Liberty cannot survive a culture that cheers assassins



When 20-year-old loner Thomas Matthew Crooks ascended a sloped roof in Butler County, Pennsylvania, and opened fire, he unleashed a torrent of clichés. Commentators and public figures avoided the term “assassination attempt,” even if the AR-15 was trained on the head of the Republican Party’s nominee for president. Instead, they condemned “political violence.”

“There is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy,” former President Barack Obama said. One year later, he added the word “despicable” to his condemnation of the assassin who killed Charlie Kirk. That was an upgrade from two weeks prior, when he described the shooting at Annunciation Catholic School by a transgender person as merely “unnecessary.”

Those in power are not only failing to enforce order, but also excusing and even actively promoting the conditions that undermine a peaceful, stable, and orderly regime.

Anyone fluent in post-9/11 rhetoric knows that political violence is the domain of terrorists and lone wolf ideologues, whose manifestos will soon be unearthed by federal investigators, deciphered by the high priests of our therapeutic age, and debated by partisans on cable TV.

The attempt to reduce it to the mere atomized individual, however, is a modern novelty. From the American Revolution to the Civil War, from the 1863 draft riots to the 1968 MLK riots, from the spring of Rodney King to the summer of George Floyd, the United States has a long history of people resorting to violence to achieve political ends by way of the mob.

Since the January 6 riot that followed the 2020 election, the left has persistently attempted to paint the right as particularly prone to mob action. But as the online response to the murder of Charlie Kirk demonstrates — with thousands of leftists openly celebrating the gory, public assassination of a young father — the vitriol that drives mob violence is endemic to American political discourse and a perpetual threat to order.

America’s founders understood this all too well.

In August 1786, a violent insurrection ripped through the peaceful Massachusetts countryside. After the end of the Revolutionary War, many American soldiers found themselves caught in a vise, with debt collectors on one side and a government unable to make good on back pay on the other. A disgruntled former officer in the Continental Army named Daniel Shays led a violent rebellion aimed at breaking the vise at gunpoint.

“Commotions of this sort, like snow-balls, gather strength as they roll, if there is no opposition in the way to divide and crumble them,” George Washington wrote in a letter, striking a serene tone in the face of an insurrection. James Madison was less forgiving: “In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob,” he wrote inFederalist 55. Inspired by Shays’ Rebellion and seeking to rein in the excesses of democracy, lawmakers called for the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787.

Our current moment of chaos

If the United States Constitution was borne out of political chaos, why does the current moment strike so many as distinctly perilous? Classical political philosophy offers us a clearer answer to this question than modern psychoanalysis. The most pointed debate among philosophers throughout the centuries has centered on how to prevent mob violence and ensure that most unnatural of things: political order.

In Plato’s “Republic," the work that stands at the headwaters of the Western tradition of political philosophy, Socrates argues that the only truly just society is one in which philosophers are kings and kings are philosophers. As a rule, democracy devolves into tyranny, for mob rule inevitably breeds impulsive citizens who become focused on petty pleasures. The resulting disorder eventually becomes so unbearable that a demagogue arises, promising to restore order and peace.

The classically educated founders picked up on these ideas — mediated through Aristotle, Cicero, John Locke, and Montesquieu, among others — as they developed the structure of the new American government. The Constitution’s mixed government was explicitly designed to establish a political order that would take into consideration the sentiments and interests of the people without yielding to mob rule at the expense of order. The founders took for granted that powerful elites would necessarily be interested in upholding the regime from which they derived their authority.

Terror from the top

History has often seen disaffected elites stoke insurrections to defenestrate a ruling class that shut them out of public life. The famous case of the Catilinarian Conspiracy in late republican Rome, in which a disgruntled aristocrat named Catiline attempted to overthrow the republic during the consulship of Cicero, serves as a striking example.

In the 21st century, we face a different phenomenon: Those in power are not only failing to enforce order, but also excusing and even actively promoting the conditions that undermine a peaceful, stable, and orderly regime.

The points of erosion are numerous. The public cheerleading of assassinations can be dismissed as noise from the rabble, but it is more difficult to ignore the numerous calls from elites for civic conflagration. Newspapers are promoting historically dubious revisionism that undermines the moral legitimacy of the Constitution. Billionaire-backed prosecutors decline to prosecute violent crime.

For years, those in power at best ignored — and at worst encouraged — mob-driven chaos in American social life, resulting in declining trust in institutions, lowered expectations for basic public order, coarsened or altogether discarded social mores, and a general sense on all sides that Western civilization is breaking down.

Without a populace capable of self-control, liberty becomes impossible.

The United States has, of course, faced more robust political violence than what we are witnessing today. But even during the Civil War — brutal by any standard — a certain civility tended to obtain between the combatants. As Abraham Lincoln noted in his second inaugural address, “Both [sides] read the same Bible and pray to the same God.” Even in the midst of a horrific war, a shared sense of ultimate things somewhat tempered the disorder and destruction — and crucially promoted a semblance of reconciliation once the war ended.

Our modern disorder runs deeper. The shattering of fundamental shared assumptions about virtually anything leaves political opponents looking less like fellow citizens to be persuaded and more like enemies to be subdued.

