From “Black Jack” Pershing’s pursuit of Pancho Villa deep into Chihuahua to fentanyl streaming into the United States, Washington forgets that the southern border has always been a battlefield.

In August, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum declared, “We will never allow the US army or any other institution of the US to set foot in Mexican territory.” Her words came after reports that President Trump had signed a directive authorizing the Department of War to conduct military operations against Latin American cartels designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, Sinaloa foremost among them.

In Washington the rubric was “hemispheric defense.” In Mexico City it was heard as the prelude to invasion. Both capitals spoke as if the prospect was novel. But it is not.

American forces have crossed the Rio Grande in uniform far more often than most Americans realize. The Mexican-American War of 1846 amputated half of Mexico’s territory. Then, there were the Las Cuevas War of 1875 and the “Bandit Wars,” a series of raids by Mexican outlaws into Texas from 1915–1919. Even the obscure Garza Revolution of the 1890s followed the same logic. When cross-border violence spilled north, the United States answered not with demarches but with dragoons. Mexico remembers. But Americans forget and then declare the next repetition “unprecedented.”

Today’s cartels are not Villa’s cavalry with Mausers. They are diversified corporations of crime with private armies, intelligence capabilities, and global supply chains. Increasingly, they sharpen battlefield skills drawn from contemporary wars. Defense News reported in July that cartel operatives snuck into Ukraine via the International Legion to receive drone training, with the hope of deploying those tactics back home. Their trainers are TikTok and Telegram as much as any jungle camp, and the lessons return home in the form of cheap quadcopters that drop grenades on rivals.

Their signature export, illicit fentanyl synthesized from Chinese-sourced precursors, kills between 50,000 and 75,000 Americans each year. Roughly 450,000 Americans have died from synthetic opioids over the past decade, a death toll that dwarfs U.S. losses in Vietnam. In scale and lethality, fentanyl is closer to hybrid war than banditry. Yet the American debate remains trapped in a prosecutorial frame: indict, extradite, and issue press releases. Meanwhile, the pipeline replenishes itself.

Sheinbaum’s posture is orthodox nationalism. No state welcomes foreign troops, and Mexico, with its long memory of U.S. incursions, least of all. But sovereignty is not merely the absence of foreigners—it is the presence of effective authority. Where criminal syndicates tax, govern, and patrol with heavy weapons, a parallel state has taken root. When that hostile para-state shapes life on both sides of the border, history suggests the neighbor eventually responds.

Here is the awkward truth: even as Mexico swears off a U.S. “invasion,” elements of a U.S. intervention already operate without flags, formations, or ceremony. A recent report in Reuters revealed that for years the CIA has been the gatekeeper of America’s most consequential anti-narco operations in Mexico, working through elite “vetted units” inside the Mexican army and navy. These formations are screened by U.S. polygraphs, trained and equipped with American kit, and financed for travel and sources. They plan and execute many of the high-value captures the public attributes to Mexico alone.

This is not the DEA’s world of chain-of-custody and grand juries. It is the post-9/11 machine of “find, fix, finish” quietly repurposed. Langley leverages signals intelligence to map cartel communications, builds targeting packages, flies drones along the seam of sovereignty, and fuses U.S. interagency efforts from a perch close to the ambassador. Intelligence officers sit on the embassy’s top floor while law enforcement works below.

The January 2023 arrest of Ovidio Guzmán López, a crown prince of Sinaloa, was a case in point: CIA tasking and analytics, U.S. aerial surveillance, a flipped insider, and a Mexican army unit the Agency had long trained and vetted. The colors on the shoulder were Mexican, but the architecture of the hunt was American.

There is historical rhyme here. In the late 19th century, Washington leaned on Rangers, scouts, and ad hoc columns to pacify the border. In the Cold War, U.S. covert power supplied Latin militaries with the means, intelligence, mobility, and money to stabilize their interiors. Today’s version is subtler. Mexico’s civilian leadership publicly shuns the optics of a DEA partnership, then quietly privileges the army and its CIA-vetted cadre as the least leaky vessel. It spares Mexico’s politicians open humiliation and gives Washington an instrument that leaves few fingerprints.

But the pathology is also familiar. Decapitating kingpins’ cartels ignites succession wars and spreads violence laterally. Some 30,000 Mexicans are murdered annually, many in cartel “civil wars” that resemble the internecine feuds of early-modern magnates. This is roughly the level of bloodshed seen in El Salvador and Guatemala at the height of their civil wars in the 1980s. Tactical successes—arrests, extraditions, trophies—stack up while structural conditions worsen. The secrecy that protects operations also shields policy from scrutiny and therefore from correction.

For Trump the politics are brutally simple. Fentanyl deaths dwarf many wartime casualty rolls. Voters see an undefended border and a poisonous supply chain into the country that mocks U.S. sovereignty. Threatening direct action advertises resolve and, not incidentally, distinguishes his posture from a Democratic establishment uneasy about confronting Mexico, let alone Beijing’s role in precursors. The legalists warn of authorities and authorizations. The strategists ask a sterner question: Even if the right exists, can force be applied to decisive effect across a system that stretches from Guangzhou chemical firms to stash houses in Ohio?

Pershing’s columns could raid a bandit camp and degrade the threat. Seizing a Sinaloa lab today is nearer to hitting a node in Amazon’s logistics network. The precursors keep moving, the cooks reconstitute, the middlemen adjust margins, and the product flows.

This is not to say that force is futile. It is to say that force must be nested: financial warfare against cartel and facilitator capital, industrial pressure on precursor exporters, maritime interdictions that treat east-to-west chemical flows as seriously as north-to-south migrant flows, and intelligence-led strikes that deny safe havens. But it is a fantasy to imagine that a single cavalry slash or a wave of missile strikes will extirpate an industry whose demand sits in American towns and whose supply is globally fungible.

