The Claremont Institute Feed Items

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.

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.

Bunker Busted | The Roundtable Ep. 273

The Supreme Court has upheld Tennessee’s right—and by extension, the right of other states—to regulate or ban trans medical procedures for children. Meanwhile, Trump’s precision strike against Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities has succeeded in extracting a ceasefire between Israel and Iran. The possibility of diplomacy and peace now exists—but will it materialize? The hosts are joined this week by regulars Seth Barron and Matthew Peterson, alongside special guest and Army veteran Will Thibeau to discuss the recent events in the Middle East and global implications. Plus: book and media recommendations!

Recommended reading:

Donald Trump’s significance to the American republic must be understood in light of his fight against despotism. He does not face a tyranny of blood and iron—he faces a tyranny of mass conformity, which bypasses the body and controls the will by controlling the mind. It seeks universal conformity, and for that reason, it is a more complete tyranny than anything imagined by ancient or medieval tyrannies. Kings could proscribe against their enemies, but they could find protection from the church, the aristocracy, or the people. There were threats to individual freedoms in the past, but they were never those of a mass society.

Trump’s candidacy was a declaration of war against a despotism that has restricted free speech and freedom of the mind more effectively than could any Roman emperor or European monarch. Our modern tyranny has been named, though not necessarily explained, using a variety of epithets: “political correctness,” “globalism,” “Cultural Marxism,” “the Deep State,” “the uniparty,” “the Swamp,” “the establishment,” and “the blob.” By challenging it, Trump forced it to drop its mask and reveal itself.

It’s easy in hindsight to say that Donald Trump’s ride down the Trump Tower escalator a decade ago changed everything. It’s more accurate and helpful to say that his journey merely heightened and channeled trends that were likely to emerge anyway.

Ten years ago, virtually no one was talking about populism or a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, working-class-based Republican Party. Democrats believed in the Rising American Electorate theory, which held that increased Democratic Party dominance was demographically assured because older, conservative whites were dying off and being replaced by young, Democratic-leaning voters plus people of color. The intra-GOP debate focused on which approach to the future was more compelling: doubling down on fiscal and social conservatism (Senator Ted Cruz was the most visible adherent of this view) or moving to the Left on immigration and same-sex marriage (the infamous RNC 2012 “Autopsy”).

Trump proved all three groups wrong. He ostentatiously ran against both GOP arguments, championing a hard-line immigration policy, attacks on free trade, and a notable unwillingness to compete in the GOP’s quadrennial “who’s the most religious candidate” primary pageant. He then upended the Democrats’ theory by attacking their soft underbelly: their reliance on blue-collar, Northern and Midwestern white votes. He assembled a coalition few had dreamed of, one that sacrificed moderate, college-educated whites for somewhat conservative non-college whites combined with the GOP’s conservative core.

For too long, many conservatives have relied on the Supreme Court to thwart the Left. I cheered over the last few years as President Trump’s appointees shifted the makeup of the Court to the Right, arguably becoming the most conservative Court since before the New Deal. I was thrilled when it handed down 6-3 decisions overturning Roe v. Wade, upholding gun rights, clawing back power from executive agencies, and quashing Biden’s attempts at student loan forgiveness.

The Supreme Court recently handed down two unanimous decisions that were clear conservative victories. The first vindicated the religious (and thus tax-exempt) status of Wisconsin’s Catholic Charities over against scrutiny from the state government. In the second decision, the Court sided with a heterosexual woman in Ohio who sued her state as a result of experiencing reverse discrimination that favored lesbians and gays. And in what is perhaps the biggest conservative win from the Court this term, we witnessed a 6-3 decision upholding Tennessee’s ban on transgender procedures for minors.

Donald Trump had publicly toyed with the idea of running for president many times before 2015. In fact, he even entered the Reform Party’s presidential primaries for the 2000 election. But the timing was never quite right, until it finally was.

Of the many actions and twists of fate that created the opening for Trump’s presidential candidacy, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision is an underappreciated one. Hailed by the conservative legal establishment as a win for free speech (on the merits I would agree), in practice it released a flood of money into the American political system that fundamentally reshaped the landscape of campaigns and how they were conducted. Suddenly the candidates themselves mattered much less, along with political parties. What mattered now were the new players who emerged from the wreckage of campaign finance law.

