term in office.

Americans can’t afford to be complacent about our election security. The right to vote is one of the most indispensable civil rights in a constitutional republic, but it is not self-executing. Laws must protect that right, ensure its proper administration, and defend it against error, fraud, and foreign influence.

Citizenship must be verified when voters register. States must maintain accurate voter rolls and give federal authorities the data to which they’re legally entitled. They must also have reliable proof-of-eligibility requirements and prosecute election-law violations.

This is ultimately not merely an election-administration issue—it is a matter of sovereignty.

The proposition that only American citizens may vote in elections is a cornerstone of our republic. The citizenship requirement preserves self-government and ensures that those who decide our elections are members of the American political community. If these basic rules are treated as mere aspiration rather than an enforceable legal requirement, then American sovereignty is at risk.

The vote—and the machinery that receives, records, verifies, counts, and reports it—is how the American people confer legitimate authority on public officials.

Washington’s Farewell Address is often celebrated as one of the great documents of American history—the political testament of the nation’s founding father. Its authorship, however, has occasioned debate. Some, especially those who viewed Washington as a puppet of closet monarchists, wondered if he was even in charge of his own administration and whatever statements emerged from it.

The record shows that while Washington certainly had assistance during the drafting process, the document was truly his—he dictated what he wanted included and gave the final approval of the text. The tenets espoused reflected beliefs Washington had held for decades—beliefs he hoped could guide the nation from infancy to maturity. The Farewell Address was a worthy capstone to his extraordinary career and a touchstone of American republicanism.

Writing the Farewell Address

On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV stood in the Vatican’s Synod Hall and presented Magnifica Humanitas, his encyclical on artificial intelligence. Beside two cardinals sat the lay speaker chosen to address the room, Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic and self-described atheist working to develop the “soul” of its AI model, Claude.

The Catholic Church, the West’s oldest institution, has long stood at the forefront of the day’s most important moral questions. It has often found itself opposed to insidious ideologies that swept the globe. In the 1930s and ’40s, the Vatican waged a secret war against Nazism. Then it took on Communism. But at the start of the 21st century, a new ideology emerged that would eventually take hold among wealthy tech elites called Effective Altruism, or EA.

Developed from the stark utilitarian philosophy of Princeton University’s Peter Singer, EA claims to use evidence and reason to determine how to benefit others as efficiently as possible. Effective Altruists like Bill Gates and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei direct enormous sums of money toward causes they believe will produce the greatest measurable benefit, regardless of whether those causes are personally meaningful to them.

Because I’m going to be quite critical of Theo Baker’s How to Rule the World, it feels only right to start with three pieces of sincere praise: the book held my attention all the way to the end, I learned things from it, and I read it twice. These are not reactions I expect most new books to generate, let alone one written by someone not yet of legal drinking age. Hence on this basis alone, I would have to concede that Rule (borrowing Baker’s shorthand for a “secret” Stanford class, about which more below) is a real achievement.

The first round of Brazil’s presidential election is on Sunday. Two candidates are locked in a dead heat: Lula da Silva, incumbent president and founder of the center-left Workers’ Party, and Flávio Bolsonaro, the 45-year-old son of ex-president Jair Bolsonaro (2018-2022). Last year, Jair Bolsonaro was convicted of plotting a coup to remain in power after losing the 2022 election and sentenced to more than 27 years in prison.

The parallels between Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro are notable. They were elected in 2016 and 2018, respectively. Both are populist nationalists. Both are coarse, politically incorrect, and hostile to critics. Most remarkably, both lost re-election, after which supporters stormed the halls of Congress seeking to overturn the result. Though Trump, in contrast to Bolsonaro, avoided prison and returned to office, both command die-hard support and lead political movements that dominate the Right in their countries.

It is reasonable to ask why two countries as different as the U.S. and Brazil have followed such similar political tracks since the late 2010s. Why did the Trump model work in Brazil? Trump’s signature issues—illegal immigration and tariffs—were irrelevant there. To answer this question, we need to step back and consider populism in broad terms.

