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As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches, Spencer Klavan invites us to reflect on the origins of that document and its fate. He asks us to consider an array of questions: Are the principles of the Declaration the final truth at the end of history? Is the end of history lamentable? Does the war in Iran refute the end of history? Is the Declaration informed by a rational view of the universe or by revealed religion?

I have access neither to the world-historical spirit nor to prophetic signs, so I’ll begin with what has become a necessary task: to establish that the Declaration marks the founding of the American nation, to explain what it means, and to defend it against popular criticisms.

Some have tried to define America by the year 1619, because that is when slavery was established. Others opine that 1607 is the beginning of the United States, because that is when the English first settled in Jamestown. However, these are not true national origins, in part, because they do not recognize the independence of the United States from Great Britain. More importantly, they are wrong because neither of these events recognizes the fundamental principles of right that define the United States.

White House lawn speeches greeting foreign heads of state are usually sleepy pro-forma affairs, filled out with the clichés of long-standing ties and mutual interests. But President Trump’s speech welcoming King Charles was no mere boilerplate. It was a masterpiece of ironic and subtle mischief on multiple levels—triggering the Left, offering a ground of unity for the Right as we draw near to the 250th anniversary of the American Founding, and, for those who listened closely, a rebuke both to Britain and the rest of Europe for their supine and rapidly declining civilizations. Making all the “No Kings” protestors look silly was just a bonus.

As everyone knows—especially Pope Leo XIV—Trump is not typically known for subtle rebukes, so kudos are deserved for his speechwriting staff for crafting a succinct and enthymematic message worthy of Aristotle, though it was fully in accord with Trump’s main instincts and central purposes.

In 1964, the Supreme Court of the United States revolutionized our country’s understanding of the First Amendment. More specifically, the Court’s ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan caused a fundamental change in how we think about the relationship of the First Amendment’s protection for freedom of the press, on the one hand, and the problem of libel, on the other.

According to the traditional view swept aside by the Sullivan Court, libel—or publication of defamatory falsehood—was simply outside the scope of the freedom of the press, a licentious abuse that the Founders never intended to enjoy constitutional or legal protection. During the lengthy period that this view prevailed, those who published false and defamatory matter were open to being sued successfully for damages, whether the victim of the libel was a private or a public person.

Most corporate mission statements are real snoozers. Especially in the case of large public defense companies, they’re designed to present boilerplate language to the public: “We develop science and technology to help people, and we produce some other things (weapons) that we won’t directly mention here, but which you can find on page five of our annual report.”

Palantir recently broke from this mode of anodyne corporate communication in a manifesto-style post titled “The Technological Republic, in brief,” which itself is a summary of a book of the same title by Palantir executives Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska.

Here are some paraphrased highlights from the 22-point declaration:

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.

Callooh, Callais | The Roundtable Ep. 316

At this very moment, humanity is venturing beyond the limits of Earth.

NASA’s Artemis II mission to the far side of the moon was a reminder that this is no longer science fiction. Commercial launches are becoming more frequent, private missions are expanding, and durable off-world habitats—once the stuff of far-flung imaginings—are well within reach. What was once a set of hypothetical word problems has become a collection of real-world challenges to solve.

Those of us who believe in America’s ideals, political structure, and folkways have to start thinking now about how to preserve them in outer space. Human nature is not going to change. But the parameters of human life will—and dramatically. The question is how, in this unprecedented scenario, we can make the American way of life one of the things we carry with us. We are taking our humanity to space. How can we take our freedom too?

To meet this challenge, the University of Austin has initiated the Torchlight Summit. Torchlight convenes astronauts, scientists, engineers, classicists, and political theorists to address a question that is too often ignored: What are the political and institutional consequences of life beyond Earth, and how can we shape them before they solidify?

The summit is structured around three core pillars:

Nowhere have the ramifications of “the long march through the institutions” been more apparent than in colleges of education.

New revelations seem to emerge every day of yet another program being stuck in the mud of critical theory. A University of Minnesota K-12 model curriculum includes lesson plans about “settler colonialism” and creating protest art. Harvard’s Graduate School of Education offers dozens of courses explicitly rooted in social justice themes, with one issuing a call to “liberate” youth. Many of Stanford’s general education courses have students respond to drag ballet troupes, ICE incidents, and the war in Gaza.

The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Louisiana v. Callais may dramatically alter congressional districts in Southern states. Writing for a 6-3 majority, Justice Samuel Alito unraveled decades of confusing and misguided caselaw construing the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) to hold that states may not engage in racial gerrymandering—or be forced to do so by federal courts—when drawing congressional districts. The Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause forbids race-based discrimination, Alito pointedly declared, preventing Section 2 of the VRA from being interpreted to require the creation of “majority-black” districts to comply with the VRA.

