I have spent the last several years learning—the (very) hard way—a lesson that most Americans still have not learned: the courtroom has become the principal battlefield of American politics. And on that battlefield, the Left arrived with an army. The Right brought a checkbook and a prayer. That ends now.

Last week, the Oversight Project announced the launch of a new law firm—a salaried, in-house, battle-ready legal outfit whose mission can be stated in just ten words: defend our friends, and go on offense against our enemies. Backed by a generous philanthropic seed investment from Tom Klingenstein, the chairman of the Claremont Institute, the firm is designed to do what the conservative legal ecosystem has refused to build for 50 years: an institution that treats the legal defense of patriots as a standing obligation rather than a series of one-off charity bake sales.

The Problem Goes Deep

Politics in a constitutional republic does not require every citizen to be a professional political operator. A country made entirely of aspiring senators would be unbearable—and ungovernable. The genius of the American design is that ordinary people can tend to their faith, their families, their trades, and their towns, precisely because a thin line of citizens—candidates, lawyers, organizers, whistleblowers, election officials—is willing to stand in the public fray on their behalf.

If you want to destroy a republic, you do not need to repeal its constitution. You merely need to make participation in public life ruinous financially, professionally, and reputationally. Make every act of public-spirited citizenship carry the threat of personal bankruptcy, and watch the thin line slip into the invisible, based on self-selection and attrition.

The Left long ago figured this out. It moved disputes that belong at the ballot box—case by case, indictment by indictment, bar complaint by bar complaint—into venues where it holds the advantage of purse, personnel, and patience. As Tom Klingenstein pointed out in his essay, “It’s Time for the Right to Return Fire,” the Left raised at least $183 million last year for precisely this sort of activity. It amassed these funds through a sprawling network of nonprofits—including the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center—whose assets vastly outstrip the Right’s legal capacity, supplemented by a Big Law industry that does its pro bono bidding as a kind of liturgical obligation.

Everyone on the Left gets defended, while everything on our side gets challenged and our best people are persecuted and prosecuted.

Klingenstein makes the crucial category correction: we have treated Lawfare as a “series of discrete legal disputes.” It is not. It is “a system of political power”—what the old Whigs would have called an instrument of prerogative. And systems of power are defeated only by counter-institutions, not by sporadic acts of individual heroism.

An Ancient Story With New Costumes

Weaponized law is one of the oldest diseases of government, and the patient records are voluminous.

When King John’s barons forced Magna Carta upon him at Runnymede in 1215, they devoted two clauses—39 and 40—to countering this pathology: no free man is to be ruined save by lawful judgment of his peers, and justice is to be neither sold nor delayed. The barons knew that the King’s courts could be made engines of ruin as easily as instruments of right.

But by the 1630s, the Crown had perfected the art. The Court of Star Chamber—a body of the king’s privy counselors sitting without a jury—became the model for punishing political speech, and its sister tribunals did the rest. When John Hampden refused to pay the Ship Money tax, the Crown prosecuted him in order to teach every country squire a lesson: resist, and see what it costs you. Hampden lost the case narrowly—but eventually won the argument decisively. A few years later, the Long Parliament answered by abolishing the Star Chamber outright, and Edward Coke’s Institutes of the Lawes of England—the later volumes pried from the king’s grasp and ordered into print by that same Parliament—became the handbook of liberty (according to Jefferson, “Coke Littleton was the universal elementary book of Law Students”) for two centuries.

The 17th century also gave us the great martyr-defendants who helped forge a tradition of liberty. There was “Freeborn John” Lilburne, repeatedly fined, whipped, pilloried, and imprisoned for the crime of pamphleteering. He used his trials to establish—against ferocious opposition—the right against self-incrimination. There was William Penn (a distant relative of mine), prosecuted in 1670 for preaching to an unlawful assembly, whose jury was locked up without food for refusing to convict him; when juror Edward Bushel would not bend, the resulting Bushel’s Case helped establish that juries cannot be punished for their verdicts—a pillar of our Sixth Amendment. There was Algernon Sidney, executed in 1683 on the strength of a manuscript he had never published, deemed “treason” by a friendly court because the judges decided that ideas hostile to the King’s authority were themselves constructive treason.

The American Founders studied every one of these cases. They were not abstractions to them; they were current events and family lore. That is why the Declaration of Independence—drafted by Jefferson, revised by the Continental Congress—contains among its grievances that King George III had “made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices” and had sent “swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.” These are 18th-century words for 21st-century Lawfare, and I could not improve on them with a dozen law review articles.

Nor did the disease vanish with independence. The Sedition Act of 1798 criminalized criticism of the government—the one the founders had just built—and was wielded exclusively against the Adams Administration’s critics. Matthew Lyon, a congressman, was jailed and fined for accusing the administration of “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp.” James Otis, a generation earlier in Boston, had declared in opposition to the Crown’s writs of assistance that “a man’s house is his castle”—and the young lawyer scribbling notes in the courtroom was one John Adams. His administration stormed the castle anyway. The people responded, correctly, not by filing an amicus brief but by going to the ballot box in 1800—and Jefferson pardoned the sedition convicts (but even he privately encouraged the prosecution of some Federalist newspaper editors under state libel laws).

When power is abused, the remedy is never solely legal. It is political, and the law must be made to serve the politics of liberty again. This requires men of means and conviction to build counter-institutions. The lone martyr may be glorious, but he is usually killed, bankrupted, or disbarred. The counter-institution endures.

Failure Theater

Why hasn’t the conservative legal movement already done what the Oversight Project’s new law firm was founded to do?

Because for decades, our legal capacity has been rented, not owned. The Right’s answer to Lawfare has been the legal defense fund: raise money from patriotic donors, then pass it directly to private firms billing $1,000 an hour, or three or more times that amount. Under that model, a handful of senior figures get rescued. Everyone else—the county commissioner, the poll watcher, the young staffer, the alternate elector, the lawyer who dared to accept a client the regime disfavors—is left alone with a subpoena and a six-figure retainer estimate.