The 2026 midterm elections present a tough environment for the Republican Party, raising questions about how to campaign in such challenging circumstances. As is often the case in American politics, the economy is a central concern for voters. In the last few weeks, prices—particularly for gas—have been too high for the comfort of any incumbent party. What have Republicans been saying to assuage voters’ concerns?

Some have taken a kind of high road, encouraging or even admonishing voters to rise above self-interest and consider the loftier aims President Trump and his administration are pursuing. Yes, gas prices may be high, but the president is trying to end the Iranian threat to American national security. This process is taking longer and causing more economic pain than anyone would like. But it is worth it for the nation in the long run, and so patriotic voters should toughen up. So the argument runs.

This approach, however, has no shortage of critics. They think it is futile or worse (maybe insulting) to tell ordinary voters, whose economic means are increasingly limited, to grin and bear higher prices on the necessities of life. This environment, they suggest, is a recipe for electoral disaster for the Republican Party.

The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

The Crisis of America is the Crisis of the West | The American Mind Podcast ft. Steve Hayward

There’s nothing Congress likes better than not legislating. The legislative process in theory still takes place in Congress, but the results, which have the name and form of law, are in reality not law, properly understood. Legislative policy is still made in America, but it overwhelmingly takes forms other than laws enacted by Congress according to the process set forth in Article I of the Constitution. By conferring legislative power on others and leaving vital public issues unaddressed through congressional action, members of the legislature are effectively failing to carry out their constitutionally designated duties.

The importance of this change in the American political system cannot be overstated. Delegation—Congress’s abdication of its core legislative function—is key to understanding both the modern Congress and the crisis of constitutional government in America. Congress’s regular use of delegation has led to two seismic consequences: institutional failure on a massive scale and, more fundamentally, a transformation in the very character of the American regime.

Congress and the Legislative Power

Over the past few weeks, Old Guard conservatives have been making a concerted effort to attack Vice President JD Vance and the New Right.

Many were critical of Vance’s support for a Trump Administration proposal to allow federal dollars to go to stay-at-home parents. Dana Loesch suggested that those who accepted such funds weren’t “man enough.” Another conservative called it a “scheme” and “a longstanding tenet of the Postliberal/Orbanist policy agenda.”

Old Guard critic Jay Caruso mocked Vance for saying the administration would not “let” companies exchange American workers “with cheap foreign labor,” accusing the vice president of turning his back on the free market. Simultaneously, a chorus of Old Guard conservatives have been blasting Vance for supposedly refusing to distance himself from Nazis and groypers—and from a group of trinitarian Christians, the Society for American Civic Renewal.

Increasing numbers of Americans are deeply opposed to building more data centers.

Over the summer, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro imposed the strictest data center rules in the country, Kathy Hochul ordered a statewide moratorium on hyperscale construction, and Greg Abbott paused new approvals in Texas pending a grid audit. At the local level, dozens of county and municipal fights have followed no reliable partisan pattern. Polling from Heatmap and Embold, collected by the anon Cremieux, shows data center popularity plummeting over the last year.

Though Cremieux argues the opposition is fundamentally driven by NIMBYism, I’m unconvinced. The polling seems to follow the pattern you’d expect if NIMBYism were the primary driver, but posing the problem as a generic national issue produces substantially less opposition. Something else is going on that NIMBYism can’t fully explain.

President Trump’s America First foreign policy asks a simple question of every foreign engagement: What does it do for the American people? A trifecta of developments in July 2026 highlights a threefold answer to this question in regard to Bosnia and Herzegovina, the central European country formed by the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the Balkan War and created two legal entities: Republika Srpska, consisting mostly of Serbian Orthodox Christians; and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, consisting mostly of Muslims (called Bosniaks), with a significant minority of ethnically Croat Roman Catholic Christians.

First, on July 1, 2026, as we were celebrating 250 years of independence from a tyrant named King George III, a non-elected German “High Representative” in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Christian Schmidt, who, like George III, has been enacting what our July 4, 1776, Declaration called “Acts of pretended Legislation,” resigned.

