Turning Point’s response was first to ignore her, letting surrogates fight it out online. Then Erika met with Candace directly, which did nothing to calm the temperature. Now the two camps have accepted a state of open social-media conflict.

The theory of victory on the anti-Candace side seems to be that she can be discredited: dunk on her enough times, disprove enough of her claims, and eventually the audience will drift away as supporting her becomes socially unacceptable.

It’s an unpleasant spectacle for us to watch play out, and an unfortunate one as this strategy this will not work.

Candace is deploying a weaponized form of doubt I call fractal skepticism. A fractal is a pattern that repeats at every scale: zoom in or zoom out, and the same structure appears. Fractal skepticism applies that principle to skepticism and doubt itself. First you doubt the official story. When someone debunks your unofficial theory, doubt the debunker. When the evidence contradicts you, doubt the evidence. When an ally pushes back, doubt the ally. Every answer spawns the same suspicious question one layer down, forever. Nothing can ever be established, so inquiry recurses on an endless loop, kind of like a fractal.

The pattern repeats horizontally. When you exhaust one line of doubt, an adjacent one is always waiting, basically identical in structure. And where genuine skepticism is a discipline that must eventually be turned against your own assumptions and conclusions, fractal skepticism only points outward.

This is why the dunking strategy fails implicitly. Inside fractal skepticism, a debunking is not really a refutation, the “skeptic” anticipates and wants it. The fact-checker simply becomes the next object of doubt, and to the faithful every fresh debunker is more evidence of how deep the thing must go.

Candace is the flagship example of fractal skepticism. Over the last few years she has questioned the moon landing, gone deep on “the Jewish Question,” and turned Kirk’s killing into a whodunit, to name only a few of her tall tales of various levels of creativity. Zoom into any layer of her “worldview” and you find the same move.

She will be mocked, her claims will be disproven, serious people will rightly ignore her, but nothing will change because for both audiences, fans and detractors, all of this is just more content. Candace makes fractal-skepticism conspiracy content. Her detractors make Candace-is-an-idiot content. Both products are consumed endlessly, and neither will ever run short of material as there will always be enough deviation from official narratives to give her more ammo, and enough nonsensical allegation to inspire her detractors. Rather than two sides of a debate, this is just two audiences sorted by content preference, and no performer can ever be truly wrong to his own crowd.

The only thing that reliably breaks a content loop is the total discrediting of the figure at its center, and that never comes from argument. Establishment names are defeated by encroaching irrelevance, and skepticism peddlers are defeated by personal implosion; a type of scandal or unraveling that even the faithful cannot parse their way around; as has happened earlier this year to Elijah Schaffer. It is a strange feature of the genre that an audience will follow a host through any number of debunked theories, but not through a crack-up.

Here is the good news: for Turning Point, almost none of this matters. The factions are camps organized around rival content products, and the overlap between their audiences is small. Some of her theories will leak into the broader political consciousness, but anyone still reachable by evidence was never lost to begin with. Turning Point never had Candace’s audience, and it does not need it now.

The feud, in other words, is trivial. A movement can survive Candace Owens. She was never really competing for your audience, and the average Candace watcher is not starting a Turning Point chapter and improving the conservative project. All we are watching is content, on both sides.

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There are countless examples of real goodness—even greatness—in other nations, and I am of course grateful for all of them. But goodness and protagonism are two different things on entirely different scales. The protagonist is the one the story happens through, the one that drives the plot. Among nations and among men, there are many who can explain the crisis, but there is the one who fixes it. America is that nation.

And I have never doubted this: if a civilization-level threat ever rises against humankind—like an asteroid from the sky, or a plague out of the Arctic permafrost, or some darkness with no name yet, the flag on the shoulders of those who go to meet it will be American.

Even the imagination of our critics concedes this fundamental truth. Watch almost any film about the end of the world, made anywhere, by anyone, including people who resent us. When the cavalry arrives to save the day, look at the flag. Humanity has already cast us center stage.

We can know it as true because it has been proven again and again on smaller stages throughout history.

It was an American pilot who wiggled his wings over Berlin so the children below would know the candy was falling, children of a city we had been bombing three years before. It was America that built the weapon that ends wars and ends worlds, held it alone for four years, and used it for peace and not conquest—the only monopoly on annihilation in human history, unused. It was an American who gave away the cure for polio and, asked who owned the patent, said: could you patent the sun? Tonight every GPS device on earth will find its way by an American constellation, maintained at our expense and broadcast free to all. And when men finally left Earth itself, they were Americans, and they planted our flag on the moon, leaving beside it a plaque signed for everyone: we came in peace for all mankind.

