Twenty-five years ago this morning, 2,977 people were murdered in the space of 102 minutes. Most of them had gone to work. Some had boarded an airplane. Among them were 343 New York City firemen who climbed the stairs of the World Trade Center towers while everyone else came down, knowing what that act meant. Aboard a plane over Pennsylvania, 40 passengers and crew learned by telephone what was happening and took their plane back from the men who had seized it.

We memorialize them, as we should. But a quarter century is long enough that we owe them something more than memory. We owe them an accounting. The honest question on this anniversary is not whether we honored the dead. That we have done. It is whether we have ever understood what had been done to us and why—and whether the American people have been made safer or left exposed in ways their forefathers would have found unthinkable.

In Natural Right and History, the political philosopher Leo Strauss opens by asking whether the United States, having become the world’s most powerful and prosperous nation by adhering to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, still held those truths to be self-evident.

Strauss thought the answer was no, and he thought he knew where the rot had entered. American social science had absorbed from German thought the conviction that natural standards of right and wrong are not accessible to human reason—that all such standards are the products of history, culture, and will. As he wrote, “It would not be the first time that a nation, defeated on the battlefield and, as it were, annihilated as a political being, has deprived its conquerors of the most sublime fruit of victory by imposing on them the yoke of its own thought.”

If those who lead the United States reject the principles on which our country was established, we would not long remain a republic. To deny the idea that human beings can reason about right and wrong and are therefore fit to govern themselves is to deny what it means to be an American. And a people whose leaders have abandoned these premises will find, when the hour comes, that they cannot say why their civilization is worth defending—or what, exactly, is attacking it.

The hour came on a Tuesday morning in September.

Prelude to the Attack

America is said to have won the Cold War. But victory over the Soviet Union did not mean that all our enemies were defeated, nor that Russia and Communist China would abandon the instruments they had spent 70 years perfecting. Chief among them was the use of proxies to foment terrorism that they could publicly disavow. The Soviets cultivated the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Baader-Meinhof Group in West Germany, while Communist China supplied the Palestinians with equipment and logistical support.

By the 1990s, however, the character of anti-Western terrorism was changing. Our adversaries discovered that the Islamic world’s hatred of the U.S. could be tapped indefinitely and at almost no cost. Whether through the rise of Wahhabist Islam and the growth of al-Qaeda or through the Iranian-sponsored terrorism of Hezbollah, the lesson was the same: one could strike the West, and the West would find it troublesome rather than intolerable. Moreover, the Islamic world had concluded that the West was morally bankrupt, and a morally bankrupt enemy is not to be feared.

It was only a matter of time before the escalation ran its course. The World Trade Center bombing of February 26, 1993, killed six people and injured more than 1,000. But it failed in its objective to topple one tower into the other. During the Clinton Administration, there were the simultaneous bombings of our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, which killed 224 people, 12 of them Americans. And then there was the attack on the USS Cole in the port of Aden on October 12, 2000, which killed 17 American sailors.

Each was treated as a crime. Each was, in fact, an act of war.

The Conundrum of 9/11

Most Americans still carry the images of 9/11: two airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center towers, a third into the Pentagon, and a fourth into a Pennsylvania field. Nineteen hijackers—15 of them Saudi nationals—planned and executed the attack. Their object was to prove that the Great Satan, the defender of Western Christendom, could be struck.

America retaliated—not against Saudi Arabia, but against Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden was, and Iraq, a sponsor of terrorism that had not been involved in 9/11. America stayed in both countries for over two decades at an estimated cost of roughly $8 trillion. Some 7,050 American service members and an additional 8,200 contractors were killed in these operations. More than 50,000 were wounded. To date, over 30,000 post-9/11 service members and veterans have died by their own hand—more than twice as many as the enemy killed.

The central question for us 25 years later is simple: Is America more secure?

Al-Qaeda as an expeditionary organization was broken, a real achievement. There was no second attack of that kind on American soil in the decades since. But that does not mean we won.

There is a serious argument that a nation attacked in its own streets is right to carry the fight abroad, to tie the enemy down where he lives rather than where we live, to force him to change his way of life rather than change ours.

Instead, we degraded a terrorist organization while leaving its sponsors and financiers—and above all, its ideology—entirely untouched. The mission in Iraq and Afghanistan shifted from defeating an enemy capable of harming us to building democracies that would not. The foolish neoconservative premise that democratic institutions would render these nations peaceful gave way to governments prone to extremism, with Islamic law written into their constitutions.

All of this was evidence to a generation of Americans who believe, not without reason, that American military power cannot defeat our enemies. The perversion of American statecraft did more to discredit the use of American power than any enemy could have managed.