Charlie Kirk, despite his relative political moderation and his persistent willingness to engage in attempts at persuasion, continues to be smeared by many as a “Nazi propagandist.” The willful refusal to distinguish between mostly run-of-the-mill American conservatism and the murderous foreign ideology known as National Socialism is telling. The implication is not subtle: If you disagree with me, you are my enemy — and I am justified in cheering your murder.

Fellow citizens who persistently view their political opponents as enemies and existential threats cannot long exist in a shared political community.

“Democracy is on the ballot,” the popular refrain goes, but rarely is democracy undermined by a single election. It is instead undermined by a gradual decline in public spiritedness and private virtue, as well as the loss of social trust and good faith necessary to avoid violence.

The chief prosecutors against institutional authority are not disaffected Catalines but the ruling class itself. This arrangement may work for a while, but both political theory and common sense suggest that it is volatile and unlikely to last for long.

The conditions of liberty

Political order, in general, requires a degree of virtue, public-spiritedness, and good will among the citizenry. James Madison in Federalist 55 remarks that, of all the possible permutations of government that have yet been conceived, republican government is uniquely dependent upon order and institutional legitimacy:

As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.

In short, republican government requires citizens who can govern themselves, an antidote to the passions that precede mayhem and assassination. Without a populace capable of self-control, liberty becomes impossible. Under such conditions, the releasing of restraints never liberates — it only promotes mob-like behavior.

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The disorder of Shays’ Rebellion prompted the drafting of the Constitution, initiating what has sometimes been called an “experiment in ordered liberty.” That experiment was put to the test beginning in 1791 in Western Pennsylvania. The Whiskey Rebellion reached a crisis in Bower Hill, Pennsylvania, about 50 miles south of modern-day Butler, when a mob of 600 disgruntled residents laid siege to a federal tax collector. With the blessing of the Supreme Court Chief Justice and Federalistco-author John Jay, President George Washington assembled troops to put down the rebellion.

Washington wrote in a proclamation:

I have accordingly determined [to call the militia], feeling the deepest regret for the occasion, but withal the most solemn conviction that the essential interests of the Union demand it, that the very existence of government and the fundamental principles of social order are materially involved in the issue, and that the patriotism and firmness of all good citizens are seriously called upon, as occasions may require, to aid in the effectual suppression of so fatal a spirit.

Washington left Philadelphia to march thousands of state militiamen into the rebel haven of Western Pennsylvania. The insurrectionists surrendered without firing a shot.

Our new era of political violence rolls on, with Charlie Kirk’s murder being only the latest and most prominent example. Our leaders assure us they will ride out into the field just as Washington once did. Whether they will use their presence and influence to suppress or encourage “so fatal a spirit” remains an open question.

Editor’s note: A version of this article was published originally at the American Mind.

Virtue, not power, is the true aim of politics



The great outbreak of evil in these past days stirred a memory of something I used to tell my freshman students on the first day of their introduction to politics class: Politics is about what is good.

We would read together the first sentence of Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics”— an unrivaled introduction to politics:

Every art and every inquiry, and likewise every action and choice, seems to aim at some good, and hence it has been beautifully said that the good is that at which all things aim.

Aristotle goes on quickly to observe in his usual empirical way that many goods exist along with many arts developed to achieve the different goods. The medical art aims at the good of health. The art of shipbuilding aims at building good ships. The military art aims at victory in war. The art of managing the household, which the Greeks called economics, aims at the good of wealth.

Virtue is the end or aim of political life.

Some arts are subordinated to other arts, because the good at which the art aims is subordinate to a larger good, the way the art of the cavalryman is subordinate to the art of the general.

Aristotle then introduces the subject of politics with a great hypothesis: If there exists some good, some end, that we seek for its own sake, and we seek all the rest for the sake of or on account of this one good — if, in other words, we don’t choose everything for the sake of something else, which would make all of our desires empty and pointless — this would be the good itself, in fact the highest good.

He asks: Would not an awareness of this highest good have great weight in a man’s life? Wouldn’t the art of attaining that good be the sovereign or master art encompassing all the ends or goods of the other arts? And isn’t this what we call the art of politics?

The good that the art of politics aims at, he says, is “the human good.” What name do people give to the human good that encompasses all others and lacks nothing? The Greek word, Aristotle says, is eudaimonia, which we usually translate as “happiness” in English. The art of politics is the art of happiness. But it gets even better.

The art of politics is a practical art. It aims not just at knowing what happiness is but at being happy. Thinking happiness through, Aristotle finds that it does not have primarily to do with the body. It is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue — in fact, in accordance with complete virtue. You can’t be a happy man without being a good or virtuous man. And in this sense, virtue is the end or aim of political life.

Aristotle goes on to distinguish between virtues of character and virtues of intellect, or what we usually call moral and intellectual virtues. He argues that the specific virtue or excellence of the statesman — the political man par excellence — is the intellectual virtue of practical wisdom, what he would call “phronesis.” Phronesis is the only intellectual virtue that is inseparable from moral virtue. According to Aristotle, a man cannot possess phronesis without possessing all the moral virtues actively and in their fullness. He is a man in full.