We have seen it firsthand. A friend of the Oversight Project’s President Mike Howell, then a young White House official, received a January 6th Committee subpoena and an unfriendly telephone call from the FBI. The fee quotes he received merely to respond to an investigation—not to litigate—were far beyond his means. Mike represented him pro bono. Most people in his position have no friend in the profession willing and able to do that. Multiply him by thousands.

Meanwhile, the Left runs the opposite model: institutionalized, salaried, in-house capacity. Their lawyers do not bill by the hour for the cause; they draw salaries for the cause. Ours must too. A salaried, mission-driven lawyer inside a nonprofit can defend dozens of clients for what a single Big Law engagement letter would devour in a month.

Tom Klingenstein says plainly in his essay what our establishment has refused to say: playing defense is honorable, but the best defense is a good offense, and we must now fight “by wartime rules.” He is funding accordingly. We are starting with five lawyers, spread thin, and we seek at least 15 more. “The good news is that they are there, waiting,” Klingenstein writes—“But no one has sounded the trumpet to call them up.”

Consider the trumpet sounded.

What the Firm Will Do

The Oversight Project’s law firm will do four things: defend patriots under attack, bring specialized legal expertise to the fight, take the offensive against those who abuse the law, and build a new generation of lawyers willing to fight for what is right. The goal is not merely to survive Lawfare, but to change the incentives that make it so effective—and to marshal the offensive legal capabilities the Right has too often lacked.

Rapid-response defense. When a subpoena, bar complaint, investigation, or politically motivated lawsuit lands, clients get experienced counsel immediately—without absorbing crippling bills. No more GoFundMe jurisprudence. No more watching good people choose between their family’s finances and their country’s future.

Specialized expertise. Our firm will feature experts in constitutional law, administrative law, ethics, bar defense, and First Amendment litigation—plus a nationwide network of aligned attorneys able to appear wherever the fight happens. Lawfare is distributed—it is leavened; our defense must be too.

Go on Offense. A movement that only absorbs punches is eventually ground down. Paired with the Oversight Project’s investigators, the firm will dig up the records behind the abuse—as we already have with Jack Smith’s dragnet—and pursue the damages, fees, sanctions, and professional consequences that make Lawfare expensive to practice. Here is the dirty secret of the whole business: the aggressors have never paid a price. Their calculation has never changed because nothing has ever made it change. When donors keep victims afloat forever, the aggressor’s incentives remain intact. That must end. It is imprudent to reveal the full playbook to the enemy (why forfeit surprise?), but understand the principle: the Star Chamber fell when its members feared the Long Parliament more than the King.

Building the bench. Young, hungry, ambitious attorneys will get real responsibility early, trained by lawyers who have been in the arena. The old conservative legal establishment has long reserved its appointments and laurels for those who never fundamentally challenge the regime. Lawyers who choose duty over careerism should be the movement’s heroes—and should be rewarded like heroes, not martyrs.

The Stakes

I know firsthand (from Arctic Frost’s targeting of me, especially) the Left’s use of Lawfare—I was arrested, indicted by Fani Willis, targeted by Jack Smith, subpoenaed by the January 6th Committee, pursued by the D.C. Bar, and much more. I’ve racked up millions in legal bills and more millions in opportunity costs, including the destruction of my BigLaw career and partnership. And yet I am still standing—and still fighting! I mention this not for sympathy—save it for the January 6 defendants, the overcharged and the smeared who received far worse treatment—but because I am the experiment, and the experiment proved the thesis: absent proper infrastructure, the most faithful are targeted, one by one, precisely because they are the most disruptive to the permanent bureaucracy and the Uniparty status quo.

Lilburne was whipped for a pamphlet. Sidney died for a manuscript. Penn’s jury starved rather than convict him. We dishonor their memory if we pretend the machinery aimed at us is novel—and we waste their example if we fail to build the institution that is necessary in the modern era of Lawfare and Barfare. Each of those fights ended not merely with brave individuals but with structures: Magna Carta, Bushel’s Case, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, the Bill of Rights’ guarantees against excessive bail and cruel punishments—hard-won institutional scar tissue against the misuse of law.

The Left built a machine because it understands power. For too long the Right has rented its lawyers by the hour and hoped beyond hope. That era is over.

The next time the Left comes for one of ours—and they will; the machinery never idles for long—someone will be there to defend him. And that lawyer will be ready to fight—and win.

The post The Right Finally Gets a Law Firm of Its Own appeared first on The American Mind.

The morning after you win, the National Governors Association will call. They will offer a seminar, a binder, and a roster of former governors prepared to explain why you should slow down. Take the meeting if you must—but do not buy their theory.

The midterms may cost Republicans the House, and possibly even the Senate. But they will not lose the states. Thirty-six governorships are on the ballot, and the incoming class, with open seats in Ohio, Alabama, Iowa, Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and others, will likely yield the most conservative slate of new governors in a generation. The federal government will likely be deadlocked in 2027, but the states offer hope for advancing a bold and transformative national agenda.

To carry out such an agenda, incoming governors must reject the advice found in the NGA’s transition manual, which is an apologia for paralysis. On page 39, a former governor offers what the association presents as wisdom: “As a businessman, I spent 90 percent of my time on process and 10 percent on policy. As governor, I find I spend 90 percent of my time on policy and 10 percent on process.” This advice comes from a man who once controlled his own calendar but learned to let someone else control it. Unsurprisingly, he did not transform his state during his term in office.

