The Claremont Institute Feed Items

The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail is one of the most interesting and controversial novels of the 20th century. Which is why it’s good news that Vauban Books, a small publishing house, is coming out with a new edition, complete with a fresh translation by scholar Ethan Rundell. English-language copies of the book, first published in the U.S. in 1975, have been passed around like samizdat. The Camp of the Saints became popular again in the 2010s, but the rightsholders refused to reprint it until Vauban managed to secure the rights.

The Camp of the Saints depicts mass immigration destroying European civilization. In the novel a gigantic flotilla of boats filled with destitute Indians sets course for France to seek refugee status. After much handwringing, the government allows them to land rather than take the only other option available, which is to massacre them. France—and very quickly all of Europe—turns into a dystopian Third-World slum.

Raspail’s novel was written in the 1970s when the “boat people” fled Vietnam for Europe. The book caused an enormous sensation—it was a bestseller in France and the U.S., and eventually globally. Many have hailed it as a great and important work of prophecy. But, predictably, it was then and is now denounced as a horribly racist screed that only white supremacists would be interested in reading.

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

The Crooks in DC | The Roundtable Ep. 280

As if to confirm the problem Andrew Beck identified in “Assimilation and Its Discontents,” U.S. Representative Delia Ramirez just days after publication of his piece declared (in Spanish) at a leftist gathering in Mexico City, “I’m a proud Guatemalan before I’m an American.” The Chicago-born Democratic congresswoman—more than the Hindu idol in Texas Beck decries—defines the problem we face in creating an unum out of the plures of people, states, and regions that make up our sprawling continental nation.

Representative Ramirez deserves all the obloquy heaped on her for being America Second (at best). But the core assimilation problem we face is not that some immigrants and their children are insufficiently committed to America—it’s that America is insufficiently committed to assimilation.

Immigrants are going to take their cues from Americans about what we expect of them regarding assimilation. As an old boss of mine used to say, you teach people how to treat you—and we’ve been teaching newcomers that it’s okay to, as Beck puts it, “come to America, live in America—but…not become an American.”

For some Gen Zers, it’s already time to retire. A new trend known as “micro-retirement” has spread like wildfire on social media. It involves young adults working for a few years, quitting their jobs to pursue life experiences, and then repeating the cycle. While it is tempting to dismiss this trend, micro-retirement’s appeal to Zoomers reveals much about their unique perspective on life.

One popular influencer, Adama Lorna, made the case for micro-retirement in a TikTok video: “Instead of waiting until you’re 60 or 70 to travel the world and indulge in hobbies, you do them while you have your youth, your energy, and health.” As she sees it, micro-retirement is a way for young people to have their cake and eat it too. By “retiring” every few years, they’re able to reap the freedom that comes with retiree life while enjoying their youth.

Lifestyle guru Timothy Ferriss coined the term “micro-retirement” in his book titled The 4-Hour Workweek. Although it was written in 2007, it didn’t catch on among Millennials. The fact that Zoomers popularized a term coined while they were learning their ABCs suggests that something about their generational experience primed them for it.

Andrew Beck has made a cogent case for why the U.S., like other countries, requires cultural and moral cohesion to protect its nationhood and act with a unified will on behalf of the common good. Beck correctly notes that the U.S. started out as a country with a well-defined collective identity. If we look back at America’s beginnings, we discover John Jay in Federalist 2 defining this original American identity in a memorable observation:

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

At the time this was written, the newly formed American nation-state was composed overwhelmingly of Northern European Protestants; its legal institutions were largely British. Its shared culture was shaped by, among other things, reading and revering the King James Bible. Among the professional class, the Bible’s authority was supplemented by that of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, Shakespeare’s tragedies, and (to some extent) classical texts like Plutarch’s Lives.

A few years ago, I was invited to observe some student presentations on the topic of Leisure: The Basis of Culture. It is one of the perks of my job as a professor at a Catholic liberal arts university that I get invited to such events. I thoroughly enjoyed the presentations, but I could sense from the Q&A that one part of the audience remained unpersuaded: the students’ parents. Moms and dads who had worked hard to pay for their children to attend college were not enthusiastic about the main point their sons and daughters were making: work is not what life is all about.

Leisure is the goal of work, after all. Leisure activity (rather than do-nothing inactivity) awakens the greatest part of our souls, the part that is capable of wonder and contemplation. Beginning with Aristotle, excellent philosophical authorities over the years have made that very argument. Classicist Sarah Broadie once observed that Aristotle’s idea that “we are not-at-leisure in order to be at leisure” remains understudied—except by the mid-20th century Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper, the foremost recent thinker who has argued for leisure’s importance. In 1948, he wrote that “the power to be at leisure is the power to step beyond the working world and win contact with those superhuman, life-giving forces that can send us, renewed and alive again, into the busy world of work.”