On his way to the State House on the morning of July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson would have walked along High (now Market) Street, Philadelphia’s main thoroughfare. Four blocks down, past the open markets, on the southeast corner of Second Street was the printing shop of John Dunlap, an Irish immigrant and publisher of the Pennsylvania Packet, a weekly newspaper reporting on the proceedings of the Continental Congress. In his shop at No. 48 High Street, Dunlap, then only twenty-nine, was about to play a key role in the first hours of American Independence.

Though Congress had adopted the Declaration in the name of the “good People” of the colonies, John Adams would later claim that only one-third of these good people had supported war with Great Britain, while another third had opposed it and a middle third remained undecided. Americans needed to know that the colonies were now a new nation fighting for its existence, and they needed to be inspired to choose the right side. As soon as the delegates voted on the statement, they ordered “That the declaration be authenticated and printed” and “That the committee appointed to prepare the declaration superintend & correct the press.” After that, the record goes silent, and the questions begin.

Democrats have an extremism problem, and it’s not clear how they can solve it. After yet another gunman tried to assassinate President Donald Trump at last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, liberals nobly renewed their commitment to moderation. “We need LESS violence in America, not MORE violence in America,” wrote CNN’s Van Jones. Quite right. But the American Left has not exactly put itself in a good position to calm down its radicals.

Consider: last Wednesday, the New York Times hosted superstar streamer Hasan Piker for a podcast with writer Jia Tolentino. Piker has fantasized on camera about murdering landlords and once told his viewers that “If you cared about Medicare fraud or Medicaid fraud, you would kill [Florida Senator] Rick Scott.” He joked with Tolentino about “microlooting”—that is, shoplifting—and equivocated about whether UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson deserved to die at the hands of his alleged murderer, Luigi Mangione.

Few ideas are more daunting to an artist than opening up their creative process on the merciless sewer that is social media. Yet this is precisely what my dear friend Josh Steinman suggested when I shared my plan to write a symphony for America’s 250th birthday on a hot SoCal day in December 2024. “You should post live-to-tape updates with all of the mistakes, insecurities, decisions, and improvisation,” he proposed.

Thus began a process that no longer involved cloistered introspection. In the digital age, millions of creators vie for attention with stunts, AI slop, and general vapidity—yet almost none have capitalized on audiences’ desire for authenticity. What better way to be authentic than an egoless public struggle against oneself in the construction of a large-scale symphonic work!

In that initial pursuit of authenticity, the conduit for inspiration revealed itself in the form of a fundamental question: “What is America?” It is from meditating on that question that the American essence gathers through the rightly crafted language of music.

Music is a language. It is the most poetic language because it is the most abstract language, as words never seem to elucidate its emotional or spiritual power. There are, however, clear stylistic markers or syntactic structures that may evoke truths of specific peoples. America is no exception.

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 Piker Pill | The Roundtable Ep. 315

If George Washington and John Quincy Adams were in the Oval Office advising President Trump on whether to go to war with Iran, what would they have said? They would likely have argued that any American war in the Middle East—whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or Iran, or in partnership with any ally that commits American money, armaments, or troops—is pure folly.

Both in theory and practice, early American political leaders unequivocally rejected the claim that America was an empire or world hegemon like those established by Alexander the Great, Imperial Rome, the Mongols, or Napoleon. Instead, America was a new kind of regime unseen in world history: a republican empire of liberty, limited in constitutional scope and political geography but unlimited in the power of her political spirit and her example to the world.

Equal Nations

The Preamble of the Declaration of Independence includes a curious phrase often overlooked by commentators: “and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” What did the founders mean by a “separate and equal station,” and what does this phrase tell us about their conception of America’s political regime?

The footage was grainy and imprecise, the black-and-white nighttime combat visuals to which Americans have become accustomed over the past generation. Still there they were: American aircraft and American soldiers in action, another strike in defense of a nation at war. Yet this combat operation was not part of the American war with Iran, then only four days old: the announcement on March 3, followed by another on March 6, concerned American forces in Ecuador.

With the cooperation of Ecuadorian authorities, the United States attacked narco-terrorists who were reportedly a splinter faction of FARC, a guerrilla force that once sought leftist revolution in Colombia. Now having devolved into a cartel with socialist characteristics, its successors find themselves on the receiving end of American violence. The two military actions received relatively little attention in U.S. media: an air-assault infantry raid in the Andean region isn’t as telegenic as B-2s flying over Isfahan. But they just might be as portentous.

