The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
Russell Vought: How to Control the Administrative State | The American Mind Podcast
Amid the Iran War and midterm U.S. electioneering, most Americans probably missed a potentially game-changing shift in President Donald Trump’s war against Mexico’s drug cartels. The administration has pivoted to a consequential new tactic that, according to some Mexico experts, could cripple the cartels if expanded. Though it has received little U.S. press coverage, this new strategy has the potential to be more effective than anything ever tried.
The shift is epitomized by a recent 34-page Department of Justice indictment that named ten past and present senior government officials of Mexico’s ruling Morena party in Sinaloa State, which is home base for the Sinaloa Cartel. All ten have denied wrongdoing.
The indictment alleged that Governor Rubén Rocha Moya (who briefly stepped down but has returned) and his current and former security service appointees took “veritable fortunes” in bribe money to dramatically aggravate America’s crisis of fentanyl-related deaths.
President Trump may have accomplished something fiscal conservatives have been trying unsuccessfully to do for decades: he got Washington talking seriously about the national debt. All it took was promising a $5,000 payment—what he calls a “Trump Dividend”—to every adult American citizen if Republicans retain control of Congress. With roughly 240 million eligible recipients, the back-of-the-envelope cost is about $1.2 trillion.
Suddenly, the political class discovered fiscal responsibility. Critics immediately pointed out that the federal government doesn’t have over a trillion dollars lying around. They warned that the checks would increase the deficit. They reminded us that the national debt has surpassed $40 trillion. They worried about inflation, borrowing costs, and the burden we are leaving to future generations.
Those are legitimate concerns. In fact, they should have been dominating our national political debate for decades.
The federal government has been spending money it does not have at an astonishing rate. Annual deficits that once would have produced political panic are now treated almost as background noise.
AI companies want to regulate their open-source competitors out of existence and regulate themselves into riches. We do not usually think of innovative private companies inviting government regulation of their own industry, but that is exactly what is happening in AI.
Concerns about the pace of AI development have existed since the technology entered public awareness in late 2022. Early fears about AI’s economic impact focused largely on job losses for writers and coders and its effects on writing instruction. More recently, as major AI platforms have rolled out agents—AI bots that can be given a task and carry it out over an extended period—the focus has shifted.
What if the bots carry out a cyberattack? What if they are given instructions and the user forgets to tell them to stop? What if they gain access to the nuclear codes? We have not yet reached the point where people are worried about AI turning the universe into paperclips. We are, however, already in a situation where Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei felt the need to publish an essay, “We Must Pace the Frontier,” in which he announced, “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.”
“Teen takeovers” have gone from a social-media spectacle to a serious public-safety issue. While the name conjures images of high schoolers innocently hanging around a drive-in à la American Graffiti, at its core, this phenomenon is about sowing violence and chaos—and leaving communities to deal with the consequences.
The 2026 Wisconsin State Fair concluded its final evening with a massive brawl, during which violent “teens” swarmed the park and beat unassuming fair guests. One man was kicked and beaten as he lay in the fetal position. Earlier this summer, a teen takeover at a Chipotle in Washington, D.C., forced frightened patrons to scramble as youths began throwing chairs and screaming.
In cities across the nation, the same pattern of brutality has emerged: swarms of young, primarily black teenagers will suddenly invade a public space to fight, threaten police, destroy private property, and occasionally get involved in shootings.
When the definitive history of Joe Biden’s presidency is written, it will likely conclude that his most important legacy was unprecedented immigration levels. The U.S. foreign-born population (legal and illegal) grew by 8.3 million during his time in office, driven mostly by the border crisis that he instigated.
At first, the media called the massive influx “seasonal” or blamed it on pent-up demand after COVID lockdowns. Later, they claimed that every Western country faced a similar situation. Many argued it was inevitable. As David Bier of the Cato Institute argued in the New York Times, “Biden Can’t Stop Immigration. Time to Embrace It.” Of course, nothing about it was inevitable.
The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
Uncovered: Administrative State Abuses of Military Contracts | The American Mind Podcast
In this special episode, Will Thibeau, director of the Claremont Institute’s American Military Project, sits down with Claremont president Ryan P. Williams to discuss his recent report on the 8(a) Program, its unique weaponization in the Woke Era, and how the military under Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is combatting the rampant abuses. Plus: What can America’s industrial base learn from the Iran and Ukraine wars?
The post Uncovered: Administrative State Abuses of Military Contracts | The American Mind Podcast appeared first on The American Mind.