Fixing American education begins with figuring out what to do about the United States Department of Education (ED). The Trump Administration wants to eliminate the ED at once. Kenin Spivak’s recent article for The American Mind argued that policymakers should simplify the ED and reduce its power, and then consider whether to eliminate the department entirely. Regardless of the option they ultimately choose, policymakers should at minimum return most of the ED’s powers to determine the content and structure of education back to the states and local school districts.

Why should the first priority of education reformers be to eliminate the Education Department, or at the very least remove most of its power over American education?

The National Association of Scholars’ report Waste Land: The Education Department’s Profligacy, Mediocrity, and Radicalism provides chapter and verse on how the ED misbehaves. The Education Department and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) use four big tools to impose ideologically extreme policies on states and school districts. These tools are:

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.

Hardball and Big Balls | The Roundtable Ep. 279

Zohran Mamdani’s recent conversation with Sadiq Khan should instill fear in the hearts of the average New York City voter. In the weeks since he defeated Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary in June, Mamdani has reportedly “been in touch with a number of progressive mayors,” including London’s.

During a “warm and collegial” phone call, Khan reportedly advised the young socialist from Queens to shift to the center. After winning the primary by pledging rent freezes and free buses, he urged Mamdani to reassure moderates in the same way that Khan himself did in 2016, after routing his fellow left-wing opponents before defeating the Conservative candidate in the London mayoral race.

Although Khan is not a leftist in the same sense as Mamdani or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, his tenure in London shows his alleged “centrism” can be just as damaging.

Keeping people safe is a basic responsibility of an elected leader—a test Khan is failing. London has a terrible knife problem. Almost one-third of the 50,000 violent and sexual crimes with knives reported in England and Wales last year occurred in the capital.

In the 1980s Jesse Jackson helped banish “Western Civ” from Stanford with a silly chant. Many colleges and universities that had not already done so followed suit.

But in the classical counterrevolution of the 21st century, Western civilization is back. The Great Books, long thought a relic of Mortimer Adler’s Cold War-era salesmanship, now guide the curriculum at many of the over 1,000 classical schools that have been founded over the past few decades, dozens of which are publicly funded charter schools. A new Great Books college sprouts up every year or so. Dead languages like Latin seem to be very much alive again.

Whether it is humanism, the medieval liberal arts, or even just memes about the Roman Empire, it turns out that Western Civ did indeed have to go—big.

The 21st-century classical counterrevolutionaries should not get high on their own supply, though. If their project ends up being a retread of the Mortimer Adler-Robert Hutchins show, they may be greeted by an even deeper abyss of failure than the ostracism Western Civ faced in the name of diversity that occurred with the rise of racial and gender studies.

At least on paper, DEI in the federal government is dead. On the very first day of his second presidency, Donald Trump issued a presidential action, “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing,” ending all diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility “mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.” Employees in DEI-specific positions were fired; DEI positions and offices were dismantled; and DEI training programs, newsletters, and promotion criteria were scrapped.

But it would be beyond naive to think that just because federal agencies are not currently promoting DEI that their workforces do not still widely hold the opinions they were encouraged to hold. Thousands of current federal employees participated in or supported DEI programs. Even those who might disagree were coerced to back DEI if they wanted to keep their jobs.

President Donald Trump unveiled his AI Action Plan last week, an ambitious and strategically framed document that signals artificial intelligence is no longer a niche issue for technocrats. It has become the defining arena of great-power competition.

As AI has become more deeply embedded in governance, a critical question has emerged: Will this revolutionary technology tip the scales in favor of authoritarian regimes or empower democracies? History offers no easy answers. Past innovations have demonstrated both emancipatory and repressive potential. Theoretically, AI could enhance transparency, participation, and accountability.

Theory, however, is conjecture. There are underlying authoritarian advantages at a cognitive and structural level that cannot be wished away.

AI competition is not merely a race for innovation—it is a contest of governance models.

Autocracies—particularly China—are poised to benefit disproportionately from AI’s capabilities: pervasive surveillance, granular social control, and predictive state planning. It is time the United States openly acknowledges this truth.

Given the heated back-and-forth over the Trump Administration’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities and continued support for Ukraine, it is clear that matters of foreign policy will be a major factor in defining the character of American conservatism moving forward.

