The Claremont Institute Feed Items

The deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, who was shot after hitting an ICE officer with her car according to video footage, have many asking the question, “What exactly do these anti-ICE activists think they are doing?”

The seemingly incomprehensible decision by Good, a mother with stuffed animals in the glove box of the vehicle she used to obstruct the enforcement of federal law, is leaving people scratching their heads. Reporting that Good became an activist through a peer group at her child’s progressive, social justice-focused charter school has not provided many answers. Media outlets like CNN have sought to demonstrate that the work Good was involved in was more like a side project of the local Parent Teacher Association than domestic terrorism.

But reality was something else.

President Trump began the first full week of 2026 with several announcements, one of which was likely to get missed in everything that’s been taking place: he committed his administration to “ban[ing] large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes,” because “[p]eople live in homes, not corporations.” A fair enough observation.

However, according to the Brookings Institution, large institutional owners account for less than 3% of home ownership nationally. Yet home prices are still absurdly high.

Affordability is a key topic for young people who lived through the post-CARES Act inflation and resent many of their elders for owning homes they don’t think they’ll ever be able to afford. Zohran Mamdani soared into the New York City mayor’s office in part because he repeatedly spoke on this issue. While it is a positive sign that the Trump Administration is looking to tackle exorbitant home prices for young Americans, its ban on institutional investing may miss the forest for the trees, that great expanding forest being the Federal Reserve.

In mid-December, the White House released an executive order establishing the second Trump Administration’s space policy. In the order, the president outlines a policy to “secure the Nation’s vital economic and security interests” and “unleash commercial development” in the stars.

The EO follows on the Department of Energy’s “first-ever government purchase of a natural resource from space” last May. If successful, the procurement of lunar helium-3 by 2029 promises to be the first nugget in a 21st-century gold rush. With the value of the isotope reaching $20 million per kilogram by some estimates, prospecting and settlement of the final frontier—a goal of President Trump’s order—might soon follow.

Withdrawing from the Outer Space Treaty (OST) might help secure that frontier for Americans. Ratified by the Senate in 1967, the treaty was born of the Cold War. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, the global community focused on how to prevent preexisting terrestrial tensions from spilling over into space.

We are accustomed to thinking of political power as a binary: you either have it or you don’t. But in his 1945 masterpiece On Power, Bertrand de Jouvenel imagined it as an organism. Power is like a creature in a nature documentary, adapting, sensing opportunity, and slipping into the cracks. And it grows not because tyrants seize it but because people invite it. “Power is continually being summoned by the weak to save them from the strong who are close at hand,” de Jouvenel wrote. It expands not through violence but through promises. If one has heard the phrase “high-low vs. the middle,” this is how power operates. A higher power uses the low, whether for bodies, justifications, or clients, to attack the middle.

Here is where de Jouvenel’s argument becomes truly interesting. Power does not grow randomly: it grows toward legitimacy, toward righteousness, toward whatever moral vocabulary the age supplies. In medieval France, that vocabulary was justice. In the 20th century, it was security. But in the 21st century, the moral vocabulary of legitimacy is something different. Today’s most potent political ideal is anti-majoritarianism.

The debate over IVF has revealed a deep fissure inside the pro-life movement—not over whether life is sacred, but over whether we trust human beings to act in accord with that truth.

When President Trump announced a suite of policies to subsidize and support some forms of IVF, the fiercest criticism didn’t come from the Left. It came from those who consider themselves the most devout defenders of life. They denounced IVF as inherently immoral, condemned those who use it as selfish, and warned that creating embryos outside the womb violates the natural order.

This reaction was characterized more by moral discomfort than by moral clarity. Though the modern pro-life movement has done inestimable good, there are some among its number who conflate the misuse of fertility technology with the immorality of all fertility technology per se. It’s a reactionary posture that treats human innovation as a threat rather than a tool—one that, if guided rightly, can aid nature in its sacred purpose of bringing new life into the world.

I know this because I’ve lived it.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has attempted to hold Pax Americana together with a simple, deeply flawed strategy: pay everyone off and hope they behave. Allies, adversaries, neutrals—it didn’t matter. Subsidies, aid, trade asymmetries, security guarantees, sanctions waivers, and diplomatic indulgences were handed out on the assumption that gratitude would follow. It didn’t—entitlement did.

Bribery diplomacy rests on a childlike premise: if you keep paying, people will stay in line. In reality, when money flows freely and consequences never arrive, it stops being leverage and becomes reverse tribute. Nations don’t become loyal. They become resentful, arrogant, and defiant. And the moment you threaten to turn off the spigot, the outrage begins. “How dare you?” “You’re betraying us.” “You’re imperialist.” “You’re fascist.” The language is predictable because the psychology is.

Europe is the archetype. After World War II, the United States rebuilt the continent and underwrote its security. That made sense at the time. What didn’t make sense was continuing to subsidize Europe indefinitely while tolerating trade imbalances, defense freeloading, and open hostility toward American interests. When Trump demanded NATO countries pay their share, it was treated as the end of the “world order.” When he demanded reciprocal trade instead of one-way free trade, elites panicked. The system wasn’t collapsing; the subsidy was.

