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Since then, trade wars, foreign wars, and the usual daily controversies have offered convenient distractions from a much darker realization: Something about American politics has changed. The old assumption that nearly everyone still accepts the same basic rules can no longer be taken for granted.

Denial is a common response when a problem is too large to contemplate. The possibility that a substantial number of Americans now see political violence as acceptable has implications the conservative movement would rather avoid. Yet reminders keep appearing.

Recent videos again showed people mocking Kirk’s death, including a drag performance and comments from streamer and democratic socialist Hasan Piker. It is much easier to argue about tactics, personalities, or the latest outrage than to ask what kind of political order produces people willing to celebrate an assassination.

Piker’s case is especially egregious because he met Kirk and debated him in person. He has built a career around revolutionary rhetoric and violent political fantasies, including lurid comments about landlords and capitalists, and “soak[ing] in the blood” of his capitalist enemies. That he remains a major online personality illustrates the asymmetry conservatives have noticed for years: Rhetoric that would end a career on the right is often treated as edgy entertainment when it comes from the left.

America has received an almost embarrassing number of blessings from God Almighty, which makes it easy to forget that our political experience is historically unusual. The United States occupies a vast, resource-rich territory protected by oceans and has fought remarkably few wars on its own soil. We have not faced sustained internal danger in generations. That security has encouraged an ahistorical view of politics as a permanently orderly process.

Modern Americans expect Mr. Smith to go to Washington, make a speech, win an argument, and then shake hands with the opposition. Every election is called the most important of our lives, but the ritual remains the same because the underlying disputes are assumed to be manageable. If the argument is over marginal tax rates, retirement ages, or entitlement formulas, that expectation makes sense. Those are technocratic disagreements inside a shared political order.

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But some disputes are not like that. Consider the fight over the euphemistic “gender affirming care” for minors. One side believes the state must protect children from genital mutilation. The other believes the state has a right to seize children if parents refuse to go along. There is no clever tax-credit compromise that resolves the underlying question. One side’s victory necessarily means the other side’s destruction. That is what existential politics looks like.

This is why Carl Schmitt has re-entered conversations on the right. Certain conservatives often reduce his friend-enemy distinction to a license for treating anyone who disagrees with you as a mortal foe. That isn’t the useful part of Schmitt. His point is that politics becomes political in the fullest sense when groups understand that a conflict touches the survival of their way of life. His framework is gaining salience because Americans increasingly encounter disputes that feel exactly like that.

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It turns out I was not alone. Popular voices including Matt Walsh and John Doyle now openly support conservatives taking and wielding power effectively. That disagreement has launched another round of public debate over the pursuit of power, but the argument is only a proxy for a larger battle over JD Vance, foreign policy, and the future of MAGA.

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Donald Trump represented a serious threat to the established political order. Initially dismissed as a brash reality television host, he quickly demonstrated that he was tapping into something deeper than celebrity and catchy insults. Trump was not a career politician. He did not enter politics with deep ideological commitments, and he did not know or care about the established rules.

He fused law and order, economic protectionism, foreign policy restraint, immigration enforcement, and culture-war issues in a way no Republican candidate had since Pat Buchanan. Trump saw an untapped political market and, like any good businessman, gave the customers what they wanted.

Many prominent establishment figures declared themselves “NeverTrump” and vowed to resist MAGA’s takeover of the conservative movement. That strategy failed. Trump became a political steamroller. Some NeverTrumpers migrated into the Democratic coalition or created opposition “conservative” outlets such as the Bulwark. Others decided to wait.

MAGA had the populist momentum, but the establishment still controlled institutions, personnel, and much of the donor class. The bet was that it could outlast MAGA and co-opt it, just as the Republican establishment had absorbed the Tea Party.

The next opportunity came with Ron DeSantis. Establishment conservatives hoped Trump’s legal troubles would make him vulnerable to a popular governor with a record of victories. DeSantis was supposed to offer Trumpism without Trump: populist energy packaged in a form more compatible with the old ideological agenda.

It did not work. Trump’s primary and general-election victories removed any illusion that a direct assault on him from inside the party could succeed.

If the establishment could not oust Trump, the remaining option was to derail his movement and prevent anyone from carrying MAGA into future elections. Despite Republican control of the House, Senate, presidency, and Supreme Court, congressional Republicans have repeatedly clashed with the administration. The Senate has stalled key personnel and has not passed the SAVE Act. Republican politicians know they must praise Trump rhetorically, but many continue to resist important parts of his agenda.

Add a deeply unpopular war with no obvious end, and the result is an effective containment mechanism: MAGA divided, distracted, and exhausted.

That is why the fight over JD Vance matters so much. When Trump sent the vice president to negotiate a peace deal, critics who had spent years presenting themselves as Trump’s loyal allies suddenly questioned Vance’s ideology, associations, and viability as a successor. Like Trump, Vance is not wedded to neoconservative foreign policy. His role in the negotiations made clear that he is being prepared as a possible heir to the movement.

At the same time, some critics began presenting Marco Rubio as an alternative while attacking any attempt to withdraw from the conflict.

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The fights over power, foreign policy, affordability, and the dangers of the New Right are therefore part of the same proxy war for control of the GOP. It is no accident that many establishment figures who favor expansive military commitments abroad also recoil from using political power aggressively at home.

We can always find money for war, but when the cost of living becomes unbearable, suddenly government action is communism. The overlap is not accidental. It reflects the old conservative settlement: Republicans may fight wars abroad and protect big business at home. They may talk endlessly about social issues, but they are not supposed to spend serious political capital addressing them.

That is why it may seem strange to watch figures such as James Lindsay, Joel Berry, and Ben Shapiro portray Matt Walsh as a socialist or JD Vance as a crypto-Nazi. The rhetoric makes more sense when viewed through coalitional politics. Whatever they think personally of Walsh or Vance, they recognize that both threaten an order that has existed for decades.

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It also illustrated a political asymmetry conservatives rarely discuss.

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Endless ink has been spilled and countless podcasts recorded about the radicalization of young men on the right. Almost nobody in conservative media wants to address the equally serious radicalization of young women toward the progressive left.

There has been plenty of controversy in conservative circles about young men embracing nihilistic or extremist politics online. Rod Dreher, among others, has warned about young conservative men drifting toward figures such as Nick Fuentes and adopting a politics of resentment and despair.

That’s fine as far as it goes, but it does not answer the larger question. Even if Dreher is right about one cohort of men, it does not follow that young men are uniquely radicalized, or even that they represent the larger political problem. Conservatives should be capable of noticing more than one trend at a time. And the trend among women is impossible to ignore.

Kamala Harris received 53% of the female vote in 2024, while Joe Biden received 54% in 2020. Women are substantially more supportive than men of legal abortion. They are also more likely to regard changing one’s gender as morally acceptable and more likely to say society has not done enough to accommodate transgender people.

The same divide appears on immigration. Women are more likely to support amnesty, oppose ICE deportations, and favor extending legal protections to illegal immigrants.

The divide extends beyond electoral politics. Young women are less likely than young men to say they want children and less likely to prioritize family over professional goals. They are also less likely to express a positive view of capitalism.

None of this means women are a political monolith. Marriage changes voting behavior dramatically. Married women are far more likely to vote Republican and hold traditional views on family and gender.

Race also plays a part.