There is bound to be disagreement over the relative geopolitical merits of supporting Ukraine or Israel, as well as the appropriate level of support. However, one principle is undeniable: an advocate of a given course of action must demonstrate its connection to the interests of the people of the United States alone. That doesn’t mean it can’t be mutually beneficial for an international partner. But the very purpose of statesmanship is to navigate events and relationships in a manner that maximizes the advantage accruing to one’s own nation. Absent a clear definition of the specific interests served by an existing alliance, there will always be a danger of the tail wagging the dog.

The first order of business is therefore to establish such a definition. What do we gain by a given course of action in service of a foreign nation? This is as much a question of theory as of practice: What are we fighting for, and what are the best means to obtain it? As so often tends to be the case, the best place to look for an illustration of the principles that can help guide our thinking is the American Founding—although perhaps not in the way it is normally considered.

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.

Jeanetic Lottery | The Roundtable Ep. 278

In Sugar Land, Texas, a giant statue depicting the monkey-faced Hindu deity, Hanuman, was erected in August 2024. Officially titled Statue of Union, many Texans and Americans elsewhere have found this monument to be an aberration. For some it is the aesthetic unsightliness. For others it is a religious aversion to having a pagan idol be raised to such heights. And for others it is a demonstration of just how many foreigners now live in Texas.

I see each of these points as pins on a board that, when connected, reveal a fault line in American civic life: we are divided culturally—and the divide is widening.

In typical fashion, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals completely misread the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause and the congressional speech of its principal framers in a July 27 decision, State of Washington, et al. v. Donald Trump, et al. This ideologically motivated opinion was written by a three-judge panel, composed of two Clinton appointees and a Trump appointee who registered a “partial concurrence and a partial dissent.” Overall, however, it was an embarrassment to the canons of legal reasoning and historical truth. It surely will be overruled by the Supreme Court—hopefully on an expedited basis.

On January 20, 2025, President Trump acted expeditiously to fulfill a campaign promise by issuing an executive order redefining who is “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.” I believe Trump is to be applauded for bringing the question of birthright citizenship to the attention of the public and provoking debate on this crucial issue. I have questions, however, as to whether an executive order in isolation is a constitutional means of pursuing the cause.

Congress clearly has power under Section 5 of the 14th Amendment “to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” One provision is that “no State shall make or enforce any law which abridges the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” This has been controversial, because the language of the amendment is couched in negative terms.

It is fitting that what was arguably Hulk Hogan’s most memorable late-career public appearance at the 2024 Republican National Convention happened almost exactly a year before his death. In his speech, Terry Bollea (Hulk’s real name) expressed his reluctance to speak on politics. But he said that the humiliations and degradations that had been inflicted upon the American people compelled him to speak out.

Mentioning America’s former greatness, Hogan lamented that “we lost it all in the blink of an eye” when Joe Biden took over. But pointing at Donald Trump, the once-and-future president, Hogan announced, “With our leader up there, my hero, that gladiator, we’re going to bring America back together, one real American at a time, brother!”

Hulk Hogan’s meteoric rise coincided with Trump’s in the 1980s. That era is almost certainly the one that Trump’s political motto—Make America Great Again—implicitly references as our bygone halcyon days. It was a period of unbridled optimism. Ronald Reagan announced it was “morning again in America.” The economy was thriving, and Donald Trump was living proof that the possibilities in America were limitless. We were on the verge of winning the Cold War. Movies like Rocky, Top Gun, Red Dawn, and so many more were unabashedly nationalist and patriotic; children watched cartoons like G.I. Joe.

Over the next decade, artificial intelligence will revolutionize K-12 education. The advent of large language models means every student with internet access may soon have an AI tutor providing one-on-one instruction, homework help, and counseling. Every teacher will have an AI teaching assistant to plan lessons, generate assignments, and grade papers. Administrators will use AI to complete paperwork, track student outcomes, and deliver staff training. In short, AI may soon be integrated into every aspect of schooling.

Conservative politicians have complained so bitterly about a lack of viewpoint diversity in American universities that many have wondered whether they’re overreacting to a non-problem. They’re not. During a recent work trip to Dublin, I was reminded of what a homogeneous—and dangerous—progressive echo chamber the modern academy has become. At the tail end of a rather full day, I was taking in some traditional music at the Cobblestone Pub.

I grabbed the only free seat at the bar and was shocked to find that the woman sitting next to me was pursuing a Ph.D. in literature at the University of Texas at Austin, the very same program from which I graduated almost a decade ago.

What ensued was one of the most disturbing conversations I have ever had. I refuse to identify this woman, because the life of a graduate student is hard enough without having to deal with personal condemnation for what in truth is just one instance of a vast, systemic problem. Let’s just call her Jane.  

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.