In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the “monster” begins as a creature whose maker abdicates his catechetical responsibility. Victor Frankenstein spends nearly two years learning how to give life to an inanimate body. But at the moment of success, when the creature finally opens his eyes, Victor is overcome with disgust and abandons him without teaching him a word.
Spoiler: the creature receives an education anyway. He leaves Victor’s apartment functionally newborn and learns about his environment through direct experiences with hunger, pain, fear, and the elements. The monster eventually takes refuge in a hovel joined to the De Lacey family’s cottage, where he witnesses examples of familial virtue. He learns history and social order from Volney’s Ruins of Empires and draws on Plutarch, Goethe, and Milton to form his understanding of himself, society, and God. The creature’s education is accidental and ungoverned: no one chooses his curriculum, corrects his errors, or even knows he is listening.
On August 21, 2024, I rolled into the Indiana Dunes at the end of an 825-mile bicycle ride from Washington, D.C.—a ride that raised over $100,000 for I AM ALS, founded by former Obama White House counsel Brian Wallach. Two days before my arrival, Wallach was just a few miles away in Chicago, addressing the Democratic National Convention (DNC) alongside his wife, Sandra.
Also inside that convention hall was one of the party’s most prolific progressive fundraisers, a woman named Evan Barker. Her recent loud break with the Democratic Party, overnight as it looked, had been a long time coming. She walked out during Oprah Winfrey’s speech, recorded a video on the convention floor, and posted it to TikTok, garnering millions of views. After the 2024 election, she wrote an essay for The Free Press admitting she’d voted for Donald Trump.
On July 14—Bastille Day—the French national team lost its semi-final match against Spain at the FIFA World Cup. The very next day, France’s National Assembly voted to legalize assisted suicide and euthanasia, providing a humane way out for those who could not stomach the bitter taste of defeat.
Putting aside the dark humor of the timing, France finds itself in good company now that it has legalized medical practices commonly described as “euthanasia” that actively and intentionally terminate human life. These practices are distinct from those in which a medical professional contributes to the end of a patient’s life either passively (for example, by withholding life-sustaining treatments at the patient’s request) or unintentionally (for example, by administering sedatives with the intention of easing pain, even when there is a risk of hastening death as a side effect).
Twenty-five years ago this morning, 2,977 people were murdered in the space of 102 minutes. Most of them had gone to work. Some had boarded an airplane. Among them were 343 New York City firemen who climbed the stairs of the World Trade Center towers while everyone else came down, knowing what that act meant. Aboard a plane over Pennsylvania, 40 passengers and crew learned by telephone what was happening and took their plane back from the men who had seized it.
We memorialize them, as we should. But a quarter century is long enough that we owe them something more than memory. We owe them an accounting. The honest question on this anniversary is not whether we honored the dead. That we have done. It is whether we have ever understood what had been done to us and why—and whether the American people have been made safer or left exposed in ways their forefathers would have found unthinkable.
In Natural Right and History, the political philosopher Leo Strauss opens by asking whether the United States, having become the world’s most powerful and prosperous nation by adhering to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, still held those truths to be self-evident.
It is hard to believe that a year has passed since Charlie’s assassination.
Paying fitting tribute to his life’s work is daunting, and I have been hesitant to write anything at all—especially when I think of his wife, Erika, and their children. None of us can fathom what they have endured.
But we must keep Charlie’s life and work alive in memory and let them inspire and inform our own.
Prudence is an old word with a venerable tradition in Western thought and politics, though its full meaning has grown obscure in modern times. It is also the virtue I most associate with Charlie—and the one we would do best to learn from as we continue to fight for the country he loved.
Charlie was a principled man, but he was no ideological fanatic and no dogmatist on questions of politics and policy. He was always reading, learning, and talking with Americans from every walk of life: college students, grassroots conservatives, the donor class, and leaders across the country.
The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
Political Fallout: Charlie Kirk’s Legacy and “The Flight 93 Election” | The American Mind Podcast
One year ago today, America lost Charlie Kirk.
In some ways, it feels like only yesterday. At other times, it feels like a lifetime ago. Twelve months after that horrifying day, we have only begun to reckon with the scale of the loss for conservatism—and for America.
To someone who ignores politics, it can be hard to explain just why Charlie’s loss was so great. He had a popular podcast—but there are many of those. He did campus debates—but he didn’t have a monopoly on that concept. And of course, however deeply involved in politics he was, Charlie never held office himself.