Second, our 250th commemoration of the beginning of our Revolutionary War reminds us that wars happen, and our security can never be taken for granted.

Conservative blogger Erick Erickson published an essay last week on Substack, “The Midwestern Führerbunker Driving the Right Off a Cliff,” maligning the Claremont Institute, one of our donors, and a few of our fellows and alumni.

Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Steve Hayward published the first in a promised series (“Is Conservatism In Crisis?”) on his Political Questions Substack, criticizing the tone, rhetorical tactics, and substance of Erickson’s essay. As Hayward shows, Erickson relies on guilt-by-association smears and innuendo that let the juxtaposition do the arguing. Many of his citations come from untrustworthy and hostile sources, like The Guardian, which has published numerous hit pieces against Claremont. Erickson’s essay is a mile-wide, inch-deep bit of motivated reasoning.

The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

How the Left’s Climate Agenda Caused the West’s Economic Downfall | The American Mind Podcast ft. Rupert Darwall

Amid the Iran War and midterm U.S. electioneering, most Americans probably missed a potentially game-changing shift in President Donald Trump’s war against Mexico’s drug cartels. The administration has pivoted to a consequential new tactic that, according to some Mexico experts, could cripple the cartels if expanded. Though it has received little U.S. press coverage, this new strategy has the potential to be more effective than anything ever tried.

The shift is epitomized by a recent 34-page Department of Justice indictment that named ten past and present senior government officials of Mexico’s ruling Morena party in Sinaloa State, which is home base for the Sinaloa Cartel. All ten have denied wrongdoing.

The indictment alleged that Governor Rubén Rocha Moya (who briefly stepped down but has returned) and his current and former security service appointees took “veritable fortunes” in bribe money to dramatically aggravate America’s crisis of fentanyl-related deaths.

The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Russell Vought: How to Control the Administrative State | The American Mind Podcast

President Trump may have accomplished something fiscal conservatives have been trying unsuccessfully to do for decades: he got Washington talking seriously about the national debt. All it took was promising a $5,000 payment—what he calls a “Trump Dividend”—to every adult American citizen if Republicans retain control of Congress. With roughly 240 million eligible recipients, the back-of-the-envelope cost is about $1.2 trillion.

Suddenly, the political class discovered fiscal responsibility. Critics immediately pointed out that the federal government doesn’t have over a trillion dollars lying around. They warned that the checks would increase the deficit. They reminded us that the national debt has surpassed $40 trillion. They worried about inflation, borrowing costs, and the burden we are leaving to future generations.

Those are legitimate concerns. In fact, they should have been dominating our national political debate for decades.

The federal government has been spending money it does not have at an astonishing rate. Annual deficits that once would have produced political panic are now treated almost as background noise.

AI companies want to regulate their open-source competitors out of existence and regulate themselves into riches. We do not usually think of innovative private companies inviting government regulation of their own industry, but that is exactly what is happening in AI.

Concerns about the pace of AI development have existed since the technology entered public awareness in late 2022. Early fears about AI’s economic impact focused largely on job losses for writers and coders and its effects on writing instruction. More recently, as major AI platforms have rolled out agents—AI bots that can be given a task and carry it out over an extended period—the focus has shifted.

What if the bots carry out a cyberattack? What if they are given instructions and the user forgets to tell them to stop? What if they gain access to the nuclear codes? We have not yet reached the point where people are worried about AI turning the universe into paperclips. We are, however, already in a situation where Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei felt the need to publish an essay, “We Must Pace the Frontier,” in which he announced, “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.”

“Teen takeovers” have gone from a social-media spectacle to a serious public-safety issue. While the name conjures images of high schoolers innocently hanging around a drive-in à la American Graffiti, at its core, this phenomenon is about sowing violence and chaos—and leaving communities to deal with the consequences.

The 2026 Wisconsin State Fair concluded its final evening with a massive brawl, during which violent “teens” swarmed the park and beat unassuming fair guests. One man was kicked and beaten as he lay in the fetal position. Earlier this summer, a teen takeover at a Chipotle in Washington, D.C., forced frightened patrons to scramble as youths began throwing chairs and screaming.