Too Little, Too Late Show | The Roundtable Ep. 277

Americans are different from the rest of the world. Everyone knows it, but not everyone knows why. Some say it’s our Constitution, or our political traditions, or our vast landmass. But that’s not the whole story.

Above all else, what sets America apart from the rest of the world is our people—a people possessed by the same proud, defiant spirit as a 13-year-old Andrew Jackson. After being captured after the skirmish at Hanging Rock, the young Jackson refused to shine the shoes of his British captors, preferring to accept a scar across his face from an officer’s saber rather than kneeling before the foreign occupiers.

America is a nation of pioneers, explorers, and inventors. Unlike our European counterparts, we were not born gradually, over the course of millennia—we are a people who willed ourselves into existence, coming to know ourselves through a centuries-long struggle to forge a civilization in the wilderness.

We are a settler nation—dynamic, restless, reaching into infinite space. Since the first pilgrim ships arrived on our shores, we Americans have been possessed by an insatiable urge to create, to build, and to discover—to step forward into the dark unknown. Our people have flown across oceans, tunneled through mountains, defeated empires, raised up skyscrapers, and transcended our frontiersmen ancestors by expanding outwards into outer space itself. We did this all while maintaining the capacity to rule ourselves.

When CBS announced it would cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Donald Trump “truthed” as follows: “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings.” Summoning a gilt cartoon frame called the “eloquence cam,” Colbert replied: “Go f**k yourself.”

His fellow talk show host, Jon Stewart, addressed CBS directly with the help of a backup gospel choir: “Go f**k yourself! (Go f**k yourself!) Go f**k yourself!” and so on.

One begins to detect a theme. Powerful as it is to watch two men in their 60s repeatedly shriek a single obscenity at an ever-thinning crowd, maybe Trump had a point? 

The radical Left’s indifference to human life in the wake of the Texas floods is shocking. It exposes not just a troubling lack of civil discourse among the next generation of its leaders—but progressives’ long-romanticized destruction of their political foes.

Unhinged reactions to the victims of the Guadalupe River tragedy—with some even expressing satisfaction that potential MAGA supporters died—do not simply reveal the twisted views of a few leftist outliers: they expose the core principle that animates the entire movement. The radical Left increasingly sees political violence as a legitimate option in light of the Democrats’ inability to stop President Trump’s agenda.

It has been a little over 10 years since Donald Trump, with characteristic flair, descended the escalators at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for the presidency of the United States.

Today, we can say in the words of Henry Olsen, the always astute political analyst, that “Trumpism is here to stay,” and that “there will be no conservative return to a pre-Trump consensus.” Advocates of such a return claim to represent republican rectitude and fidelity to constitutional norms now under threat from a supposedly reckless and demagogic populism.

In truth, however, whatever the virtues of the old consensus, its adherents were far from perfect or imitable in important respects. They were slow to resist “the culture of repudiation” (in Roger Scruton’s arresting phrase) that had colonized the educational and entertainment worlds, as well as the commanding heights of civil society, including large swaths of the business sector. In recent decades, these quarters hectored Americans and instructed them to hate themselves. Much of our elite class obsessed about race and gender in ways that undermined self-respect and propagandized groups based on accidents of birth to give themselves over to anger and despair.

The importance of civic education is something every American seems to agree on. All U.S. states mandate some form of it in public schools, with 40 states requiring students to pass a civics course to graduate high school. And despite the wave of universities jettisoning their general education classes, many still require some form of American heritage or civics class.

However, underneath the surface, these classes are often taught in a way that undermines citizenship. In what follows we discuss these pitfalls and make a few proposals for rehabilitating civic education. In sum, we suggest that:

1. A new paradigm is needed for understanding America’s heritage.
2. Forming students’ love for the United States should be the primary goal of American heritage and civics classes.
3. We can best help future citizens love their nation by focusing their attention on the most formative, heroic, and beautiful parts of its tradition.

The Use and Abuse of Civics

If you check in on your local college’s American heritage class, you will likely find it’s doing the opposite of what it was intended to do.

The FBI has launched a criminal investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey for perjury and potentially other crimes related to the Trump-Russia hoax. This comes shortly after a CIA tradecraft review revealed their manipulation of a December 30, 2016, Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that Russian President Vladimir Putin favored Donald Trump in the 2016 election. And on Friday, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard reported that former President Barack Obama, former DNI James Clapper, Brennan, and others participated in the deception.

“The information we are releasing today clearly shows there was a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government. Their goal was to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup with the objective of trying to usurp the President from fulfilling the mandate bestowed upon him by the American people…. As such, I am providing all documents to the Department of Justice to deliver the accountability that President Trump, his family, and the American people deserve,” Gabbard said on Friday.

