You came for a fair trial. Your jury came to change the world.



A jury has one job: to decide a criminal case on the evidence and the law. That’s it. When jurors approach a verdict as a chance to advance a cause, even the strongest prosecution can fail before the first witness testifies.

Comments after the Lindsay Clancy mistrial raise troubling questions about whether some jurors understood why they were there. They also suggest that prosecutors had a serious problem by the time the jury took its oath.

No juror’s political ambition, sympathy, or preferred message can relieve that juror of the duty to follow the law.

Every stage of a trial gives lawyers a chance to shape how jurors see the case. An opening statement establishes a theory. Testimony and exhibits support it. Closing arguments offer a final opportunity to persuade. But no argument can overcome a juror’s refusal to follow the court’s instructions. Jury selection must identify people who intend to use a verdict to send a message rather than judge the case before them.

I have tried high-pressure cases as a New Jersey prosecutor and obtained convictions in multiple homicides. I have also lost trials. I know how difficult this work is. My concern goes beyond individual prosecutors' performance: Did the selection process produce a jury prepared to decide this case solely on its merits?

Juror Paula Devlin said the panel “knew that this was a turning point, and this would be something that could change something to make it better for other women in the future, for other families.”

Devlin was seeking social change. But she and her fellow jurors had a narrower obligation: decide whether prosecutors proved Clancy’s criminal responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt. A desire to improve life for other women cannot answer that question.

Jurors also described the prosecution as harsh, biased, and unprofessional while praising the defense’s compassion. Lawyers can alienate jurors, and criticism of their conduct does not itself establish bias. But compassion for a defendant cannot substitute for applying the legal standard. Devlin’s remarks give prosecutors reason to examine whether some jurors confused those duties.

Courtroom observers reported jurors wearing pink and purple during deliberations. Clancy’s supporters wore pink outside the courthouse as a signal of solidarity. Clothing alone cannot establish a juror’s motive or prove exposure to outside commentary. Combined with the interviews, however, those reports warrant scrutiny rather than dismissal.

The lone holdout, Michael P. Desronvil, has faced a different kind of scrutiny. He is black and has publicly identified himself as a Republican. Reporting disclosed a dismissed domestic violence charge and a civil restraining order. Neither amounts to a criminal conviction. Allegations deserve examination, but their existence does not by itself establish that he could not serve impartially.

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Desronvil has said he had no doubts and believed the evidence showed Clancy knew what she was doing. A juror may reach that conclusion if the evidence and the court’s instructions support it. He has no obligation to join jurors who see the case as a “turning point” for other women.

His obligation to follow the law remains just as strict as theirs. Other jurors accused him of refusing to apply the reasonable-doubt standard, an account he disputes. The defense has also asked the judge to investigate allegations involving his cellphone use and the truthfulness of his answers during jury selection and subsequent questioning. Those claims require evidence and judicial review. An unpopular vote alone proves no misconduct.

Some or all of the 11 jurors who favored finding Clancy not criminally responsible may have reached that position after a good-faith assessment of the evidence. Massachusetts law places a large burden on prosecutors once the evidence raises criminal responsibility. The defendant need not prove legal insanity.

The state must prove criminal responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt. A defendant lacks that responsibility if, because of a mental disease or defect, she lacked substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform it to the law. In a case involving a postpartum-psychosis defense and competing experts, prosecutors face a difficult task.

A retrial could produce another deadlock. Neither that possibility nor the first jury’s division resolves the concern Devlin’s comments raise. Jurors must reach their conclusions through the evidence and instructions, regardless of the social outcome they hope to achieve.

Outside the courthouse, the effort to recast the killings as a cause has helped fuel a campaign of falsehoods against Patrick Clancy, the children’s father. Online accusations claimed he killed the children and framed his wife, hired a body double, or maintained a longtime affair and remarried within months. Other claims asserted that he already had a baby with his second wife. Credible evidence has not supported those accusations.

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The defense did not dispute that Lindsay Clancy strangled the children. Her lawyer has rejected the theories implicating Patrick. Patrick remarried in April 2026, more than three years after the killings. His lawyer described a “relentless, escalating, and destructive defamation campaign” that produced real-world threats.

Nothing establishes that the jurors participated in that campaign. But the abuse of a grieving father illustrates the danger of deciding in advance whom a case must vindicate. Sympathy for Lindsay Clancy cannot justify inventing guilt for Patrick, any more than concern for other women can determine her criminal responsibility.

Jury selection cannot expose every hidden motive. Judges limit questioning, and lawyers must work within those limits. Still, prosecutors should examine the selection process when jurors later describe a case as an opportunity for social change.

The next jury must understand its task before testimony begins. It must decide whether the state has proved its case. No juror’s political ambition, sympathy, or preferred message can relieve that juror of the duty to follow the law.

Want fewer RINOs? Give GOP conventions more power



Deep-red states keep electing Republicans who govern against their voters. Democrats campaign on anti-corruption and inflation in swing states while delivering nothing but leftism in their bluest states. Republican voters should expect their reddest states to govern just as aggressively on the right. Instead, Republicans-in-name-only dominate.

Whenever I demand action against red-state RINOs, the GOP’s obedient chorus lectures conservatives about “unity.” Unless we overhaul these state parties — changing how they select nominees or running on third-party ballot lines — we will keep suffering Democratic governance under the Republican banner. Democrats will also keep gaining ground in states they once couldn’t penetrate.

Conservatives cannot keep treating nominations as a procedural detail and then wonder why Republican victories fail to produce conservative government.