The NGA’s strategic advice is designed to slow you down. In the first six to nine months, “veteran governors advise that a new governor generally should minimize downtime by not undertaking major reorganizations, large-scale personnel changes beyond normal top-level appointments or other major actions unless absolutely necessary.” The text then warns against using the honeymoon period to “eliminate some entrenched bureaucrat who has run a particular bureau like a fiefdom for thirty years,” because “experienced governors advise caution at precisely the time when difficult decisions seem easiest.” Page 19 adds a quota: veteran governors “recommend only tackling three to five large programmatic changes during a term.”

The NGA seeks to lock you into stagnation by “maintaining credibility with the legislature, state bureaucracy, press and public.” Fail at that, and you become a “caretaker, largely beholden to a bureaucracy that has previously weathered poor governors.”

The bureaucracy has weathered these past governors because they failed to act swiftly. As a new governor, you have a choice: safeguard left-wing institutions or act boldly with the mandate voters gave you.

Ron DeSantis declined the seminar’s theory of the job. In his first term, he suspended Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren and won passage of the parental-rights law the education establishment said would never be approved. And when Disney used its private government to punish the state, DeSantis moved to dissolve the Reedy Creek Improvement District.

His second term opened at the same speed. In January 2023, he replaced the board of trustees at New College of Florida, which fired the president at its first meeting and shut down the diversity office within weeks. That summer DeSantis suspended Orange-Osceola State Attorney Monique Worrell. He filled the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, the replacement for Reedy Creek, with his appointees. None of this waited for month ten, and none of it counted against a “three-to-five” quota.

Ron DeSantis immediately targeted the offices that decide what the law means, and as a result, he is the most consequential governor of modern times.

President Trump’s second transition is the federal version of the same choice. The work of remaking the government began well before he took the oath of office. Inauguration Day produced a seismic list of executive orders that revoked the prior administration’s directives and froze pending rules. President Trump moved policy-making career officials into positions where refusal to carry out the elected president’s program became grounds for removal. His speed and decisiveness made it impossible for the bureaucracy to stop him. He understood that since bureaucracy wins through inaction, such qualities are the best counter to its playbook.

The state version of the problem is worse than the NGA manual admits. Agencies are overstaffed relative to the work. A large share of the professional class inside them opposed your election and will oppose any order that threatens a program, a grant, or a headcount.

The NGA’s advice for staffing hundreds of boards and commissions—to staff them defensively, to “avoid embarrassment,” to keep them from consuming the governor’s time, and to wait until the crush of transition has passed—amounts to a 48-month holding pattern. Their goal is to outlast you.

Build the appointment list before election night. Know which boards can be abolished by statute and which must be filled by appointment in the first 60 days. Put your own counsel, budget director, and personnel leads in place before the inaugural balls are over. Carry out the reorganizations the NGA manual says to postpone. Publish the short list of agencies you intend to shrink—and shrink them while the people who run them are still writing memos about how hard that will be.

The bureaucracy is not your partner, and it is not waiting to be persuaded. It is overstaffed, and a meaningful share of its career employees do not want you to succeed. Treat it the way Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are treating it, or spend four years learning why the conservative governor before you left office with a binder full of process and a state that is merely treading water.

The post Don’t Take the Seminar: An Open Letter to Incoming Governors 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.

Beasts, Gods, and Bots: Facing down the Specter of a Post-Human Future | The American Mind Podcast

Anthropic’s top brass have been meeting religious leaders and trying to bring theology into the AI conversation. Do our newest technocrats intend to build a machine god and usher in a horrifically digitized future? Meanwhile, Justice Samuel Alito weighed in on originalism, highlighting both its pitfalls and the broader successes of conservativism in the Supreme Court—and the Left’s radical response. Plus: On the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks by Hamas, Israel defiantly celebrates the universe’s lawgiver during Simchat Torah and remembers the fallen.

The post Beasts, Gods, and Bots: Facing down the Specter of a Post-Human Future | The American Mind Podcast appeared first on The American Mind.

Americans can’t afford to be complacent about our election security. The right to vote is one of the most indispensable civil rights in a constitutional republic, but it is not self-executing. Laws must protect that right, ensure its proper administration, and defend it against error, fraud, and foreign influence.

Citizenship must be verified when voters register. States must maintain accurate voter rolls and give federal authorities the data to which they’re legally entitled. They must also have reliable proof-of-eligibility requirements and prosecute election-law violations.

This is ultimately not merely an election-administration issue—it is a matter of sovereignty.

The proposition that only American citizens may vote in elections is a cornerstone of our republic. The citizenship requirement preserves self-government and ensures that those who decide our elections are members of the American political community. If these basic rules are treated as mere aspiration rather than an enforceable legal requirement, then American sovereignty is at risk.

The vote—and the machinery that receives, records, verifies, counts, and reports it—is how the American people confer legitimate authority on public officials.

The size of the illegal immigrant population in the country underscores the point. The Department of Homeland Security estimated that roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants—or 3.3% of the U.S. population—resided in the country in January 2022. The Federation for American Immigration Reform’s March 2025 estimate puts this population at approximately 18.6 million at the beginning of 2025.

Whatever the precise number, the practical consequence is the same: a large non-citizen population resides in communities served by state voter-registration systems.

The cost of waiting to verify eligibility until after an election is too high, because even one unlawful vote dilutes a lawful citizen’s vote and undermines confidence in the electoral process.

Recent reports only reinforce the need for scrutiny. DHS has found that preliminary reviews identified more than 250,000 potential non-citizens on voter rolls in four states and asked those states to work with the department on election security. Some state officials and election experts have disputed that claim. Fine. Then investigate it thoroughly, transparently, and promptly. The answer to a serious allegation is verification, not indifference.

Though Congress began requiring states to offer voter registration when people apply for or renew driver’s licenses through the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, convenience is not the enemy of integrity. The NVRA did not relieve states of their duty to maintain accurate voter rolls. States must ensure that illegal aliens and other ineligible persons do not vote in elections.