Super PACs could raise unlimited funds from corporations and billionaires. Dark money nonprofits kept their donors’ identities secret while spending hundreds of millions on attack ads. Labor unions could now spend unlimited treasury funds on elections. A new class of mega-donors wielded influence that dwarfed anything seen in American politics since the Gilded Age.

A decade of the Trump phenomenon is a noteworthy milestone, worthy of commemoration and reflection. Yet in terms of this unusual bifurcated presidency, the high political drama has only just resumed after a four-year intermission. At Independence Day, Trump won’t even be six months into his four-year term. The real work is only beginning.

Not every citizen is bound to help the president succeed, but all must at least give him a chance to do so. Even those who don’t support Trump should recall Leo Strauss’s sound advice to expect less from politics and more from ourselves. Trump is trying to save republican self-government. Yet, since Americans fundamentally disagree on what a free society means, that depends just as much on us as it does on him—which is part of the challenge.

The Left attacks Trump for being a king, disregarding their undemocratic attempt to replace the doddering figurehead of Joe Biden with Queen Kamala, whose claim to the throne was that she is a black woman. The Right expects Trump to act with monarchical efficacy, forgetting that they elected him to regain control over the bureaucracy. This can’t be done in a day. Czar Alexander II took six years, acting by fiat, to free the serfs. Freeing citizens is even harder.

To many Americans, the riots in Los Angeles look like another chapter in the history of the country’s race riots, going from the “long, hot summer of 1967” to the George Floyd riots of 2020. But the 2025 L.A. riots are different. The figure who helps us see that is Vice President Dan Quayle, the man who covered up the true causes of another infamous series of riots in Los Angeles.

In the spring of 1992, riots began after the verdict was announced in the Rodney King case. When the LAPD lost control of the streets, President George H.W. Bush declared a state of emergency and sent in the National Guard. Shortly thereafter, in a speech that became famous for Quayle criticizing the TV character Murphy Brown, the vice president provided an ingenious reframing of the disturbances. He used the riots to pronounce the central credo of his era:

From the perspective of many Japanese, the ethnic diversity of our culture is a weakness compared to their homogeneous society. I beg to differ with my host. I explained that our diversity is our strength and I explained that the immigrants who come to our shores have made and continue to make vast contributions to our culture and to our economy.

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.

No Kings, No Congress | The Roundtable Ep. 272

President Donald Trump, like the American Founders, believes that this republic is constituted to protect the citizenry against all enemies, foreign and domestic. When it comes to foreign affairs, we are not obliged to fight and die for anyone but our fellow citizens. Our social compact is with one another as Americans. Whatever we do militarily and strategically is first and foremost to preserve the freedom and well-being of the American people.

President Trump thinks this is just common sense.

There is a disagreement now over what America’s role should be, if any, in supporting Israel after its preemptive strike on Iran. President Trump has authorized the use of American air defenses to stop Iranian attacks on American assets and citizens: our military bases in the region, our consulate in Tel Aviv, and the Americans living in the surrounding area. This is not an endorsement of the Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities and personnel. It is designed to protect the lives of Americans; the U.S. is well within its right to do so. It should be noted that we do not have an embassy in Iran, and for good reason.

The tumultuous and exhausting 12-year pontificate of the Argentinian Jorge Bergoglio, better known to the world as Pope Francis, came to an end in April. Francis was a paradoxical pope if there ever was one. He openly promoted disruption in the Catholic Church, which he did not hesitate to call causing “a mess,” as if unclarity about doctrine and the Church’s moral teaching could somehow serve constructive purposes. He spoke endlessly of mercy and the Church as an immense, nonjudgmental “field hospital” for the lost and broken. But Pope Francis rarely called for the repentance that is the crucial prerequisite for the healing of the soul. He occasionally criticized abortion and gender ideology, and in no uncertain terms, even as he tolerated and promoted those inside and outside the Church who indulged these grave evils.

I am just old enough to remember watching the tall ships sail down the Hudson River on Independence Day in 1976. My parents hosted a huge party for their friends and family to look out from the high windows of our apartment on Riverside Park and the river beyond. I alternated between eating slices from an enormous six-foot hoagie my parents had ordered and watching ship after ship sail by. My memory mixes up the sight of sails and the taste of salami.