I would tell students that to make progress in their study of politics — this practical art — they would have to make progress in virtue; they would have to make progress toward the human good; they would have to make progress toward happiness. This is what our semester would be about.

Happiness and politics go together?

If I were lucky, at least one hesitatingly confident realist among the students — they were still too young to be cynics — would be brave enough on this first day of class to raise a hand and say deferentially and politely something like: “What! Have you read a newspaper lately?” (They had newspapers back then.) “Every page is filled with violence, crime, corruption, and somebody grasping for power! To call someone a politician is an insult.”

And so the semester would be off and running.

I would admit that though Aristotle in his “Politics” defines man as a “political animal” because man is a “rational animal” — an animal possessing logos, or reason — he makes an empirical observation at the end of his “Ethics” that will be familiar to anyone who has read a newspaper: Rational creatures though they are, men sometimes do not listen to reason and are carried away by their passions.

Aristotle would agree with Alexander Hamilton, or rather Hamilton agreed with Aristotle, when he wrote in Federalist 15:

"Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.” And with James Madison’s even more famous saying, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary."

In addition, working on our non-angelic human fallibility and culpability, bad education causes us to make mistakes about what is good. For these reasons, Aristotle argues that both education and coercion are central to the art of politics and, alas, that practicing the art of politics is not a leisurely activity. It is the burdensome art of inducing others to do what they ought to do for their own good and happiness, even when they don’t want to.

These days, our children learn in school and online that it is good to shoplift or try to change themselves from a boy to a girl or from a girl to a boy. A shockingly large percentage of them have learned that it is good to kill those who disagree with you.

From his first day in office in 2021, Joe Biden — our then-educator in chief — made it the central point of American politics that being trans was being good and questioning the goodness of being trans was evil. He thrust this bad education into the face of his country — marching trans heroes before the cameras to model the “goodness” that all Americans should admire and publicly praise if they wanted to avoid ostracism, public shaming and canceling, expulsion from school, losing their jobs, being put in jail, or being murdered in cold blood.

Politics requires goodness

Knowing what is good is not easy. A man in ancient Athens with the greatest reputation for wisdom knew only that he did not know what was good. To have what was good, to be good, was so crucial to Socrates — the one thing needful — that it made no sense to do anything else with his life than to try to find out what it was.

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But we do not need to be philosophers to know that boys cannot become girls, that biological males should not be competing against biological females in sports or sharing their bathrooms, and that killing those who disagree with us is evil. Glenn Ellmers, Salvatori Research Fellow at the Claremont Institute and an old friend, published a short essay on the urgent need, in this increasingly deranged world, to hold on to our common sense.

Machiavelli — the infamous teacher of “realist” politics — seeing unflinchingly what we all could read in the newspaper, taught that in a world where so many are so bad, it is merely common sense that it is necessary for those who would succeed in the art of politics to enter into evil. I would suggest an alternative lesson to students, one that I think is in the spirit of Aristotle: In a world where so many are so bad, it is merely common sense that it is necessary for the good to be great.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.

How woke broke the country



Andrew Beck makes a cogent case at the American Mind for why the United States, like other countries, requires cultural and moral cohesion to protect its nationhood and to act with a unified will on behalf of the common good. Beck correctly notes that the U.S. started out as a country with a well-defined collective identity. If we look back at America’s beginnings, we discover John Jay in Federalist 2 defining this original American identity in a memorable observation:

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

At the time this was written, the newly formed American nation-state was composed overwhelmingly of Northern European Protestants; its legal institutions were largely British.

The homogeneity that the U.S. possessed at the time of its founding, and for at least several generations afterward, was perhaps an irreplaceable strength.

Its shared culture was shaped by, among other things, reading and revering the King James Bible. Among the professional class, the Bible’s authority was supplemented by that of Blackstone’s "Commentaries on the Laws of England,” Shakespeare’s tragedies, and (to some extent) classical texts like Plutarch’s “Lives.”

Protestant theologians went a bit farther in their reading and would have also studied John Calvin’s “Institutes,” the works of St. Augustine, and perhaps some of Plato’s dialogues. Political thinkers back then might also have pondered John Locke, Montesquieu, Polybius, and a few other influential political theorists.

In early America, a shared understanding of civic virtue, social manners, and community arose from revering the same classics as well as holding similar religious beliefs and being, in most cases, “descended from the same ancestors.”

Even in Federalist10 and Federalist 51, when James Madison addressed the possibility of the American polity becoming an extended republic, he did not recommend any modern concept of diversity or disagree with Jay’s judgment about America’s strengths. He was simply explaining how a country that consisted of mercantile and agrarian sectors could be held together by a “common passion of interest.” Madison’s novel theory posited that a representative government could filter the popular will in such a way as to coordinate overlapping interests.

The homogeneity that the U.S. possessed at the time of its founding, and for at least several generations afterward, was perhaps an irreplaceable strength. This strength may have been at work even when the country faced the ravages of civil war, which it survived because — as Lincoln observed — however calamitous their differences, both sides read the same Bible and prayed to the same deity.