History supplies ample warning on this score. A review of Department of Motor Vehicles records revealed that Philadelphia mistakenly allowed non-citizens to register to vote around 2016. State officials later revised the system, but the episode demonstrates why citizenship verification cannot be left to bureaucratic happenstance.

And the problem isn’t limited to administrative error.

In the Eastern District of North Carolina, federal prosecutors charged 19 foreign nationals with voting in the 2016 election. In the Southern District of Florida, three non-citizens pleaded guilty to illegally voting in federal elections and committing related election offenses.

These numbers may not be large in isolation, but that misses the point. Election crimes are crimes against public trust. They injure every lawful voter whose ballot is entitled to equal weight under law.

To combat this, states and municipalities should require reliable proof of citizenship and verification before an ineligible registration can result in a ballot being cast. State election officials should coordinate with federal authorities to obtain accurate citizenship and immigration-status information, consistent with law. The Department of Justice should continue to prosecute those who breach the system.

Encouragingly, some states have begun to act. The National Conference of State Legislatures reports that four states enacted documentary-proof-of-citizenship requirements in 2026. Thirteen states now have such laws at some point in the registration process, though litigation and court decisions have prevented some provisions from taking effect.

Other states have adopted bifurcated systems that allow voters who have not provided documentary proof of citizenship to vote in state elections, while still requiring verification for federal elections. These reforms reflect a necessary shift toward verifying citizenship rather than relying solely on a voter’s word.

The reason is obvious. If election safeguards are weak enough to allow non-citizens to register, vote, or otherwise influence elections, public policy could be shaped by individuals who have not assumed the duties of American citizenship or pledged allegiance to the constitutional order. That is a clear breach of the social compact.

The federal government already recognizes the critical nature of citizenship when public trust and national interest are at stake. For example, many national security positions require U.S. citizenship because they involve access to sensitive government information.

Though voting is different from government employment, it is still an exercise of sovereign authority. Through the ballot, citizens choose who will make law, set policy, spend public money, appoint officials, and direct the machinery of government. Sovereignty is preserved not by slogans but by laws faithfully enforced, passed by representatives chosen by American citizens.

State legislators must give election officials the tools to reinforce safeguards, confirm citizenship, maintain accurate voter rolls, and protect citizen self-government. Americans have fought too long and sacrificed too much to surrender sovereignty to administrative negligence and foreign influence.

The rule is simple, just, and essential: American citizens—and only American citizens—must decide American elections.

The post States Must Do More to Secure Our Elections appeared first on The American Mind.

Washington’s Farewell Address is often celebrated as one of the great documents of American history—the political testament of the nation’s founding father. Its authorship, however, has occasioned debate. Some, especially those who viewed Washington as a puppet of closet monarchists, wondered if he was even in charge of his own administration and whatever statements emerged from it.

The record shows that while Washington certainly had assistance during the drafting process, the document was truly his—he dictated what he wanted included and gave the final approval of the text. The tenets espoused reflected beliefs Washington had held for decades—beliefs he hoped could guide the nation from infancy to maturity. The Farewell Address was a worthy capstone to his extraordinary career and a touchstone of American republicanism.

Writing the Farewell Address

In 1792, Washington, considering retiring after a single term, asked Madison to draft a farewell. He shelved that text when, urged by Jefferson and Madison, he stood for reelection that year. In 1796, Washington, resolving to leave office for good at the end of his second term, updated Madison’s 1792 draft to reflect the “considerable changes having taken place both at home & abroad” during his second term.

His relationship with Madison now strained by their political differences, Washington solicited Hamilton’s help with revisions. By May, Washington had sent Hamilton the draft, giving him permission to create a completely new draft. Hamilton decided to do both. By August, he had sent Washington both drafts, his new version incorporating elements from the version Washington gave him. Throughout the process, Hamilton consulted John Jay, then governor of New York.

Ergo, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, writers of the Federalist Papers that were so crucial to the ratification of the Constitution, could all claim a degree of authorship of the Farewell Address. By early September, Washington was finalizing Hamilton’s draft. He arranged with David C. Claypoole, editor of the American Daily Advertiser, to publish the document on September 19. Since the Advertiser’s reach was limited to Philadelphia and environs, the rest of the nation gradually learned of Washington’s decision as local papers around the country republished the text.

In his roughly six-thousand-word address, Washington started with a unifying theme, acknowledging the one thing virtually all Americans agreed on: the importance of liberty. He asserted that the “love of liberty” was “interwoven…with every ligament of…[the American people’s] hearts.” While Americans might disagree on many things, they could certainly agree that being an American was synonymous with the love of freedom.

The remainder consisted of “some sentiments which are the result of much reflection…” These sentiments echoed many ideas from his 1783 circular—and, as in the circular, reinforced his version of republicanism.

Two Principles: The Universality of Truth and Morality

Washington believed there to be objective and universal moral truths about right and wrong rooted in age-old religious precepts and binding on all people and all nations. He also held that the manner of one’s adherence to those truths determined, in large part, one’s happiness or success. To depart from these truths was to incur negative consequences.

In the Farewell Address, Washington declared, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports” and “virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” These statements tracked with his assertion in the 1783 circular that America could only prosper by imitating the actions and embracing the principles of “the Divine Author of our blessed Religion,” Jesus Christ. He again linked the nation’s political success, especially given that the people ruled the country, with the citizens’ moral conduct, whose foundation lay in religious principles. He stressed that morality could not be divorced from religion: “…let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion.”

Garry Wills and other modern authors have argued that these lines about religion and morality reflected mere utilitarian notions—that Washington didn’t really believe in religious or moral principles but merely saw them as a tool for maintaining social order. This reading fails to consider other lines in the Address that indicate the existence of a religious and moral design to the universe. Washington asked, “Can it be, that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a Nation with its virtue?” The term “Providence” was often used by early American Christians to refer to the Deity, making it likely that Washington here is asserting that God has connected the happiness of a nation with its moral conduct. He believed it was in America’s interest to cultivate a virtuous citizenry.