Ripping on liberal white women is practically a conservative pastime, partly because “white” makes them culturally safe targets. But the voting data complicate the caricature. A majority of white women voted for Trump in 2024, while much smaller shares of Hispanic, Asian, Jewish, and black women did so.

White women are hardly a uniformly conservative bloc. But they are not the most progressive female constituency either.

Despite the mountain of evidence that females are far more left wing, there will be no books about the dangerous trend of radicalization among young women. There will be plenty of cable-news segments about how social media is poisoning young men. There will be endless concern about podcasts, gaming culture, online masculinity, and the political temptations facing disaffected boys.

Much less energy will be spent asking what TikTok, universities, activist institutions, and elite media have done to the minds of young women.

The reason is simple: Young men are a safe target.

Anyone can denounce them with little institutional risk. A broad criticism of female political behavior, by contrast, can quickly become a career problem. That taboo exists on the right almost as surely as it does on a college campus.

It must be said that this is not an exercise in blanket condemnation of women. The conservative movement is filled with passionate, caring, godly mothers, wives, daughters, and single women who genuinely support the fight for the future of the United States.

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A civilization where men and women are constantly at odds with each other is doomed. Breaking men and women out of loving families and turning them into political blocs to be catered to is disastrous for the health of the nation.

South Korea provides a warning about where gender war can lead. Its political divide between young men and women has grown exceptionally wide, with the sexes increasingly supporting very different parties and organizing around competing political identities.

South Korea also has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. That does not prove the political gender divide caused the fertility collapse; housing costs, work culture, marriage patterns, and other factors have played a role. But a society in which men and women increasingly regard one another as political adversaries will have a harder time persuading them to marry, form families, and raise children together.

Read the rest at The Blaze.

When Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre chided Americans for complaining about the price of staples such as milk and eggs, she did serious damage to the Democratic Party. Many voters backed Donald Trump because they trusted him to address inflation and the broader affordability crisis. Now conservative pundits and influencers are repeating the same mistake, telling consumers that everything is fine and that only economic illiterates think groceries, gas, and housing cost too much.

Elections are not won by lecturing voters that their problems are imaginary. This is Politics 101. Professional political actors adopting the strategy months before the midterms is both bizarre and dangerous.

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Affordability is not a Democrat talking point or a socialist catchphrase. It is real, and it will dominate every foreseeable election. Republicans understood this when Biden occupied the White House. The problem did not disappear when Trump returned.

People can feel that the economy is not working for them. They can see the American dream drifting farther out of reach. Conservative pundits may produce charts, cite aggregate statistics, and explain that certain indicators look healthy. None of that will save the GOP any more than it saved Democrats who insisted that “Bidenomics” was working.

The party cannot dismiss this anger as a failure of messaging. Voters do not experience the economy as an abstraction. They experience it at the checkout counter, at the gas pump, when the insurance bill arrives, and when another year of saving still leaves a starter home beyond reach. Their judgment is concrete and entirely rational.

The price of some discretionary goods, such as flat-screen televisions, may have fallen. The essentials of ordinary life have not followed the same path. Food, health care, child care, education, insurance, housing, electricity, and gasoline remain punishingly expensive. Gross domestic product and a surging stock market may comfort those already winning in the economy, but they are poor measures of the daily experience of a family struggling to stay afloat.

Many of the underlying problems are nearly untouchable in a democratic system. The hard truth is that buying votes is often the optimal electoral strategy. No candidate wins by promising voters that their benefits will shrink, their home values will fall, and their taxes will rise.

Trump understands this better than anyone. He promised not to touch major entitlements, pledged to protect home values, and proposed eliminating taxes on tips. America may be on a slow collision course with fiscal disaster, but no politician wants to lose an election by volunteering to hold the bomb when it explodes.

The American version of this problem has modern features, but the core dilemma is ancient. Large civilizations require immense resources. When rulers can no longer obtain enough through ordinary taxation, they manipulate the currency.

Roman emperors knew little of modern monetary theory, but they understood that reducing the precious-metal content of coins allowed the state to mint more of them. The apparent solution eventually helped destroy confidence in the currency and contributed to the collapse of hard money across much of Europe.

There is only so much Trump can do about structural inflation and accumulated debt. He can, however, avoid taking actions that make the problem worse.

Gasoline is the literal fuel of the economy. Higher prices punish voters at the pump and then reappear in the cost of every product that must be transported. Energy bills, food prices, and fuel costs hit households immediately and simultaneously. Voters will remember that squeeze more clearly than any lecture about macroeconomic fundamentals.

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The war with Iran has taken on a disturbingly familiar shape. Its champions mocked anyone who warned that the conflict might last more than a few weeks. Now the country approaches a critical midterm election with no end in sight.

This was predictable. Once a war begins, the ability to control its scope and duration rapidly diminishes. Machiavelli put it plainly: “Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.”

The same pundits who demanded war now tell voters they are stupid or selfish for noticing its economic consequences. They will inevitably blame any disastrous midterm result on the people who opposed the conflict, but the political reality is obvious.

The central issue is not that voters have developed a sophisticated position on Iran. Many probably care little about the strategic details. They care that everything costs more. Telling them they lack economic literacy has roughly the same electoral appeal as shooting a puppy on live television.

Read the rest at The Blaze.

Conservatives often respond with mockery.

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We’ve all laughed at the childless, blue-haired activists lauding socialism behind their COVID masks. We point at and mock the unemployed polycule, the emotional instability, the theatrical rage, and the childish demands to abolish police, erase borders, and destroy capitalism.

The mockery is usually deserved. The dismissal is not.

Those ridiculous people keep showing up. They organize. They make art. They join committees. They staff bureaucracies. They run nonprofits. They enter classrooms. They write rules. They decide what your children learn, what your employees may say, and what your business must obey.

The joke is on conservatives who laugh while losing.

Conservatives build businesses, raise families, and grow churches. These are real achievements. They are more honorable than spending one’s life screaming slogans outside a courthouse or enforcing ideology from a human resources department.

But honorable work can become an excuse for political and cultural surrender.

Many conservatives tell themselves that activism is merely a symptom of liberal dysfunction. They imagine their own reluctance to organize proves superior health. Politics has become religion for the left, they say, while conservatives seek salvation elsewhere.

All true. None of it excuses the shocking lack of action.

Alexis de Tocqueville identified the American habit that once prevented private life from collapsing into selfish isolation. In “Democracy in America,” he praised Americans for their nearly compulsive desire to form associations.

They founded churches, schools, hospitals, libraries, fraternities, unions, charities, and local organizations with their own money and labor. These institutions created a dense web of civic life. They restrained individualism, solved local problems, and reduced the need for distant government.

Americans did not retreat from public life because they had families and businesses. They entered public life through their families, businesses, churches, lodges, and communities. That habit has largely fallen by the wayside.

Just a few decades ago, the average right-leaning businessman might also belong to the Elks Lodge, the American Legion, the Rotary Club, or a local church committee. These associations provided mutual aid, mentored young men, supported local institutions, and connected families across generations.

They were also political and cultural centers.

Men decided there to support a friend for city council. Couples organized fundraisers for the orchestra, hospital, or school. Veterans discussed local problems over beer. Business owners pooled money and influence. Neighbors formed habits of trust before a crisis demanded them.

Almost every great political and cultural movement began with passionate, like-minded people bonding over a drink.