Cohesion without coercion

In my view, these sorts of inherited, culturally sustained bonds of unity furnish the ideal conditions for a collective political identity. This unity was there at the beginning of the American republic and did not depend for its creation on coercion by the state or military forces. The shared heritage that was obvious to John Jay bespoke a deeper unity than the one imposed on German Americans during World War I (and, a fortiori, Japanese Americans during World War II). Perhaps Andrew Beck and I view this chapter of our national history quite differently.

Although European nation-states were formed partly by coercing those who resisted them into accepting a centralized form of sovereignty, such political entities were able to establish themselves by drawing on an already developed national consciousness. Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, etc. all identified with some kind of national history and culture even before they accepted or were forced to accept a unified national government. Force was not the main factor that generated unity in historic nation-states.

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German Americans in the early 20th century already had a sense of being American but were bullied with the help of government inducements into giving up their ancestral heritage. This took place after the Wilson administration managed to push the U.S. into World War I.

In my part of Pennsylvania, where German Pietist farmers settled, intimidation achieved its intended effect. Churches and other buildings had their German inscriptions effaced. The teaching and use of the German language ceased. Even schools like Linden Hall in nearby Lititz that were founded by German sects stopped offering German courses and have not revived them to this day.

I won’t get into the already widely known and horrendous treatment of the Nisei, or second-generation Japanese, after Pearl Harbor. I will say only that it may have exceeded in awfulness what was done to German Americans 25 years earlier. As should be obvious, Norwegians, Swedes, and many other ethnic minorities became Americanized without the tactics applied to German and Japanese Americans. This happened through a natural process of assimilation.

By now, the national unity that Andrew Beck properly values seems to have been mostly lost. I wonder whether the “America First” politics of the MAGA movement can recover it in any meaningful way. Once the American republic lost its original ethnic and religious unity, its leaders and intellectuals were obliged to turn to other ideas to hold American citizens together. In my youth, American public education still emphasized civic patriotism and a state-sponsored pantheon of national heroes.

Unity through civic patriotism persisted until radicalized minorities began to vent their hate on ‘Amerika.’

That unifying effort succeeded for several generations, particularly since it was reinforced by a civil religion with recognizably Protestant cultural elements. This way of assimilating hyphenated Americans served well in two world wars and at least during part of the Cold War. It was the American public philosophy when I was growing up in the 1950s. An understanding of Americanness that did not depend on shared ethnicity may have worked well at the time because other unifying factors were at play.

Most of the population remained Euro-American and had some Christian affiliation. Deeper cultural bonds united (for example) an Italian American and a Swedish American than those existing between either and a third-world Muslim.

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This unity through civic patriotism persisted until radicalized minorities began to vent their hate on “Amerika.” Since these irate “dissenters” proceeded to take over the mainstream media, education at all levels, and public administration, the older methods of assimilation and of producing a unified American identity became less effective.

One might apply to this changed American identity a criticism that’s been leveled at the efforts of the present German regime to assimilate third-world Muslim immigrants. Into what, exactly, can one assimilate foreign residents when public administrators, educators, and the culture industry have taught the indigenous population to hate their country?

Unhyphenated

Earlier attempts at generating unity, however, also ran into headwinds eventually. Non-Protestants, starting with a growing Catholic population, objected to attending “Protestant” public schools and seeing their religious and cultural traditions marginalized. Later the Jewish left and anti-Catholic Southern Baptists called for a more thorough secularization of the public square in the name of separating church and state, furthering pluralism — or whatever other excuse they could find for making the United States less of what it had been before.

By now our ruling class and various influencers are trying to separate whatever they intend to make of this country from its Western roots. The still widely influential Anti-Defamation League, in a pamphlet last year titled “The New Primer on White Supremacy,” explains quite straightforwardly that the designation “Western” is really a “code word” for white racism.

Indeed, according to the ADL, a racist, xenophobic taint also attaches to “Euro-American identity.” Such descriptive terms, according to this pamphlet, are used by those who oppose large-scale Muslim immigration into Europe and emphatically reject the LGBTQ agenda.

Another now-endangered vehicle of American assimilation is the melting-pot concept, which still has many adherents in our conservative establishment. The August 1 edition of the New York Post highlighted the heavily attended Muslim funeral of a slain Bangladeshi police officer in New York City.

“This most New York story,” we were informed on the Post’s front page, was intended as a celebration of the pluralism and diversity that the paper’s editors see as proof of the American melting pot at work. By now, according to this message, ethnically and racially diverse groups are coming to see themselves and each other as unhyphenated Americans.

Unfortunately, the same city with a multicultural sense of who we are is about to elect as mayor a vocally anti-Western woke Muslim — repeating something that Londoners already did when they elected Sadiq Khan and that Minneapolis will likely do if it chooses Omar Fateh as its next mayor. The slain police officer, Didarul Islam, lost his life to a crazed black killer whom CNN, out of its anti-white derangement syndrome, described as “possibly white.”

By now, the melting-pot view of assimilation and the stress on civic patriotism, which I regard as the best substitutes for an older American cultural identity, have given way to a woke dead end.

Unless we can move beyond this divisive concept, it won’t be possible to return to less fracturing views of American identity. Targeting white male Christian heterosexuals as victimizers does not seem to be a satisfactory way of bringing together this country’s legal population. Unfortunately, large demographics, particularly college-educated women, have different ideas about what the managerial state should be imposing on the rest of us.