MAGA world seems to be down at the mouth lately. Though still months away, the latest polling seems to portend defeat in the upcoming midterms. And yet, looking back over the past year since January 20, 2025, I see not gloomy defeat but an America that has—for the first time in decades—a fighting chance.

The first year of President Trump’s second administration gives me hope that America will not continue on the path that seemed inevitable just over a year ago: tyrannical censorship, weaponized government agencies, and a Rubicon as heavily trafficked as the Rio Grande. Instead, the Trump Administration has racked up a series of clear victories in several major areas of policy that they can build on in the years ahead to inaugurate a new American golden age.

Monumental Immigration Enforcement

No issue was more central to Trump’s ascent than finally getting immigration under control, a demand from American voters that both parties had previously ignored for decades. In his first administration, Trump controlled the border. But in his second term, he’s done far more than that (crossings these days are virtually nil, something the political class said just a couple of years ago required an act of Congress). He’s taken massive steps toward removing the many millions who reside in the United States illegally.

In the town of Howell, Michigan, Andrea Lee has been trying to secure special education resources for her children through lawsuits. According to local reporting, she’s filed “more than two dozen complaints and four legal grievances over the Howell Public Schools’ treatment of her three children with disabilities.” Special education policy in North Carolina’s Cumberland County is also being determined by way of lawsuit: A new lawsuit claims that the county’s school district “systematically violated federal disability law by delaying special education evaluations for children who showed clear signs of needing help.”

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), after all, makes it so that special education policy is essentially created lawsuit by lawsuit. It puts mandates in place and then, according to Miriam Kurtzig Freedman in the University of Chicago Law Review, sets up “an adversarial private-enforcement system for the rights it created.”

In 1983, under the guidance of Ronald Reagan, Congress created the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to “foster the infrastructure of democracy.” Reagan had used the phrase a year before in an address to Parliament to describe the building blocks of liberty: a free press, unions, political parties, and universities. The president’s stated aim was noble, even high-minded—to advance democratic norms without the blunt instruments that had characterized earlier Cold War interventions.

The institutional form chosen to achieve this aim, however, was peculiar from the start. The NED was conceived as a government-organized non-government organization—a GONGO—deliberately positioned at arm’s length from formal diplomacy while remaining entirely dependent on congressional appropriations. This structure allowed U.S. officials to exert political influence abroad while maintaining a veneer of non-intervention and plausible deniability. The result was not independence, but ambiguity: foreign policy without clear accountability to either Congress or the president.

In his escalating attempts to cut ties with China, President Trump has aggressively employed tariffs, threats, and embargoes. But there’s one potentially powerful tool the Trump Administration has yet to leverage fully: trash.

Hidden among America’s trash heaps and mining waste are potentially rich accumulations of critical materials that China currently monopolizes—and that the United States desperately needs. Capitalizing on those materials will remove one of China’s greatest sources of leverage over American national and economic security.

After decades of allowing domestic production of critical minerals to flatline, policymakers and industrial partners have finally woken up to the dangers of the Chinese critical mineral monopoly. The country controls 60% of critical mineral production and 85% of the world’s processing capacity. Yet these often-cited numbers can obscure even more frightening vulnerabilities.

Almost immediately after he came down the golden escalator in 2015, Donald Trump was being compared to Andrew Jackson. From his anti-establishment tenor to his breaking of norms to his raucous times in office, media observers and even the president himself have highlighted their similarities. “It was during the Revolution that Jackson first confronted and defied an arrogant elite. Does that sound familiar to you?” Trump asked in 2017 during a speech marking Jackson’s 250th birthday.

But less discussed is the comparison between Jackson’s own revolution and Trump’s, particularly the endings. While this is understandable—Trump has in many respects served as America’s past, present, and political future for the last decade, and an ending to his time at the center of American life is difficult to fathom—as 2028 draws near, those who wish for Trump’s revolution to extend past his presidencies should look to how Jackson handled his own movement after he exited the White House.

Though Jackson left office in 1837, he did not leave the political scene. In fact, his political revolution was only half over. In managing the second half, Jackson would go on to become the most powerful former president in American history—and would see his revolution through to its conclusion.

In February 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision on in vitro fertilization (IVF) reshaped the national debate around fertility and pushed both Democrats and Republicans to present themselves as champions of reproductive health. As President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris fought for the White House, IVF shifted from a niche medical issue to a test of how each side understood family, women’s health, and how far the “right” to have a child goes.

What began as a legal question—whether embryos created through IVF are considered human persons—quickly widened into a debate about rising infertility rates and whether the country should move beyond IVF to treat the root causes of infertility itself. During President Trump’s second term, he has unexpectedly found himself at the center of these debates.

The Ruling Heard Around the World

In many ways, the United States had been building toward this moment for decades. President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics (2001–2009) was one of the first political efforts to think seriously about the rights of and responsibilities owed to human embryos.

