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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So where does this leave us?

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

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

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

The post Young Men Are Being Left Behind appeared first on The American Mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the rest here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post America’s Net Zero Near Miss 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.

Europe Lurches Leftward Toward Disaster. Can It Recover? | The American Mind Podcast

Europe faces a civilizational crisis induced by self-destructive progressive ideologies. The German Left has weaponized atonement for World War II to censor opposition. In Spain’s North African enclave, Ceuta, a recent border crossing by thousands of migrants posed an unchecked Moroccan challenge to Spanish sovereignty. Meanwhile, French deindustrialization and rampant immigration threaten to strangle its economy. Conservative movements have begun to gain traction, but can they pull Europe back from the brink? Claremont Review of Books Contributing Editor Christopher Caldwell joins Claremont President Ryan P. Williams to explain.

The post Europe Lurches Leftward Toward Disaster. Can It Recover? | The American Mind Podcast appeared first on The American Mind.

I really am—honest—trying to write a rather long and complicated book and don’t have time for things like this. But when one’s good name is impugned, sometimes thumos (to coin a phrase) gets the better of one.

Professional X Troll James Lindsay keeps dragging me into his every little fever dream. I almost always let it pass, though I did once demonstrate that he knows nothing about Plato, Carl Schmitt, or political philosophy generally.

Now he has committed yet another disastrous unforced error, on some level realizes it, and is spinning frantically to direct fire outward at everyone who has shown that he has once again made an utter fool of himself.

The nub is—literally—this: Amanda Milius, a filmmaker and former State Department official, recently gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Jerusalem. For the record, I was not there and did not watch or read the speech. But I have known Amanda for eight years and doubt I would be surprised by the content.

Lindsay spotted a picture of Amanda with a portrait of George Kennan in the background. He used this to insinuate that Amanda is somehow an anti-Semite. That’s right: Amanda Milius, a right-wing Zionist Jew who grew up in West Los Angeles, in the film industry (that notorious bastion of WASP Jew-haters) no less, who has visibly worn a Star of David around her neck literally every single time I have ever seen her, whose father is maybe the most right-wing Zionist since Menachem Begin, Amanda is somehow…an anti-Semite?

Nor did the absurdity end there. Indeed, the layers are so endless it is hard to determine the best order in which to lay them out. Let’s start with Lindsay’s “evidence.” Which is simply this: Amanda is standing next to a photo of George Kennan.

I happen to know this photo for more than one reason. First, when Amanda first took it, she showed it to several of us (I saw it on her phone; this was 2018) because she thought it was amusing. There she is vaping after hours next to the fabled first Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department! Vaping in what the Deep State calls “Main State” is a violation of Foggy Bottom protocol, to be sure. But when the picture was taken, it was something of a lark, and we all had a good laugh.

At that time, I had no idea I would one day occupy the very suite of offices where that picture was taken and pass that very same portrait every working day. Because you see, the Kennan photo is literally one in a long line (two rows of two, actually) of every single person who has ever held the office.

So, according to Lindsay, a lark photo taken in 2018 is supposed to be intended as a “dog whistle” to the “groypers” in 2026. For those not steeped in such matters, this gets complicated and absurd, but one must bear with me to see the full lunacy of this fake “controversy.”

The “groypers” are, not unlike James Lindsay, full-time X trolls. The key difference between Lindsay and the groypers is that Lindsay claims to be pro-Israel while the groypers are avowedly and vehemently anti-Israel. Which just adds a layer of bizzarro to this whole sorry episode. Amanda went to Jerusalem of all places to give a speech defending Israel, and for that deed James Lindsay accuses her of … anti-Semitism?

Lindsay also attacks the National Conservatism Conference, at which Amanda delivered that speech, which he hates just as much as the groypers. Therefore, based on Lindsay’s own “logic,” since Amanda Milius standing next to a picture of George Kennan identifies her with every opinion Kennan ever (allegedly) held, doesn’t hatred of NatCon make Lindsay a groyper?

In any case, since George Kennan is supposedly the linchpin of Amanda’s alleged “dog whistle,” one must ask: What’s the connection? It is true that in his diaries, Kennan records private remarks unflattering to Jews, sentiments common among upper-class WASPs of his day—not that this excuses anything. Kennan also opposed American recognition of Israel in 1948. But so did George Marshall, James Forrestal, and basically the entire American foreign policy establishment, for reasons of strategic judgment, however debatable, not from any nefarious motive.

