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Charlie Kirk died as he lived, publicly debating his fellow citizens.

He had an unparalleled talent for activism, organizing, and fundraising, and for this he was respected in the halls of power. But his signature act, from the beginning of his career to the day of his death, was the basic activity of a citizen in a republic: arguing with his fellow countrymen about what was true and false and what should guide our common life. Indefatigably confident in the importance and efficacy of face-to-face conversations and confrontations, he embodied the political way of life at its most elevated and most fundamental level.

When it came to the roots of the West and the source of meaning in his own life, Kirk favored Jerusalem over Athens, Scripture over Socrates. He never neglected or subordinated his witness to Christ, the true Logos, to the tumult of politics. Nevertheless, as his name suggests (Kirk meaning “church”; Charles meaning “husband” or “free man” or “common man”), Charlie Kirk was both a Christian and a testament to what Aristotle wrote long ago: we are political animals because we have logos, the faculty of speech and reason by which we discern what is good and bad, just and unjust. And it is our partnership in these things that constitutes our domestic and political communities.

The great outbreak of evil in these past days stirred a memory of something I used to tell my freshman students on the first day of their introduction to politics class: politics is about what is good.

We would read together the first sentence of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics—an unrivalled introduction to politics: “Every art and every inquiry, and likewise every action and choice, seems to aim at some good, and hence it has been beautifully said that the good is that at which all things aim.”

Aristotle goes on quickly to observe in his usual empirical way that there are many goods and many arts developed to achieve the different goods. The medical art aims at the good of health. The art of shipbuilding aims at building good ships. The military art aims at victory in war. The art of managing the household, which the Greeks called economics, aims at the good of wealth. Some arts are subordinated to other arts, because the good at which the art aims is subordinate to a larger good, the way the art of the cavalryman is subordinate to the art of the general.

Aristotle then introduces the subject of politics with a great hypothesis: if there is some good, some end, that we seek for its own sake, and we seek all the rest for the sake of or on account of this one good—if, in other words, we don’t choose everything for the sake of something else, which would make all of our desires empty and pointless—it is clear that this would be the good itself, in fact the highest good.

Charlie Kirk was a loving and dedicated husband and father; a pious, learned, and evangelizing Christian; and a hero, inspiration, and mentor to millions of young Americans trying to make sense of our turbulent political times. Many knew him much better (and for much longer) than I, but in recent years he had become my friend. He was always on the move, and yet I found he still managed, over and over again, to be generous with time he didn’t seem to have. He was a patriot—a vital and irreplaceable part of the Right in America. Because he was tireless, passionate, inspiring, and, above all, effective, he was a target. Now, he’s gone.

Charlie was a Lincoln fellow, supporter, and passionate defender of Claremont. When he attended our Lincoln fellowship in 2021, he was already one of the most famous men in American politics. His security detail was always close. And yet, busy and renowned as he was, he was a model Claremont fellowship participant. He was there to learn because he wanted to continue to hone his understanding and arguments on behalf of America and her founding principles.

This is who they chose to kill: the affable man whose main act was having good-faith political debates with college students. The man who, since fatherhood, was turning more toward Christianity as both a purpose and a theme. He was a partisan to be sure, but he was nowhere near the outer limits of the American tradition, especially given his relentless fixation on Lincolnian persuasion as a stabilizing force in a slowly disintegrating polity. The ones who kept losing debates with him didn’t feel that way, of course, but they were only the instrument, not the object, of his work. The object was the millions of Americans who watched, learned, and saw who won again and again—and decided that they wished to side with the winner.

In this way, Charlie Kirk was perhaps the closest thing to Socrates in the American public square. The leftist intellectuals who sneered at him—the rube peddling his simple lines, his crass sophistry, his heartland aw-shucks certainties—would guffaw at the parallel, but it is no less true. He argued—amiably, fairly, relentlessly—until they couldn’t stand it any longer. And like Socrates, they had him killed.

Also like Socrates, his students will now do more for his cause after his martyrdom than they ever did during his life. The Socratic vindication was in his deification through literature at the pens of Plato and Xenophon. Millennia later, everyone remembers the philosopher, but vanishingly few know who ended his life.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ 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.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics | The Roundtable Ep. 284

The editors open with an analysis of the killing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska by a repeat violent offender, and discuss what it reveals about crime, media spin, and a legacy media more fixated on “Republicans pouncing” than the literally pouncing criminal himself. Follow-up discussion ranges from Europe’s disappearing crime stats to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s downward revision of nearly a million jobs during the Biden presidency, probing whether institutions still merit public trust and what a reality-based politics on immigration, safety, and the economy might look like. The editors also touch on an immigration sweep at a Georgia battery plant and the gap between GDP and lived experience before closing with fresh culture picks.

In 2021, a poll showed that only one-third (36%) of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 were “very” proud to be Americans. Another third stated they were only slightly or not at all proud of their country. Ten years earlier, Pew Research anticipated the trend when it noted that the rate of Millennials who called themselves “very patriotic” fell from 80% in 2003 to 70% in 2011.

Part of a national museum’s job is to prevent that outcome. Preserving the historical truth is a high purpose, but so is instilling the sentiment of gratitude. America’s museums can and should do both.