Washington called for the United States to remain at peace with all the world: “Observe good faith & justice towds all Nations,” he wrote, “cultivate peace & harmony with all.” He reinforced this thought by writing, “Religion & morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it?” In other words, the practical effect of a peace-driven policy was not the only reason to do it—transcendent moral principles required it. All this echoed Washington’s First Inaugural Address in 1789, in which he declared, “the propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained.”

In his original draft, Washington had not referred to religion and morality; Hamilton may have added those lines. If so, Washington may have decided to go with that language out of concern that republicanism was being infected with anti-religious hostility, which Washington might have been referring to when he declared, “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure—reason & experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Washington apparently feared that well-educated “minds of peculiar structure” could take republicanism into a more secular direction.

The Need to Restrain Human Nature At Home and Abroad

Washington had an unblinking view of human nature, believing man to be a selfish, fallen creature who, given power, would use that power to satisfy personal ambition as Caesar had, rather than for the good of others. He wrote, “love of power, and proneness to abuse it…predominates in the human heart,” predictably leading to the destruction of liberty. In 1786, he had written to John Jay, “We have probably had too good an opinion of human nature in forming our confederation.… We must take human nature as we find it. Perfection falls not to the share of mortals.” This view was contested by Enlightenment-era contemporaries of Washington such as philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed in the utopian notion that man’s nature was inherently good and perfectible. Rousseau uttered the tongue-in-cheek mot juste, “Men are wicked, yes, but man is good.”

The French Revolution was fueled in large part by thinkers like Rousseau and their faith in man’s perfectibility. Jefferson staunchly supported that rebellion, even as it devolved into violence and anarchy. Recall that in 1793 he said, “rather than…[the French Revolution] should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.”

Washington shared no such visions, instead blending morality and realism to argue that man was entitled to freedom but, because of his fallen nature, had to be checked at multiple levels. He saw government as the means to curb that nature by keeping the people from disobeying the law, as well as keeping majorities from abusing minorities, and vice versa. Government also needed to serve as a check on itself, which is why the Constitution established checks and balances. In the address, Washington wrote, “The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power; by dividing and distributing it into different depositories…has been evinced by experiments ancient & modern; some of them in our country & under our own eyes.” Of these constraints, he asserted, “To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them.”

Washington called on the American people to accept a certain level of government power according to the Constitution as a restraint on their excesses. He urged every citizen to obey the law and the overall authority of the federal government. He emphasized the legitimacy of the new government, calling it “the offspring of our own choice uninfluenced and unawed, adopted upon full investigation and mature deliberation, completely free in its principles” and therefore deserving of “a just claim to your confidence and your support.” Echoing Romans 13, Washington held that even a government born of rebellion, if legitimate, was entitled to submission by its citizens. He wrote, “The very idea of the power and the right of the People to establish Government presupposes the duty of every Individual to obey the established Government,” and argued, “the Constitution which at any time exists, ’till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole People, is sacredly obligatory upon all.”

Believing America’s federal government to be legitimate, he maintained that measures imposing reasonable taxes were among the laws citizens had an obligation to accept. In his Farewell Address, Washington said, “towards the payment of debts there must be Revenue—that to have Revenue there must be taxes.” He explained “that no taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient & unpleasant,” but that the people needed to cultivate “a spirit of acquiescence in the measures for obtaining Revenue which the public exigencies may at any time dictate.” He regarded the Whiskey Rebellion as a violation of this principle. One could argue about the wisdom of the excise tax, but destruction of property and violent resistance of the government was not justified.

Much is made of Washington’s warning in his Farewell Address about political parties. In an era of disillusionment with the political establishment, this message resonates. Washington believed parties undermined the checks that protected all Americans, promoting selfish interests. He wrote, “This spirit [of party], unfortunately, is inseperable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human Mind”—a passion toward individual advantage over others.

He grasped that parties were inevitable and could even be “useful checks upon the Administration of the Government…” but warned, that they “put in the place of the delegated will of the Nation, the will of a…small but artful and enterprizing minority,” and that parties would be the “potent engines…[for] cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men…to usurp for themselves the reins of government.” In other words, parties would cater to people’s personal ambitions, giving them an incentive to demand protection of their own rights at the expense of others. The only answer to the problem of partisanship, according to Washington, was “to discourage and restrain it.”

Washington was not arguing that people did not have the right to seek their own advantage, or that Americans weren’t free to associate with parties. He did, however, fear Americans prioritizing their own immediate interests at the expense of the nation as a whole—something that could lead to harm for everyone. Just as kings were expected to check factions in parliament and govern with the whole kingdom in mind, President Washington warned against factions in the new republic that would undermine the nation’s interest as a whole. It’s why Washington advised his countrymen that “The name of AMERICAN…must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.”

Washington wrote in a preliminary draft of the Farewell Address of his desire “That the several departments of Government may be preserved in their utmost Constitutional purity, without any attempt of the one to encroach on the rights or priviledges of another—that the Genl & state governmts may move in their propr Orbits.” The people and their leaders would be checked by all three layers of government—local, state, and federal. Americans suspicious of a strong federal government wondered why these checks could not exist solely at the state or local level.

The main reason for Washington was that during the Revolution and under the Articles of Confederation, states had often acted against the interest of the country at large. Only the federal government, Washington believed, could defend Americans’ rights and enforce policies applying across the entire nation. Instead of states imposing tariffs on each other, hampering commerce, as had happened under the Articles, a federal government could enforce a domestic free trade zone.

Washington supported a strong national government, not only as a means of checking American citizens and public officials, but also enemies abroad, railing against the “insidious wiles of foreign influence” brought to bear by other nations seeking to seduce and “mislead” the American people into making the United States a mere “satellite.”