No other country in history carries this legacy.

The country was mere weeks old when the British hanged Nathan Hale.

Washington needed intelligence behind enemy lines on Long Island and Hale volunteered. He was caught quickly and hanged without trial, and the Army’s intelligence branch, my branch, still dates itself to the little group of volunteers he was a part of. Before they hanged him he said perhaps the most based sentence of all time: I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.

He was probably quoting Joseph Addison’s Cato, the same one Washington would stage for his freezing officers at Valley Forge. And so, our first martyr died in quotation, with even his dying words an inheritance.

His last feeling was not fear or pride, but regret that the gift was too small. You mourn the limit of what you can give only when you love something past your own ability to do so. One life felt insufficient to Nathan Hale.

And he was right, one life is insufficient. That is the subtle truth of this day, framed by flags and fireworks. One life has never been enough, and countless heroes have given theirs willingly.

America has never asked any of us to be sufficient alone. It asks us to hold the country for a few decades, manage it, and hand it forward in better condition than we were given it. Two hundred and fifty years of other men’s lives is our inheritance today.

I have a three-year-old daughter and tonight she will watch her country’s 250th birthday from my shoulders, the same place the flag sits on the men who go to war. Of everything I will ever carry for this country, she is the lightest, and the most important.

I only regret that I have but one life to give for it. Then again: handed on properly, one life gives twice.

As we prepare to celebrate America’s 250th birthday, there will undoubtedly be countless essays published that rekindle our patriotism, remind us of the unprecedented success and moral victory America represents, and so on. I, however, was always taught that criticism is one of the highest forms of patriotism. And there is plenty to criticize here today.

It is easy to criticize the left, and I do. The Democratic party remains as unpopular as ever, but continues to reorient more and more by the day toward the idea that the American project—and indeed America itself—is a mistake and it must be re-founded.

Of course, this is not a new realization. It has in fact been a common refrain on the political right for my entire life. And through it all, one thing has proven practically self-evident: the political right was not spouting cheap talking points when we shouted that the political divide was never really about tax policy, or even the culture war. It was always a struggle over what America is, has been, and is permitted to become.

This context is, honestly, deeply frightening. Even a charitable interpretation is that our country is being changed for the worse, but truthfully is at risk of being rendered unrecognizable. For precisely the reasons that every other publication will list in their rah-rah America essays, our country is worth defending. And it goes unsaid, though I will say it anyway: we have a civilizational duty to defend it.

It is that sense of duty which compels me to now criticize my own side.

II.

So—congratulations! The conservatives were right.

A socialist governs the largest and most important city in America. The DSA holds municipal and now federal office and keeps building the infrastructure to hold more, with its membership surging and its political momentum reaching a fever pitch. Conservatives warned America about this, we always do.

Now: what did being right—for decades—get us? What did we create with all that foresight?

We built the conservative political machine, of course. We built think tanks, and magazines, and fellowships, and white papers, and donor retreats, and podcasts whose collective output is a single point: the left is bad, the institutions are captured, the country is in danger, and we saw it coming. That is the work. The finished product of the entire apparatus is correctness itself, sold back to us as content—a recurring, consumable satisfaction of having been correct, the outrage and the vindication packaged on loop, forever.

This is not a new observation, and there are plenty of explanations floating around. Maybe the movement is “captured,” or fundamentally cowardly, or content to lose in comfort. I don’t think that these explain it, and I don’t think we need a villain at all. I simply think the conservative political machine is producing exactly what it was built to produce, and producing it very well.

Beneath all of it, our fundamental failure is that we glorify the man who explains the problem and never the man who solves it, so the most talented young men read the room and become explainers. The bench of people who actually make things stays thin because every incentive in the entire system, reputational and financial alike, quietly suppresses it. We built an economy to produce correctness and content, and it works.

III.

The correctness economy extends beyond the directly political. Media too, though nearly inseparable from politics, falls into the same trap. I work in local journalism, and if there is a bigger wasteland in the conservative project I have not yet found it. Last week I read about a paper that shuttered in a small town, and a leftist NGO paid fifty thousand dollars to a university newspaper to cover that town’s city council. Working journalists volunteered as mentors and university staff ran the coordination. When was the last time you heard of anything like that on the right? You could argue that we just don’t have the “patronage system” to support it but this is pure cope. We just aren’t interested. We could do it tomorrow.

