“A people that takes no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants.” — Thomas Babington Macaulay

What does a child need to know about the history of the Western world? The College Board claims to know the answer. Until 2019, the AP World History exam required students to master a sweep of history stretching back 10,000 years, from the first river civilizations to the present. Today, those requirements are much thinner. AP World History: Modern begins its tested content at 1200 AD. Ancient Greece and Rome—the birthplace of philosophy, republican government, Western aesthetics, and nearly everything that follows—are absent from the exam altogether. A student can earn a perfect score without ever being asked about Socrates, Augustus, or the Battle of Marathon.

This is not an isolated retreat. A 2017 report by the National Association of Scholars found that the College Board’s AP European History exam had scrubbed all mentions of religion, intellectual history outside of secular modernization, and the history of political liberty. The College Board later made very limited revisions, and the course remains a shell of what it once was.

While standard McGuffey Readers led young post-Civil War students through Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, and the Bible, many of today’s elite college students lack the attention span and background knowledge required to read a full book. College history courses have replaced the Western tradition with an approach that emphasizes race, class, and gender social history. Students receive not a comprehensive picture of the past but a prosecutor’s brief against it.

For decades, American education has been conducting an experiment in civilizational self-erasure. As documented by Professor James Hankins, formerly of Harvard and now at the University of Florida, Western civilization courses “began to disappear from American high schools and colleges” in the mid-1980s after serving as the linchpin of undergraduate education throughout the Cold War era. The National Association of Scholars went back further, tracing “the decline and near extinction of the Western Civilization history survey course” at America’s top colleges from 1964 to 2010. Generations of students have come of age without systematic exposure to the tradition that produced the world they inhabit.

Even worse, many students are taught to hate America’s history. An honest study of history cultivates gratitude for the achievements of our predecessors, respect for their sacrifices, and an appreciation for those benefits of civilization we enjoy but did not build. The critical progressive approach to history that dominates education today breeds not gratitude, but disdain. Students are asked to critique an inheritance they don’t understand, tear down institutions and legacies they cannot build, and accuse the past of sins while turning a blind eye to their own.

A people who lose confidence in their institutions—who no longer understand why achievements like representative government, jury trials, reasoned debate, liberty, or the rule of law are worth protecting—will not long maintain them. Knowing this, we recognize what must be done: only if we teach our children to know, remember, and protect our civilization will we be able to sustain it.

This is why Hillsdale College’s K-12 Education Office has partnered with Encounter Books to create The Official Golden Thread Curriculum, a new teacher’s guide to Western civilization that deserves to be ubiquitous in America’s classrooms.

The Golden Thread itself is a stunning achievement: a beautiful, two-volume, heirloom-quality history of Western civilization authored by Professor Hankins and Professor Allen C. Guelzo. It walks students from the dawn of the West in ancient Greece through the rise of the Roman Empire and the establishment of Christendom to the Renaissance and modern times. It unites historical facts with beautiful illustrations, maps, charts, and primary sources to help students approach our ancestors not as subjects to be dissected but as people to be understood on their own terms. Unlike contemporary textbooks, the Golden Thread does not interrupt students with quiz questions, skills practice, or reminders of learning objectives. It helps students become learned adults.

Together, The Golden Thread and its attendant curriculum developed by Hillsdale’s K-12 team constitute the most ambitious effort in a generation to restore Western civilization to prominence in America’s high schools.

The Golden Thread and its teacher’s guide walk students through known historical facts, including those found in primary sources, because thinking first requires understanding individuals as they understood themselves. Then it helps readers understand how the facts relate to each other in a meaningful and honest narrative, shows how shared symbols, stories, phrases, and ideas are embedded within that narrative, and allows students to exercise judgment and discretion while interpreting history. Students not only become knowledgeable but grow to love Western civilization and embrace the Western tradition as their own.

Take, for example, The Golden Thread’s treatment of the Peloponnesian War. First and foremost, students study the actual events and people in the war. They analyze the combatants, why they were fighting, and where they fought. Students discover who Pericles, Alcibiades, Nicias, Lysander, and Cleon were and what they did. They examine Thucydides and consider how he describes the historian’s work, in contrast to Herodotus, the “Father of History,” who came before him.

Armed with this knowledge, students soon see the roots of ideas and debates that blossomed over the centuries and still grip us today. They grapple with whether might makes right. They see the virtues and excesses of nascent democracy and its recurring descent into oligarchy, tyranny, and cruelty. And they observe how the internal rot of hubris and greed destroys an empire untouchable by mere armies.

In the Melian dialogue, the irrational Athenian rage after the Mytilene revolt, and the collapse of Athenian democracy in Sicily, students can see themselves and our own times. They can look with wonder upon what those before us accomplished, and with horror at how they lost it. Students learn the painstaking difficulties of erecting civilization and how even the most powerful and sophisticated can nonetheless choose savagery.