If that were not enough, consider that a substantial number of young Americans now believe that September 11 was a plot by our own intelligence services or by Israel’s, contrived to draw us into the Middle East. Others believe the towers could not have fallen from the airplanes’ impact alone and that explosives were planted, which Building 7’s collapse supposedly proves. This is what happens when a government cannot give a coherent account of the greatest attack in its history: the vacuum will be filled by whoever is willing to speak with confidence.

If there is a single source of the confusion, it is this: on September 17, 2001, six days after the attack, with the fires still burning in lower Manhattan and the dead still being recovered from the Pentagon and from Shanksville, President George W. Bush went to the Islamic Center of Washington and told the American people: “These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that…Islam is peace.”

Most Americans knew little of Islam beyond that it was one of the world’s largest religions. But to be told within the week of the 9/11 attacks that the faith in whose name the terrorists had acted was a religion of peace was morally and intellectually at odds with everything the American people had just witnessed.

Rather than tell the truth, George W. Bush offered Americans an excuse. Rather than initiate an inquiry into what the enemy believed and why, the president assured us that the religion of Muhammad had been hijacked by a handful of criminals flying a false flag.

Why did he say this? Partly because President Bush believed it. But more importantly, it was a view acceptable to Riyadh and to those inside and outside our own government who had spent two decades conditioning American policymakers to accommodate Islam rather than critically examine it.

The deeper reason, however, is Strauss’s. To say what Islam teaches about the infidel would have required our governing class to confront the possibility that some beliefs about man and God might be incompatible with life in a free republic. But a ruling elite that no longer believes reason can distinguish right from wrong, and that has been trained to regard every civilization’s claims as equally valid, cannot say what the enemy believes.

The yoke was already on our necks. September 11 merely revealed it.

What Should Have Been Done: The Case of Saudi Arabia

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals, and bin Laden came from a prominent Saudi family. Al-Qaeda’s money flowed overwhelmingly from Saudi and Gulf donors, and from charities the Saudi state was supposed to be policing. The hijackers’ religious doctrine was Wahhabism, which Saudi Arabia had spent four decades exporting through mosques, madrassas, textbooks, and salaried imams around the world, including America.

The 9/11 Commission found no evidence that the Saudi government ordered the attack. But it did find that al-Qaeda received a substantial portion of its funding from sources in Saudi Arabia, both before and after the attacks. The worst offender was the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, which the Commission’s investigators discovered was overseen by at least two Saudi government officials and received significant Saudi government sponsorship. So although Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud may not have directed the attack, his government certainly facilitated the lax environment in which al-Qaeda funding flourished.

Now consider what we did about it. Section 311 of the PATRIOT Act gave the Treasury Secretary the power to bar any foreign bank from the American financial system—a death sentence for an international bank and the most powerful nonmilitary weapon we possess.

Yet the U.S. has never once used this provision against a single Saudi bank. This was hardly retribution. It was nothing short of shameful.

Worse still, the House of Saud rules Saudi Arabia under U.S. protection. Since 1744, it has maintained power through a bargain with the Wahhabist clergy: the Al Saud govern, and the clerics pronounce that rule legitimate. That bargain was tested in 1979, when fanatics seized the Grand Mosque at Mecca. But the regime did not break the clerics who had bred such men. It bought them, vastly increasing the funds devoted to spreading their doctrine abroad. Nor could it defend itself: with Saddam’s army on its border in 1990, the kingdom asked the United States for protection, and half a million Americans came.

The idea that we lack leverage over the Saudis is absurd.

The demand should have been made to the Saudi government privately, precisely, and with a deadline: dissolve the apparatus that exported Islamic ideology, shut down the charities entirely, hand over the donor lists and the financiers, strip the ministries of the clerics who preach the killing of the infidel, and produce Osama bin Laden. And the consequence of refusal should have been stated with equal precision: any American security guarantee dissolves, Section 311 falls on the Saudi banks, and what our own intelligence services know about Saudi money and Saudi nationals is read aloud on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

Would this strategy have worked? We cannot know with any certainty. But when al-Qaeda bombed three residential compounds in Riyadh in May 2003, the regime decisively targeted terrorist financing, passing an anti-money-laundering statute, banning cash boxes from mosques, dismissing clerics, making 600 arrests, and dissolving Al-Haramain. Measures that were well within its power on September 12, 2001, were taken only when its own princes were in danger.

The objection is that if we pressed the Saudi government, the regime might have fallen and something worse might have followed. That was a risk. But it was heavily outweighed by the reckless course we chose instead: failing to force the House of Saud’s hand.