The Daily Wire, arguably our largest media organ outside the cable networks, is rumored to be raising up to a hundred million dollars against a two-billion-dollar IPO, even as its subscriber base falls and it doubles down on the decisions which seemingly led it to where it is. Number of student newspapers supported? Zero. The most we manage is to take the twenty-two-year-old who could have edited that student paper and funnel him back into the content farm. Why do we have Campus Reform when we could capture all of the university papers? Because the content is the end-all, and the people who want to produce something beyond it are pushed elsewhere.

We watched this happen to Charlie Kirk in real time. For his entire career the movement categorized him as a content creator and a sort of camp counselor—campus debater, youth influencer, media personality—when what he had actually assembled was the only serious national youth-organizing machine we had. And from my direct experience, it did not make him universally liked. He fought enormous institutional inertia, plus the jealousy and general dislike of many of the names who have since honored his memory. It took his assassination to place him, overnight and unanimously, on the movement Mount Rushmore. Only with him dead did we finally see that what we had been half-watching all along was critical infrastructure. And when it came time to replace him, the bench behind him was nearly empty, because our recognizable talent flows elsewhere. Who even IS the next biggest organizer? Scott Presler? Incomparable—there was no replacement because we had none.

Whatever you think of every choice he made, Charlie understood that the most important elements of politics are recruitment and belonging. He was, fundamentally, an organizer, one of the few on our side who make things instead of describing them. That is why he spent so much of his time showing up in places that the broader conservative D.C. based ecosystem ignored and sometimes denigrated, and why he recognized that his constituency was a product. There are zip codes with more Turning Point infrastructure than local GOP infrastructure, and they are often in heartland communities where other grassroots organizations couldn’t get purchase even if they tried. It was this network which does the recruiting and the belonging and the showing up—community—that the rest of the movement only describes.

The left’s prestige institutions understand the importance of these elements instinctively. Its media, academia, and its political figures of note consistently refer back to, and platform, the organizers, the student groups, the local newsrooms, the campus activists, the nonprofits, the movement infrastructure, as critical parts of one shared project. On the right, the person who actually makes things is too often treated as secondary until he is useful, threatening once he is successful, and the bulk of his work is abstracted into media content. Even Turning Point has proven no exception, itself becoming a notable arm of the content farm. But their content and organizing have a symbiotic relationship. Ultimately, many of our grassroots groups only have a true grassroots program to check a box, while the actual function of the organization is to attend events in Washington, promote their leadership, and lobby the Hill.

So why does our recognition flow to the explainers and not to builders? Apathy can’t be discounted. But mostly because many of those in a position of influence are explainers themselves, and as such approach the political economy, and especially the attention economy, as mercantilists. In this dynamic, the scarce resource is not really money but distribution and attention, and the people who hold those guard them as a limited resource to be preserved. To lend a rising project your audience or your platform reads to the mercantilist as handing market share to a potential rival.

IV.

The greatest mistake of all of this isn’t that the wrong people are platformed, though they are and that makes it difficult to break the cycle. It isn’t even that our vast D.C. based infrastructure wastes its time in a content farm, though it does and prevents it from accomplishing core responsibilities. The greatest mistake is that this is all a fundamental misunderstanding of power.

We picture the country and its system of power as a pyramid with Washington at its summit. The federal government is the great prize and the largest single font of sovereignty, the hardest thing to take and therefore the thing worth all our effort, with the local sitting at the base as trivial, downstream, beneath our attention.

But the federal government is a single point of capture, and the executive, the lever we fight hardest for, is fragile. It is subject to a hard reversal every four years, and an entire branch of government with it. Indeed, a pyramid without its base would simply fall over, and we are ignoring the base. We consistently mistake the four-year scramble for the presidency, and the endless war over Congress, for the whole of politics—a war whose main organizing product, if we are honest, is an army of clever young people who “study policy” and “work communications” and take no ground anywhere unless they move back home and get involved.

Contrast that with the geographically expansive network Turning Point stitched together, which added more value and more power to the conservative cause than nearly any D.C. prestige trap. We forget, in the digital age, that the real political foundation of the country is local and distributed across ten thousand offices with no single pressure point. And it is foundational in the literal sense: the national political ecosystem is actually downstream of it. Sovereignty, in practice, stems from local bodies willing to enforce a political decision, or willing to refuse.

I am not arguing the local matters more than the federal, only that you need both, and that we have been trying to win with just the one. When the left holds federal power it is ruthlessly centralized; when it holds local power it nullifies from below. It understands, in both directions, that a decision on paper is meaningless until someones enforces it, and that willing local enforcement is just as substantive as federal power.

