The Claremont Institute Feed Items

If you’re taking flak, you’re over the target.

The old World War II idiom certainly appears to ring true regarding President Trump’s plan to begin the much needed process of refocusing America’s foreign engagements. The subsequent tranche of articles decrying the alleged return of “American isolationism” by defenders of the crumbling American-led liberal international order should therefore not come as a surprise.

They tell us that failing to maintain a sprawling military-industrial framework of permanent alliances, defense guarantees, and logistical entanglements is akin to weakness—appeasement even—that will undermine U.S. national security.

Senator Mitch McConnell makes this exact argument in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. The Republican senator’s lengthy article, “The Price of American Retreat,” is thorough and well-written. It articulates current challenges to U.S. hegemony on the world stage and identifies economic, political, and doctrinal elements of the U.S. force posture that are inadequate to the task of meeting those challenges.

One of the most critical questions of our time is whether the Westphalian system in which sovereign nation states remain the primary form of societal and political organization or if it will be replaced by some form of global government. The U.N. was formed to establish the latter, and unsurprisingly, it has devolved into a trade association for corrupt Third World governments. The time has come for the United States to reassert its status as a sovereign and independent nation and consider withdrawing from the U.N.

Essentially an attempt to revive the failed League of Nations under a new name, the U.N. was founded in June 1945 to prevent war by establishing a deliberative body which could resolve disputes in a peaceful manner. This was based on the belief that it was both feasible and desirable to establish a system where individual nations would depend on multilateral organizations instead of protecting their own national interests.

The adoption of the U.N. Charter was followed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which breathlessly declares it to be “a milestone document in the history of human rights.” It lays out “a common standard of achievements for all people and all nations,” including a list of “fundamental human rights to be universally protected.” Whoever wrote this platitudinous drivel was apparently unaware of Magna Carta or the U.S. Constitution.

Before the Coronavirus pandemic gripped the American consciousness in early 2020, America was seized by a pandemic of another kind: a hysteria among the nation’s elites over President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. The frenzy generated by the progressive-liberal press, Hollywood radicals, progressive politicians (both Democrat and Republican), the minions of the Deep State, academics, and law professors was unprecedented.

It was driven, for the most part, by the Trump Administration’s attempts to curtail illegal immigration by the adoption of a zero-tolerance policy for illegal border crossers; significant restrictions on asylum policies; the use of the National Emergencies Act to shift funds allocated for other purposes to build a border war; the use of the “remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers while their claims are evaluated; and the end of the long-standing “catch and release” policy.

But nothing engendered as much hysteria as the president’s bare suggestion that, in 2018—the year of the sesquicentennial of the adoption of the 14th Amendment—the policy of granting automatic birthright citizenship to the children of illegal aliens born in the United States should be ended.

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.

Big Tech Turns Red | The Roundtable Ep. 250

America’s universities may be a disgrace, but the deeper problems with our education system lie with grades K-12. Higher education still ranks as a U.S. strength that other countries might admire—but our grade schools might even be inadequate for poor, developing countries.

The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as The Nation’s Report Card, found that barely a quarter or less of students are proficient in reading, and even less are proficient in math, geography, and U.S. history. U.S. 4th and 8th graders are performing worse not only compared to East Asian countries, but also to such places as Poland, the U.K., South Africa, Turkey, and Sweden, all of which have boosted their scores.

Some of this can be blamed on the pandemic, but not all of it can. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, between pre-pandemic 2019 and 2023, the average score for 4th graders on standardized math tests dropped by 18 points, while scores for 8th graders declined by 27 points. Overall, some 40% of all U.S. public school students fail to meet standards in either math or english, up 8% from pre-pandemic levels.

“The Kids are Alright,” The Who once sang. But about half of American kids are far from alright—in fact, our boys are in real trouble.

The statistics are jarring. Young men without both parents are more likely to spend time in prison than graduate college, according to sociologist Brad Wilcox’s Get Married. In the United States, the second leading cause of death for men under 45 is suicide. Political economist Nicholas Eberstadt contends in Men Without Work that male workforce engagement is at the level it was during the Great Depression.

Political scientist Warren Farrell and counselor John Gray point out in The Boy Crisis that by age nine, children who are not getting enough time with their fathers have telomeres (chromosome indicators which predict life expectancy) 14% shorter than average.

There’s a certain triumphalism on the Right regarding the declining fortunes of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in American institutions and corporations. Companies which have recently rolled back their DEI programs include heavy weights such as Walmart, Ford, Harley-Davidson, Caterpillar, and Lowe’s. “DEI Is Dying,” read one New York Post op-ed in May of last year. The editors of National Review crowed in May 2024: “DEI on the Run.” Yet as someone who recently completed my employer’s web-based DEI training, it’s going to require a much more concerted effort by businesses and government to excise this cancer from American public life.