Here the Trump Administration’s global fantasies deserve contrast. In September the Taliban publicly rejected Washington’s demand to reclaim Bagram Air Base. The bid was dressed up in Mackinder’s “Heartland” geopolitics—maps drawn for railheads and coal, not fentanyl supply chains and encrypted finance. It reads like a neoconservative reflex: costly, symbolic, remote. The intervention that matters, however, is nearer at hand. The southern border is not a cartographic abstraction but the membrane through which drugs, migrants, and money move daily.

Washington does not need another Bagram. It needs to reckon seriously with Sinaloa.

There is a sober middle course between chest-beating and paralysis. Start with candor: the CIA-led enterprise in Mexico already amounts to intervention by other means, sanctioned by Mexico’s government even as its leaders denounce “invasion.” That reality should be matched to strategy rather than left to metastasize in secrecy.

The United States can insist that vetted Mexican units remain the executors of force while it tightens the rings around the cartels’ money, chemicals, and mobility. It can integrate Treasury’s financial warfare with Coast Guard and Navy interdiction, expand targeted export controls on precursor chemistry, and treat Chinese gray-zone suppliers as facilitators of mass casualty events rather than as mere violators of customs paperwork. Above all, it can consolidate intelligence fusion, not just information sharing, so that every lab raid is linked to a bank seizure and a precursor disruption within the same campaign rhythm.

Realism also demands humility. Tactical brilliance without strategic coherence is caffeinated drift. The Reuters report made clear that Langley’s “find, fix, finish” has not staunched the flood of fentanyl. The kingpins fall, the successors rise, and the funeral homes in America keep long hours. A republic that’s serious about its border will look less like a touring cavalry column and more like an orchestra pit: many sections, one conductor, and a score everyone can read.

When Arturo Rocha, formerly of Mexico’s foreign ministry, said, “This isn’t Afghanistan,” he was right. It is more intimate and more historically entangled. The United States has long treated its southern border as a zone where raiders, revolutionaries, and now cartel magnates test the limits of sovereignty. In earlier eras Americans acted with an often-brutal clarity. Today they outsource decisive action to deniable partners and then wonder why the ledger of the dead continues to climb even as targets are neutralized.

The point of recalling Pershing is not to romanticize punitive expeditions but to remind ourselves that strategy must connect means to ends. The CIA’s invisible auxiliaries have delivered remarkable tactical effects: Ovidio in chains, networks mapped, operations disrupted. Yet a decade’s toll of nearly half a million American dead tells us that tactics without systemic design are the militarized version of the drug user’s dilemma, another hit to stave off the pain.

Sheinbaum draws her red line. Washington counts its dead. The cartels count their profits.

Between the cavalry raid of 1916 and the drone feed of 2025 lies the same question a serious republic must answer: whether it can act with strategic purpose, combining clandestine pressure, economic warfare, and political will on both sides of the border, so that the next repetition of history is not another turn of the screw.

The post The Never-Ending Border Battle appeared first on The American Mind.

Today, we commemorate Christopher Columbus, the man whose daring voyage across the Atlantic in 1492 initiated the Age of Discovery that reshaped the world. Columbus’s prediction that a western route to Asia was possible was not correct in its specifics, but he did not have to be correct to change the world. His legacy is about the spirit that drove him: a spirit of exploration, courage, and leadership.

Columbus’s journey across the Atlantic was no small feat. In an era when ships were fragile and navigation rudimentary, Columbus and his crew faced uncharted waters and unpredictable storms. The dangers were not merely physical; the psychological toll of sailing in the open sea, with no guarantee of land appearing on the horizon, tested the limits of human endurance. Columbus’s men urged him to turn back, but he pressed on, navigating not only the seas but also the fragile morale of his crew.

What does it mean to celebrate such a man? As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, we raise monuments to men as well as the spirit that moved them:

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

This spirit continues to inspire. We honor Columbus not just for what he achieved, but for the qualities that made his achievements possible.

Americans have been celebrating Columbus for a long time. The first monument to Columbus in America, the “Columbus Obelisk” in Baltimore, was erected in 1792. Baltimore Heritage reports that its great age led to it being forgotten at times. “In the 1880s, a local historian felt compelled to debunk a popular rumor that the obelisk memorialized a horse named ‘Columbus’ instead of the man.” That kind of sleepy forgetfulness, however, is impossible in today’s polarized environment.

In 2017, left-wing activists began vandalizing the obelisk. They took a sledgehammer to its base and posted a sign that read “Racism. Tear it Down.” Three years later, in 2020, Baltimore Democrats tried to rename it “The Police Violence Victims Monument,” but the mayor vetoed the city council.

Like the Columbus obelisk, Columbus Day has become a symbol of America that some wish to tear down. Calls to replace it with “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” have grown over the last several decades, reflecting a broader opposition to European exploration. Critics argue that Columbus’s arrival in the Americas led to colonization, displacement, and suffering for the indigenous people. They point to the hard things Columbus did—his role in enslavement and violence—as reasons to elevate the tribal peoples of the New World above the explorers and colonists of the Old.

The push to raise tribal peoples over Europeans found formal expression in Joe Biden’s four “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” proclamations. Biden’s practice was to issue two proclamations each Columbus Day, an “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” proclamation and a legitimate “Columbus Day” proclamation. In these, he would emphasize the goodness of tribal peoples and the immorality of Columbus, and white people generally. In no proclamation did he mention anything that might embarrass America’s former tribal peoples.

The “deep concern” for historical accuracy was merely a pretext to focus on the evils of colonization—it reached no further. The reader is led to believe American Indians have existed forever, from “time immemorial,” that they are the most maligned and most patriotic group of American citizens, and that they “lead in every way.” The message is that indigenous people have rightful sovereignty over the territory presently inhabited by the white, colonial, racist United States of America.

Thankfully, President Trump issued a Columbus Day proclamation that doesn’t traffic in self-flagellation.