One of the core executive powers is that of prosecuting criminals. Article II of the Constitution assigns “the executive power”—all of it—to the president of the United States. In practice, the power to execute the laws against those who have violated them is delegated from the president to the attorney general, the Department of Justice which she heads, and the 93 U.S. attorneys spread across the country.

Yet since he took office for the second time last January, President Trump and his attorney general, Pam Bondi, have had a heck of a time getting their people in place. Of the roughly 50 U.S. attorney nominations the president has sent to the Senate, fewer than half—just 19—had been confirmed by December 15, and all of those but three were confirmed en masse in October, some 10 months after Trump took office. Although another 13 were confirmed en masse on December 18, 14 are still awaiting confirmation as we approach the one-year mark of Trump’s second term.

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.

Minnesota ICE (ft. Kyle Schideler) | The Roundtable Ep. 300

For years, AI has been surrounded by extreme predictions of ushering in either catastrophe or paradise, with breakthroughs in machine intelligence repeatedly promised as imminent for well over a decade. Elon Musk has recently stated that artificial general intelligence, where AI matches or exceeds human-level capabilities across tasks, could arrive as early as later this year. A reasonable person might assume that’s optimistic, but it nevertheless merits a serious look at what that means for Americans and our politics.

Many on the Right are correctly concerned about what this transition could look like for our nation. As government spending at all levels exceeds 40% of GDP, the reality is that it will be a political issue with implications for both this year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential election. Figures like Steve Bannon and Ron DeSantis are staking out pro-regulatory positions on AI, emphasizing risk mitigation and regulations that could alter the development of this technology. The regulatory appetite will likely only increase as we see the impact on the economy grow—a fact that must be reckoned with.  

We share a positive vision for the future AI may bring, where it dismantles bloated bureaucracies, unleashes economic growth, and rewards high-agency individuals to build the future we want to live in.

It has been a healthy development that parts of the conservative movement over the last decade or so have become increasingly skeptical of the Republican establishment’s slavish devotion to excessive individualism, indiscriminate immigration, and globalism.

In a recent First Things article, R.R. Reno pointed to America’s original Progressives—and to Woodrow Wilson in particular—as sources of inspiration for today’s conservative reassessment, because they too yearned for greater solidarity as they contended against the excesses of individualism. While I sympathize with Reno’s aims, Wilson and his fellow Progressive fathers of our modern state should not serve as guides to escaping our present mess—after all, they were the figures most responsible for bringing it upon us.  

Conservatism is a divided movement today. But if we’re honest, it almost always has been, coming as it did out of the shotgun marriage of traditionalists and individualists. What united the diverse elements of the conservative movement, however, was their opposition to the collectivism and statism foisted on us by the likes of Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. It is a sign of just how precarious our times have become—and of just how badly establishment conservatism has fallen short—that sensible conservatives should now turn for inspiration to those whose principal mission was to overturn the American political tradition and replace it with the modern state.

At the time of his death in the summer of 1987, James Burnham was falling into obscurity. Today, though, his work has surged rapidly in prominence on the Right, especially among some of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters. The reasons for this merit close attention.

At one time, Burnham was widely known as one of America’s sharpest Marxist intellectuals. His most recent biographer, intellectual historian David T. Byrne, ably captures the young Burnham’s contradictions in James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography: a professor of philosophy at New York University, unapologetically bourgeois and completely in his element at black-tie dinner parties, he could respectfully engage Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Yet he was also a militant Marxist and a trusted protégé of Leon Trotsky, whom he met and befriended in the 1930s. Distraught over the mass unemployment that was then sweeping across the United States, he admired the ferocious determination of the Marxist revolutionaries who promised an overthrow of America’s supposedly irredeemable capitalist system. Byrne writes that he “loved the idea of violent revolution.”

The alternate reality Democrats have constructed is falling apart in real time. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the following when asked to comment on an ICE agent’s shooting of a woman in Minneapolis who was attempting to run over him with her car: “What we saw today was a criminal murder [of] a woman [who was shot] in the head while she was trying to escape and flee for her life.”

She then called “disgusting” the “editorializing” of those who argue that the ICE agent was in front of the car as it was accelerating, just before he fired. “Watch it for yourself, watch it for yourself,” she concluded, with supreme confidence that any viewer would see with the same skew of her own lenses.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey went even harder over the rhetorical cliff in responding to the shooting. He classified interpretations of the ICE officer’s action as self-defense as “bull***t” and demanded that ICE “get the f**k out of Minneapolis.” Mayor Mamdani in New York followed suit, calling the event a “murder” and a “horror.”

It is a stark bit of evidence of how American society has been warped by the twisted rhetoric of the radical Left regarding political conflict in our country.

“I think, in many ways, the uniformed military may help save us from this president.” – Senator Mark Warner on MS NOW

One of the reasons why civilians living in the Western world have comparatively high levels of public trust in their militaries is that their service members are taught to obey only lawful orders, the kind that satisfy basic moral and constitutional demands. That’s an important principle for most Americans, whose peace of mind relies on our military being under civilian control.