No one saw this more clearly at the time than Angelo Codevilla. In “Victory: What It Will Take to Win,” published in the Claremont Review of Books in the fall of 2001, he wrote:

Common sense does not mistake the difference between victory and defeat: the losers weep and cower, while the winners strut and rejoice. The losers have to change their ways, the winners feel more secure than ever in theirs. On September 12, retiring Texas Senator Phil Gramm encapsulated this common sense: “I don’t want to change the way I live. I want to change the way they live.” Common sense says that victory means living without worry that some foreigners might kill us on behalf of their causes, but also without having to bow to domestic bureaucrats and cops, especially useless ones. It means not changing the tradition by which the government of the United States treats citizens as its masters rather than as potential enemies. Victory requires killing our enemies, or making them live in debilitating fear.

The object of a war is to change the lives of those who attacked you. We changed ours instead. Twenty-five years on, the TSA makes an American grandmother remove her shoes in Des Moines while the ideological apparatus that produced the hijackers operates unmolested.

Mark Helprin saw the same problem and named the target with more precision than anyone before or since. Also writing for the Claremont Review of Books, he argued:

The enemy has embarked upon a particular form of warfare with the intent of shielding his center of mass from counterattack, but he must not be allowed such a baseless privilege. For as much as he is the terrorist who executes the strategy, he is the intelligence service in aid of it, the nation that harbors his training camps, the country that finances him, the press filled with adulation, the people who dance in the streets when there is a slaughter, and the regime that turns a blind eye.

There was nothing hawkish about these proposals. It was American common sense: find out who was paying, find out who was making war against us, and make them stop so there would be no further attacks. And, more importantly, do so in a way that justice was served.

Why Were We Attacked?

Osama bin Laden did not leave his reason for attacking America a mystery. In a statement broadcast on October 7, 2001, he forthrightly stated the immediate cause: “I swear by Almighty God who raised the heavens without pillars that neither the United States nor he who lives in the United States will enjoy security before we can see it as a reality in Palestine and before all the infidel armies leave the land of Mohammed.”

That much is intelligible to any Westerner, and it is the part our commentators seized upon, because it can be discussed without confronting religion.

The permanent cause for the 9/11 attacks, however, is the one we have refused to acknowledge for the last 25 years. The commonsensical question is never asked: On what authority did the terrorists act?

The authority is not hidden—it is published in the Koran. Surah 9:29 commands:

Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.

And Surah 5:51 states:

O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you—then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people.

This is authoritative Islam, not subject to interpretation and punishable by death for any Muslim who would try to change its meaning.

This matters because we in the West have projected our own lack of religious faith onto Muslims, assuming that they do not actually believe what the Koran teaches. But if we are to understand them as they understand themselves, we must take Islam with deadly seriousness.

Nor is this a matter of inference from scripture alone. In “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” dated May 22, 1991, and written by Mohamed Akram, the Muslim Brotherhood set down its goals in its own hand:

The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

The Brotherhood is describing its own purpose in a document it never intended us to read, appended to a list of the American organizations it regarded as its own. We have had it for over 20 years. Yet it has changed nothing.

What Is to Be Done?

To win, the United States must aim with precision at the organizations and states still making war on us—and at the ideology behind them.

Designate the Muslim Brotherhood. The Trump Administration has already moved against chapters in Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and Sudan. This is progress, but it is inadequate because the Brotherhood is a transnational organization with a written strategy. President Trump must designate the entire Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, and the Senate must pass the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act now.

Suspend nearly all immigration and restore ideological screening of aliens. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 barred from entry members and affiliates of totalitarian parties, and we screened for Communists for four decades without any serious person suggesting we had established a religious test. The Supreme Court has never questioned the plenary authority of the political branches to exclude aliens on ideological grounds. A man who holds that the unbeliever must be subdued, that apostasy warrants death, and that the law of his faith supersedes the Constitution of the United States has told us that he does not intend to become an American. We are entitled to believe him. Immigration from states that sponsor jihadist movements should be ended, and every applicant should be asked, plainly and on the record, what he believes about these things.

Cut the foreign money. Saudi, Qatari, Turkish, and Emirati funding of American mosques, Islamic centers, university chairs, and campus organizations should be treated as foreign political influence operations and prosecuted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Section 117 of the Higher Education Act already requires universities to report foreign gifts. Enforce it, publish the results, and let Americans see who has been paying for what.