I doubt this kind of foolishness displayed in Biden’s proclamations is embraced by many American Indians. Of course, Americans should remember them as brave, tragic heroes. There could be a holiday praising great Indian leaders and peoples.

But such a holiday, like Columbus Day, would mean celebrating men who did hard things. Pick one of the great Indian figures from the colonial era. Try to celebrate him. See what kind of complaints come out of the woodwork. We can either have holidays about real men and actual peoples, or we can have bland holidays characterized by rage and resentment.

The complainers forget how hard the world can be and assume that the gentility made possible by civilization is a moral requirement rather than a high achievement. Additionally, proponents of “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” have to argue that the only way the Americas were going to avoid colonization was if Europeans had not set out to explore the world.

The complainers believe Columbus, upon seeing the newly discovered lands inhabited, should have turned back. He should have known that a great civilization would overwhelm the tribal peoples he found. Columbus’s decision to explore was a decision for genocide. That is how the complainers necessarily see it.

They do not merely hate Columbus for the actions he took—they hate that a civilization existed such that the scales of power were completely lopsided in the world for centuries. They hate that daring men lived to carry this civilization everywhere they went.

Actual human beings are far too impressive for leftist ideology, however. Imagine what it would be like for one of these complainers to meet a true 1600s Iroquois brave or Algonquin shaman.

Scholars can debate the justice of this or that event. They can examine the motivations, the pressures, what exactly happened, who did what and when, the impact and outcome, and a thousand other questions that someone genuinely interested in justice would ask. But they should consider the overarching question of our time: Is civilization a good thing? If it is, Columbus can and should be celebrated. If it is bad, he and other explorers must be maligned as destroyers of indigenous peoples.

The activists and intellectuals who hate Columbus hate the spirit of exploration and the civilization that birthed it. The people attacking him are attacking the history of the world as it is, on behalf of a history of the world that never was and never could have been.

For those of us who celebrate Columbus Day, the holiday has likewise become more important than it used to be. We aren’t merely celebrating a great and daring explorer—we are celebrating our right to celebrate him, our right to be proud of him, and the civilization he carried into the New World.

The post Why Columbus Matters appeared first on The American Mind.

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.

Columbus brought that faith, Catholic and Christian, to the Americas, and so the enemies of the faith became enemies of his. A man of Italy, he sailed for Their Catholic Majesties of Spain, and so the enemies of the Spanish inheritance became enemies of his. Columbus brought a European civilization that came to dominate and define the life of the New World. Columbus brought the ideas of that civilization to the Western Hemisphere, and laid the groundwork for those that transcended them—natural rights, republican law, and every moral advance from Bartolomeo de las Casas to Frederick Douglass.

It is the same tale over and over again: scratch an opponent of Columbus and Columbus Day and you inevitably discover a deep hostility toward the very culture and principles that underpin liberty and decency everywhere. After all, once it is conceded that a seafaring adventurer braving the vast ocean in the name of Christian majesties discovered a land where a “new birth of freedom” eventually flourished—still the fulcrum of mankind’s earthly hopes more than half a millennium later—what is left? That concession means that faith is an intrinsic good—and that adventure in its name is a surpassing virtue.

Men and women who admire Christopher Columbus might dare to be free—and that’s what his enemies truly fear.

Of course there is reason to criticize the historical figure of Columbus, as there is reason to criticize any man who ever lived save one. Christopher Columbus was sometimes iniquitous and at times cruel. This is indisputable—and also irrelevant to the reasons for his celebration. The magnitude of his achievement and its world-historical consequences—dwarfing those of all but a handful of other men in human history—render his faults almost meaningless. The God whom Columbus imperfectly served makes use of imperfect instruments to accomplish His perfect will. We who live in the world Columbus found have only one proper and virtuous response to him: gratitude.

We live in a New World made fit for us and our posterity because Columbus saw a horizon and went beyond it. We live in a republic of laws because Columbus brought that inheritance with him, and by the grace of God, it stayed and flourished. If we are not grateful, we are undeserving.

We who are the apotheosis of the New World—the great republic, the last best hope on earth—have every reason to celebrate Christopher Columbus. Now with the imprimatur of the White House, we do.

If you are Italian American, reclaim this special commemoration of your inheritance. If you are Catholic, or indeed any sort of Christian, celebrate the man who brought your faith to the farthest reaches of the West. If you are Hispanic, rejoice at what was done in the name of your ancient monarchs.

If you are American, this holiday is for you.

The spirit of Columbus did not end with one man. It lives across the New World. It lives on in this holiday and every other day. It lives in you.

The post The Spirit of Columbus Lives On appeared first on The American Mind.

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.

I’ll call it “the Kentucky Trilogy”: the 1925 silent film Kentucky Pride, 1934’s Judge Priest, and 1953’s The Sun Shines Bright. The latter two films are very similar but not the same, both based on Kentuckian Irvin S. Cobb’s Judge Priest short stories. All three films are family dramas with strong comedic flourishes which celebrate homespun American virtues and small-town values. They are heartwarming and emotional but not sugar-coated (there can be villainy in small towns, too). All three take place in the late 19th or early 20th century and are steeped in American history, especially Southern history.

Kentucky Pride, released a century ago last month, is one of a handful of John Ford silent films to survive completely intact. It’s a horse racing movie. Ford biographer Joseph McBride called it “a modest gem” among Ford’s work. Written by Dorothy Yost and Elizabeth Pickett (a Kentuckian who grew up on a tobacco farm and was the granddaughter of Confederate General George Pickett), it is a story told mostly from a horse’s perspective. The filly, Virginia’s Future, introduces the equine cast first and then “those creatures called humans.” She tells us that “with us Kentuckians, pride of race is everything!” Among the four-legged cameos in the film is Man O’War, “King of them all, the perfect horse,” the great racehorse who was as famous and celebrated as Babe Ruth in his day.