But Lindsay doesn’t cite any of that, presumably because he doesn’t know any of it. Lindsay merely takes for granted that Kennan is somehow a bad person, so anyone who stands next to a picture of him must also be bad. That would be a long list.

But to repeat, Lindsay cannot explain why Kennan is bad. He doesn’t even really assert that Kennan is bad. He simply wants to smear Amanda, and Kennan is his vehicle.

Which is especially ironic since Lindsay’s X bio is “James Lindsay, anti-Communist.” George Kennan is literally the greatest and most effective anti-Communist who ever lived. When the entire American political, military, and foreign policy establishment was at a loss as to what to do about the rising Soviet threat, Kennan (in early 1946) cut through the fog with an unforgettable analysis. And—this is the most important part—not just a diagnosis, but a treatment.

George Kennan did what every would-be policy wonk spends his entire life dreaming of doing: he came up with a plan, which his superiors then adopted, which was followed by eight administrations of both parties for forty-five years, and which worked. And which threaded the treacherous waters between the Charybdis of “rollback” and the Scylla of appeasement.

For this great achievement, surely one of the greatest of the 20th century, Lindsay dismisses Kennan as “obscure.” I don’t need to say much on this point because Lindsay has justly been dogpiled for saying something so laughably false. But I will say at least this: George Kennan is the most famous and accomplished pure diplomat (which is to say, someone who did not go on to higher office) this country has ever produced. His “containment” is almost certainly the most famous single-word strategic concept in three thousand years of recorded history. And Kennan was the subject of one of the greatest works of biography of the 21st century so far.

To call George Kennan “obscure” is, simply as a factual matter, to show oneself to be an ignoramus. Why James Lindsay continually insists on advertising that fact, I find mystifying.

I have noticed that whenever Lindsay is caught in a humiliating error like this, he simply moves on, pretends he never said it, doesn’t defend it, doesn’t correct it, just acts like it’s not still out there in pixels, and sprays random fire in every direction. On the other hand, when called out for implying that Amanda is an anti-Semite, he puffed out a high-dudgeon denial. He didn’t say that in those precise words, you see. No, he just said that she was winking to the groypers who are all (or I at least assume them all to be, based on what I have read) anti-Semites. No one was buying that phony dodge, but it ought to be career-ending.

Anyway, leaving the matter at George Kennan’s alleged “obscurity” is to underestimate the magnitude of Lindsay’s malfeasance. He has taken it upon himself to decide who in American history is worthy of admiration and who is not, and to denounce as bad people anyone who admires one of those cast out of the pantheon by James Lindsay. If this sounds exactly like what, say, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Robin D’Angelo do for a living, that’s because it is. In other words, “James Lindsay, anti-Communist” is in fact in lockstep with the Communist, America-hating Left and works hand-in-glove with them toward the same ends.

Lindsay claims to be a supporter of Israel and is critical of the way certain quarters of the Right are turning (or have turned) against the Jewish state. OK. I share this concern, despite being (far) less of a traditional interventionist Republican hawk than James Lindsay. But he chooses as his target, of all people, Amanda Milius, speaking in Jerusalem, on the current state of the American Right. He denounces NatCon, and by implication Yoram Hazony, for…what? Is the latter man, whom the groypers denounce as a Zionist plant to destroy America, somehow also…anti-Israel?

I suspect what really freaked Lindsay out is not anything Amanda (or Yoram) did or did not say but simply what they represent: a new faction of the Right, gaining strength—because their arguments are stronger than their opponents’—that sees the impossibility of America forever remaining an overextended Atlas propping up every corner of the world. Lindsay wants to frame the issue as: you either take my exact same position on Israel, or you are anti-Israel. That framing is absurd enough on its face, but when your targets are Amanda Milius and Yoram Hazony, you are lashing out so blindly and wildly that your aim may as well be random.

It might also interest Lindsay to know that one of the topics discussed at NatCon Jerusalem was the desirability, to both countries, of Israel weaning itself off American aid. This is not yet a majority opinion in that country, but it is gaining ground, especially on the Israeli Right, a fact I learned when I first visited Israel in 2007. Are all adherents of this view—not just the Americans but the Israelis—also somehow anti-Semitic and anti-Israel? According to James Lindsay’s “logic,” they must be.