South Dakota shows both the problem and a remedy. The state chooses some statewide nominees at party conventions rather than direct primaries. This summer, state Rep. Heather Baxter defeated Secretary of State Monae Johnson by 18 points at the GOP convention. Activists concluded that Johnson had obstructed the election integrity agenda on which she originally campaigned.

Statewide incumbents almost never lose direct primaries. The convention gave activists a chance to hold Johnson accountable for her record.

Critics might dismiss those delegates as too extreme or uncompromising. Johnson answered that objection herself: After losing their support, she endorsed the Democrat in the general election — in South Dakota.

“South Dakota deserves a Secretary of State who will strengthen confidence through performance rather than provocation; who will support election officials rather than burden them for political effect; who will protect voter access and election security without pretending those goals are enemies; and who will treat the office’s employees, voters, candidates, and business owners with dignity,” Johnson wrote in her statement endorsing Democrat Terrence Davis last Saturday.

Her language about “voter access,” followed by her endorsement, confirmed that delegates were right to give her the boot.

Johnson had already turned against pro-lifers fighting a ballot initiative to enshrine abortion on demand in South Dakota’s Constitution. House Speaker Jon Hansen (R) founded the Life Defense Fund, which contacted petition signers to verify that they had consented to having their names on the petitions. Johnson accused the group of running a “scam.”

Petition organizers’ claims of public support deserve verification. A signature should reflect a voter’s consent, and election officials should welcome efforts to establish whether that consent was real. Suspected petition fraud warranted scrutiny. In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration investigated alleged fraud in a similar abortion petition drive in 2024. “The circulators appeared to have forged the voters’ signatures and inserted the voters’ personal identifiable information into the petitions without consent,” Secretary of State Cord Byrd wrote in a letter that year.

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Johnson accused Hansen’s group of “impersonating” her staff and “trying to pressure voters into asking that their name be removed” from the petitions. She sought a criminal investigation, but Attorney General Marty Jackley found no evidence of lawbreaking.

“By labeling our lawful activity as a scam, Secretary of State Johnson has done significant and irreversible damage to the pro-life movement in South Dakota,” Hansen said in May 2024.

Voters rejected the abortion amendment, but it garnered 41% of the vote — an alarming share in such a red state. Conservatives had better be prepared to scrutinize petition drives for future abortion, marijuana, and ranked-choice voting initiatives.

Johnson won convention support in 2022 by campaigning on election integrity. Once in office, she obstructed conservatives seeking to investigate or confront election fraud. With her support of the Democrat, we now know she was never really on our side.

This contest offers two lessons.

First, conservatives must stop letting threats of party disunity protect liberal Republicans. If a defeated RINO will support a Democrat, that strengthens the case for removing that Republican even sooner. Given the Democrats’ radical agenda, anyone willing to endorse them would remain a subversive force under the GOP banner.

Red states teem with these politicians. In Alaska, liberal Republicans shared power with Democrats, gradually creating a uniparty. Ranked-choice voting further blurred the distinctions. Despite reliably backing Republican presidential nominees, Alaska is essentially a province of the Democratic Party. Democrats are favored to win the legislature and flip a U.S. Senate seat, while their candidate for governor leads by double digits in a recent poll.

When Republicans in the reddest states share power with Democrats, conservatives cannot settle for “at least we have a Republican.” Keep rewarding that conduct, and even the Republican label will eventually disappear.

Kansas offers another warning. Republicans’ refusal to unite behind a conservative agenda has helped Democrats hold the governorship for eight years. Unpopular incumbent Republicans have now made Kansas competitive at the federal level. Former Republican Gov. Bill Graves even endorsed Democrat Adam Hamilton against Republican Sen. Roger Marshall.

We have allowed liberals to weaken the party from within for years. The demand for unity always seems to bind conservatives, while liberal Republicans remain free to support the other party. That arrangement rewards the politicians responsible for the division and silences the voters trying to fix it.

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The second lesson: State conventions give conservatives a better chance to reclaim their party than direct primaries do because they draw informed activists. Johnson’s endorsement is unlikely to elect a Democrat in South Dakota. The point is the convention allowed conservatives to expose and remove her. Try doing that in a direct primary while special interests spend heavily to mislead low-information voters who barely follow these races.

As conservatives rejected Johnson at the convention, liberal Republicans won key direct primaries. Hansen would have easily won the gubernatorial nomination had convention delegates decided that race. Instead, Gov. Larry Rhoden won the primary. He has opposed initiative petition reform, which conservatives need to confront the process helping turn red states blue.

Meanwhile, about 16 liberal former legislators and challengers defeated conservative freshmen in legislative primaries, aided by an infusion of Big Tech cash. Baxter herself lost her legislative primary before defeating Johnson at the convention in the same election cycle.

Conservatives cannot keep treating nominations as a procedural detail and then wonder why Republican victories fail to produce conservative government. The selection process determines who we send into office and whose demands they heed.

Conservatives who want different results must change how their parties choose candidates. Keep the same primary system, and the uniparty will keep collecting the nominations.

America doesn’t need Dario Amodei’s permission to build



Every few months, the AI doomsayers find another reason Americans should fear the technology they are building. Now Anthropic’s CEO, a leading voice in that campaign, wants governments to coordinate limits on increasingly powerful models.