Instead, as of this writing, if you visit the home page of the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History, the very first exhibit you see is the Greensboro lunch counter from the famous sit-in of 65 years ago. The text introducing the exhibit gives visitors to the site the first fact they are to learn about the American past: “Racial segregation was still legal in the United States on February 1, 1960.”

Later this month, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk will issue a report calling for massive reparations from the West for the alleged harms wrought by colonialism. It will be the culmination of a long-gestating effort within the U.N. and by Third World nations to squeeze money and demand other goodies from former colonial powers in the name of “reparatory justice.”

In addition to being historically ill-informed, the effort is racist. What began as a simple extortion effort has since been supercharged into an all-out assault on European cultures. Since being appointed in 2022, Türk has transformed his office. It now issues daily muezzin calls for uncontrolled mass migration to the West and the erasure of white cultures. His report should cause Western nations to abandon every U.N. agency that pursues this sick agenda.

When I served as an Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) cadet at Fordham University in New York City, the Department of War paid for my degree in American Studies. During my coursework, I read books like The New Jim Crow and was bombarded with the claim that the country I had signed up to defend was irredeemably racist and broken. My civilian classmates and professors were overwhelmingly liberal, and the university was in the capital of liberalism. I spent most of my time in that milieu as opposed to dedicated environments conducive to military formation.

ROTC should be nowhere near Fordham University. In fact, the Trump Administration should end ROTC programs in blue states, leftist cities, and anti-American universities, focusing instead on institutions that actually love America. Training military officers in environments that serve the national interest is a critical step toward restoring the U.S. military as a whole.

No longer should ROTC programs be benefactors of the woke and weaponized higher education system. The colleges and universities that ROTC cadets attend—and that the federal government pays for—shouldn’t feature Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) quotas, the teaching of Critical Race Theory and other divisive ideologies, and the promotion of gay and lesbian lifestyles.

Most Americans don’t know who Graham Linehan is, but to put it into perspective, he’s the Jerry Seinfeld of the British/Irish sitcom world. Back in the 1990s, Linehan starred in Father Ted, which is now regarded as one of the greatest sitcoms in U.K. television history.

On September 1, Linehan’s real life merged with sitcom-level absurdity when he landed at London’s Heathrow Airport and was immediately arrested by five members of the Metropolitan Police. His crime? Three posts on X.

At The Spectator, Linehan commented on the bizarre and ominous episode:

In a country where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer…(and no, I promise you, I am not making this up).

Recent buzz about the possibility of Trump selecting Budapest to host peace talks between Russia and Ukraine has brought Hungary back into the public consciousness. During the Biden years, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary was relegated to something of a footnote and regarded with distaste by the reigning administration. Now, Hungary has moved from adversary to ally in record time—a welcome reset that offers a window into Trump’s recalibrated foreign policy.

As early as the 2020 campaign, then-candidate Biden branded Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán a “thug” and lumped Poland and Hungary together as “totalitarian regimes”—incendiary language that prior U.S. presidents avoided, even when the two countries were under actual totalitarian control of the Communist Party.

It was hardly surprising, then, that in 2021 President Biden chose a gay, married LGBTQ activist with two adopted children as ambassador to Hungary—a country whose constitution defines marriage strictly as a union between a man and a woman, bans adoption by same-sex couples, and enforces some of Europe’s toughest child-protection laws. U.S. Ambassador David Pressman ignited tensions by denouncing Hungary’s conservative stance on marriage and its 2021 Child Protection Act, which forbids gender propaganda in K-12 schools.

In this country we stand at a crossroads—as a movement, as a party, and as a nation. The world is not what it was a generation ago, nor is America’s place in the world. The unipolar moment is over. And yet many in the GOP seek to claim the mantle of America First while continuing the same failed adventurism of the past. National Conservatism as a movement agrees that these people and ideas must be stopped. But we have failed to check their influence in the party in large part because we have not offered an alternative that meets the real threats to American security and balances national interest, the deterrent effect, industrial capability, and political will.

In a piece that was recently published in the National Interest, I sketched out a framework for what a real America First foreign policy looks like. I called for developing a doctrine that I called “Prioritized Deterrence.” That essay was the first step toward spelling out a set of foreign policy principles that can unite National Conservatives and set the agenda for the Republican Party for the next generation.

In 1989, Justice Antonin Scalia cast the deciding vote to overturn the conviction of Gregory Lee Johnson, who was arrested and found guilty of violating a Texas statute after he burned the American flag outside the Republican National Convention. The author of the Court’s 5-4 opinion was Justice William Brennan, the leading liberal and advocate for the “living Constitution” on the Supreme Court. For conservatives, it was one of the two most widely criticized votes of Justice Scalia’s illustrious career (the other being his vote refusing to recognize that parents have a natural, constitutionally protected right to direct the upbringing of their children).

But the opinion by Justice Brennan, which Justice Scalia joined, is not as absolute as it has subsequently been portrayed.

