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.
Somalia et Alia | The Roundtable Ep. 297
In the first part of my extended reflection on the character of conservatism, I warned that the American Right is confronted by a “pseudo-Rightist culture of repudiation” that in important respects mirrors the intellectual and political Left. The crude white nationalism and vociferous anti-Semitism of the so-called “groypers,” who delight in the nasty, transgressive utterings of the internet chameleon Nick Fuentes, present the most recent example of that phenomenon.
On another front, a spirit of ingratitude dominates in certain precincts of the Right. There is a marked tendency to dismiss even the most admirable conservative wisdom of the past as outdated, irrelevant, or worse. A young critic of mine at The American Conservative, who writes very much in that dismissive spirit, accuses me of making “rote” appeals to the likes of Burke and Churchill, as if deep immersion in the thought and action of these two great conservatives can only be formulaic and irrelevant.
But a conservatism that forgets the most capacious meaning of the social contract, the enduring bond that connects the living to the dead and the yet to be born, and the multiple reasons for gratitude to our noble if imperfect forebears—Burkean themes par excellence—has lost essential bearings, and will rather quickly lose its soul.
Every few years, someone tells us the United States is not really the child of the long tradition of republicanism, English common law, colonial self-government, the natural rights principles enshrined in our Declaration, and the debates involving the framing of a new government that transpired in Philadelphia after the war. No, we’re subtly led to assume that our political father is someone else entirely: this time, it’s the Haudenosaunee—the Iroquois Confederacy.
Ken Burns’s new PBS documentary on the American Revolution leans into that claim, suggesting in the first episode’s preamble that the very idea of our Union was inspired by the Iroquois. By subtly juxtaposing the Iroquois and the Founding Fathers, viewers are invited to believe that if they thought Franklin, Washington, and company fathered America, then they’ve been building the wrong monuments.
Burns tells a vivid story. But it’s also a deeply misleading one—and the very treaty on which his opening narrative depends says almost the opposite of what he needs it to say.
The scene in question is the 1744 Lancaster treaty council. Representatives of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia met with Iroquois leaders to settle land disputes and keep them allied against the French. During the talks, an Iroquois speaker did just as Burns relates—namely, he advised the colonial governors to live at peace with one another and act together as the Iroquois nations did. But the colonial reply—effectively omitted by Burns—matters just as much.
The Trump Administration recently released an extremely promising National Security Strategy (NSS)—but the same cannot be said about the proposed FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
The House and Senate’s compromise NDAA, which was published on Sunday night, appears to be in tension with the goals of the NSS. While the National Security Strategy prioritizes a hemispheric defense of the American homeland, the NDAA locks decision makers into maintaining unnecessary overseas troop levels. Despite the stated aims of the NSS, Congress seems to be looking to safeguard the national security priorities and infrastructure of previous eras.
Restricting the drawdown of troops stationed overseas, increasingly murky foreign entrenchment through legally binding efforts to sell arms, and dubious clauses requiring congressional approval at every turn all serve to bind the commander in chief’s hands. All of this reeks of a shadowy order desperately trying to maintain the status quo at the expense of the will of the people who elected Donald Trump in 2024.
This cannot stand.
For half a decade, the Right has debated “free market fundamentalism.” This phenomenon is also known as “zombie Reaganism,” “libertarian neoconservatism,” and “neoliberalism.” Whatever you call it, it never happened. That is to say, the reduction in government expenditure and size that Reaganites promised and liberals feared turned out to be a mirage. What happened instead is that, starting in the 1980s, both parties set the country on a course toward Total Boomer Luxury Communism (TBLC).
TBLC is driving every aspect of American decline—from skyrocketing national debt and the erosion of our defense industrial base to the despair of young people. It’s not the only reason for the decline, to be sure, but it’s a major part of the problem. Yet TBLC has been entirely obscured from view.
The essence of TBLC is that it redistributes wealth from younger families and workers to seniors, who are on average much richer. America has achieved the Marxist paradise of hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, rearing cattle in the evening, and criticizing after dinner. Only it looks more like golf in the morning, horseback riding in the afternoon, drinks at the social club in the evening, and a restful night’s sleep in a million-dollar home—all thanks to the largesse of the U.S. government.
With his lead symposium essay, Jesse Merriam revisits the constructive criticism he offered of “A Better Originalism,” the manifesto I, Hadley Arkes, Josh Hammer, and Matthew Peterson co-authored in these pages at the advent of the Biden presidency. As Merriam wrote in 2021, “The failure of legal conservatism is principally a product of how it is structured, not the product of an inadequate legal theory.” By structured, he meant not only the institutions that dominate the conservative legal movement, but also the aims at which those institutions pull oars together to achieve.