The DEI training I took wasn’t mandatory, though it was encouraged by senior leadership, and H.R. told the workforce that its completion would be looked upon positively for promotion purposes.

As I speculated, I got through the approximately 11 hours of video content while still doing my actual job. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of my colleagues thought DEI so important that it demanded their undivided attention.

Conservatives interested in higher education reform have spun their wheels for decades. They have demanded free speech, stopping racial preferences, abolishing DEI offices, and ending tenure in the hope of getting universities to appreciate Western civilization. While conservative causes are noble, the mismatch between means and ends predestined its reforms to failure.

Opportunities to reform universities are coming. But conservatives must be willing to take the time to understand how universities work and how to use the levers of power within the academic system to their advantage.

As I show in a new report on the University of Wyoming, one such lever available to conservatives is program review.

Program review, which all accreditors endorse, involves identifying academic programs that lose money or do not fit a school’s mission. Even tenured faculty can be released if their programs do not survive review.

In the 1920s, Joseph Stalin coined the term “American Exceptionalism.” He called it the “heresy of American exceptionalism.” In his Marxist religion, the class struggle outlined in the words of the prophet Marx were gospel. To suggest that the universal history described in Marx’s works somehow didn’t apply to America was therefore a heresy.

This story comes to mind as leftists, in the wake of the election, take to re-evaluating the prudence of wokeness. Their assessment seems to be that overemphasizing sexuality, and to a lesser extent race, was a mistake not because it offended America’s egalitarian sensibilities, but because it distracted from the really urgent inequalities: those of the class struggle. 

If one was paying attention, one saw this line of criticism emerge in response to the New York Times’s 1619 Project. Many of the earliest and most influential critiques of the Project were published on a Socialist website. One of the main critics, the distinguished historian Sean Wilentz, is a critic of exceptionalism in the Stalinist sense of the term (he published an article “Against Exceptionalism” early in his career).

On November 5, the American people delivered President-elect Trump a historic mandate to advance the agenda he championed on the campaign trail. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, several Republican senators have already turned the cabinet confirmation process into their own personal vanity project. Even before the process has officially commenced, they have signaled that they may resist confirming, or outright vote against, some of Trump’s nominees. Republicans in that camp would do well to remember—for the good of the country and their own political future—that the electoral mandate was given specifically to President-elect Trump, not the Republican Party as a whole.

Trump far outpaced many Senate Republican candidates on Election Day. He won all five swing states with concurrent Senate races, yet the Republican Senate candidate won in just one of them—Pennsylvania—and by mere thousands of votes despite Trump winning by over 100,000. In the other four swing states—Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan—all four Republican candidates came up short.

Whether a president-elect squeaks out a marginal Electoral College victory while losing the popular vote, achieves a Nixon/Reagan-esque landslide, or winds up somewhere in between as most do, a president has the absolute right, and even obligation, to follow through on as many campaign promises as possible. But for those who believe margins and public perception matter, President-elect Trump’s victory was an undeniable landslide given the current state of the electoral map.

Reports released by two House committees in December shine a harsh light on the deceptions and oppressive tactics utilized by numerous federal agencies, the Intelligence Community, and leaders of the Democratic Party. During the last year of the first Trump Administration, agencies within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), State Department, and Justice Department (DOJ) initiated improper contacts with media in an effort to censor conservative views. These agencies also took steps to interfere in the 2020 election to benefit Joe Biden.

Is the H-1B visa a talent visa or an outsourcing visa? Many Americans see it as an outsourcing visa, and for good reason. Until tech Right leaders like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy understand this perspective, their attempts to bring in more foreign labor via the existing H-1B program will face increasing opposition.

“Pink Slips at Disney. But First, Training Foreign Replacements.” Back in 2015, this headline made national waves when Disney replaced about 250 tech workers with H-1B holders. Even worse, these workers received no severance unless they trained their foreign replacements.

One employee, Leo Perrero, broke down crying as he testified before the Senate about his experience—especially when he talked about having to explain his firing to his kids. And lest you think that the H-1B is a talent visa, Perrero had to repeatedly explain basic concepts to his foreign replacements.

On Tuesday, Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced sweeping changes that he claims will reduce censorship and promote better civic discourse on his social media platforms. If fully enacted, these policy shifts across the Meta family of companies would mark a significant departure from the organization’s practices since 2016.

While Zuckerberg’s apparent desire to halt overt information warfare against conservatives is a positive step, we should remain cautious in interpreting this move as a principled stand in favor of respecting constitutional and natural rights. It is far more likely that he is acting out of pragmatism rather than principle, sensing what he has to do given Trump’s victory and the Right’s ascending fortunes.