In cities across the nation, the same pattern of brutality has emerged: swarms of young, primarily black teenagers will suddenly invade a public space to fight, threaten police, destroy private property, and occasionally get involved in shootings.

When the definitive history of Joe Biden’s presidency is written, it will likely conclude that his most important legacy was unprecedented immigration levels. The U.S. foreign-born population (legal and illegal) grew by 8.3 million during his time in office, driven mostly by the border crisis that he instigated.

At first, the media called the massive influx “seasonal” or blamed it on pent-up demand after COVID lockdowns. Later, they claimed that every Western country faced a similar situation. Many argued it was inevitable. As David Bier of the Cato Institute argued in the New York Times, “Biden Can’t Stop Immigration. Time to Embrace It.” Of course, nothing about it was inevitable.

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the “monster” begins as a creature whose maker abdicates his catechetical responsibility. Victor Frankenstein spends nearly two years learning how to give life to an inanimate body. But at the moment of success, when the creature finally opens his eyes, Victor is overcome with disgust and abandons him without teaching him a word.

Spoiler: the creature receives an education anyway. He leaves Victor’s apartment functionally newborn and learns about his environment through direct experiences with hunger, pain, fear, and the elements. The monster eventually takes refuge in a hovel joined to the De Lacey family’s cottage, where he witnesses examples of familial virtue. He learns history and social order from Volney’s Ruins of Empires and draws on Plutarch, Goethe, and Milton to form his understanding of himself, society, and God. The creature’s education is accidental and ungoverned: no one chooses his curriculum, corrects his errors, or even knows he is listening.

The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Uncovered: Administrative State Abuses of Military Contracts | The American Mind Podcast

In this special episode, Will Thibeau, director of the Claremont Institute’s American Military Project, sits down with Claremont president Ryan P. Williams to discuss his recent report on the 8(a) Program, its unique weaponization in the Woke Era, and how the military under Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is combatting the rampant abuses. Plus: What can America’s industrial base learn from the Iran and Ukraine wars?

The post Uncovered: Administrative State Abuses of Military Contracts | The American Mind Podcast appeared first on The American Mind.

On August 21, 2024, I rolled into the Indiana Dunes at the end of an 825-mile bicycle ride from Washington, D.C.—a ride that raised over $100,000 for I AM ALS, founded by former Obama White House counsel Brian Wallach. Two days before my arrival, Wallach was just a few miles away in Chicago, addressing the Democratic National Convention (DNC) alongside his wife, Sandra.

Also inside that convention hall was one of the party’s most prolific progressive fundraisers, a woman named Evan Barker. Her recent loud break with the Democratic Party, overnight as it looked, had been a long time coming. She walked out during Oprah Winfrey’s speech, recorded a video on the convention floor, and posted it to TikTok, garnering millions of views. After the 2024 election, she wrote an essay for The Free Press admitting she’d voted for Donald Trump.

On July 14—Bastille Day—the French national team lost its semi-final match against Spain at the FIFA World Cup. The very next day, France’s National Assembly voted to legalize assisted suicide and euthanasia, providing a humane way out for those who could not stomach the bitter taste of defeat.

Putting aside the dark humor of the timing, France finds itself in good company now that it has legalized medical practices commonly described as “euthanasia” that actively and intentionally terminate human life. These practices are distinct from those in which a medical professional contributes to the end of a patient’s life either passively (for example, by withholding life-sustaining treatments at the patient’s request) or unintentionally (for example, by administering sedatives with the intention of easing pain, even when there is a risk of hastening death as a side effect).

Twenty-five years ago this morning, 2,977 people were murdered in the space of 102 minutes. Most of them had gone to work. Some had boarded an airplane. Among them were 343 New York City firemen who climbed the stairs of the World Trade Center towers while everyone else came down, knowing what that act meant. Aboard a plane over Pennsylvania, 40 passengers and crew learned by telephone what was happening and took their plane back from the men who had seized it.