Why did Lindsay drag me into this? What is my even ostensible link to this non-controversy? It seems to be, though Lindsay does not mention it, my review of a biography of George Kennan, published in the Claremont Review of Books nearly four years ago. Lindsay never or rarely spells anything out, but perusing his tweets on this sorry business, his point seems to be: Anton is skeptical of further American aid to Ukraine; Anton reviewed a book about Kennan in which he said Kennan would be too; Milius posted a picture of herself next to Kennan; the groypers are pro-Russia; Amanda’s photo was a dog-whistle to Anton and the groypers (who Lindsay neglects to mention hate me and denounce me daily). It’s all literally that tenuous, about at the same IQ level as John Blutarsky’s grade point average: zero-point-zero.

None of this adds up on any level except as personal grudge. I know that Lindsay has one against me, but from what it arises I have no idea. I see that he claims he has “met” me. Not so. It is true that we once attended the same event—a Claremont Institute event, James; you decided to conceal that little detail from your acolytes—but we never spoke.

Lindsay insinuates in that same post that all of the supposedly dastardly Kennan worship he denounces me (and Amanda) for was present on that occasion. But that is also false. That conference’s topic was tech; its date was January 2021, two years before I even wrote my review of Frank Costigliola’s biography of Kennan, which I hasten to add was assigned to me by the editors of the CRB: I otherwise likely wouldn’t have even heard of it and certainly wouldn’t have sought it out. Kennan was not then on my mind at all, except insofar as I had read John Lewis Gaddis’s biography upon its publication ten years earlier. (Has Lindsay read either?) The idea that Kennan was some proto-groyper secret handshake Jew-hating link tying us all together is the fever dream of a malicious lunatic.

Lindsay began this sorry episode with a character-assassinating smear. As he spiraled downward when his cruelty and stupidity were pointed out to him, he went on to call Amanda “trash,” called Megan Basham an “awful person” for standing up for a friend, and accused Matt Peterson of having a “personality disorder.” These are not, to say the least, arguments from strength.

People can’t help being dumb, and stupid people can’t help being ignorant. But anyone can avoid malice, and anyone can avoid choosing as their profession spouting garbage and libeling others on the internet.

James Lindsay’s great ambition is to be the reincarnation of William F. Buckley, the man who gets to decide who is on the “legitimate” Right, and who must be excommunicated as part of the nefarious “far right.” What his qualifications might be for this position, to which he has appointed himself, are hard to say. Beyond his nominal “anti-Communism,” he rarely espouses any conservative opinions. He only, as the saying goes, “punches right.” He’s a sort of X version of David French, without the New York Times imprimatur.

Why does anyone on the Right listen to him? Or perhaps the better question is: Does anyone on the Right listen to him? Here I think most signs point to no, which is encouraging.

To end where we began, some will then ask: Why bother to respond at all? To which I reply: Are my friends and I obligated to be subjected to tidal waves of unanswered libel simply because we are supposed to be “above it”? We all have reputations and good names that James Lindsay routinely impugns. Is there some rule of justice or prudence that requires us to put up with that endlessly?

I have little expectation of changing James Lindsay’s behavior. But I hope that others will see through his bluster and see him for what he really is.

The post James Lindsay’s Fever Dream appeared first on The American Mind.

I came here because supposed friends on the Right, as well as enemies on the Left, are slandering the great realignment that the American Right has been undergoing over the last decade, which led to the coalition that put Trump in office for the second time in 2024.

I noticed that by merely announcing online my plan to attend this conference, I have since been called both a Nazi and a sellout to the Zionists. This dual claim may not make logical sense, but it does give us a sense of what’s happening right now. People are trying to rip our coalition apart.

Many are now being encouraged to conclude that the New Right, the coalition that helped put President Trump back in the White House, and a whole generation of young conservatives have gone mad. And that story is no doubt very useful to the people telling it. The problem is that it’s just not true.

The National Security Strategy released last year describes President Trump’s foreign policy using these words: “realistic,” “pragmatic,” “principled,” “muscular,” and “restrained.” To quote: “It’s not grounded in traditional political ideology. It is motivated above all by what works for America—or, in two words, America First.”