Legal conservatism needs substantive goals to which the movement can orient its activities, a point on which Merriam is correct. Indeed, a hyperfocus on the methodologies of the prevailing form of originalism, the original public meaning variety, masks the ultimate ends of a legal conservatism worth pursuing in the first place.
Suicide is a growing public health crisis in the United States.
In 2023, approximately 49,300 Americans died by suicide, with an age-adjusted rate of 14.1-14.7 per 100,000 people. The rate for men was 22.8 per 100,000, which is roughly four times higher than that of women, at 5.9 per 100,000. Suicide rates among young men have been rising steadily since 2010, with men ages 15-34 being the fastest-growing segment. In 2023, the suicide rate for men ages 15-24 was 21 per 100,000, compared with 5 per 100,000 for women of the same age.
Today’s suicide prevention efforts must focus more on men, yet public awareness and policy attention remain limited. Unsurprisingly, mainstream media coverage often fails to report these age- and gender-specific trends accurately, making it harder to direct resources and interventions where they are most urgently needed.
Given the generation-defining AI race that’s currently moving at breakneck speed, one would think Congress might have a productive thought about it by now. But this assumption would unfortunately be a mistake. Instead, federal legislators have chosen to mostly ignore a crucial issue that has deep ramifications for our nation. By the time they step up and see the bigger picture, it might just be too late.
Recently on Truth Social, President Donald Trump slammed the “patchwork” of state regulations Congress has allowed to flourish. AI policy is being drafted not in Washington but in states like California. It’s being crafted not by sensible, informed actors but by out-of-touch lawmakers who few people know, who won’t be held accountable, and whose motivation lies in appeasing their constituents rather than strengthening U.S. national security.
Jesse Merriam persuasively argues that legal conservatives are no longer committed to maintaining the essential features of the American legal and political order. They are instead obsessed with matters of constitutional interpretation, emphasizing the related doctrines of originalism and textualism. So they consider it something of a victory when progressive justices such as Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson embrace those doctrines, even though it’s perfectly clear they will use them for progressive ends. Indeed, even Justice Neil Gorsuch, an avowed textualist, did so in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) when he insisted, absurdly and ahistorically, that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects individuals from employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. His pretextual textualism is as lawless as anything that has animated judicial supremacists since at least the 1950s.
Furthermore, making originalism and its variants the core of legal “conservatism” is a fool’s errand. It does not give conservatives a positive legal language in which to express, or a legal agenda with which to fight, the substantive evils that non-originalist decisions represent. And this assumes that originalism even provides the tools to overturn such decisions, which is hardly clear.
Legal conservatives find themselves in an unusual position: originalism has reached unprecedented acceptance within the judiciary and the bar. A majority of Supreme Court justices—including at least one appointed by a Democratic president—identify as originalists, or at least strive toward originalism. Guided by the original understanding of those who ratified the Constitution and the Reconstruction Amendments, the High Court has overruled Roe v. Wade, ended the use of race in higher education, and recognized the individual right to own firearms.
But some find these successes disorienting. Originalism’s victories have triggered an important debate among conservatives. Some wonder if originalism is up to the task of fashioning an approach to constitutional interpretation rooted in a conservative morality that can supply a positive agenda for law and policy. For these conservative critics, the moral neutrality of originalism, which arose in opposition to the explicit policymaking of the Warren Court, appears to be its central defect.
Professor Jesse Merriam’s essay in The American Mind is an example of this view. He writes,
On July 19, 1776, after New York’s delegates had received instructions from the new Provincial Congress in their colony to support independence, Congress resolved that the Declaration “be fairly engrossed on parchment, with the title and stile of ‘The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America,’ and that the same, when engrossed, be signed by every member of Congress.”
The formal handwritten document, the one now displayed in the Rotunda of the National Archives building in Washington, D.C., was probably prepared by Timothy Matlack, clerk to the Second Continental Congress, who was known for his fine penmanship. He was also a colonel in the Philadelphia Fifth Battalion and later became a delegate to Congress.
The Journals of the Continental Congress records on August 2, 1776, that “The Declaration of Independence, being engrossed, and compared at the table, was signed [by the members].” Most signed the Declaration on that date, though several delegates signed later. Delaware delegate Thomas McKean was a colonel of the Philadelphia Fourth Battalion, in New Jersey reinforcing Washington’s troops, and was the last person to sign the Declaration, perhaps as late as 1781.
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.
Double Tap Dance | The Roundtable Ep. 296
Many conservatives, myself included, have recognized the wisdom of a populist turn in our politics. A roused populace was necessary to address the growing illiberalism and sheer unaccountability of woke elites who, for at least a generation, have committed themselves to redefining the theory and practice of liberal democracy. But populism also has marked limits, especially when applied to the realm where principle and prudence, in the high and noble Aristotelian or Burkean sense, must inform action.