In the current cultural moment, the woke movement is in decline, and a conservative political ethos is on the rise. X is no longer dominated by progressives. Fortune 500 companies are dismantling Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, properly seeing them as liabilities. Despite the media casting Donald Trump and his supporters as extremists, he is set to begin a second presidential term this month with more popular support than he’s ever had. Within the military, pages promoting the LGBTQ agenda are being taken offline. As these shifts continue, expect to see a societal domino effect where leftism loses mainstream legitimacy and counterculture symbols return to their original fringe status.

Normal is coming back in style.

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.

Mar-a-Igloo | The Roundtable Ep. 249

Over the last 40 years, it has become increasingly clear that having open, unsecured borders is at odds with the interests of the American people. Our porous southern border has led to alarming surges in disease, illegal drugs, and human trafficking. Mass immigration has contributed to a growing housing crisis, while new job creation is being disproportionately soaked up by migrants at the expense of native-born Americans.

The most recent conflict over immigration, which erupted over the Christmas holiday, concerns the last point: how many foreign workers should we allow to displace American workers?

The 2024 election ushered in a new era in Republican electoral strategy. The chaos of 2020 left ordinary voters bitter and disappointed in the clunky inadequacies of old-fashioned canvassing efforts against a decentralized and shameless Democratic ground game. In response, ordinary citizens began gathering into grassroots, populist groups to get out the vote in a more nimble and up-to-date way. I was among them, and what I saw gave me hope for the future of the party.

I arrived on the ground in Glendale, Arizona, unsure of what to expect. During the Biden years, I had been keeping track of my home country from afar as I worked for a conservative organization in Budapest. I watched with alarm as inflation soared, drug cartels trafficked kids across the southern border, towns were overwhelmed by illegal migration, men invaded women’s sports, teachers radicalized students into trans activism, and global instability worsened under Democratic leadership. Usually, I’d roll my eyes, rant on social media, or vent to my friends. This time, I felt compelled to act—but how?

What could I, a 54-year-old woman with no political connections or online influence, really do? In Budapest I was immersed in a thriving conservative movement. Coming home, though, I wasn’t prepared for the political chaos that greeted me. In Hungary I felt part of the cause; back here, I feel completely out of the loop.

Donald Trump’s resounding victory in November indicates widespread public support for radical action on immigration.

In October, a Marquette Law School poll showed support for “deporting immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home countries” at 68% among registered voters. After the election, a separate poll found that 57% of respondents favored deporting at least 11 million people living here illegally.

The once and future president has a clear mandate to restore law and order to our immigration system. The question is how long it will last.

Legacy media outlets are sure to flood the airwaves with heart-wrenching images. The press would like nothing more than for deportation to generate maximally painful images of crying abuelas with a dozen American grandchildren being loaded into ICE vans, idealistic DREAMers killed by cartel violence after being deported to Guatemala, and jackbooted thugs beating good samaritans with nightsticks as they use their bodies to shield the migrants claiming sanctuary at their Unitarian church.

Education in America has a political problem. At this point, even the Chronicle of Higher Education admits that conservatives have been winnowed out of academia, leaving a brittle coterie of narrow-minded extremists to staff faculties across the country. But the problem does not end with leftist indoctrination. Conservatives are increasingly divided about how to address the issue.

One form of counter-revolution is taking shape in Ron DeSantis’s Florida. There, government officials have used state power not only to overhaul the administration at New College of Florida, but also to impose curricular reforms across the state’s educational system. This approach, though, has drawn criticism from anti-woke liberals and moderates like David French and Jordan Peterson.

DeSantis, Chris Rufo, and their allies intend to wield state power for good while their enemies wield it for evil. For critics, this only shifts the problem across the aisle: where once the University of Toronto tried to force Peterson to use neo-pronouns, perhaps New College will mandate a traditional view of American civics. Dissenters would then be purged as Peterson was.

Ever since news of President-elect Trump’s more unorthodox appointments was leaked, debates have raged over whether his nominees are “qualified” for the roles for which they’ve been selected.

When President Trump chose Pete Hegseth to serve as Secretary of Defense, protests immediately began that he is nothing more than a “Fox News Host” who should be dismissed as unserious. Matt Gaetz had to forego his nomination for Attorney General not just because of his controversial past but because he lacks experience directly practicing law.

When it comes to Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., Kash Patel, and the rest, our august senators will surely provide their judicious advice and consent—setting aside all personal grievances and factional concerns. (I know, I know…but c’mon, give them a chance.)