In regard to the Middle East, it states that

America will always have core interests in ensuring that Gulf energy supplies do not fall into the hands of an outright enemy, that the Strait of Hormuz remain open, that the Red Sea remain navigable, that the region not be an incubator or exporter of terror against American interests or the American homeland, and that Israel remain secure. We can and must address this threat ideologically and militarily without decades of fruitless ‘nation-building’ wars. And of course, we also have a clear interest in expanding the Abraham Accords to more nations in the region.

And that’s pretty much the national security strategy of the United States under Trump.

Now, the worry about the conflict in Iran on the part of most Americans on the Right is not, of course, due to any support for the current regime in Iran. We would all like to see it go. The worry is that this turns into another fruitless war, which is why its outcome will likely shape Israeli-American relations for the next generation.

Take me as an example. I support the American military. I support President Trump and his administration in the hard work of governing. But I’m also among those troubled by the framing, escalatory logic, and timing of the conflict with Iran. If I’d been in a position to advise the president, which I was not, I would likely have counseled restraint. I have many friends who disagree vehemently. That disagreement, of course, is not civilizational betrayal.

Opposing endless war is not hostility to Israel. Having a different opinion of how America should fight Iran is not hatred of Jews. Those who conflate these things are committing an error with strategic consequences.

America is a nation. Israel is a nation. Interests sometimes align and sometimes do not. When they align, we act together with clarity and strength. When they do not, it is not a scandal. It’s ordinary politics among free peoples. George Washington’s Farewell Address, which warned of entangling alliances, was not a conspiracy theory. The adult posture between nations is to map the overlap honestly without either side dissolving its sovereignty into the other’s.

Regardless of our views on the issue, the future of the American-Israeli relationship is not going to look exactly like it did in the past, nor should it. What it becomes must be decided by serious people arguing from reality, not by Twitter mobs, paid intermediaries, or a binary in which every skeptic online is answered by bots as a Nazi or a Zionist pawn. That trap prevents a growing number of Americans on the Right from saying what they actually believe. They do not share every position of the old neocon hawks. They know that American and Israeli interests are not always identical. But they do not hate Jews, wish Israel destroyed, or, for heaven’s sake, support Marxist Islamists.

Whether well-meaning or not, the people who squash any discourse along these lines are not defending Israel. They’re isolating it from the next generation of American power.

It’s very sad that, over the last few years, many sensible Americans have been unwilling to have public adult discussions about this and related matters because of the controversy among the influencers and the online swirl and swarm. So many Republican voters are prevented from making clear that, while they may not think about Israel exactly like Mike Huckabee or Ted Cruz, they’re generally supportive and they oppose the Islamists.

Why is this happening? There are many reasons, but this dynamic would almost seem ridiculous if larger political forces in America weren’t using bad actors to try to divide the coalition on the Right. They appear suddenly and deeply concerned about anti-Semitism and increasingly attempt to besmirch the names of good people. And I would submit to you that this is because the remnants of the prior establishment on the Right in America hope that when Trump leaves the scene, they will rise to power once again. And they seek to use whatever means necessary to attack the vice president and others who represent the obvious future of the American Right, and to muddy the waters for American Jews and older American donors alike.

Now, American Jews and Israelis are understandably deeply concerned about the current scene. But I think this makes people especially receptive to commentators and analysts who are spreading lies about the actual landscape of reality on the Right. These actors use the tactics of the Left. They paint a picture, whether it’s true or false, of someone as anti-Semitic or a fascist. Then they smear whoever they can with guilt by association, asking the journalistic equivalent of “When did you stop beating your wife?” And then they demand denunciations. The problem in America is that many of us have stopped playing this game a long time ago, because it is the Left’s central tactic.

So while my concern is for America and the American political coalition, I think the loop of much of this discourse, the way in which it’s stuck, is harming Israeli interests.

For what it’s worth, here’s my counsel: five quick points.

First, be wary of buying a map of the American Right from intermediaries whose product is fear. Watch the people who are actually leading on the Right. Read what they write. Listen to what they say. Ask them direct questions about what they think. Make few assumptions. The prevailing larger changes in opinions about foreign policy on the Right are not based upon irrational hatred and cannot be countered, never mind prevented, by reacting as if they are.