Virginia’s Future is born on the Blue Grass horse farm of kindly Roger Beaumont, a breeder and a gambler. Both horse and owner encounter various travails—a broken leg while racing, the threat of being shot, abuse by a new owner for the horse; and for the man, near-ruin from gambling at the racetrack, an unfaithful wife, and a lost daughter. But in the end, Virginia Future’s daughter, the filly Confederacy, wins the great race; the usurping adulterers are disgraced; and father is reunited with daughter (as is horse with horse). Roger Beaumont is played by Alabama-born actor Henry B. Walthall, whose father had been a captain in the Confederate Army. Walthall became a star with D.W. Griffith’s well-known (or notorious) 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation.

Walthall plays a key role, but is not the star, in our second film, Judge Priest, starring Will Rogers. A famed humorist and actor, Rogers plays an easygoing small-town judge—William Pittman Priest—who uses his native cunning to advance the cause of justice and true love. A judge for a quarter of a century—except when the Republicans were in power—he loves his mint juleps, playing croquet with his cronies, and his Confederate past. The setting is 1890: “the War between the States was over, but its tragedies and comedies haunted every man’s grown mind.”

The Judge is attended to by his black servants Aunt Dilsey (Hattie McDaniel in a prominent early role) and Jeff Poindexter (Stepin Fetchit), a reformed chicken thief, layabout, and fishing partner of Judge Priest. Rogers, McDaniel, and Fetchit (real name Lincoln Monroe Perry, from Key West, Florida) were all veterans of the early 20th-century vaudeville and carnival circuit.

While Rogers was a star and prominent national figure before his untimely death in 1935, Stepin Fetchit, whose acting schtick was that he was the “laziest man in the world,” was the first black actor to receive a screen credit and earn a million dollars. Much derided for his supposedly demeaning movie roles by activists during the Civil Rights era, the actor has in recent years been somewhat rehabilitated by his African American biographer Mel Watkins, who makes a case in a 2005 book for the “rebellious, folk-inspired subversiveness” of the lazy Fetchit screen persona. It is kind of ironic that one of the earlier indictments by liberal elites of poor Fetchit’s career was issued in a 1968 CBS documentary produced by Andy Rooney and narrated by Bill Cosby, an actual criminal and rapist.  

Facing an electoral challenge, Judge Priest describes himself as “an old country jake who’s kind of a baby-kisser,” and notes that “the name of Priest means something in Kentucky,” but one thing that it doesn’t stand for is intolerance. The wily old Confederate turns the tables on intolerance and injustice (with an assist from a top hat and coon coat-wearing Jeff Poindexter playing “Dixie” on the harmonica).

Both Judge Priest and our last film, The Sun Shines Bright, are steeped in nostalgia for the past, especially in the post-war past of Confederate war veterans, something that is (along with the antics of Stepin Fetchit) sure to infuriate today’s progressives. Some may see these productions as dated. But this longing for the past and place was there when these films premiered, and has grown only stronger with age. To many today they may seem as incorrigibly retrograde (although similar themes abound throughout Ford’s work). There is an irony here in that, at the time, both director Ford and Judge Priest creator Irvin S. Cobb were regarded as relative liberals. Cobb—whose stories of Kentucky contain regular uses of “the N-word”—celebrated in both a magazine article and a book the exploits of the Harlem Hellfighters, African American soldiers of the 369th infantry in the First World War.

Ford, for his part, was more liberal than many Hollywood Cold Warriors. But the Irishman from Maine had a clear cinematic sympathy for the Lost Cause of the South, abetted by a wife from North Carolina who was a member of both the Daughters of the American Revolution and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Ford’s Western films are filled with honorable veterans of both Union and Confederate armies (John Wayne plays both), and this same trend is also in evidence in the last film in the Kentucky Trilogy.

If the first two films in our trilogy are good films, The Sun Shines Bright is a great one, a mature and deft portrayal of small-town hypocrisy redeemed by small-town goodness. Veteran character actor Charles Winniger plays Judge Priest. The romantic lead, actor John Russell, served at Guadalcanal and would later appear as Bloody Bill Anderson in Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales. It was supposedly Ford’s favorite film, though some critics suggest he was just intentionally mocking film critics by saying so.

Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who thought very highly of the film, noted that while Ford may have been considered a liberal in the past, in this film he is “conservative and reactionary—meaning a certain idea of tradition; it also entails a certain view of human nature that is relatively pessimistic.” In the film, Judge Priest’s opponent Maydew is very much the progressive: he declares that “no longer can an empty sleeve [of a Confederate veteran] smother the progress of the 20th century.” A campaign poster against the boozy Judge Priest promises that “Maydew will drive out the moonshiners.” The powerful, beautifully rendered, and nuanced screenplay is by Ford collaborator Lawrence Stallings, another Southerner who fought and was severely wounded as a U.S. Marine in France during the Great War.

In both of the Judge Priest films, true love triumphs, a young woman’s good name is redeemed from the intolerance of local small minds, and unjustly accused men are vindicated. The atmosphere of Kentucky Pride is not too different—families are reunited and justice (on the racetrack) triumphs.

All three films underscore that, while there are always evildoers, criminals and liars among us, the inherent character of Heritage Americans, both black and white, is deeply rooted in family, tradition, and friendship. It is also, and above all, fundamentally decent.

The post John Ford’s America appeared first on The American Mind.

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?