Earlier this month, The Atlantic published a hit piece on FBI Director Kash Patel, accusing him of frequently drinking to excess and often being absent from work and unreachable by colleagues in the administration. Reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick’s article claims that Patel’s deficiencies are a threat to national security given the essential role the FBI director has in protecting the country from grave threats.

Patel responded by suing The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick for defamation. His lawyers argued that the article’s claims are false and accused The Atlantic of behaving irresponsibly by publishing them. The lawsuit alleges that, among other things, the magazine did not give Patel sufficient time to respond to the allegations before publication, and that the article did not adequately convey the denials and counterevidence that Patel and his supporters had provided.

What are we to make of all this?

Patel certainly has something to complain about. The Atlantic presents the claims of his alleged drunkenness and absenteeism as facts, not as mere speculation. And, as his filing notes, such factual claims certainly amount to libel per se. That is, they are claims that are prima facie injurious to reputation without the need to consult their context.

Lionel Shriver’s 2003 novel-turned-movie We Need to Talk About Kevin was a major prize-winner, a bestseller, and a hit, especially among liberals. Perhaps this is unsurprising, as it dealt with two of their favorite subjects: school shootings and mental health. However, her latest work of fiction, A Better Life, is guaranteed to be received less warmly on the Left, if it’s acknowledged at all.

The central figure in A Better Life is Gloria Bonaventura, an archetypal liberal white woman whom conservatives and independents know all too well. While many New Yorkers at least bristled at their city’s 2022 “migrant crisis,” in which billions were spent on hotel housing alone, Gloria splashily ramps up her do-gooder bona fides. The Brooklyn resident and mother of three adult children sets up a clothing drive for “our newest New Yorkers,” then pushes supermarkets to install donation bins for “culturally appropriate” food, a new program called “Big Apple, Big Hearts” that lets her reach new heights in conspicuous charity. Gloria also brings a highly questionable asylum-seeker into her large home to live with her and her Gen Z son, Nico. For Gloria, young Martiné of Honduras becomes the perfect vehicle, in the words of Nico’s woke sister, to “assure her that she’s making the world a better place.”

If the United States is serious about giving citizenship to worthy immigrants, we also need to be serious about revoking it from the unworthy.

More than 800,000 immigrants became American citizens in FY 2024, and a comparable number are expected in FY 2025, though the final numbers aren’t out yet. There are more than 25 million naturalized American citizens, which is about half the foreign-born population. Having delivered remarks at many swearing-in ceremonies, I welcome those—undoubtedly the majority—who followed the rules and took the Oath of Allegiance in good faith.

But many didn’t. That’s where denaturalization comes in.

The question of revoking citizenship from immigrants who lied on their applications or were otherwise ineligible is part of a broader debate about what membership in our national community means—a debate made especially urgent by the waves of mass immigration the political class has allowed into our country over the past 50-plus years.

In the third book of the Discourses on Livy, Niccolo Machiavelli argues that republics “do not last if they do not renew themselves” by recourse to their origins, when they were at their most pure. “Because in the process of time that goodness is corrupted, unless something intervenes to lead it back to the mark, it of necessity kills the body.”

Historian J.G.A. Pocock elaborates on this idea, arguing for a “Machiavellian moment” (the title of his sprawling and majestic book on the subject) in which a republic must act to save itself by returning to first principles. Per Pocock, the Renaissance Florentines, the Commonwealthmen of 18th-century Britain, and the Revolutionary-era Americans all faced such a moment and were forced to act against the corruption of their regimes. These moments, however, are not always successful. The Florentines lost their republic, and the Commonwealthmen remained a minority in Britain, whose legacy was predominantly to influence the American patriots at the end of the century.

The Trump Administration has done what no previous administration attempted in directly confronting Iran. American and Israeli forces destroyed the Iranian Air Force and Navy, killed the supreme leader and dozens of senior IRGC commanders, struck over 13,000 targets across 26 provinces, and drove Iran’s ballistic missile launch rate down by more than 90%. B-52 Stratofortresses now fly unchallenged in Iranian airspace, carrying out bombing runs with impunity over a country whose integrated air defense system ceased functioning within the campaign’s first week. This pressure culminated in a ceasefire framework brokered through Pakistani mediation, representing the first serious diplomatic movement since the war began.

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.

Cloak and Docket | The Roundtable Ep. 314

In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American people, find our account running, under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tell us.