Populist anger must be calibrated and channelled so that it does not become self-destructive. The welcome resistance to the progressivist “culture of repudiation,” as the late Roger Scruton so suggestively called it, must not give way to a rival spirit of repudiation on the Right that dismisses our intellectual and political forebears as fools and frauds. “What has conservatism ever conserved?” is both historically illiterate and politically ungrateful.
As a pessimistic Boomer (and Big Law veteran) who channels Robert Bork, I regard the state of our politics in the MAGA era the same way Charles Dickens did in A Tale of Two Cities nearly two centuries ago: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” I try to temper my gloominess about the current zeitgeist by aiming for a perspective somewhere between Pollyanna and Jeremiah.
Thanks to President Trump, the 6-to-3 originalist majority on the Supreme Court is the only thing standing between us and the abyss—a hellish combination of Deep State corruption, socialist economics, cultish wokeism, and cultural degeneracy. Yes, President Trump has over three years left in his second term, and is heroically trying to drain the swamp. But Congress is gridlocked, the midterms loom, and recent election results suggest the MAGA agenda is not as popular as Trump’s 2024 drubbing of Kamala Harris might indicate. She was, after all, the weakest Democratic candidate for president since Michael Dukakis in 1988. Unlike Trump in 2024, the Bush/Quayle ticket won an Electoral College landslide, and a majority of the popular vote. The nation is much more divided now.
Despite all of this, unlike my friend Jesse Merriam, I am encouraged by the state of the conservative legal movement—at least relative to the Left’s capture of so many other American institutions.
I have a longtime friend—I’ll omit his name because he is somewhat politically prominent—who has been very involved in the extraction of Afghans from Afghanistan who allegedly helped us and resettling them in the United States. My friend already has a demanding job, but he has often worked through the night, forgoing sleep to help with this task.
I have a number of strong political disagreements with him, but I would never question his patriotism. He voluntarily served as a soldier in Afghanistan after overcoming great obstacles to be accepted into the military. But I would strongly question his political judgment, and the judgment of anyone who thinks we should be settling Afghan refugees in America.
Unfortunately, a number of our former soldiers, no matter how sincere their beliefs, seem to sympathize more with people in a foreign country whom they believed, rightly or wrongly, to be allies rather than with the interests of the only country to which they owe their allegiance.
Despite thousands of lawsuits against OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma now being settled, the opioid crisis continues to devastate families and communities. This is why there are massive national efforts to expand addiction treatment, develop non-opioid pain alternatives, promote natural remedies, and confront the Mexican drug cartels flooding America with fentanyl. In recent years, opioid-related deaths have finally begun to decline, suggesting those initiatives are starting to make a real impact. But that progress may already be slowing.
In his opening essay, Jesse Merriam calls for a more positive, more substantive, and more ambitious legal conservatism. An almost exclusive focus on originalism, he suggests, has made the conservative legal movement too narrow, technocratic, and reactive. Merriam argues it has become overly concerned with means, such as the correct rules of constitutional interpretation, instead of ends, like securing the common good. It is too preoccupied with correcting old wrongs, like reversing erroneous precedents, instead of achieving positive results, such as fostering the conditions of a virtuous and orderly society. The scions of legal conservatism, Merriam contends, should learn from the great legal-political movements of the past like the New Deal and the civil rights movement and seek, through legal and political activism, to build the kind of legal order necessary to restore the nation’s traditional political identity.
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.
Friends and Frenemies | The Roundtable Ep. 295
A recent White House meeting between Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani gave the president a chance to flip the script while publicly debasing the rhetorical currency of the “anti-fascist” Left. In this special holiday episode, the guys are joined by Matthew Peterson to discuss the president’s latest strategy, and answer listener questions. On the docket are emerging factions within the conservative movement, federal leniency on Antifa post-domestic-terrorist designation, and more. Plus: The crew gives thanks and share holiday plans, antics, eats—and cultural recommendations!
For too long, many Republicans have confined their criticisms of mass migration to illegal immigration. But the truth is that our entire legal immigration system is broken—and the consequences for Americans have been nothing short of disastrous.
The Optional Practical Training (OPT) program is a clear example of the urgent need for reform.
Recent reports have outlined the Trump Administration’s plans to overhaul or end OPT. As I noted in a letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and USCIS Director Joseph Edlow earlier this month, this is welcome news. It would represent a long-overdue correction to one of the most abused programs in the U.S. immigration system.
The OPT program is a work benefit tied to the F-1 visa, the standard nonimmigrant student visa that allows foreign nationals to attend U.S. colleges and universities. The program allows student visa holders to work in the U.S. for up to 12 months after finishing their degree; STEM graduates are allowed an additional 24-month extension.
American popular culture since at least the 1950s has fetishized rebellion. But what’s left to rebel against in the 21st century?