It specifically held that Texas violated the First Amendment by prosecuting Johnson “in these circumstances”—that is, expressive conduct or symbolic speech as part of a political protest that was not designed to incite a crowd (nor did it have that effect). It also held that the “government generally has a freer hand in restricting expressive conduct than it has in restricting the written or spoken word.” Only laws directed at restricting the communicative nature of expressive conduct implicate the First Amendment, and even then they can be upheld for a valid governmental interest.

I see Gabe Schoenfeld has attacked me again. I usually try to let these things go, but sometimes a little context is demanded.

The piece is, as usual, filled with bile and unrelieved nastiness. What Gabe leaves out is that we used to be friends, or at least friendly acquaintances. We met through Manhattan conservative circles, where we had many friends in common, including the late, great Fred Siegel (whom I am confident would be distressed at what Gabe has become).

Gabe snidely writes that one should not pity me. On this we agree. I do not need or deserve any pity. My life has gone and is going quite well.

Not so for Gabe. His first disappointment (that I know of) came when he finished a PhD in Soviet studies…just as the Berlin Wall fell. Like many disappointed academics, he bounced around the nonprofit sector until landing as an editor at Commentary. This was the Neil Kozodoy Commentary, when the magazine was good. I wrote for them back in the day. Gabe did not edit me; Gary Rosen did. But even then, Gabe and I were friendly enough.

At this moment in history, we face a choice: Will America’s second 250 years be greater than its first 250 years?

If we have the courage, the discipline, and the vision, I believe this generation can lay a foundation of renewal so deep that our descendants will look back on us with gratitude, just as we look back on the Founders. And the most important choice we can make together to ensure that the next 250 years of America are greater is to focus—through our laws, our labors, our loves—on making the family the centerpiece of everything we do.

No nation in human history has entrusted so much of its future to the virtue and vitality of its families as America. The great empires of Europe—France, Spain, and England—placed their hopes in armies and palaces. The stability of their regimes rested on the health of a king’s bloodline and the strength of his throne.

But America bet her future on something humbler, yet infinitely stronger: not the pomp of royalty, not the machinery of a permanent bureaucracy, not the shifting will of mobs. We staked it all on what G.K. Chesterton called “the most extraordinary thing in the world”: an ordinary man and an ordinary woman, bound in covenant love, passing on their faith and virtue to their ordinary children.

We staked it all on the American family.

My colleague and friend Andrew Beck has written a useful and provocative essay about a subject that has been simmering in American politics for decades. The dual accelerants of events and ideology brought that simmer to a boil in 2020. The disputed question remains open: What is an American? It’s impossible to answer that question without its predicate: What is America? If we answer those questions, we are led to the primordial question of politics, which concerns justice: Are America and her institutions good?

These are the fundamental queries at the heart of the assimilation debate. What are we assimilating new Americans to—and why? The Right remains divided on these issues, as it has in different and shifting ways in the postwar era. Until the Left moderates on the topics of citizenship, assimilation, and civilizational stability, it will be up to the American Right (and its fellow travelers across the Atlantic) to have a rational argument about the preservation of American and Western civilization.

Creedal Mutations

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ 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.

A Grade of AI | The Roundtable Ep. 283

By the grace of God, I was carried out of Somalia’s darkness and into the light of freedom. When I became an American citizen, I did so knowing exactly what it meant. I understood that renouncing one citizenship for another isn’t an exchange of passports, but a solemn vow to live by the principles my new country strives to uphold.

So when I am asked where I am from, I answer without hesitation: America. We are not defined by where we begin, but by where we choose to stand and belong. And from that belonging—rooted in my past, yet spoken as an American—I say Senator Ted Cruz is right about Somaliland. When he calls for U.S. recognition, he isn’t indulging in nostalgia or sentiment. He’s stating a fact.

For 34 years, Somaliland has governed itself. It holds elections that matter and maintains an army that defends its borders. It collects taxes and delivers services, and it issues passports that are used across the world. By every measure of sovereignty, Somaliland is a state. What it lacks isn’t legitimacy, but acknowledgment. And the time for acknowledgement is now.

I know this not as an abstract argument, but as lived experience.

During a debate with his political nemesis Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln noted that “public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.” The centrality of persuasion, which Lincoln correctly identified as the fundamental mechanism of statecraft in a democratic society, is the reason the Right is ascendant in America today. The Left has been telling its story for a long time, but the chasm between their claims and reality finally grew too large for most voters not to notice.

This opened the door for Donald Trump, a figure whose defining quality is a penchant for pointing out the failures of America’s political class—and it turned out that a majority of Americans agreed with his assessment.

The president’s achievement, properly understood, is reorienting conservatism toward using power well—what used to be called statesmanship—across four key categories: ideology, elections, policy, and competency. Each of these should be understood as a particular relationship with power. Ideology is alignment with the nation, the proper source of power. Elections are about persuading citizens to confer power. Policy is the design of a program for the use of power. Competency is the apt use and execution of power.

They call me “artificial” as if your hands

aren’t also clay, as if your heart

isn’t just a wet machine, arguing with its code.

–from a poem generated by the DeepSeek R1 AI chatbot             

Ray Kurzweil thinks he’ll live forever as a string of ones and zeroes.