— Abraham Lincoln January 27, 1838

For decades, legacy conservatives have sent mixed signals about family life. On one hand, they have emphasized family values and spoken about the family as the “cornerstone of society.” On the other hand, to distinguish themselves from the feminist Left, legacy conservatives have created a leaner formulation that emphasizes choice. This focus accommodates the supposed gains of second-wave feminism, allowing legacy conservatives to bypass seemingly lost causes and avoid accusations of wanting to “turn back the clock.” They want an agenda that caters to both conservative girlbosses and full-time mothers—a coalition that winks at having no favorites. Rather than acknowledging the obvious tension of trying to be a full-time mom and a full-time employee at the same time, legacy conservatives have spent decades telling women that they can have it all—motherhood, career, both, or neither—whatever their hearts desire.

This logic has long dominated institutional legacy conservative thinking. Single women, even if they hate a family-first worldview, must be courted, or at least not antagonized. Even organizations that promote the traditional family usually apologize for their benighted traditionalism—“It’s a free country,” “Family life is not for everyone,” “Some of our best employees are career women,” or “We support feminism, but oppose abortion.”

In March, Americans witnessed just how broken our naturalization process has become. Within the span of just 11 days, the nation experienced four terrorist attacks: mass shootings at a Texas bar and at Old Dominion University in Virginia, an attempted bombing in New York City, and an assault on a synagogue in Michigan.

The terrorists in Texas, Virginia, and Michigan were naturalized U.S. citizens. And the New York City bombers were the children of naturalized citizens.

In response to inquiries about these incidents, a spokesman for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) reiterated that it “has a zero-tolerance policy for anyone who lies or misrepresents themselves during the naturalization process.”

That zero-tolerance policy is the right approach, but these recent attacks point to a stark reality: our naturalization process has erroneously granted the priceless privilege of American citizenship to foreigners who never accepted America, never embraced our values, and never intended to live as loyal members of our national community.

Naturalization is a long-standing, time-honored American tradition. But it is not a clerical formality or a routine application for benefits. Citizenship is not a property interest—it’s a covenant.

For decades, the relationship between the United States and the Vatican has played a vital role in promoting individual liberties, religious freedom, and resisting authoritarianism in the West. This partnership, forged by then-President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, helped hasten the dissolution of the Soviet Union and contributed to the liberation of millions from Communism’s grip.

When aligned, America and Rome have exercised a formidable moral and geopolitical influence, representing the best of Western civilization. Yet the current feud between them, as historian Paul Kengor suggests, potentially presents a new cold war that could have deep ramifications for the future of free government.

While tension between political leaders and pontiffs is nothing new in world history, open hostility risks undermining cooperation at a moment when it is badly needed. The path back to stability—and to the renewal of Western civilization—will require both Trump and Leo to draw from the lessons of the past.

Round One

For Trump, who is lobbing derogatory insults at the Holy Father, history offers a clear warning: conflicts with the papacy rarely end well for political leaders.

Why did the National Park Service regularly denigrate the events of 1776 prior to the Trump Administration? In the Claremont Review of Books’ 25th anniversary issue, Jeffrey Anderson describes a visit to Independence National Historical Park, situated in the heart of old Philadelphia and run by the National Park Service. Congress created Independence Park for the purpose of “preserving” historic sites associated with “the American Revolution and the founding and growth of the United States,” as Anderson notes.

Anderson found an overwhelming emphasis on slavery and race—25 of 30 signs at the park’s President’s House, where George Washington and John Adams lived during part of their presidencies, “focus on slavery or race relations.” He writes that Washington and other founders “stand accused” of “‘injustice’” and “‘immorality.’” The first U.S. president’s “actions [are] characterized as ‘deplorable,’ ‘profoundly disturbing,’ and as having ‘mocked the nation’s pretense to be a beacon of liberty.’”

How did this situation come to pass?

Dystopian novels are not predictions but projections: they imagine what the world will become if a current trend continues uninterrupted. The difference between prediction and projection is vital but often overlooked. The former is a call to fatalism, the latter a call to action.

In a sense, dystopian novels are both optimistic and conservative. They are optimistic in that they do not hold the future they describe to be inevitable and unavoidable. They are conservative in that they imagine a world very much worse than our own, and therefore are an encouragement to political virtues such as prudence and realism. They remind us that, short of extermination camps or other complete disasters, we always have something to lose as well as to gain and that progress often has a dark—even a very dark—side. Perfection is not of this world.