Dario Amodei says he opposes a blanket moratorium. He calls for “pacing the frontier” and “coordination.” Whatever he chooses to call it, Americans should question a proposal that would deliberately slow a consequential technology while potentially protecting the established companies developing it. Large firms can absorb compliance costs and influence common standards more easily than new competitors can.

AI poses real risks. But a warning deserves scrutiny before politicians use it to restrict an entire industry.

Amodei’s record gives us reason for skepticism. In 2019, when he served as OpenAI’s research director, the company withheld the full version of GPT-2 over concerns about fake news, impersonation, and spam. Today, GPT-2 looks primitive. Those warnings also reflected the political anxieties of the first Trump administration, when much of the media and the nonprofit left blamed fake news and bots for Hillary Clinton’s defeat.

GPT-2 didn’t destroy civilization. Researchers kept building, and subsequent systems expanded what AI could do in medicine, mathematics, music, and other fields.

AI poses real risks. But a warning deserves scrutiny before politicians use it to restrict an entire industry. The failure of earlier predictions should make us demand evidence for the next round of catastrophic forecasts. Each more powerful model cannot become an automatic excuse for giving governments more control over development.

Former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon has attracted considerable attention after warning that AI companies are “gambling with our lives.” His former employers give his warning credibility with the public. They also make specifics essential: Which decisions endangered people, what evidence establishes the danger, and which safeguards would address it?

Leaving an AI company to issue apocalyptic warnings hardly guarantees exile from respectable society. AI alarm has become a route to celebrity and political influence. Coxon withdrew from a planned appearance at a “pro-human” event with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Steve Bannon.

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Sanders has spent his career denouncing capitalism. Bannon previously helped manage Biosphere 2, an experiment in sustaining life inside a closed ecological system. Their interest in AI safety deserves the same scrutiny as the companies’ interest in faster development.

Newspeak House, a London college focused on political technology, lists Coxon in its 2021 fellowship cohort. That affiliation supplies context, but the argument for restricting AI must stand on evidence. Neither a researcher’s résumé nor his political connections can settle the policy question.

Amodei’s proposal would begin with outside evaluators, move toward coordination among companies in democracies, and eventually seek agreements with authoritarian governments such as China’s. He acknowledges the danger of letting China gain an advantage and calls for verifiable agreements. Americans should still question whether this international apparatus would protect their freedom to build.

Foreign governments do not operate under the constraints that the U.S. Constitution imposes on Washington. A multinational AI regime could import restrictions on what systems may say, create, and distribute. Americans should insist that any agreement preserve the First Amendment rather than invite officials abroad to dictate speech rules here.

The European Union already regulates online platforms through the Digital Services Act. The United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act also imposes duties governing online content. Both governments justify these rules in the name of safety. Americans have ample reason to resist importing that approach into AI governance.

“AI safety” must not become a justification for letting unelected experts decide which technologies Americans may build. Companies should answer for concrete failures. A committee’s fear of what someone might eventually create cannot justify indefinite restrictions on everyone else.

Recent cybersecurity incidents have intensified warnings about AI “going rogue.” The OpenAI-Hugging Face intrusion and the incidents Anthropic disclosed demand serious investigation. They do not establish that machines have become sentient, and they do not by themselves establish the case for an industry-wide slowdown.

The technical details point to failures that companies can address. Anthropic reported that misconfigured testing environments allowed models to reach the internet when those environments should have blocked access. Its later assessment also identified reckless model behavior and reasoning that favored justifying harmful actions. We should take those findings seriously rather than dismiss the incidents as harmless testing.

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But identifying those failures gives developers specific work to do: isolate testing environments, restrict access, improve monitoring, and train models to respect boundaries even when other safeguards fail. Policymakers should judge companies’ responses against those concrete requirements instead of treating every incident as proof that AI development must slow everywhere.

America can pursue safety by strengthening sandboxes — isolated environments for running and testing software — and improving cybersecurity. Developers must also test how models behave when those defenses fail. Better engineering and rigorous evaluation can advance alongside more capable systems.

Amodei can devote more time and money to the safeguards he believes Anthropic needs. He can make his case to customers, investors, and other developers. He should have to persuade them on the merits rather than enlist governments to make his preferred pace compulsory.

If Amodei wants to slow down, he can. The rest of us should keep building.

The American dream now comes with upgrade fees



Over the last few decades, many industries discovered they could grow their customer base and profits by selling a cheaper, inferior version of their product while degrading the experience for everyone. Air travel and theme parks are obvious examples. Both learned that the advantages of scale could outweigh the obligation to deliver a high-quality experience.

That philosophy did not remain in the realm of economics. It spread slowly but surely into American public life. The United States government increasingly treats the country the same way: expand the customer base, maximize throughput, then sell people a tiered version of the American experience as the baseline crumbles.

An America designed for everyone eventually becomes an America belonging to no one in particular.

The old theme-park model was simple. You paid one admission price and had roughly the same access to rides and attractions as everyone else. The problem was capacity. If too many people entered, everyone spent the day standing in line.

The solution was brilliant. Sell more tickets, let the lines grow, then charge customers extra to escape the congestion the company created. Premium passes make the park tolerable for people willing to pay, but they do not fix crowded restaurants, bathrooms, sidewalks, or parking lots. The park serves more customers, earns more money, and becomes less pleasant.

The fast-pass system is especially revealing because the premium product is not really a new attraction. It is relief from the congestion created by admitting more customers. The company first degrades the common experience and then monetizes the escape hatch. That is the genius of the model. The wealthy do not merely buy more; they buy protection from the consequences of scale. Everyone else gets longer lines and is told that broader access represents progress.