But what happens if a revolutionary movement works to divide the chain of command from elected lawmakers? Congressional Democrats, in partnership with mainstream media figures and establishment actors, have been running just such a play.

Judging by the War Department’s actions to capture cosplay Venezuelan “President” Nicolás Maduro and his wife, it seems that the latest attempts to cast Donald Trump as a dictator in the minds of America’s men and women in uniform have failed. Yet it would be a catastrophic mistake to dismiss the highly organized effort to turn the U.S. military against President Trump as more of the same partisan rhetorical games of the past. Had the Left succeeded, helicopters could have been hovering over the White House instead of a compound in Caracas. In their minds, that remains the desired outcome.

Perhaps no group of scholars has investigated the principles of the American Founding more seriously than the students of Leo Strauss. The bicentennial celebrations of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution produced notable Straussian commentaries, including the still-influential essay by Martin Diamond, “Ethics and Politics: The American Way.” Although those who studied directly under Strauss have, for the most part, retired or passed, we can expect the students of those students to take the lead as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration and, in a few years, of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Yet Straussians, famously, disagree about the meaning of America. Following Diamond, so-called “East Coast” Straussians contend the founding was “low but solid,” grounded primarily and essentially in preserving life, liberty, and property and nothing more, thus eschewing or at best downplaying the cultivation of virtue and morality. So-called “West Coast” Straussians interpret America more favorably, even claiming that it is the “best regime” of Western civilization, as Harry V. Jaffa argued in these pages. West Coasters maintain that America, properly understood, aims at goodness and nobility. Why so much disagreement? More importantly, who gets America right?

Ronald J. Pestritto has done a splendid job in supplying us with a succinct account of the ideological origins of the administrative state, its evolution, and the attempts by Donald Trump and some of his predecessors to rein it in. Essentially a fourth branch of government, the administrative state has taken over most of the functions of government, yet is not directly responsible to any elected official.

Its establishment and expansion presuppose the existence of what Hegel called “the universal class”—an impartial, benevolent, all-wise cohort of Platonic Guardians apt to take better care of us than we would be capable of doing ourselves, even if we were blessed with ample resources. Such an arrangement makes a mockery of our pretension that, as human beings, we have the capacity to govern ourselves, and that it is incumbent on us to do so. How can there be liberty and personal responsibility when our conduct is governed in nearly every particular by individuals over whom we exercise no leverage? And how can there be a redress of grievances when our true rulers are largely beyond our reach?

The American Founders freely acknowledged that natural rights were granted by God—“endowed by their Creator,” to use their language. They and their early republic successors saw the United States as an example to the rest of the world in practicing the art of self-government. But what bears remembering in our own day is that they did not believe the United States was a home for all the world’s freedom-loving people. Instead, constitutional nationalists like Daniel Webster understood the U.S. as a teacher of mankind, a republican people seeking to pass along the blessings of liberty they cultivated to their posterity.

Due to an explosion in unrestrained Enlightenment universalism, Democrats of Webster’s day wanted to obliterate national borders and all non-democratic governments. Webster affirmed those same universal natural rights, but believed they could only be truly expressed through the particular history of the people of the American republic. It was not America’s job to tear down borders or obliterate national distinctions. It was America’s duty to teach all nations the value of natural rights by their example so that every nation might embrace natural rights in its own particular way, through its own institutions.

America was a nation founded upon universal principles, but those principles could only be truly expressed through the historical development and experience of the particular people who called themselves Americans.

The social media hashtag #NeverTrump first appeared in June 2015, days after Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy. For the balance of that year, social media derision attracted less attention than Trump himself, mostly due to the widespread belief that Trump’s campaign was self-extinguishing, which argued against pointless efforts to bring about an already inevitable defeat. In election cycles since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide victory, unlikely protest candidates for the GOP presidential nomination—Pat Robertson, Ron Paul, Herman Cain—had briefly surged in the polls, only to give way to a conventional politician who ended up as the party’s nominee. Bill Clinton observed that, when selecting a presidential nominee, there is an almost anthropological difference between Democrats, who fall in love with a previously obscure politician (George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama), and Republicans, who fall in line behind an established one (Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney).

Ronald Pestritto’s article on the Trump Administration’s efforts to tame the administrative state helpfully offers what he calls a “brief snapshot,” focusing primarily on the administration’s project to reshape administrative law to buttress presidential control over the bureaucracy through regulatory review and firing authority. His longer Provocation offers an exceptional and more thorough introduction to these and other issues, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand why the administrative state presents such a fundamental challenge to American constitutionalism.

The core principle that animates Pestritto’s article and Provocation is the consent of the governed—a principle enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as a prerequisite of any just government. According to the Founders, our natural equality means that we cannot be governed by another without our consent. To accept government without consent would be tantamount to admitting that there are rulers who are so naturally superior that they may rule us against our will. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote just before the celebration of the Declaration’s 50th anniversary that “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

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.

