The Claremont Institute Feed Items

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?

The post Catastrophe at Cambridge – Jason Arday and the Scandal at DEI | The American Mind Podcast appeared first on The American Mind.

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.

When the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order in Trump v. Barbara, it settled for now in the courts who becomes a citizen at birth. It did not settle—and could not settle—whether American citizenship may be bought and sold.

It remains well within the power of Congress and the president to shut down the contracts, clinics, agencies, and visas that convert foreign money into American citizenship—without amending the Constitution or defying the Court. Until the Court revisits the issue, the political branches are solely responsible for overseeing the marketplace, and they have no excuse to delay.

If you doubt that such a marketplace exists, meet the Simpson triplets.

Nearly 20 months ago, Kyla Simpson of St. Augustine, Florida, gave birth to triplet boys as a gestational surrogate for an intended parent she had never met: a single man in China. He never came. Not during the boys’ two months in the NICU, not through the year and a half the Simpsons raised them, and not even when one of the triplets died of RSV.

Appearing before Rand Paul’s Senate committee on July 29, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who headed the federal government’s response to COVID under Presidents Trump and Biden, refused to answer any questions, even though Biden gave him a preemptive pardon “for any offenses against the United States…in any manner related to his service” to the government between January 1, 2014, and January 19, 2025.

Certainly Fauci has much to answer for, starting with severe errors in judgment—whether criminal or not. As Dr. Scott Atlas and his coauthors put it in a 2024 report, “[A] calm, proportionate response would have applied the lessons from past influenza pandemics and used existing pandemic response plans. Instead, from the moment the virus was detected in America, the public health community and politicians spread an outsized message of fear and doom.” Public health officials “overlaid enormous economic, social, educational, and health (including substantial non-COVID excess mortality) harms on top of the virus itself, which nonetheless worked its way through substantially all of the population.”

On July 14, the State Leadership Initiative was honored to host the Florida DOGE team and their tech partners, Vulcan, Echelon, and DigiBuild, for the Florida DOGE Showcase in Washington, D.C. Spearheaded by Governor Ron DeSantis, the state has become the leader for providing accountable and efficient governance to its citizens.

Since its creation in 2025, the Florida DOGE team has identified nearly $1 billion in waste and abuse at the local government level and sent over $878 million back to the federal government. But the team’s work extends beyond fiscal savings and budgetary cuts—it also includes auditing university curriculum and state union programs and reining in rogue municipalities that had adopted woke-left policies.

On November 10, 1793, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame ceased to be a church. The high altar where the Holy Mass had been celebrated for centuries was made into a stage, and on it, a woman was enthroned as the Goddess of Reason. The French Revolutionaries believed they were liberating France from a faith and a tradition they thought had unjustly shackled mankind. In speech, policy, and action, they sought to overturn the Christian religion that had shaped European civilization for nearly 15 centuries.

About two decades before the French Revolution, another revolution began across the Atlantic: the American colonists rose up against British rule. Yet their goal was neither a triumph of “reason above God” nor a severing of liberty from the moral order that had birthed it. The American Revolutionaries achieved a miracle, establishing the first enduring constitutional republic of the modern age. They secured the rule of law on a vast scale with a robust representative government.

Both revolutions transformed Western civilization’s understanding of authority, man, and God—the American Revolution for good, but the French Revolution for ill. They carried distinctly different anthropological messages about the nature of man, the sources of authority, and the purposes of political life.

The American Way of Life

In Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court deemed birthright citizenship a constitutional right for the children of illegal aliens and birth tourists. It did so based on a dubious reading of the law, a blindness to its spirit, and a stubborn dismissal of relevant history, policy, and practices. That jurisprudence, I argued in part I, could spell coming doom for the Trump Administration in parallel cases likely to arise in response to its effort to exclude illegal aliens from the census apportionment base. This is a critical initiative given that those figures are used to allocate congressional seats and Electoral College votes across the states, redistrict, and dole out trillions of dollars in federal funds.

However, there is one powerful argument the Court did not countenance in Barbara or elsewhere that could lead it to render a more favorable judgment if and when the census-citizenship issue comes before it.

When President Trump reposted a video featuring President John F. Kennedy warning about subversion in America, he renewed focus on a threat we have long ignored at our peril.

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.

A New Phase in the Iran War | The American Mind Podcast

Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu entered meetings with Trump this week to discuss their respective wars with Russia and Iran. Will Trump shift strategies to bring an end to the conflicts in time for the midterms? Will Thibeau, director of the American Military Project, joins the guys to survey the battlefield and its implications. Meanwhile, Senator Rand Paul released pages of Fauci’s COVID-era diary ahead of the ex-public health official’s appearance before a Senate committee, prompting a retrospective on the dark days of lockdown.

The post A New Phase in the Iran War | The American Mind Podcast appeared first on The American Mind.

When I read James Rosen’s review of my Dispatches from the Late Republic, I panicked a little over the following:

Anton is way off base when he asserts that Wolfe’s creative decision-making was at any point driven by exigent financial needs…. For Wolfe—who never borrowed money—the 1990s were flush: The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) had been a titanic success, and he had, as a matter of public record, sold a brownstone and bought a co-op. It was struggles with plot, not finance, that delayed the publication of A Man in Full (1998). (Emphasis added.)

Now, some of the above is not in doubt. Bonfire was indeed a huge success, selling 800,000 copies in hardcover alone, plus God knows how many in paperback (nearly 40 years later, the book is still in print), and netting Wolfe a $750,000 check for the movie rights. But does that necessarily mean that, for Wolfe, “the 1990s were flush”?

In Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court held that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship regardless of a child’s parents’ nationality—and that the president cannot change that by executive order.

So what now?