The left’s version is uglier because the left is uglier. Progressive organizations often produce coercion, resentment, and ideological fanaticism. Conservatives are right to reject their ends.

But rejecting progressive ends does not justify abandoning organization itself.

If left-wing activists are so absurd, why do they keep winning? Why do they control education, entertainment, philanthropy, corporate bureaucracies, and much of government?

They win because they show up.

Conservative mockery has become a coping mechanism. It allows the right to transform defeat into evidence of superiority. The progressive may control the school board, but at least the conservative has a successful landscaping company and grills excellent barbecue.

The man with the barbecue may be happier and saner. The school board still controls his children’s curriculum.

Birth rates provide another excuse.

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Conservatives correctly note that they are having more children than liberals. They assume demography will eventually deliver political victory. But children do not inherit politics like eye color.

Two obstacles destroy the fantasy of automatic triumph.

First, Democrats import loyal new voters faster than Republicans can raise children, and many immigrant populations have higher birth rates than native-born conservatives.

Second, the left controls the institutions that shape those children. Schools, universities, entertainment, music, social media, and corporate culture bombard young people with progressive assumptions all day.

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Technology promises an escape from the consequences of those political and cultural failures. Flock Safety cameras appear to offer law and order at the push of a button. In the hands of the ruling class that manufactured the crisis, however, they are more likely to produce tyranny for citizens.

Municipalities are buying Flock’s automated license plate readers. The company did not invent plate cameras, but its artificial intelligence radically expands their reach.

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Flock cameras photograph passing vehicles and record license plates, makes, colors, damage, bumper stickers, and identifiers. A single camera means little. A citywide network collecting thousands of images every day creates something powerful.

The cameras send their information to an AI database in real time. Police and other municipal employees can search for vehicles nearby. They can place cars on “hot lists” and receive alerts whenever those vehicles appear.

The system effectively places a GPS tracker on every moving car. Police ordinarily need a warrant to attach a tracker to your vehicle. Flock can reproduce the same surveillance through a network of cameras, often without probable cause, due process, or meaningful legal restraint.

The benefits are obvious. Perfect information about every vehicle makes suspects easier to find. Police can recover stolen cars, locate fleeing murderers, and respond faster to crimes.

In a high-trust town, every grandmother on the porch once knew which cars belonged and which did not. Flock offers a technological imitation of that lost social awareness.

But imitation carries a price. Grandma knew her neighbors and exercised human judgment. The database knows everyone and answers to government employees.

Flock is not alone in selling technological substitutes for social order. Cities have used gunshot-detection systems. Networks of acoustic sensors identify gunfire and triangulate its location, allowing police to respond faster.

The engineering may be impressive. The governing theory is primitive: If authorities watch and listen to everyone constantly, they can prevent more crimes and solve more cases.

A surveillance panopticon may work. People who know they are always being watched behave differently. Americans have resisted that bargain for good reason.

The Fourth Amendment exists because efficient policing is not the highest political good. Government must possess evidence and follow procedures before invading the privacy of citizens. New technology should not erase old constitutional limits.

Britain offers a warning. Closed-circuit television cameras have become ubiquitous across the United Kingdom. Some estimates suggest that the average British resident appears on camera dozens of times each day.

Britain has no written equivalent of the Fourth Amendment, and its political culture places fewer obstacles before constant public surveillance. Yet cameras did not prevent the Rotherham grooming-gang scandal or protect thousands of vulnerable girls from organized abuse.

Officials ignored or concealed the crimes for years because confronting them threatened the ruling class’s multicultural ideology. When public anger finally erupted, the surveillance state proved far more competent at identifying and punishing citizens who protested the cover-up.

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That is the anarcho-tyranny trap.

Conservative thinker Samuel Francis used the term to describe a regime that tolerates disorder while imposing suffocating control on peaceful citizens. Authorities fail to punish criminals, then use the chaos created by that failure to justify new powers over everyone else.

Americans have already seen the pattern.

The government possessed enormous amounts of video from the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Businesses burned, neighborhoods were looted, and citizens were assaulted. The system showed little appetite for using every available image to identify and prosecute everyone involved.

After January 6, the same government used surveillance footage, facial recognition, financial records, and digital communications to pursue participants with extraordinary intensity. Officials punished many who entered the Capitol and investigated people who merely stood nearby.

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The speed of information and the incentive to push hot takes onto social media mean that when a public figure dies, there is an immediate race to decide which competing narrative will define his legacy.

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When Lindsey Graham died suddenly of heart failure over the weekend, conspiracy theories about foreign assassination plots immediately began to circulate online. Many leftists openly celebrated his death, and the reactionary impulse of conservatives drove others to recast Graham as a stalwart crusader for MAGA.

The truth is more complicated. But in the eternal battle for narrative supremacy, there is little time for reflection, even in response to death.

No one is above criticism. But in a healthy society, some space exists between a public figure’s passing and attacks on his legacy.

That standard now seems quaint, perhaps naive. It is also better for the soul of the nation.

Unfortunately, wishing to live in that kind of society does not make it real. The information war is relentless. Abstaining from the fight only means someone else defines the truth.

The news cycle does not observe a respectable period of mourning. The battle begins the moment the headline drops.

Wild conspiracy theories now seem obligatory whenever a prominent figure dies, and Graham was no exception. The senator toured a Ukrainian weapons factory the day before his death, and several figures speculated that he had really been killed in an attack on that facility or poisoned by the Russians.

Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin suggested on social media that Graham had likely been killed by Israel, despite Graham’s long record of advocacy for that country.

This is not to denigrate conspiracy theories in general. One thing we learned after COVID is that such theories can often prove correct. But the narratives around Graham’s death were bizarre.

Graham was a 71-year-old man with a family history of fatal heart conditions who did not take care of himself. His death is sad, but its cause was hardly mysterious.

Progressives reacted exactly as expected. There was gloating, celebration, mockery, and even speculation about who should come next.

Graham’s death was nowhere near as visceral or violent as Charlie Kirk’s assassination, but the left’s response carried unnerving echoes. It was a brutal reminder of a lesson conservatives have worked hard not to learn since Kirk’s murder.

Even the average Democrat is emotionally unhinged.

Your progressive neighbor may not be willing to commit violence personally against you over politics. But many are happy to cheer those who do and dance on your grave once you are gone.

The reaction on the right was strange in a different way. Some conservatives rushed to construct a hagiography, transforming Graham into a MAGA saint, a lion who died fighting for the cause.

That impulse may have been an understandable response to the left’s disgusting vitriol. It was not wise.

Graham served in the Senate for 31 years. He supported every disastrous war during his tenure, including the war in Ukraine that Donald Trump ran on ending and the war in Iran now costing the administration dearly.

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Graham pushed for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. He backed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during military operations in Syria and Libya.

He pushed to send hundreds of billions of dollars to foreign governments while inflation was driving up the cost of living for ordinary Americans. After Graham’s death, Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that when he told the senator Israel should pay for its own defense, Graham insisted that American taxpayers should foot the bill.

On immigration, the core issue of the MAGA coalition, Graham was even worse.

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Democrats had made contempt for men, especially young white men, central to their message, and that came with a cost. Any white man who remained on the left had to accept that he was either uniquely guilty or expected to participate in his own dispossession. The party even launched a $20 million effort to discover why men were abandoning it, only to arrive at the familiar conclusion that men were simply bad and deserved what they got.