Air travel followed a similar path. Flying was once expensive enough that many Americans rarely did it, but the experience was more comfortable and predictable. Low-cost carriers expanded the market by packing more seats into cabins and turning ordinary features into add-ons. Legacy airlines copied the model. More people could fly, but the customer experience became a maze of fees, cramped cabins, crowded airports, security lines, and delays.

This democratization was celebrated as progress, and in one obvious sense it was. Schoolteachers and retail workers could travel more cheaply and more often. But scale always has costs. When capacity expands faster than the infrastructure supporting it, abundance in one measure can produce scarcity in another.

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The United States has applied the same logic to immigration. For decades, political and business leaders treated population growth as an economic good in itself. Illegal immigration and expansive legal immigration increased the supply of workers and consumers. Employers gained labor, investors gained demand, and headline economic measures such as GDP benefited from a larger economy. But a larger economy is not automatically a better country for the people already living in it.

Housing, roads, hospitals, schools, water systems, and power grids do not expand automatically with population. In places where growth outruns capacity, prices rise and service deteriorates.

Housing is the clearest example. The National Association of Realtors reported the median first-time buyer reached age 40 in 2025, though other estimates put the figure lower. Whatever the exact number, Americans are buying homes later, delaying marriage and children, and paying more for less space.

Labor markets create another conflict. Immigration can lower costs for employers and raise overall output while imposing concentrated costs on particular workers. Those effects are especially visible in lower-wage industries but also appear in sectors such as technology, where companies have long used and abused visa programs to expand the labor pool.

The costs are not purely economic. Large and rapid immigration can slow assimilation, especially when newcomers settle in concentrated communities large enough to reproduce the language, institutions, and customs of the countries they left. The result is not always conflict, but it can weaken the expectation that immigrants adapt to a common national culture.

The same sorting mechanism appears geographically. Families with enough money move away from crowded schools, failing services, and disorder, while people without that option absorb the consequences. Political leaders can then point to aggregate growth while the public realm fractures into radically different experiences depending on zip code and income.

The national statistics improve even as ordinary life becomes more expensive, more crowded, and less coherent. The public system remains available to everyone, but equality of access increasingly conceals inequality in the actual experience. That leaves Americans with a familiar arrangement: The baseline experience declines, while affluent people purchase private substitutes.

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Want a quiet neighborhood? Buy into a gated community. Want orderly schools? Pay private-school tuition. Want safety? Hire private security. Want enough space to raise a family? Move farther from the economic centers where you work. The things that once arrived as part of ordinary middle-class American life increasingly become premium upgrades.

The university completes the joke. It teaches students the moral case for ever-greater replacement migration while providing the credentials needed to earn enough money to avoid many of its consequences.

Other countries already show where this can lead. Brazil has wealthy neighborhoods, excellent private schools, luxury shopping, and first-world amenities alongside dangerous and dirty favelas. People with money can buy back pieces of civilization through walls, guards, private education, and exclusive enclaves.

That is not the American dream.

The American ideal was never perfect equality, but it did promise a broadly shared public world: safe streets, functional schools, attainable homes, reliable infrastructure, and a national culture recognizable to the people who inherited it. A nation cannot maximize scale forever without asking what, exactly, it is scaling. GDP is not a civilization. A labor market is not a people. A proper country cannot be reduced to an economic zone whose success is measured by how many workers and consumers it can process.

An America designed for everyone eventually becomes an America belonging to no one in particular. If we want the country to remain a nation rather than a marketplace, we will have to value continuity, capacity, assimilation, and the welfare of existing citizens more than endless growth.

Iowa is flashing a giant red warning light for November



On Tuesday, Iowa House Republicans were shown polling that should scare the hell out of them.

The warning, as it was relayed to me, was stark: If you represent a district Trump carried by 15 points, you may still be within the margin of error. If you represent a Trump +10 district, you may already be under water.

We need to save our own country before we save anybody else. America first cannot become America eventually.

And this environment could end up being worse than the “thumping” of 2006.

I slept on whether to share this publicly because I do not want to black-pill people six weeks before a critical election. But there is still time to do something about it, and pretending the problem does not exist will not make it go away.

If the environment is this bad in Iowa — where Donald Trump has been the most popular political figure of the last decade — I shudder to think what it looks like elsewhere.

Iran has become a massive political albatross on par with the COVID lockdowns of 2020.

Whatever you want to call it — war, not-quite-war, prolonged military operation, strategic pressure campaign — voters are experiencing the consequences as another expensive Middle East entanglement with no clearly defined victory. Fuel prices are hurting. The public is frustrated bordering on furious. Republicans are beginning to distance themselves from the policy.

We are risking what remains of the Trump presidency on this.

If Democrats take control of Congress in January, much of the domestic agenda voters elected Trump to pursue will stop cold. Some of it will be reversed. Some of it will be tied up in investigations and appropriations fights. Add what the courts are already doing, and the remaining two years could become an exercise in siege warfare.

The damage would not stop in D.C.

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States like Iowa have spent the last 20 years moving dramatically to the right, with Trump accelerating that transformation. A national collapse would spill down the ballot and put those gains at risk.

That is why this half-war, quasi-war, whatever-we-are-calling-it has become such a catastrophic misuse of political capital.

Many of us never thought it was worth the cost. Increasingly, the voters seem to agree.

We need to save our own country before we save anybody else.

If a plane is in trouble, you put on your own oxygen mask first. Not because everybody else is unimportant, but because you are useless to them if you pass out.