Maduro No Más: Venezuela’s Future After His Capture ft. Josh Treviño & R.J. Pestritto | The Roundtable Ep. 299

Nicolás Maduro is in U.S. custody, pleading not guilty to federal drug and weapons charges. What does his capture mean for Venezuela, American foreign policy, and the global order? And how does this moment connect to the domestic fight over America’s administrative state? Josh Treviño of AFPI unpacks the geopolitical aftermath of Maduro’s arrest, and R.J. Pestritto of Hillsdale College discusses his latest publication about the rise of America’s unelected bureaucracy: Government by the Unelected: How It Happened, and How It Might Be Tamed.

R.J. Pestritto’s “How the Trump Administration Is Taming the Administrative State” argues that President Donald Trump’s attacks on independent agencies seek to restore democratic accountability to the administrative state. For once, I find that Professor Pestritto has not gone as far as he could have. The fight over the removal of federal commissioners is only part of a larger campaign to free the executive from the misguided “reforms” of the Watergate era. The goal is not just to render the independent agencies democratically accountable, but more broadly to restore the “energy in the executive” that is the “definition of good government,” as Alexander Hamilton declared in Federalist 70.

The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine was barely a month old when the president ran a successful one-hour military operation, with no American casualties, that captured Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro.

Most of the responses thus far have been one-dimensional, for better or worse: “Trump grabbed a wanted narcoterrorist cartel leader to stand trial.” “He’s starting another war for oil to help his capitalist cronies.” “He’s getting us into another war of choice.” “He’s betrayed his base and done a regime change as a tool of the (insert hidden hand here).” These arguments are simple and easy to understand. They range from the politically and legally tidy to stale anti-imperialist Marxism and paranoid isolationism, which often sound like the same thing, to the ragebait trolling of the gullible. But they all fail to understand the full gravity of the administration’s accomplishment in Venezuela.

In capturing Maduro, Trump has removed a key pillar that, if played wisely, could compromise the web of entangling alliances of many of our most dangerous adversaries.

Operation Absolute Resolve, paralleling the collapse of the Islamic Republic of Iran, just might have forestalled Communist China’s expected invasion of Taiwan. The synchronicity is perfect. Maduro joins Iran’s mullahs in a pas de deux to the bottom, while the Cuban Communist regime, constantly suckling at a wealthy patron’s teat for 65 years, now faces a fatal weaning.

Everyone remembers the famous warning Benjamin Franklin reportedly gave Elizabeth Willing Powel as he and his fellow framers left the Constitutional Convention’s final session: they’d created “a republic, if you can keep it.” What’s less understood is that we didn’t.

Ronald J. Pestritto’s new Provocation from the Center for the American Way of Life brings the welcome news that valiant efforts have begun to restore the lost republican framework that those great men designed. But since most Americans believe we still live under the regime forged in Philadelphia, what’s equally valuable in Pestritto’s essay is his lucid reminder of just how we squandered the brilliant contrivance that James Madison shepherded through the Convention: the self-governing republic formed, as Alexander Hamilton wrote, by “reflection and choice” rather than by “accident and force,” arguably the finest achievement of the Western Enlightenment.

Today, the concept of “national security” is a staple of our political vocabulary, common in everyday language and entrenched in official institutions such as the National Security Council. But it was not always thus. Total Defense by Andrew Preston, a Canadian who is now a history professor at the University of Virginia after nearly 20 years on the faculty of Cambridge University, traces the rise of this concept and how it displaced earlier notions of national defense during the course of the 20th century. It is an important history, and one with underappreciated implications. 

The book’s subtitle—The New Deal and the Invention of National Security—distills its thesis: the concept of national security as we know it today (involving military and foreign policy matters not limited to territorial defense) coalesced during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. Before the New Deal era, “national security” was used relatively rarely, and often to refer to something more like economic and political stability or, in the 19th century, national unity versus sectional interests. But in the 20th century, a new vocabulary was required to grapple with increasingly grave foreign threats that did not involve the imminent invasion of U.S. territory. Such a vocabulary was largely lacking in World War I, but the term “national security” emerged in the years leading up to World War II. 

We no longer live in a republican regime, properly speaking. We are instead governed by a class of administrators whose claim to rule is based on expertise rather than the consent of the governed. As Ronald J. Pestritto argues, President Trump’s administration has embarked “on the most extensive project since at least the 1930s to reclaim executive power from unelected bureaucrats and judges.” It’s hard to disagree with Pestritto’s observation that, in a more constitutionally sound world, we would not have to rely on the executive branch alone to do this heavy lifting. But as the saying goes, here we are. Whatever one might think of the current occupant of the White House, he is elected by the people—which is more than can be said of federal bureaucrats and judges. Ironically, those who complain most loudly about assaults on “our democracy” are least committed to restoring it.

Nick Fuentes is a problem. His influence is growing, fueled by his deft channeling of valid grievances. He has been further buoyed by neoconservatives and the progressive Left, both of which are desperate for “Nazi” bogeymen to validate their anti-MAGA hysterics. However, their ritual denunciations of Fuentes and his groyper legions are worse than useless. They merely encourage groyperism by providing a bigger kick of frisson due to breaking social taboos.