In the words of Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright, the chickens may be coming home to roost.

Every year, well-meaning donors pour hundreds of millions of dollars into America’s most prestigious universities. They do so out of sentiment, prestige, or the vague hope that their alma mater will preserve the civilization it once championed. But in 2025, this is delusion. The modern university—especially the Ivy League—is a machine built to erase the memory of the old world, not preserve it. Donors aren’t saving the institutions they love: they’re financing their own irrelevance.

To understand what was lost, one need only look back to the Ivy League of the 1940s, an era in which fraternal culture was not simply an appendage of undergraduate life, but a central organ of elite formation in America.

In those years, the great colleges—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia—still retained the trappings of their founding: small, WASP-dominated, semi-clerical institutions filled with the Yankee elite. But the real crucibles of influence were not the classrooms. They were the clubs, the societies, and the houses.

The great final clubs of Harvard, the eating clubs of Princeton, the secret societies of Yale—these were more than social diversions. They were incubators of elite consensus. Membership in such circles conferred a kind of spiritual citizenship in the American governing class. Men were trained to speak in a certain tone, carry themselves in a certain way, and, above all, recognize one another across institutions and borders. It was a culture that, for better or worse, assumed the right to rule.

Though he has the pedigree, Elbridge Colby is not a man for the cocktail circuit. As the principal author of the 2018 National Defense Strategy and the widely read book The Strategy of Denial, he could easily have settled into elite foreign policy circles. But he does not flatter diplomats, nor does he shield allies from hard truths, which in Washington inevitably provokes friction. In a recent Politico “exposé,” a chorus of disgruntled former officials bemoans the under secretary of defense for policy’s alleged impoliteness and strategic indelicacy. His crime? Speaking too bluntly. Acting too decisively.

But behind the theatrics of bureaucratic grievance is the truth that Colby is precisely the kind of strategist our moment demands. His critics may fixate on style, but the real discomfort he inspires stems from substance. Many of the former officials I’ve encountered aren’t scandalized because Colby is failing—they’re unsettled because he is, unlike many before him, trying to execute the platform Americans voted for.

Colby is being pilloried by the Washington establishment for being effective. He has advanced the logic of strategic prioritization with a seriousness that rankles them and unsettles allies long accustomed to American indulgence. The problem, it turns out, is that he is right, and unapologetic about it.

“Artificial general intelligence” (AGI) is typically defined as any computer system that can match or surpass human intelligence in performing any task a human can perform. No such program yet exists, but if one were to arise it could instantly begin improving its own capabilities. The result might be a kind of superintelligence, as far beyond our own intelligence as ours is beyond that of snails There exists no natural limit to this process. The only guardrails would be those we construct now, before the avalanche begins.

The timeline remains uncertain, yet the “San Francisco consensus” among AI researchers predicts superintelligence by decade’s end. Skeptics raise legitimate concerns about decades of failed predictions. But when Nobel laureates warn of extinction and industry leaders purchase remote bunkers or speak of “summoning the demon,” prudence demands attention. These are not Luddites but AI’s very architects sounding the alarm.

Of all the course corrections Donald Trump has pursued since his now-famous escalator ride, the one with the most lasting implications—perhaps barring immigration enforcement—may be his war against the unelected bureaucracy that has anti-democratically governed America for decades.

What the Trump Administration has undertaken in the past few months, and what is only beginning to bear fruit with cases like Trump v. American Federation of Government Employees, is nothing less than the opening salvos in a war to dismantle the blatantly unconstitutional technocracy that has defined American governance for at least the last half century. Contra the usual “end of democracy” hysterics from critics, if Trump is successful in these efforts he will be the greatest restorer of constitutional norms in the United States in more than 100 years.

The vision of the American system from Schoolhouse Rock!—a legislature that makes the laws, a president who enforces them, and a judiciary that faithfully interprets the law—hasn’t described how our government actually functions for quite some time. Indeed, it’s not an exaggeration to say that Congress has behaved largely as a vestigial organ, transferring the legislative powers the American people originally delegated to Congress to a multitude of agencies.

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.

Art of the Arms Deal | The Roundtable Ep. 276

As Joe Biden shuffled toward the finish line of his presidency, he and his staff let off a final volley of pardons—but who was really holding the (virtual) pen? This week, the guys sit down to weigh in on the renewed discussion of autopens as the New York Times reports on a cache of emails that may reveal the truth. Trump, meanwhile, caused a stir by agreeing to sell military supplies to NATO, which will then be passed to Ukraine. In the U.K. and Europe, technocrats crack down as triple crises fester: unchecked immigration, rampant crime, and youth radicalization. Plus: book and movie recommendations!