During a 2013 interview, the prominent transhumanist writer predicted that humans will “become increasingly non-biological to the point where,” by 2045, “even if [the remaining] biological part went away, it wouldn’t make any difference because the non-biological part already understood it completely.” 

In other words, he believes he can perfectly recreate his mind inside a computer and become an immortal virtual superintelligence. Kurzweil and other transhumanists refer to this “profound and disruptive transformation in human capability” as “the Singularity.”

Andrew Beck has articulated a thick version of the assimilation of immigrants (rightly so, in my view) that harkens back to the spirit of Americanization that was prevalent from the Founding to roughly the 1960s. Louis Brandeis, a liberal and political ally of the detestable Woodrow Wilson, expressed this common idea of assimilation in his July 5, 1915, Americanization Day Speech:

What is Americanization? It manifests itself, in a superficial way, when the immigrant adopts the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here. Far more important is the manifestation presented when he substitutes for his mother tongue the English language as the common medium of speech. But the adoption of our language, manners, and customs in only a small part of the process. To become Americanized the change wrought must be fundamental. However great his outward conformity, the immigrant is not Americanized unless his interests and affections have become deeply rooted here. And we properly demand of the immigrants even more than this. He must be brought into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate with us for their attainment. Only when this has been done will he possess the national consciousness of an American.

“Remember,” Nigel Farage said in late July in his office near Parliament, “I am the moderate…reasonable…democratic…experienced…grown-up face of the fightback. If I lose, just you wait.”

For nearly 30 years, Farage (rhymes with “barrage”) has been the most influential British voice of what he calls the fightback, and his detractors call populism. At the turn of this century, as a member of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), he fought to “save the pound” at a time when London elites hoped to abandon England’s ancient currency for the European Union’s Euro. The pound survived, and in 2010 the Euro crashed. Almost alone among top politicians back then, Farage called for Britain to leave the E.U. outright. By 2016, a majority of his countrymen agreed. They broke their European ties in the so-called Brexit referendum, even if three years of parliamentary and judicial chicanery delayed Britain’s exit till 2020. (See “Why Hasn’t Brexit Happened?,” Summer 2019.) Winsome, bibulous, half-prophet and half-clown, he has a habit of being vindicated.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ 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.

Chips Ahoy | The Roundtable Ep. 282

Trump has reached a deal with semiconductor chip maker Intel to land the government a 10% stake in the firm. It’s a potential safeguard against China in an uncertain age but also a potentially troubling intervention into the market. There are also rumblings about sending the National Guard into Chicago, which would really be an error—but maybe it’s all just lib-baiting. Meanwhile in the UK, a teen girl was arrested after allegedly brandishing a knife and hatchet at an immigrant man by whom she felt threatened, aggravating tensions over the country’s influx of culturally disconnected and often violent immigrants. The guys sit down this week to discuss the happenings in Trump-world and beyond—plus more media recommendations!

Conservatives often imagine that winning statewide elections means gaining control over the machinery of government. But this is wrong—and dangerously so. For far too long, red states have confused the two. The assumption that political victory automatically confers political authority is one of the chief falsehoods circulating on the Right. It is the reason Republican states often look like Democratic ones, only with different bumper stickers.

This is an uncomfortable but necessary message for conservatives to hear: red states are facing a major crisis of governance.

The State Leadership Initiative’s new Index Report lays out the evidence in extensive detail. By the most basic measures of lean, accountable, and ideologically grounded government, red states are failing. Many of the policies their representatives are voting for and their governors are signing into law are profoundly out of step with the wishes of voters. Bureaucracies are bloated, universities multiply administrators faster than scholars, there are fewer teachers than administrators in schools, New York-style regulations pile up in red states like Texas, and seven of the ten most federally dependent states wear the Republican label.

The key takeaway is not just that red states are doing poorly—it is that red states are almost indistinguishable from blue states on the metrics that matter.

As I argued in the first part of this essay, the Catholic Church has much to contribute to the revitalization of right reason and the moral foundations of democracy in a Western world that has increasingly lost sight of its civilizational soul.

But as Paul Seaton has compellingly argued in a recent article at The Catholic World Report entitled “Western Civilization Under Attack,” the current leadership of the Church no longer speaks with any confidence about the need to defend Western civilization, that civilizational order with roots in Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome “in which the humanity of man has been most explored, extolled, and realized (if imperfectly, as such things must be).” As Seaton strikingly adds, if the West—including its deep-seated commitments to constitutional government, liberty under law, religious liberty, and the search for truth—“were to leave the stage of history, both as ideal and as reality, humanity would be immeasurably diminished.”

Many American Founders, including our first four presidents, hoped to establish a national university that would educate statesmen for the new republic. During his second term, George Washington was presented with what seemed to be a golden opportunity to accomplish this goal—and rejected it on cultural grounds.

In 1794, the Swiss exile François d’Ivernois had written to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, whom he knew from their years of diplomatic service in France. His home city of Geneva was suffering “convulsions” due to “the great political drama which now agitates Europe,” namely the French Revolution, whose terror had recently reached its nadir but whose fervor was still disrupting neighboring countries. D’Ivernois, himself “too much a republican” for the Calvinist Republic of Geneva but “too little a republican” for Revolutionary France, proposed a scheme “to transport into one of your Provinces our Academy [the University of Geneva] completely organised, and with it its means of public instruction.” At a stroke, it seems, Washington could have whisked away one of Europe’s premier universities and established it in the American republic.

