The Claremont Institute Feed Items

Columbus Day ought to provoke reflection as much as celebration—and not just because the White House is emphatically committed to the latter. It was the right move, of course, for the administration to confidently reject acts of erasure like “Indigenous Peoples Day,” and the whole apparatus of academia, media, and elite-left cultural bludgeoning behind it. We should understand what exactly was meant to be erased.

Although Columbus Day in its historical roots is a de facto holiday for Italian Americans, that group was never really the target of those attacking Christopher Columbus or the holiday in his name. Rather, the opposition to Columbus and his day came due to enmity toward the values and roots of those Italian Americans—and every other American worth the name.

Columbus’s Journal of the First Voyage opens with “In nomine Domini nostri Jesu Christi (In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ),” revealing that his journey was an act of faith. He navigated the dangerous waters of the Atlantic to bring about the evangelization of the world foretold in sacred Scripture.

A young person wanting to learn something of American history could do worse than to watch the works of director John Ford (1894-1973).

One of the great American filmmakers—in my view, the greatest—Ford delved deeply and repeatedly into American history, and not just that of the American West for which he is most famed. You also have Ford’s films on the Second World War (including the award-winning war documentaries he made while on active duty for the U.S. Navy), Abraham Lincoln, and the Great Depression. There are Ford films that take place during the American Revolutionary War, the American Civil War, and the First World War. Themes addressed in his films include American race relations, immigration, religion, and urban politics.

One of Ford’s crowning achievements is the so-called Cavalry Trilogy, three films starring John Wayne about the U.S. Cavalry in the West, made between 1948 and 1952. They are all about the same subject and in roughly the same setting, but the story and characters are different in each.

I’d like to propose that John Ford had a second trilogy—perhaps more loosely connected than the Cavalry films, certainly less known and less celebrated, but still a triumph of All-American filmmaking and worthy of rediscovery.

With 2025’s V-E Day and V-J Day anniversaries behind us, the Second World War will soon be 80 years in history’s rearview mirror. Very few veterans of the conflict remain alive. According to records in the National World War II Museum, as of the last survey in 2024, only 66,143 soldiers were still with us—less than 1% of the Americans who served.

True, many institutions that emerged out of the war to form the architecture of postwar international relations endure, from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank created at Bretton Woods in July 1944, to the United Nations born at Yalta in February 1945. But their relevance recedes further every year. When was the last time anyone paid attention to a U.N. Security Council resolution, much less one from its General Assembly? Even the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which inspired screaming headlines and protests in the 1990s over their interference in the affairs of developing nations, seem today like forgotten relics of a bygone age. Why, then, does this “Good War,” known to most Americans only from Hollywood films, invoke such passion?

The assassination of Charlie Kirk was not just evil, it was cowardly—and above all, dishonorable.

That an action might be dishonorable used to bother men, dissuading them from perpetrating such an act. When Themistocles was on the run from both the Spartan authorities and his own Athenian countrymen, he fled to the royal court of Molossia. Though Themistocles and King Admetus were mortal enemies, he supplicated his host. Themistocles said that if the king wished to take vengeance on him, honor demanded he should pick another time, when the two were on equal footing. With thoughts of honor swirling in his mind, the Molossian king protected his guest from his pursuers.

Honor codes are the most powerful restraint—much more powerful than state law—on those who are able and willing to use violent force. No wonder we see honor so highly prized among warrior castes and the political classes of healthy nations—knights, Spartiates, the admiralty, military aristocracies, and so on. A sense of honor not only curbs chaotic violence among the energetic, but it also channels that aggression toward productive ends, even toward excellence.

However, left-wing activists have spent at least the last generation demolishing the edifice of honor in the hearts of young men. We are now reaping the whirlwind.

Losing the Telos

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.

Nobelesse Oblige | The Roundtable Ep. 288

The Trump Administration’s approach to the government shutdown is aimed above all at recovering the unitary executive as envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. Article II’s vesting clause, the epitome of “short and sweet,” empowers the president to control the executive branch, as Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist 70. Though the administrative state steadily seized the chief executive’s power throughout the 20th century, President Trump seems determined to wrest it back by reasserting his authority over the executive agencies under his purview.

In preparing for the shutdown, each agency created contingency plans for operating during a lapse in appropriations. These are required by law and managed under guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to ensure that essential government functions continue even when Congress fails to pass funding.

Each shutdown plan outlines an agency’s core mission, identifies which functions are critical, and lists how many employees will keep working and how many will be furloughed. It also explains how the agency will communicate with staff, why certain programs are allowed to continue, and how operations will restart once funding is restored.

Loyalty can elevate or enslave. Placed in truth, it anchors. Placed in tribe, it distorts. Though I have known both, I abandoned the latter and embraced the former. That is why when I look at Ilhan Omar and Charlie Kirk, I see two distinct moral universes.

Charlie’s foundation was faith in Christ and country, in family and the free market. His faith was that America embodies true freedom and dignity because our country was founded on biblical principles—principles that demand that power be checked and the weak be protected.

Ilhan Omar’s foundation rests on three pillars: clan, Islamism, and leftism. Each demands loyalty not to principle but to faction. Each reduces life to a struggle for dominance.