The whole debate, though, rests on faulty premises. Before asking whether Trump’s picks are “serious” or “qualified,” we should consider that our governing class may have a warped view of what counts as “qualified” and what “serious” means.

Since the election conservatives have assumed that the results represent a “mandate” for their political agenda, as well as a confirmation of their version of national identity. Yet in reality, the election was actually quite close, as Trump’s win margin in the popular vote is the smallest since Jimmy Carter’s in 1976.

Under the best of circumstances, it is difficult for any intelligence service to collect, analyze, and produce actionable, predictive data for a nation’s leadership. This task is made considerably harder when lockstep adherence to a fringe political ideology is imposed upon the workforce tasked with carrying out this challenging mission. Unfortunately, this is the situation the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies of the U.S. Intelligence Community are in: to America’s detriment, their leadership enthusiastically imposed Diversity, Equity and Inclusion ideology upon their employees.

To underscore how deeply DEI has metastasized inside the host, in a recent enlightening and publicly available statement, the CIA’s Chief DEI officer said there are three criteria by which an intelligence officer can be promoted at America’s most important foreign intelligence service. Only one of them is related to mission impact. The others are a rather vague “corporate mindset”—and DEI.

Of the three, adherence to the cant of DEI is the most important; those who do not vocally and unreservedly support it are denied promotions and meaningful assignments. Like rallies held by authoritarian regimes, you do not want to be the first to stop clapping at the approved, serial pronouncements.

The year 1968 was not all roses for America. We found ourselves in a seemingly endless stalemate in Vietnam, where the death toll approached 40,000 U.S. troops. Growing opposition to the war caused the incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, to decline to run for re-election. Assassins’ bullets cut down civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Riots tore through Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other great American cities. The economy was plagued by rising inflation. The Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia.

But on Christmas Eve, from a most unexpected place, America and the free world received a bit of good cheer. It came in the form of a broadcast to the largest global television audience to date.

The story starts with President John F. Kennedy’s speech to a special joint session of Congress several years before, in May 1961, in which he announced that it was “time for a great new American Enterprise.” This enterprise would be to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth before the decade was out. JFK did not mince words about the purpose of this costly and risky venture: it was to help “win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny.”

On May 19, 2023, the graduation speaker at New College of Florida, Dr. Scott Atlas, walked up to the podium to begin his remarks. The sun was just beginning to set over Sarasota Bay, off which the campus is located, and guests were seated near the water under a large white tent. Behind Dr. Atlas on an elevated stage, faculty and administration wore their academic regalia. The event looked like many college commencements taking place around the nation that spring. However, when Dr. Atlas had accepted the invitation to speak from me, the recently appointed interim president, we had both known it would be anything but typical.

Shortly after Dr. Atlas began his remarks, yells from the audience of “Murderer!” and “Go f*** yourself!” would result in police entering the crowd to stand quietly, scanning the rows. A chorus of boos and jeers continued throughout Dr. Atlas’s 16-minute speech. He stoically read from his script, stopping rarely, except once toward the end, when many of the several hundred in the audience stood up, turned their backs on him, and chanted, “Wrap it up!” for more than a minute, forcing him to pause as the noise became overwhelming.

My advice to President Trump on how to deal with the mess in Ukraine is simple: you should pull the plug on the Biden Administration’s flailing European peanut gallery. Your friends and allies in Europe want to shoulder the burden of their own defense, but they don’t want to pour money down the drain and risk World War III in Ukraine. Get an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine, a war which no sane European wants to fight, and let the sovereigntist parties of the New Right mop up the globalist Left. They believe in their countries and will fight to protect them, unlike the Brussels liberals cowering behind the skirts of Mother America.

Ending the war won’t happen without an agreement to keep Ukraine neutral and out of NATO. The Deep State will try to convince you that NATO can’t afford to back down on eventual Ukraine membership, and that Russia is bleeding out and ready to fold. But the opposite is true: Europe’s willingness to defend itself depends on a revival of nationalism and the ascent of the sovereigntist parties on the Right. Freeze the fighting and deliver a political victory to European patriots whose watchword is “Make Europe Great Again.”

A specter is haunting the contemporary Right.

This particular ghost goes by the name “woke Right”—a term pushed by admitted non-conservative James Lindsay, and subsequently adopted by others such as Konstantin Kisin.

Part of the term’s attractiveness is its amorphousness. It clearly can mean many things to many people, from targeting alleged racism or anti-Semitism on the Right to simply referring to a person on the Right whom “classical liberals” (hereafter “liberals”) dislike. To the extent that the term has any coherence, it is a critique of the right-wing’s so-called use of identity politics. 