None of the traditional sources of authority or repression hold much sway today: not the church, not parents, not hierarchies of taste or class. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll are now just passé Boomer recreations. Yet American society is not without a rigid morality that imposes itself on everyone, and on some—young men in particular—much more than others.
The modern dogma that regulates everything from sex to speech is liberalism. What happens when the all-American love of rebellion meets this dogma? You get a generation in revolt against liberalism’s strictures. And like earlier generations that revolted against Christianity and bourgeois respectability, the radical youth of this generation embrace whatever is shockingly offensive to the old prudes.
Hierarchical marriage—the “trad wife”—is as much a rejection of today’s norms as sex outside marriage was of the old norms. Affirming traditional religion is now the kind of rebellion that rejecting the same used to be. Feminism is repressive, so the “manosphere” becomes liberation. Antiracism is humorless, so “The Will Stancil Show,” in all its ugliness, is an underground hit.
A friend who works with high school students recently said to me, “I overheard a group of boys talking about ‘international Jewry.’” He was in disbelief to hear these seemingly mild-mannered kids express views that, not 20 years ago, would have been considered taboo.
What is going on with Gen Z?
I’ve written elsewhere that Gen Z is experiencing a kind of church resurgence. That remains true. But at the same time, Gen Z is one of the most polarized generations in American history.
In 2024, Gen Z—led in part by young activists like Charlie Kirk and Scott Pressler—shifted toward Donald Trump. He won 46% of Gen Z voters—56% of young men and 40% of young women. This led many to expect that a younger, more populist generation would shift the country rightward. But now, in 2025, the self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani won 78% of the youth vote in New York City—67% of young men and 84% of young women. Far from being locked into any one existing political party, young people are more divided than ever.
One cause of this is what I call “Nomadic Progressivism.” Kids born between, say, 1997 and 2012 have been thoroughly inundated with progressivism and identity politics from birth. They came of age amid several key developments that shaped their moral and social formation:
The charge that newly elected New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is an “Islamist” has mostly been derided either as Islamophobic or mocked as Boomer bait. In response, many cite Mamdani’s commitments to various leftist social causes that are antithetical to radical Islam, such as his promise to use $65 million in taxpayer funds for “sex change” operations. And indeed, he seems to use his Muslim faith as more of a chit in the great progressive oppression game—“Muslim and brown: two points!”—than being genuinely dedicated to its tenets, let alone the fundamentalist version of it.
However, his campaign’s success is owed at least partially to what may be New York City’s first politically organized Muslim voting bloc. It represents what is likely the beginning of a new chapter in the city’s long history of ethnic retail politics.
Even in his transition period, Mamdani’s deep connection to this voting bloc is clear. For example, Hassaan Chaudhary, the political director for Mamdani’s transition and inaugural committee, was not only outed by the New York Post for anti-Semitism, which is par for the course in left-wing politics, but also for the more traditional Muslim skepticism of gay rights, which is decidedly not.
Three incidents from Mamdani’s campaign stood out as notable, showing his connections to this growing group.
Dr. D, as I called him, was a scholar and a gentleman. He earned his PhD from Yale after writing a dissertation on Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, and Wittgenstein, published as Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy by The University of Chicago Press in 1981. Later he wrote David Hume and the Problem of Reason, from Yale University Press, and a book published by ISI called The Roots of Freedom, based on lectures he gave for Radio Free America. After starting his career at the University of Chicago, Dr. D moved to the University of Houston and then to Loyola University Chicago in 1993, just as I was enrolling there in graduate school.
Jesse Merriam has inaugurated this symposium on the future of the conservative legal movement with a provocative essay arguing that the movement needs to reassess itself in light of our current political and cultural moment. He argues that it should shed its technocratic “focus on how precedents are interpreted and distinguished” in favor of a broader project “that conceives of law as a way to sustain the American way of life.” Legal conservatism, Merriam continues, should “develop a constitutional morality that reflects the larger project…of constitutional and…civilizational restoration.” He does not want to abandon originalism but says that the conservative legal movement needs to mount a positive project to meet today’s considerable challenges.
I agree.
In order to clarify Merriam’s argument, it is important to point out that the movement has always needed, if it has not quite always had, at least three separate but overlapping projects.
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.
I Will Be Your Tootsie-Nuzzi | The Roundtable Ep. 294
Today’s conservative legal movement is the proverbial dog that caught the car. After years of effort (and more than a little fortuity), a solidly conservative majority now sits on the Supreme Court. The movement has racked up a string of wins on longstanding priorities, ranging from affirmative action to abortion to administrative agency deference, with perhaps the most seismic changes still to come. The Court’s blessing of the long-theorized “major questions doctrine,” which grants courts broad power to deem a particular action outside the purview of administrative agencies and properly committed to Congress, is a blade perfectly forged for dismantling that perennial movement bogeyman, the administrative state.
So where do things go from here?