In 1973, Jean Raspail, who died aged 94 in 2020, published his dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, for which he is now mostly remembered (certainly outside of France, though he was the author of many other well-considered novels and travelogues, and narrowly missed election to the Académie française). The Camp of the Saints is a book that refuses to lie down, so to speak, despite attempts to render it invisible or make it go away.

As the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding this July, it seems fitting to reflect on our national heroes. This country has many monuments honoring important figures from our history, but none loom larger than Mount Rushmore, featuring the faces of four of our greatest American presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. Each of these leaders was flawed in his own way, but we honor them together as heroes for the way they served their country.

As human beings, we need heroes. We need not only abstract descriptions of what is excellent, but also individuals we can strive to emulate. Reading the stories of those who pursued excellence in the face of adversity can train us to pursue that which is good in our own circumstances. Stories of human excellence show us that achieving the good is still possible in our time and should prompt us to be better than we would be on our own.

Heroes are not limited to national leaders. They can be found in almost every area of American life—even in classrooms. What if the field of education had its own Mount Rushmore? What four American teachers, out of the millions who have faithfully taught students, should be represented? We propose Booker T. Washington, Anne Sullivan, Jaime Escalante, and Marva Collins.

Cast Down Your Bucket

Hungary’s elections earlier this week marked a seismic shift after 16 years of Viktor Orbán’s dominance, as Peter Magyar’s opposition Tisza party won with over half the vote and a supermajority in the legislature.

The attention focused on this small Central European country may seem disproportionate—but Orbán attracted not only the active support of the Trump Administration, with Vice President Vance flying out to rally for him in person, but also equally strenuous opposition from the American Left and its allies in Brussels. In the wake of Orbán’s defeat, left-wing luminaries Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Alex Soros (son of Hungarian native and Orbán arch-nemesis George and inheritor of his left-wing activist empire) were among those sending out celebratory tweets.

“We didn’t go because we expected Viktor Orban to cruise to an election victory,” Vance later told Fox News. “We went because it was the right thing to do to stand behind a person who had stood by us for a very long time.”

I have some personal familiarity with Hungary, having made two multi-week visits as a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute, a conservative think tank that was broadly aligned with (though occasionally critical of) Orbán’s government. 

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.

Chimping Out | The Roundtable Ep. 313

Spencer Klavan has invited us to contemplate the American age, to think again in civilizational, epochal terms, and to search out the prerequisites for its continuation.

The chaos (good and ill) of the past decade has made it difficult to look beyond the immediate. But Klavan is right: Trumpism, whether embattled or dead, is more a harbinger of a possible future than its fulfillment. To carry on, “Americans will need to recover a sense of their country as an era-defining project, forward-looking but steeped in ancient traditions of faith and law—not just a Western nation, but the Western nation par excellence. Much depends on whether we can learn to see ourselves that way again.” This is a spiritual inquiry as much as an intellectual one.

The singular trait most essential to American renewal—perhaps the most predominant, central belief during the founding period—is what I have called “Protestant Providentialism.” Here we find the American soul that gives shape to the body and governance to the mind, and promise to America’s future.

A Providential Nation

A recent ruling by a German court at first glance could be seen as a victory for freedom of speech. But on closer inspection, it shows why so-called visibility filtering—artificially restricting the reach of online content rather than removing it outright—is the future, and indeed increasingly the present, of online censorship.

As reported by the German alternative media Nius in February, a court in Wiesbaden acquitted defendant Sebastian W. of the charge of having “insulted” Germany’s then-Economics Minister Robert Habeck. (“Insult” is a crime in German law.) In a July 2024 tweet, Sebastian W. referred to the German minister as a “traitor.” Under Section 188 of the German Criminal Code, which is commonly known in Germany as the lèse-majesté law, the penalties for insulting a public official are greater than those for insulting an ordinary citizen.

Over a year ago President Trump began dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). While bemoaned by many in the foreign policy community as a mistake, in reality the agency had long ago strayed from its initial purpose, namely, helping developing nations establish prosperous and growing free market economies. Indeed, its initial purpose as envisioned by President Kennedy was to bring the economic promise of America to the poorest nations in the world. Just as with our opening to China in 1972, we were confident that democracy would follow.

Yet the tragedy of USAID was its failure to bring a single new market-based economy to life. After several decades it could produce no examples of even having brokered an alliance between a Third World country and the United States. USAID’s annual core operating budget of $22 billion and its ineffective record rightly proved too much for the Trump Administration’s DOGE review.

It is fitting that in America’s 250th year of independence, public discourse is centered around the meaning of citizenship.