There is an aspect of the “woke Right” accusation that is inherently parasitic. With the Right having successfully stigmatized “wokeness”—most voters now realize it’s insane and dangerous—liberals are now attempting to apply that term to the Right, claiming that its critique of the Left has gone too far.

President Donald Trump’s electoral victory makes him an anomaly in the annals of U.S. history—not only for winning non-consecutive terms, which no one has accomplished since Grover Cleveland over a century ago, but also for surviving multiple assassination attempts and becoming the first elected president convicted of felony crimes.  

Whether or not the convictions are justified, prognosticators have rightly called his win one of the greatest comebacks ever in American politics—greater even than Richard Nixon’s rise from the ashes after losing to John F. Kennedy in 1960.  

Unlike in 2016, when he failed to clinch the popular vote but won the Electoral College, Trump outpaced Kamala Harris by nearly 2.5 million votes, making gains among racial, gender, age, and geographic demographics with whom Democrats typically have excelled, particularly blacks, Latinos, and blue-collar workers.  

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.

Unidentified Federal Operations | The Roundtable Ep. 248

Expect conflict when President-elect Donald Trump revokes, as planned, the “Temporary Protected Status (TPS)” program that President Joe Biden massively expanded to shield almost one million immigrants from deportation. Biden did so on grounds that these illegally present immigrants cannot be returned to, as the New York Times recently put it, “dangerous and deeply troubled countries.”

Bryan, Ohio, is a fine small town. It’s the kind of place where holiday dinners are potlucks, featuring several versions of homemade meatloaf and bean casserole, and the cooks silently watch to see which desserts are gone first. It’s as flat as a sheet of plywood, and the wind bites bare skin in the winter.

Dad’s Place, a storefront church run by Pastor Chris, occupies an old building a few doors down from the county courthouse. It looks like plenty of other businesses that haven’t yet spruced up their early-20th century buildings. Mentally ill and homeless people shelter in the church, which is open 24/7—but the day of my visit, the local City Hall got a court order to shut it down. The temperature dipped to 16 degrees that night.

Pastor Chris founded Dad’s Place years after his conversion to Christianity in mid-adulthood, after which he entered ministry. He describes his reluctant conversion this way: “It was like a nuclear bomb went off. I can’t describe it—nothing around me happened, I didn’t hear a voice or anything like that.” His eyes welled up at the memory. “But everything changed in that moment.”

Inside of Dad’s Place, there’s a front room that faces the street, with just a table and some chairs. Anyone can walk in off the street. There’s always a live or recorded sermon playing for customers.

In the hamlet of Remsenburg, Suffolk County, Long Island, New York lies a small cemetery behind the chapel of the Remsenburg Community Church. There one finds the modest final resting place of a great American, marked by a substantial rectangular headstone with a large open book sculpted on top, in which is inscribed from top to bottom:

Jeeves

Blanding’s Castle

Leave it to Psmith

Meet Mister Mulliner

Beneath this on the wide headstone you see the name of the great American:

Sir Pelham Grenville

WODEHOUSE

At the very bottom of the headstone are the words:

HE GAVE JOY TO COUNTLESS PEOPLE

Seldom have truer words been engraved in stone. Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (Plum to his friends; P.G. to his reading public) gave joy to countless millions of people with his books, about a hundred of them, written during the first 75 years of the 20th century. So long as people and books are to be found, he will continue to give joy—the joy of pure soul-refreshing laughter—by inviting his readers into the worlds of Jeeves, Blandings castle (not Blanding’s as on the headstone), Psmith (with a silent P as in ptarmigan), Mr. Mulliner, and other immortal comic characters and settings.

Daniel Penny enjoyed a well-earned beer more than a year too late. After protecting dozens of New York City subway passengers from the violent fantasies of Jordan Neely, Penny was punished at the hands of activist Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Though he escaped a heavy punishment—spending the prime of his life rotting away in jail—for Penny and others like him, the process is the punishment. The stress of a grueling trial, the financial toll brought on by his parents fronting an $100,000 bond, and the reality that many Americans taken in by the media’s lies think Penny got away with committing a lynching in broad daylight—all of this will serve as a stern warning to men who dare stand up to the lawless tyranny in many of America’s major cities.

A regime that allows an army of Jordan Neelys to harass and threaten its citizens, and then tries to make an example of any man who dares try putting a stop to it, is a regime infused with a deep-seated hatred of masculinity. This makes sense given that masculinity is what will protect the innocent from the regime’s open embrace of lawlessness.

A decent society would honor Daniel Penny. Instead, our elites dragged him through a sham trial that ended in an acquittal despite their most brazen efforts. In a regime of lawlessness, citizens who enforce order are the enemy.