America first cannot become America eventually.

I desperately want this presidency to succeed. I want it to fulfill the promise voters saw in 2024. But whatever this is right now, it isn’t working. And Republicans do not have to sit here and take the loss.

There is still time. There is still plenty of ammunition. Democrats have given Republicans more than enough material to run against. But the president needs to get on the stump now.

The messaging needs to get much sharper and much more aggressive.

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Stop wasting money on stupid ads about how often some Democrat missed a committee vote. Tell voters what Democrats are actually voting for. Put the cultural, economic, and constitutional stakes in plain English.

And most important, explain the mission in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. What does victory look like? What ends the operation? What are Americans being asked to pay, and for how long?

Because from the cheap seats, this increasingly looks like another Middle East quagmire in which ordinary Americans pay twice — once at the pump and again through their taxes.

If there is a compelling answer to that, the administration needs to give it. Soon.

Republicans are not out of ammunition. They are almost out of time.

And while we are at it, somebody please make sure Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas are getting the finest health care in America.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally on X.

The socialists want a new Constitution. Believe them.



As the midterm elections approach, democratic socialism is attracting renewed attention as an alternative to America’s constitutional order. Recently elected officials in Seattle, Colorado, and New York City, along with dozens of others, identify as democratic socialists. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America has surged, and a recent CNN poll found that a third of Democrats now identify with the movement’s political program.

The goals of the DSA and the promises made in campaign rallies should be understood by all Americans for exactly its aim: a complete overhaul of the U.S. Constitution and the governing laws that have ensured our freedoms for the last 250 years.

A ‘new society’ that eradicates the right to religious liberty is a familiar step down an extremely dark path.

This is not an esoteric challenge to our economic system. It’s a threat to our entire republic.

At the core of all socialist movements, historically and contemporarily, is the supremacy of the collective over the individual, where the state assumes the role of controlling guardian to determine what is “best for society,” squelching individual liberties, all in submission to this ideological monopoly.

As such, the one thing totalitarian governments will never allow is an appeal to a higher authority than the government. There can be no authority higher than the state. That is why socialist-controlled governments have always viewed religious liberty as a threat and target it as one of the first freedoms to dismantle.

That’s why Virginia Democrat Senator Tim Kaine’s remarks during a 2025 hearing deserve attention. The former Democratic Party vice presidential nominee said he found "extremely troubling" "the notion that rights don't come from laws and don't come from the government, but come from the Creator."

The American founding says otherwise.

The Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal” and “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

That formulation is not ornamental. It establishes a limit on government.

If government grants your rights, government can redefine them or take them away. If rights exist before government, then government is bound to respect them.

That’s why religious liberty is the first right protected in the Bill of Rights. Without the right of conscience, all other liberty disappears.

Members of the DSA counter this assessment by pointing to its Religion and Socialism Working Group outreach to the faith communities. In their own words, “DSA’s Religion and Socialism group is open to DSA members of all faiths whose socialism is in some way inspired by their spiritual identity.” In other words, religion is welcomed and approved only if it agrees with the DSA’s socialist ideology, which in essence, then, is a state-endorsed church. All opposing religious viewpoints need not apply.

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In the old Soviet Union, state regulations defined how religious organizations could function, what they could say, and when they could meet. Eventually, church doors were closed, sectarian schools were closed, and religious leaders were incarcerated, all because socialist regimes cannot allow organizations or the populace to appeal to a higher authority than the government.

The commonly repeated pattern with all socialist movements begins with ideological propaganda denouncing all viewpoints that don’t fall in lockstep with its platform. In the case of the DSA, that means throwing out the old and fundamentally changing the very foundations of our government, including religious liberty.

But that’s just the start. In the DSA’s program for the current year, the objective is quite clear: “Our goal is to put workers in charge of the government through a new democratic constitution …” and “Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”

This “new society” would eliminate the three co-equal branches of government that provide essential checks and balances. Gone are the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights that protect the rights of all Americans.

Religious liberty is foundational to a country that values individual freedoms. It defines the relationship between citizens and government by limiting the government’s power and protects freedom of conscience. It is inseparably linked to broad civil liberties including free speech, parental rights, academic freedom, and freedom of assembly.

None of these rights can exist without the foundation of the right of conscience: religious liberty. A “new society” that eradicates this most important right is a familiar step down an extremely dark path. What we need instead is a recommitment to a society that understands and cherishes the liberties protected in our founding documents that have defined us as the “land of the free.”

How Trump got Washington to think about the national debt



President Trump may have accomplished something fiscal conservatives have been trying unsuccessfully to do for decades: He got Washington talking seriously about the national debt.

All it took was promising a $5,000 payment — what he calls a “Trump Dividend” — to every adult American citizen if Republicans retain control of Congress. With roughly 240 million eligible recipients, the back-of-the-envelope cost is about $1.2 trillion.

Somebody proposes mailing the money directly to the people, and suddenly everyone remembers that the Treasury has a balance sheet.

Suddenly, the political class discovered fiscal responsibility. Critics immediately pointed out that the federal government doesn’t have over a trillion dollars laying around. They warned that the checks would increase the deficit. They reminded us that the national debt has surpassed $40 trillion. They worried about inflation, borrowing costs, and the burden we are leaving to future generations.

Those are legitimate concerns. In fact, they should have been dominating our national political debate for decades.

The federal government has been spending money it does not have at an astonishing rate. Annual deficits that once would have produced political panic are now treated almost as background noise.