And yet millions think that Charlie Kirk’s martyrdom leaves a tremendous void on the Right. Why?
What America lost one year ago on that dreadful September 10 was not merely a debater, a pundit, an activist, or even, as many speculated, a future president. What America lost was a true leader, the kind who comes along only a few times in a generation.
The American Way
In one of the most important passages in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville describes the tremendous capacity for self-organization among America’s citizens, in contrast to the torpor he saw among the people of Europe:
Gloria Steinem, a popularizer of feminist dogmas, died last week at the age of 92. She promoted many of the false doctrines of women’s liberation beginning in the 1960s through her persona, writings, publications, and speeches. As she passes from the scene, few of the original so-called second-wave feminists remain. Yet the overwhelming victories the movement has achieved in the decades since have largely obscured the radicalism at its center.
As I researched my second book, The Recovery of Family Life: Exposing the Limits of Modern Ideologies, I read Steinem’s influential 1970 Time essay, “What It Would Be Like If Women Win,” to understand what the fully realized feminist project would look like. What emerged from my survey of her work was the idea of an unfinished and unfinishable Rolling Feminist Revolution.
With tensions in Iran still boiling and our national debt hitting $40 trillion, it’s time to take a hard look at the military’s budget. We should preserve what the military needs to be capable and prepared—and cut the waste. One little-known program has not only failed its mission but also driven excess government spending. The good news is that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has already announced a review. The bad news? This program is so fundamentally defective that it should be abolished outright.
In the summer of 2024, a “socially disadvantaged” small business won two Defense Logistics Agency contracts worth more than $34 million. The firm then handed 95% of one contract’s value to Lockheed Martin and 94% of the other to a subsidiary of Leonardo DRS, two of the world’s largest defense contractors. The disadvantaged firm did little more than sign the paperwork and collect a fee.
The arrangement broke no law. It followed the standard business model of the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) Business Development Program, the federal government’s oldest identity-based contracting scheme—and one of Washington’s most durable corporate welfare rackets.
Ten years ago today, September 5, 2016, Michael Anton’s “The Flight 93 Election” took the internet, and the Right, by storm. Anton’s essay made the case for Trump in the face of furious, well-funded opposition from elite conservative intellectual and political circles.
The electoral choice was easy: Trump was a risk; Hillary was a certainty. On Trump, though, Anton went further. On trade, war, the economy, and especially immigration, Trump promised to disrupt the establishment status quo in the name of the long-aggrieved GOP voting base. He ran on a concrete policy platform, amassed a presidential electoral coalition around it, and then delivered. How novel!
Anton’s arresting polemic in defense of Trump has been vindicated. It also did not come from nowhere. Six years before “Flight 93,” in 2010, the late Angelo Codevilla (a longtime Claremont Senior Fellow) published an equally viral essay in The American Spectator, “America’s Ruling Class—and the Perils of Revolution.” He called out the intellectual, moral, and republican bankruptcy of America’s bipartisan ruling class. Rush Limbaugh read it on air, as he would again with Anton’s essay in 2016.
Mark exited his family group chat after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election and, shortly after, stopped speaking to his family entirely. He knew his mom and siblings were conservative and pro-life, and though they didn’t really talk politics, his suspicions about their votes were confirmed when he pressed them. They had made a choice, and now he would too.
Mark had taken to social media the day after the election to rant about half the country, but there was little he could do with anger of that scale. His family offered something more manageable: a localized target for a generalized grievance. He couldn’t control how millions of Americans voted, but he could control whether the few he knew who voted for Trump remained in his life.
His mother, recently widowed, is heartbroken by her son’s decision to go no contact. She tries to focus her attention on the rich relationships she still has. Mark’s siblings vacillate between annoyance and deep hurt, bewildered that something so distant from the ordinary life of their family—national politics—could enter their intimacy and overwhelm it.
Optimists have lately claimed that wokeness was a fad that has gone out of style. To their credit, there has been evidence to support this. “Woke 1 was crazy,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in August on ABC News. “Rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric we would use today.” Progressivism’s biggest champions seem eager to distance themselves from its recent excesses.
But the Jason Arday scandal shows that wokeness is not over, not by a long shot. The fact that Arday held a well-paid position at one of the world’s most prestigious universities is a telling sign that wokeness is alive and well.
More telling still is that powerful and otherwise seemingly intelligent people, such as the autism specialist Simon Baron-Cohen, have leaped to defend Arday. It would have been easy for people on the Left to acknowledge his blatant fraud and dismiss him as an isolated case whose offenses have no bearing on the broader issue of DEI in higher education. They did not.