Second, to this effect: I understand the desire to call out hatred. But here’s the problem. Denouncing anti-Semitism in America in the abstract these days is much like calling an opponent racist. Both terms have been hollowed out by the Left. The ADL, for instance, has long since lost any power over the Right by attacking figures like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and TPUSA, which is why the FBI cut ties with them last year. We have a boy-who-cried-wolf problem in America and the West. The Left makes accusations like this all the time, and the younger rising Right doesn’t care about being called names or abstract -ists or -isms from any side. And frankly, neither do I.

But I do not mean to tell anyone to be silent. Far from it. On the contrary, if we’re going to sort through the noise, my advice is to stop using abstract categories and -isms and -ists and -istics. Call out and argue instead about specific statements and positions you think wrong or evil. Ask specific questions to specific people.

Third: understand where many of the young men on the Right are coming from. As Stephen Miller posted from the White House: “A nation is its people. This has always been true. This will always be true.”

But if you are a young white American, you have grown up in an education system and culture that celebrated both mass migration to America and organized tribalism among all those being imported there—an educational system and political culture that encouraged every ethnicity to join together as an interest group against oppression from—well, you. Young white Americans have been told that they must apologize for their whiteness, and that if they were ever to act as a group like everyone else in America they see is trained to do and celebrated for doing, they are evil or Nazis. And this anti-white sentiment and discrimination have had very predictable results.

Now I’m not going to go into this in detail, other than to say I’m not happy or sanguine about the tribalization of America. But this is the reality young people have been born into—a reality in which World War II is as far away as the Civil War was to those who fought in that conflict. And rather than clean up this mess—the great political task that is part of the work I and others must work to resolve every day—those who caused it or allowed it to happen constantly denigrate this younger generation and make things worse.

The young people on the Right have reached a point in which they justifiably feel betrayed by institutions that demanded their loyalty yet gave them contempt in return. They are re-evaluating alliances because they are re-evaluating everything, as is the United States as a whole. It isn’t just Israel; it’s NATO, it’s our relationship with every nation, it’s our entire history outside of leftist indoctrination in the classroom.

So if the collective response by the “adults in the room” to all these issues is the rhetoric of 1985 plus accusations of evil, a lot of the young Right aren’t going to be persuaded. If the response is seriousness, however—shared enemies named, shared interests argued, shared goods defended without apology—you may find more allies than many of those who are full of doom and gloom would lead you to believe.

Fourth: young men in America who probably have never even met, or don’t know that they have met, someone who is Jewish will still notice that many American Jews on the Left have been supportive of mass immigration and woke Communism. Clearly some American Jews thought, and many still seem to think, that the identity politics coalition of the Left did not consider them white oppressors, that they were a minority whose rights the Left was fighting for alongside other ethnic groups.

This has been revealed as a lie—a total lie. The Left will not prevent Jewish American college kids from being chased down on college campuses. The Left will not condemn the DSA, Mamdani, or Abdul El-Sayed, who Obama is about to campaign with in Michigan. Their coalition, as we know, will treat American Jews as white or white-adjacent oppressors as soon as they feel they can get away with it, and they feel that way now.

The flip side of this, however, is that many Americans know little of Israeli politics. They don’t know much about what right-wing Israeli leaders think, and they do not often hear what they say at conferences like this one. What they do end up hearing sounds hypocritical or worse.

This is what they think: If the nation of Israel will not allow itself to be overrun by foreigners who are trained to call Jews oppressors, how can Jews support mass migration of such people to Western countries, and why would they do so? Of course, there are right-wing Jews in America who are very good at answering this question, but younger Americans need that question answered, and the position of the members of the Israeli Right on the matter—stated clearly—would have an enormous impact on American politics.

In fact, only the Israeli politicians who, by their words and deeds, condemn this suicidal path the West is currently walking down will have influence on America on the Right in the future. Further, whoever says to the American Right, “We don’t need your aid anymore. We’re a sovereign nation like you and not a client state,” will be hailed as an honest leader.

Fifth, and I can’t emphasize this enough, though I don’t have time to go into it in detail: while many of my evangelical friends—and they are my friends—still hear “stand with Israel” as a religious duty, for many other Christians in America, the idea that their religion requires them to support the particular policies of another nation is deeply insulting. Many Republicans frequently complain to me that they’re done with this dynamic. Many who support Israel want me to convey this message. They do not think their Christianity requires them to blindly support whatever decisions Israel chooses to make, and find it condescending if anyone assumes that this is the way they should think about it.