A well-functioning society possesses an inherent will to survive. Daniel Penny’s grave mistake was assuming he lived in such a place.

In light of the commanding victory by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance in November’s election, conservatives are optimistic about the prospects for restoring American greatness. While I share this hope, it’s important to understand the true state of the regime and the character required to heal our nation’s wounds and unite the country around a shared political vision.

The American regime is ill, and everyone feels it. Yet few can agree on the diagnosis and fewer still on the cure. On the Right, some blame the alien germ of European progressivism that captured the imaginations of John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, others Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, or the Supreme Court’s Engle v. Vitale decision banning school prayer—the list could go on. There’s some truth to all these narratives, but they elide more fundamental realities.

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election victory, many education reformers are saying that now is the time to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the presumptive leaders of the new Department of Government Efficiency, have been strongly hinting that eradicating the DofEd outright is a real possibility.

That’s an attractive goal—the DofEd wastes a great deal of money and does a great deal of damage to American students. But eliminating it outright will be difficult. Education reformers need 60 votes in the Senate to abolish the Department of Education. Using budget reconciliation might allow that requirement to be sidestepped, but it’s doubtful that Congress will go along with that tactic. Additionally, the Trump voting coalition isn’t just made up of small-government conservatives—it includes voters who don’t mind big government so long as it isn’t woke.

Also, “abolishing the Education Department” can mean less than meets the eye. Every single office and program can be transferred over to the Department of Health and Human Services—uncut, unreformed, and unchanged. Putative reformers could declare a hollow victory while supporters of the radical education establishment would then happily perform their outrage dance, secure in the knowledge that nothing really has changed.

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.

Strangio-er than Fiction | The Roundtable Ep. 247

There is a striking similarity between the situation President Reagan faced in 1982 and the state of the Middle East today. There are three valuable lessons from the Reagan era that will almost certainly help inform the future course of President Trump’s approach toward peace: 1) the countries of the region want security above all, and the United States is the only one that can provide it; 2) Saudi leadership is essential for any comprehensive and durable peace; and 3) laying the foundation for relationships between Arabs and Israelis can only take place in private, far from the public view. Liberal institutions and commentators might question the new administration’s ability to make further gains on regional peace absent a comprehensive solution for the Palestinian issue, but their skepticism is more a consequence of their narrow vision for how negotiations should be run.

Two explanations are popular among Democrats for why Donald Trump won: voters are racist and voters (wrongly) blame their economic insecurity on mass immigration.

In a post-election autopsy at The New York Times, correspondent Miriam Jordan admitted that Americans’ immigration attitudes have shifted “to the right,” but argued that this is borne not of intelligent analysis but of a spell cast by a demagogue. Jordan quoted Rodrigo Garcia, a “Mexican American” who was taken in by “Trump’s forceful rhetoric.” “I feel like there should be a certain limit of the people that come into America, instead of just letting everyone come in,” Garcia said.

Garcia’s view is not radical. It’s a sensible one, no matter what nation is being considered. Trump’s “forceful rhetoric” is not what makes people think immigration needs some limits.

During the past 20 years in America, a great contest has been waged over what the nation will become in the twenty-first century. Those on the political Left—progressives, statists, academics, and secularists—insist that America was always fundamentally flawed. They say we must become something other than what we have been. For their part, conservative Americans—workers, traditionalists, religious believers, and constitutionalists—hold that America is becoming something they don’t recognize. They claim the Left has betrayed the nation’s founding principles and has rejected the habits and traditions that once defined our national identity.

In short, the political battle between the Left and Right is best understood as an existential fight over what America will be. The Left pushes for a metanoic transformation, while the Right tries to catalyze an epistrophic one.

Metanoia is a forward-looking change—a recognition that one’s past way of life was flawed in some fundamental way. Regret precipitates a self-rejection that drives the transformation, which is a deliberate turning away from one’s previous identity. In contrast, epistrophe is a backward-looking change—a realization that at some point one betrayed the true self and embraced a false mode of being. Epistrophic transformation, then, is a return to one’s essential identity—a return to a previous (and more authentic) way of life.

Perhaps no sector better exemplifies the economic recklessness, inflation, and elitism that Americans rejected last month than academia. What was once a beacon of Western enlightenment has devolved into a profiteering industry that survives on Washington’s tired, cynical bribe: “Vote for us, and we’ll funnel more money to colleges!” As this hollow promise loses its power to persuade, President Trump has a historic opportunity to dismantle the College Cartel and free Americans from the stranglehold of these calcified interests.