One reason is the role such storytelling has played in supporting the polite fictions that have always undergirded the postwar consensus. Only two of the U.N. Security Council’s five permanent members—the U.S. and the Soviet Union—had any real power in the post-1945 world. Postwar Britain was moribund, rationing foodstuffs into the 1950s, reduced to a kind of financial receivership to the United States. This situation precipitated our vaunted “special relationship,” i.e., eight decades of America bullying London. Charles de Gaulle’s France was allowed to pose as a victor, the legacy of Philippe Pétain’s Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime swept under the rug. China may have power now, but the country was a basket case in 1945, and its Security Council seat was held until 1971 by Chiang Kai-shek’s government, based in Taiwan after it lost its civil war with Mao Zedong’s Communists in 1949. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) which now holds that seat, unlike Chiang, was not even a belligerent in the war: Stalin’s USSR brokered an agreement with Tokyo in October 1940 whereby Japan and Mao agreed not to attack each other’s forces. Portraying this miscellany of states as the proud legacy of an anti-fascist triumph, rather than as a haphazard product of the war’s catastrophic after-effects, helps uphold the comic book fiction that the U.N. is to international relations what the Avengers are to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Still more fantastical are the half-truths which surround the war itself. Perhaps Americans in the 1940s were less naïve than those in 1917 who had believed President Woodrow Wilson’s airy promise that they were entering the fray because “the world must be made safe for democracy.” But they were bombarded with no less overwrought propaganda about an evil fascist “Axis” bent on world domination, told they were fighting for abstractions such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms,” and sold a whitewashed portrait of their wartime “Ally,” Josef Stalin, as “Uncle Joe.” Some of this wartime propaganda was later jettisoned out of embarrassment, such as the Stalinophilia which came to seem passé, if not downright treasonous, in the early Cold War years. Still, most of us were raised on a diet of dramatizations about democracy standing up to fascism as the righteous Allied armies delivered Europe from the clutches of wicked Hitler and the Holocaust, all while saving China, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific region from Japanese aggression.

The real story of the Second World War is murkier than this, beginning with the U.S.’s role in it. If we fought a war against fascism, then why did we wait until 1941 to do so, 19 years after Benito Mussolini’s fascists came to power in Italy and six years after Italy invaded Abyssinia? If what was really meant was a war against Nazism, then why did we wait until Adolf Hitler had been in power for nearly nine years, five years after he remilitarized the Rhineland, three years after the Anschluss and Munich, two years after he invaded Poland, and nearly a year and a half after Germany invaded Denmark, Norway, France, and the Low Countries? Why, moreover, did we let Hitler declare war on the United States proactively in December 1941, rather than do it the other way around?

As for “armed aggression,” it is rich to say that we went to war to oppose this, when we did not do so in response to multiple such actions by Italy, Germany, and Japan before 1941, not to mention the similarly aggressive behavior between 1939 and 1941 by the Soviet Union—a country we not only did not go to war with, but supported vigorously with Lend-Lease aid and arms shipments even before the U.S. entered the war against Nazi Germany. Stalin’s Communist dictatorship was just as “unfree” as any of the Axis powers, indeed far more oppressive and murderous vis-à-vis its own subjects. By December 1941 it had invaded nearly as many countries as Nazi Germany and more than either Italy or Japan had done. If the “Good War” was a crusade for democracy or against armed aggression, why did we not go to war with the USSR?

Read the rest here.

The post Goodbye to the Good War appeared first on The American Mind.

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

As James Bowman notes in his illuminating, if overly pessimistic, Honor: A History (2006), honor is gender-specific across societies, from the primitive to the advanced: “The basic honor of the savage—bravery for men, chastity for women—is still recognizable beneath the surfaces of the popular culture that has done so much to efface it. If you doubt it, try calling a man a wimp or a woman a slut.” This hypothesis was clearly easier to prove some two decades ago when the book was published.

Honor is most salient for, and characteristic of, men. Its breeding ground is what one historian called the “honor group.” As Bowman explains, “[Such] honor groups form naturally around any corporate enterprise, but especially those—like the armed services, police forces, fire brigades and sports teams—that are male-dominated.”

However, in the 20th century, elite service academies in America forgot that crucial lesson.

The Ford Administration passed a law in 1975 requiring West Point, Annapolis, and Colorado Springs to accept women. Virginia Military Institute (VMI) managed to hold out until 1996, when it too fell to the onslaught of second-wave feminism in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s majority opinion in United States v. Virginia. Scott Yenor gives the full, sad story in the latest Provocation from the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. As Justice Scalia noted at the time, the principles articulated by the majority effectively declared single-sex public education unconstitutional.

These developments are bad for men and women alike. They indiscriminately abolish female excellence by setting a male standard for women. And they abolish single-gender institutions and projects that are necessary for developing a lifelong taste for honor in young men. This robs men, who are charged with the responsible use of violence, of the tools of honor that can help them channel their power in good ways.

In the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a legal framework that gradually crystallized like a massive kidney stone, ensuring equal outcomes for “protected groups,” became the goal for which everything else was sacrificed. This inorganic growth now crowds out honest discussion, based on an accurate understanding of human nature, from our courtrooms.

While the racial dimensions of this legal paradigm shift dominate our public debates, the rigorous denial of a teleological difference between the sexes is far more pernicious. For this difference cuts deep to the heart of what it means to be human.

Historically, honor-based war bands were often mixed-race, transcending real and meaningful natural divides, as in the motley comitatus Romulus assembled to found the Eternal City. From the pharaohs to the Macedonians and the Roman legions of late antiquity, coalition armies gradually drew a barbarous diversity into a unity, even sparking ethnogenesis—but the war band was never mixed gender.

Nature Always Comes Back

As Yenor points out, the defense in US v. Virginia felt forced to make their case on the basis of bland ideals such as preserving a diversity of educational options in the State of Virginia, or sexless policies like “better educational outcomes for both men and women.” You know, like test scores and job placement. Even the clairvoyant Scalia had little room to maneuver against Justice Ginsburg’s well-precedented presumption that gender-specific goals for education were ipso facto baseless and inadmissible in a serious courtroom.

The gradual denaturing of VMI’s renowned “Code of a Gentleman” is an unsettling illustration of the collapse of honor. The organic, common code of honorable action upheld by peers (a gentleman “does not slap strangers on the back” nor “hail a lady from a club window”) was shoved aside by the bureaucratic “Code of a Cadet,” which the school administration now requires students to memorize. Predictably, the code is mostly managerial boilerplate, much of which is redolent of an “In This House” type of morality: “A cadet stands against intolerance, prejudice, discrimination, hate, and oppression.”