We memorialize them, as we should. But a quarter century is long enough that we owe them something more than memory. We owe them an accounting. The honest question on this anniversary is not whether we honored the dead. That we have done. It is whether we have ever understood what had been done to us and why—and whether the American people have been made safer or left exposed in ways their forefathers would have found unthinkable.

In Natural Right and History, the political philosopher Leo Strauss opens by asking whether the United States, having become the world’s most powerful and prosperous nation by adhering to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, still held those truths to be self-evident.

The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Political Fallout: Charlie Kirk’s Legacy and “The Flight 93 Election” | The American Mind Podcast

One year ago today, America lost Charlie Kirk.

In some ways, it feels like only yesterday. At other times, it feels like a lifetime ago. Twelve months after that horrifying day, we have only begun to reckon with the scale of the loss for conservatism—and for America.

To someone who ignores politics, it can be hard to explain just why Charlie’s loss was so great. He had a popular podcast—but there are many of those. He did campus debates—but he didn’t have a monopoly on that concept. And of course, however deeply involved in politics he was, Charlie never held office himself.

And yet millions think that Charlie Kirk’s martyrdom leaves a tremendous void on the Right. Why?

What America lost one year ago on that dreadful September 10 was not merely a debater, a pundit, an activist, or even, as many speculated, a future president. What America lost was a true leader, the kind who comes along only a few times in a generation.

The American Way

In one of the most important passages in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville describes the tremendous capacity for self-organization among America’s citizens, in contrast to the torpor he saw among the people of Europe:

It is hard to believe that a year has passed since Charlie’s assassination.

Paying fitting tribute to his life’s work is daunting, and I have been hesitant to write anything at all—especially when I think of his wife, Erika, and their children. None of us can fathom what they have endured.

But we must keep Charlie’s life and work alive in memory and let them inspire and inform our own.

Prudence is an old word with a venerable tradition in Western thought and politics, though its full meaning has grown obscure in modern times. It is also the virtue I most associate with Charlie—and the one we would do best to learn from as we continue to fight for the country he loved.

Charlie was a principled man, but he was no ideological fanatic and no dogmatist on questions of politics and policy. He was always reading, learning, and talking with Americans from every walk of life: college students, grassroots conservatives, the donor class, and leaders across the country.

Gloria Steinem, a popularizer of feminist dogmas, died last week at the age of 92. She promoted many of the false doctrines of women’s liberation beginning in the 1960s through her persona, writings, publications, and speeches. As she passes from the scene, few of the original so-called second-wave feminists remain. Yet the overwhelming victories the movement has achieved in the decades since have largely obscured the radicalism at its center.

As I researched my second book, The Recovery of Family Life: Exposing the Limits of Modern Ideologies, I read Steinem’s influential 1970 Time essay, “What It Would Be Like If Women Win,” to understand what the fully realized feminist project would look like. What emerged from my survey of her work was the idea of an unfinished and unfinishable Rolling Feminist Revolution.

With tensions in Iran still boiling and our national debt hitting $40 trillion, it’s time to take a hard look at the military’s budget. We should preserve what the military needs to be capable and prepared—and cut the waste. One little-known program has not only failed its mission but also driven excess government spending. The good news is that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has already announced a review. The bad news? This program is so fundamentally defective that it should be abolished outright.

In the summer of 2024, a “socially disadvantaged” small business won two Defense Logistics Agency contracts worth more than $34 million. The firm then handed 95% of one contract’s value to Lockheed Martin and 94% of the other to a subsidiary of Leonardo DRS, two of the world’s largest defense contractors. The disadvantaged firm did little more than sign the paperwork and collect a fee.

The arrangement broke no law. It followed the standard business model of the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) Business Development Program, the federal government’s oldest identity-based contracting scheme—and one of Washington’s most durable corporate welfare rackets.

Ten years ago today, September 5, 2016, Michael Anton’s “The Flight 93 Election” took the internet, and the Right, by storm. Anton’s essay made the case for Trump in the face of furious, well-funded opposition from elite conservative intellectual and political circles.