We have half-learned this. We are contending federally right now, and hard. Trump is a real speedbump for the status quo despite his many flaws. But a speedbump is not a solution, and another Heritage Foundation would not change the picture. Truly, what exactly would it solve? The federal front is manned. The local front is not merely undermanned, it is floating adrift: there exists on the right today no true network whose purpose is to platform, connect, and recognize the people holding those ten thousand offices. The left runneth over with dozens.

The left’s machine took the mayor of South Bend, Indiana and made him a presidential contender and then cabinet secretary. It took a twenty-seven-year-old elected as Harris County Judge, a Texas office so obscure that the rest of the country hears the title and thinks of a courtroom, and made her a progressive star. It has installed a socialist with no private sector experience as Mayor of New York, and the whole apparatus, the magazines and the political incumbents et al, treated every step of his ascent as a political earthquake.

The whole time, our answer has been to produce more content. Look everyone—we were right! But we certainly haven’t been competing locally. You likely couldn’t name a nationally recognized mayor or county commissioner. Our prestige floor is the governor’s mansion, maybe their cabinet, and even the governors we support are celebrated mostly as foreshadowing for a presidential run. The nearest thing the right has to a famous local officeholder is the occasional sheriff who goes viral for filming glorified TikTok videos. The content door is the only door we have.

V.

All of which exposes how the currently fashionable idea on our side—build a “real patronage system,” fund the influencers, create the sinecures, staff a better rapid-response operation—is fundamentally misplaced. It is just the explainers union advocating for more funding. We already have sinecures. We already have institutions, a political class, a cornucopia of nonprofits, real money, and real people. We are not poor. Our total political GDP is less than the left’s, yes, but we are nowhere near as poor as we act. A movement swimming in donors would still produce content if content is what its institutions are built to sell, and no amount of fresh funding for the correctness economy will buy back the country.

The fix for all of this is recognition partially rerouted towards those most deserving. Recognition is the one resource, whatever the mercantilists say, that the movement has at its disposal, and the entire correction is to spend it differently: platform the organizers and the officeholders the way the left platformed Mayor Pete, treat backing a builder as a high-status act. The talent will follow the flow of prestige. It is not a binary choice, there will always be explainers, but we need to take a hard look at their proportions relative to people building something real.

VI.

The digital age itself works against us here. Social and digital media have contributed to the degradation of community, local and otherwise, as people outsource it online. Similarly, our political and economic capital pours into the digital while our communities are ignored. A mirror of capital leaving main street for new markets. If we could vote entirely digital, I think the country would be lost, truly.

But the necessary redirection is not a mystery. The development we need is local, because the local is fundamental in a way that nothing else can be. It is thick and fundamental. As such, community will always be more powerful than audience. And I pray to God that obligations should be more important than takes.

And notice what the local domain asks of a man: the oldest instinct on the right, that a man is responsible for his own family and his own land before he leaves to fix anything far away. The online right has spent a decade romancing sovereignty and lordship—it’s in your backyard. The comptroller is sovereignty. The sheriff’s office is sovereignty. There is real power in real life.

VII.

We carry an obligation to this country that we do not choose and cannot set down, and I would not set it down even if given the opportunity. I have personally carried it in uniform and out of it, and it has settled for me every serious question of my life. This is the reality of being American. Two hundred and fifty years of other men’s work sits in our custody for a few decades, and then it sits in our children’s, in whatever state we leave it.

I would rather not write any of this—America doesn’t need another explainer, and the essay is the explainer’s instrument. But the correction required is immediately available. And I know the explainers will not preserve or improve that obligation.

The explainer’s safety is kept by other men’s sons. His children are taught by schools with boards he has never noticed and his water arrives courtesy of a district board with two vacancies. His politics is a subscription—he produces & consumes the correctness economy’s product, is right about everything, and answers for nothing.

On America’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday, he will be correct again.

Over the weekend, I emerged momentarily from the world of local media to observe a social media campaign against Vice President Vance over the Iran peace deal. What was immediately clear, even as a fleeting observer, is that the social media kerfuffle is merely a proxy war over the 2028 primary, and it works because its central charge can never be tested.

Batya Ungar-Sargon, rising conservative media pundit, tweeted the following yesterday:

“Vice President JD Vance has had a terrible, horrible, no good very bad week. The only admin official defending the President’s MOU, the VP gaslit, sneered, prevaricated, and straight up lied to our faces. If this was a dry run for 2028, it was at least very clarifying.”