Chris Rufo argues that Fuentes’s critics misapprehend the groyper phenomenon by taking it in earnest instead of recognizing the “hyperreal” run amok. The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard used the term to denote the condition of postmodernity wherein our representations of reality become more phenomenologically real to us than reality itself, until they detach from reality entirely. “Emptied out, [signs] then circulate through digital media,” writes Rufo, “where they drive the discourse and, while purely derivative, still spark real emotional involvement.”

The United States Constitution establishes a republic, not a monarchy. If an American president ever had royalist or autocratic aspirations, it would pose an existential threat to the Constitution. Numerous Americans believe that’s what made President Richard Nixon so dangerous. When House Speaker Carl Albert denounced Nixon’s “one‐man rule” in 1973, he was channeling the opinion of many at the time—and since. But removing a monarch from office is no smooth, straightforward affair. If it’s true that Nixon acted like a king, then the closest the country has ever come to regicide was the drama of Watergate. The scandal began with the arrest on June 17, 1972 of five men working for the Republican Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP), who were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, located in the Watergate Office Building. The scandal appeared to end with Nixon’s resignation speech two years later, on August 8, 1974. The successful removal of the president took presidential authority down in its wake, condemning any president who tries to recover it as another Nixon, another monarch-in-the-making. This has itself become a scandal, a stumbling block to understanding some of the most tumultuous years in American history, when the country and its politics changed forever.

Gen Z women, the most liberal demographic in the country, are becoming a powerful share of the electorate. Yet conservatives are misreading what actually drives our political decisions. While the legacy media fixates on a supposed surge of right-leaning youth, the reality is more complicated. Young women are not moving right because Republicans keep repeating the same mistakes Democrats made with young voters in the last election cycle. 

Last year, I wrote about former presidential hopeful Kamala Harris’s failed attempt at being hip with the cool girls during her 2024 campaign. During a year when women were suffering sexual violence in conflicts from Gaza to Ukraine, and when the prospect of marriage and family felt economically out of reach, Harris had countless opportunities to show young women she understood our concerns. Instead, she fixated on the fact that British musician Charli XCX made a pop culture reference about her, invited social media influencers to the Democratic National Convention, and appeared on a sex podcast while Americans were dying in a hurricane. Harris’s endeavor to win over the youth was more than wildly unsuccessful. It was vapid, unserious, and embarrassing. It communicated a belief that young women’s concerns begin and end with oversexed pop culture. 

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.

We Wish You a Merry Christmas | The Roundtable

This week, hosts Ryan and Spencer sit down as the year closes out to share their Christmas plans and recommendations: music, theater, food, drink, and more! Stay tuned in the new year!

As we close out 2025, the Trump Administration has racked up many big wins. But none are as significant as what President Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth have done to repair the recruitment crisis that took place during President Biden’s watch.

When I served in the House of Representatives, I chaired the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, so I saw firsthand how bad things got under Biden, especially at the Pentagon and in our military.

When Biden was president, he presided over the worst recruitment crisis since our military became an all-volunteer force over 50 years ago.

In 2022, the Army set a goal to recruit 60,000 new soldiers, but it only managed to recruit 45,000. That’s 15,000 soldiers short. And the same thing happened again the following year, when the Army was again 15,000 soldiers short of its 65,000 recruitment goal. When you add up the recruitment losses under President Biden between 2021 and 2025, the Army shrank by 40,000 soldiers due to a lack of recruits. That’s as many as four divisions of troops.

The Navy fared no better. In 2023, it was 7,500 sailors short of its recruitment goal of 37,000. In 2024, it was nearly 5,000 short of its goal of over 40,000 new sailors. So between 2021 and 2025, the Navy shrank by 16,000 sailors, which is about three aircraft carriers’ worth of United States sailors.

That’s how bad the recruitment crisis got during Joe Biden’s watch.

The assassins who conspired against Julius Caesar could have stabbed their victim in the street, but they chose to commit their crime in the Curia of Pompey while the Senate was in session. The location’s symbolism was part of the message they intended to send. Charlie Kirk was assassinated on a college campus with a microphone in his hand as he answered questions from the crowd. It was the style of debate that earned him the love of millions and the admiration of many powerful figures, including the president of the United States. It was also the activity that led his murderer to mark him as someone who “spreads too much hate” and therefore deserved to die.

Charlie Kirk was a once-in-a-century talent who will not be replaced. He had boundless energy, acute judgment, and a capacity to evolve that was unusual in a public figure. His organization, Turning Point USA (TPUSA), and its political affiliate, Turning Point Action, managed a turnout operation for President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign that helped achieve the biggest popular-vote victory in a generation. Kirk himself could have been on a presidential ticket someday, possibly even the first ticket for which he would have been eligible. Had he lived, he would have turned 35 a month before the 2028 election.

D.C. wasn’t supposed to be like this. Hard as it is to believe today, the capital was set apart as its own district not to make it an untouchable bureaucratic citadel, but to make it work for all Americans. Unattached to any one state and free from the control of any one constituency, our government was supposed to serve the whole country. Decades of misunderstanding, however, have muddled this design. Federalization gives us a fighting chance of restoring it.