Editor’s note: This article was published originally at the American Mind.

Martyrs don’t bend the knee — even to the state



In 1535, Saint Thomas More went to his death, not in defiance of his king but in ultimate service to both God and England. His final words — “I die the king’s faithful servant, and God’s first” — captured the essence of true religious liberty: the freedom to fulfill the duty to worship God rightly. As the patron saint of religious liberty, More challenges lawmakers and church leaders to renew their commitment to defending that sacred duty.

To More, religious liberty wasn’t just freedom from state interference. It meant the freedom to obey God, even at the cost of his life. His last declaration made clear that duty to God comes before any loyalty to civil authority. Pope Leo XIII put it plainly in “Immortale Dei”: “We are bound absolutely to worship God in that way which He has shown to be His will.”

When laws hinder the duty to worship God rightly, they chip away at the foundation of religious liberty the founders meant to preserve.

More lived this principle, choosing martyrdom over surrender to the world. His death makes clear that real freedom begins with obedience to God — a truth rooted in the moral obligations of human nature. To defend religious liberty is to affirm the duty to give God the worship He deserves, a duty no earthly power — not even a king — can rightly deny.

America’s founders understood this well. They saw religious liberty not as license, but as the right to fulfill one’s duty to God. James Madison wrote, “It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.”

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America’s founders drafted the Constitution with the understanding that citizens would practice their religious duties — not as optional acts, but as essential to a free and moral society. As John Adams put it, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

That understanding now faces growing threats. When laws hinder the duty to worship God rightly, they chip away at the foundation of religious liberty the founders meant to preserve. Consider the case of Colorado baker Jack Phillips. For refusing to make cakes that violated his faith, Phillips endured more than a decade of legal battles, fines, protests, and business losses. He wasn’t seeking special treatment — he simply wanted to live out his faith. Although the Supreme Court eventually sided with him, the fight drained years of his life and resources. Religious liberty delayed for a decade amounts to religious liberty denied.

True religious freedom, as More and the founders envisioned it, demands strong protections for people and institutions to live out their beliefs in every area of life, not just within a sanctuary or under the narrow shelter of exemptions.

To fulfill the vision of religious liberty embodied by Thomas More and upheld by America’s founders, Americans must renew their commitment to strengthening religious institutions through laws that promote the common good. Elected leaders cannot separate their faith from their public responsibilities. Religious truth shapes just governance.

Having just celebrated Religious Liberty Week, we would do well to recall More’s words: “God’s first.” True religious liberty begins with the duty to worship God as He commands. That duty forms the bedrock of a free and just society.

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A republic cannot endure when leaders do not see themselves as stewards of a specific people, culture, and nation.

This red-state attorney general has declared war on the First Amendment



We thought the Supreme Court had finally purged anti-religious discrimination from Establishment Clause jurisprudence. After years of confusion — conflating the ban on state-sponsored religion with an invented mandate to scrub faith from public life — the Court, through a series of rulings on religious schools and public funding, had restored sanity. It returned the law to its pre-Warren era understanding: Equal treatment of religion does not violate the Constitution.

Yet, here we are again.

Those who claim that equal treatment of religion violates the Establishment Clause are the ones betraying its meaning.

In a move that stunned observers, Oklahoma’s own Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond and the state supreme court now argue that states cannot recognize religious charter schools.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond. The case centers on St. Isidore, a Catholic online school seeking to join Oklahoma’s charter school system. Drummond contends the school’s religious affiliation disqualifies it. He sued the state charter board — a move usually made by the ACLU or militant secularist groups.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court sided with him. The court claimed that granting charter status to a Catholic school would violate the First Amendment by effectively establishing Catholicism as a state religion. Justices labeled charter schools “state actors” and argued that any religious affiliation disqualifies a school from public recognition.

This logic turns the First Amendment on its head. The Constitution does not require hostility toward religion. It requires neutrality. Denying a religious school access to a public benefit — simply because it is religious — violates precedent.

Oklahoma’s Charter Schools Act permits any “private college or university, private person, or private organization” to apply for state funding to open a charter school. Excluding religious applicants contradicts not one but three major Supreme Court rulings.

In Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia Inc v. Comer (2017), the court ruled that excluding a religious school from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified “solely because it is a church” is “odious to our Constitution.” That case involved a grant for playground resurfacing. If states can’t deny rubber mulch, they can’t deny full charter status.

In Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020), a 5-4 majority held that state constitutions barring aid to religious institutions over secular ones violates the Free Exercise Clause. Public benefits, the Chief Justice John Roberts emphasized, cannot be denied “solely because of the religious character of the schools.”

Then came Carson v. Makin (2022), where Maine tried to distinguish between religious status and religious use, barring religious schools from voucher funds. The court rejected the distinction. Roberts, writing again for the majority, ruled that the program “operates to identify and exclude otherwise eligible schools on the basis of their religious exercise.” He warned that attempts to judge how a religious school carries out its mission invite unconstitutional state entanglement.

So how, after such ironclad precedent, do we find a Republican state attorney general and a court in a state Trump carried in every county ruling that religious schools can’t even apply for public funding?