If U.S. citizenship means more than mere birth on our “magic dirt,” we must find other ways to protect it.

One possible fix is for Congress to pass a law clarifying that under the 14th Amendment, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” excludes any child whose parents hold citizenship in, and thus loyalty to, another country.

But this route is fraught with problems.

First, Congress rarely passes laws that require 60 votes in the Senate, the threshold for all legislation except spending bills. The Senate could eliminate the filibuster for this purpose. But what goes around comes around, and Republicans could soon see Democrats use it for D.C. statehood, immigration amnesty, and other left-wing dreams.

When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Pentagon officials briefly removed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from a list of recognized faiths, Mormon commentators objected immediately, and evangelicals and Catholics jumped into the fray. The debate quickly outgrew the particulars of LDS doctrine and became a vigorous argument over the nature of God, the Trinity, revelation, authority, and the meaning of “Christian” itself. Though some of it was rude, much of it was insightful.

For many Americans, this felt unusual. We have grown accustomed to treating religious disagreement as something best kept away from the public square. But what happened on X revealed something important: Americans are increasingly willing to argue about religious truth in public again. That should be welcomed.

Most Americans assume that self-identification settles whether one is Christian—that anyone who claims to follow Jesus is a Christian. But what one means by “God” and “Jesus” matters more than just adopting a label. A group that worshipped the Flying Spaghetti Monster in Jesus’s name would not count as Christian.

Words have meanings, and categories have boundaries. The significance of the public debate on X was not about one side triumphing over the other—it was that Americans were arguing about first principles again.

America’s debate over poverty has undergone a remarkable—and troubling—transformation. Two centuries ago, the central challenge was persuading needy people to accept public assistance. Today, the challenge is preventing people from fraudulently claiming benefits to which they were never entitled.

That trajectory tells us something profound about the nation’s changing moral culture.

Alexis de Tocqueville noticed something remarkable when he traveled through America in the early 1830s. Unlike Europe, where poverty often produced permanent dependence upon the state or aristocratic patrons, Americans possessed an almost universal determination to remain independent. They formed voluntary associations to care for neighbors in distress, but they regarded prolonged dependence as inconsistent with the character of a free citizen.

That observation reflected a broader understanding shared by the American founders and the generation that followed them. Every state maintained some provision for public relief, but it was deliberately limited and administered locally. It existed for those genuinely incapable of caring for themselves—the disabled, widows, orphans, and others facing extraordinary hardship. Families, churches, fraternal organizations, and private charities bore the primary responsibility for helping the poor.

The most consequential domestic policy development of the 2020s is neither COVID-19 nor Donald Trump’s reelection. It is Joe Biden’s decision to import ten million foreigners into the United States in violation of standing federal law. Many of the defining political fights of this decade stem from that choice: government shutdowns over border enforcement, states unilaterally redefining the meaning of citizenship, the growing willingness of the restrictionist wing of the Republican Party to defy its own business class, major fraud investigations in Minneapolis and New York, and the unraveling of consensus over whether federal law binds the states.

These are battles in a larger fight over who constitutes the American people, one that escalated with President Biden’s decision to actively facilitate the mass importation of illegal aliens into this country by land, air, and sea.

American politics is no longer primarily a contest over how we govern ourselves. It is a contest over who we are and who decides.

None of this is merely rhetorical. The federal government has shut down six times since 2018—and immigration has been central to nearly every one of them. The government shut down over border wall funding in 2018 and benefits for “Dreamers” in 2019. Two partial shutdowns concerning immigration enforcement occurred in 2026, the second shutdown being the longest in American history at 76 days.

Johann Kurtz’s essay on why younger generations feel left behind economically, even while official statistics from GDP to stock markets send signals that our economy is thriving, touched a nerve. 

Kurtz’s central argument is that young people only appear to be doing fine in official statistics because those measures fail to capture the collapse of “social capital”—the free inheritance of trusted neighbors, functional public schools, safe streets, and marriageable norms that previous generations received at no cost. Because that commons has been liquidated and privatized, young people must now repurchase its components individually at market prices. Expensive homes in good districts, private schooling, daycare, credentials, and more—all of it requires substantial financial resources, even as incomes have risen only modestly. Meanwhile, the cost of these essentials has increased many times over. 

The result is a measurement failure: cheap electronics and rising nominal incomes make the young look prosperous, but the actual building blocks of a middle-class life have moved beyond the reach of average Americans, which explains why younger generations are delaying or forgoing them entirely.

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.

Trump Reopens the Trade War | The Roundtable Ep. 327

President Trump this week has announced a set of 50 percent tariffs on various Canadian goods, with a 30-day window to negotiate before they are imposed. In retaliation against Canada’s quotas on American cars and alcohol, Trump proposes to levy tariffs on wine, hockey sticks, and cement. But does it serve America and the Right ahead of midterms? Meanwhile, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearings, following the dismissal of Pam Bondi, give a snapshot of the Right’s shifting composition ahead of midterms. Plus: Lindsey Graham, RIP.

With the release of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, mankind’s foremost moral authority—a Chicago-born priest and the absolute monarch of the longest-running institution in history—addressed a technology so advanced that even its creators struggle to comprehend it.

One of those creators appeared alongside the Holy Father: Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, the leading AI model provider and a company publicly feuding with the government of the pope’s home country over battlefield use of its algorithms.

The remarks of both men were scrutinized the world over by public officials, executives, theologians, technologists, believers, and non-believers alike. The consequences of their attention remain to be seen. For now, as historian T.R. Fehrenbach said of the Korean War, the lesson of Magnifica Humanitas’s unprecedented release is that it happened.

The lessons of the document itself, however, are harder to summarize.

A Servant, Not a Master