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

A Pardon in a Pear Tree | The Roundtable Ep. 246

Donald Trump’s victory was in part a decisive repudiation of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), the odious, unconstitutional, racist, and sexist grift concocted by the extreme Left as a radicalized form of affirmative action. DEI is based on Critical Race Theory (CRT), the doctrine that all whites are bigots. It has been fused into the firmament of academia, government, and business by the far Left, those beholden to it (particularly Joe Biden), and those fearful of it (including corporate boards and CEOs).

DEI and CRT have destroyed the careers of straight white men and Asians, humiliated blacks and other minorities who can excel without preferences, reduced government effectiveness and business productivity, savaged American exceptionalism, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and vitiated a century of federal civil rights laws.

It’s time to ramp up the fight against corporate bias. The next four years will be difference-making ones.

For years, corporate activists have infiltrated the boardrooms and governance structures of America’s biggest companies and brands, destroying their focus on fiduciary duty and politicizing them through a plethora of activist-driven ESG and DEI initiatives. As a proxy analyst, I see the fruits of corporate activism everywhere, from shareholder proposals pressuring brands like Walmart into auditing their “racial equity” to existing corporate policies discriminating against religious and/or conservative employees.

For conservatives interested in doing the work of depoliticizing American businesses, it shouldn’t just be about stopping the current ambitions of ESG activists—it should be about undoing all the gains they’ve made in company culture and policy. And it shouldn’t be simply about decrying companies’ biased decisions, but about working to bring them back to a politically neutral baseline so that such decisions don’t happen again.

As much as this election was affected by voters’ concerns about the economy and their dissatisfaction with the past four years, the most decisive factor in Kamala Harris’s loss may well have been a massive cultural transformation currently happening in America. Despite their obsession with vibes, no one on the Harris team seemed to notice the actual vibe shift happening across the country. Briefly put, we are beginning to see a collective rejection of the fake in favor of the real.

It’s no great revelation that major TV and movie studios have been pumping out repetitive, overproduced, and unimaginative tripe for some time. But whereas big-budget schlock used to be accepted as mildly amusing by a public with few better options, TikTok and the smartphone have totally changed the game. As critic Ted Gioia pointed out in a recent essay, viewers are increasingly turning their attention from “official” sources of entertainment to homemade clips by amateur creators. There are obvious dangers in this, as Gioia points out. But there’s also opportunity: what’s driving people to choose the phone screen over the big screen is a newfound interest in the raw, the real, and the direct. Fake is out. Live is in.

I served in the U.S. Army Special Operations Command on a Cultural Support Team embedded with elite combat units. From this vantage point, I can state with absolute certainty that women do not belong in U.S. military combat units.

Today it has become a perverse badge of progress to claim that equality demands women shoulder the same burdens of war as men, even at the cost of life, limb, and sight. The feminist project seeks full parity within all combat ranks of the U.S. military, the latest effort in a decade-long push for formal gender integration.

But this misguided egalitarianism reflects not progress but a profound cultural regression. Unfortunately, the military has become yet another battleground for the cultural revolution, where the truths of human nature are denied in service of ideological dogma.

The recent nomination of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense has reignited this debate. Hegseth, unlike most generals and policymakers today, understands that combat roles demand capabilities and cultural cohesion that women cannot provide. For his honesty, he has been met with predictable outrage, as contemporary gender ideology admits no dissent. In 2024, to question a woman’s “right” to fight and die on a battlefield is to invite condemnation as a bigot. This is the twisted truth of modern feminism: celebrating a woman’s ability to die in foreign wars over her capacity to build families and communities at home.

By September 25, 1789, the U.S. House of Representatives had only been operating for about six months under the Constitution. They were meeting in New York, as they would continue to do until the government was moved to Philadelphia the following year, and then to what became Washington, D.C. Everything was new and uncertain.

On that day in September, Elias Boudinot, a representative from New Jersey, introduced a resolution:  

That a joint committee of both Houses be directed to wait upon the President of the United States, to request that he would recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging, with grateful hearts, the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a Constitution of government for their safety and happiness.

Not everyone thought this Thanksgiving business was a good idea. Aedanus Burke of South Carolina “did not like this mimicking of European customs, where they made a mere mockery of thanksgivings.”Thomas Tudor Tucker, also of South Carolina,

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.

Biden’s Parting Gifts | The Roundtable Ep. 245

As you gather with your loved ones this Thanksgiving, passing the turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce, I hope you take time to reflect on the many blessings God has bestowed upon our nation.

And while politics at the dinner table is typically taboo, most of us have at least one relative eager to stir the pot.

Now, I’m certainly not advocating for full-blown debate before the pumpkin pie, but if the conversation happens to shift to politics, and that friend or family member is still reeling from President Trump’s overwhelming win, don’t worry. Here are a few reasons to be thankful for the upcoming Trump Administration.