I remember a spectacle, and I remember a host of people coming together to enjoy it. I remember the small, personal delight of racing from the dining room table with the hoagie to the window and back again. I remember the ships, proceeding by stately fathoms, with the Palisades of New Jersey behind. I remember my country’s 200th birthday—not as a solemn public event, but as something bound up with the happiness of family and friends, and with the individual joy of a small boy shuttling from gulping food to gaping at the masted vessels out of a storybook.

We have been too slow off the mark in preparing to celebrate America’s 250th birthday. It didn’t help that too many people in positions of power were at best indifferent to our country and have procrastinated celebrating its birth. Now we have leaders who love our country and want to hold a dazzling party for America in 2026.

Has anyone actually read The Handmaid’s Tale? Maybe Margaret Atwood has. But it seems unlikely that many of the demonstrators who hauled out their red cloaks yet again last weekend have done more than watch the HBO TV show based—rather loosely—on the 1985 novel. Thomas Aquinas was supposed to have said, “I fear a man of only one book.” These are people of only one streaming miniseries.

Margaret Atwood doesn’t seem to mind them very much. In fact she appears pleased as punch with them, which is yet another indication that she is not a serious person. Ever since she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, the dystopian thriller implying that America in the mid-1980s was on the brink of turning women into burqa-wearing sex slaves because Ronald Reagan was president, Atwood and her non-readers have treated every political event they don’t like as their personal Iranian Revolution.

“Do you know the locus classicus of that exquisitely American intransitive verb, to absquatulate?” I am often asked. “Prefix, ab- as in from or out of; root, squat– from the reflexive verb, to seat oneself upon the hams or haunches; suffix -ulare, emulating other Latinate infinitives such as ‘to emulate’? Literally, to depart dragging one’s hindquarters; colloquially, to haul a** or tuck tail and skedaddle; literarily, to hasten away abjectly; melodramatically, to abscond in shame?”

“I believe I do,” is my unwavering reply, though these things are, of course, subject to eternal debate among those who care. “It is to be found on the second page of the Gold Hill Daily News in the Comstock, Nevada Territory, May 30, 1864.”

Some background and context are called for. In September 1862, Samuel Clemens, not yet boasting his soon-to-be famous nom de plume “Mark Twain,” walked into the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise office and started work as a reporter at $25 a week. In Virginia City, Twain would later write, “There were military companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theatres, ‘hurdy-gurdy houses,’ wide-gambling palaces, political powwows, civic processions, street fights, murders, inquests, riots, [and] a whisky mill every fifteen steps.”

The release last fall, after 44 years, of the Beach Boys’ abandoned masterpiece Smile is a milestone of American popular culture. Rolling Stone has called it “the most famous unfinished album in rock & roll history.” But Smile is also something much bigger. It is the pinnacle artistic achievement of a lost civilization, the middle-class, baby-boom, sun-soaked, clean-cut, work-hard-play-hard, bungalow-and-car culture of post-war Southern California. It was a paradise for the common man, one that produced legions of loyal and productive citizens, developed the modern aerospace industry, helped the West win the Cold War, and exported an attractive and fundamentally decent (if often vapid) vision of American life to every corner of the globe.

Western Migration

To understand Smile, you have to start by understanding the Wilsons, which requires understanding Hawthorne, California, circa 1961. In 1922, Murry Wilson arrived in Los Angeles at age five from Hutchinson, Kansas. His family was part of what journalist Carey McWilliams described in his classic 1946 study Southern California: An Island on the Land, as one of Los Angeles’s frequent “quantum leaps, great surges of migration”—in this case the 1920s oil boom that flooded L.A. County with white low-church Protestant burghers and strivers (mostly the latter) from the Plains and the Midwest.

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.

Battle: Los Angeles | The Roundtable Ep. 271

This week, special guest Peachy Keenan rounds out the cast with a report from LA, where riots are breaking out (again). Governor Gavin Newsom failed to gain control on the ground, so Trump inserted himself and the National Guard to enforce law and order. Meanwhile, it’s not news that Trump and Elon’s bromance has concluded in a spectacular social media exchange, but Elon’s public tailspin in the aftermath merits a closer look. Plus: advice to law-abiding illegal immigrants (and to Elon), as well as media recommendations to help you escape the insanity of daily politics.

Recommended reading:

Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War

Shortly after Linda McMahon was sworn in as the 13th Secretary of Education, she pledged to dismantle the Department of Education (ED) as its “final mission.”