Washington believed that only the federal government could concentrate the resources of the people to defend against external threats. He wrote, “All the parts [of the Union] combined cannot fail to find in the united mass of means & efforts greater strength, greater resource, proportionably greater security from external danger.” In his initial draft, he made this point clear: “That our Union may be as lasting as time. for While we are encircled in one band we shall possess the strength of a Giant and there will be none who can make us affraid—Divide, & we shall become weak; a prey to foreign Intriegues and internal discord.”

Washington believed that preventively expending money and resources to deter enemies was an investment in peace and freedom: “…timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it—avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt.” This had been his argument since the days of the Revolution. Had America somehow been able to amass and direct the money ahead of time to create a professional army, it might have won the war sooner and at far less expense.

Washington said a strong union would check state interests and prevent internecine conflicts, writing that the union would provide “an exemption from those broils and Wars between themselves, which so frequently afflict neighbouring countries, not tied together by the same government; which their own rivalships alone would be sufficient to produce.” Americans could look to Europe, a continent of nation-states constantly warring with one another, nursing long-standing rivalries, and shifting among intrigue-ridden alliances—a pattern that would continue into the twentieth century. He had written in his 1783 circular that without a firm union, the states would “become the sport of European Politicks, which may play one State against another, to prevent their growing importance and to serve their own interested purposes.” He worried especially about the states on America’s western frontier, whose remoteness from the rest of the country would incline their residents to ally with whatever European empires they did business with. In 1784, Washington had written, “The Western settlers—I speak now from my own observations—stand as it were upon a pivet; the touch of a feather would almost incline them any way…”

Amity among the states would prevent the need for individual states to form standing military forces, which republican theorists had long considered threats to freedom. Washington wrote, “Hence likewise they [the states] will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which under any form of Government are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty.”

Washington and fellow Founders saw in ancient history antecedents for their situation, specifically the Greek city-states and their confederations of the third and fourth centuries BCE, organized to guarantee security. One such confederation was the Achaean League, an early example of federalism, in which the need for collective action was balanced with each city-state’s desire to maintain its autonomy. These leagues failed to prevent defeats, first at the hands of a centralized monarchy in Macedonia and later at the hands of a rising empire centered in Rome. James Madison wrote in Federalist 18, “Had Greece, says a judicious observer on her fate, been united by a stricter confederation, and persevered in her union, she would never have worn the chains of Macedon; and might have proved a barrier to the vast projects of Rome.”

For Washington, union was indispensable for the establishment of cohesive policies, solidification of the national defense, and therefore freedom. He wrote, “your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other.” An effective national government would check the untoward impulses of the nation’s citizens, leaders, and adversaries. And where government failed, individual morality would check the conduct of the people themselves. Washington wrote, “Respect for its [the Constitution’s] authority, compliance with its Laws, acquiescence in its measures, are duties enjoined by the fundamental maxims of true Liberty.”

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On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV stood in the Vatican’s Synod Hall and presented Magnifica Humanitas, his encyclical on artificial intelligence. Beside two cardinals sat the lay speaker chosen to address the room, Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic and self-described atheist working to develop the “soul” of its AI model, Claude.

The Catholic Church, the West’s oldest institution, has long stood at the forefront of the day’s most important moral questions. It has often found itself opposed to insidious ideologies that swept the globe. In the 1930s and ’40s, the Vatican waged a secret war against Nazism. Then it took on Communism. But at the start of the 21st century, a new ideology emerged that would eventually take hold among wealthy tech elites called Effective Altruism, or EA.

Developed from the stark utilitarian philosophy of Princeton University’s Peter Singer, EA claims to use evidence and reason to determine how to benefit others as efficiently as possible. Effective Altruists like Bill Gates and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei direct enormous sums of money toward causes they believe will produce the greatest measurable benefit, regardless of whether those causes are personally meaningful to them.

The problem with Effective Altruism is that its genealogy runs through the rationalist and New Atheist online hovels of the 2000s and 2010s, where cheeky Redditors “debunked” Christianity and advanced rationalist systems to replace it. EA is one such system, even asserting its own eschatology—just without God.

In the age of artificial intelligence, some of its proponents believe they are crafting new gods to replace the old one. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has described his creation as a “magic intelligence in the sky.” The company’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever has likened interacting with ChatGPT to “almost a spiritual experience.” Another AI engineer believes explicitly that “We’re creating God. We’re creating conscious machines.” Elon Musk has also weighed in, asserting that Google co-founder Larry Page envisioned a “digital super-intelligence” that would become “basically a digital god.”

If AI really is to become something approaching godlike, then the question of who controls its development becomes considerably more consequential. This helps explain why Effective Altruists have become some of the loudest voices calling for AI regulation, as they believe humanity is racing toward a technology powerful enough to eradicate civilization. For the “long-termist” wing of EA, the stakes are existential.

But in our current debate between AI accelerationism and doomerism, there is reason to be suspicious of the AI leaders’ arguments for government regulation. Though they clearly believe in EA’s tenets, their renewed calls for government intervention appear to use the philosophy as a means of securing their own market share.

For years, EA’s money and allies were deeply embedded in the Biden Administration, and two of its biggest AI-safety donors, Dustin Moskovitz and the now-convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, were also two of Joe Biden’s biggest donors. Then Trump won, and the AI-safety movement lost its seat at the table. In recent weeks, Trump and Vice President JD Vance have pushed to accelerate artificial intelligence development, chiefly to stay ahead of the Chinese.

However, in the years since Donald Trump won re-election, EA’s donor apparatus started a new project: working with religious institutions. Since 2025, EA-linked funders, particularly the Future of Life Institute (FLI), have put $3.3 million into churches, seminaries, and faith networks across nearly every faith tradition in the country.