At the start of his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote, “I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.” His words could be applied to the entirety of Western civilization. Whether it is the canon written in words, etched in the stones of cathedrals, embodied in the halls of government, or revered in the hearts of citizens, the West is our possession—an inheritance more precious than gold.

That inheritance has been neglected. Now we can begin to restore it.

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From a young age, we ask kids what they want to be when they grow up. Firefighter, doctor, president, mechanic, astronaut, teacher, actor—the list goes on.

Dreams shift as children discover their gifts, what they enjoy, and where the two overlap. The kid who wanted to be a doctor might change his mind after finding out he can design spaceships and likes math better than anatomy.

Allowing people to follow their dreams has always been an American aspiration and part of what makes our country exceptional. Yet today, one group of Americans—young men—is at risk of being shut out from their dreams, largely through no fault of their own.

Mountains of evidence show that our education system and economy are increasingly leaving boys and men behind. This is a national crisis our political leaders must urgently acknowledge and address.

For Exhibit A, simply look at the last 50 years of wage trends. Although earnings for women have steadily increased, nearly doubling in the last half-century, men’s wages have remained largely stagnant. Indeed, while the inflation-adjusted median full-time wage for women has grown by $21,750 since 1976, it has increased for men by only $7,570.

But it gets worse. In August, 98% of U.S. job growth went to women according to government statistics. While female employment has grown by 870,000 since last year, male employment has contracted by 1.5 million. Roughly one-third of men are not participating in the labor force, including over half of young men ages 16-24.

The same trend is happening in college participation. In the mid-1990s, American men and women ages 25-34 were equally likely to have completed college, but the gap has ballooned since then. Today, about 47% of young women have a bachelor’s degree compared to 37% of young men. Women make up about 55% of U.S. undergraduate enrollment, while men account for 40% (with the remaining 5% being unknown or unreported).

Male education and workforce success directly impact family formation. Women are more likely to marry a man with a steady income, and men are more likely to want to work if they have something to work toward. But couples are told to wait until they have financial stability before having kids, a goal that is increasingly difficult to reach, leading them to have fewer children.

And while feminists may cheer the number of women in the 9-to-5 work world, it has not come without a cost. As many observers (including Elizabeth Warren before she entered politics) have pointed out, more mothers entering the workforce has made households increasingly reliant on both parents working to stay afloat, creating a “two-income trap.” It is financially unfeasible for many women to stay home with their children, even when they want to.

Many factors have led us to the current status quo. American industrial and trade policy over the last half-century has shipped many blue-collar jobs overseas while driving down wages for those who remain. Economic policy influenced by feminism has convinced many women to invest in careers rather than family. But we should not overlook another important driver of young men’s present disadvantage: the rapid proliferation of DEI across society.

Jacob Savage’s essay in Compact magazine last December highlighted the devastating impact of the DEI regime on young men. Fittingly titled “The Lost Generation,” Savage chronicled how Millennial and Gen Z men over the last 10-15 years have found themselves chained to the same job, or without one entirely, while less qualified but more “diverse” employees rise in the ranks. This practice has run rampant across numerous industries—entertainment, academia, the medical field—with untold casualties.

What film masterpieces did we miss by passing over a promising writer for a more diverse candidate? What medical breakthroughs did we forgo to reach a quota? What discoveries, studies, and breakthroughs are missing from academia simply because the men who would have made them were unfairly denied the opportunity?

Fortunately, DEI has been in retreat lately, thanks in large part to the Trump Administration’s crackdown. DEI has also declined in popularity in the workforce, though it still boasts majority support amid widespread ignorance about its true consequences. Even so, DEI remains a powerful force that could regain greater influence if political conditions become more favorable.

Meanwhile, young men continue to suffer. A recent Institute for Family Studies survey found that about half of men ages 18-29 now see the American Dream as out of reach. Many have retreated into destructive pastimes such as pornography and gambling, while suicide rates have risen to record highs. The statistics are grim in every direction.

So where does this leave us?

Our young men are still dreaming as they did when they were little boys, but they are being forced to acknowledge that hard work may not be enough to achieve those dreams. In America especially—the country founded on the ability to get ahead and create something spectacular—this is a reality we should not tolerate.

The situation young men face is an issue lawmakers can no longer afford to ignore. We need an economy where men’s skills and contributions are valued and appropriately compensated. We also need to make it possible for a family to raise children on one income. There is no easy fix for these problems. It will necessarily involve a myriad of approaches, from fully eliminating DEI to bringing back blue-collar work and stabilizing our broken dollar, whose debasement undergirds so much of Americans’ current struggles.

To save the American Dream from today’s threats, we must tackle this challenge. We owe it to the next generation of boys who still dare to dream.