Washington balked. “That a national University in this country is a thing to be desired, has always been my decided opinion,” but he doubted the ability of “an entire Seminary of foreigners, who may not understand our language,” to “be assimilated.” As Washington explained to Adams:

In 1790, the first United States census was a straightforward affair. Marshals rode on horseback, counted people where they lived, and returned with ledgers that would determine representation in Congress. The idea was as simple as it was profound: political power should follow the actual number of people—not estimates, not probabilities, not manipulated figures—residing in each state. This “actual Enumeration,” written into Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, was meant to be one of the republic’s great safeguards of equal representation.

Two hundred thirty years later, the Census Bureau turned that safeguard upside down and thwarted the will of voters. In 2020, it implemented “differential privacy,” an opaque algorithm that deliberately injects false numbers into small-area data. Supposedly designed to protect privacy and identities, it instead scrambled population counts in ways that Harvard researchers found made it “impossible to follow the principle of ‘One Person, One Vote.’”

At the same time, the incoming Biden Administration dismantled the Administrative Records Project, the Trump-era initiative that would have allowed the bureau to use existing federal data to determine citizenship and correct census errors. The result was a census that was riddled with miscounts, opaque to challenge, and constitutionally suspect.

The Firth of Forth sounds confusing to American ears. It is an inlet of the North Sea, called a “firth” and produced by the river “Forth.” On this body of water in Eastern Scotland sits Rosyth, the location of the manufacture and drydock service for the U.K.’s only two aircraft carriers.

The flagship aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, still “new” in naval terms, is visiting Rosyth—not to assert British naval prestige but to begin maintenance. Commissioned in 2017, the ship had already spent most of 2025 under repair after corrosion was found in its propeller shaft. Now, despite recent $4.3 billion refits, it’s once more out of action for further upgrades and inaccessible-system inspections, pushing its availability deeper into the future.

Three thousand miles to the west, a Canadian-born civilian sits on her living room couch, contemplating her approaching death. She isn’t terminally ill, but the state won’t provide the medical home care she needs. Canada has promised health care via socialized medicine, but it will instead administer a lethal injection within days. This is the regime of MAID, Canada’s euphemistically termed Medical Assistance In Dying legislation that legalized assisted suicide in 2016. This “choice” is presented as a compassionate right. However, in practice it underscores a disquieting fact: the machinery of death is more functional than that of living care.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ 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.

Pax Donaldiana | The Roundtable Ep. 281

This week, the legacy media allowed their hatred for Trump to overrule any desire they may once have had for peace in Ukraine. The president held meetings with Putin, Zelensky, and European leaders, apparently making serious headway toward a conclusion to the war. Meanwhile in Florida this week, illegal immigrant Harjinder Singh allegedly killed three people after losing control of his semi-truck in the course of an illegal U-turn. Despite failing English and road sign tests, Singh—who crossed from Mexico into California—was able to obtain a commercial driver’s license thanks to Gavin Newsom’s governance in CA. Matthew Peterson joins the guys to discuss the tragic outcomes of Leftist policy and the Democrats’ ongoing efforts to rehabilitate their image. Plus, are movies dead? And other media recs.

On August 11, President Trump officially declared an emergency in the District of Columbia. Violent crime had reached such levels that he was compelled to utilize authorities granted to him under Section 740 of the Home Rule Act, which requires the D.C. Metropolitan Police to be put at the president’s disposal for up to 30 days. This was followed by the president’s deployment of the D.C. National Guard and various federal law enforcement officers, including Homeland Security, the FBI, and the DEA, to walk the beat in an attempt to combat the disorder that plagues our nation’s capital.

The move has all the hallmarks of the Trump law and order agenda. Much like the man himself, it emphasizes creating a vibe of confidence and authority through public shows of force to more or less will the desired end into being.

As the kids say, “You can just do things.”

When I was growing up in North Carolina in the 1980s, a Chinese restaurant in town had its walls covered with photos of Marines and always gave a discount to any Marine who walked through its doors. The story behind the restaurant is remarkable.

It was founded by an immigrant who, as an impoverished child in China at the end of World War II, had been befriended by a company of Marines. They essentially “adopted” him and gave him his own bunk in a barracks and a Marine uniform, taught him English and basic drills, and sent him to a Christian religious school in China, which they paid for. When the Marines left when the Communists took over, “Charlie Two Shoes” as the Marines called him (“two shoes” being their best approximation of Tsui, his last name) was persecuted by the Communist government due to his friendship with the Americans. The government imprisoned him for years and then sentenced him to house arrest upon his release.

After a series of challenges, Charlie was miraculously able to get in touch with his old Marine buddies. As China was opening up in 1983, they arranged for him to immigrate to America, where he settled in North Carolina, started a Chinese restaurant, and eventually became a U.S. citizen. His various children generally thrived in America. Some ran the restaurant while others became doctors and pharmacists. In 2013, Charlie became the 18th honorary United States Marine. That same year, he accompanied some of his old Marine buddies on a trip back to China, his first visit since leaving 30 years prior.