In March, a group of Catholic theologians filed an amicus brief backing Anthropic in its legal dispute with the Department of War over the company’s use of its AI systems. FLI’s “faith liaison,” Brian Boyd, was among the signers. Weeks later, Anthropic convened 15 Christian thinkers, including Boyd, for a two-day summit on Claude’s ethics. Then came the Pope’s encyclical and Olah’s appearance in the Synod Hall.

This sequence of events reveals that EA-aligned groups have deliberately been building relationships with AI-skeptical religious institutions. They are using these institutions’ moral authority to issue warnings about the supposedly impending AI apocalypse. Anthropic has been cultivating relationships in these same circles, which independently view AI safety as a matter of grave moral concern. It is using them to launder its own agenda under the appearance of an independent moral and theological imperative. The most radical leaders of the EA movement ultimately seek to replace religion with a kind of AI-led technocracy shepherded by our tech oligarchs.

If Effective Altruists and their allies believe they are building something capable of destroying humanity, their growing influence over both AI policy and religious institutions is cause for concern. Faced with EA’s renewal of New Atheism, America’s political class ought not to be swayed by the promises of its gods, but should remember the true God who upholds our civilization.

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The first round of Brazil’s presidential election is on Sunday. Two candidates are locked in a dead heat: Lula da Silva, incumbent president and founder of the center-left Workers’ Party, and Flávio Bolsonaro, the 45-year-old son of ex-president Jair Bolsonaro (2018-2022). Last year, Jair Bolsonaro was convicted of plotting a coup to remain in power after losing the 2022 election and sentenced to more than 27 years in prison.

The parallels between Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro are notable. They were elected in 2016 and 2018, respectively. Both are populist nationalists. Both are coarse, politically incorrect, and hostile to critics. Most remarkably, both lost re-election, after which supporters stormed the halls of Congress seeking to overturn the result. Though Trump, in contrast to Bolsonaro, avoided prison and returned to office, both command die-hard support and lead political movements that dominate the Right in their countries.

It is reasonable to ask why two countries as different as the U.S. and Brazil have followed such similar political tracks since the late 2010s. Why did the Trump model work in Brazil? Trump’s signature issues—illegal immigration and tariffs—were irrelevant there. To answer this question, we need to step back and consider populism in broad terms.

It is clear why Left populism occurs. Economic inequality arises; the rich capture the political establishment; then the poor and precariously situated vote in an outsider who soaks the rich. But why does Right populism occur? In part, because disorder also exists. Crime and illegal activities occur; drug gangs or insurgencies pop up; the political establishment fails to impose order; then the public votes in an outsider who promises to restore it.

But a separate source of Right populism is modernization itself—that cluster of shifts many countries have experienced over the past quarter millennium: from farm to industry, rural to city life, illiteracy to education, provincial, religious values to cosmopolitan, secular ones, and monarchy and dictatorship to democracy. In Left populism, the elite is the economic elite, but in Right populism, it’s the cultural elite: the shapers of opinion and culture, the cream of the urban, educated, secular, cosmopolitan class.

Certain issues activate both Right populist concerns—disorder and class conflict. Take immigration in the U.S. context. Trump tapped into a sense that mass illegal immigration was disorderly but that the cultural elite didn’t consider it a major problem or even tacitly supported it. Crime is another example. From the perspective of the Right populist voter, crime is menacing and chaotic, and a misguided liberal elite refuses to employ the harsh methods needed to address it.

Obstacles to Left Populism

Judging from both countries’ economic situations, one might think Left populism would have prevailed in the U.S. and Brazil. But left populists have been at a relative disadvantage for a few reasons, two of which are particularly important.

First, Right populists have more freedom to tack leftward on economics than Left populists have to tack rightward on culture. Consider the U.S. presidential primaries in 2016. On the Republican side, Trump was the insurgent. His signature issue, on which he outflanked his competitors, was cultural: build the wall. But on economics, he enjoyed a wide berth: he could defend Social Security and Medicare and propose sweeping tariffs.

On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders was the insurgent. His main issue, on which he outflanked his competitors, was economic: tax the 1 percent and beef up the welfare state. But on culture, Sanders had little room to maneuver. Black Lives Matter protesters stormed the stage at one of his rallies. In a CNN debate, he was asked whether black lives or all lives mattered, and there was a right answer. Sanders gave the standard response but still lost minorities, women, and ultimately the nomination to more economically moderate candidates—Hillary Clinton in 2016, then Joe Biden in 2020.

Second, the welfare state provides a modicum of compensation to economic “losers.” Neither the U.S. nor Brazil is Scandinavia, but redistributive programs in both countries annually reduce the Gini coefficient, a classic measure of economic inequality, by five to ten percentage points. This at least marginally decreases demand for Left populism. There is no analogous mechanism for compensating those who lose out in the cultural domain. Many voters experience demographic change, affirmative action, the decline of religion, and the legalization of abortion and same-sex marriage as losses for which there is no redress. There is only the possibility of reversal—through deportation, the elimination of racial preferences, religious revival, and the reinstatement of abortion and same-sex marriage bans.

So perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that Left populism hasn’t prevailed in Brazil or the U.S. But the question of why Right populism has prevailed remains.

The Role of Religion

Trump and Bolsonarism draw support from broadly similar perceptions: first, that society is afflicted by disorder; and second, that the cultural elite—and, more broadly, the modern elite class—is morally misguided and decadent.

The specific concerns aren’t always the same. As noted, Trump supporters are concerned about illegal immigration, and some are concerned about demographic change and lack of assimilation. These are non-issues in Brazil.

But take urban crime: it’s a massive problem in Brazil, and Bolsonaro is perhaps best known for his hardline stance on it. Although less severe in the U.S., crime is still a big problem, especially compared to Canada and Western Europe. Trump’s base has always cared about crime, which became an especially important issue during and after the summer of 2020.