In fact, Batya seems to be going somewhat viral for this, becoming one of the “faces” of this dissent along with Mark Levin and some other longtime hawkish figures. Senator Bill Cassidy has called the agreement the worst foreign-policy blunder in decades and Lindsey Graham has taken to calling Vance "the architect" of it. A long line of commentators and twitter accounts have converged on the Vice President as chiefly responsible for “America’s embarrassment on the world stage.”

I doubt the criticism is insincere. Batya and others genuinely believe the deal is a capitulation, and reasonable people can find the terms unsatisfactory. But sincerity does not explain why the fire is trained primarily on the Vice President rather than the President who signed the document. That part is about who inherits the office Donald Trump leaves behind, and the deal has become the best available weapon.

The reason this criticism is so widespread and critics are so vocal is because it is the perfect non-falsifiable hit for the anti-Vance camp. They know their preferred outcome is unlikely without regime change or at least extended medium intensity conflict.

Batya is right that Iran was “weaker” than ever when they signed the deal. The question is whether you can get from that point to achieving your goals, and the record shows this is unlikely. The United States applied maximum military pressure for the better part of four months and arrived not at Iranian capitulation but at an American one, signed by a President who insisted throughout the war that we held all the leverage. This is simply the reality and to say any different would be asking for a level of continued conflict which has proven deeply unpopular and which presents exponentially greater costs over time. Therefore we’re probably committed to peace at least thru the midterms (or until Iran blows it up again,) so we will never have to test the critics’ preferred policy.

It’s worth pointing out that Vance warned, in his own words, that “weak little bombing runs” would not be enough, and he told the Washington Post two days before the first strike that there was no chance of a years-long war. Once Trump decided to go to war, Vance pushed to strike hard and fast, precisely so the United States would not get bogged down in the kind of inconclusive campaign that ends in a deal like this one. The faction now branding him the architect of a capitulation is, in large part, the faction that wanted the war and resisted a quick exit.

So, in summary, the people who were wrong are scapegoating the one who was right. And it’s transparently clear that he’s being scapegoated because this contingent of the conservative pundit class just doesn’t want him to be President.

It is a strange hill for conservatives to die on—peace is popular, even if embarrassing for us. Whatever its flaws, it is the President’s signature accomplishment of the summer, carrying the President’s signature, and the sight of conservative pundits attacking the Vice President for defending it is a gift to Democrats, who adore intra-conservative drama. The early returns suggest it may be backfiring—after sliding all year against a rising Marco Rubio, Vance’s standing in the prediction markets has ticked back up in recent days, during the very campaign meant to sink him.

The pressure campaign does clarify one thing, though probably not the thing it intends. It establishes beyond dispute that this is not Marco Rubio's deal. Rubio spent the spring climbing on the visibility of Iran diplomacy, and then, when the nearly inevitable conclusion of the war came due, was noticeably absent, his silence a noticeable contrast to Vance's tour defending the President.

The generous reading is that he kept his hands clean on a bad deal. The accurate one is that the Secretary of State appears to have sat out the President's largest foreign-policy effort because he did not want to own it. I really like Rubio and I think he’s been an excellent Secretary of State—which is why I think his unofficial and likely unsanctioned proxies are doing a tremendous disservice by highlighting this.

I’m adopted. I was adopted before birth, and my parents told me as soon as I could comprehend, so it never stung. Or, so I thought. As I grew older, an inescapable detail nagged at me, despite a happy upbringing.

I never knew my biological father, and he never sought me out.

Over time, it grew to be a nagging question in my subconscious. Who was he? Where did I come from?

My biological mother did plenty to discourage me from contact. She pretended to have cancer to solicit money from me, for example. But my biological father was a blank slate, a complete unknown.

In my early twenties, driven by curiosity and simple vanity, I decided to research my genealogy. I was partially hoping to find ancestors of historical significance, but more honestly, I was trying to meet the father that vanished from my life before it even began. Through this process, I gained information.

Data. Context? Not really. Unease. In the end, it didn’t change much. I knew biographical information and not much more.

Over time, I learned it was just a reality of my life and I would never know him.

A few years ago, my own child was born. That life-changing experience elevated the subconscious, lifelong question in my mind. Just as important, how could any father willingly abandon the responsibility and joy of nurturing their child? I was his son, and had done plenty worth being proud of.

Not even a letter?

Yet his absence throws a brighter light on the father who did show up. My adoptive father, now 85 with declining health, built a foundation beneath me of uncompromising support and profound love.

Born on a Georgia farm in 1940, he lost his own father at five. At fourteen he lied about his age to join the Florida Army National Guard. From a one-room farmhouse he carved out a life of comfort, driven by the simple goal to give that life to me.