The lesson for the Right is that there is much more work to do to dismantle wokeness, and it will not simply be a matter of doing more of what we have been doing so far. The power centers of wokeness are not just holdouts we haven’t gotten around to eliminating yet. They are strongholds that have been impervious to our tactics.
The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
FIRE Challenges Trump’s Deportation of Pro-Gaza Immigrants | The American Mind Podcast
Will marriage survive the internet?
It’s a question no one was asking in the 1990s, even as the World Wide Web became part of our everyday lives. Yet here we are more than halfway through the 2020s, and it’s fair to say the digitization of our social lives has drastically unsettled the relations between the sexes. As scholar Patrick T. Brown recently wrote, “At this point, anyone who is arguing that phones didn’t change societal scripts in a meaningful way has the burden of proof.”
Yes, the battle of the sexes is as old as civilization itself. But digital technology has introduced a new and disorienting dynamic. It turns humans into avatars. And avatars don’t fall in love or find God or have children. They exist in your phone, as pixels to be rewarded with likes or screamed at with comments, depending on the situation.
According to John Adams, if you cannot fail, you’re not truly free. In his last public statement, honoring the 50th anniversary of American Independence in 1826, Adams wrote that the American Revolution would be
A Memorable epoch in the annals of the human race; destined, in future history, to form the brightest or the blackest page, according to the use or the abuse of those political institutions by which they shall, in time to come, be Shaped, by the human mind.
That was not a new thought. In the Preface to his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, Adams mused that Americans “have now the best opportunity and the greatest trust in their hands, that Providence ever committed to so small a number, since the transgression of the first pair.” Should “they betray their trust,” Adams contended, “their guilt will merit even greater punishment than other nations have suffered, and the indignation of Heaven.”
Vice President JD Vance recently drew criticism for questioning the benefits of the dollar’s reserve currency status. In a 2023 interview, he argued that it encourages Americans to consume too much, describing it as a “resource curse.”
If you’ve followed Vance during his time in Congress, these comments are not particularly surprising. He has been one of the biggest proponents of rebalancing America’s relationship with the global economy through targeted industrial policy, much to the chagrin of the GOP establishment.
Naturally, the response from Vance’s free-trade critics was immediate and severe. They argued that cheap imports increase consumers’ purchasing power, while an economy organized around offering high-value services is not necessarily a sign of economic weakness. In their eyes, what Vance proposed amounts to a command-and-control economy, snuffing out economic opportunity and raising prices at a time when families can least afford it.
Contrary to his critics, Vance had the right general diagnosis, even if his prescription risks creating problems of its own.
Last summer, European news outlets reported that “volunteers” from Mexican and Colombian drug cartels had infiltrated Ukraine’s military—considered the world’s “drone superpower”—to learn cutting-edge drone warfare so they could use the knowledge to kill their enemies back home.
Claims that this problem is ongoing have not yet been publicly verified by the U.S. intelligence community or the media. As yet, however, they remain undisputed. They now demand further scrutiny and broader attention in the United States to prompt appropriate action. If it’s not too late, and if the reports are correct, the U.S. urgently needs to terminate this knowledge transfer from Ukrainian soldiers to Latin America’s crime lords.
It is no surprise even to the most casual observer of American culture that pornography is rotting the soul of America. More than 10% of American men self-report being addicted to pornography, while over 70% say they used pornography in the last year—and the actual figures are likely much higher. Declining marriage rates, increased incidents of suicide, and decreased productivity can all be traced to the rise of this nearly $100 billion industry. And, even worse, the kind of pornography that saturates the internet is not the type of casual nudity the average American imagines. It is hardcore pornography that would immediately disgust all but the addicted.
That’s far from the founders’ vision for America.
Any honest scholar of the American Founding will assure you that no founding father would ever have imagined that a republican form of government could coexist with such rampant moral degeneracy. For most of American history, obscene material was not only illegal but subject to criminal prosecution.
For a long time our most heated public and academic debates have been almost uniformly characterized by false dichotomies. We are supposed to choose between “realism” and “idealism” in foreign affairs and ethical theory; John Rawls’s excessively egalitarian “theory of justice” and Robert Nozick’s untenable “minimal state”; post-liberal dogmatism and a decayed liberalism that is increasingly oblivious to the moral foundations of democracy.