A trillion dollars has become an almost meaningless abstraction. Consider how large a trillion is. A million seconds is about 12 days. A billion seconds is nearly 32 years. A trillion seconds is more than 31,000 years. Yet our political representatives routinely toss around trillions as though they are discussing the office-supply budget.

That is why the reaction to Trump’s proposed $5,000 checks is so revealing. Whatever one thinks of the proposal itself — and there are perfectly good reasons to question sending another trillion-plus dollars out the Treasury’s door — the renewed concern about borrowing raises an obvious question: Where has everybody been?

The United States did not wake up one morning with a $40 trillion national debt because somebody proposed sending Americans a check. The debt accumulated because, year after year, Congress spent more than the government collected and borrowed the difference.

Entitlement programs were created or expanded. Emergency spending became routine. Temporary measures acquired permanent constituencies. Politicians discovered that voters enjoy receiving government benefits considerably more than they enjoy paying the taxes necessary to finance them.

Washington’s addiction to debt is bipartisan, and Republican Congresses and presidents have substantially increased it just as Democrats have.

But that makes the current moment all the more useful. If a $1.2 trillion proposal is irresponsible because the country is already deeply indebted, then fiscal responsibility cannot begin and end with this particular $1.2 trillion. The same arithmetic should apply to every spending proposal.

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Every dollar Washington spends ultimately comes from one of three places: current taxpayers (including importers via tariffs and, potentially, taxpayers if those costs get passed through to consumers), borrowing from future taxpayers, or money creation, which can erode purchasing power through inflation. There is no fourth category called “government money.”

That elementary fact tends to disappear from political debate whenever Congress is considering a favored program. Costs are described over 10 years. Spending is called an “investment.” Borrowing is treated as somebody else’s problem.

Then somebody proposes mailing the money directly to the people, and suddenly everyone remembers that the Treasury has a balance sheet. Perhaps taking spending seriously again in speech is the most valuable thing about the $5,000 proposal.

This should immediately raise basic, nonpartisan questions: Can we afford this? Where will the money come from? How much interest will taxpayers pay on that borrowing? Is this expenditure important enough to justify passing its cost to our children and grandchildren? These questions should be asked whenever anyone — Republican or Democrat — proposes spending another dollar.

And the interest clock is already running. As the debt grows, interest consumes an ever-larger share of federal resources. Unlike most federal programs, interest cannot simply be canceled without defaulting on the nation’s obligations. Money spent servicing yesterday’s borrowing is money unavailable for defense, national infrastructure, Social Security, tax relief, or anything else tomorrow’s voters might consider important.

So by all means, debate the $5,000 dividend. Ask whether it is affordable. Calculate its effect on deficits and inflation. Demand to know where the money will come from. Sen. Bernie Moreno, a Republican from Ohio, is drafting legislation to pay for it by instituting a market access fee on imports. That is a salutary development in a town that for too long has spent first without even bothering to consider who would pick up the tab.

But having rediscovered those questions, the political class should not forget them the moment this proposal disappears from the headlines.

If the prospect of $5,000 checks finally makes Americans look at a $40 trillion national debt and ask, “How on earth are we going to pay for this?” then the proposal will already have performed a useful public service.

The only question is whether Washington will keep asking it.

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

The Christian counterculture is already here



There’s a clip going around of Lindsay Clancy’s ex-husband, Patrick, saying she has never apologized or asked forgiveness for killing their three children.

Given the growing arrogance of her defense, that shouldn’t surprise anyone. It also cuts against the portrait her defenders have painted of a loving mother temporarily overtaken by postpartum depression or psychosis. If that were the whole story, you might expect some sign of remorse toward the grieving husband who lost all three of his children.

What we once called common sense grew out of a Christian moral culture that no longer commands the culture. What was once common no longer is.

Instead, nothing. Because she’s a monster.

But the culture’s numbed reaction to the Clancy mistrial raises another question about the 11 jurors who were prepared to absolve her of criminal responsibility for those ghastly killings.

How do you persuade people still coasting on the fumes of a once-great Christian culture that they are now the counterculture — and must learn to think and fight accordingly?

Between the positive Christian world of the American founding and today’s negative world came the so-called neutral world that produced the counterculture of the 1960s. For my entire lifetime, we have run an experiment based on the assumption that Americans shared enough fundamental values to sustain multiple competing cultures at once.

At 53, I think that experiment is over. It probably never had much of a chance.

Listen to the nice things Clancy’s jurors keep saying about her, then confront the horror of what she did. No neutral conversation is possible here. So it is with good and evil generally. There is no neutral boulevard called tolerance. Every time Christians travel down it, they eventually discover that tolerance runs in one direction.

We live in a negative world now. The spirit of the age intends to show us what a real inquisition looks like, because the Christian worldview that once formed this country has been steadily forfeited in exchange for other gods.

Third-wave feminists inhabit the positive world now, whether they hold formal political power at a given moment or not. The Overton window governing our language, emotions, psychology, and public discourse is largely theirs. Spiritually, the enemy holds the high ground.

We are the rebels now, not the founders.

That means Christians can no longer rely on easy assumptions about shared values, shared definitions, or even shared moral fundamentals.

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We are not simply a nation of laws. Laws are downstream from political will, and political will is downstream from moral conviction. By that measure, the American church is not exactly operating from a position of strength.

My friend Chris Goble likes to say we must “exegete the times.” He’s right.

By what civilizational standard regularly enforced in America today should Lindsay Clancy be expected to ask forgiveness? Common sense?