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This should have created a golden opportunity for the GOP to secure the loyalty of young men for a generation.

Instead, conservatives are setting that opportunity on fire.

Men’s natural role in society is to protect, provide, and lead. Even when women earn good incomes, the data consistently shows that they still prefer men who are at least as successful as they are. Women generally do not form families with men who cannot find stable work, buy homes, or attain the status markers that signal competence and security.

A society that blocks young men from those roles is choosing dysfunction and decay.

In a recent Fox News interview, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed the rise of democratic socialism on Gen Z. She said young people were “raised with silver spoons in their mouths,” called them lazy, and suggested sending them to Cuba or Iran.

Calling those remarks callous and tone-deaf would be generous.

Leavitt married a millionaire real estate developer more than 30 years her senior. It is unlikely that her “silver spoon” would be adjusted by deployment to a foreign combat zone. The entitlement only became more obvious when she defended the comments after deserved criticism.

The message to young people was unmistakable: Your concerns are not legitimate, and we despise you for expecting us to fix anything.

Of course, some young people are lazy and entitled. Every generation has its share. That does not mean most young men are or that the obstacles they face are imaginary.

Young men, especially young white men, have been systematically excluded from educational institutions, corporate hiring, and promotion. This is not mere resentment or speculation. It is the predictable result of decades of cultural indoctrination and civil-rights enforcement that trained institutions to prefer women, immigrants, and minorities whenever possible.

That has real consequences. Men who cannot secure education, employment, and status are less likely to marry or form families, no matter how often our culture repeats slogans about equality.

Housing has become another barrier. The average first-time home buyer is now approaching middle age. Young men cannot build wealth as their parents did or provide the stability women often want before marriage.

There are many reasons for this, including mass immigration and corporate speculation in residential real estate. But one factor is simply welfare for seniors. Many older Americans failed to save adequately for retirement and now depend on the inflated value of homes they bought decades ago.

President Trump has said explicitly that he does not want housing prices to fall for this reason. That is a deliberate choice to sacrifice young men’s development and family formation to protect older asset holders.

Young men have also watched their country import foreigners, legally and illegally, to replace them. Immigrants receive special access to education loans, business programs, and hiring preferences unavailable to natives. Mass immigration drives up housing, insurance, medical, and education costs while transforming neighborhoods beyond recognition.

In Minneapolis, the mayor now manages Somali clan politics like a colonial regent simply to maintain control.

The question is not why young white men are radicalized. The question is why it took so long.

On July 4, during America’s 250th anniversary celebration, Patriot Front marched in Washington, D.C. The group consists largely of young white men in quasi-military uniforms carrying American flags.

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A comical number of conservatives rushed online to call them federal agents after Reuters published a photo of one black woman sitting in a subway car full of Patriot Front members. It later appeared that the supposed new Rosa Parks was a homeless drug user with a record of indecent exposure.

She was certainly safer than Iryna Zarutska, who was stabbed in the neck by a mentally ill black man while riding public transportation alone. The Patriot Front members may even have prevented another indecent-exposure incident simply by being present.

Read the rest at The Blaze.

That is false.

Truth may be eternal, but our knowledge of it is not. Knowledge can be lost when a civilization stops practicing it. As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, we must understand that remembering our traditions and values is not enough. To keep them alive, we must embody them in what we do.

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Ancient Rome is remembered as one of the most powerful civilizations in history and also one of the most technologically advanced. The Romans developed special concrete and engineering techniques that allowed them to build extraordinary structures and civic infrastructure.

When Rome fell, those techniques still existed in one sense. They had been discovered. But they were lost to time because the people who possessed the knowledge could no longer practice it or pass it on. The scientific truth remained objectively real, but without the civilization that had maintained it, the knowledge faded as if it had never existed.

People lived in the ruins of ancient wonders, taking shelter in buildings they could not build or maintain. Without the continuity of tradition, science had no practical meaning.

Moral truth faces the same danger.

The Old Testament shows a repeated cycle of Israel receiving divine revelation and then forgetting what had been handed down by God Himself. Again and again, the nation falls away from the commandments of the Lord until a prophet pulls an old scroll from its rack and reminds the people of what they once knew.

The Israelites cry out and rend their garments in repentance. They practice the truth for a time. Then, the practice fades, and knowledge fades with it.

Despite receiving direct divine revelation, Israel — and humanity itself — could not maintain the practice of God’s truth. That is why the Lord sent his Son as a perfect example and living sacrifice, an eternal embodiment for all nations to see what the righteous life looks like in practice.

This weekend, America will celebrate its 250th anniversary. But saying that we honor our traditions and culture is not enough.

Most Americans have spent little to no time reading what the founders actually wrote. Their understanding of our national traditions comes from a heavily curated version of history they learned in school. There will be plenty of talk about celebrating the country’s past. What we need is a revival focused on living that tradition in the present.

Sentimentality is nice. It will not save the country.

Today, most Americans, including many conservatives, say the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment means Muslims cannot be prevented from moving here and building entire cities dedicated to their way of life. The average American believes Hindus have a First Amendment right to immigrate and build giant statues of their demonic gods in Texas.

This is absurd.

States often required public officials to be professing Protestant Christians well into the 1840s, decades after the Bill of Rights was adopted. Even Catholics were often considered too foreign to hold office. None of this was viewed at the time as a violation of religious liberty. The idea that religious liberty was intended to allow Muslims or Hindus to control the public square is a lie.

The entire “tradition” of religious liberty many people think they are honoring is false.

The Supreme Court recently provided another example by ruling that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens. The 14th Amendment was one of three amendments added to the Constitution after the Civil War to address the legal framework for freed slaves.

Its purpose was to clarify that people born into slavery became citizens once they were free. That intent was made clear by the people who authored the amendment. It did not create citizenship for American Indians, for example, or other groups added later through law and policy.

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The idea that birthright citizenship for illegal aliens is some grand American tradition is entirely false. Yet a conservative Supreme Court just enshrined it in the Constitution.

This is what happens when a people inherit words without preserving the practices and assumptions that gave those words meaning. They recite “religious liberty” and forget the civilization it was meant to protect. They invoke “equal citizenship” and forget the specific injustice the 14th Amendment was written to remedy. They honor the shell while abandoning the substance.

A nation does not preserve itself by remembering slogans once a year. It preserves itself by forming children, families, churches, neighborhoods, and leaders who know what those slogans demand when they collide with power, fear, comfort, and fashion. Otherwise, July Fourth becomes pageantry without inheritance.

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The war had solid support from Trump’s more Fox News-oriented voters, but it remained unpopular with much of the country. It cost Trump several high-profile supporters. It also earned him the favor of political operators who previously despised him. Several figures who had declared themselves “Never Trump” suddenly discovered a strange new respect for the president once they believed he was willing to launch another regime-change war in the Middle East.

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Those fair-weather allies are now melting down over the prospect of peace between America and Iran.

In his farewell address, George Washington warned the fledgling republic that foreign entanglements were dangerous to freedom and independence. He encouraged commerce with all nations but cautioned against permanent alliances and favored nations. Washington understood that favoritism toward a foreign power would invite foreign influence and lead some citizens to mistake loyalty to an ally for loyalty to the United States.

No event has vindicated that warning more clearly than the war with Iran.

Trump immediately stood out in conservative politics by taking three positions that were popular with the base and dangerous to the establishment. He opposed open borders, unfettered trade, and endless regime-change wars.