I know Omar’s world. It is a place without law, where men with swords and guns decide the fate of neighbors, where girls are cut to mark them as pure, where bribes stand in for justice. These are not random misfortunes, but the dynamics of the system Omar embodies. It incentivizes and rewards absolute and unchecked power—even at the expense of life, limb, and property.

Some years back during a conversation with Charles Murray about his justly praised book Coming Apart, Bill Kristol made perhaps the single most outrageous statement he has ever uttered in public. Murray’s book chronicled the decline in the traditional work ethic and other foundational values in the American lower classes, and Kristol suggested a solution. If the indigenous American lower classes are increasingly “decadent, lazy [and] spoiled,” Kristol said, “don’t you want to get new Americans in?”

The idea of replacing legacy Americans with immigrants is as distant from conservatism as one can get. The Americans described in Murray’s book are far more connected to American culture than any “new Americans” Kristol would like to see take their places. Given that, however, it is undeniable that there are significant problems with the white lower classes that need to be resolved.

Last week, the federal government “shut down” because the Senate could not get the required 60 votes to invoke cloture and pass a continuing resolution to keep the government funded. The CR had passed the House, was supported by a majority of the Senate, and would have been signed into law by President Trump. It was defeated, however, by a minority of senators (mostly Democrats) who refused to fund the government unless the Republicans would make concessions on some other matters.

This raises an oft-debated question: Should the Senate further limit the use of the filibuster, which per Senate rules requires a supermajority of 60 votes to proceed to a vote on most legislative items? The Senate has already disallowed filibusters in the case of presidential nominations to executive or judicial office. However, some have suggested going even further and eliminating the filibuster altogether.

These calls to remove the filibuster have typically come from Democrats. They have made this argument when they’ve controlled the Senate and have been frustrated by Republicans using the filibuster to impede their agenda. They’ve noted how some Southern senators sought to thwart the enactment of federal civil rights legislation through the use of the filibuster. More generally, they have emphasized the non-democratic character of the filibuster, which empowers a minority in the Senate to defeat legislation supported by the chamber’s majority.

At Wired, Laura Bullard writes that “Among the relatively few people associated with National Conservatism who do cite Schmitt openly in their own work are Thiel and Michael Anton, the essayist and sometime Trump administration official.”

We may leave to one side the extent to which I am “associated” with National Conservatism. I did not attend its last two conferences, having been invited and then disinvited in 2024 and not invited at all in 2025. I did sign its manifesto, an act I have come to regret for reasons Charles Kesler explains here.

But that is a quibble compared to the real whopper in the sentence quoted above. I have never, to the best of my knowledge—and I assume that I know my own oeuvre better than Bullard does—“cited” Carl Schmitt. A citation is a very specific thing: a quote or an idea attributed to an author that is typically accompanied by a footnote pointing to an exact source. Moreover, one may cite to signify approval or disapproval, or just to show that one is aware of the thing being cited. Bullard implies that my nonexistent citations of Schmitt signify approval. If she can show one instance of that in any of my writings, I promise to send her a set of steak knives. But I’m certain she can’t.

In his opening salvo, the esteemed Scott Yenor righteously scrutinizes the travesty of single-sex education at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI). Yenor lays bare the deleterious effects that forced sex integration has had on honor, cohesion, and the society into which graduates of the school march. What he emphasizes less, however, is how the Supreme Court’s decision in US v. Virginia fundamentally changed the nature of VMI’s military character, and the essential path to reclaiming same-sex spaces for military officer formation.

The most important part of Yenor’s essay is his proposal to create more VMIs that can force a legal and cultural reconsideration of issues involving sex in education and the military. This is a compelling recommendation, because responsibility lies with committed red state governors who have the authority to make bold moves to challenge existing institutions and create alternative ones.

The governor of West Virginia could establish a military academy with higher education credentials and, like VMI does today, endow a Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program at the school to serve as a pipeline into the military’s officer ranks. The character of this new service academy must be ironclad, inculcate a warrior ethos, and be set apart from the civil society that its graduates will pledge their lives to defend.

Freedom of speech on university campuses has collapsed. Left-leaning college administrators, faculty, and students have been silencing conservative voices, and conservative students are increasingly adopting the Left’s errant ways. The Trump Administration has launched a strong counterattack that also seems poised to suppress speech.

The First Amendment’s free speech guarantees are at the core of our liberties. As Justice Louis Brandeis explained in Whitney v. California (1927), “If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” Though set out in a concurring opinion, Justice Brandeis’s counter-speech doctrine has become the bedrock of free speech jurisprudence. In the milestone First Amendment case of United States v. Alvarez (2012), Justice Anthony Kennedy cited Justice Brandeis, opining, “The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.”

“Angelo.” With no surname necessary, the mere mention put Washington’s late-Cold War intelligence establishment on edge. Their tormenter was but a thirtysomething staffer on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Contrarily, to the Cold Warriors sacrificing their all to defend the nation from Communist subversion and nuclear-missile threats, that single name, like a messenger from heaven, brought comfort and joy.

Angelo Codevilla knew and understood that the country that took him in as a boy would preserve itself and its Founding principles by having the most capable intelligence and counterintelligence services the world had ever seen. “Most capable” didn’t mean the largest, or the most lavishly funded, or supplied with the most high-tech gear. It meant having the most creative, most principled, most virtuous, and wisest people doing the job.