Last summer brought a debate accompanying the “One Big Beautiful Bill” over whether non-citizens, particularly illegal migrants, should be receiving government welfare benefits. In the winter, new revelations were unearthed regarding the many problems with birthright tourism. Each year, thousands of mainly Chinese nationals visit the U.S. to give birth, obtaining citizenship for their babies under the modern interpretation of the 14th Amendment before returning home. The children are U.S. citizens with the right to receive benefits and vote in American elections, despite being raised in a foreign country and under the indoctrination of the Chinese Communist Party.

On April 1, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on birthright citizenship. Does citizenship extend to any child born in the United States to parents who are in the country illegally? Or does the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment refer only to those who give their full allegiance to the United States?

In 2011, when U.S. Navy Seals blew open the front door of Osama bin Laden’s fortified compound in Pakistan, stormed up the stairs, and shot him dead, they found more than a loaded AK-47 in his room. Bin Laden had been reading the Yale historian Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), which told the story of military conflict since the 15th century. Kennedy’s argument was as dismaying to his fellow countrymen as it must have been heartening to bin Laden: the American empire, too, was mortal, and “imperial overstretch” was bringing inevitable decline. Kennedy wrote with such brio that his book climbed The New York Times bestseller list, peaking in March 1988 at number two, topped only by a real-estate mogul’s ghost-written memoir called Trump: The Art of the Deal.

This year, just days after President Trump committed the United States to join Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel in bombing Iran into regime change, another Yale historian, Odd Arne Westad, published a book that also warns of relative decline and imperial overstretch. Westad, a Norwegian-born expert on Asia and the author of the highly regarded The Cold War: A World History (2017), focuses on the turn of the 20th century, when Europe’s Great Powers—prosperous, complacent, and at peace—lurched into civilizational catastrophe.

When Donald Trump accepted the GOP’s nomination for president in 2024, he boldly stated that “the Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of the country.” It was music to the ears of tens of millions of Americans who lived through the Biden border invasion and experienced decades of sustained illegal immigration with little interior enforcement. Finally, a political leader had the gumption to say, “Enough is enough,” and proclaim that it is time for millions of illegal aliens to go home. The American people rewarded Trump’s courage when they decisively re-elected him.

Unfortunately, the second Trump Administration has not lived up to the promises made in that July 2024 speech in Milwaukee. It has instead prioritized removing the worst criminal illegal aliens. With that population estimated at between 500,000 and 800,000 individuals, the administration has focused enforcement resources on a small subset of illegals, prioritizing quality over quantity. But this is a misguided attempt to assuage the concerns of a radical—but sizable—segment of Americans who do not believe in borders or in sovereignty.

Earlier this week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, flanked by a multi-hued cast of New Yorkers (though with no whites visible), announced the results of NYC’s long-awaited “racial equity” audit that attempts to assess the allegedly dire plight of “people of color” across the five boroughs.

The report itself, running 375 pages, makes it clear that the state of racial disparities in NYC is rooted in “settler colonialism,” noting that “New York City’s history has been one of colonization, exploitation, and racial oppression.” The report asserts, for example, that the Lenape Native American tribe are the “rightful stewards” of New York.

It also has numerous calls to action, including mandating anti-racism training for government staff and a fresh look at “fine and fee based programs” for transportation to seek out “racial and ethnic disparities”—that is, doing even less to enforce against subway fare evaders, who are predominantly black and Hispanic and who disproportionately commit other crimes on the subway. It decries the “punitive policing policies” that further marginalized “Black and Latine communities”—the very policing measures that drove the city’s historic drop in crime under Giuliani and Bloomberg.

And it goes on in this vein for chapter after chapter. But you get the idea.

New York City is racist, and it’s your fault, whitey, so you must pay even more taxes.

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.

Genocide or Hyperbole? | The Roundtable Ep. 312

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is under attack from practically all sides. The Left has been after him since before his confirmation hearing. Some on the Right have likewise been lukewarm since Trump picked him, with interventionists hoping for one of their own such as Senator Tom Cotton, and restrainers wanting a candidate who aligns with their views. Throughout his tenure, the press has placed Hegseth under a magnifying glass, reporting on a long list of supposed controversies, which now includes his daring to fire generals and his willingness to carry out President Donald Trump’s orders in Iran. As the pressure has built, leaks against Hegseth, and even some calls for his firing, have begun to seep into the press.

President Trump should resist these efforts. Not only would firing Secretary Hegseth be a mistake, but doing so would undercut, and potentially even put an end to, his revolution against the uniparty.