I often ask myself: What of a tough-minded, morally serious politics that unites principle and prudence, and advocates a broadly secular state but is not neutral between religion and irreligion? What about a project that defends liberty and equality without succumbing to the illusion of human autonomy, or an indiscriminate egalitarianism that levels and homogenizes? How about “liberty under God and the laws,” in Alexis de Tocqueville’s memorable formulation, that is in equal measure liberal and conservative? Why can’t we think more deeply and dialectically and move beyond dichotomies that distort much more than they illuminate?
The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
The Great American Trade War Continues | The American Mind Podcast
In the opening of Federalist 1, Publius makes clear to his countrymen the great question that Providence had placed before them. Americans, he said, have the opportunity to decide “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
This was the momentous question that underlay the American Founding. Now, 250 years after the American Revolution, we face the same one today.
A self-governing people must cultivate the habits that make responsible public action possible. They must learn to connect principles with practice, to deliberate about the proper ends of political action, and to judge wisely among the means available to achieve those ends. This is the work of civic education: forming citizens capable of exercising prudence to pass on the blessings of liberty we received to future generations.
The study of history is an essential preparation for that work. By learning the stories of those who have gone before us, we acquire knowledge and experience that help us deliberate well about the questions before us. This formation in knowledge for the sake of prudence is the purpose of history and civics education—and we are in dire need of it today.
Dozens of “gap” statistics have become so deeply embedded in our political discourse that we hardly question whether unequal outcomes are actually evidence of discrimination. “Women make 77 cents on the dollar compared to men.” “Hispanic students make up a disproportionately small percentage of university graduates.” “Black women must work into the following July to catch up to what white men made the previous year.”
In our equity-obsessed age, each one of these “gap stats” has a grimy underbelly, made up of individuals who are unfairly denied the fruits of their talents because institutions have tried to force equal outcomes: men who work longer hours on average; Asians who have higher SAT scores on average; Millennial and Gen Z white applicants who get passed over at work because they don’t add to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
The national debt of the United States just crossed $40 trillion.
That number is so large that it risks becoming meaningless. But consider this: the federal government did not reach $30 trillion in debt until January 2022. It added the next $10 trillion in just four and a half years. As of August 18, the Treasury reported gross federal debt of approximately $40.05 trillion—$32.27 trillion held by the public and another $7.78 trillion owed within the government itself.
The conventional debate over our fiscal catastrophe is familiar. Democrats blame Republican tax cuts. Republicans blame Democratic spending. Budget experts correctly point to Social Security, Medicare, defense spending, pandemic relief, and now the staggering cost of servicing the debt itself.
But there is another cause of our fiscal predicament that almost no one in Washington is willing to discuss: the federal government spends enormous sums of money on things the Constitution never authorized it to fund.
The chart below tells a remarkable story. At the founding, the federal debt was below 40% of the nation’s economic output, largely the legacy of the Revolutionary War. Successive administrations paid it down. After the War of 1812, it rose again and then fell. By 1835, President Andrew Jackson’s administration had essentially extinguished the national debt.
Consider a simple question. The Biden Administration imported somewhere between six and ten million immigrants into the United States illegally. Do you think President AOC or President Newsom, if given the chance starting in January 2029, would let in fewer than Biden or more?
The American people don’t need a detailed policy briefing to answer that question. Amnesty and mass immigration are key features of expanding the Democratic Party coalition. Its ideology and electoral math, along with a vast government-contractor apparatus that supports the party, entrench a quasi-legal parallel rights regime.
Meanwhile, in the wake of Minneapolis, conventional GOP analysis holds that a combination of unsurvivable headlines and business interests demanding labor flexibility will pull the Republican Party back toward accommodation. That calculation may hold for another few months in Washington, or even survive until the midterms. It will not survive beyond then.
The accommodationist wing of the Republican Party sees immigration as the kind of disagreement that can be settled with a clever compromise, new labels, or a schedule of fines and penalties offered to voters who were promised the opposite in 2024, and who will bear the consequences of continued wage stagnation.
On October 23, 1956, students gathered at the foot of Sandor Petofi’s statue in Budapest and read his poem “Rise, Magyar!” made famous in the democratic revolution of 1848. Workers, and even soldiers, soon joined the students. The demonstrators took over the state-run radio station and the Communist Party offices and toppled a huge statue of Stalin, dragging it through the streets. Rebellion spread throughout the country. The demonstrators—now Freedom Fighters—held Soviet occupation forces at bay for several days.