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The Obama Presidential Center, located on Chicago’s South Side, opened in June 2026, nine years and five months after Barack Obama’s term in office concluded. The politicians who build these centers force themselves to run one final fundraising gauntlet, not to finance an election campaign but to leave behind an edifice that makes an enduring case for their probity, sagacity, and historical importance.

What sets Obama apart is that he began publicly discussing the greatness he hoped for prior to occupying, winning, or seeking the nation’s highest office. “My attitude about something like the presidency is that you don’t want to just be the president,” Barack Obama told journalist Jacob Weisberg in 2006. “You want to change the country. You want to make a unique contribution. You want to be a great president.” Later in the interview he said, “There are, what, maybe 10 presidents in our history out of 40-something who you can truly say led the country? And then there are 30 who just kind of did their best.”

At the time, having been elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004 after serving eight years in the Illinois state legislature, Obama was still a Washington, D.C. newcomer. The author of The Audacity of Hope (2006) lived up to his book’s title in October 2006, during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press. “When I think about great presidents, I think about those who transform how we think about ourselves as a country in fundamental ways,” Obama said. Specifically, “they transformed the culture” rather than “simply promoted one or two particular issues.”

After Obama announced his candidacy in February 2007, he continued to dilate on history’s judgment. “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” Obama told the Reno Gazette-Journal in January 2008. “He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.”

In June 2008, when the South Dakota and Montana primary results clinched the Democratic presidential nomination for Obama, his victory speech was astonishingly grandiose:

I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment—this was the time—when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals.

The Obama Presidential Center’s opening elicited many assessments of the 44th president’s legacy, but few reassessments. Politicians and writers who criticized Obama in the decade between the beginning of his candidacy and the end of his presidency reaffirmed their critiques, and those who supported him reiterated their high regard.

Notably absent from the latter takes, however, were claims that Obama had fulfilled the lofty expectations he had set before being elected. His admirers, rather, had long since concluded that he was a capable leader but not a world-historical figure. Jacob Weisberg, reflecting in 2017 for Slate on the career of the young politician he had interviewed eleven years before, wrote that Obama’s “legacy of integrity, eloquence, and patient commitment” qualified him as an “inspirational” president. But not a “transformational” one.

Obama himself appears to have moved on from the question of presidential greatness. His speech at his Center’s opening ceremonies touched on his administration’s achievements obliquely, while conceding that it “did not accomplish everything we set out to do,” in part because “hard things are hard,” as a sign he kept on his desk in the Oval Office affirmed. Even before leaving the White House, Obama addressed his legacy in a lower register, having apparently concluded that being president was tougher than becoming president. “At the end of the day we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right,” Obama told The New Yorker in January 2014. “The President of the United States cannot remake our society, and that’s probably a good thing.”

Read the rest here.

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America came closer to going net zero than many realize. To explain its rise, we need to consider a prophetic 1983 essay, “Risk and Culture,” by British anthropologist Mary Douglas and American political scientist Aaron Wildavsky. They argued that the risks a society deems most serious are a product of culture. “Each social arrangement elevates some risks to a high peak and depresses others below sight. This cultural bias is integral to social organization,” they wrote.

Douglas and Wildavsky observed the rise of the environmental movement as an insurgent political force, or what they termed the “border.” Led by white Boomer liberals inspired by the African Americans’ fight for civil rights, environmentalists appropriated the movement’s moral absolutism and refusal to compromise.

They predicted the border insurgency would conquer the political center thanks to generational turnover and because it would co-opt green ideology to avoid being on the losing side. Their predictions have been vindicated. Campaigning for the presidency in 1988, George H.W. Bush said he would tackle the greenhouse effect with “the White House effect.” Less than two decades later, his son George W. Bush complained of America’s addiction to oil and then signed into law the Energy Independence and Security Act, requiring tougher fuel economy standards and biofuels, and the Consolidated Appropriations Act 2008, which imposed mandatory greenhouse gas reporting.

Co-option was followed by conquest. “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” Barack Obama declared in June 2008 after winning the Democratic nomination for president. Once in the White House, he met early disappointment. Obama carried forward his predecessor’s objective of agreeing to a global climate treaty that included the largest emitters from the Global South. The November 2009 Copenhagen climate conference sought to produce such a treaty, but these efforts were sabotaged by the Global South, led by China and India.

That same year also saw the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill die a lingering death in the United States Senate. The Senate filibuster, which requires 60 votes to overcome, spared America the type of aggressive climate legislation enacted on the other side of the Atlantic. Britain’s Climate Change Act, passed the previous year, imposed a goal of 80% decarbonization by 2050, which in 2019 was raised to 100%, or net zero.