Real honor works, however, when a man shrinks from the shame of disappointing not his overlords, but his peers. If it feels like homework, it’s not honor.

After the rapid cultural developments of the last decade, from the popularity of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life to the forceful public rejection of trans men in women’s sports, RBG’s premise that all social construction of gender difference is arbitrary and unjust now seems not just quaint and laughable, but thoroughly unscientific. Even moderate liberals like Richard Reeves are now arguing for male-only institutions to solve men-specific social problems (skyrocketing rates of suicide, unemployment, drug use, and inceldom, to name just some). Even if such calls from the likes of Reeves are piled high with qualifications about the unquestionable goodness of women’s social progress, such a shift is momentous, and we should be grateful for it.

Second-wave feminism perverts the equal dignity between the sexes into mandating an equality of potentials, ends, and outcomes, denying the harmonious biological and anthropological differences which underpin that very dignity. In the Odyssey, good women are usually found standing next to the pillars of a magnificent household—for they are themselves the true pillars.

Instead, in our day, bereft of the natural protectors who honor their virtues, women are often exploited by the government, corporate employers, pollsters, and pickup artists. Men often lack good friends who can hold them to a standard of honor, instead dissipating their energies on frivolity and destruction. Thankfully, feminism is mortally wounded and on its way out as a political force. But a dying she-bear can still kill you.

As of now, our legal institutions lag substantially behind popular culture. The kidney stone sticks; men and women will continue to cramp and suffer until we pulverize it. Legal activists and institution builders now have a popular mandate to do exactly that.

The Road to Restoration

Overturning United States v. Virginia offers a promising practical route to begin this project. The work is urgent, because educational institutions built upon a corrupt anthropology will continue to subconsciously distort minds and characters—even if we compel their denizens to affirm conservative platitudes about the family and patriotism.

From all appearances, Charlie Kirk’s assassin was raised in the type of family that in former times might have been adequate to ensure his stability (that is, married parents who were conservative and present in the home). What he lacked was a healthy male youth social structure. Indeed, most young men now lack this—and if they have it, they only managed to cobble it together despite the suspicion or even hostility of the institutions entrusted with their formation.

As Charlie’s wife Erika pointed out in the wake of his murder, her husband’s work was especially focused on giving a meaningful, hopeful purpose to the kind of young man who killed him. Building on Charlie’s work means not only calling our youth to the higher purposes of family and duty, but also restoring to them the institutional and social struts that uphold strength of character.

Reviving—or refounding—institutions, groups, and activities that recognize the unique and differing teleology of male and female excellence can begin with the service academies and the military, where the fate of honor has the most obvious consequences for national security. But it should not stop there. Reviving sex-specific education as a widely accessible option should be the number one priority for anyone in the conservative movement who cares about America’s long-term health and viability. While we’re at it, we can get to work tossing out all those other outdated statutes that are regularly used to ram gender mixing and gender quotas where they clearly do not belong.

The post No Honor Among Assassins appeared first on The American Mind.

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

Trump has a twenty-point plan to end the war in Gaza, emphasizing demilitarization and the release of hostages. On the two-year anniversary of the October 7 attack, the guys contemplate the plan’s prospects for success, Netanyahu’s political future, and domestic reactions. Meanwhile back home, leaked texts from Virginia Democrat Jay Jones express hair-raisingly violent fantasies about “fascist” conservative opponents and their families, epitomizing the Left’s bloodlust problem. Plus: Gen Z’s devolution of marriage structures, and more cultural recommendations!

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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.

The key law for our purposes is the Antideficiency Act, which makes it illegal for federal employees to obligate or spend money not appropriated by Congress, or to continue working when funding has lapsed—that is, unless the work is tied to constitutional powers or has an explicit exception. For example, the Department of War keeps nearly all uniformed personnel on duty, the Treasury Department continues key financial activities like IRS collections, and agencies such as the EPA, Department of Education, and HUD typically place most of their employees on furlough.

All of this raises an important question: If someone isn’t essential, why should they be employed at all? If an agency is performing duties that are out of step with President Trump’s agenda, shouldn’t he have the power to release those employees and close those departments? This is, after all, what any successful chief executive would do.

After Satya Nadella became the CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he saw that the phone hardware division was a non-essential drain on resources and talent and had a less-than-meaningful market share. Within a year, he shut down the entire division, writing off over $7.6 billion in the process and firing 18,000 employees. He refocused efforts on Microsoft’s core mission, which has proven quite successful. What was controversial at the time has since been seen as a decisive act that has been critical to the company’s success.

Elon Musk did a much more drastic version of this at Twitter/X. Steve Jobs famously eliminated dozens of Apple product lines in 1997. Andy Jassy streamlined Amazon.

Chief executives are the embodiment of an organization’s focus and mission. So it is with the President of the United States. Without the power to hire and fire at will, without the power to close unprofitable product lines, what is his role other than being a national figurehead?

And that is the rub—the modern liberal wants a figurehead who serves the managerial state instead of a managerial apparatus which serves the executive as the Founders wanted.

The late Sam Francis argued that modern liberal democracy produced the very managerial regime that enslaves the executive. The power the regime wields is unaccountable. No one votes on the staffing at HUD, for example. Therefore, this regime is self-perpetuating and naturally becomes monolithic in ideals. This structure becomes an antibiotic-resistant infection that is impossible to treat or to remove.

Francis further argued the Constitution’s grant of “the executive Power” to the president had been hollowed out by civil service protections, administrative law, and vast agencies that followed their own agendas. Instead of being constrained by lawyers and career officials, he contended that decisive leadership from the president could break up the procedural paralysis of the modern state.

Drawing on thinkers like James Burnham and Vilfredo Pareto, Francis maintained that only a strong, centralized executive could reassert discipline and restore national purpose, much like a CEO who can swiftly reorganize a failing company. For Francis, restoring full presidential command was a constitutional and moral necessity to ensure that the people’s elected leader, not an entrenched bureaucracy, actually governs.