On November 1, the Hungarian Prime Minister announced that Hungary would withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. At dawn, November 4, the Soviets launched a major invasion of Hungary, in an offensive involving tens of thousands of additional troops, air and artillery assaults, and 6,000 tanks. A heroic resistance was crushed in less than a week.
The last free Hungarian radio broadcast spent its final hours repeating the Gettysburg Address in seven languages, followed by an S.O.S. Over 20,000 Hungarians were tried and sentenced for participation in the uprising, hundreds receiving the death sentence. An estimated 200,000 Hungarians—of a population of nine million—became refugees. Forty-seven thousand came to the United States. Hungary became a member of NATO on March 12, 1999.
Widespread use of the word “meritocracy” may only be possible in the world it describes. British sociologist and former Labour Party official Michael Young coined the term in a 1958 satire as a sly alternative to aristocracy, clumsily mixing Latin (mereo: to deserve) with Greek (kratos: power, rule). Young’s friend, a classicist, warned he would be “laughed to scorn” for employing such a barbarism. Her caution was, sadly, optimistic.
Nonetheless, meritocracy’s advocates have attempted to supply it with a noble lineage. Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio and former presidential candidate, is convinced the 20th-century term is central to the American experiment going back to 1776. Palantir’s Jordan Chandler Hirsch likewise argues that America was “born meritorious,” defining meritocracy as when government and society operate through objective measures of “quality and talent, open competition based on fair play, and ruthless disinterest in any other factor.”
The American Mind 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.
Groypers, Grifters, and the GOP: Florida’s Primary Election | The American Mind Podcast
Florida is conducting a primary election to pick Governor Ron DeSantis’s conservative successor. President Trump’s choice, Representative Byron Donalds, leads in the polls. Opposing him, political newcomer James Fishback leads a young, online centric and anti-Israel platform. Meanwhile, the Left coalition continues its reckoning with Woke, reordering to capture populist, pro-Gaza, and anticapitalist energy. Plus, backlash against Big Tech: data centers, Flock cameras, and more!
Thirty-two Cubans died when American forces entered Caracas on January 3, 2026, to capture Nicolás Maduro. Cuba and Venezuela are more than a thousand miles apart. Why were Cubans dying in defense of Maduro? How did a small Caribbean island become so deeply invested in the survival of another country’s dictatorship?
To answer those questions, we have to go back nearly seven decades to a revolution that promised liberation but spent a lifetime exporting authoritarianism and reshaping the politics of an entire hemisphere.
From the moment he seized power in 1959, Fidel Castro knew that the survival of his revolution depended on its spreading throughout South America. In the years that followed, Havana trained Marxist guerrillas across Latin America, dispatched troops to fight Soviet proxy wars in Africa, supported Syria in its war against Israel, and embedded intelligence officers inside allied dictatorships. Today, it’s widely reported that Cuban nationals are fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine.
An old, not to say ancient, debate among certain scholars is whether and to what extent the American Founding was ancient versus modern. That is to ask: to what extent, if any, was ancient political philosophy not only an inspiration to the American founders but actually incorporated into the regime they built? This issue rises well above a mere scholarly controversy over “sources” and goes to the heart of what kind of regime the American founders were trying to build, to what America is.
To sum up as briefly as possible, one view holds that the American regime is purely modern—that is, derived wholly and self-consciously from modern political philosophy. For instance, the influential political scientist Joseph Cropsey declared America “an arena in which modernity is working itself out” and “the microcosm of modernity, repeating in its regime, on the level of popular consciousness, the major noetic events of the modern world.” Those who hold this view tend to conclude that this origin makes America, and a fortiori Americans, “low but solid,” concerned more with comfortable self-preservation than with the soul.
At the outset of Marco Rubio’s tenure as Secretary of State, his department introduced a new paradigm for U.S.-European relations: civilizational alliance. Rubio and his aides have persistently sought to remind Europe that our relationship is based not merely on trade deals and defense agreements, but ultimately on a shared Western anthropology and history.
Rubio’s July 4 message declared,
[America’s] seeds were planted by the philosophers of Athens, the imperial majesty of Rome, the monks and kings of medieval Christendom—centuries of European exploration, science, faith, and restless ambition finally unleashed from every constraint on the boundless American frontier. America was the destiny of an entire civilization.