Angelo watched the United States’ intelligence apparatus deteriorate. Visiting CIA headquarters over the years, he passed the stone inscription that the late and great CIA director Allen Dulles placed as what he intended as a permanent greeting: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free”—the Gospel According to John. In the last year of his life, Angelo saw the videos of CIA corridors festooned with mind-numbing murals and telescreens about diversity, equity, and inclusion. To Angelo Codevilla, who spoke Latin, DEI meant “of God.” A new god, a false one, possesses the American intelligence community today.

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.

Post-Kamala Clarity | The Roundtable Ep. 287

Sex-specific education is needed to preserve America’s self-governing republic. Though many are only now rediscovering single-sex public schooling, there is still space for it to exist within the framework established by the Supreme Court’s 1996 United States v. Virginia decision, as I argue in a just-released Provocation for the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. In that decision, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ruled for the 7-1 majority that the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), a public school, must admit women.

The Bush Administration sued VMI in the early 1990s, alleging that Virginia’s single-sex military school violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The Clinton Administration continued the case, and Virginia had to tailor its defense to the reigning civil rights framework. Since VMI’s discriminatory practices faced “intermediate scrutiny” from the courts, Virginia had to prove that its admissions policies supported practices that served important but gender-neutral educational goals.

Virginia asserted that men especially benefit from and are attracted to VMI’s distinctives, including its Marine-style, in-your-face “adversative” training methods, its lack of privacy, its egalitarian grooming and uniform standards, and its rigorous, stoical honor code.

“Now that everyone has seen the blatant white Christian nationalism on display at the Kirk memorial/political rally, here are some resources to help you learn more and resist more effectively.” This sentence was posted on X by Jemar Tisby, a protégé of the huckster Ibram X. Kendi. Tisby followed up that observation by helpfully pointing people to his own book, Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity with Racism, as a manual to combat the grave evils they had just witnessed in State Farm Stadium.

That Tisby would think to write and then publish this sentiment about Charlie Kirk’s memorial service shows the depths to which the Left has sunk. They are categorically rejecting the bonds of civic friendship that are necessary to keep our country whole. Instead of centering “whiteness,” they center race-based narcissism, envy, and pride, the modern Left’s unholy trinity.

Roughly a year before President Trump was inaugurated for the second time, I joined a group of 230 veterans in signing the Declaration of Military Accountability. It seeks justice for the violation of military members’ rights of conscience during the COVID era and calls for steps to be taken to make amends for abuses of command authority. Having lived through the terror of weaponized institutions being directed at us and our loved ones, those of us who are calling for a return to constitutional rule in the Armed Forces have no interest in an inquisition. It is not a technique we wish to make part of the American tradition. But systems of law remain trustworthy only when they uphold and administer justice.

There are three basic camps among top military management that enforced the Pentagon’s illegal shot mandate.

The Concerned Institutionalists had reservations about the legality and ethics of the Department of War’s COVID policies and enforced them with mercy and flexibility for those under their charge. They recognized that shot, mask, and testing mandates were morally suspect and tempered enforcement with sympathy. Though these supervisory officials personally adhered to immoral policies, they avoided acting in punitive ways toward subordinates who had moral and ethical concerns.

Andrew Beck’s “Assimilation and Its Discontents” helps us understand why assimilation is an urgent concern. Anthropologists and historians make it clear that human beings, from bands of hunter-gatherers to modern nation-states, have always lived in sociopolitical groups that were distinct from one another. This enduring, fundamental reality elevates the importance of determining each group’s far edge. Who’s in and who’s out? And by what standard do we make this distinction?

The United States of America has been not only one of the most heterogeneous social orders in human history, but also one of the most successfully heterogeneous. Even in America, however, there is a limit beyond which heterogeneity renders a nation incoherent in both senses of the term: it doesn’t make sense; and it can no longer hold together as a single sociopolitical entity wherein Americans feel they have important ties and obligations to one another for no reason other than a shared national identity. To exceed that limit, Beck warns, invites the collapse of our nation into “fractious, tribal chaos.”

Over the past few decades, countless “rules” or “laws” have been coined to describe the murmurations of internet behavior. One of the most enduring of these is Godwin’s Law, which holds that as an online discussion continues, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler or the Nazis approaches one. This “law” is as much a joke as a thesis, but the universality of the reductio ad Hitlerum suggests something fundamental to public thought.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, they played the role of Hitler. Ukraine, too, needed to be de-Nazified. On October 7, Hamas recreated the Holocaust. Now Israel is smeared as a génocidaire. Gun control, porn bans, or HOA bylaws—it’s all fascist. Be they strict teachers or world leaders, everyone is someone’s führer. For Alec Ryrie, this rhetorical cliche is proof that the West has chosen Adolf Hitler as its primary moral reference point, replacing Jesus Christ.

This claim was argued in 2021 by another British historian, Tom Holland: “Today, when we ask ourselves ‘what would Hitler have done?’, and do the opposite…our forebearers…wondered ‘what would Jesus have done,’ and sought to do the same.” Ryrie agrees: “Crosses and crucifixes have lost most of their power in our culture. It is possible to play with them, even joke about them, and no one really minds. Not so with swastikas.” Renaud Camus has described Hitler’s role as a moral symbol as his “second career.”