The American Enterprise Institute is an unlikely place to be reminded of why Donald Trump was necessary ten years ago, and is no less needed now. But a comment by Yuval Levin on a recent AEI panel succinctly brought out the difference Trump has made. Criticizing today’s populist, Trump-led Republican Party, Levin said, “The Right has to ground its approach to the public in a more conservative message, in a sense that this country is awesome. It is not a festering burning garbage pile—that is a strange way to talk to the next generation, and it’s not true, even a little bit.”

Trump has never used the words “festering burning garbage pile,” but he’s used similarly strong language to describe America’s condition in this century under administrations other than his own. Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” implies that America hasn’t been great lately, although he and his voters can change that. Whenever Trump alludes to what Levin calls “a festering burning garbage pile,” he’s referring to the poor leadership our country has suffered from in the not-too-distant past and the results of its misgovernance.

California generally—and Claremont in particular—has produced some of the most profound and revolutionary conservative thinkers of the last half-century.

And for a great many of them, it’s because they understood what’s at stake if we abandon our American identity.

And we’re lucky enough to have a few of them, like Michael Anton, now working in the administration with us.

Now, Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams asked me to speak a little bit about statesmanship and, more to the point, about how to respond to some of the challenges our movement will need to confront in the years to come.

It’s an interesting question.

And I think it’s useful to reflect on the state of the Left in 2025’s America.

Last week, a 33-year-old Communist running an insurgent campaign beat a multimillion-dollar establishment machine in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary.

I don’t want to harp on a municipal election, but there were two interesting threads. The first is that it drives home how much the voters in each party have changed.

If our victory in 2024 was rooted in a broad, working- and middle-class coalition, Mamdani’s coalition is the inverse.

On Independence Day, nearly a dozen black-garbed individuals, some equipped with body armor and firearms, allegedly orchestrated a premeditated ambush on law enforcement outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. According to the federal criminal complaint, the group began firing on the center with fireworks and spray-painting anti-ICE and pro-Antifa slogans on vehicles until law enforcement moved to secure the area. Once law enforcement came out of the building, two assailants opened fire with AR-15s, firing 20-30 rounds and wounding at least one officer.

The attack was entirely foreseeable. Antifa militants motivated by virulent rhetoric have repeatedly doxxed and targeted ICE, going all the way back to Antifa member Willem Van Spronsen’s 2019 attack on a Tacoma, Washington, ICE detention facility. Van Spronsen was killed by responding officers and became a popular anarchist martyr.

In June “Texas Patriot,” a prominent anonymous account supportive of President Trump, announced during the height of tensions with Iran, “F*ck it. If Trump takes us to war, I’m done with him and his administration.

I voted for:

NO WARS

No taxes

Cheap gas

Cheap groceries

MAHA.

What of these things has actually happened?

I’m pissed.”

This message from a popular pro-Trump account seemed significant. Was Trump’s populist base turning on him? But shortly thereafter, Right Angle News, another popular anon account, asserted that the Texas Patriot account was actually based in Pakistan. Yet another popular anon account contested this, saying that Texas Patriot is actually an American who was originally from Texas and now lives in Georgia. Notably, most other major accounts weighing in on the controversy, from “Proud Elephant” to “Evil Texan,” are themselves anonymous, adding further to the hall of mirrors.

Either way, “Texas Patriot” deleted his own account shortly thereafter, perhaps at least suggesting there was something that he or she had to hide—or at least that he didn’t desire scrutiny.

Should the federal government auction less than one percent of non-conservation status public lands to alleviate housing shortages and reduce the federal debt? This is how Utah Senator Mike Lee tried to frame the question when he included a provision to this effect in the Senate version of the Big Beautiful Bill. Alas for Senator Lee, the New Right’s resounding answer has been hell no, and he has beaten a hasty retreat. Perhaps to his relief, the Senate Parliamentarian ruled the public land sale provision ineligible for the reconciliation procedure under which the BBB was being handled. Mr. Lee lives to fight another day, but can the New Right be warmed up to his proposal?

For many years, Western Republicans have chafed at the federal government’s poor management of public lands, which make up most of the acreage of several states. California is almost half public land, while Nevada is more than 80%. Western states average about 50% public lands.

These lands were open to homesteading until 50 years ago, just as was the vast American valley of the Mississippi. But where the Great Plains were rapidly settled with farms and towns, the arid Mountain West saw far less settlement. Late 19th-century technology was inadequate to access the water resources necessary to farm most of the high desert, so homesteaders stuck to the very few fertile stream valleys. The rest of the land remained free for mining and cattle grazing.