The answer lies in years of lukewarm Republican control. These are Republicans in name only, who blocked judicial reform and refused to challenge activist courts. Now, Drummond wants a promotion. He’s announced his run for governor after already overruling the state education superintendent’s decision to ban pornography in public libraries.

This case reveals a larger pattern. Courts act as a one-way ratchet. Even after strong Supreme Court rulings, liberal lower courts defy precedent. They delay, split hairs, and distinguish without merit. The high court may reverse Oklahoma, but its rulings rarely secure lasting victories.

And the irony? Those who claim that equal treatment of religion violates the Establishment Clause are the ones betraying its meaning.

During the House debate on the First Amendment in 1789, James Madison explained: “Congress should not establish a religion, and enforce the legal observation of it by law, nor compel men to worship God in any manner contrary to their conscience.”

That principle — freedom of conscience without coercion — shaped the American experiment. Far from excluding religion, the founders assumed its influence. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.” He added that politics and religion formed an “alliance which has never been dissolved.”

It’s time for the Supreme Court to reaffirm that alliance — clearly, decisively, and without leaving room for lower courts to ignore. And in Oklahoma, it’s time to elect Republicans who still believe the Bible belongs in the Bible Belt.

Trump’s trade tactics echo founding-era common sense



Prominent voices on the left and within movement conservatism have argued that President Trump’s approach to foreign trade is strange, unorthodox, and even un-American. This is not surprising. After all, doctrinaire commitment to free trade — and doctrinaire distaste for protecting American industry — has been the dominant view among elites of both major political parties for at least a generation.

Against this backdrop, it is no wonder that Trump’s actions on trade appear as a wholly irrational disruption of a system that, according to our political elites, does not need to be discarded.

Hamilton would find it perfectly sensible of Trump to hold that other nations should give America something of value in exchange for access to our vast market.

This view of the matter, however, is based on an incomplete understanding of the American political tradition. Trump’s approach to trade policy has deep roots in American history, as we can see if we cast our gaze further back than we are accustomed to doing. It does not go too far to say that America’s founders would find Trump’s approach to international commerce perfectly intelligible and respectable.

The most obvious way to link President Trump to the founders is to invoke the justly celebrated name of Alexander Hamilton. The “Report on Manufactures,” Hamilton’s most famous state paper during his tenure as George Washington’s treasury secretary, laid out policy objectives that are essentially the same as those being defended by Trump and the members of his Cabinet who are responsible for trade policy.

It was necessary, Hamilton contended, to exert the government’s authority to promote American manufacturing to counteract the “artificial policy” of other nations that sought to exclude or disadvantage American goods. The ultimate aim of such a policy, he explained, was not the “vain project of selling everything and buying nothing” — it was instead to secure America’s vital national interests.

Hamilton argued that national “independence and security” are the “great objects” of all governments, thus requiring each country to “possess within itself all the essentials of national supply,” especially “the means of subsistence, habitation, clothing, and defense.” Having such goods available within one’s own country, he continued, “is necessary to the perfection of the body politic, to the safety as well as the welfare of the society.”

No strange departure

It is hard to see much daylight between Hamiltonian trade principles and President Trump’s desire to have the products necessary to American security and prosperity built in the United States.

The nationalist character of Hamilton’s thinking about trade policy, moreover, did not emerge after the founding as some strange departure from its essential principles. Rather, such nationalism was evident earlier, especially in the prominent part Hamilton played in the debates over the ratification of the Constitution.

Writing in "The Federalist Papers," Hamilton observed that one of the great advantages of a union of states under one government was the power it would confer on the nation to “oblige foreign countries to bid against each other for the privileges of our markets.” Elsewhere in “The Federalist Papers,” Hamilton suggested that the restrictive trade policies nations sometimes pursue are not properly viewed as “injuries” but simply as “justifiable acts of independent sovereignties consulting a distinct interest.”

Hamilton, then, would find it perfectly sensible of President Trump to hold that other nations should be willing to give America something of value in exchange for access to our vast market. His arguments similarly anticipated Trump’s frequent remarks that while other nations will inevitably act in their own interest, they likewise must understand that we intend to act in our own interest as well.

The preceding argument is enough to show that Trump’s thinking about trade policy has venerable roots in the American political tradition. After all, who is more American than Alexander Hamilton?

We can go further, however. Trump’s approach broadly represents not just the Hamiltonian strain of American economic nationalism but the common sense of the founding-era generation itself. Indeed (and as I have observed elsewhere at greater length) the authority to regulate trade with foreign nations was included in the Constitution precisely for the purposes for which the Trump administration is now wielding it.

Regulating commerce was uncontroversial

In his massive and highly regarded "Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States,” Joseph Story — John Marshall’s great colleague on the early Supreme Court — observed that the power to regulate foreign commerce was so obviously necessary in a complete and effective government that it was hardly even a matter of controversy at the Constitutional Convention.

Commerce, Story suggested, is important to “the prosperity of nations.” Nevertheless, the prosperity of American commerce had been thwarted by the restrictive policies of other nations during the time America was governed by the Articles of Confederation, which conferred on the government no authority to regulate America’s foreign trade.