President Donald Trump’s latest comments on semiconductor exports sounded almost conciliatory—until they weren’t. Speaking recently on 60 Minutes, the president said he would let NVIDIA “deal with China,” but drew a bright red line: Beijing could buy chips, just not the “most advanced” ones. The message was calibrated for maximum effect: permissive enough to please markets, hawkish enough to claim toughness. NVIDIA’s stock jumped immediately—but China did not get what it wanted.
Days later, in a Financial Times interview, NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang warned that if the U.S. blocked his company from selling more of its advanced chips to China, it would “lose” the AI race. The argument was astonishing in its candor: cut us off, Beijing wins.
The comparison between a president sounding measured and a CEO trying to sound indispensable captures a dangerous inversion of power. NVIDIA has become more than America’s most valuable company. It’s attempting to become its policymaker, shaping the boundaries of what Washington thinks possible in its competition with China.
To understand how one company reached that position, it helps to revisit what happened in Washington just days before Trump met Xi Jinping in South Korea.
For decades, U.S. education has been dominated by the American Left. Their stranglehold was highly visible during the Biden Administration, with countless stories about wildly inappropriate books in school libraries, Critical Race Theory being taught in classrooms, and national associations calling for parents to be designated as domestic terrorists.
How did our public school systems—including those in red states, from Iowa to Alaska—become infected with radical leftist ideology? The answer is education consulting groups.
Most Americans don’t realize that every aspect of governance, from parks and wildlife departments to the curriculum in kids’ schools, has been outsourced to a coalition of nameless, faceless NGO consulting groups that are funded by millions of taxpayer dollars funneled through the government. One of the worst offenders is the American Institutes for Research (AIR).
The great civilizations of antiquity have never needed a majority to survive. They have always required just a quorum of men who knew what they believed and acted on the courage of their convictions. A few hundred trierarchs at Salamis, a few thousand hoplites at Thermopylae, a Roman handful who backed Scipio when everyone else wanted to sue for peace—a hearty few have helped preserve their respective ways of life in times of turmoil.
The American Founders understood this. Fifty-six merchants, farmers, and lawyers in Philadelphia signed their own death warrant, and 12,000 half-frozen men at Valley Forge kept that signature from being erased. Formation of character is about learning how to stand when everyone else sits down. We don’t study great men to cosplay greatness—we study them to see how a group of determined souls can change the world.
Today’s America, however, no longer forms leaders. It manufactures influencers and administrators. Its schools churn out credentialed mediocrities fluent in therapy and management but strangers to duty, tragedy, or honor. The republic’s elite, once shaped by Scripture and Cicero, is now shaped by LinkedIn. The result is a leadership class without leadership, a caste of clever children managing the ruins of their inheritance.
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.
Kondo for Congress | The Roundtable Ep. 293
Fall is not just a time for campfires and s’mores—it’s also when the Supreme Court starts its new term. This session comes at an especially significant time for conservatives, given that in just the last few years almost all of the most infamous cases that have been driving legal conservatism for roughly two generations have been overruled or substantially narrowed. Indeed, the Supreme Court has repudiated and formally overruled Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), Roe v. Wade (1973), and Chevron v. NRDC (1984)—cases that, respectively, represent church-state separationism, abortion rights, and the administrative state. Likewise in SFFA v. Harvard (2023), the Supreme Court sharply criticized and substantially narrowed Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) and Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), the two doctrinal pillars of affirmative action.
Such success, however, raises an unnerving question: What’s next? That is, what should drive the conservative legal movement now that its biggest enemies have seemingly been vanquished?
Before we can supply an answer to that question, however, we must first give some background on the conservative legal movement, beginning with an important distinction between legal and political conservatism, which will show that legal conservatives must create new strategies that are tailored to our current political and social moment.
A Way Forward
The FBI’s Arctic Frost investigation is confirmation that the Left sees conservatives as enemies of the state. If you are a conservative when the Left holds the reins of power, you will be treated as such.
Arctic Frost began in April 2022, with the approval of then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and FBI Director Christopher Wray. In November 2022, the newly appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith took it over. Smith declared he was focused on the allegations of mishandling classified documents, but Arctic Frost shows he was much more ambitious. He helped turn the investigation into an effort to convict Donald Trump and cripple the Republican Party.
Yesterday, a young woman named Laura filed the first medical malpractice lawsuit against doctors in Latin America for perpetrating the lie that she was born in the wrong body. Doctors from the Clínica Valle del Lili in Colombia diagnosed Laura with gender dysphoria on her very first visit. Though only 15 at the time, they told her that testosterone and puberty blockers would solve her distress. Despite Laura’s desire to breastfeed one day, they performed a double mastectomy after she turned 18. Now, with the help of lawyers, she is going to court and to the public because “kids and teenagers shouldn’t be able to transition.”