In a July full of high-stakes Supreme Court rulings, U.S. v. Skrmetti stood out as a crucial victory against insanity. In a 6-3 decision, the Court asserted that it is not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment for Tennessee to ban transgender surgeries and hormone therapies for children with gender dysphoria. This opinion, along with cases like Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022 and Medina v. Planned Parenthood last month, allows room for sanity in red states. These are important victories against the institutional Left, which seeks to shut down debate on controversial issues by imposing its political will under the guise of newly invented rights. Skrmetti doesn’t win the fight against transgender extremism, but it allows red states to pass sane laws and begin to reverse course.

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

Big Bill, Big Win | The Roundtable Ep. 275

The Supreme Court’s blockbuster cases—in other words, those that are politically controversial—always seem to be decided in late June at the very end of the term. October Term 2024 is no exception.

Planned Parenthood does not have standing to challenge South Carolina’s decision to exclude it from Medicaid funding, the Court held in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. Texas’s law requiring that websites publishing sexually explicit content verify that visitors to the site are over 18 is constitutional, stated the Court in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. And Mahmoud v. Taylor indicates that parents of children in grades K-5 are entitled to a preliminary injunction allowing them to opt their children out of “LGBTQ-inclusive” storybooks.

But the case causing the most apoplexy on the Left is Trump v. CASA, Inc., which held that lower courts exceed their authority when they issue nationwide or “universal” injunctions that block the implementation of executive orders beyond the actual parties to the case.

DEI employees are still running amok in the hallowed halls of the United States Military Academy at West Point (USMA). President Trump and members of his administration have taken the first steps toward eliminating DEI in the military, but there won’t be lasting change until all traces of it are removed from our military’s oldest academy.

In 2024, Congress and watchdog groups started asking questions about why cadets were being taught DEI and CRT ideology in West Point classrooms. Over the next several months, USMA was embroiled in controversy as it faced a barrage of congressional hearings, lawsuits, and FOIA requests. But West Point was able to successfully shield many of its woke policies through disingenuous public relations efforts.

More than six months into the Trump Administration, it is clear that West Point’s “compliance” with President Trump’s Restoring America’s Fighting Force executive order and Secretary Pete Hegseth’s anti-DEI memo is merely perfunctory, and even deceptive. Their orders are being undermined by the continued presence of woke employees who continue to prop up a leftist regime that has embedded itself at West Point.

The last letter we have in Thomas Jefferson’s handwriting is an RSVP, dated June 24, 1826. It is a response to an invitation from the mayor of Washington, D.C., to attend a celebration of the 50th anniversary of American Independence. Jefferson was too ill to attend. In fact he would die, as if American destiny had decreed it, on the day for which the celebration was scheduled: July 4, 1826, fifty years to the day after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress.

In his letter, sent from Monticello, Jefferson reflected on the meaning of the Declaration, whose language he had famously crafted. He showed that his revolutionary spirit had not dimmed.

He called the Declaration “an instrument pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world”:

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.

New York, New Left | The Roundtable Ep. 274

For decades, the foreign policy elite in both parties insisted that America’s greatness has more to do with Damascus than Detroit, or Baghdad than Bozeman. It was a bipartisan delusion—driven by ideology, divorced from consequence, and devastating to the American people.

Against the wisdom of the ancients and our own founders, we went abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” But our foreign exploits proved fruitless, producing little but fallen soldiers and toppled regimes, soon replaced by even more dangerous ones. Worse still, the sands of faraway deserts blinded us to the sand that our own house stood on.

Now is the time to rebuild—to restore our republic and usher in a new American golden age. But first, we must face the truth.

Neoconservative foreign policy, once mistaken as a legitimate branch of the conservative movement, has proven to be one of the most destructive ideological projects of the last half-century. With its soaring rhetoric and shallow roots, it promised that endless war could birth endless peace, that liberal democracy could be exported like grain, and that remaking the world was more urgent than restoring our own nation.

That misjudgment has cost this nation dearly. In blood. In treasure. In trust. 

Pat Buchanan foresaw this disaster decades ago. He warned:

Despite the complaints of conservatives, it was not in disloyal subversion or terrorism against the American state that the American university lost its soul. Nor, despite the strictures of leftist radicals, did academia sully itself by colluding with government warmongers. In fact, the purpose of the modern university, since it was created in Berlin by Wilhelm von Humboldt and transplanted to America, has always been to serve the nation, not least by helping to produce and celebrate a national culture. As an institution of higher learning, the university has a duty to seek truth and knowledge in all its varied domains. But when we think about the university as citizens, we should think fundamentally of the duties of the American university to the state that privileges it and to the country which supports it.