Just eight days later, the ED announced a reduction in force (RIF), which impacts nearly 50% of its personnel, as part of a “commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most.” Terminated employees were to be placed on administrative leave beginning March 21. The department explained that when Donald Trump was inaugurated it employed 4,133 personnel; after the RIF and voluntary resignations, 2,183 workers would remain.

One week later, on March 20, Trump issued an executive order that proclaimed that “the experiment of controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars—and the unaccountable bureaucracy those programs and dollars support—has plainly failed our children, our teachers, and our families.” Closing the department, Trump observed,

Ever since “Liberation Day,” President Trump’s tariff policy has provoked spirited public discussion. Supporters and opponents have vigorously debated the economic and political consequences of the administration’s departure from our governing elites’ preference for free trade.

There is, however, another aspect of the question—an ethical component—that is suggested by Trump’s rhetoric, although it has not been fully developed.

“America First” is one of the famous slogans Trump often deploys in defense of his tariff policy. The president’s use of this phrase implies that his efforts to regulate trade are in the service of a preferential concern for America over other nations. In other words, on his own understanding, Trump is embarked on a patriotic trade policy. This observation forces us to consider the questions: What is patriotism, and what does it have to do with trade and tariffs?

Patriotism is a love of country and also, necessarily, a love of one’s fellow countrymen. Most human beings in our own time and throughout history have regarded patriotism as a natural and normal human emotion—but also as a virtue or a duty. In other words, normal people care for their country with a warm affection and are willing to, and feel an obligation to, subordinate their own interests to its well-being as circumstances may require.

When you learn that the White House is keeping an eye on human rights violations in other countries, you probably imagine authoritarian regimes like those in Iran, China, or Burma. If I told you that it was the United Kingdom, only a small group of liberty-minded individuals might believe me. However, considering the critical state of free speech in Britain, it’s unsurprising that Donald Trump’s administration has expressed their concerns.

A representative from the U.S. State Department recently announced that the administration is monitoring the case of Lucy Connolly, a British woman who received a 31-month prison sentence in October last year due to a message she posted on social media. The announcement regarding Connolly comes just a month after the State Department issued a statement saying it was monitoring the case of Livia Tossici-Bolt, one of five British pro-life activists who were arrested for silently protesting outside abortion clinics. Connolly’s tweet followed the horrific murder of three young girls in Southport, which led to widespread rioting across the country. Two weeks ago, the 42-year-old’s appeal was rejected by judges. She is currently not set for release until August. 

In Crisis of the House Divided, Jaffa argued that once it became possible for Lincoln to foresee the end of slavery, he prepared himself for a role in emancipation, and even, in the Lyceum speech, gave a “prophetic account of the coming crisis” casting himself in the role of Emancipator! Lincoln warned of future dangers that would confront the nation. These would be internal dangers, principally those stemming from mob rule, or more precisely the “spirit of mob rule.” The lawless in spirit—those who tolerate lawlessness—will be prone to become “lawless in fact.” Lincoln, of course, without direct acknowledgement, referred to abolitionists, who advocated violating the Constitution in order to emancipate slaves, whereas Lincoln’s avowed policy was one of prudence, which was to observe strict adherence to the Constitution which, when understood in light of the principles of the Declaration, had put slavery on the course of “ultimate extinction.” The greatest danger engendered by the “mobocratic spirit,” Lincoln insisted, “which all must admit, is now abroad in the land, [is that] the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed—I mean the attachment of the People.” What can unite them? What is the remedy Lincoln proposes? A political religion!

Let every American swear, Lincoln pleads,

Last Tuesday Florida’s Board of Governors rejected Dr. Santa Ono for president of its flagship school, the University of Florida (UF). This came just one week after UF’s Board of Trustees (BOT) unanimously approved Ono. In what is typically a procedural process, it marked the first time in the 22 years since the Board of Governors was established that it had rejected a candidate in this fashion. It was a blow for not only Ono, but also UF’s BOT.

How did Ono nearly get approved as UF’s next president? The short answer is the almost childish simplicity of UF’s BOT, and especially its chairman, Mori Hosseini. They created a situation where only an establishment education administrator like Ono could be selected.