Like youth in other countries, Laura first encountered gender ideology online. After seeing a Swedish girl use a breast binder, she became seized with the idea that she could “become a boy.” This offered her escape from impending womanhood—something she dreaded. Additionally, at only six years old, Laura was sexually assaulted by a person who worked in her household. As she began to go through puberty, that trauma resurfaced, and crippling fear made it hard just to leave the house.
In 1991, the Tailhook scandal rocked the U.S. Navy. Hundreds of aviators at a Las Vegas convention engaged in misconduct that shocked the public. The fallout was swift. Policies that had long rewarded tactical excellence and operational rigor gave way to gender sensitivity training, compliance mandates, and a culture of political correctness. Officers who once climbed the ranks based on battlefield skill suddenly found themselves judged on how well they adopted progressive talking points. Conservatives conceded too much to progressives, even if only rhetorically, and responded with caution, attempting to preserve what little influence remained. Once a warfighting meritocracy, the military had begun a subtle shift. The pivot favored optics over lethality.
Over the next three decades, this dynamic deepened. The Peter principle—the idea that competent individuals rise only to the level of their incompetence—was weaponized. Political loyalty and agenda signaling replaced combat effectiveness as the dominant criterion for promotion. Diamonds, the true experts in warfighting, began to sink under the weight of bureaucratic mandates, while incompetents and social climbers got to the top rungs of the Pentagon.
However, in 2025, reformers like Pete Hegseth have emerged, leading a merit-first reclamation project that aims to restore skill, innovation, and operational readiness.
In 1992, a young Democratic strategist on the Clinton campaign named James Carville coined the now-famous phrase “It’s the economy, stupid.” He directed it to the campaign workers to ensure they remained laser-focused on kitchen table issues. In Tuesday’s elections, voters delivered that same message, loud and clear, in races in New York City, Virginia, and New Jersey. The results were not surprising—even the margins were roughly in line with 2017, the last off-year elections in those localities when Trump was president.
But the message was clear: while many give the economy solid overall marks, many young voters in particular are hurting economically. Of course, the Trump Administration is well aware of this. They’ve been digging out of the economic disaster Joe Biden left them. Compared to Europe and much of Asia, the U.S. is doing better, with unemployment still low and Trump having largely tamed inflation. But the global macro environment is still challenging—especially for young people.
This is why almost immediately after the election, the administration focused on ramping up its communication efforts on the economy. President Trump indicated an urgent need to blow up the filibuster and enact a legislative agenda commensurate with the issues young voters are facing. Trump’s approach was echoed by Vice President JD Vance, who noted, “We’re going to keep working to make a decent life affordable in this country, and that’s the metric by which we’ll ultimately be judged in 2026 and beyond.”
Today, nearly all Americans agree that drug prices are too high. The average annual per capita spending on medications is over $1,000 and climbing. These sky-high costs burden working-class families with yet another expense, reducing their ability to save, invest, or buy other needed items.
In response to this urgent matter, politicians are singling out pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), the financial negotiators between pharmaceutical companies and pharmacies. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a report in 2024 accusing PBMs of price-gouging and is currently suing one of these managers over insulin prices. The House Oversight Committee has made PBMs the primary target of its drug price-fighting efforts, rehashing the FTC’s accusations of profiteering.
The Supreme Court began its November sitting this week in what is already shaping up to be a blockbuster term, both on the regular oral argument docket and the emergency docket. The latter has taken on huge significance as lower federal court trial judges in forum-shopped district courts have issued an unprecedented number of nationwide injunctions against President Trump’s executive actions.
I say “forum-shopped” because a large number of the roughly 400 cases that have been filed against the administration since January 20 have been brought in jurisdictions in which all (or nearly all) of the judges were appointed by Democratic presidents. All 11 of the sitting active judges on the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, for example, were hand-picked by Democrats—one by Bill Clinton, five by Barack Obama, and another five by Joe Biden. The five judges serving on the First Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees that court, are likewise entirely stacked with Democratic appointees—three by Obama and two by Biden.
Even before the term began on the first Monday in October, the Supreme Court was already checking what increasingly appears to be rogue rulings by anti-Trump lower court judges who are essentially second-guessing the president’s executive decisions dealing with foreign aid and other spending cuts, deportations, federal law enforcement, and administrative agency personnel firings—all core areas of executive authority.
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.
Groy Polloi | The Roundtable Ep. 292
Tucker Carlson hosted Nick Fuentes, an antisemitic broadcaster, for a friendly interview, causing divisions to erupt on the Right. This week, as socialist Zohran Mamdani is forecast to take New York City’s mayorship, the guys appraise the influence of Fuentes on the mainstream and discuss the Right’s alternatives to curry favor with the middle. Plus: details have emerged about an FBI operation, “Arctic Frost,” aimed at targeting GOP officials’ comms to delegitimize Trump and his supporters post-2020 election. And more cultural recommendations!