At the heart of President Trump’s MAGA movement has always been the American people. The bright thread throughout his historic 2024 campaign was promoting policies that will reverse the damage of the Biden Administration and restore America and her citizens to greatness. President Trump’s authentic rock-and-roll campaign resonated with voters weary of stale DNC talking points, and his enthusiastic message resounded far beyond what pollsters anticipated. In fact, the majority of Americans demanded his vision of change.

The transition to this new era of leadership is already off to a promising start with President Trump’s key appointments. From Susie Wiles and Russ Vought to RFK Jr., Pam Bondi, and Elise Stefanik—these individuals will bring fresh perspectives to the White House and will combine their experience and Trump-required work ethic to deliver for the American people.

It did not take long for the Left to demand a consolation prize for their failed leader Kamala Harris. The opening bid was replacing Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor with “Justice” Harris. What joy that would be. But it’s also mercifully implausible. Not only would the Wise Latinx Justice need to retire to make way for a proud black Brahmin, but Chuck Schumer would have to wrangle a one-vote majority that includes departing former Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. In his lame duck era, Schumer doesn’t really have the ability to rally this captious crowd behind any nominee. But for Harris? Please.

We must go back to the beginning of our quest: how to console the hapless Harris? She’ll have to do what she always does: fail upward. And there’s only one logical next step on that path: the governorship of California.

The ghastly Gavin Newsom is termed out in two years. Unless California Rs get their stuff together in a big way, he will inevitably be followed by another progressive D. And there is no bigger progressive D in Cali Town than Kamala D. Harris, D-San Francisco.

Harris recently won three statewide races in California, twice for attorney general and once for the United States Senate. She then appeared twice on presidential tickets that handily won California in 2020 and 2024. She will easily win a race for governor. Yes, she is a disaster in national politics, but for the exact same reasons she is the bespoke lefty for today’s Golden State coasties.

The approach of Thanksgiving invites us to turn our minds to the relationship between religion and the American regime. We now encounter controversy where we once found consensus. With the rise of modern secularism, many Americans now believe that religion should play no role in the nation’s public life, while many other Americans continue to hold to the traditional view that it should.

These divisions were illustrated strikingly in the homestretch of the presidential campaign. Speaking in Wisconsin, Kamala Harris was interrupted by hecklers who called out, “Jesus is Lord.” Harris responded by saying, “You guys are at the wrong rally.” A few days later, in the same state, and apparently in response to this exchange, someone cried out, “Jesus is king!” during a speech by J.D. Vance—and Vance replied, “That’s right. Jesus is king.”

In the wake of Donald Trump’s crushing victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, social media has been flooded with videos of apartment- or vehicle-bound neurotics screaming, banging pots and pans in sheer disbelief, packing their belongings, or generally convulsing as if Kristallnacht were upon us. The American public has been introduced to the 4B movement, in which liberal women appropriate a South Korean sex strike because justice.

To be sure, social media is at best a caricature of real life. Only the most dramatic individuals will shave their heads for “reproductive rights” (read: for likes), but most people do not express themselves in quite such a hyperbolic register. That said, in this case the memes are imitating real life. Not every ex-Kamala voter is experiencing a full-scale breakdown. But judging based on my own clinical observations as a practicing therapist, I think it may well be true that a significant number of young American leftists are going through a collective mental health crisis.

I speak from some experience, having spent multiple hours per day over the past few weeks hearing from clients about the damage inflicted upon their psyches “by the Trump win.” This is their account of things. My own opinion, however, is that someone has subjected these kids to psychic trauma. But it wasn’t Donald Trump.

First Things

In the waning days of the 2024 campaign, Team Harris made a truly devious effort to revive their flagging poll numbers. Their two-part pitch to the electorate went like this: 1) Men should vote Democrat so their daughters can get abortions, and 2) women should vote Democrat, then lie to their conservative husbands about it.

Part one focused its appeal on the vanishingly small percentage of abortions performed in response to rape. This argument probably appeals to some men. Most Americans are pro-choice in that they don’t much care if their neighbor gets an abortion. And when it comes to their own families, they’d rather have the option than not. Better to keep abortion legal for any reason at all than for my wife or daughter to “need” an abortion and not be able to get one.

In extreme cases, the argument goes, getting your daughter an abortion is an act of fatherly protection. When Charlie Kirk spoke out against rape exceptions, the anonymous X personality known as RadFem Hitler responded with characteristic vitriol. “No genuinely masculine man would ever allow his 10 year old daughter to give birth to her rapist’s baby,” she wrote. “Something is deeply CUCKED within you if you would allow a child molester to pass on his genes at the expense of your own progeny.”