A little over a year ago, General Mills, maker of Trix and Lucky Charms, promised to pull synthetic dyes from all its U.S. cereals and school foods by the summer of 2026, and from its whole retail line by the end of 2027. Kraft Heinz made the same pledge days earlier, while Nestlé USA, Conagra, and Tyson followed with similar commitments.
Nobody forced them. They read the room.
The room had changed because of one man: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The Secretary of Health and Human Services has transformed how Americans think and talk about health policy. For years, Washington rightly worried about access to affordable care, especially in troubled federal programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Kennedy took on a bigger task: making Americans healthier.
On foreign policy, Washington agrees on almost nothing. How much or whether to arm Ukraine, how hard to push Israel, what to do about Iran—these questions split both parties. But one issue cuts across the partisan divide with something close to consensus: China is the greatest strategic challenge of our era, and America must prevail.
That consensus is both practical and ideological. Unlike when our competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War was mostly measured in missiles, ships, semiconductors, and satellites, our competition today with China is mostly measured in economic growth, minerals, manufacturing, and supply chain security. In both cases, the ultimate competition is between a nation built on freedom and limited government and one built on command and control.
The parallel runs deeper than most people appreciate. When America competed against the Soviet Union, we did not try to out-Soviet the Soviets. We did not build a command economy to match theirs. We built a freer one, trusted it to outperform, and won. The technologies that defined American victory—GPS, the microchip, the internet—were byproducts of a freedom-driven competition that unleashed American ingenuity at a scale no command economy could match.
And yet the temptation to abandon this system is growing stronger.
Readers familiar with Dr. Seuss’s classic, The Cat in the Hat, will remember the twin chaos agents Thing 1 and Thing 2. “‘These Things are good Things,’” the Cat reassures the children whose mother has inexplicably left them under the supervision of a fish. “‘They are tame. Oh, so tame! / They have come here to play.’” The Things briefly feign innocence, then quickly reveal themselves to be marauding imps, knocking over nightstands and ruining the linens. “I do not like the way that they play!” says the son of the house.
Now here comes Woke 1 and Woke 2. “Woke 1 was crazy,” said U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, quoting an unnamed city councilman in a viral interview for ABC. The congresswoman sheepishly acknowledged that Americans did not like the way Woke 1 played out, while also implicitly announcing that there will soon be, or already is, a Woke 2. And it will be tame. Oh, so tame!
There is, in fact, a new version of wokeness in the making. But just as Thing 2 was fundamentally identical to Thing 1, Woke 2 will not be any different in essence from Woke 1. They are both here to upend the furniture. Wokeness in all its forms is grievance politics. Its central idea is that an injustice lies at the heart of America and must be corrected to atone for the historical misery inflicted on groups of innocents.
The American Mind 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.
AOC Goes from Woke 1 to Woke 2: A New Left Coalition Forms | The American Mind Podcast
“Woke One was crazy.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, questioned this week on ABC about a fellow Democratic Socialist’s call to cancel Thanksgiving in 2020, rolled out a new messaging strategy for the Left. Woke 2 will try to distance itself from COVID-era messaging while still demanding that America be transformed to suit its latest grievance coalition. Plus: inflation of the racial oppression narrative, and the purge of liberal arts colleges.
The Right should pursue politically feasible policies that will help create a better environment for family formation. Producing more marriageable men and women includes cultivating the former’s virtue and confidence and encouraging the latter to make marriage and motherhood a higher priority.
These policies should appeal to reliable Republican voters without worrying whether they offend reliable Democratic voters. They should also help advance the broader MAGA agenda, defined by defending those putting down roots in America, encouraging republican virtues and self-government, and raising children to responsible adulthood.
In short, this agenda should form self-governing men and women who can become the backbone of an electoral coalition capable of ruling.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who exemplifies the growing red-green alliance in the United States—he is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and a follower of Twelver Shiism, the apocalyptic state religion of Iran—has been in office for little more than seven months. But he’s already made it clear what this confluence of radical ideologies means in practice: manufacturing scapegoats and fomenting class, racial, and religious hatreds. In this, Mamdani is following a political playbook used by both Communist and Islamist regimes to advance revolutionary aims.
With the 52nd anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation, his reputation is experiencing a resurgence—especially among younger generations.
For example, in just the past month and a half, at least a half-dozen articles have examined Nixon’s legacy. There was Tim Rice’s Daily Wire article, “How The Kids Learned To Love Richard Nixon,” which ends with this sentence: “Maybe Nixon wasn’t a relic come too late, but a visionary come too early. Maybe his time is now.” Frontier Magazine published a cover story by Blaze Media Editor-in-Chief Christopher Bedford, “The Once and Future Nixon.” Then there was Philip Wegmann’s full-page Wall Street Journal feature, “Young Conservatives Have an Unlikely New Icon: Richard Nixon,” which characterizes me as “the main architect of modern Watergate revisionism.”