On Story’s telling, before the Constitution was adopted, American commerce “was regulated by foreign nations with a single view to their own interests; and our disunited efforts to counteract their restrictions were rendered impotent by a want of combination.” Under the Constitution, however, the government of the United States has the power to control access to the entire American market and hence has the ability to retaliate against the excessively self-regarding trade policies of other nations.

The Trump administration is simply using this constitutional power in an attempt to secure an arrangement that is more mutually beneficial for the United States and our trading partners.

Just as the founders anticipated

Story’s understanding of these matters was by no means idiosyncratic or partisan. On the contrary, essentially the same views were expressed by James Madison, the “father of the Constitution.”

Writing to James Monroe in 1785, Madison expressed his personal wish that “no regulations of trade, that is to say, no restrictions or imposts whatever, were necessary.” “A perfect freedom” of trade, he continued, “is the system which would be my choice.” Nevertheless, he immediately added, for such a system to be “attainable, all other nations must concur in it.” And if any other nation imposed restrictions on American trade, Madison continued, it would be appropriate for America to “retort the distinction” — in other words, to impose retaliatory restrictions of its own. Indeed, Madison held that to question the propriety of such economic retaliation would be “an affront to every citizen who loves his country.”

Similarly, in the preface to his notes on the Constitutional Convention, Madison observed that the lack of a commerce power under the Articles of Confederation had “produced in foreign nations ... a monopolizing policy injurious to the trade of the U.S.” and further suggested that the appropriate response would be a “countervailing policy on the part of the U. States.” Such a policy became possible because the new Constitution included a power to regulate trade with foreign nations — the power the Trump administration is wielding to secure more advantageous trade relations for America, just as the founders anticipated.

None of this is to say that the founders would have approved of the specific steps the Trump administration has taken in the last several weeks. No one can pretend to know how they would apply their principles to the changed circumstances of the present. Nor is it to say that the founders would approve the extent to which the Congress has delegated its foreign commerce power to the president. It is to say, however, that Trump’s aims, and the kind of tools he is using to achieve them, would be unobjectionable to those who founded our nation and established our form of government.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.

Trump Is Right To Push Back Against Judicial Supremacy

A federal judge has no power to usurp Executive Branch authority or dictate foreign policy to the president.

History affirms Trump’s right to use the Alien Enemies Act against gangs



President Donald Trump on Friday issued a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. Predictably, this move drew the ire of anti-borders activists, who classified it as an attempt to circumvent due process protections for illegal aliens. Critics claimed that the legislation can be used only in times of war, but do they have a legal leg to stand on? For several significant reasons, they do not.

The Alien Enemies Act was first passed in 1798 as one of four pieces of legislation collectively — and erroneously — referred to as the “Alien and Sedition Acts.” These laws were implemented in response to the undeclared Quasi-War with France — bolstering the federal government’s power to react to national security threats.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that noncitizens have no constitutional right to stay in the US unlawfully.

Contrary to popular open-border narratives, these laws were not originally universally reviled. Many Americans saw them as necessary measures to ensure the safety and sovereignty of their newly established nation. Out of the four laws, however, only the Alien Enemies Act survived; the others either expired or were replaced before the Supreme Court established judicial review in 1803 with Marbury v. Madison.

Where does that leave the Trump administration today? Historically, the Alien Enemies Act has been used during wartime or in response to an invasion, such as the War of 1812 and World Wars I and II. The law itself was written broadly, however. It states that when the United States is at war with a foreign nation — or when an “invasion or predatory incursion” occurs — the president has the authority to detain and remove citizens of the hostile country.

The key question now is whether the law applies to foreign nationals like Tren de Aragua and other non-military individuals who have entered the country illegally. That hinges on the definition of “invade” or "predatory incursion.” Interestingly, neither term is defined explicitly in U.S. law, nor has the Supreme Court clarified it.

However, history offers some clues. Colonial-era legal documents allowed British subjects to defend themselves against foreign threats described as "destruction, invasion, detriment, or annoyance.” In Federalist 41, James Madison referred to the need to protect against "pirates and barbarians," suggesting that non-state actors engaged in criminal activities could qualify as invaders. Similarly, in Federalist 43, Madison warned of threats from hostile nations and the “ambitious or vindictive enterprises of [a state’s] more powerful neighbors.”

Based on these historical interpretations, two conclusions emerge. First, an invasion doesn’t have to come from a foreign government’s military. Second, as the Texas Public Policy Foundation notes, criminal organizations like cartel-linked gangs could be classified as engaging in an invasion or predatory incursion if their activities undermine U.S. sovereignty. That’s exactly what Tren de Aragua is doing.

Trump justified his decision by pointing out that Tren de Aragua is a designated foreign terrorist organization with thousands of members who have illegally entered the U.S. According to his statement, the gang is engaging in "irregular warfare and hostile actions" aimed at harming Americans, destabilizing communities, and furthering the Maduro regime’s influence.

The U.S. Constitution gives the government broad powers to respond to evolving global threats, and the Supreme Court has historically limited its review of immigration-related decisions. Additionally, the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that noncitizens have no constitutional right to stay in the U.S. unlawfully.