When 20-year-old loner Thomas Matthew Crooks ascended a sloped roof in Butler County, Pennsylvania, and opened fire, he unleashed a torrent of cliches. Commentators and public figures avoided the term “assassination attempt,” even if the AR-15 was trained on the head of a then-former president—instead, they condemned “political violence.”

“There is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy,” former president Barack Obama said. One year later, he added the word “despicable” to his condemnation of the assassin who killed Charlie Kirk. That was an upgrade from two weeks prior, when he described the shooting at Annunciation Catholic School by a transgender individual as merely “unnecessary.”

Anyone fluent in post-9/11 rhetoric knows that political violence is the domain of terrorists and lone wolf ideologues, whose manifestos will soon be unearthed by federal investigators, deciphered by the high priests of our therapeutic age, and debated by partisans on cable TV. The attempt to reduce it to the mere atomized individual, however, is a modern novelty. From the American Revolution to the Civil War, from the 1863 draft riots to the 1968 MLK riots, from the spring of Rodney King to the summer of George Floyd, there is a long history of Americans resorting to violence to achieve political ends by way of the mob.

One of the least understood but most consequential aspects of American government is the United States Federal Reserve System. Bankers, investors, and even the president sit with bated breath, waiting to see how the Fed will manage interest rates.

The Fed is so important to the world economy that the president sometimes may feel the need to voice his administration’s position and hope the chair of the Federal Reserve will acquiesce to his wishes. Sometimes, however, he may point out issues with the chair’s performance, puncturing the claim of central bank independence. President Trump recently accused Fed Chair Jerome Powell of being too late with interest rate cuts, “except when it came to the Election period when he lowered [interest rates] in order to help Sleepy Joe Biden, later Kamala, get elected.”

About a decade ago, a person I knew very well who had been very helpful to me in my campaigns when I was in the Senate said she had met a very impressive young man. He was going to start a group to go on college campuses and try to convince young Americans that ours is the greatest country in the history of the world, and that Marxism is bad.

And I remember thinking back then, I was a little skeptical. I said, “College campuses? You’re going to do that? Why don’t you start somewhere easier, like, for example, Communist Cuba?”

But my skepticism was proven wrong in place after place.

Over the last decade and a half, we’ve seen a renaissance. Understand where we were at that time in our history. Understand where we are still today in many places, where young Americans are actively told that everything they were taught—that all the foundations that made our society and our civilization so grand—was wrong. That they are all evil, that marriage is oppressive, that children are a burden, that America is a source of evil, not of good, in 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.

The Kirk Awakening | The Roundtable Ep. 286

Special guest Ryder Selmi, longtime friend of Charlie Kirk and Strategy Director at Beck & Stone, joins the hosts this week to recount his experience attending Charlie Kirk’s memorial service on Monday. There, Erika Kirk forgave her husband’s assassin in a moment of prayer, joined by Trump and more than 200,000 attendees at an Arizona stadium—a moment emblematic of Charlie’s faith and his movement. Reactions from the Left elite have ranged from bewilderment to spite, epitomized by Jimmy Kimmel’s distasteful attempt to pin the assassination on MAGA. The late-night host was then briefly pulled from air, now made a “martyr” by Hollywood to distract from their offenses. Plus: media recommendations!

Everyone is speculating about what drove a young man to assassinate Charlie Kirk. But for academics like us, the more pressing lesson lies not in the mind of the killer, but in the conditions that elevated Kirk to such notoriety.

Kirk’s voice echoed against the awkward silence of scholars who are afraid to speak out against ideas they know are wrong. On many campuses today, a dominant cohort of faculty and administrators openly promote progressive and liberal positions in policy, curriculum, and student life, while those with traditional or conservative views hold their tongues, fearing social backlash or professional reprisals. Among students, the same imbalance prevails: liberal voices are amplified while conservative and nonconforming perspectives struggle to be heard.

Such reticence from the dissenting few amplified the shock felt by the majority of students each time Kirk appeared on campuses to openly challenge what he saw as comfortable orthodoxy. Liberals and progressives were not prepared to receive any pushback to their assumptions about equity versus equality, Critical Race Theory, gender identity, cosmopolitanism, or the expansion of state power into private life.

In a world where a Supreme Court nominee can’t safely say what a woman is, perhaps we should be unfazed by a U.S. senator who insists that the concept of God-given natural rights is really crypto-Iranian theocracy. In the week leading up to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, that is exactly what Virginia Senator Tim Kaine claimed.

The Left has long recoiled from natural rights, which rest on a truth (gasp) about human nature (deeper gasp). They axiomatically hold that all rights are just privileges bestowed by the state and that there is no truth, only persuasive assertions that serve the Left’s power.

Senator Kaine therefore rejects the truth about human nature on which the American republic is founded: that all people—no matter their differences in ability or circumstances—have natural rights. That in the possession and exercise of these rights we are indeed equal. And that the source of these rights is God, not the state nor the common acquiescence of the community.