The electoral choice was easy: Trump was a risk; Hillary was a certainty. On Trump, though, Anton went further. On trade, war, the economy, and especially immigration, Trump promised to disrupt the establishment status quo in the name of the long-aggrieved GOP voting base. He ran on a concrete policy platform, amassed a presidential electoral coalition around it, and then delivered. How novel!

Anton’s arresting polemic in defense of Trump has been vindicated. It also did not come from nowhere. Six years before “Flight 93,” in 2010, the late Angelo Codevilla (a longtime Claremont Senior Fellow) published an equally viral essay in The American Spectator, “America’s Ruling Class—and the Perils of Revolution.” He called out the intellectual, moral, and republican bankruptcy of America’s bipartisan ruling class. Rush Limbaugh read it on air, as he would again with Anton’s essay in 2016.

Mark exited his family group chat after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election and, shortly after, stopped speaking to his family entirely. He knew his mom and siblings were conservative and pro-life, and though they didn’t really talk politics, his suspicions about their votes were confirmed when he pressed them. They had made a choice, and now he would too.

Mark had taken to social media the day after the election to rant about half the country, but there was little he could do with anger of that scale. His family offered something more manageable: a localized target for a generalized grievance. He couldn’t control how millions of Americans voted, but he could control whether the few he knew who voted for Trump remained in his life.

His mother, recently widowed, is heartbroken by her son’s decision to go no contact. She tries to focus her attention on the rich relationships she still has. Mark’s siblings vacillate between annoyance and deep hurt, bewildered that something so distant from the ordinary life of their family—national politics—could enter their intimacy and overwhelm it.

Optimists have lately claimed that wokeness was a fad that has gone out of style. To their credit, there has been evidence to support this. “Woke 1 was crazy,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in August on ABC News. “Rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric we would use today.” Progressivism’s biggest champions seem eager to distance themselves from its recent excesses.

But the Jason Arday scandal shows that wokeness is not over, not by a long shot. The fact that Arday held a well-paid position at one of the world’s most prestigious universities is a telling sign that wokeness is alive and well.

More telling still is that powerful and otherwise seemingly intelligent people, such as the autism specialist Simon Baron-Cohen, have leaped to defend Arday. It would have been easy for people on the Left to acknowledge his blatant fraud and dismiss him as an isolated case whose offenses have no bearing on the broader issue of DEI in higher education. They did not.

The lesson for the Right is that there is much more work to do to dismantle wokeness, and it will not simply be a matter of doing more of what we have been doing so far. The power centers of wokeness are not just holdouts we haven’t gotten around to eliminating yet. They are strongholds that have been impervious to our tactics.

Will marriage survive the internet?

It’s a question no one was asking in the 1990s, even as the World Wide Web became part of our everyday lives. Yet here we are more than halfway through the 2020s, and it’s fair to say the digitization of our social lives has drastically unsettled the relations between the sexes. As scholar Patrick T. Brown recently wrote, “At this point, anyone who is arguing that phones didn’t change societal scripts in a meaningful way has the burden of proof.”

Yes, the battle of the sexes is as old as civilization itself. But digital technology has introduced a new and disorienting dynamic. It turns humans into avatars. And avatars don’t fall in love or find God or have children. They exist in your phone, as pixels to be rewarded with likes or screamed at with comments, depending on the situation.

The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

FIRE Challenges Trump’s Deportation of Pro-Gaza Immigrants | The American Mind Podcast

According to John Adams, if you cannot fail, you’re not truly free. In his last public statement, honoring the 50th anniversary of American Independence in 1826, Adams wrote that the American Revolution would be

A Memorable epoch in the annals of the human race; destined, in future history, to form the brightest or the blackest page, according to the use or the abuse of those political institutions by which they shall, in time to come, be Shaped, by the human mind.