Republican politicians, conservative pundits, and Washington think tanks loathed him for all three positions, but especially for the third. Endless conflict created job security and enormous income streams for permanent Washington. The war class did not appreciate a reality television star barging in and threatening the gravy train.

Many neoconservatives abandoned the GOP once they realized Trump was not going away. Others stayed because the war-hawk establishment had deep roots in the Republican Party. They realized they could gain more influence by pretending to convert to the MAGA movement and working from within to steer policy.

Several figures who swore they would never support Trump began presenting themselves as his greatest champions, hoping they could define what MAGA should become.

When the war with Iran began, these neoconservative champions viciously attacked anyone who pointed out that the conflict contradicted Trump’s previous foreign policy. They invented slurs to brand opponents as traitors to the president and insisted that total ideological conformity was the only acceptable position.

The strategy worked for a time. It drove many anti-interventionists away from their previous support for Trump. That made it even more revealing when Trump moved to end the conflict and his new allies suddenly attacked him in blind rage.

America and Israel entered the conflict with very different goals. For the United States, the only real concern was preventing Iran from gaining the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon. It is unlikely an Iranian nuke could threaten the U.S. directly, but keeping hostile regimes from obtaining that capacity is a legitimate goal.

Israel saw Iran differently. For Benjamin Netanyahu, Iran was an existential threat that had to be taken off the table entirely. His goal was always to collapse the current Iranian regime, replace it, or let the country become a failed state.

As Marco Rubio indicated after the war began, Israel insisted on starting the fight knowing it would force the United States to join. The two allies were out of step from the beginning, so it is no surprise that Netanyahu has done everything possible to disrupt the peace process and achieve every military objective he can while still under the protection of American arms.

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The reaction in Israel to Trump’s pursuit of peace has not been gratitude. The president’s popularity there has plummeted, and headlines accusing him of betraying Israel have appeared across the country’s newspapers. One Israeli media figure even suggested America deserved another 9/11-style terror attack so the public would be frightened back into fighting Iran.

Hardcore Israel supporters in America have reacted no better. Figures such as Ben Shapiro, who briefly departed the Never Trump camp to push for war, are now turning back against Trump. At times they try to hide their anger by blaming Vice President JD Vance for the peace deal, but no one is fooled.

Read the rest at The Blaze.

Gay men exposed themselves to children at parades while police looked on. Transgender activists went topless on the White House lawn while Joe Biden declared that transgender youth “shape the soul of America.” The spectacle was grotesque, but the LGBTQ movement kept winning, and its radicals assumed they could do whatever they wanted without consequence.

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Donald Trump’s 2024 victory shocked the cultural radicals who expected the country to keep swallowing the agenda. Trump did not end wokeness, but his mandate signaled a limit to what the public would tolerate. Movies and television still push woke pieties. Democrats still advance insane views on child transition. But the most outrageous excesses of Pride Month have begun to recede. This June, far fewer institutions seemed eager to signal total loyalty to the rainbow regime.

Professional sports remain among the stubborn exceptions.

Hockey and baseball teams still drape their social media in rainbow colors and hold Pride nights at their stadiums. On the surface, this makes little sense. Sports audiences tend to be male, more conservative, and far less interested in radical LGBTQ propaganda than the professional class that runs these leagues. Pride branding does not attract these fans. It alienates them.

So why keep doing it?

Because the point is not profit. The point is domination.

The leagues maintain their public worship of homosexuality because it irritates their middle-American audience. Hollywood did something similar with “Joker.” The first film made a fortune, but elites hated that disaffected young men embraced it. So the sequel humiliated and destroyed the main character. The studio cared more about punishing the audience than pleasing it.

Sports owners increasingly behave the same way. They despise the people who make them rich and would rather lecture them than serve them.

San Francisco is hardly a conservative stronghold, so no one should be surprised that the Giants held a Pride night and required players to wear LGBTQ-themed uniforms. The team redesigned its logo in rainbow colors and placed it on player caps, as it has done before.

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This time, a few players found a way to resist.

Pitchers Landen Roupp, JT Brubaker, and Ryan Walker wore the required Pride caps but wrote “Genesis 9:11-16” beside the logo. The passage refers to God giving mankind the rainbow as a sign of His promise never again to flood the earth.

It was a clever protest. The players wore the mandated symbol of the regime. They did not directly attack LGBTQ activists or the Pride agenda. They simply recontextualized the rainbow, turning a celebration of homosexuality into a reminder of God’s love, covenant, and dominion. The shift was subtle but devastating. It seized the frame and subverted the intended message.

Activists were predictably outraged. They could not tolerate faithful Christians finding a tactful way to register dissent. They demanded punishment, claiming the players had “politicized” the event.

That complaint sounds absurd until you understand the real rule. This is not hypocrisy. It is hierarchy.

Read the rest at The Blaze.

As the United States confronts mass immigration, the question “What is an American?” has become unavoidable on the right once again. It is a question about identity. For the first time in decades, conservatives must navigate one of the most important parts of human life.

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Identity feels dangerous because it is dangerous. From the beginning of time, identity has been something men kill and die for. People can fight over voluntary commitments, but identity largely consists of things we did not choose. We do not choose where we are born or to whom. We do not choose to be a brother, sister, son, or daughter. Even religion, though it requires voluntary practice, is usually inherited before it is chosen.

Identity is what you cannot leave behind, often because you never chose it in the first place.

That is why identity produces existential conflict. Its involuntary nature means people cannot simply opt out when the pressure rises. If someone wants to kill everyone who likes the movie “Jaws,” you can stop being a fan. If someone wants to kill everyone born English, you cannot stop being English. You have no option but to fight.

This explains why the post-World War II consensus tried to suppress as many thick identities as possible. If people lack strong attachments to heritage, tradition, nation, or religion, they are less likely to treat those attachments as matters of life and death. The impulse is understandable. No sane person wants another war of religion or world war fought over nationalism.

But the shift carries a cost. Without the boundaries of nation and religion, we drift toward open-borders globalism, which is deeply unhealthy.

A nation without identity has no coherent sense of the public good. The man whose family has lived in America since the founding has different priorities from a newly arrived immigrant hoping to move his extended family here. The Christian who wants his faith reflected in his ancestral nation has conflicting interests with the Muslim who wants his new home to implement Sharia law.

The state cannot remain neutral between these visions. It must decide which identity takes priority and which public good it will pursue. Neutrality is a lie. Identity is inescapable.

As America tries to unwind the open-borders disaster liberalism produced, the need for concrete identity becomes obvious. Illegal immigration is a massive problem, but legal immigration has also been destructive. If being American means more than obtaining paperwork, uncomfortable lines must be drawn. Identities are inherently exclusive. Some people are in, and some people are out.

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That feels dangerous because it is. But we no longer have the luxury of avoidance. Turning a blind eye to these questions created the mess. We will not escape it by doing the same thing again.

Modern people like rigid categories, but identity has always had strong centers with some flexibility at the margins. A traditional biological family is the best outcome and should be preferred above alternatives, but an adopted child can still become part of a family. People know what a woman is, but progressives exploit overly rigid definitions to destroy the category. If you say a woman is someone who can bear children, they immediately point to a sterile female and ask whether she is still a woman.

The rigid category becomes the tool of deconstruction.

Read the rest at The Blaze.