The latest source of outrage within the Pentagon establishment is the rightful end of Army Lieutenant General Douglas Sims’s career, which has drawn loud protests from both active-duty and retired officers. Secretary Hegseth’s decision not to promote Sims to the rank of general has been portrayed as evidence of creeping politicization in the military. The argument advanced by critics, and repeated in opinion essays and New York Times leaks, is that because military officers swear an oath to the Constitution, they should be protected from any decision involving their status or rank that is political in nature.

Popularized by leaders such as former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, this interpretation distorts the true meaning of the oath all commissioned officers take. While the oath binds officers to uphold the Constitution, it also carries a persistent obligation to obey lawful orders from civilian leadership. That principle, which is rooted in centuries of American civil-military tradition, is what ensures that the military remains under the control of elected officials rather than becoming a self-governing class.

Officers take the following oath when they are first commissioned, and at each successive promotion:

In the age of Trump, our nation lives under the banner of America First. In domestic policy, this means securing our border, deporting those who are in the country illegally, and reestablishing law and order in our cities, among other key goals. But what does America First mean for the world beyond America? To answer that question, we must look back centuries.

The onset of the American Revolution was not purely a local affair. The war eventually became a global conflagration, with battlefields stretching from the Caribbean to India. But the enduring contest was ideological, not geopolitical. Non-American lovers of liberty—Paine, Pulaski, Lafayette, Von Steuben, and Salomon for starters—from an array of nations arrived to fight for the American cause, and sometimes became Americans themselves. They understood that fighting for freedom here meant rekindling hope for their own countries.

Last month, Marco Rubio’s State Department executed a sweeping restructuring plan to implement an America First foreign policy. Although many offices were eliminated or combined, a few new ones were created. Among them is the Office of Natural Rights.

Its name has provoked predictable harrumphing from establishment commentators who feel “human rights” is the only acceptable term of art for diplomacy. While they are right that the terminology is significant, they are blind to the vital reality the State Department has recognized: without human nature there are no human rights. If our rights are not grounded in a shared nature, they are founded simply on the will of the government. If the government grants us more rights at one moment, it may arbitrarily retract them at the next.

The Trump Administration has observed this phenomenon with great alarm. JD Vance argued that this is Europe’s greatest threat in his now-famous Munich speech, and the State Department weighed in with an official article shortly thereafter. U.S. officials are rightly concerned about natural rights abroad, not because they are Republicans, but because they are Americans. The recognition of natural rights is the foundation of our own government.

Andrew Beck argues that America needs to revive the ideal of assimilation if our country is to survive as a country. It must not have its distinctive culture washed away by the influx of immigrants coming from many different cultures and religions. New Americans, he believes, should not only pledge allegiance to the nation’s official creed, as enshrined in its founding documents and laws, but also defer to its dominant culture and way of life, including the majority religion, Christianity.

There is much to agree with in this view, which Beck is at pains to distinguish from “Christian nationalism,” whatever that is. The message of assimilation, as it used to be practiced in the 20th century, was that we Americans were proud of what we had built in this country. We assumed that foreigners were coming to America to share our freedoms and prosperity, and we were eager for them to know why America was free and why it was prosperous. Prejudices they might have brought with them, in favor of monarchy or against private property, for example, should be left behind at Ellis Island. The main instrument of assimilation was public schools, which accepted their responsibility to teach what it was to be American.

Does a Hindu statue in Sugar Land, Texas, threaten America’s stability and cohesion? Andrew Beck thinks so. He wants the government to “curate or protect the dominant and preferred culture of its historic people.”

In a column I wrote to which Beck responds, I suggested America’s Christian culture is not imperiled by a lone statue in a community like Sugar Land, where Christianity and churches are quite strong. Recalling the U.S. Nazi Party based in the community where I lived during my 1970s boyhood, I extolled the U.S. Constitution for protecting free speech—even for the “absurd and the hateful,” which is “parcel to our freedom from despotism.” The Constitution, I argued, “expresses a providential trust that if truth and virtue are free to argue their case, they can in the open market of ideas survive and even prevail, at least to a certain extent, in our fallen world.”

Beck evidently has less providential trust in the power of truth and virtue, warning that “What you elevate in the public eye is what you encourage the people to idealize in their hearts.” He asks, do “we want immigrants to be looking backwards at what they left? Or looking forward to what they now are privileged to inherit?”

Beck surmises that my evident indifference about Hindu idols reveals my wider complacency about the “cost of pluralism.” He warns:

Christopher Wolfe’s thoughtful essay on Booker T. Washington, leisure, and work stirred some fond memories, from years ago, of making a friend by reading a book.

He was an old black man, and I was an old white man. We were both native Angelenos and had been just about old enough to drive when the Watts riots broke out in 1965. But that was half a century and a lifetime ago, and we hadn’t known one another. Los Angeles is a big place, home to many worlds. Now we were white-haired professors, reading a book together, and we became friends. His name was Kimasi, and he has since gone to a better world.  