Begin a national debate over the role of Islam in American life. Islam, properly understood, is a political, ideological, and military tool for uniting the Islamic world. It has been designated a religion and afforded accordant legal protections. Although Americans believe in freedom of religion, that freedom extends only to religions that recognize human freedom. Islam does not. It should not be taboo for Americans to take seriously the possibility that Islamic doctrine, rightly interpreted, is fundamentally incompatible with the American way of life.

Rebuild the military. Twenty-five years after September 11, having fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we do not have a military sized and configured for the central challenge posed by Communist China. We have failed to build the national missile defense necessary to protect the American homeland from the threats we have spent years trying to deny—ballistic missiles, including those launched from ships off our coasts. A nation that spent $8 trillion in misguided wars and cannot defend its homeland from ballistic missile attack is fundamentally unserious.

The Yoke of Our Own Thought

Let us return to where we began.

The men who attacked us on September 11, 2001, did not conquer the United States. They destroyed the World Trade Center, tore open the Pentagon, and murdered nearly 3,000 people in a single morning—the deadliest attack ever perpetrated on American soil. But they took no territory, deposed no government, and put no army in the field. Within two months they had lost their sanctuary; within ten years their leader was dead in a compound in Abbottabad. By any military reckoning, they were defeated.

And yet look at our broader response.

We took up war and fought it in the wrong countries. We built a domestic apparatus that scrutinizes the lives of Americans instead of our enemies. We spent $8 trillion and left the ideological center of mass untouched—all while telling ourselves that the religious doctrine that motivated the hijackers was one of peace.

Strauss’s formulation was that a nation annihilated as a political being may still deprive its conquerors of the fruit of victory by imposing on them the yoke of its own thought. That is very nearly what has happened in America, and that is crucial—because the yoke we are wearing is not theirs. It is ours. It was fitted long before the towers fell. Our American intellectual class had concluded that no civilization is any better than any other, that reason cannot reach the truth about right and wrong, and that what we call judgment is only prejudice.

As such, our enemies understand us more accurately than we understand ourselves. They concluded that a people who will not say that their civilization is good will not fight very hard to keep it. Twenty-five years of evidence has not disproved them.

But the American people are not fools. They never doubted. On the morning of September 11, 2001, they understood what they had seen, whatever their betters told them. The failure has been one of the governing class, but governing classes can be replaced. Indeed, the election of President Trump was partly a rejection of how the governing class handled September 11.

But the city that was attacked on September 11 is now governed by an Islamist and Marxist, Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The great state of Michigan may soon be represented in the U.S. Senate by Abdul El-Sayed, whose Islamic views are not merely anti-Semitic but anti-Christian and therefore opposed to the American way of life. The Muslim population in the United States is approaching five million people. To believe that Islam is a benign part of American life is to deny what is obvious, namely, the radical beliefs many Muslims hold.

What is required now is not complicated. We must defend American civilization. We owe that to the American people. We also owe that to the 343 who went up the stairs and the 40 who stormed the cockpit over Pennsylvania. They did not need a seminar to know what was worth dying for. Let us pray for the clarity they had, and for the courage to act on it while there is time.

The post The Heavy Yoke of 9/11 appeared first on The American Mind.

One year ago today, America lost Charlie Kirk.

In some ways, it feels like only yesterday. At other times, it feels like a lifetime ago. Twelve months after that horrifying day, we have only begun to reckon with the scale of the loss for conservatism—and for America.

To someone who ignores politics, it can be hard to explain just why Charlie’s loss was so great. He had a popular podcast—but there are many of those. He did campus debates—but he didn’t have a monopoly on that concept. And of course, however deeply involved in politics he was, Charlie never held office himself.

And yet millions think that Charlie Kirk’s martyrdom leaves a tremendous void on the Right. Why?

What America lost one year ago on that dreadful September 10 was not merely a debater, a pundit, an activist, or even, as many speculated, a future president. What America lost was a true leader, the kind who comes along only a few times in a generation.

The American Way

In one of the most important passages in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville describes the tremendous capacity for self-organization among America’s citizens, in contrast to the torpor he saw among the people of Europe:

Anyone living in the United States learns from birth that he must rely upon himself to combat the ills and obstacles of life…. Should an obstacle appear on the public highway and the passage of traffic is halted, neighbors at once form a group to consider the matter…. [A]ssociations are born to resist enemies of an entirely ideological nature and to share the fight against social excesses. In the United States, associations aim to promote public safety, business, industry, morality, and religion. There is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined power of individuals.

Any honest observer recognizes that the self-organizing energy Tocqueville describes has, to say the least, badly atrophied in modern America. Americans today are far less likely to join a club, attend church, start a family, or even date. They have fewer close real-life friends. Not only do they rarely participate in local government, but they typically have no idea how it works or who their elected officials are. A spirited public life has given way to atomization, smartphone addiction, and a passion for national politics at the expense of everything local. We love to beg Washington to solve our problems while many have never even met their neighbors.