That was not a new thought. In the Preface to his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, Adams mused that Americans “have now the best opportunity and the greatest trust in their hands, that Providence ever committed to so small a number, since the transgression of the first pair.” Should “they betray their trust,” Adams contended, “their guilt will merit even greater punishment than other nations have suffered, and the indignation of Heaven.”

Vice President JD Vance recently drew criticism for questioning the benefits of the dollar’s reserve currency status. In a 2023 interview, he argued that it encourages Americans to consume too much, describing it as a “resource curse.”

If you’ve followed Vance during his time in Congress, these comments are not particularly surprising. He has been one of the biggest proponents of rebalancing America’s relationship with the global economy through targeted industrial policy, much to the chagrin of the GOP establishment.

Naturally, the response from Vance’s free-trade critics was immediate and severe. They argued that cheap imports increase consumers’ purchasing power, while an economy organized around offering high-value services is not necessarily a sign of economic weakness. In their eyes, what Vance proposed amounts to a command-and-control economy, snuffing out economic opportunity and raising prices at a time when families can least afford it.

Contrary to his critics, Vance had the right general diagnosis, even if his prescription risks creating problems of its own.

Last summer, European news outlets reported that “volunteers” from Mexican and Colombian drug cartels had infiltrated Ukraine’s military—considered the world’s “drone superpower”—to learn cutting-edge drone warfare so they could use the knowledge to kill their enemies back home.

Claims that this problem is ongoing have not yet been publicly verified by the U.S. intelligence community or the media. As yet, however, they remain undisputed. They now demand further scrutiny and broader attention in the United States to prompt appropriate action. If it’s not too late, and if the reports are correct, the U.S. urgently needs to terminate this knowledge transfer from Ukrainian soldiers to Latin America’s crime lords.

For a long time our most heated public and academic debates have been almost uniformly characterized by false dichotomies. We are supposed to choose between “realism” and “idealism” in foreign affairs and ethical theory; John Rawls’s excessively egalitarian “theory of justice” and Robert Nozick’s untenable “minimal state”; post-liberal dogmatism and a decayed liberalism that is increasingly oblivious to the moral foundations of democracy.

I often ask myself: What of a tough-minded, morally serious politics that unites principle and prudence, and advocates a broadly secular state but is not neutral between religion and irreligion? What about a project that defends liberty and equality without succumbing to the illusion of human autonomy, or an indiscriminate egalitarianism that levels and homogenizes? How about “liberty under God and the laws,” in Alexis de Tocqueville’s memorable formulation, that is in equal measure liberal and conservative? Why can’t we think more deeply and dialectically and move beyond dichotomies that distort much more than they illuminate?

It is no surprise even to the most casual observer of American culture that pornography is rotting the soul of America. More than 10% of American men self-report being addicted to pornography, while over 70% say they used pornography in the last year—and the actual figures are likely much higher. Declining marriage rates, increased incidents of suicide, and decreased productivity can all be traced to the rise of this nearly $100 billion industry. And, even worse, the kind of pornography that saturates the internet is not the type of casual nudity the average American imagines. It is hardcore pornography that would immediately disgust all but the addicted.

That’s far from the founders’ vision for America.

Any honest scholar of the American Founding will assure you that no founding father would ever have imagined that a republican form of government could coexist with such rampant moral degeneracy. For most of American history, obscene material was not only illegal but subject to criminal prosecution.

In the opening of Federalist 1, Publius makes clear to his countrymen the great question that Providence had placed before them. Americans, he said, have the opportunity to decide “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

This was the momentous question that underlay the American Founding. Now, 250 years after the American Revolution, we face the same one today.

A self-governing people must cultivate the habits that make responsible public action possible. They must learn to connect principles with practice, to deliberate about the proper ends of political action, and to judge wisely among the means available to achieve those ends. This is the work of civic education: forming citizens capable of exercising prudence to pass on the blessings of liberty we received to future generations.

The study of history is an essential preparation for that work. By learning the stories of those who have gone before us, we acquire knowledge and experience that help us deliberate well about the questions before us. This formation in knowledge for the sake of prudence is the purpose of history and civics education—and we are in dire need of it today.