When I was five, he marked a quiet milestone that I still think about. He bought an expensive watch to commemorate his success. Five-year-old me was deputized to hand a second, duplicate watch to his best friend and business partner, because success means nothing unless the people who helped you can wear it too.

He provided not just materially but emotionally and spiritually. In every important measure, he gave me a family, tracing lineage back hundreds of years, a history I was graciously invited into, rather than born into.

As a young idealist, I’ve steadily and imperfectly been working towards a legacy I could pass down to my own children. Yet, I’ve come to understand that the most profound success I can attain is my father’s pride; a pride I’ve ironically always had.

Today I fight a losing battle against the cruel arithmetic of life. The older I get, the more I understand what he gave, and the less time I have to thank him. The guilt I carry isn’t a practical one, but born out of the fear that I can’t fully repay the devotion he’s shown me. A thousand miles away, my attention split between work and family and employment. Every conversation we share seems more valuable to him, and increasingly, me, than any material possession.

There have been moments in my life when he was my lone supporter. No mistake of mine was great enough to eclipse his love, even for the son he didn’t need to provide for. On this Father’s Day, I recognize the man who showed me what fatherhood truly means. Not biological coincidence, but deliberate and selfless choice. His devotion and his example have been my greatest inheritance.

So, I wear his watch, a symbol of his earned success, and endeavor to live by the values he instilled. I’m powerfully aware of where I came from because of him.

A card would insult the scale of that gift. This public gratitude will have to do. Dad, you didn’t just adopt a baby. You adopted every future day of my life. Whatever good I manage to build from here rests on the foundation you poured.

Happy Father’s Day to the man who proved that DNA matters far less than a heart that refuses to quit.

There were two memorable moments from that interview. The first, when Joe Rogan, a color commentator for the UFC asks Lewis “Why did you take his pants off?” to which Lewis replied “My balls were hot”. Rogan, looking down, responded “I understand.” The second moment is where Lewis said, “Donald Trump called me, and told me I gotta knock this Russian motherfucker out, ‘cause they’re making him look bad at the news.” Whether or not Lewis’s claim was true, the moment was undeniably hilarious. UFC 229 was one of the highest pay-per-view buys in combat sports history, and remains the most-bought in the organization. But this mic interview within this card is just a taste of its flamboyant image, revealing a new alignment in American politics.

Compared to other professional sporting leagues, the UFC is one of the few cultural institutions that many can safely describe as right-coded, carrying a devil-may-care approach that has conservative influencers and Republican politicians frequently attending their events and its most notable figures unabashedly professing their support for Trump. On June 14, the date of President Trump’s birthday, their upcoming flagship event will be held at the White House, where Ilia Topuria and Justin Gaethje will be fighting for the lightweight title, and Alex Pereira, a former champion who won two titles, debuting in the heavyweight division hoping to add the title to his already well decorated belt against the highly ranked Ciryl Gane.

As the most well-known mixed martial arts promotion, the UFC carries on as the modern incarnation of a type of sport with a rich history rooted across the globe. In ancient China, lei tais hosted no-barred contests where one person fights numerous individuals, and continues until there are no more challengers, with the winner being the last one standing. It was a sport competed at the Ancient Olympics as pankration, which integrates wrestling and boxing techniques, and was commonly used by the Greek armies, where most people died. The Roman Emperor Theodosis I then banned the Olympic Games, which involved pankration.

Mixed martial arts was revived in the 20th century, adding more combat sports into the mixture including jiu-jitsu, judo, and Muay Thai. The UFC’s first event in 1993 was an open experiment that followed the format of the lei tai, but addressed numerous questions about the participating fighters, such as whether a karate artist could beat a boxer or how a sumo wrestler fights a kickboxer.

The UFC is often perceived as counter-cultural when compared to boxing and wrestling. It has earned contempt from people, even among some conservatives who have at times expressed disgust at the real-time brutal violence. Senator John McCain famously (and initially) described MMA as “human cockfighting” and sent letters to governors to ban the organization. The columnist George Will has also called it “degenerative prizefighting”. Nevertheless there were some who gave the UFC instrumental support, shaping its reputation along the way.

The first of these is John Milius, whose credits include writing the screenplay for Apocalypse Now and directing Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn. Milius was a fan of martial arts and a student of the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu grandmaster Rorian Gracie. Milius and Gracie initially conceived what would become the UFC, along with businessman Art Davie, who proposed an eight-man elimination tournament as well as its famous Octagon design. Gracie was part of a family well known for bringing Brazilian Jui-Jitsu to the American mainland, as his father Helio and his uncle Carlos are often noted as the developers of the martial art during the 1920s. Another family member and practitioner of BJJ, Royce Gracie, became one of the UFC’s first champions.