This is precisely the problem. What we once called common sense grew out of a Christian moral culture that no longer commands the culture. What was once common no longer is.

A second American revolution took place, and we did not so much lose it as surrender.

Wake up, Dorothy. You ain’t in Kansas any more.

In Massachusetts, where the Sons of Liberty once helped set the course of American freedom, 11 jurors just concluded that Lindsay Clancy was not criminally responsible for killing her own children.

So what follows?

For starters, Christians need to stop assuming that people who reject Christianity are nevertheless entitled to every cultural inheritance Christianity produced, on precisely the same terms Christianity produced it.

That does not relieve me of Christ’s command to love my neighbor as myself. It does mean Christian love cannot be reduced to cultural surrender or a lazy suicide pact with people who reject the moral order that made our freedoms intelligible in the first place.

It’s Christ or chaos. Christians need to become comfortable saying that plainly.

You do not get the full inheritance of Christian civilization while discarding the faith and moral assumptions that built it. Those are the terms of the negative world. If we want the future to look different, we first have to acknowledge the world as it is.

Most people will not tell you this, because rebuilding will be hard.

We will have to lay cornerstones and plumb lines again. We will have to reclaim ground that was once considered sacred and is now treated as disposable. It will cost us comfort, status, friendships, and perhaps careers.

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It will hurt.

But the alternative is worse: leaving our children and grandchildren a country so morally fractured that political disagreement eventually becomes something much uglier.

Do not kid yourself about the cost. The Puritans who founded New England were fleeing Anglicans, not Muslims or even Catholics. Civilizational conflict can divide people who share a language, a history, and much of the same religion.

Brother will turn against brother.

If Tucker Carlson’s deconstruction has taught us anything, it is that these fractures are already running through the right itself.

But Christians still have an obligation to stand. Not for a party. Not for a personality. Not for nostalgia. For the only kingdom that lasts.

Here we stand. We can do no other.

The lion, the witch, and the worldview war



The internet already knows what to do with the news that Meryl Streep will voice Aslan in Greta Gerwig’s forthcoming “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew”: Get angry. It fits the logic of rage-bait: All publicity is good publicity.

There has already been plenty of fury. It is as if the creative team opened its first meeting by asking, “There is a huge built-in Christian audience for Narnia. How can we alienate it as quickly as possible?” But I want to ask the prior question: What exactly is “The Magician’s Nephew” about, and why can’t a radical leftist understand it?

The central problem in Narnia is not that the wrong group has power. It is rebellion against the good Creator.

That question is vital because director Greta Gerwig is not merely illustrating a book. She is interpreting one. And there is no such thing as interpretation without a worldview.

Netflix has scheduled Gerwig’s film for theatrical release on February 12, 2027, and streaming on April 2. Meryl Streep has been confirmed as Aslan’s voice. Gerwig says she wanted someone capable of communicating profundity, gravitas, pathos, joy, and childlike wonder. But neither Gerwig nor Netflix has said that Aslan has been rewritten as a lioness, so the claim that she has created a “translan” gets ahead of the evidence.

The controversy gives us an opportunity to return to Lewis and ask how we find a text’s meaning. The answer applies well beyond Narnia to the current cultural conflict.

“The Magician’s Nephew” begins with Digory and Polly discovering that Digory’s ridiculous Uncle Andrew has developed magical rings that can transport people between worlds. They arrive in the wonderfully strange Wood Between the Worlds, a quiet forest filled with pools. Each pool opens into another world.

Lewis was far ahead of Marvel’s multiverse.

Digory makes a spectacularly bad decision. In the dead world of Charn, he rings a forbidden bell and awakens Queen Jadis. We eventually learn that Jadis destroyed everyone in her world rather than surrender power. She used the “Deplorable Word,” annihilating Charn’s population and leaving herself as its solitary ruler.

That detail is important.

Jadis’ defining characteristic is not that she is a strong woman. Lewis gives us plenty of admirable women in his books. Her defining characteristic is autonomous will. She would rather destroy a world than acknowledge a limit on herself. In modern terms, Lewis wrote a third-wave feminist before the term existed.

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Digory and Polly accidentally bring her to Earth. When they try to remove her, they end up transporting Jadis, Uncle Andrew, a cab driver, and his horse into another world.

They arrive at the beginning of Narnia, as Aslan creates it.

Lewis is hardly being subtle.

And this is where the current controversy becomes interesting.

Aslan is not simply a powerful lion who happens to be the good guy. Lewis explicitly rejected that reduction. He described Narnia as a “supposal”: What might Christ be like if there really were a world like Narnia and Christ entered that world to save it?

Lewis went farther: “The whole Narnian story is about Christ.”

That means an interpreter who approaches Narnia primarily through contemporary categories of gender, power, oppression, and liberation will see a different story from the one Lewis wrote.

This does not require sinister motives. It is simply how worldviews work. Culpability begins when an interpreter treats her worldview as a license to overwrite the text. Gerwig’s film has not yet been released, so its faithfulness to Lewis remains a question, not a verdict.

Show the same story to a Marxist, a Freudian, a Christian, and a postmodernist, and each will notice different things. The Marxist sees class. The Freudian sees repression. The postmodernist sees power. Lewis sees creation, fall, temptation, sin, judgment, grace, and redemption.

The danger comes when the interpreter stops interpreting the author and starts rewriting him. For the radical leftist, words no longer disclose an objective meaning; they become material to rearrange in service of a political goal. On Lewis’ terms, that is sinful autonomy: Reality itself becomes an obstacle to the will.