The U.S. Department of State is too bureaucratic, insular, and disconnected from the American people to meet today’s global challenges. For those reasons, Secretary Rubio announced a reduction in force and a broader reorganization of the department in July. These reforms should inspire hope in those wishing to enter a career in diplomacy and international relations. Above all, they need to be worthy of the American people’s trust and confidence. One hopes this is just the beginning of reforms that will create a State Department that is prepared for conflict around the world, agile in crisis, deliberate in strategy, and effective in delivering results for the American people.

Secretary Rubio’s reforms reflect the spirit of Harry S. Truman, namesake of the State Department’s headquarters. The last U.S. president without a college degree, Truman was born in the rural Missouri Ozarks in the small town of Lamar and raised outside Kansas City, Missouri. From humble beginnings, he learned the value of grit, service, and earning one’s keep—a reflection of Midwestern values.

In April 2022, I re-enlisted in the Air National Guard after a 12-year break in service. Having first taken the oath of enlistment at age 17 with the Air Force Reserve, I approached it this time with a deeper appreciation for its weight: to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

Three years have passed since that moment, and recent events have revealed something troubling: many service members either misunderstand this oath or treat it as a hollow formality. Following the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk, I have witnessed service members praise that act of cowardice and terrorism. But our oath is no mere ceremony. It must be the foundation of our duty, our professionalism, and our warrior ethos.

Military service members who glorify the killing of innocent Americans must be removed from our ranks.

“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil.” – Isaiah 5:20

On September 17, America celebrated its 238th Constitution Day—the day the framers of the Constitution signed the document destined to become “the supreme law of the land.” Today, September 22, we honor the 249th anniversary of the death of the young American hero Nathan Hale, who gave his life for his country in the early months of the American Revolution. These anniversaries have an especially poignant connection this year in light of the political assassination of Charlie Kirk, another young American hero who, like Nathan Hale, will be an inspiration to generations of Americans to come.

From all I have seen and heard, Charlie bore the same attitude that 21-year-old Nathan Hale made famous as he faced death at the hands of his British captors and said, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” America will always need its Nathan Hales and its Charlie Kirks—heroes willing to give “the last full measure of devotion” for their country’s cause. We can’t get on without them.

Though not every citizen will rise to the level of Hale or Kirk, we are equally held to high standards of citizenship, as seen in the oath of naturalization that every immigrant to the United States must take to become a citizen:

I have one short story to tell you about Charlie Kirk—my friend.  

He became a friend of mine because I interrogated him one time. Nineteen-year-olds are my specialty. I asked him some questions he couldn’t answer. And he was already becoming famous. And I noticed his reaction: he said, “What should I do?”  

And I said,

Well, you have to suffer. If you want to grow, you have to suffer. It’s hard to learn—into the night, crack of dawn in the morning. Start with the Bible. Read the classics. Study the founding of America. In those places you will find that there’s a ladder that reaches up toward God. And at the bottom of it are the ordinary good things that are around us everywhere. If we can call them by their names—they have being, and the beings of the good things are figments of God. You will find that article in Aristotle. You will find it in the Bible. You will find it in Madison and Jefferson. 

“How do I learn that?” he said, and I said, “You have to suffer. You have to study. You have to think.”  

I thought I’d never hear from him again.  

Within a month, he got ahold of my cell phone number, and he texted me a copy of a certificate of completion of a Hillsdale College online course. He would go on to do that 31 times.  

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has made abolishing property taxes for homeowners a centerpiece of his second-term agenda. This idea may sound appealing, but it would be unjust, unsustainable, set back Florida’s economic ascendance, and make the state an electorally inefficient “vote sink.” Instead of following Britain’s Tories in taking the easy route of pandering to rentier gerontocracy, DeSantis should return to making Florida a beacon of smart conservative policy.

The property tax reliably polls as America’s most unpopular major tax, primarily because it must be paid in large lump sums and does not fluctuate with family income. Nevertheless, DeSantis’s plan to eliminate property taxes on Florida residents’ primary residences, presumably funded by a sales tax hike, would be a serious mistake.

The accelerating ascent, ubiquity, and commercialization of artificial intelligence require a renewed focus on truly elite human capital if we are to safeguard the future of Western civilization—both from external adversaries like China and also, perhaps even more importantly, from ourselves, especially our postmodern and transhumanist tendencies.

We will need in the coming years an elite cadre of Americans residing at the top levels of national and state government and bureaucracy. And yet we are confronted by a very sad state of affairs across K-12 and postsecondary education, making the creation of such an elite class an increasingly difficult task.

Exhibit A of this problem was illustrated in a recent Atlantic article about the peak of elite credentialing institutions, Harvard. The article, titled “The Perverse Consequences of the Easy A,” documents an alarming trend after decades of grade inflation. This excerpt helps give a sense of the problem’s progression: “In 2011, 60 percent of all grades were in the A range (up from 33 percent in 1985). By the 2020-21 academic year, that share had risen to 79 percent.”

The assassination of Charlie Kirk—a law-abiding man peacefully speaking his mind in a public place to a crowd of people gathered to hear him—has touched off a new debate about “cancel culture.” Some on the Right who are understandably disgusted by seeing some on the Left gloat about, or even justify, Kirk’s murder have attempted to get such people fired from their jobs, with success in a number of cases. In response, the Left has accused the Right of hypocrisy for reversing course on the cancel culture that it very recently deplored.