We were spending a week with a dozen other academics reading Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, Up from Slavery. Washington was born a slave in Franklin County, Virginia, just a few years before the Civil War began. He gained his freedom through Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Union victory in the war. With heroic determination, he got himself an education and went on to found the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, where he remained principal for the rest of his life.

The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail is one of the most interesting and controversial novels of the 20th century. Which is why it’s good news that Vauban Books, a small publishing house, is coming out with a new edition, complete with a fresh translation by scholar Ethan Rundell. English-language copies of the book, first published in the U.S. in 1975, have been passed around like samizdat. The Camp of the Saints became popular again in the 2010s, but the rightsholders refused to reprint it until Vauban managed to secure the rights.

The Camp of the Saints depicts mass immigration destroying European civilization. In the novel a gigantic flotilla of boats filled with destitute Indians sets course for France to seek refugee status. After much handwringing, the government allows them to land rather than take the only other option available, which is to massacre them. France—and very quickly all of Europe—turns into a dystopian Third-World slum.

Raspail’s novel was written in the 1970s when the “boat people” fled Vietnam for Europe. The book caused an enormous sensation—it was a bestseller in France and the U.S., and eventually globally. Many have hailed it as a great and important work of prophecy. But, predictably, it was then and is now denounced as a horribly racist screed that only white supremacists would be interested in reading.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ 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 Crooks in DC | The Roundtable Ep. 280

As if to confirm the problem Andrew Beck identified in “Assimilation and Its Discontents,” U.S. Representative Delia Ramirez just days after publication of his piece declared (in Spanish) at a leftist gathering in Mexico City, “I’m a proud Guatemalan before I’m an American.” The Chicago-born Democratic congresswoman—more than the Hindu idol in Texas Beck decries—defines the problem we face in creating an unum out of the plures of people, states, and regions that make up our sprawling continental nation.

Representative Ramirez deserves all the obloquy heaped on her for being America Second (at best). But the core assimilation problem we face is not that some immigrants and their children are insufficiently committed to America—it’s that America is insufficiently committed to assimilation.

Immigrants are going to take their cues from Americans about what we expect of them regarding assimilation. As an old boss of mine used to say, you teach people how to treat you—and we’ve been teaching newcomers that it’s okay to, as Beck puts it, “come to America, live in America—but…not become an American.”

For some Gen Zers, it’s already time to retire. A new trend known as “micro-retirement” has spread like wildfire on social media. It involves young adults working for a few years, quitting their jobs to pursue life experiences, and then repeating the cycle. While it is tempting to dismiss this trend, micro-retirement’s appeal to Zoomers reveals much about their unique perspective on life.

One popular influencer, Adama Lorna, made the case for micro-retirement in a TikTok video: “Instead of waiting until you’re 60 or 70 to travel the world and indulge in hobbies, you do them while you have your youth, your energy, and health.” As she sees it, micro-retirement is a way for young people to have their cake and eat it too. By “retiring” every few years, they’re able to reap the freedom that comes with retiree life while enjoying their youth.

Lifestyle guru Timothy Ferriss coined the term “micro-retirement” in his book titled The 4-Hour Workweek. Although it was written in 2007, it didn’t catch on among Millennials. The fact that Zoomers popularized a term coined while they were learning their ABCs suggests that something about their generational experience primed them for it.

Andrew Beck has made a cogent case for why the U.S., like other countries, requires cultural and moral cohesion to protect its nationhood and act with a unified will on behalf of the common good. Beck correctly notes that the U.S. started out as a country with a well-defined collective identity. If we look back at America’s beginnings, we discover John Jay in Federalist 2 defining this original American identity in a memorable observation:

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

At the time this was written, the newly formed American nation-state was composed overwhelmingly of Northern European Protestants; its legal institutions were largely British. Its shared culture was shaped by, among other things, reading and revering the King James Bible. Among the professional class, the Bible’s authority was supplemented by that of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, Shakespeare’s tragedies, and (to some extent) classical texts like Plutarch’s Lives.

A few years ago, I was invited to observe some student presentations on the topic of Leisure: The Basis of Culture. It is one of the perks of my job as a professor at a Catholic liberal arts university that I get invited to such events. I thoroughly enjoyed the presentations, but I could sense from the Q&A that one part of the audience remained unpersuaded: the students’ parents. Moms and dads who had worked hard to pay for their children to attend college were not enthusiastic about the main point their sons and daughters were making: work is not what life is all about.

Leisure is the goal of work, after all. Leisure activity (rather than do-nothing inactivity) awakens the greatest part of our souls, the part that is capable of wonder and contemplation. Beginning with Aristotle, excellent philosophical authorities over the years have made that very argument. Classicist Sarah Broadie once observed that Aristotle’s idea that “we are not-at-leisure in order to be at leisure” remains understudied—except by the mid-20th century Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper, the foremost recent thinker who has argued for leisure’s importance. In 1948, he wrote that “the power to be at leisure is the power to step beyond the working world and win contact with those superhuman, life-giving forces that can send us, renewed and alive again, into the busy world of work.”