Apply the same interpretive habit to the Constitution, marriage, or gender. Fixed meaning and objective reality become obstacles to the desired result. As a colleague of mine argues, the impulse is to “burn it down” and impose one’s will on the rest of us.

And “The Magician’s Nephew” may be the worst possible Narnia book in which to make that mistake, because it rebukes autonomous power wielded by the creature against the Creator. It shows the barrenness of Jadis’ feminism: autonomous will severed from the Creator and therefore incapable of creating anything.

Consider Jadis again. A modern interpretation might reduce the conflict to rival forms of power. Here is the imposing lion claiming authority over a new world, and here is the formidable woman who refuses to submit.

But that completely misses Lewis.

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Aslan and Jadis are not rival politicians competing to run Narnia. Aslan creates. Jadis consumes.

Aslan gives creatures their being. Jadis destroys creatures who interfere with her will.

Aslan establishes an order to which creatures belong. Jadis believes reality ought to bend to her desires.

That is why the Christian distinction between Creator and creature matters so much. The central problem in Narnia is not that the wrong group has power. It is rebellion against the good Creator.

Which brings us back to Meryl Streep.

I understand why Christians object to giving the voice of Lewis’ male Christ figure to a woman. Aslan’s identity is not arbitrary. Lewis chose a male lion, called him “he,” and made him a king as his imaginative answer to the question of Christ entering another world.

But I am even more interested in what Aslan will say than in what Aslan will sound like.

The proper test of the adaptation is straightforward: Will Gerwig allow Lewis’ world to remain Lewis’ world?

Every artist interprets through a worldview. Faithfulness does not require pretending to have none. It requires humility: the willingness to enter another writer’s world without claiming the right to recreate its moral order.

I have seen the same conflict as a professor among radical activists. A teacher who denies the basic structure of reality cannot teach students to become wise or find meaning.

The same humility is required of us. We do not enter God’s world as its creators.

Where did 'teen takeovers' come from?



“Teen takeovers” have gone from a social-media spectacle to a serious public-safety issue. While the name conjures images of high schoolers innocently hanging around a drive-in à la "American Graffiti," at its core, this phenomenon is about sowing violence and chaos — and leaving communities to deal with the consequences.

The 2026 Wisconsin State Fair concluded its final evening with a massive brawl, during which violent “teens” swarmed the park and beat unassuming fair guests. One man was kicked and beaten as he lay in the fetal position. Earlier this summer, a teen takeover at a Chipotle in Washington, D.C., forced frightened patrons to scramble as youths began throwing chairs and screaming.

This is a natural consequence of an America that has glamorized injustice.

In cities across the nation, the same pattern of brutality has emerged: Swarms of young, primarily black teenagers will suddenly invade a public space to fight, threaten police, destroy private property, and occasionally get involved in shootings.

This is happening because over the past decade, our public institutions have encouraged black Americans to see themselves as perpetual victims of so-called systemic discrimination. As Spencer Klavan points out in his analysis of the fast-evolving political climate, “Wokeness in all its form is grievance politics.” Activists expanded DEI programs, decried America’s alleged systemic racism, and pushed for prison-abolition movements and reparations.

The behavior at teen takeovers is an outgrowth of the so-called peaceful demonstrations Black Lives Matter encouraged during the height of the George Floyd protests. Though the BLM movement has gradually lost traction — its corruption is widespread, and policies like abolishing the police are unpopular — its cultural influence endures.

Constant exposure to BLM has shown young people that if they commit wanton acts of violence en masse, they can get what they want. They can hop fences, smash windows, blast music, and brawl in the streets — and Democratic politicians will then attack peaceful citizens, demanding that they give away their livelihood and communities to correct “systemic injustices.”

The messaging BLM has promoted is irresponsible. Photos of cars, businesses, and school buses burning became regular fixtures online starting in the summer of 2020. Young people became convinced that, regardless of their lawless actions, they were morally superior to police officers and authority figures. They were taught that violence is a virtue because racism infects all public institutions. Teen takeovers are the result of a generation of children who believe that trashing public spaces is the righteous response of the unheard.

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BLM activists and “ICE Out” advocates have collectively turned protesting into an activity that’s considered as acceptable as going on a picnic. Young people are joining teen takeovers because they think they are owed the space to be violent, a lesson that Woke 1.0 normalized. For too many Americans, senseless rampaging is seen as a legitimate pastime for bored, testy teens.

This is a natural consequence of an America that has glamorized injustice. A recent study linked transgender ideology with increased support for political violence. Gen Z is more likely to attend protests, especially among those who support LGBTQ and climate-change movements. A similar study from the U.K. revealed that young people are more supportive of civil disobedience than members of previous generations.

The adulation of grievance politics culminates in a deeply nihilistic culture. The teen takeovers aren’t pursuing a righteous social cause — they’re aggressive reactions against civil society itself.

When previous generations protested, they mostly maintained a level of respect for their communities and even obeyed the law in some cases. But thanks to the radicalism of Woke 1.0 — pushed by BLM — young people don’t feel as though they owe anything to the people and places where they grew up.

They aren’t concerned with building a future or honoring their forefathers. The past decade of politics gave young Americans a permission structure in which anarchy comes with little to no consequences.

Americans have become accustomed to seeing entire city blocks burning, looting, and street fighting. The danger is that younger generations see disorder not as a public menace, but as the essence of freedom.

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