To the best of my knowledge, George Washington never explicitly offered his opinion of the First Amendment. It was proposed by Congress and ratified by the states during his first term as president but, per the Constitution, without his formal participation. Washington wrote to James Madison privately on May 31, 1789, stating, “I see nothing objectionable in the proposed Amendments. Some of them in my opinion, are importantly necessary; others, though of themselves (in my conception) not very essential, are necessary to quiet the fears of some respectable characters and well meaning men.”

The Constitution’s abolition of religious tests for office emancipated American Jews and Catholics from legal disabilities at the federal level, and decades before Britain did the same (this was only seven years after the devastating anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in London).

We gather at a time of great anxiety—and great possibility. For years, we’ve seen an America in decline. We have been told that our best days are behind us. That the people are too divided, our institutions too broken, our moral center too hollowed out ever to recover.

And yet—here we are. In 2025. Back under the leadership of President Trump. Not in retreat. Not in despair. But in the early, bracing hours of a national renewal.

I believe we are witnessing the dawn of a golden age. Not because of one man—though he has been a battering ram through the fortress of the ruling class. But because of what this moment now makes possible: a return not just to strength or prosperity or sovereignty—but to the permanent things.

As Russell Kirk once wrote, “The conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of the spirit and the character—for the perennial truths.” And if anything defines this political moment—it is the hunger for those truths.

We are living through the collapse of liberal technocracy. And we are standing at the edge of something new—or rather, something very old. A renewal of the American republic grounded not in managerial jargon or neoliberal drift but in the principles of moral order, self-government, national purpose, and human dignity.

We are not clinging to fading embers but standing at the sunrise of a golden age, guided once more by the permanent things. This is not an accident of policy. It is the result of a people remembering who they are.

Last week, the Israel Defense Forces announced it will no longer train female soldiers to serve in infantry mobility units due to concerns about their physical preparedness. It is no small announcement that after two years of sustained warfare, the prime example of a modern sex-integrated military decided to backtrack. As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth noted in a tweet last weekend, this is major news for militaries around the world that are reconsidering the role of women in combat.

Israel’s decision highlights the obvious. Proper physical fitness is imperative for soldiers operating in combat roles—not only so they may achieve their objectives effectively, but also so they do not cause undue danger to themselves or their teammates. Soldiers must be able to trust each other. Real-world experience, from Israel to U.S. Army Special Operations Command, demonstrates that it is entirely reasonable to wonder if such trust can be maintained in co-ed military combat units.

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.

White-Collar Bots | The Roundtable Ep. 270

Artificial Intelligence threatens to storm the office as tech companies compete to replace entry-level workers with “agent” underlings. Will this be the next major technological displacement in the workforce? And to what end? Meanwhile, this “Pride month” has lacked the eruption of rainbows typical of June. Is a Pride Shift to go along with the Vibe Shift underway? This week, Blaze Media editor-in-chief and now Claremont Washington Fellow Matthew Peterson joins the guys to discuss the ramifications of AI, the containment of Pride, and to dispense good bad movie recommendations!

Recommended reading:

While experts have long dismissed large-scale Medicaid fraud as improbable, evidence from New Mexico tells a different story. This discovery presents an unprecedented opportunity to offset part of the $880 billion budget deficit without cutting healthcare services for enrollees.

As the most powerful stakeholders, insurers frame fraud as an issue with hospitals, physicians, and enrollees while quietly escaping scrutiny themselves. A 2020 Health and Human Services report claimed that fraud in Medicaid fee-for-service stood at 12.3%, compared to just 0.3% in Medicaid managed care, reinforcing the industry’s message that managed care is highly efficient. However, the Government Accounting Office offers a starkly different interpretation, arguing that fraud in managed care is simply escaping detection.

Unlike fee-for-service, managed care payments are issued in advance based on projected costs. When actual costs turn out to be lower, insurers are legally required to return excess funds. The failure to do so amounts to fraudulent retention—and this is where a massive financial recovery opportunity lies.

New Mexico’s Medicaid program provides a striking case study:

When the 28-year-old Bill Buckley wrote to his new pen pal, Whittaker Chambers, asking permission to come and meet him for the first time, Chambers, recovering at his Maryland farmhouse from another heart attack, replied cheerily, “By all means come. Come anytime of the day.” The letter included driving directions and what Sam Tanenhaus calls “a taste of Chambers’s signature gloom.” Chambers could not sign off without noting, “The score, as the points are chalked up, clearly and boldly, more and more convinces me that the total situation is hopeless, past repair, organically irremediable.”