Counterintuitively, the best way to come to grips with the here and now is not to immerse oneself in the constant froth and daily firestorms of up-to-the-minute journalism and media. Real understanding requires a perspective informed by serious engagement with political history, a study of human nature, and a careful engagement with the noble if imperfect intellectual heritage left to us by our Western and American forebears. So the latest sensation from the world of podcasting—Tucker Carlson’s two-and-a-half-hour interview with the young streamer Nick Fuentes—will not be best addressed by those caught up in the breathless excitement of the moment, nor by those fixated on the cults of personality surrounding these two broadcasters. The issues raised by Fuentes and Carlson need sober evaluation from a critical distance.
“I, Wisdom, dwell with prudence (phronēsis), and I find knowledge and discretion. By me kings reign, and rulers decree what is just.” – Proverbs 8:12–14 (ESV)
“Practical wisdom (phronēsis) is a true and reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to the things that are good or bad for man.” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VI.5–13
As Thucydides observed, the causes that drive nations to war—fear, honor, and interest—remain constant. A prudent foreign policy recognizes the powerful pull of these passions without surrendering to them.
Leo Strauss is often accused of inspiring not only neoconservatism, a movement bereft of such wisdom, but specifically the vigorous interventionism championed by the most vociferous voices within its ranks. On the surface, the Platonic rationalism that searches for the discoverable “just city” seems to infer the duty to impose such a schema onto others, willing or not. In direct contrast, the “Realism and Restraint” school is often linked with ideologies of amorality or isolationism. “Just leave me alone and let me grill.”
Both of these caricatures are foolish simplifications. In reality, both approaches share a moral foundation rooted in prudence (phronēsis), the classical virtue of doing the right thing in the right way for the right reasons.
Great power competition now hinges on technological dominance. While the U.S. may master the machines of progress, we are faltering in securing the power that makes them run, a deficiency that our greatest competitor is beginning to weaponize against us.
Lithium exemplifies this dynamic. Beyond its well-known use in electric vehicles, lithium’s strategic value lies in securing the energy-intensive infrastructure that powers broader technological competition. Data centers—the backbone of artificial intelligence and cloud computing—increasingly rely on lithium-ion batteries, which China subjected to export controls last month. This is not an abstraction: lithium is more than a commodity—it has become a foundational national security asset.
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.
ICE Gets Shaken Up | The Roundtable Ep. 291
The expectation among seasoned D.C. professionals was that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would quickly fade in his tenure as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). He was too idealistic, his ideas were too fringe, and the gulf between his base and Trump’s was too vast to bridge. And anyway, the vast sprawling bureaucracy of HHS—which housed 82,500 career bureaucrats when Kennedy assumed the role—would swallow him up.
But Kennedy had something that the Washington consensus failed to take into account, something that the bureaucracy didn’t have: a popular movement and a level of backing from the president that has surprised political observers.
It’s easy to forget that Kennedy pulled in millions of votes as an independent presidential candidate before throwing his support behind Trump in August 2024, a move that likely shifted the outcome of the election in key swing states. His messaging about chronic disease and corporate capture resonated across traditional political lines. But Kennedy did not just bring votes: he brought an energetic grassroots network that spanned the whole country. His rallies drew crowds that dwarfed those of other third-party candidates, feeling less like political gatherings and more like a great social movement.
Late one night in May 1973, New Jersey trooper James Harper stopped a speeding white Pontiac LeMans for a broken taillight. Sundiata Acoli was driving the car. In the back was Zayd Malik Shakur, the minister of information for the Harlem Black Panther Party. In the passenger seat was 26-year-old Joanne Chesimard, wanted by the FBI for armed bank robbery and by the New York police in connection with the slayings of two policemen and a hand‐grenade attack on a police car. Six months before, she and two men stole $1,800 in bingo money from a church safe. When Monsignor John Powis let them in, Chesimard put a gun to his head until he opened the safe, and they told him, “We usually just blow the heads off White men.”
Noticing a “discrepancy” in the driver’s identification, Trooper Harper asked Acoli to exit the vehicle. Meanwhile, State Trooper Werner Foerster, who had arrived as backup, reached into the car and pulled out a semi-automatic pistol magazine. Harper ordered the car’s nervous occupants to keep their hands on their laps. Chesimard suddenly raised a pistol and shot Harper in the shoulder; he fired back into the car, hitting Zayd Shakur. Acoli attacked Foerster, seized his pistol, shot him in the head, and jumped back into the car. He sped off down the turnpike with the injured Chesimard and dead Zayd. They were soon apprehended.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk puts to rest the dreamy hope that President Trump’s 2024 election was the final word on identity politics in America. The revolutionary faction he defeated at the ballot box walks not by argument, but by faith. It is a faith that the innocent victims of the world cannot rest until the racists, misogynists, homophobes, transphobes, Islamophobes, extremists, fascists, authoritarians, Nazis—and now the (Israeli) colonizers—are purged.