What are we to make of this? Are there any principles to guide us besides the one infamously associated with Lenin: “Who, whom?”

In the first place, there is a difference between cancel culture and the idea that there are just and reasonable limits on the freedom of speech. There is a big difference between getting someone fired for expressing a provocative view on a controversial public question and condoning—or even celebrating—a political assassination.

A free and democratic society can only survive if people feel free to express their views on questions of public import. But such a society cannot survive if we allow the approval of political murder to be normalized.

With the release of OpenAI’s Chat GPT-5, artificial intelligence has vaulted forward again. But this is no ordinary tech update. With each new development in this technology, America and the world edge closer to something resembling a world-historical revolution.

Technological and economic shifts have always marched hand in hand, but this wave of automation threatens to upend labor markets like never before, creating what historian Yuval Noah Harari chillingly calls a “useless class.” And in a nation already fractured and struggling to find its shared identity, it would be insane to think of such a transformation without acknowledging that it risks igniting unrest on a scale far beyond mere economic anxiety.

Policymakers must stop treating AI as a purely economic—or geopolitical—matter. They must treat it as a question of national survival. 

Throughout history, as Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne remind us, “technological progress has vastly shifted the composition of employment.” John Maynard Keynes famously cautioned that the pain from these changes “often springs not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing-pains of over-rapid changes.” Both observations may ring true today—but this rupture is unlike any before. 

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.

Remembering Charlie | The Roundtable Ep. 285

There is a growing urgency within the Trump Administration to take on what the president has called “the radical left lunatics” following the assassination of conservative icon Charlie Kirk. But despite much of the talk from the Right, including even from the administration itself, there is no easy way to dismantle the far-left’s networks. Defeating the forces arrayed against the American republic will require a detailed understanding of the enemy and a systematic plan to break up their networks, utilizing all methods of national power.

Defining Terms

The biggest initial problem the Trump Administration faces in confronting the radical Left is a refusal by the national security, federal law enforcement, and intelligence apparatuses to even recognize whom the president has identified as a threat.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is a watershed moment in the contest of ideologies—and increasingly of peoples—in America.

On the one hand are what might be called the restorationists, who yearn for a common culture that has been eroding since the 1970s, and mostly vanished in the 2010s. The most recent example of this tendency is Utah Governor Spencer Cox’s press conference announcing that Charlie Kirk’s killer was captured. Cox issued a well-meaning exhortation to all Americans to “find an off ramp, or else it’s going to get much worse.” In this vision, Kirk’s brutal murder is an episode that shocks us as a people into pursuing greater concord and amity.

The governor should be credited with categorically rejecting political violence and laying out an optimistic vision. His prescription and analysis are technically correct—but also contextually and prudentially wrong. The restorationists have an aspiration but not a case. It’s a problem worth understanding.

Edmund Burke once wrote, “Circumstances…give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect.” The circumstances in America now must be described accurately. There is no roughly equitable contest of sides, each with its own dangerous extremists. It is not, for example, Northern Ireland of a generation past. Instead, we are in a contest in which one side overwhelmingly reserves violence to itself and employs it freely.

That side is, of course, the Left.

On September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk was assassinated for the political sin of showing up on college campuses across our country and taking and answering questions. These queries came from students and guests whether they were allies or adversaries—or simply curious-minded Americans engaging in their unalienable birthright to engage in civics openly.

Charlie Kirk was martyred for the free exercise of his First Amendment rights. And the right to free speech, which he championed, was critically wounded in the attack.

The aftermath marks a turning point in our nation’s “house divided” future.

Let’s do as Charlie did masterfully and probe the mindset of the other—in this case his assassin’s and that of his like-minded enablers. It was Charlie’s way. It is the Socratic way. It is the Western Civ, the American way.

Who will rid us of this meddlesome apostle of free expression?

Progressives don’t like to think of themselves as King Henry, the man who uttered the fateful words that caused four loyalists to murder Thomas Becket. But where else can their constant denunciations of Republicans as “Nazis” or “fascists” lead?

A young man, who was being groomed to be a moral monster by our culture and the passions it unleashes, heard the dog whistle call to arms, seized the opportunity of a public event in his home state, and did what was collectively seen by his ilk as necessary and proper.

Charlie Kirk died as he lived, publicly debating his fellow citizens.

He had an unparalleled talent for activism, organizing, and fundraising, and for this he was respected in the halls of power. But his signature act, from the beginning of his career to the day of his death, was the basic activity of a citizen in a republic: arguing with his fellow countrymen about what was true and false and what should guide our common life. Indefatigably confident in the importance and efficacy of face-to-face conversations and confrontations, he embodied the political way of life at its most elevated and most fundamental level.

When it came to the roots of the West and the source of meaning in his own life, Kirk favored Jerusalem over Athens, Scripture over Socrates. He never neglected or subordinated his witness to Christ, the true Logos, to the tumult of politics. Nevertheless, as his name suggests (Kirk meaning “church”; Charles meaning “husband” or “free man” or “common man”), Charlie Kirk was both a Christian and a testament to what Aristotle wrote long ago: we are political animals because we have logos, the faculty of speech and reason by which we discern what is good and bad, just and unjust. And it is our partnership in these things that constitutes our domestic and political communities.