The Democrats’ shellacking in the 2010 midterms put a definitive end to the prospect of Congress passing any climate legislation. At a post-election press conference, President Obama promised that cap-and-trade had been just one way of “skinning the cat.” For the rest of his presidency and into a third Obama term under Joe Biden’s titular presidency, the strategy was the same: do climate policy while bypassing Congress and refusing to let the Senate give its advice and consent on any climate treaty. Todd Stern, Obama’s climate envoy, used to joke that if you took the Declaration of Independence and stamped “climate change” at the top, it wouldn’t have gotten any votes in the Senate.

The strategy required pretending to believe two things that Obama’s presidential memoir tells us he knew were untrue. He justified his “happy talk” about a painless shift to a carbon-free future as necessary in the “highly irrational world” of American politics. There wouldn’t be any climate policy, Obama’s 2008 campaign strategist David Plouffe pointed out, “if we lose Ohio and Pennsylvania.”

The second involves what Paul Tucker, in his 2022 book Global Discord, calls the “Humean institution of promising,” on which any global climate treaty would have to rely. At every international forum he attended, Obama was struck by how “few nations felt obliged to act beyond narrow self-interest…China, Russia, and even genuine democracies like Brazil, India, and South Africa still operated on different principles.” “They abided by the established rules only insofar as their own interests were advanced…and they appeared happy to violate them when they thought they could get away with it.”

The Obama Administration’s post-Copenhagen approach sought to get around potential treaty vetoes from China and the U.S. Senate by having each country create its own climate pledges. At the start of his second term, Obama formed a climate G2 with China, opening the way to the Paris Climate Agreement and its novel structure, which can best be understood as synchronized unilateralism.

There was a catch that should have sent the resulting agreement to the Senate. The Paris Agreement states that developed-country parties should continue to take the lead by setting economy-wide emissions cuts. Worse, once they submitted their initial pledges, the United States and advanced democracies became subject to a legally binding ratchet that sets increasingly stringent emissions targets irrespective of what the rest of the world is doing. In practical terms, the Paris Agreement is not so very different from the discredited 1997 Kyoto Protocol: the West is on the hook for mandatory emissions cuts while the non-West is exempt, the principal difference being that the West gaslights its citizens by falsely claiming that under the Paris Agreement, everyone is in it together.

The domestic counterpart of the Paris Agreement was the Obama Administration’s war on fossil fuels, coal in particular. In 2012, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) imposed onerous standards on mercury emissions from coal-fired power stations (the MATS rule) that entailed billions in costs for trivial environmental benefits. The Supreme Court struck down the rule in 2015, but not before the EPA had proposed the Clean Power Plan, which aimed to achieve a nearly one-third reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from power generation. In 2016, the Court stayed the plan’s implementation, and in 2022, it decided that the regulation exceeded the EPA’s statutory authority.

With the Supreme Court closing off the Clean Air Act as a substitute for Congress passing climate change legislation, the Biden Administration found a more insidious way of doing climate policy. Having announced its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 only two weeks after Biden’s inauguration, the White House issued an executive order on climate-finance-related risk that sought to use the financial system to achieve net zero. This was the high point of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing.

The Securities and Exchange Commission would require companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, and suppliers, customers, and big institutional investors would do the rest. In his 2021 letter to chief executives, BlackRock’s Larry Fink said he wanted companies to submit a plan showing how their business model would align with a net-zero economy. Corporate America was being made a net-zero offer it couldn’t refuse.

The Obama Administration’s climate policy was stymied by process (the Senate filibuster) and the Supreme Court (Justice Scalia died four days after the Court issued its stay). Biden failed for different reasons. Asset managers got cold feet at the threat of an antitrust suit launched by Republican state attorneys general while the stock market did the rest. Energy was the S&P 500’s top-performing sector in 2022. At the same time, ESG indices and exchange-traded funds suffered double-digit losses.

Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky described environmentalism’s ideological ascendancy as co-option followed conquest. What was missing was confrontation. No Western political leader dared challenge the environmental movement—until Donald Trump.

“The environmental [sic] is the biggest tool for stopping growth,” Trump told Joe Rogan during the 2024 presidential campaign. As a New York real estate developer, Trump saw firsthand the scam run for the benefit of environmental consultants and lawyers. And he grasped the strategic importance of the shale revolution in giving America unparalleled energy dominance.

Even before Trump re-entered the White House, his election victory was a political turning point. Chief among its casualties was climate catastrophism, which is essential to environmentalism’s Malthusian substructure of sin, punishment, and redemption. It serves as a form of rhetorical blackmail, with any instance of denial framed as risking the planet’s future, thereby making climate policy ever more extreme—the moral absolutism Douglas and Wildavsky noted.

Without catastrophism, environmentalism loses its potency and renders the prospect of planetary salvation meaningless. Trump’s example is likely to encourage other Republican politicians to follow his lead. A return to a stringent climate policy under a Democratic president will look far more like a grubby rent-seeking affair than a noble crusade against an existential threat.

President Trump has permanently changed the politics of climate change. Net zero will never happen in America.

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