For more than a decade, we called this faith “cancel culture.” But cancellation was never going to be enough. In the end, the dark inner logic of identity politics requires a literal purging of those identified as “toxins” from the body social. Identity politics is, as I have written, “the spiritual eugenics of our age.” To achieve this always-receding goal of purity, a scapegoat must be found upon whom to lay the sins of the world. Charlie Kirk became that scapegoat.
The Republican political victory of 2024 notwithstanding, identity politics remains the reigning theodicy in all of our public American institutions; it is the established church of the American elite, whose parishioners rage and mock the majority of impure American citizens, who themselves are awakening to its bloody logic. One America mourns a martyr for Christ. Another America celebrates the purging of a scapegoat.
Half of Americans are lonely and isolated—and artificial intelligence is stepping into the void.
Sam Altman just announced that OpenAI will soon provide erotica for sexually lonely adults. Mark Zuckerberg envisions a future where solitary people enjoy AI friends. According to the Harvard Business Review, the top uses for large language models are therapy and companionship.
It’s easy to see why this is happening. AI is always available, endlessly patient, and unfailingly agreeable. Millions now pour their secrets into silicon confidants, comforted by algorithms that respond with affirmation and tact. But what masquerades as friendship is, in fact, a dangerous substitute. AI therapy and friendship burrow us deeper into ourselves when what we most need is to reach out to others.
As Jordan Peterson once observed, “[O]bsessive concern with the self is indistinguishable from misery.” That is the trap of AI companionship.
Space is the defining strategic frontier of the 21st century. America’s space leadership depends on harnessing the private sector to create wealth and focusing the public sector on limited yet critical security and scientific objectives. While achieving supremacy in cislunar space (the region between the Earth and Moon, including the Moon’s surface) must be our immediate aim, it lacks the strategic coherence to sustain American leadership across decades. We need long-term goals to define success and clarify tradeoffs. A manned mission to Mars can do both.
China and Russia, our near-peer competitors in space, pose serious challenges. Beijing openly pursues dominance in the Earth-Moon system while accelerating toward Mars, with an ambitious sample return mission scheduled for 2028. Russia maintains formidable military capabilities in space, alongside proven Mars science achievements.
If our authoritarian rivals prevail, the world’s free nations may find their ability to access and use space significantly curtailed.
This is why the United States needs a unifying long-term vision that focuses and directs near-term commercial, military, and scientific objectives. We must also research and develop technologies for sustained living in space. A smart Mars strategy provides the needed framework, creating the technological roadmap and institutional durability to win the cislunar competition and position America for permanent space premiership.
The shocking murder of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University puts an exclamation point on the degraded state of reasoned debate in America.
Like many in the last month, I’ve found myself doing a deep dive into Kirk’s YouTube channel, watching debate after debate. You learn something from watching them in full: Kirk was willing to talk to anybody, and he always brought liberals to the front of the line. He was pugnacious at times, but always civil. It was his interlocutors who would sometimes resort to ad hominem attacks, and their arguments often collapsed as they met a steady stream of his questions and retorts. Time after time, these students lost the debate with Kirk because they simply didn’t know enough.
What causes a person to stake out a position with such confidence before mastering the evidence to support it? For many of the students who challenged Kirk, the answer is action civics. This is a pedagogical theory that teaches that the highest form of civic participation is protest rather than discussion. Its result is thoughtless grandstanding or worse. The antidote to this state of affairs is classical education rightly understood.
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.
Troll King | The Roundtable Ep. 290
The latest round of “No Kings!” rallies, reportedly attended by 7 million—average attendee, per Axios, mid-40s and female—took to the streets this weekend in protest of…what monarchy, exactly? This week, three kings—Ryan, Matt, and Spencer—discuss progressive populism, John Bolton’s indictment for alleged mishandling of classified intelligence, and Zohran Mamdani’s likely victory despite a weak performance in New York’s mayoral debate. Plus: more cultural recommendations!
The Manosphere. This online, man-made safe space serves as a kind of glasshouse of masculine performance, there for observers to imitate or revile. However one might measure the relative percentages of truth and lies on offer in the Manosphere, however one might separate the true masculinity on offer there from the Manosphere’s many vain effeminacies masquerading as virile strength, one thing is clear: men are in the middle of an identity crisis.
We could leave aside the various instances of that crisis that emanate from the sexual Left, by which I mean the LGBTQ emporium of options for how one might live out one’s manhood. But why should we? Left, Right, and Center—we can’t agree on what it means to be truly manly. A central cause of the present crisis is that America’s men have almost a complete lack of experience with single-sex education before college.