Now, this does not mean that they see no religious ties to the Holy Land. It means that relying on this approach alone to persuade American Christians is a dead end. I submit the way forward is frank policy discussions based on reality. This means getting clear on where our interests align and do not, and when they do not, it’s okay.

To summarize, I think the central question we face is not anti-Semitism or podcasters, but reaching agreement within the shifting landscape of political reality we’re in right now, with new constituencies, with new concerns and goals, as opposed to the Cold War era or the ensuing Gulf War era. The question before us is what a new Israeli-American relationship for the 21st century should look like, shaped with goodwill and honest speech.

So to close, some words of encouragement in this churning time of Babel.

First, Yoram Hazony. Yoram has taken flak on all sides for this project, when he should be praised for doing what a lot of people in America and Israel should have been doing all along—and that is openly and honestly hosting these discussions and having the prescience to put future presidents on his stage.

Second, and more generally: it’s easy when navigating difficult waters to lose hope, to try one direction and fail, to misperceive the true nature of the swirling currents around you, and, seemingly beset on all sides by the tides, to despair. But hope is not just a wish or a feeling. It’s a virtue—a virtue we are commanded by God to take on as part of ourselves, as a habit of thought and action, as a light that guides our thought and action.

And we are gathered in Jerusalem, the holy city, whose history, human beings being what they are, is also tied to violence and war. In fact, many of those who wish to completely forget about the Middle East and its troubles in the West themselves forget that even the European ancestors of people like myself fought and shed blood over this city, and that Jerusalem will never be forgotten. And this is because Jerusalem is also the city of hope.

As the prophet said in Lamentations, in the wreckage of Jerusalem:

This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him. The Lord is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him.

May we all act and speak with the boldness of hope, which brings with it the confidence that we’re all capable of rejecting lies and deception, and able to seek the truth and act on it.

The post Israel and the New American Right appeared first on The American Mind.

Arizona law does not permit the state to require an employee to undergo training that presents blame or judgment on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex. The wording is not obscure. It addresses the state and its subdivisions, identifies the protected employees, and forbids a particular act. Yet when I sought to enforce that prohibition against Arizona State University for required DEI training, the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) maintained that I had no right to be in court. The legislature may have enacted a command, its argument runs, but it gave the people protected by that command no means of enforcing it.

I have taught philosophy and religious studies at Arizona State University for more than two decades. In 2022, ASU began requiring its employees to complete an online program called “Inclusive Communities.” Arizona had enacted A.R.S. § 41-1494 the previous year. The statute provides that the state and specified political subdivisions “may not require an employee to engage in training, orientation or therapy that presents any form of blame or judgment on the basis of race, ethnicity or sex.” It separately forbids spending public money on such programs.

The complaint filed on my behalf by the Goldwater Institute detailed the contents of the training and its accompanying quiz questions. It advanced contested claims about race, privilege, and sexuality as authoritative conclusions. Its treatment of “whiteness” assigned moral guilt according to racial membership, while its treatment of sexuality cast biblical Christian beliefs about morality as impediments to inclusion. Employees had to complete the lesson and provide the approved answers for the quiz.

I sued the ABOR for declaratory and injunctive relief. I did not ask for damages—instead, I asked a court to declare whether a public university had violated the legislature’s command and to stop the violation. The superior court held that § 41-1494 implied a private right of action for employees subjected to forbidden training. The court of appeals reversed. Because the statute contains no clause expressly authorizing an employee to sue, it concluded that I could not enforce it. The Arizona Supreme Court granted review on a precise question: Did the court of appeals err by failing to apply the factors set out in Transamerica Financial Corp. v. Superior Court?

The distinction between standing and a private right of action matters, as does the distinction between an express and an implied right of action. Standing asks whether a litigant has a sufficient personal stake in the controversy; a private right of action asks whether the law authorizes that person to seek judicial enforcement. Such authorization is express when the statute states that an injured person may sue. It is implied when that authorization must be inferred from the statute’s language, context, purpose, and remedial structure. Everyone agrees that § 41-1494 contains no express right of action. My case turns on whether it implies one.