Nowak, an 18-year-old from Essex, reportedly told officers, “I can’t breathe,” and “I’ve been stabbed.” Officers mocked him, denied that he had been injured, and debated whether they had any obligation to check. The case has drawn comparisons to George Floyd in the United States. The comparison is imperfect, but the contrast is obvious: In Nowak’s case, the police had every reason to believe the man on the ground needed urgent medical care.

In December, Nowak was walking home from a pub while recording himself on social media. He encountered Vickrum Digwa, a 22-year-old Sikh immigrant, who claimed Nowak intentionally bumped into him. The recording stopped during the initial encounter, so the exact sequence remains unclear. When it resumed, Nowak called Digwa a “bad man” before Digwa grabbed his phone and the recording ended.

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Digwa then allegedly stabbed Nowak multiple times in the jaw, legs, and heart with a ceremonial dagger. Britain imposes strict anti-knife laws on its native population, yet Sikhs receive exemptions to carry kirpans. That fact turned Nowak’s death into a symbol of Britain’s two-tier society.

Digwa did not immediately summon help. He recorded himself mocking Nowak as the wounded teenager tried to escape over a fence. Nowak told his attacker more than once that he was dying. Digwa’s brother eventually called police with a story that Nowak was a violent racist who had insulted and assaulted the Sikh man before injuring himself while climbing a fence.

The police appear to have accepted that story instantly. They treated the bleeding English teenager as the threat and the immigrant suspect as the victim. They handcuffed Nowak, and he reportedly choked to death on his own blood in police custody.

Even before the bodycam footage emerged, Nowak’s death had become a flashpoint in a deeply divided Britain. Despite the clear wishes of voters, British politicians have allowed mass migration to transform the country. Immigrants have strained the welfare state, crowded the job market, driven housing pressure, and changed the country’s culture. But nowhere has the transformation become more obvious than policing.

The Pakistani grooming-gang scandals revealed the pattern. English girls were raped across the country while police, terrified of being called racist, ignored or minimized the crimes. In some cases, victims were treated as the problem. In others, fathers who tried to protect their daughters faced the law instead. The message was clear: The state feared accusations of racism more than it feared the destruction of its own people.

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Immigrant stabbing attacks have also helped justify sweeping bans on defensive weapons, including knives and pepper spray. Yet Nowak died from a ceremonial blade Digwa was permitted to carry. Immigrants enjoy exceptions while native Britons face disarmament. That is not equal justice. It is hierarchy.

After a stabbing spree last year left three young girls dead, riots broke out across Britain. The government response was brutal. Authorities did not merely arrest violent offenders or street protesters. They escalated social media arrests so aggressively that Britain now jails people for speech and political offenses at levels no free country should tolerate. At every turn, the government has privileged the comfort of foreign communities over the safety and dignity of the native population.

Read the rest at The Blaze.

That escape has narrowed. As media and universities became more radical, their disciples moved into rural America through government-mandated institutions like schools and libraries. Progressivism became harder to avoid no matter how far someone moved from the city. Thus the hicklib was born.

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The hicklib is usually a social outcast, a failson who needs a moral explanation for why he hates the community he never fit into. His resentment searches for a theory that will dignify his rage, and the progressive missionaries installed in local institutions are happy to provide one.

Teachers tell the hicklib his country is evil. His family and neighbors are racist, sexist, backward religious fanatics destroying the lives of minorities who do not even live in town. The white Christian culture that dominates rural America is primitive and responsible for the evils of the world. The hicklib’s failure to fit in becomes proof of moral superiority.

So the hicklib shows up at town council meetings in a Black Lives Matter shirt to denounce minority oppression in a community with no actual black people. That absence, naturally, becomes further proof of the town’s intolerance. He loudly organizes Pride events attended by two other hicklibs. The clique stages protests, distributes flyers, and imitates urban activist rituals.

By practicing the sacraments of their faith, they hope to summon the spirit of the age to judge their reactionary little town.

The hicklib has become one of rural America’s petty plagues. But as the value of college degrees collapses, a new breed is emerging: the fail-lib.

The fail-lib worked hard in high school and gave progressive teachers every approved answer. She wrote her college entrance essay on the oppression of transwomen of color in coal mining. On campus, she became an activist. She secured a degree in some woke humanities discipline and earned straight A’s by repeating everything her communist professors told her.

The path to success was laid out before the fail-lib was born. She followed it perfectly. All that remained was the cushy corporate HR job and her rightful place making ordinary people miserable.

Then the plan failed.

The college degree that cost $100,000 was supposed to guarantee success. The debt would be worth it because the credential would deliver a salary large enough for an apartment, a car, and monthly student loan payments. But the degree was not merely about financial security. It was also a symbol of status. College graduates were supposed to rule over the simple plebs who never left home.

The degree would confer wealth, power, and privilege. Instead, it turned out that too many people held degrees and too few jobs required them. Corporations began cutting HR departments that wasted resources and reduced productivity. Poor oppressed immigrant workers somehow found work while the fail-lib remained unemployed, though a good progressive would never complain. She could never explain how, but she knew the white Christian patriarchy was responsible for this injustice.

Earlier generations of college students had an insult for the ordinary residents of college towns: townies. The townie was contemptible because he was not merely passing through before collecting a credential and moving on to rule the world. He belonged to the place the student planned to use and abandon.

The arrogance required to insult the permanent residents of a community while you are a temporary visitor is staggering, but the slur was common. It revealed the sneering condescension of the would-be liberal elite. Now the tables have turned.

The college degree was once a ticket to the top. Now it is an expensive lottery ticket with worsening odds. More graduates emerge from extended stays in higher education with mountains of debt and few prospects.

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The fail-lib spends a year unemployed, desperately seeking even the entry-level positions her fancy degree was supposed to let her bypass. After burning through savings and taking on more debt, she accepts a management job at the local Starbucks or retail outlet. If she gets lucky, she might run the local Apple Store.

The hicklib may be insufferable, but the fail-lib is worse. She was destined to leave the college town behind and move to a big liberal city like New York. She was supposed to be the person ordering lattes and $30 burrito bowls for important work lunches, not the person making them. Once, she mocked the parochial townies trapped in their backward existence. Now she is stuck among them with no escape.

Read the rest at The Blaze.

That failure should have created an obvious opening for libertarians. Governments shower data-center projects with subsidies, wield eminent domain to seize land, and help politically connected corporations reshape local communities in the name of technological progress. A coherent libertarian response would attack the merger of state power and corporate power.

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Instead, many libertarians have chosen to cheer the expansion without asking what the technology will be used for or whom it will serve. Their quasi-religious loyalty to capital has pushed them into another foolish position and exposed the danger of turning an economic theory into a full worldview.

The tech elite insist that AI will revolutionize the world, but they have done almost nothing to tell average people how their own lives will improve. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs spin wild stories about superhuman intelligence and the automation of tens of millions of jobs. That does not sound like a sales pitch. It sounds like the setup for a science-fiction dystopia. The one concrete justification they offer is strategic: AI will supposedly define the future of warfare, and America must stay ahead of China.

That argument would carry more weight if the same people pushing AI were not also so committed to building the kind of technology most likely to be used against Americans. They are not preparing some noble shield for the republic. They are building tools that can make the United States look a lot more like the techno-authoritarian China they claim to fear.