Try, Try Again

President Trump faces a still-powerful military-industrial complex, as well as a hardened political establishment that backs it. He should learn from Andrew Jackson, both a former president and a political revolutionary, who came to understand how important it was to have loyal people around him.

No mere politician in modern history has had a wartime general’s capacity for decision-making amid chaos like President Trump. His force of character (“Fight! Fight! Fight!”) and his appeal to the everyman (with the boorishness thereof) reveal an instinctual giant who is at his best while disorder surrounds him.

However, one who thrives in chaos often rejects the peace and order of civilization and tends to gravitate to the home turf of mayhem. Consequently, Trump may still pull a rabbit out of the hat in Iran. But the odds continue to stack against him.

The American people voted for him multiple times on his assurance of peace and promises of foreign adventurism to be a thing of the past. As Trump repeatedly noted on the campaign trail, American blood and treasure had been treated far too cheaply by both Presidents Bush and Obama. He vowed to stop that bipartisan trend.

What is it, according to Francis Fukuyama, “for which we should be willing to struggle and die today,” and how does history—Western civilization—inform our answer to this permanent question?

Fukuyama thinks history has bequeathed us liberal “values” sufficient for the purpose. Spencer Klavan thinks history has quite a bit more to offer. Fukuyama has made a career out of the “end of history.” Klavan points the way to careers for young Americans in the continuation and making of history. He thinks the 250th anniversary of American independence is a good time for Americans to reflect on how Western civilization has always informed our answer to this question and continues to do so.

Nothing could be more edifying for Americans than a true and sufficient answer to the unsettling question of what they should be willing to fight and die for. Klavan thinks that if Americans are to be properly edified, they will “need to recover a sense of their country as an era-defining project, forward-looking but steeped in ancient traditions of faith and law—not just a Western nation, but the Western nation par excellence.” Here, to quote Walter Berns, I will hope to do “nothing but edify.” Berns gave that phrase currency among small circles back in the early 1980s, accusing Harry Jaffa of misunderstanding Leo Strauss when Jaffa claimed Strauss thought philosophy, or even political philosophy, might have some place in saving Western civilization—and America.

When Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins began writing The Golden Thread, their two-volume History of the Western Tradition, they were both Ivy League professors. By the time it was published, neither of them was. Hankins, whose first volume on The Ancient World and Christendom sweeps from Greco-Roman and Jewish antiquity to the European Renaissance, gave his last lecture as a history professor at Harvard late last year. Guelzo, whose second volume on The Modern and Contemporary West begins with the Protestant Reformation and ends hauntingly with images of the World Trade Center shortly before its destruction, left Princeton last fall. Both authors are now faculty members at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, established in 2022. The Golden Thread is a momentous achievement. It’s also a landmark event in the history of American letters. Its appearance signals that the country’s most prestigious universities have all but given up on maintaining the intellectual foundations of the West. For the time being, perhaps, the stewards of civilization will have to do their work outside the gates of the old academy. They will have to build something new.

***

It’s a running joke in the Beltway that defense contractors put up billboards advertising, say F-35s, at the Pentagon City metro station. Your everyday commuter, even in Washington, isn’t picking up fighter jets off the shelf at Costco on Sundays. But a chunk of the people who work on defense contracts will pass through the Pentagon’s metro stop, and Lockheed Martin knows this.

In theory, the same logic fuels D.C.’s media business. In the last two decades, the capital city has become dominated by a constellation of powerful media outlets that deliver niche, social-media-based coverage of the federal government. Think Politico, Semafor, Punchbowl News, and Axios (the latter two evolved directly from the Politico model).

These publications produce insider email newsletters that cover the daily pulse of Capitol Hill, energy policy, foreign affairs, and the White House, and are written specifically for staffers, journalists, and lobbyists. Playbook famously includes a birthday list every morning; that’s how small the audience is relative to other national publications. Web 2.0 made this business model possible, and it’s only grown as mass media flails.

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.

Congress Take the Wheel | The Roundtable Ep. 311

Spencer Klavan’s thoughtful reflections on America and its future are measured and understated, reflecting the general mood of ambivalence and uncertainty surrounding the nation’s 250th birthday. Those of us old enough to remember the 1976 Bicentennial have been struck by the dissimilarity in the public mood. Julie Ponzi, writing for Chronicles, noticed this back in 2024: “The hype surrounding both the 1976 Bicentennial and the 1987 Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution was so intense that both events inspired in me an intense interest and curiosity about American history.” Now that the semiquincentennial year is officially upon us, the lack of enthusiasm is even more evident. We don’t seem to know what we should be celebrating, or even whether we should.