Enter the reduction in force (RIF), a formal mechanism under federal personnel law that allows agencies under the supervision of the OMB and the Office of Personnel Management to permanently eliminate positions when funding or organizational needs change.

During the early stages of a shutdown, employees are temporarily furloughed but remain on the payroll. If the funding lapse continues and it becomes clear that some programs won’t reopen or that budgets will not return to previous levels, agencies may need to reorganize to preserve essential functions. At that stage, OMB can authorize a formal reduction in force, making those job cuts permanent.

A reduction in force follows a strict legal process in which agencies identify positions to eliminate, rank employees by service and performance, and give at least a 60-day notice before separation. Affected employees may receive severance pay, have priority for reemployment, and can appeal their dismissal to the Merit Systems Protection Board.

OMB’s main role during a prolonged shutdown is to coordinate staffing reductions across federal agencies, ensure compliance with fiscal and personnel laws, and prevent inconsistent or overlapping cuts. If the shutdown appears likely to continue, OMB can shift from temporary furlough management to planning permanent workforce reductions, turning short-term pauses into long-term structural downsizing.

Russ Vought, the head of OMB and a Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow, understands that the shutdown is an opportunity to permanently scale back the federal Leviathan. This is beneficial from a mission standpoint, from a budgetary standpoint, and from a moral standpoint, which is why Vought should be supported politically and procedurally. It is immoral to ask the American people to employ nonessential people. It is immoral to ask the American people to support an unconstitutional system.

Donald Trump once promised, “I will shatter the Deep State (this administrative monster), and restore government that is controlled by the People” (emphasis added). He needs every bit of support, every bit of help, to achieve this important goal. The administration must have the will to follow through with the president’s stated intentions. It must show the intestinal fortitude to restore executive power as it was envisioned by the framers of the Constitution.

There are further tools to explore at a later time. Impoundment and Schedule F should be revisited. But now this is a time of opportunity. A time of decision. A chance to give the country a leaner heart and a clearer head.

This is a once-in-a-generation chance to restore constitutional government in the executive branch and remove entrenched powers that have only served to drag the country to the Left.

The post Cutting Back the Administrative State appeared first on The American Mind.

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.

The foundation of Omar’s world is the clan. From birth, children are taught to display unquestioning loyalty to their group, to obey a rigid code of honor and shame without question. Loyalty to kin is praised above all else. The cost of such loyalty, however, is naked, irrational hostility to all outsiders. Distrust, concealment, and perceived persecution feed collective paranoia, and zero-sum thinking rules daily life. Lying and cheating are not sins if they serve the group.

Layered on that is Islamism. The headscarf Omar wears is not a symbol of modesty but a political marker. Her rhetoric on Jews and Israel follows the Muslim Brotherhood script: condemn Israel at every turn, blame Jews for every setback, and treat unbelievers as entirely expendable. There is no depth, only disdain.

And then comes today’s prevailing Leninist leftism. Omar merges the absolutism of clan and the dogmatism of Islamism with the mantras of Marxism: take from the rich and hand to the poor, sanctify grievance, and frame history as an endless struggle between identity groups. But here lies the irony. She now enjoys the wealth of the very system she supposedly despises. She is not the barefoot refugee she once was. She is a multi-millionaire, living in luxury, lecturing Americans about redistribution while securing her own fortune. Her maxims remain Marxist, but her lifestyle is decidedly capitalist.

Charlie Kirk refuted the identity politics of Ilhan Omar and called out Islamism. Instead of fantasizing about socialist utopias, he urged young people to marry, stay faithful, raise children, and build more than they inherited. He believed America’s greatness came not from grievance but from gratitude. He stated his values openly and treated his opponents with respect. For Charlie, faith was not tribal. And he believed wholeheartedly that the universal truths on which America was based were available to all.

This is why Omar’s response to Charlie matters. She lied about him. She smeared and slandered him. When he was killed, she mocked him with grave-dancing remarks. For her, these tactics are permitted. For him, they never would have been. His moral universe did not allow it. Hers encourages it.

Clan, Islamism, leftism: each is a cage. Together they form a prison of mind and soul. Ilhan Omar is the elected, walking, talking example of this blighted mindset.

This is why I reject moral relativism. This moral posture was clearly demonstrated by the journalists who allowed Omar to hurl false accusations at Charlie Kirk. It breeds the racism of low expectations, which is something Kirk also called out. For it is taboo in leftist culture for white girls in the media to ask a black girl with a headscarf to support her statements with some facts. Moral relativism is the false comfort blanket of the liberal West. It pretends all cultures, all creeds, and all systems are equal.

They are not.

Opportunists like Omar exploit this weakness. They demand rights without accepting obligations. They demand protection while scorning the principles that grant it.

The vast differences between Charlie and Omar lead to a larger question: What does citizenship mean? Citizenship was once thought to be a covenant. It meant shifting loyalty away from old allegiances—to foreign leaders, foreign ideologies, foreign gods—and giving it wholly to America. It meant embracing the Constitution and the creed of liberty under law. It was a privilege to be earned, not a welfare card to be handed out.

Omar wants the rights of citizenship but not the responsibilities. She has never spoken with outrage about the atrocities committed against Christians in Somalia or across Africa. She has not condemned the violence of Islamist rule. She has learned instead how to draw from America without giving back. She takes, but she does not adopt. She enriches herself while preaching envy.

This is not about denaturalizing or deporting her. It is about recognizing that she should never have been granted citizenship in the first place. Her life is a warning of what happens when citizenship is treated not as a covenant but as an entitlement.

Charlie Kirk stood for honor, sacrifice, and loyalty to country. Omar stands for deceit, division, and loyalty to faction. He built his message on faith and family. She builds hers on resentment and rupture. He called Americans to unite and find some common ground. She divides and drives her followers toward malice and mistrust.