In that respect, from 1775 to 1989 the American university had a pretty good war record. 

In its campaign to shake up higher education, the Trump Administration has taken unprecedented steps to repel foreign college students. These include banning Harvard University from enrolling foreign nationals, ordering American embassies and consulates to pause all student visa interviews, and revoking visas of students from China. While the administration has since walked back some of these measures, the problem of foreign students demands sober reflection.

Ever since the Republican Party failed to repeal and replace Obamacare during President Trump’s first term, healthcare reform has slipped off the GOP’s agenda. However, Obamacare’s problems continue to fester, with Americans in the individual health insurance market facing high costs and restricted choices. If the GOP intends to deliver on its pledge to help middle-class families—and especially the young voters who swung to Trump—it must finally honor its broken promise to repeal and replace Obamacare. In doing so, the GOP could look to countries like Australia, Chile, and Germany on how to restructure the individual market.

There’s a world before Trump’s descent down the escalator, and there’s a world after it. The recent “No Kings” protests transmitted the idée fixe of the pre-2015 world. That idea was hostility to personal authority, or personal power—hostility to the notion of sovereignty, to the power once exercised by kings. Donald Trump, the figure who has dominated politics since 2015, is its most visible sign of contradiction. In that sense, the protesters weren’t entirely wrong. Trump’s success marks the passing of the world of the latter half of the 20th century, which was defined by hatred of personal authority.

Successive generations demolished the concept of sovereignty, casting suspicion on the notion that a leader’s decisions can legitimately reshape political or social life. This shift began in the United States when the intelligentsia promulgated the concept of “the authoritarian personality.” They found this personality in the working classes, their churches and associations, their families and fathers, and the politicians who represented them. Where there was the whiff of authoritarian character traits, fascism probably lurked.

To borrow a phrase from a writer many of my radical colleagues love to cite, the chickens are coming home to roost at colleges and universities around the country.

As anyone paying even a modicum of attention knows, the Trump Administration is endeavoring to curtail some of the more explicit ideological partisanship going on in higher education under the mask of scholarship and teaching. Beyond that, many schools are recognizing that bottom lines have shifted, and faculty hiring will have to adjust.

Recently, faculty and administrative communities on many campuses have discussed the difficulties departments are facing in replacing departing faculty lost through retirement or moves. The American Association of University Professors has been fretting about it for some years. My place of employment, Bucknell University, is currently experiencing just such a moment, as have institutions like American University and UNC-Chapel Hill.

The federal budget today resembles a time bomb with a Medicare card taped to it. Entitlement spending consumes the vast majority of federal outlays, and future obligations (mostly from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) far exceed $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Reform is overdue, but politically radioactive. The welfare state is no longer a safety net—it is a gravitational force pulling federal priorities inward.

Sixty-nine million Americans received $1.5 trillion in Social Security payments in 2024. Nearly $2 trillion was spent on Medicare and Medicaid combined. Welfare outlays were $1.6 trillion. The magnitude of these numbers is not simply staggering, but beyond comprehension. For comparative scale, the outlay for military salaries and housing was $176.2 billion for fiscal year 2024. Federal employees who weren’t military were paid $384 billion.

This is obviously irresponsible and unsustainable. Treating Social Security as anything other than a general fund and part of the federal income tax structure is dishonest. The program is a general fund in, and a general fund out. This was once an important debate—but it is no longer.

Only President Trump could have ordered Operation Midnight Hammer, which dealt a blow to the Iranian nuclear program while blazing a path toward a real diplomatic solution to the Iran-Israel conflict. The president has demonstrated peace through strength, and it is now the responsibility of policymakers and defense officials to ensure the military can deter and, if necessary, win in a range of conflict environments.

By all accounts, Operation Midnight Hammer was a stunning success. It was a meticulously executed, 37-hour tactical operation that was meant to cripple Iran’s nuclear program. It demonstrated America’s unrivaled ability to project force across continents, penetrate air defenses, and strike hardened targets with precision.

The coordination of stealth bombers, mid-air refueling aircraft, and supporting naval assets showcased the professionalism and lethality of the U.S. military. At least a dozen B-2 bombers, including those that were part of the deception flights out of Guam, were joined by mid-air refueling tankers, multiple fighter jets, and even a few nuclear-powered submarines that acted in concert against three Iranian nuclear sites. For many observers, it appeared to reaffirm the conviction that when the United States chooses to act, it can do so with unmatched resolve and capability. President Trump’s decisiveness is fundamental to this reality, one that our enemies are only beginning to come to grips with.