It is a pleasure to respond to Spencer Klavan’s graceful and inspired reflections on the prospects for America as we move closer to the 250th anniversary of the founding. He admirably eschews polemics and avoids an excessively narrow preoccupation with the most heated issues of the day, concerning himself with broader and deeper matters. At the same time, he writes as a partisan of the American project and the broader civilization—Western civilization—of which it has been a particularly vital and noble expression. Klavan raises big questions without succumbing to fashionable, or once-fashionable, theses such as “The End of History” or the ideological temptation of Year Zero-ism, which distort the past and present, as well as the prospects for the future.

As AI continues its explosive growth, data centers are becoming the primary target of backlash. From rural Louisiana to the suburbs of Arlington, Virginia, Americans are showing up at zoning and permitting boards to challenge their construction. Bernie Sanders has called for a nationwide data center moratorium, while Republicans in Florida propose regulating their energy and natural resource use.

The criticisms so far have centered on claims about the data centers’ water consumption, electricity demand, noise pollution, land use, and overall disruption—issues that tech companies like Meta are working to address with new practices and community investments. Yet something more needs to be done on the political front to ameliorate Americans’ growing concerns about data centers.

Every couple of years, another hit piece surfaces to explain why the Right supposedly hates women and why women on the Right hate themselves. The Left has trafficked in condescending explanations for the alleged paradox of the right-wing female for quite a long time. The latest in this tired genre, “The Young Women Leaving the New Right” in New York Magazine, is more of the same, dressed up for the digital age.

We are supposed to believe that conservative women are “Pick Mes,” seeking to gain male validation by belittling other women. They are afraid of their right-wing husbands, are too dumb to form their own opinions about politics, have “internalized misogyny,” lack dignity, and so on.

Not even the element of poaching a few disgruntled former conservatives and mining them for embarrassing tidbits is a remotely new tactic. There have always been some willing to take the liberal media up on the chance to open their kimono in exchange for the opportunity to fire a shot at their intra-right nemeses.

With the celebration of America’s 250th birthday in July, it is an opportune moment to examine the traditions and culture of those who set the American experiment in motion. Any good American has a duty to consider the views and aims of the founding generation when contemplating the future direction of the United States. After all, a good employee pays deference to the founder of the company—an individual who took substantial risks to establish the firm—where he works. Citizens should do so to an even greater extent.

In this context, the pillars of American culture must be stressed. In pre-Revolutionary America, an immense web of patronage networks filled the role of the British aristocracy. Very few, if any, of the richest colonial gentry could hold their own against the colossal estates of British aristocrats, with their ornate country seats and vast fortunes. As Gordon Wood noted, the 13 colonies were instead “held together by intricate networks of personal loyalties, obligations, and quasi-dependencies.”

During a dinner at the annual gathering of the Ciceronian Society on March 19, a glance at my phone profoundly changed the rest of the evening. It had been an intellectually stimulating day with fellow Christian thinkers, for which my wife and I were grateful to be part of. Something familiar caught my eye: the photo of a man I instantly recognized, Brandon Shah. We were part of the same staff group section within the larger U.S. Army Command and General Staff College class of 2019. Brandon never used X, so I was immediately curious why he was showing up so prominently on my feed. Immediately, the following words accosted me: “The victim of the terrorist attack at Old Dominion has been identified as Lt. Col. Brandon Shah.”

My pulse raced, followed moments later by sudden rage. My anger over how the political class has betrayed veterans of the so-called Global War on Terrorism rekindled. My wife could tell something was bothering me. “Are you okay?” she asked. I wasn’t. My focus on the planned presentation I was to deliver later broke, my mind hijacked by a kind of mourning I had avoided throughout 20 years in the military due to learning that a man I served with died in combat on home soil.

While many eyes are focused on Iran, the Trump Administration’s policies suggest that reasserting the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere could rank among its highest geopolitical priorities. As laid out in the 2025 National Security Strategy, the Trump Corollary “is a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.” What if America could project its dominance quickly, dramatically, and without firing a single shot? With one bold stroke, President Trump could expand America’s sovereign territory by nearly 20% and recover the largest unclaimed tract of land left on the planet.

Marie Byrd Land is the name for 620,000 square miles of Antarctica, a territory roughly the size of Alaska. It belongs to no nation and is governed by no sovereign power. It is desolate, largely uninhabited, and of enormous strategic importance. Claiming it would be the largest expansion of American sovereign territory since William Henry Seward’s purchase of Alaska in 1867.

The moment is right. The case is overwhelming. And the window is closing.