I fled the warped world Omar actively endorses. I chose the world Charlie defended. And I say with genuine urgency: America must learn the difference.

Citizenship must again be tied to allegiance—not to bloodline or to imported ideologies. To belong here should mean to believe in what America is. Without that, our nation will not endure.

The post From Clan to Congress: Why Ilhan Omar Betrays the Meaning of Citizenship appeared first on The American Mind.

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.

Murray noted some of the relevant trends 15 years ago, and many of those have continued to get worse. The imprisonment rate for lower-class white Americans, for example, has skyrocketed in recent years, more than doubling since the mid-1980s. Though white poverty rates have remained mostly stable for decades, white Americans make up 43%—more than 40 million people—of those on Medicaid/CHIP. Though they are 60% of the overall population, and therefore underrepresented statistically in those ranks, this is still an unacceptably high number.

Murray shows clearly in Coming Apart that a fair amount of the problems affecting white America did not involve unexpected and insuperable life disasters for those who were otherwise self-sufficient and productive. Rather, there has been a sustained retreat from the ethic of work and honorable self-reliance that were once much stronger. There is much reason to believe this trend is ongoing and indeed getting even worse.

The American white working class and underclass are similar in many ways, most notably in terms of their general location in the bottom half of the socioeconomic hierarchy, though some skilled members of the working class make salaries that are indistinguishable from many in the middle class. But they also differ in ways that are of tremendous importance.

By classic social scientific terminological consensus, the working class is that segment of a society employed in blue-collar trades and industrial fields. The underclass comprises both the straightforward unemployed and those who work in poorly paid segments of the service economy and other occupational fields in which pay, benefits, and job security are considerably worse than in working-class jobs. The two groups can also generally be visually distinguished, and they can easily be told apart behaviorally.

I have some informal ethnographic data to share on this point. I spent a pleasant day a few weeks ago at Knoebel’s Amusement Park in Elysburg, Pennsylvania, with my family. The park draws people from all over the area. There is no entry fee, and rides are paid for with tickets you purchase inside the park, so there is no economic barrier to entering.

The white American working class and underclass make up the majority of the people there on any given day, just by visual evidence. As an inveterate social scientist, even as I was enjoying the rides and food with my family, I was informally taking mental notes on the human population around me.

One woman I observed was perhaps in her 60s or 70s, almost certainly a grandmother, to judge by the ages of the girls and women surrounding her. She had on an Aerosmith shirt and was missing a front canine and smoking. I could not help but overhear a large part of their conversation, as all of them talked at essentially a shouting register. This elderly woman spoke in a vocabulary that would have made a truck driver or a drill sergeant proud, nearly every sentence sporting one or two profane terms.

I frequently saw messages emblazoned on t-shirts that made addiction and criminal behavior into objects of humor. I saw several “Floating down the river while killing my liver” shirts. A woman walking with small children was wearing a shirt bearing the message “It was a rough week, but I didn’t need bail money so there’s that.” The demeanor of many of the people wearing these shirts told me with a fair degree of certainty that alcohol abuse and jail time were probably not mere abstractions for them.

There was a girl, 11 or 12 at most, who was so morbidly obese she could walk only with waddling difficulty, and her mother and father, perhaps in their forties, were both so overweight that they were in mobility scooters. All three were eating huge ice cream cones and holding massive soda cups as they passed.

There was a woman, perhaps 20, with at least six or seven different facial piercings and both arms full of tattoos. Some of the tattoos consisted of inexplicable long numbers and reminded me of the marks borne by concentration camp survivors. She had chosen to have herself marked in the way that Nazis imposed on populations of people they saw as inhuman.

Again, all of these descriptions were social types. I saw many individuals who were similar in appearance and behavior to these individuals. Some were far more exaggerated than these.

Fishtowns Galore

When I was growing up during the 1970s, you could clearly see the distinction between the two populations. I lived in a border area between a working-class white neighborhood and another dominated by the white underclass. Nobody in the working-class neighborhood ever sat out on their front porch, drunk at midday, beer cans scattered all around. Working-class front yards never had broken-down cars parked there. Working-class homes were humble and showed their age, but they were not falling apart with no effort at maintenance, with gutters hanging unattached, paint peeling, and roofing tiles missing and lying in the yard.

Working-class men and women dressed like members of their class, in t-shirts and jeans, and it was easy to tell they had limited means. But their shirts did not boast of their drunkenness or criminal records. The men did not go about scraggly, unshaven, and unbathed day after day. The women did not dye their hair green and purple, and they did not decorate their arms and legs with tattoos that they constantly showed off with sleeveless shirts and skimpy shorts.

The white underclass, by contrast, was already beginning to show these external signs of distinctiveness that I saw at Knoebels. And now you rarely see an underclass white person who is not tatted, facially pierced, unbathed, unshaved, uncombed, and wearing pajamas in public.

In Murray’s insightful book Coming Apart, one of the most telling facts was the significant decrease in rates of religious adherence and behavior in the white lower classes in recent decades. It turns out that overall rates of irreligion, as defined with multiple variables, do not vary hugely by social class according to survey data. The overall trend is an increase in those who have no religious beliefs, in all social classes, which is itself a troubling phenomenon.

When you get into the most meaningful specifics of irreligiosity, however, the class difference Murray discusses becomes apparent. When you explore, for example, the frequency of religious attendance (one of the religious variables most clearly connected to the ability of religion to pass along moral values and behaviors), you find that Americans at the bottom of the hierarchy have rates that are substantially lower than those of other classes.

The point is certainly not to replace the lower classes—it is to endeavor to fix our culture such that they might be brought out of the mire in which they currently live. We should help their children escape the trajectories that led their parents to the dismal position they now occupy.

Securing our border and removing those who are here illegally is an important part of resuscitating America. But if we cannot also reduce the now alarmingly growing numbers in the white underclass, that work will be for naught.

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