By the “total situation” he referred not merely to his own ailments, though Buckley found him in bed and forbidden by the doctor “even to raise his head.” No, Chambers meant the whole situation of modern man, especially in the West. As he wrote in his invitation to Buckley, “Almost the only position of spiritual dignity left to men, therefore, is a kind of stoic silence, made bearable by the amusement of seeing, hearing, and knowing the full historical irony that its victims are blind and deaf to, and disciplined by the act of withholding comment on what we know.”

Real estate agents often say, “It’s always a good time to buy a house”—because they earn their commission whether or not it’s actually a good time to buy a house.

In the same vein, over at the Wall Street Journal it’s always a good time to increase immigration. The paper’s editorial page—notorious for repeatedly advocating a constitutional amendment saying, “There shall be open borders”—recently ran a column by Jason Riley, a member of the editorial board, entitled “Want to Raise Birthrates? Immigration Is the Key.” 

Curiously for a newspaper focused on business and economics, the column contains no numbers to back up this assertion.

Now, falling birthrates are an issue for almost all countries, developed or otherwise. The way this is usually expressed is the total fertility rate, or TFR. This represents the number of children the statistically average woman is likely to have in her lifetime. To maintain a stable population, a nation needs a TFR of slightly above two—one for mom, one for dad, and an additional fraction to account for child mortality.

Home ownership is declining across the West. In America, the rate continues to fall, down 3.5 percentage points since its peak. Australia is down 3 points, Great Britain is down nearly 7 points since, and so on.

These might look like only small drops, but they’re part of a worsening trend. In America, people under 35 have seen the largest decline in home ownership of any cohort, with their real rates falling by 12 points since 1990. Not long ago, the average age of a first-time buyer was around 30. Today it is almost 40 years old. The housing crisis, in other words, is disproportionately a younger person’s crisis.

In the first months of 2025, Donald Trump played a game of Russian roulette with the American economy and survived. Although the president had never hidden his enthusiasm for tariffs, the way he went about implementing them on taking office sowed confusion. Targeting not just geostrategic competitors like China but also allies like Canada and Britain, issuing demands that economists struggled to explain, reversing world-shaping policies from one hour to the next, and doing all of this on doubtful constitutional authority, sent markets into a tailspin.

And just when the president had been enjoying a honeymoon. In the last days of January, a majority of Americans had declared themselves—for the first time—Trumpians. They were particularly optimistic about his economic plans. But their enthusiasm diminished as the rumble of artillery from the trade war grew louder. By mid-April, fewer than 40% backed the president’s policy, and Trump was less popular than he had been at the same point in his first term.

In January, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded a policy enacted by the Obama Administration, and expanded by the Biden Administration, that barred immigration law enforcement from making arrests in “sensitive” areas, namely churches and schools. According to Biden DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, this had become “fundamental” agency practice, which is something like so-called “super precedent”—that is, rules that progressives prefer.

“Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” declared President Trump’s DHS. “The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement and instead trusts them to use common sense.” To most Americans this seems like common sense. If fugitives are exploiting lenient policies to avoid arrest and deportation, then those policies need adjusting.

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.

Putting DOGE Down | The Roundtable Ep. 269

News broke a few weeks ago that President Trump would seek to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in his next budget proposal, along with several other federal cultural agencies. Hours later, it was also widely reported that some of our current grants were being withdrawn and canceled with immediate effect.

These announcements have caused fear, anger, and bewilderment inside our agency. I find myself (as the historian for the NEA) in the unique position of explaining to my fellow employees how matters have reached this dire pass.

When I arrived at this agency in 2004, in the first years of the George W. Bush Administration, the staff was mostly composed of Democratic Party supporters. But they were also cognizant of the near-death experience that the NEA suffered during the so-called “culture wars” (which stretched from 1989-1998), when the agency was widely lambasted for providing sub-grants that were used for exhibitions which included Andres Serrano’s blasphemous work “Piss Christ,” as well as Robert Mapplethorpe’s sado-masochist and homosexual pornography.

The result of that foolish grantmaking was the restructuring of the NEA so that from then on 40% of our total budget was automatically awarded to state arts agencies, while an independent council was created to oversee the entire grants authorization process as a watchdog appointed by the executive branch.