But in Charlie’s own life, the old American way endured.

He hearkened back to America’s golden age, inspiring discouraged young people today. Read about the men who revolted against Britain, who conquered the West, who crushed Santa Anna at San Jacinto, or who charged up San Juan Hill. You will find Charlie over and over again: men with absolute confidence in the truth of the Christian Gospel, men with a fierce devotion to the United States of America as the greatest nation and greatest people in the world, men with no university degree but a lifetime hunger for learning, men of optimism who endured through one setback after another, men of self-reliance who raised armies and gambled fortunes to leave a worthy legacy to their posterity, men who would—and often did—lay down their lives for God and country.

Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence at 33. Alexander Hamilton played a decisive role in crafting the Constitution at 32. Buck Travis died leading the defenders of the Alamo at 26. Charlie Kirk, at just 31, ignited a conservative resurgence in the places it was deemed impossible—the American college campus—and swung a presidential race for good measure.

America’s present media ecosystem rewards emotional incontinence of the worst and most hysterical sort. Nothing attracts attention faster than screeching loudly, “We’ve been betrayed!” and howling that nothing has been accomplished. It is easy—and highly profitable—to be a charismatic complainer.

But it is far harder to be someone who fixes problems. And that was what Charlie did.

Few people believed more deeply in the power of his own disciplined efforts to change the world for the better. Charlie loved to recite the line from the Book of Isaiah: “Here I am, Lord. Send me.” When confronted with a crisis facing America, Charlie asked, “What can I do to help fix this?” This virtue drove his campus debates. If the youth were too liberal, why not be in the arena changing their minds?

But Charlie’s efforts went far beyond that. After poor early-voter turnout was a major contributor to the Republicans’ disappointing performance in the 2022 midterms, Charlie transformed Turning Point Action into an early-vote ballot-chasing operation with hundreds of employees. He fine-tuned the rhetoric to convince wary Republicans to come around on early voting. And for good measure, he wore a black “Vote Early” T-shirt while hosting his show to make sure the message got through. Come November, Charlie was deeply proud that of the seven major swing states, his home state of Arizona had shifted the most toward President Trump.

These efforts existed alongside recurring minor ones. After President Trump’s 2024 victory, Charlie moved to Mar-a-Lago for two months to help with the presidential transition. He did not seek a position for himself but worked to find promising hires to fill the new administration. When he learned that Nebraska’s oddball way of awarding electoral votes could hand the presidency to Democrats, Charlie organized a rally within a single week to change the law and made two visits to Nebraska to lobby for it. That particular effort failed, but it is still a testament to Charlie’s style—he always wanted to be where the work was most critical, and where he could have the greatest impact.

Charlie’s accomplishments followed the simplest strategy imaginable: identify a problem, search out a solution, and then do the work necessary to secure it. That is so basic it may sound like a joke, but it isn’t. The vast majority of us are content to spot a problem and whine as it persists. We send angry tweets and wait for someone to fix it. Charlie’s life was all about repeatedly taking the next step: becoming the solution.

Every day he attacked life, guided by a handful of questions written on a small sign he kept on his desk:

1. What can I do to help someone today?
2. What can I do to add value in the world today?
3. How can I honor God today?

This could easily be a trite message printed on a fridge magnet and then forgotten. But Charlie’s secret weapon was his earnestness: He asked himself those questions, found the answers, and followed through.

Walking the Walk

Charlie loved to call Turning Point USA the most important organization in America. When I first started working for him, hearing that phrase made me roll my eyes a little. But I was the fool, and Charlie was the great man: his total commitment and utter self-confidence made his words a reality.

If Charlie left all of us in his shadow, he did so with Christian humility. When success came, it was God’s doing, not his own. Politics is full of lip-service believers, but Charlie was the rare public Christian for whom faith clearly guided every decision and statement he ever made. He had a pastor’s knowledge of the Bible but always gave all the credit to the experts who taught him.

And even more than he loved talking about the importance of borders or explaining why he was pro-life, Charlie loved to talk about marriage, parenthood, and the transformative effects of family life. He liked to give dating and relationship advice because he earnestly wanted young men and women to experience God’s design for them. His final book, rather than an exhortation to political action, encouraged Christians to observe the Sabbath. Every time Charlie took a stage or stepped behind a microphone, he was showing America’s young people a better way that, once routine, is still available: Live the way I do, he said, and you can have the life I have.