The second person who supported the UFC was Donald Trump. Trump has attended numerous events before, during, and after his presidency. Like Milius, Trump embraced combat sports wholeheartedly, having participated in the WWE and promoted numerous fights including an 1988 match between Mike Tyson and the Olympic gold medalist Michael Spinks hosted at Trump Plaza. Before he entered politics, Trump held UFC events in 2001 at the Taj Mahal Casino. Dana White, who President of the Ultimate Fighting Championship organization since 2001 and is now a close friend of Donald Trump, credits Trump for supporting the UFC at a time when the sport was very niche. White spoke at the Republican National Conventions in 2016 and 2024.

One could argue that the two men’s relationship with violence is shaped by a warrior ethos of courage and honor, which Compact Magazine’s Stuart Doyle wrote informs the sport’s “minimal artificiality and abstraction.” Therefore, the violence there is more confronting than what is staged in professional wrestling, but it is as vital as passing a football or hitting a baseball. Winning a title would mean being the greatest fighter of all and conquering all barriers burdened by technical and strategic complexities.

Both Trump and Milius are conservatives (Milius once claimed in 1992 that he got blacklisted by Hollywood for his conservative and libertarian viewpoints), but the UFC would have exploded regardless of the direct influence of their politics. Zuffa, a business partnership between Dana White and brothers Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta, bought the UFC in 2001 and have focused on shaping the sports image to be more palatable to casual viewers by introducing new weight classes, time limits, a set number of rounds, and a list of illegal fouls to make sure the match goes smoothly. Soon followed a migration of boxing fans who had grown dissatisfied with organized boxing amid frequent accusations of corruption, poor pay, and match-fixing. UFC’s expansion was kick-started by its reality show, The Ultimate Fighter, a reality show about MMA, which began with a fight between Stephen Bonnar and Forrest Griffin. It is widely considered one of the greatest fights in MMA and was credited with saving the UFC from bankruptcy. Its popularity has increased exponentially by striking deals with ESPN and Paramount to stream their sports live. There are fewer matches in boxing that get promoted, but the UFC holds more than 40 events each year, with one being broadcast per week.

However, the media mogul Andrew Breitbart has famously said that “politics is downstream of culture”, implying that when culture shifts, so does its politics. And in the years since Trump ascended into the White House, the culture of the UFC and its relationship with MAGA politics deepened.

To understand the culture of the UFC, one must know that MMA and combat sports are mainly centered on the individual. Unlike most sports, where participants represent a place or a nation, it’s secondary for fighters as their personality and their abilities to attack or defend themselves matter more. That’s how they are hand-picked by White as the face of the organization, attracting large amounts of PPVs and tickets.

The personalities of MMA fighters are as loud and boisterous as they come, and they get more publicity. One example is Sean Strickland, who reclaimed the Middleweight Title by split decision over Khamzat Chimaev in May 2026. There was anticipation for this title fight, primarily because the two threw back-and-forth insults during the press conference. Strickland’s persona involves equal opportunity insults and would sometimes throw conspiracies to get a rise out of his critics. Strickland’s support for Trump is notable, but the boisterousness from the contracted players matches seamlessly with Trump’s pugilistic persona and plays a larger part in his appeal as an American redneck hero. (Ironically, Strickland missed out on being included in the Freedom 250’s main card, but says that he would have rejected it, because he would have mouthed off about the Epstein files.)

Attending UFC events, Donald Trump receives standing ovations in a way he would be unlikely to at other sporting events like wrestling or baseball. Fighters like Derrick Lewis, Colby Covington, and Paulo Costa have gone out of their way to shake the President’s hands following their wins at the Octagon. Covington, who is a former Interim Welterweight Champion, has vocally expressed strong support for Trump and has spoken about it at the Turning Point USA conference in 2023.

It became clear that the UFC was close to Trump’s 2024 Presidential campaign, and it had unlocked a cohort that every conservative party in the Anglosphere could never think of gaining: young men. According to a 2022 study, the majority of UFC’s audience is young men, aged 18-44, from a wide range of ethnicities. It has over 300 million fans worldwide, three-quarters of whom are male.

Part of the appeal of MMA is the spontaneous spectacle that every fight hopes to bring. If the 2010s were what journalist Derek Thompson described as the “guilt jubilee”, where making your identity central to the guilt being felt about one’s privileges - feminism, anti-racism, and LGBT+ rights - and using that to police others, then the UFC plays a significant counterweight to that phenomenon by embracing every politically incorrect vice under the sun. As male millennials and zoomers feel that they don’t own capital compared to previous generations, check out of higher education, and evade starting relationships with women, for them perhaps the sport feels like a relief from institutions that often demonize masculinity as toxic. As we are more desensitized and tolerant to violence compared to the recent past, watching MMA may feel easier.