In Kleindienst v. Mandel, the court ruled that unadmitted, nonresident foreigners have no right to entry or continued presence in the country. Similarly, Mathews v. Diaz upheld congressional authority to make laws for noncitizens that would never apply to U.S. citizens.

Given such precedent, it is hard to argue that the president lacks the authority to remove gang members who threaten American security just because Venezuela hasn’t formally declared war. But never underestimate the extent to which those manifesting “Trump derangement syndrome” will interfere with legitimate attempts to protect U.S. citizens from the likes of Tren de Aragua.

This Yale professor warns of Elon Musk’s ‘fascism’ — and misses the real threat



Timothy Snyder may not be well known in American conservative circles, but his European influence is substantial. I hadn’t heard of the Yale historian until I moved to Vienna, Austria, where he enjoys a kind of celebrity status. European leaders frequently refer to his ideas, whether they are criticizing Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency or comparing JD Vance’s criticism of censorship at the Munich Security Conference last month to the Holocaust. These talking points have crossed the Atlantic, reaching U.S. media through figures like CBS News moderator Margaret Brennan. Snyder’s influence among the American left continues to grow.

I recently attended Snyder’s “Making Sense of an Unsettling World” lecture at Vienna’s Institute for Human Sciences. His casual demeanor, paired with a Zelenskyy-style quarter-zip — a nod to the Ukrainian leader he has met and advised — reinforces his “rebel professor” image. This blend of defiance and intellect captivates and galvanizes college students, making Snyder both a compelling and polarizing figure.

Snyder’s call to 'defend institutions' fails to recognize that institutions can be corrupt, bloated, and unaccountable.

After the predictable barrage of ad hominem attacks on Trump — of which there were many — Snyder shifted his focus to the most controversial figure in the administration: Elon Musk. As Snyder spoke, I couldn’t help but notice the vast ideological divide between the left and the right. This gap felt particularly sobering, not just because of its seemingly unbridgeable nature but also because Snyder's perspective undermines the very foundation necessary to bridge such divides: dissent and dialogue enabled by free speech.

Snyder accuses Musk of building a privatized, fascistic government by dismantling America's institutions. According to Snyder, we common folk are mere pawns in Musk’s algorithmic “system,” which he claims is designed to predict and manipulate human behavior. The goal, Snyder argues, is clear: to destroy institutions, privatize government functions, and siphon taxpayer dollars into Musk’s pockets.

Negative vs. positive freedom

Snyder’s argument centers on a critique of the conservative notion of “negative freedom” — the idea that freedom is best preserved by minimizing external restraints on the individual. He dismisses this concept as “freedom against,” portraying it as a tool ripe for exploitation by figures like Elon Musk. In Snyder's view, Musk uses this version of freedom to turn the masses “against” institutions, only to privatize them for personal gain later.

In contrast, Snyder champions the left-leaning principle of “positive freedom,” or “freedom for.”This approach suggests that freedom is only legitimate when exercised in service of ideals codified and enforced through institutions. According to Snyder's 2016 manifesto, which evolved into his New York Times best-selling pamphlet "On Tyranny," institutions “preserve human decency” and serve as the greatest barriers to tyranny. In this framework, Musk emerges as Snyder’s villain, a modern-day figure following in the footsteps of 20th-century fascists who dismantled institutions to consolidate power.

Institutions need accountability

Snyder’s alarmism about Musk exposes the deep divide between the left and right on the nature of freedom and the role of institutions. While critiques of corporate and political power are valid, Snyder’s perspective assumes that institutions should be defended without question, a stance that conflicts with conservatives’ healthy skepticism of concentrated power — a skepticism the left once shared.

Positive freedom, as Snyder envisions it, relies on the belief that government can act as a benevolent force. This assumption contradicts James Madison’s warning that “if angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” But angels don’t govern us. Washington bureaucrats are subject to the same ills and vices that make government over the masses necessary. Defending institutional authority without scrutiny undermines the conservative commitment to negative freedom — the principle that individual liberties should be checks against excessive power.

Snyder’s solution, then, is not just to oppose authoritarian figures but to resist decentralization itself. He cites Aristotle and Plato to argue that inequality leads to instability and that demagogues exploit free speech to seize power. In Snyder’s world, speech is only “free” when it supports institutional interests rather than challenges them. Yet his call to “defend institutions” fails to recognize that institutions can be corrupt, bloated, and unaccountable. Snyder assumes institutions are inherently legitimate, ignoring the need for them to be accountable to the people they serve.

Where Snyder falls short

Snyder’s argument falls apart here. The left's crusade against so-called oligarchs like Musk isn’t about returning power to the people — it’s about re-centralizing it under authorities leftists consider ideologically acceptable.

Negative freedom is dangerous to them because it allows individuals to dissent, challenge state-sanctioned narratives, and question institutional orthodoxy. Yet it is precisely this freedom that has protected human decency from the imposition of top-down tyranny.

Snyder is right that institutions should be defended when they uphold the people's dignity, rights, and liberties. But just as institutions act as a check on the whims of the populace, the dissent of the people serves as a vital check on the inherent corruptibility of institutions. As Madison argued, both safeguards are essential.

When Snyder and his growing following on the global left seek to suppress dissent for the sake of institutional authority, they don’t prevent tyranny — they empower it.