As we pass the one-year mark without Charlie, this is the most important lesson to take from his life. None of his achievements required unnatural genius or physical prowess. Instead, they required tenacity, discipline, faith, and a readiness to put God and others first—virtues available to all of us, regardless of our innate talents.

On this September 10, the loss we feel remains immeasurable. But as Charlie understood better than most, the work continues. And as he would tell the staff of The Charlie Kirk Show every time the work seemed hard: “No blackpilling.” If we follow that simple lesson, we can carry on Charlie’s legacy and continue to build the country he devoted his life to saving.

The post America’s Youth Still Need Charlie Kirk appeared first on The American Mind.

The American Mind’s 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.

Political Fallout: Charlie Kirk’s Legacy and “The Flight 93 Election” | The American Mind Podcast

Ten years ago, the Claremont Review of Books published “The Flight 93 Election,” Michael Anton’s urgent warning that the 2016 election would be do-or-die: Trump or Hillary. But where is conservatism now, ahead of midterms and the 2028 election? Plus: The guys reflect on the virtues and achievements of Charlie Kirk, who built up the conservative movement and the nation, and sacrificed everything for it one year ago. In the wake of Kirk’s assassination, the Right—splintered by the attack—has reckoned with the precarious state of our politics. Meanwhile, the Left has minimized the impact of the violence.

The post Political Fallout: Charlie Kirk’s Legacy and “The Flight 93 Election” | The American Mind Podcast appeared first on The American Mind.

It is hard to believe that a year has passed since Charlie’s assassination.

Paying fitting tribute to his life’s work is daunting, and I have been hesitant to write anything at all—especially when I think of his wife, Erika, and their children. None of us can fathom what they have endured.

But we must keep Charlie’s life and work alive in memory and let them inspire and inform our own.

Prudence is an old word with a venerable tradition in Western thought and politics, though its full meaning has grown obscure in modern times. It is also the virtue I most associate with Charlie—and the one we would do best to learn from as we continue to fight for the country he loved.

Charlie was a principled man, but he was no ideological fanatic and no dogmatist on questions of politics and policy. He was always reading, learning, and talking with Americans from every walk of life: college students, grassroots conservatives, the donor class, and leaders across the country.

He knew what many in the conservative movement have forgotten: while the principles of justice advanced by the American Founders are eternal, circumstances change, and the application of principle must change with them. Dangers that one generation rightly ranks first may not deserve that place in the next, let alone a half-century later. The moral, political, and material circumstances of a great country are no less changeable. Navigating that complexity in pursuit of the good, while minimizing harm, is the essence of prudential statesmanship.

Prudence of this kind is built out of experience, which a long life supplies in abundance. The young have not accumulated such stock from which to draw. Sound political judgment early in life requires a voracious appetite for grappling with hard problems, a willingness to be taught by mentors, and a self-imposed, methodical program of study. It is difficult work, and most who attempt it fail.

Not Charlie. Year after year he labored to understand the true state of America and the Right, and then to explain to his fellow citizens where the country ought to be headed.

What Turning Point USA became under his leadership was a remarkable achievement. His goal, however, was something higher than the growth of the organization he founded. Second only to honoring God and protecting his growing family, Charlie aimed at nothing less than cultural and constitutional revival.

We honor Charlie properly by remembering these facts of his life and work. We honor him further by continuing to build, intelligently and prudently, the America we want for ourselves, our fellow citizens, and our children and grandchildren.

The post Remembering Charlie Kirk, One Year Later appeared first on The American Mind.

Gloria Steinem, a popularizer of feminist dogmas, died last week at the age of 92. She promoted many of the false doctrines of women’s liberation beginning in the 1960s through her persona, writings, publications, and speeches. As she passes from the scene, few of the original so-called second-wave feminists remain. Yet the overwhelming victories the movement has achieved in the decades since have largely obscured the radicalism at its center.

As I researched my second book, The Recovery of Family Life: Exposing the Limits of Modern Ideologies, I read Steinem’s influential 1970 Time essay, “What It Would Be Like If Women Win,” to understand what the fully realized feminist project would look like. What emerged from my survey of her work was the idea of an unfinished and unfinishable Rolling Feminist Revolution.

In “If Women Win,” Steinem compared the status of women to slavery and childhood, just as feminists had done from 1848 onward. “Being a wife” in 1970, “according to most social and legal definitions,” was “still a 19th century thing,” as if the pillars of coverture remained. Steinem complained that a woman still could not “sign credit agreements, use her maiden name, incorporate a business or establish a legal residence of her own” in some states. If a woman had to take her husband’s name in Hawaii, women everywhere were in chains.