“Ana minkum wa ileikum,” shouted 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani, newly elected mayor of New York, to the heaving crowd in Brooklyn’s Paramount Theater just before midnight on Election Night. I’m one of you!

What did he mean by that? Mamdani, after all, can come off as almost comically foreign. Look at the way he waves as he walks to the podium. He doesn’t swing his arm like a regular American. He doesn’t even wiggle his hand, as the late queen did. He frantically flaps his fingertips against his thumbs, the way kindergarteners do when they are pretending to listen to an imaginary friend. There’s something a bit “off” about Mamdani, like those German spies in old movies who, despite their perfect English, give themselves away by not knowing who won the last World Series. Or like Barack Obama, who proclaimed his affection for the Chicago White Sox and then proved unable to name a single player who’d ever taken the field for them. (Mamdani fends off baseball questions, such as whether he’s a Yankees or a Mets fan, by professing himself a fan of English soccer.)

Foreign policy and international relations are not disconnected from domestic politics—they are intimately intertwined. As I previously argued at The American Mind, the downsides of imperial foreign policy involve not only the possibility of being routed abroad, but also corroding social relations between citizens and their representatives at home. Perhaps the clearest recent example of this is the tragic shootings of two National Guardsmen in our nation’s capital by an Afghan national who was resettled in the U.S. after the war in Afghanistan.

Jeremy Carl is surely right that many of our Afghan allies are far from benevolent allies like the British or Canadians, as evidenced by reports from our own soldiers of serial pederasty amongst the Afghan National Police. But we should also analyze the extent to which the shootings can be described as “blowback.” It is reasonable to ask to what extent U.S. policymakers laid the groundwork for these sorts of attacks by our intimate involvement in nation-building in Afghanistan.

As part of its celebration of the 250th anniversary of American independence, the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life has published my Provocation, “Government by the Unelected: How it Happened, and How it Might be Tamed.” This full-length essay seeks to assess how the Founders’ principles have fared after 250 years. I argue that government by the consent of the governed has gradually diminished—especially in the 20th and 21st centuries—and has been substantially replaced by the government of a permanent, unelected, and allegedly expert class.

The fuller work traces the history of this development, pointing both to the rise of the Progressives in the latter part of the 19th century and to the role of the federal courts in enabling the Progressive remaking of American government during the 20th century. These phenomena will not be unfamiliar to readers of my scholarly work or that of others in the Claremont Institute’s orbit.

Ladies and gentlemen: it is a great pleasure to be with you tonight in the People’s Republic of New York. Two days ago the voters in their wisdom elected as mayor by a comfortable margin Zohran Mamdani—a socialist, an immigrant, a critic of Israel and of Zionism, son of a movie director and a Columbia professor of postcolonialism, the holder of a degree in “Africana Studies,” a 34-year-old whose experience extends to co-founding the Bowdoin College chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and being a backbench New York State assemblyman for the last five years, with stints as a rap producer and tenant organizer. Except for being a member of Democratic Socialists of America rather than the Democratic Party, Mr. Mamdani is in every respect a worthy successor of Barack Hussein Obama as a modern-day progressive statesman.

One of the most striking features of the Trump Administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy is not merely what it argues, but how it argues. This is not accidental. Michael Anton, one of its chief architects, is not a technocrat or a committee scribe. He is a political theorist in the classical mold, deeply aware that ideas endure not merely because they may be correct in the abstract, but because they are memorable, vivid, and intelligible to the moral imagination.

Political philosophy is rarely remembered for syllogisms alone. Plato’s Republic is canonized because it shows justice. We remember the image of the just man likened to a well-bred dog, fierce toward his enemies yet gentle toward those he knows. Plato compressed an entire moral psychology into a single, unforgettable metaphor. We remember the cave not because it proves an epistemological claim step by step, but because it dramatizes the human condition in a way no abstract argument ever could.

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.

Now It Can Be Told | The Roundtable Ep. 298

Australia has suffered its deadliest mass shooting in decades, allegedly perpetrated by father and son Sajid and Naveed Akram, on the first night of Hannukah. Meanwhile in Germany, (yet another) planned attack at a Christmas market was foiled. This week, Spencer and Mike discuss problems that have finally gotten too overwhelming for even the BBC and the New York Times to ignore, from mass migration to the DEI crusade against young white men. Plus: Christmas recommendations!

Conservative jurisprudence has been casting about for over 40 years, trying to find an anchoring ground or even a stable definition of “originalism.” But with the advent of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), overruling Roe v. Wade (1973), the tagline for conservative jurisprudence might now be, “Conservative Jurisprudence: Seeking Justice by Changing the Subject.” And the mission statement: “We carefully, and steadily, steer around those questions of moral substance that stand at the heart of our gravest cases.”

In the Dobbs case, Kavanaugh took his bearings by noting that the country was deeply divided on this contentious matter. One notable sign, he said, was that “many pro-life advocates forcefully argue that a fetus is a human life”—”forcefully argue,” as though there is no long-settled, empirical truth on this matter, found in all of the textbooks of embryology, as though there never could be a truth of the matter. In other words, in this mode of conservative jurisprudence, the judges must affect not to know the plainest objective truth that bears on the practical judgment here.