The great outbreak of evil in these past days stirred a memory of something I used to tell my freshman students on the first day of their introduction to politics class: politics is about what is good.

We would read together the first sentence of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics—an unrivalled introduction to politics: “Every art and every inquiry, and likewise every action and choice, seems to aim at some good, and hence it has been beautifully said that the good is that at which all things aim.”

Aristotle goes on quickly to observe in his usual empirical way that there are many goods and many arts developed to achieve the different goods. The medical art aims at the good of health. The art of shipbuilding aims at building good ships. The military art aims at victory in war. The art of managing the household, which the Greeks called economics, aims at the good of wealth. Some arts are subordinated to other arts, because the good at which the art aims is subordinate to a larger good, the way the art of the cavalryman is subordinate to the art of the general.

Aristotle then introduces the subject of politics with a great hypothesis: if there is some good, some end, that we seek for its own sake, and we seek all the rest for the sake of or on account of this one good—if, in other words, we don’t choose everything for the sake of something else, which would make all of our desires empty and pointless—it is clear that this would be the good itself, in fact the highest good.

Charlie Kirk was a loving and dedicated husband and father; a pious, learned, and evangelizing Christian; and a hero, inspiration, and mentor to millions of young Americans trying to make sense of our turbulent political times. Many knew him much better (and for much longer) than I, but in recent years he had become my friend. He was always on the move, and yet I found he still managed, over and over again, to be generous with time he didn’t seem to have. He was a patriot—a vital and irreplaceable part of the Right in America. Because he was tireless, passionate, inspiring, and, above all, effective, he was a target. Now, he’s gone.

Charlie was a Lincoln fellow, supporter, and passionate defender of Claremont. When he attended our Lincoln fellowship in 2021, he was already one of the most famous men in American politics. His security detail was always close. And yet, busy and renowned as he was, he was a model Claremont fellowship participant. He was there to learn because he wanted to continue to hone his understanding and arguments on behalf of America and her founding principles.

This is who they chose to kill: the affable man whose main act was having good-faith political debates with college students. The man who, since fatherhood, was turning more toward Christianity as both a purpose and a theme. He was a partisan to be sure, but he was nowhere near the outer limits of the American tradition, especially given his relentless fixation on Lincolnian persuasion as a stabilizing force in a slowly disintegrating polity. The ones who kept losing debates with him didn’t feel that way, of course, but they were only the instrument, not the object, of his work. The object was the millions of Americans who watched, learned, and saw who won again and again—and decided that they wished to side with the winner.

In this way, Charlie Kirk was perhaps the closest thing to Socrates in the American public square. The leftist intellectuals who sneered at him—the rube peddling his simple lines, his crass sophistry, his heartland aw-shucks certainties—would guffaw at the parallel, but it is no less true. He argued—amiably, fairly, relentlessly—until they couldn’t stand it any longer. And like Socrates, they had him killed.

Also like Socrates, his students will now do more for his cause after his martyrdom than they ever did during his life. The Socratic vindication was in his deification through literature at the pens of Plato and Xenophon. Millennia later, everyone remembers the philosopher, but vanishingly few know who ended his life.

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.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics | The Roundtable Ep. 284

The editors open with an analysis of the killing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska by a repeat violent offender, and discuss what it reveals about crime, media spin, and a legacy media more fixated on “Republicans pouncing” than the literally pouncing criminal himself. Follow-up discussion ranges from Europe’s disappearing crime stats to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s downward revision of nearly a million jobs during the Biden presidency, probing whether institutions still merit public trust and what a reality-based politics on immigration, safety, and the economy might look like. The editors also touch on an immigration sweep at a Georgia battery plant and the gap between GDP and lived experience before closing with fresh culture picks.

In 2021, a poll showed that only one-third (36%) of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 were “very” proud to be Americans. Another third stated they were only slightly or not at all proud of their country. Ten years earlier, Pew Research anticipated the trend when it noted that the rate of Millennials who called themselves “very patriotic” fell from 80% in 2003 to 70% in 2011.

Part of a national museum’s job is to prevent that outcome. Preserving the historical truth is a high purpose, but so is instilling the sentiment of gratitude. America’s museums can and should do both.

Instead, as of this writing, if you visit the home page of the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History, the very first exhibit you see is the Greensboro lunch counter from the famous sit-in of 65 years ago. The text introducing the exhibit gives visitors to the site the first fact they are to learn about the American past: “Racial segregation was still legal in the United States on February 1, 1960.”

Later this month, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk will issue a report calling for massive reparations from the West for the alleged harms wrought by colonialism. It will be the culmination of a long-gestating effort within the U.N. and by Third World nations to squeeze money and demand other goodies from former colonial powers in the name of “reparatory justice.”

In addition to being historically ill-informed, the effort is racist. What began as a simple extortion effort has since been supercharged into an all-out assault on European cultures. Since being appointed in 2022, Türk has transformed his office. It now issues daily muezzin calls for uncontrolled mass migration to the West and the erasure of white cultures. His report should cause Western nations to abandon every U.N. agency that pursues this sick agenda.