In the world Steinem created, neither men nor women could choose anything fulfilling until the emergence of feminism. For most of human history, she claimed, sex was “arranged on the barter system.” Most women found it “second nature” to be “Uncle-Tom.” According to Steinem, no one experienced “love or sex” in the “unequal partnerships” of the past. No woman exercised before Title IX. Every woman was pigeonholed into the miserable social script of wife and mother, a servant to her husband and a slave to the species.

Until the Revolution.

For Steinem, “the revolution would not take away the option of being a housewife.” A woman could still be “her husband’s housekeeper and/or hostess,” but only if she “chose” it. An entire social apparatus would have to be built to ensure that women were genuinely choosing to be homemakers. Any socialization to traditional sex roles would have to end, lest a girl be gently guided into motherhood. Any restraint channeling sexual practice into marriage must end, lest choice be anything but an arbitrary exercise of the will. Complete independence between the sexes would have to be promoted. A whole new stereotype must arise to extinguish the old stereotypes.

To complete this Revolution, Steinem collaborated with several others to found Ms. Magazine, the flagship popularizer of feminist ideology.

The first issue, released by New York magazine in 1972, maps out the next stages of the Rolling Feminist Revolution. The issue featured articles about desexing the English language, promoting gender-neutral parenting, normalizing lesbianism, and celebrating careerism. Subsequent issues defended women getting angry instead of being agreeable. Achieving such goals would require a revolution in how society operated.

This would happen not only through the coercive power of the state but also through a fundamental shift in cultural norms. Endless nagging about using terms like “fire-person” or “police-woman” began. Androgynous clothing would have to be adopted from infancy, as would demands that little girls love the same toys as little boys. Girls would play boys’ sports—and with boys.

The Rolling Feminist Revolution required the difficult task of erasing sex differences. The second issue of Ms. included “Body Hair: The Last Frontier,” which argued that girls would not be free until they were as hairy as guys. “Populist Mechanics” contended that women would not be free until as many women became mechanics as men. Steinem imagined that far fewer women would take their husbands’ last name than do even today.

Steinem’s anticipated world has come about in many ways (a testament to the power of culture), but not with the results she expected (a testament to the power of nature).

She promised breaking down traditional sex roles would lead “half the teachers” to be men—but there were more male teachers in 1970 than there are today.

She promised that doubling the workforce would lead to “higher wages”—but wages have predictably been depressed by expanding the supply of labor since 1970.

She promised that “marriage will probably go right on” once society stopped “encouraging men to be exploiters and women to be parasites”—but marriage rates have declined substantially since sex roles were destroyed, especially among the working class.

She thought women had two choices: “Either she’s a feminist or a masochist”—but it turns out the feminists are the miserable masochists, and married neo-traditional moms are among the happiest women.

She thought that characterizing men as exploiters and women as parasites would lead to a society based on mutual trust and affection—but instead it created suspicion between the sexes. Women distrust men more today than they did in 1970.

She thought that destroying the old idea of marriage would make marriage stronger—but instead marriage, for the most part, is weaker, love is less apparent, and sex is less connected to meaningful, enduring relationships.

Steinem helped midwife a world of purposeless men, miserable women, mutual suspicion, loneliness, depression, anger, insanity, collapsing family life, civilizational barrenness, and hyper-politicization. The healthiest parts of our culture are the parts least affected by Steinem’s false, pernicious advocacy. The world after Steinem would be better if men and women once again built common lives without feminism’s poisonous influence.

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With tensions in Iran still boiling and our national debt hitting $40 trillion, it’s time to take a hard look at the military’s budget. We should preserve what the military needs to be capable and prepared—and cut the waste. One little-known program has not only failed its mission but also driven excess government spending. The good news is that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has already announced a review. The bad news? This program is so fundamentally defective that it should be abolished outright.

In the summer of 2024, a “socially disadvantaged” small business won two Defense Logistics Agency contracts worth more than $34 million. The firm then handed 95% of one contract’s value to Lockheed Martin and 94% of the other to a subsidiary of Leonardo DRS, two of the world’s largest defense contractors. The disadvantaged firm did little more than sign the paperwork and collect a fee.

The arrangement broke no law. It followed the standard business model of the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) Business Development Program, the federal government’s oldest identity-based contracting scheme—and one of Washington’s most durable corporate welfare rackets.

In January, Secretary Hegseth announced that the Pentagon would take a “sledgehammer” to the program and ordered a line-by-line review of every small business sole-source and set-aside award above $20 million. As he put it: “In many, many instances, these ‘socially disadvantaged’ businesses, they don’t even do work. They take a 10 percent, 20 percent, sometimes 50 percent fee off the top, and then pass the contract off to a giant consulting firm.”