For 80 years, American science has operated under the Vannevar Bush model that was established in the wake of World War II. In his 1945 report, Science, the Endless Frontier, Bush argued that the government should fund “curiosity-driven basic research,” with panels of peer scientists choosing which projects deserved financial support. His goal was not merely to subsidize scientists’ intellectual whims without regard for visible applications, but to secure American technological supremacy by developing fundamental knowledge before its practical uses were apparent. In practice, however, Bush’s vision mutated into a bloated, risk-averse bureaucracy split between government and universities, stifling the very innovation it was designed to foster.
After eight decades, the weaknesses of Bush’s project-grant model are clear. As the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) points out in its new report, academic researchers spend up to half their time writing, formatting, and defending grant proposals rather than actually doing science. Moreover, because review panels naturally gravitate toward proven concepts, researchers are incentivized to propose incremental work that is guaranteed to succeed, often because they have already accomplished it.
America is engaged in negotiations to end the war in Iran on terms favorable to the United States. It is difficult to believe this will be achieved through negotiations alone, however hopeful President Trump is about the prospects. Like many Americans, the president wishes to bring this war to a close. After all, America is not the policeman of the world. Nor are we the protector of the Middle East.
When the United States spends the blood and treasure of the American people, we do so for the good of the American people. This is both the beginning and the end of President Trump’s strategic view of the war in Iran. Although other very high-priority policies must be carried out—the deportation of 25 million illegal aliens that came during the Biden Administration, for starters—this war must be prosecuted to a satisfactory conclusion for the United States.
President Trump does not see the war in Iran as a diversion from America’s true interests, as many of his critics on both the Left and the Right insist. He sees it as one front in a larger world war that America did not choose but needs to fight and win.
Every political community needs its story. It needs an account of itself, its heroes and villains, its founding wounds and saving deeds. The public does not merely remember these things but also reinforces them by making them a template for education, teaching the young what is noble, what is shameful, what must be revered, and what must never be permitted to return. This is not simply propaganda. It belongs to political life. No polity can live by disembodied ideals alone, and no people can endure without memory, piety, gratitude, and shared attachments.
The difficulty begins when people start to forget that their sacred story, however reflective of the truth it may be, is nevertheless a parable or a narrative about justice, not justice itself.
The American postwar consensus is such a story, and one that has been generating a fair amount of controversy of late. This consensus is not merely the historical fact that the United States and its allies defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, or the moral fact that this was a good thing. Nor is it merely the institutional settlement that followed the war: Bretton Woods, the United Nations, NATO, the national security state, the administrative welfare state, and the open-ended commitment to upholding the liberal international order. At its deepest level, the postwar consensus is how America came to understand itself under Franklin Roosevelt.
The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
Catastrophe at Cambridge – Jason Arday and the Scandal at DEI | The American Mind Podcast
Jason Arday, who rocketed to academic stardom as the youngest black professor at Cambridge, now faces claims that his PhD thesis contains plagiarism. That’s not all: huge portions of his story seem likely to be fabricated, from a supposed brain surgery days before his defense, to an appearance on the documentary Seven Up. But is Arday really the problem? It seems the institutional decay goes much deeper. This week, hosts Spencer and Mike discuss the necessity of a reckoning in the academies. Plus: is America having a Catholic moment? Or is she an irrevocably Protestant nation?
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The obituary for the Trump State Department’s efforts against “Far-Left Terrorism” (FLT) may have been premature. The Washington Post—from its lofty position as stenographer for the federal bureaucracy—declared the State Department’s Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism a flop before it even began. Anonymous sources lined up to chortle that it was a waste of time and was intended only as public spectacle. According to the credentialed experts popular with the Post, the threat of far-left violence exists only in the minds of the president and his supporters.
In the middle of April, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez summoned the world’s leftist statesmen to Barcelona for what he called a Global Progressive Mobilization. There are not many leftist statesmen to choose from these days. But Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico and Lula of Brazil rallied round Sánchez, and so did the representatives of activist philanthropies—Bill Gates’s people and George Soros’s, too. Various agitators came for environmental and sexual causes, with their earrings and keffiyehs and polyglot t-shirts.