Fixing American education begins with figuring out what to do about the United States Department of Education (ED). The Trump Administration wants to eliminate the ED at once. Kenin Spivak’s recent article for The American Mind argued that policymakers should simplify the ED and reduce its power, and then consider whether to eliminate the department entirely. Regardless of the option they ultimately choose, policymakers should at minimum return most of the ED’s powers to determine the content and structure of education back to the states and local school districts.

Why should the first priority of education reformers be to eliminate the Education Department, or at the very least remove most of its power over American education?

The National Association of Scholars’ report Waste Land: The Education Department’s Profligacy, Mediocrity, and Radicalism provides chapter and verse on how the ED misbehaves. The Education Department and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) use four big tools to impose ideologically extreme policies on states and school districts. These tools are:

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ 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.

Hardball and Big Balls | The Roundtable Ep. 279

Zohran Mamdani’s recent conversation with Sadiq Khan should instill fear in the hearts of the average New York City voter. In the weeks since he defeated Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary in June, Mamdani has reportedly “been in touch with a number of progressive mayors,” including London’s.

During a “warm and collegial” phone call, Khan reportedly advised the young socialist from Queens to shift to the center. After winning the primary by pledging rent freezes and free buses, he urged Mamdani to reassure moderates in the same way that Khan himself did in 2016, after routing his fellow left-wing opponents before defeating the Conservative candidate in the London mayoral race.

Although Khan is not a leftist in the same sense as Mamdani or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, his tenure in London shows his alleged “centrism” can be just as damaging.

Keeping people safe is a basic responsibility of an elected leader—a test Khan is failing. London has a terrible knife problem. Almost one-third of the 50,000 violent and sexual crimes with knives reported in England and Wales last year occurred in the capital.

In the 1980s Jesse Jackson helped banish “Western Civ” from Stanford with a silly chant. Many colleges and universities that had not already done so followed suit.

But in the classical counterrevolution of the 21st century, Western civilization is back. The Great Books, long thought a relic of Mortimer Adler’s Cold War-era salesmanship, now guide the curriculum at many of the over 1,000 classical schools that have been founded over the past few decades, dozens of which are publicly funded charter schools. A new Great Books college sprouts up every year or so. Dead languages like Latin seem to be very much alive again.

Whether it is humanism, the medieval liberal arts, or even just memes about the Roman Empire, it turns out that Western Civ did indeed have to go—big.

The 21st-century classical counterrevolutionaries should not get high on their own supply, though. If their project ends up being a retread of the Mortimer Adler-Robert Hutchins show, they may be greeted by an even deeper abyss of failure than the ostracism Western Civ faced in the name of diversity that occurred with the rise of racial and gender studies.

At least on paper, DEI in the federal government is dead. On the very first day of his second presidency, Donald Trump issued a presidential action, “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing,” ending all diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility “mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.” Employees in DEI-specific positions were fired; DEI positions and offices were dismantled; and DEI training programs, newsletters, and promotion criteria were scrapped.

But it would be beyond naive to think that just because federal agencies are not currently promoting DEI that their workforces do not still widely hold the opinions they were encouraged to hold. Thousands of current federal employees participated in or supported DEI programs. Even those who might disagree were coerced to back DEI if they wanted to keep their jobs.

President Donald Trump unveiled his AI Action Plan last week, an ambitious and strategically framed document that signals artificial intelligence is no longer a niche issue for technocrats. It has become the defining arena of great-power competition.

As AI has become more deeply embedded in governance, a critical question has emerged: Will this revolutionary technology tip the scales in favor of authoritarian regimes or empower democracies? History offers no easy answers. Past innovations have demonstrated both emancipatory and repressive potential. Theoretically, AI could enhance transparency, participation, and accountability.

Theory, however, is conjecture. There are underlying authoritarian advantages at a cognitive and structural level that cannot be wished away.

AI competition is not merely a race for innovation—it is a contest of governance models.

Autocracies—particularly China—are poised to benefit disproportionately from AI’s capabilities: pervasive surveillance, granular social control, and predictive state planning. It is time the United States openly acknowledges this truth.

Given the heated back-and-forth over the Trump Administration’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities and continued support for Ukraine, it is clear that matters of foreign policy will be a major factor in defining the character of American conservatism moving forward.

There is bound to be disagreement over the relative geopolitical merits of supporting Ukraine or Israel, as well as the appropriate level of support. However, one principle is undeniable: an advocate of a given course of action must demonstrate its connection to the interests of the people of the United States alone. That doesn’t mean it can’t be mutually beneficial for an international partner. But the very purpose of statesmanship is to navigate events and relationships in a manner that maximizes the advantage accruing to one’s own nation. Absent a clear definition of the specific interests served by an existing alliance, there will always be a danger of the tail wagging the dog.

The first order of business is therefore to establish such a definition. What do we gain by a given course of action in service of a foreign nation? This is as much a question of theory as of practice: What are we fighting for, and what are the best means to obtain it? As so often tends to be the case, the best place to look for an illustration of the principles that can help guide our thinking is the American Founding—although perhaps not in the way it is normally considered.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ 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.

Jeanetic Lottery | The Roundtable Ep. 278