Hegseth has diagnosed the disease, but a contract review will not cure it. Several administrations and Congresses have tried to fix the 8(a) program. But all of them have failed because its own incentives reward the abuse. Congress cannot regulate those incentives away; it wrote them into the program’s design. The only reform that will work is to abolish the 8(a) program entirely.

Congress created the modern program in 1978, when it amended Section 8(a) of the Small Business Act to steer noncompetitive and set-aside contracts to firms owned by “socially and economically disadvantaged individuals.” The SBA promptly defined that term to cover nearly every racial and ethnic minority group while excluding white Americans. Lawmakers promised that nine years of preferential treatment would turn these firms into independent competitors. Nearly half a century later, the program has produced the opposite: a permanent class of pass-through firms selling access to the defense giants.

A Claremont Institute investigation found the same pattern under administrations of both parties. In 2011, under President Obama, EYAK Technology LLC subcontracted $2.6 million of a $2.9 million Army manufacturing contract—91% of its value—to L3Harris Technologies. Between 2009 and 2025, L3Harris received 47 subcontracts from 8(a) firms through the Department of Defense under prime contracts worth nearly $1 billion, and eight of those subcontracts exceeded 90% of the prime contract’s value. General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and other giants worked the same racket.

Reforms to the program keep failing because enforcement would require a small army of compliance officers. Even worse, every actor in the system profits from the abuse.

The 8(a) firms earn millions and face no pressure to build real capability. The defense giants pad their bottom line by accessing set-aside contracts they could never win directly. The contracting agency fills its procurement needs and hits the SBA’s small-business goals on paper. Nobody at the table has a reason to flip it over. The structure rewards dependency, not the development the program promises.

The program’s defenders blame a few bad actors, but the abuse flows from the design itself. Any program that confers preferential treatment on a favored class will produce the same result. When government channels public money to a group in the name of solving its problems, the intended beneficiaries grow more dependent while middlemen and incumbents prosper at the taxpayer’s expense.

The Trump Administration has made some encouraging early moves. The SBA demanded three years of financial records from participants and suspended roughly 1,000 firms that failed to produce them. Secretary Hegseth’s contract review shows the same willingness to act.

But audits and reviews leave the machine intact, and the next administration can switch it back on. As long as the program exists, the incentives will win.

Congress and the administration should stop trying to perfect the irreformable. After 48 years, the 8(a) program has failed its stated purpose and wasted taxpayer dollars while enriching prime contractors, pass-through firms, and the bureaucracy that certifies them. Secretary Hegseth should swing his sledgehammer through the program’s foundation and shut it down for good.

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Ten years ago today, September 5, 2016, Michael Anton’s “The Flight 93 Election” took the internet, and the Right, by storm. Anton’s essay made the case for Trump in the face of furious, well-funded opposition from elite conservative intellectual and political circles.

The electoral choice was easy: Trump was a risk; Hillary was a certainty. On Trump, though, Anton went further. On trade, war, the economy, and especially immigration, Trump promised to disrupt the establishment status quo in the name of the long-aggrieved GOP voting base. He ran on a concrete policy platform, amassed a presidential electoral coalition around it, and then delivered. How novel!

Anton’s arresting polemic in defense of Trump has been vindicated. It also did not come from nowhere. Six years before “Flight 93,” in 2010, the late Angelo Codevilla (a longtime Claremont Senior Fellow) published an equally viral essay in The American Spectator, “America’s Ruling Class—and the Perils of Revolution.” He called out the intellectual, moral, and republican bankruptcy of America’s bipartisan ruling class. Rush Limbaugh read it on air, as he would again with Anton’s essay in 2016.

Anton and Codevilla were ahead of the curve, analyzing the trends and the future of American politics and institutions at a higher level than their peers in the commentariat. Many of their Claremont Institute colleagues had been doing similar work for decades—on the threat of the administrative state, the folly of George W. Bush’s Middle East democracy project, and foundational constitutional questions like birthright citizenship.

“The Flight 93 Election” should be understood in this larger context. The enduring work of the Claremont Institute, what Harry V. Jaffa called “the scholarship of the politics of freedom,” is the necessary precondition for serious analysis of America’s rolling constitutional crisis. This project of constitutional restoration, started during the first Trump Administration and now proceeding in the second, draws on intellectual foundations many decades in the making.

Revisit “The Flight 93 Election” this weekend. And if you haven’t already, pick up the updated edition of Angelo Codevilla’s The Ruling Class (2024), with an introduction by none other than Michael Anton.

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