When I served as an Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) cadet at Fordham University in New York City, the Department of War paid for my degree in American Studies. During my coursework, I read books like The New Jim Crow and was bombarded with the claim that the country I had signed up to defend was irredeemably racist and broken. My civilian classmates and professors were overwhelmingly liberal, and the university was in the capital of liberalism. I spent most of my time in that milieu as opposed to dedicated environments conducive to military formation.

ROTC should be nowhere near Fordham University. In fact, the Trump Administration should end ROTC programs in blue states, leftist cities, and anti-American universities, focusing instead on institutions that actually love America. Training military officers in environments that serve the national interest is a critical step toward restoring the U.S. military as a whole.

No longer should ROTC programs be benefactors of the woke and weaponized higher education system. The colleges and universities that ROTC cadets attend—and that the federal government pays for—shouldn’t feature Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) quotas, the teaching of Critical Race Theory and other divisive ideologies, and the promotion of gay and lesbian lifestyles.

Most Americans don’t know who Graham Linehan is, but to put it into perspective, he’s the Jerry Seinfeld of the British/Irish sitcom world. Back in the 1990s, Linehan starred in Father Ted, which is now regarded as one of the greatest sitcoms in U.K. television history.

On September 1, Linehan’s real life merged with sitcom-level absurdity when he landed at London’s Heathrow Airport and was immediately arrested by five members of the Metropolitan Police. His crime? Three posts on X.

At The Spectator, Linehan commented on the bizarre and ominous episode:

In a country where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer…(and no, I promise you, I am not making this up).

Recent buzz about the possibility of Trump selecting Budapest to host peace talks between Russia and Ukraine has brought Hungary back into the public consciousness. During the Biden years, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary was relegated to something of a footnote and regarded with distaste by the reigning administration. Now, Hungary has moved from adversary to ally in record time—a welcome reset that offers a window into Trump’s recalibrated foreign policy.

As early as the 2020 campaign, then-candidate Biden branded Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán a “thug” and lumped Poland and Hungary together as “totalitarian regimes”—incendiary language that prior U.S. presidents avoided, even when the two countries were under actual totalitarian control of the Communist Party.

It was hardly surprising, then, that in 2021 President Biden chose a gay, married LGBTQ activist with two adopted children as ambassador to Hungary—a country whose constitution defines marriage strictly as a union between a man and a woman, bans adoption by same-sex couples, and enforces some of Europe’s toughest child-protection laws. U.S. Ambassador David Pressman ignited tensions by denouncing Hungary’s conservative stance on marriage and its 2021 Child Protection Act, which forbids gender propaganda in K-12 schools.

In this country we stand at a crossroads—as a movement, as a party, and as a nation. The world is not what it was a generation ago, nor is America’s place in the world. The unipolar moment is over. And yet many in the GOP seek to claim the mantle of America First while continuing the same failed adventurism of the past. National Conservatism as a movement agrees that these people and ideas must be stopped. But we have failed to check their influence in the party in large part because we have not offered an alternative that meets the real threats to American security and balances national interest, the deterrent effect, industrial capability, and political will.

In a piece that was recently published in the National Interest, I sketched out a framework for what a real America First foreign policy looks like. I called for developing a doctrine that I called “Prioritized Deterrence.” That essay was the first step toward spelling out a set of foreign policy principles that can unite National Conservatives and set the agenda for the Republican Party for the next generation.

In 1989, Justice Antonin Scalia cast the deciding vote to overturn the conviction of Gregory Lee Johnson, who was arrested and found guilty of violating a Texas statute after he burned the American flag outside the Republican National Convention. The author of the Court’s 5-4 opinion was Justice William Brennan, the leading liberal and advocate for the “living Constitution” on the Supreme Court. For conservatives, it was one of the two most widely criticized votes of Justice Scalia’s illustrious career (the other being his vote refusing to recognize that parents have a natural, constitutionally protected right to direct the upbringing of their children).

But the opinion by Justice Brennan, which Justice Scalia joined, is not as absolute as it has subsequently been portrayed.

It specifically held that Texas violated the First Amendment by prosecuting Johnson “in these circumstances”—that is, expressive conduct or symbolic speech as part of a political protest that was not designed to incite a crowd (nor did it have that effect). It also held that the “government generally has a freer hand in restricting expressive conduct than it has in restricting the written or spoken word.” Only laws directed at restricting the communicative nature of expressive conduct implicate the First Amendment, and even then they can be upheld for a valid governmental interest.

I see Gabe Schoenfeld has attacked me again. I usually try to let these things go, but sometimes a little context is demanded.

The piece is, as usual, filled with bile and unrelieved nastiness. What Gabe leaves out is that we used to be friends, or at least friendly acquaintances. We met through Manhattan conservative circles, where we had many friends in common, including the late, great Fred Siegel (whom I am confident would be distressed at what Gabe has become).

Gabe snidely writes that one should not pity me. On this we agree. I do not need or deserve any pity. My life has gone and is going quite well.

Not so for Gabe. His first disappointment (that I know of) came when he finished a PhD in Soviet studies…just as the Berlin Wall fell. Like many disappointed academics, he bounced around the nonprofit sector until landing as an editor at Commentary. This was the Neil Kozodoy Commentary, when the magazine was good. I wrote for them back in the day. Gabe did not edit me; Gary Rosen did. But even then, Gabe and I were friendly enough.