Data centers consume staggering amounts of electricity, sometimes drawing as much power as a moderate-sized city. They also use enormous volumes of water, create nonstop noise, and disfigure the landscape. Developers have found ways to soften some of those costs by building new power infrastructure and improving cooling efficiency, but none of the problems have been solved. In the meantime, local communities absorb the burden.

The economic case is weak as well. Data centers create construction jobs while they are being built, but once construction ends, they employ surprisingly few people. Governments usually justify subsidies by promising long-term economic activity and job growth. In the case of data centers, corporations collect the incentives while communities get very little in return.

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A sane political movement would notice that. Many libertarians have not. Instead of challenging subsidies and land seizures, they have fought to champion the projects. Nick Gillespie of Reason recently posted a chart showing that almond farms use far more water than AI data centers. Almonds are notoriously inefficient in water use, and agriculture probably does consume more water overall.

But the comparison gives away the problem. People eat food. AI, at least so far, mostly offers job displacement and surveillance.

Libertarianism grew, in part, out of the Austrian school of economics, which is useful for understanding markets. It was never meant to serve as a complete theory of human life. Like Marxists, however, many libertarians have turned an economic framework into a totalizing ideology. Free markets, contract law, and voluntary exchange become an all-encompassing lens through which everything must be judged. Once that happens, it becomes difficult to see anything that does not show up in GDP.

The real question is not how much of a resource gets spent, but for what purpose. Most people would not give up a hand to save a cockroach. Most would give up their lives to save a child. On paper, preserving the cockroach may look like the more efficient transaction. Only a lunatic would fail to understand why no sane person would ever choose it over the child.

Read the rest at The Blaze.

Recent data shows the dismal marriage numbers in the United States. The percentage of married couples, average age at which couples are marrying, and number of children are all in catastrophic decline. The numbers represent a dramatic collapse in the institution that serves as a foundation for successful civilizations.

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Conservatives will often place the blame on a lack of individual virtue, and there is plenty of truth to that claim, but the most important factors are baked into the structure of our society in a manner that Republicans are terrified to address.

When a movement refers to itself as “conservative” you would think the preservation of marriage would be its top priority. However, when marriage does receive any attention from conservative pundits and politicians, it is in the form of glib advice directed at young men telling them to get out of their parents' basement and stop playing video games.

Part of the marriage problem is certainly the lack of initiative on the part of young males, but this is also the easiest and most cowardly attempt to explain away the issue. Our culture encourages placing the blame on young men, who are one of the few groups that can be attacked without consequence. The real answers require taking on far more sacred cows.

When conservatives are feeling a little more adventurous, they will admit that some aspects of our economy are antithetical to family formation.

The fact that the average age of first-time homeowners is pushing past 40 signals how difficult achieving stability for young families has become. College is now required for even the most entry-level jobs, and the cost keeps exploding, consuming the capital that once went into a starter home.

The costs of health care and food continue to skyrocket so that most households require two incomes, forcing mothers to work, while the price of child care also increases rapidly. The economic issues are real and important, but even they do not tell the whole story.

Love, duty, and honor are all factors that hold our social bonds together, but it is dependence that makes them necessary in the first place and continues to undergird them when everything else falls away.

Modern people do not like to hear this fact because they believe that maximizing freedom and independence is the ultimate good, but there is a point at which autonomy rips society apart.

Men are, of course, dependent on many things, but women, due to their biological vulnerability, were always directly dependent on men.

Women are physically weaker, less aggressive, become pregnant, must care for children, and regularly need the direct intervention of others to ensure their safety and security. Women could not work outside the home while pregnant or raising children, so they remained dependent on their husbands’ income.

People will have sex — we are hardwired to pursue it — so the reality was that women and men needed to get married early to secure the safety of mothers and their children. Family formation was part of the rhythm of life. It was largely unavoidable, and this kept marriage rates among young people relatively high.

Once birth control and abortion made pregnancy a choice instead of an inevitability, everything shifted. Single women became a larger part of society, and the state expanded its reach to provide them with broader physical and economic protections.

The newly emancipated woman needed her own stream of income, and corporations were more than happy to provide it. Women doubled the labor pool, driving down wages. In large bureaucratic organizations, where compliance is key, the more agreeable nature of women is considered an asset in a way that it would not be in a more entrepreneurial economy.

Advantages were built into every level of our system to help elevate women due to the perceived biases that existed when mothers were expected to stay home. Universities gave priority to women, who now earn more degrees than men. Corporations gave hiring priority to women, who now make up a majority of their workforce.

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Government assistance and scholarship programs were established to ensure that working mothers did not fall through the cracks. It is not that women stopped getting married — every female must be married at some level — they simply became dependent on the men running the government and corporations instead of traditional husbands.

Women do not date men who earn less than they do, even if they think of themselves as independent. Deep down, females know that in the modern world, income signals status and status means protection.

Read the rest at The Blaze.

Today, however, people often use this explanation when it comes to political disagreements. Abortion, hatred of Christians, the mutilation of children — these beliefs are so horrible that they can only possibly be explained by a malfunctioning brain. But that is not the only explanation. The other option is that some people have a very different set of values that drive them to pursue goals we view as evil.

The average American would like to avoid this truth, because it comes with an unnerving conclusion: Your political enemies are not crazy; they are sane people who hate you and want to hurt you.

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As sophisticated and modern people, we tend to avoid language that implies some form of objective metaphysical truth. Evil is a concept that conjures up images of old churches, judgmental Sunday-school teachers, and medieval peasants trying to explain a drought.

We have the technology and understanding to explain everything in the world around us. Explanations that call on unseen forces or divine intervention are no longer required. In this thoroughly materialistic view, humans are simply animals with more sophisticated brains. Any undesirable behavior, therefore, can be understood as a malfunction of that brain.

There is no evil; there is only mental illness.

Modern Americans are universalists in a very strange sense. We assume that our values, beliefs, and customs are the default for all humans everywhere. Americans believe that all our assumptions about the way life ought to be lived are arrived at through individual human rationality, so if another person has a functioning brain, he will, of course, come to the same conclusion.

When we are confronted with someone who has very different understandings or goals, it is assumed that something has happened to his faculties of reason.

We try to argue with these people in hopes that rational debate will help them see the error of their ways. If debate does not work, we begin diagnosing the dissenting individual with all kinds of pathologies that explain why he doesn’t see the world the way we do. The explanation for divergent morals or goals is always a defective mental process, never a genuine difference in how we view the world.

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The obsession with material explanations accounts for half of this phenomenon, but the other half is explained by our desperate need to avoid real conflict.

One of the major selling points of liberalism was the reduced need for violent conflict by removing existential questions from the political arena. Who is right about God? What is the ultimate good? To what end should we orient our society? These are all important but dangerous questions. The answers are exclusive and all-encompassing.

These are the things that people are willing to kill and die for, so better to make them off-limits and focus on something everyone can agree on — making more money and increasing the standard of living.

The desire to end the terrible wars that were fought over religion or identity is entirely understandable, and it is difficult to argue that the focus on economic cooperation did not produce significant benefits, but this was always a trade-off that could never last.

We may like to pretend that we are too advanced and sophisticated to get hung up on these primitive concerns, but under the surface, they continue to define us. Those conflicts do not disappear, and when they re-emerge, you have stripped your civilization of the tools needed to identify and address them, which is exactly what we are seeing now.