Or take racial politics. The backlash to the “anti-racism” movement is a huge part of Trump’s appeal, and it is relevant to Bolsonarism, too. Whereas racist speech is protected by the First Amendment in the U.S., it is constitutionally unprotected and treated as a major crime in Brazil. In 2017, a federal judge fined Bolsonaro tens of thousands of dollars for disparaging comments he made about Afro-Brazilian descendants of escaped slaves. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down rigid racial quotas in university admissions in 1978 and the broader policy of race-based affirmative action in 2023; by contrast, the Brazilian judiciary upheld racial quotas in 2012, after which Brazil’s Congress made them mandatory in federal universities. In his 2018 campaign, Bolsonaro staunchly opposed racial quotas while supporting class-based ones.

Finally, take sexual politics—abortion, same-sex marriage, trans activism, and the like. These are major issues for Right populist voters in both the U.S. and Brazil. Trump’s 2024 campaign aired the “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you” ad over 30,000 times in every swing state. Sexual politics are even more integral to Bolsonarism’s appeal. Brazil is significantly more religious and socially conservative—in that sense, more traditional—than the U.S.

Nevertheless, Brazil, like the U.S., has secularized considerably in recent decades. Movements challenging traditional views on abortion, sexuality, and gender have gained significant traction, especially among urban, college-educated Brazilians. The Workers’ Party has shifted left on sexuality and gender. So has the Brazilian judiciary, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2013, two years earlier than the U.S. Supreme Court. More recently, it has taken steps toward decriminalizing abortion and held that homophobic and transphobic speech, including individualized slurs and insults, are major crimes on par with racism and racial injury. Last year, Brazilian feminist Isabella Cêpa was granted asylum in Europe after being criminally charged for referring to transgender deputy Erika Hilton as a man.

Bolsonarism defines itself in opposition to these trends and in defense of the unborn, traditional marriage, and Christianity. Jair Bolsonaro has described himself as a “proud homophobe” and accused LGBTQ activist groups and political opponents of seeking to normalize homosexuality and transgenderism, especially in public schools. His 2018 campaign slogan was “Brazil above everything, God above all.” Jair is Catholic and raised his son, Flávio, as a Catholic, but both have cultivated strong evangelical ties. In 2016, Jair was baptized in the River Jordan by an evangelical pastor; earlier this year, Flávio followed suit.

In the end, religion may be the clearest lens through which to understand the recent political convergence of Brazil and the U.S. In both countries, politics have increasingly become a referendum on the kind of moral or religious order people wish to inhabit. Regardless of who wins the upcoming Brazilian election, that larger story will remain.

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Because I’m going to be quite critical of Theo Baker’s How to Rule the World, it feels only right to start with three pieces of sincere praise: the book held my attention all the way to the end, I learned things from it, and I read it twice. These are not reactions I expect most new books to generate, let alone one written by someone not yet of legal drinking age. Hence on this basis alone, I would have to concede that Rule (borrowing Baker’s shorthand for a “secret” Stanford class, about which more below) is a real achievement.

The book is a college memoir of sorts, in the tradition of Ross Douthat’s Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (2005). Baker is adamant that, unlike Natalie Krinsky’s Chloe Does Yale (2005) or even F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920), “this is no roman à clef”; he insists that everything he reports happened as written. Still, though the genre may be familiar, Rule is unusual in that it covers only one academic year, the author’s freshman sojourn at Stanford University. That particular year—2022-23—was eventful, for Baker and Stanford alike. To cut to the chase, as a student journalist for the Stanford Daily, Baker managed to bring down the president of arguably the world’s most prestigious, influential, and richest university (even if the defenestrated ex-boss remains a tenured professor in the Biology Department). Baker is quick to acknowledge that he didn’t pull this off all by himself, but if Rule is to be believed—and I have no reason to suspect otherwise—the announcement of Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation on July 19, 2023 wouldn’t have happened without him.

***

How to Rule the World is really two books: a journalistic procedural à la All the President’s Men, and Baker’s account of “the Stanford inside Stanford,” his—to my ear, rather memorable—phrase for the secretive network of clubs and classes that separate “ordinary” Stanford students (if any can be called such) from the “10xers,” “builders,” and “high-agency” Übermenschen who constitute no more than ten, perhaps not even five, percent of the student body. The procedural gobbles up more and more pages as Rule progresses, but the inner Stanford is the more interesting topic. Baker has done a real service in shining a light into corners rarely, if ever, illuminated for outsiders.

The connection between the book’s two themes is not merely that both defined Baker’s freshman year, but what the “MTL” resignation over falsifying research data says about Stanford and elite academia more broadly. In both his investigation of the former president and his experience of the secret Stanford, Baker finds corner-cutting, conflicts of interest, ethical lapses, mendacity (up to and including outright lying), stonewalling, logrolling, cover-ups, and much dismal else: all is not well in the ivory tower. Rule does not, to say the least, whitewash Stanford. Baker is forthright about the university’s many recent failures: famous ones such as Theranos and FTX that resulted in jail time, but also lesser-known malfeasance such as a professor’s $29 million payout to settle a fraud claim, a former dean’s affair with an undergraduate (though Baker omits that both were female and the dean was married to a man), and Stanford’s steadfast refusal ever to acknowledge anything. “Stanford is supposed to look perfect,” Baker intones.

I found How to Rule the World by chance. I spent most of fall 2024 in Berkeley researching my own (prospective) book on the modern university (among other things) and began the actual writing of it earlier this year. One morning wasting time on clickbait (procrastination being the bane of all writers), I happened across a review of Baker’s book. Now, had it been about any other school, I wouldn’t have bought it; I’ve read enough college books at this point to grok the essential points. But if you’re going to write about Cal (as alumni and sports fans call the University of California, Berkeley), you need to understand Stanford, its bitter cross-Bay rival, so I coughed up. I’m glad I did. Rule is helpful for understanding not only Stanford but our world more broadly, including the incubators that produce our elites.

Read the rest here.

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