The Trump Administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) provides a rare official statement on the main threats facing the United States, as well as lays out strategies to address them. Typically released once per presidential term, this administration’s NSS focuses on how the U.S. can reestablish its military and economic might in a world that’s clearly moved well beyond the post-Cold War era. As stated in its introduction, the document aims to be a “roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history, and the home of freedom on earth.”  

Part of advocating a foreign policy of “principled realism” is pointing out how Europe, an important U.S. partner going back centuries, has been actively rejecting its historic ways of life.

The Trump NSS details several serious challenges the continent faces, including economic stagnation. However, that issue is overshadowed by the impact of mass immigration, which is transforming Europe by “creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.” The NSS forecasts that if current trends persist, Europe may become unrecognizable within two decades, as it is at risk of “civilizational erasure.”

Northwestern University recently struck a deal with the United States Department of Education (ED). The university will pay a $75 million fine and guarantee there will be no more Jew-hating on the quad and no race discrimination in the admissions office or on faculty hiring committees. Then, federal money will start to flow again. But can Northwestern be trusted to honor its end of the bargain?

It is honestly amazing to be noticed, even if negatively, by someone of the eminence of Steven Pinker. I respect Pinker because (among other reasons) Steve Sailer, whom I also respect, respects him and has explained in terms I can understand why Pinker’s work is worthy of respect.

Pinker and I have one major disagreement (and I assume many others), which is brought out in his tweet: I have a foreboding sense of apprehension about the future; Pinker by contrast wrote two whole books arguing that now is the greatest time to be alive. What I recall of them is that Pinker’s case centers around, first, a decline in violence. Which I don’t doubt is true in many respects, though as Sailer points out, it can be made easier or harder to argue the world is less violent than it used to be depending on when you start the clock. Second, Pinker enthuses about various advances of science and technology, much of which I would have to concede, especially since I am a beneficiary and consumer of so much of it.

Chile rarely captures sustained American attention. It is distant, orderly, and often portrayed as a reliable outpost of stability in South America. But this image is vanishing—and the shift matters far more to the United States than many realize.

Chile is a crucial democratic partner in a region where China and Russia are expanding their influence. Its economy is tightly linked to U.S. markets, its copper and lithium reserves are central to American technological and defense supply chains, and its politics influences the balance of the entire Southern Cone.

The country features a two-round system for its presidential elections, the second round of which will be held on December 14. Two candidates are running: one from the Right and the other from the far left-wing. A Communist victory in Chile—or a prolonged period of instability—would affect U.S. geopolitical, economic, and security interests.

But the deeper reason Chile matters to Americans is that its current crisis illustrates a broader lesson: economic success without a strong cultural foundation cannot sustain a free society. The United States faces its own internal cultural fractures. What is happening in Chile is not only a regional concern—it is a cautionary tale.

To understand how Chile arrived at this fragile moment, one must look at its origins and the long-standing tensions that have shaped its national identity.

If you only read social media, you’d think the conservative legal movement is in dire straits. Politicians lash out at judges and at the Federalist Society. Some on the Right grumble that originalism has yielded little more than panel discussions and law‑review symposia. In this very forum, friends suggest that our moment demands a new “constitutional morality,” a more ambitious jurisprudence that will somehow arrest civilizational decline.

Count me unconvinced. The short answer to “What comes after originalism?” is more originalism, plus better policy. The movement’s future lies in consolidating the gains of the last decade, deepening our commitment to the Constitution’s text and original public meaning, and building political and cultural institutions that can address the “crises of belonging, fertility, and meaning.” Courts have an important—but limited—role in that project. Asking judges to save the country is not just unrealistic; it’s a category error.

Every few years, someone tells us the United States is not really the child of the long tradition of republicanism, English common law, colonial self-government, the natural rights principles enshrined in our Declaration, and the debates involving the framing of a new government that transpired in Philadelphia after the war. No, we’re subtly led to assume that our political father is someone else entirely: this time, it’s the Haudenosaunee—the Iroquois Confederacy.

Ken Burns’s new PBS documentary on the American Revolution leans into that claim, suggesting in the first episode’s preamble that the very idea of our Union was inspired by the Iroquois. By subtly juxtaposing the Iroquois and the Founding Fathers, viewers are invited to believe that if they thought Franklin, Washington, and company fathered America, then they’ve been building the wrong monuments.

Burns tells a vivid story. But it’s also a deeply misleading one—and the very treaty on which his opening narrative depends says almost the opposite of what he needs it to say.

The scene in question is the 1744 Lancaster treaty council. Representatives of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia met with Iroquois leaders to settle land disputes and keep them allied against the French. During the talks, an Iroquois speaker did just as Burns relates—namely, he advised the colonial governors to live at peace with one another and act together as the Iroquois nations did. But the colonial reply—effectively omitted by Burns—matters just as much.