The Arizona Supreme Court answered that question in Transamerica in 1988. There the court declined to adopt the restrictive federal approach. It examined “the context of the statutes, the language used, the subject matter, the effects and consequences, and the spirit and purpose of the law.” The analysis asks who is protected, what duty the statute creates, what remedies are available, and what consequences follow if courts refuse to recognize one.

Those considerations fit § 41-1494 naturally. The legislature identified a discrete protected class: public employees required to undergo proscribed training. It imposed a mandatory prohibition on state entities. The employee bears the injury, and an injunction is the remedy tailored to it. The statute requires compliance reports, but a report to political officials neither adjudicates an employee’s claim nor stops unlawful training. A report about compliance is not a remedy for noncompliance.

At oral argument, Justice Clint Bolick placed the dispute in the larger American legal tradition. He invoked the maxim ubi jus ibi remedium: where there is a right, there is a remedy. Chief Justice Ann Timmer asked counsel for the board whether that principle should not apply in Arizona. The maxim expresses something very basic about the rule of law. A right that public officials may violate without judicial redress is not fully a right. It is advice addressed to the government, enforceable only if the government wishes to heed it.

The lineage runs through Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in Marbury v. Madison. The case is remembered for judicial review, but Marshall’s reasoning begins with the relation between rights and remedies. He called it “a general and indisputable rule” that where there is a legal right, there is also a legal remedy when that right is invaded. The judicial duty to say what the law is arises because law governs officials as well as citizens.

That principle sharpened the separation-of-powers exchange at our argument. Chief Justice Timmer asked whether recognizing an implied action risks transferring legislative power to judges. Courts must not manufacture causes of action whenever they approve a statute’s purpose. But my lawyer, Jonathan Riches of the Goldwater Institute, answered that our position preserves, rather than disturbs, the division of powers. The legislature enacted a prohibition. If courts hold that the law supplies neither an express nor an implied means of enforcement for the people it protects, judges have not modestly deferred to the legislature but have instead rendered its command practically unenforceable—and thereby nullified it in the cases that matter most.

The chief justice pressed the point from the other direction. The legislature is presumed to know Arizona law, including Transamerica. Might lawmakers have omitted an express cause of action because they legislated against the background rule that an appropriate remedy could be implied? Thankfully, an amicus brief from the Arizona speaker and the Arizona Senate president at the time of the law’s passing states that they certainly intended it to provide an implied right of action for employees like me. Under Transamerica, statutory silence begins an inquiry; it does not end one. To treat the omission of explicit language creating a right of action as conclusive would replace Arizona’s settled multifactor analysis with the federal rule Arizona expressly rejected.

The board’s position also creates a peculiar asymmetry. It holds that the law allows only for a report about potential violations to be submitted to ABOR. The government would be both the regulated party and, in effect, the final judge of its own compliance. Periodic reporting may inform the board, the governor, and legislative leaders, but political oversight cannot substitute for the judicial remedy owed to a person presently subjected to unlawful state action.

My case concerns one university program, but its consequences will extend far beyond DEI training. Arizona enacts many statutes that establish duties and protect persons without appending a sentence expressly authorizing suit. The court’s decision will tell legislators how they must write future laws, lower courts how they must interpret existing law, and citizens whether statutory rights may be judicially vindicated. It will also decide whether Transamerica remains the law in Arizona or survives only as a citation whose method courts need not use.

The question is therefore whether the justices should give legal effect to a prohibition the legislature actually enacted, using the interpretive rule Arizona already recognizes. The separation of powers does not require courts to stand aside while an executive agency effectively treats a statute as optional. It requires each branch to perform its own office: the legislature writes the law, the executive obeys it, and the judiciary supplies judgment when a concrete violation is alleged.

Ubi jus ibi remedium is a warning against a government without accountability. If Arizona recognizes a right of public employees to be free from compulsory race-based blame and judgment yet closes the courthouse door when that right is invaded, the statute will retain its words while losing its force. Arizona’s public universities will be emboldened to teach their DEI curriculum without meaningful oversight under Arizona law. The court now must decide whether the legislature enacted a law or merely expressed a hope.

The post When a Right Has No Remedy: From Marbury to DEI appeared first on The American Mind.

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.

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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.