Americans no longer have the moral language to discuss good and evil, so they simply apply a clinical diagnosis to their opponents instead. Believing a radical leftist is mentally ill is far easier than addressing the alternative. If the progressive is a perfectly sane person and still wants to take your son if you do not chop off his genitals, then the calculus for what must be done changes radically.

Read the rest at The Blaze.

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While Democrats will deliver tired platitudes about political violence having no place in our country, the truth is that violence has been central to their strategy for a long time. From the race riots of the 1960s to the terror bombings of the 1970s to modern-day assassinations, leftists have regularly wielded violence. It is comforting to pretend that our political system is one in which peaceful negotiation and intellectual debate drive every outcome, but that simply is not the case. Whether it’s the intimidation of Supreme Court justices or the shooting of members of Congress, Democrats understand the power of violence and do not hesitate to use it.

Violence is the ultimate political argument, the most powerful tool one can deploy in furthering one’s cause. This is why our founding fathers referred to the revolution as an “Appeal to Heaven,” the final attempt to secure their rights as Englishmen when all else had failed. Violence is powerful but destabilizing; no one wants to live in a constant state of war, where every political and personal disagreement is resolved by force. That is why the first duty of the state is to secure a monopoly on sanctioned violence, taking that powerful but dangerous weapon off the table.

Some political systems believe the civil magistrate has been granted stewardship over violence by God; others see it as a social contract in which we collectively give up our right to violence in exchange for the protection of the state. However you frame it, a monopoly on violence is critical to maintaining order. A country that allows other entities inside its jurisdiction to use violence, like gangs or cartels, is generally considered a failed state because the citizens cannot rely on the government to maintain order. The population will feel compelled to go outside the sanctioned system to meet their security needs, and whoever reliably delivers on those needs tends to become the new government.

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This might all sound obvious, but in the modern world, it must be repeated because we have lost touch with this basic truth. America and much of the Western world have been safe and stable for so long that we have forgotten the historical norm. Free debate and inquiry leading to a democratic consensus that is then peacefully enacted by a civilian government is fantastic, but it is far from the standard throughout history. Amazingly, we have been able to enjoy this extended period of stability, but it can also blind us to reality when the nature of our situation changes.

The cliché is that violence is never the answer; the truth is that violence is the ultimate answer, and we forget that at our own peril. That is why the state must take violence off the table by maintaining its monopoly on violence. Once violence is introduced into the equation, it quickly spreads across all domains because it outcompetes all other political strategies. In an orderly society, political violence must carry the ultimate taboo, not because it does not work, but because it works all too well.

Read the rest at The Blaze.

To its advocates, UBI is the obvious answer to a future in which machines displace human labor. But beneath the sleek language of innovation lies the same old welfare-state promise: material comfort in exchange for dependence. Its supporters speak as though it were the natural companion of progress. In reality, it threatens to rob millions of the work, structure, and purpose that give life meaning.

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UBI attracts supporters for very different reasons. For Andrew Yang and others on the left, it promises relief from poverty through guaranteed cash transfers. For Charles Murray, it has represented a simpler and more streamlined alternative to the sprawling welfare state. For Elon Musk and many AI boosters, UBI solves the problem of those with too little cognitive ability to compete, left behind in an increasingly IQ-based economy.

Their motives differ, but they share a revealing assumption: that UBI is an inevitable response to progress rather than a political choice with deep moral and social consequences. In each case, the individual is treated less as a citizen with duties and aspirations than as a materialist problem to be managed.

Welfare for all

A version of UBI basically already exists in the United States. With the vast web of interlocking welfare programs offered by the state for things like disability, poverty, child care, minority status, and educational attainment, most people can find a way to qualify for assistance with food or housing. It might not provide a comfortable or desirable life, but if someone doesn’t want to work to survive in America, they often do not have to.

As artificial intelligence drives fresh excitement in the tech world, major figures such as Elon Musk are reviving an old political fantasy: universal basic income. The idea has drawn support from a strange coalition, from progressive politicians like Andrew Yang to libertarian thinkers like Charles Murray.

To its advocates, UBI is the obvious answer to a future in which machines displace human labor. But beneath the sleek language of innovation lies the same old welfare-state promise: material comfort in exchange for dependence. Its supporters speak as though it were the natural companion of progress. In reality, it threatens to rob millions of the work, structure, and purpose that give life meaning.

UBI attracts supporters for very different reasons. For Andrew Yang and others on the left, it promises relief from poverty through guaranteed cash transfers. For Charles Murray, it has represented a simpler and more streamlined alternative to the sprawling welfare state. For Elon Musk and many AI boosters, UBI solves the problem of those with too little cognitive ability to compete, left behind in an increasingly IQ-based economy.

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Their motives differ, but they share a revealing assumption: that UBI is an inevitable response to progress rather than a political choice with deep moral and social consequences. In each case, the individual is treated less as a citizen with duties and aspirations than as a materialist problem to be managed.

Welfare for all

A version of UBI basically already exists in the United States. With the vast web of interlocking welfare programs offered by the state for things like disability, poverty, child care, minority status, and educational attainment, most people can find a way to qualify for assistance with food or housing. It might not provide a comfortable or desirable life, but if someone doesn’t want to work to survive in America, they often do not have to.

Read the rest at The Blaze.

So the question everyone is left asking is: If liberalism ultimately makes nations fragile, how did it come to dominate the most powerful countries in the Western world?

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Most people are lazy, selfish, and impulsive. Successful civilizations are created by accumulating low-time-preference behaviors that collectively enable them to overcome the negative aspects of human nature. Those lessons are costly to relearn with each generation, so these prosocial behaviors are encoded in the traditions, folkways, and institutions of civilization. The systems that allow society to function work their way into language, religion, literature, song, and art until they are almost invisible to the people who live inside them. The people could not imagine living any other way.

This thick network of embedded folkways and traditions does a great job of cultivating virtue in the citizenry and perpetuating the society that gave birth to them, but it makes cooperation with other nations difficult. In many cases, even the inhabitants of the society cannot really articulate what the behaviors are or what makes them work because they have become second nature. The very thing that makes them work for the host nation makes them very difficult to explain or implement in other cultural contexts.

A small, tight-knit society is great for a time, but eventually it gets outcompeted by larger civilizations. The advantages of scale are too great, and to compete, the small, successful nation must learn to expand through cooperation. The civilization with more troops, more crops, more trading partners, and more allies will eventually crush smaller societies, no matter how virtuous those societies might be. This is where liberalism enters the equation.

Liberalism, in the classical sense, not the modern Democratic Party, was a project that allowed civilizations to scale. Specifics of religion, custom, tradition, and even financial transactions had been too deeply territorialized in particular civilizations to allow cooperation or commerce between different peoples. In many cases, the differences were so severe as to spark wars. To enable cooperation and scale, the scaffolding that allowed cooperation at the local level needed to be removed from these divisive, conflicting cultural contexts and reterritorialized into a neutral space where different peoples could access it.

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By identifying and extracting the behaviors that enabled social cooperation from their cultural contexts, liberalism created a framework that enabled different nations to engage in commerce and other forms of exchange. A minimum viable morality was reached among nations, allowing them to sign business contracts, diplomatic treaties, and trade agreements that each side understood and could adhere to. Rather than go to war, people with very different ways of life could buy, sell, and even ally with each other productively. Capitalism was born, and with it came vast gains in wealth and standard of living.

Read the rest at The Blaze.