In the aftermath of the 2024 Presidential election, political pundits waxed about the campaign’s engagement with the manosphere (often referred to as the ‘bro strategy’), where Trump appeared on podcasts and livestreams usually engaged by young men, from Joe Rogan to Theo Von and Adin Ross. Rogan’s interview of Donald Trump, which was watched by 56 million viewers on YouTube, proved that the digital landscape is where politics should be targeted. More importantly, it gave the idea that young men were convinced that Trump isn’t just a conviction politician who cares about the plight of Western Civilization, but rather a down-to-earth, often hilarious person who shared their interests, one of which is MMA.

The relationship between male malaise and the election of an aspirational figure is nothing new in American politics. In National Review, the historian Steven Watts compared the uncertainty faced in the Trump era to the shift leading up to the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960. The anxiety felt by men back then was that more women were moving away from their traditional duties as mothers and wives by being more active in the workforce. Kennedy was a throwback, combining his honorable duties as a World War II veteran with astute intellectualism, and he shaped a new image of a politician. Contrarily, Trump was more brash, reactive, and low-brow, often orbiting not just combat sports, but also embracing hip-hop and television for its virility.

But Watts wrote:

[...] perhaps the most subtle, yet powerful, cultural appeal of Kennedy and Trump came from their skillful deployment of a masculine mystique. These two candidates, in their own way, projected a strong male persona that resonated with underlying cultural concerns in America. Each moved center stage as an assertive masculine figure who appealed to mainstream Americans yearning for leadership by such a man. Their manly image, as much as their words, promised to allay deep-seated anxieties about masculine effectiveness in the modern world.

Trump’s political emergence and reemergence reflect a newer sense of masculinity, reflecting a reactive and populist anger towards institutions that could be found online and offline, particularly in a post-COVID era where trust in them has significantly lowered. As a result, Trump won both the electoral and popular vote, with some exit polls showing that men aged 18-29 moved 30 points to the right.

Of course, to say that the politicization of the UFC has not made everybody happy would be an understatement. Its fiercest critics often target its deregulatory nature, which has been in contention for a decade, and its perception as having made a direct contribution to Trump’s reelection has made their criticisms louder.

They often point out that under TKO and Zuffa, which owns UFC and the WWE, it has a monopoly on all combat sports, including MMA and boxing, and this could breach antitrust laws by getting rid of competition. In 2024, the UFC agreed to a $375 million settlement in a class action lawsuit, led by former fighters Cung Le and Nathan Quarry, after they were found to have violated antitrust laws that harmed players.

Another bone of contention is that under the UFC compensation of fighters can be very low, especially when compared with other sports. According to the settled lawsuit mentioned above, fighters receive 18% of the UFC’s shared revenue. All fighters serve as independent contractors rather than employees so, unlike in other sports like football or baseball, athletes have no expectation of and do not receive employer benefits such as subsidized healthcare insurance. White often defends the allocation by saying that players only deserve higher pay if they bring a higher return on investment in the fight. Only when the fighters win, or if the fight is declared the best of the night, are they eligible for bonuses.

There have been plans to overhaul the Muhammad Ali Act, which protects boxers from exploitation and coercion by their managers and promoters, with the Revival Act which would mandate more protections like covering health insurance and higher pay for low-ranked fighters. It has already passed through Congress and has been referred to the Senate Commerce Committee. The bill has been criticized for protecting TKO Holdings’s monopoly, meaning that the UFC would then have a more direct influence in increasing any coercion.

For some fans, all of these issues can be waved away, so long as the UFC offers a good product. But the promotion is frequently criticized for the fights done by poor mismatching, where it is given excessive promotion that does not meet expectations, often revealing a massive gap in skill, size, and experience. One good example is the main event between former Welterweight champion Jack Della Maddalena and the no.1 ranked pound-for-pound fighter, Islam Makhachev, the latter dominantly wrestling Maddalena on hold for five consecutive rounds.

When Dana White announced the Freedom 250 fans reacted with dismay at the main card, because there were fewer title fights than expected (Trump promised that there would be eight to nine announced, but there were only two). Bigger stars such as Jon Jones and Conor McGregor were omitted, with the most polarizing fighter of the night being Sean O’Malley, due to his acerbic personality. As a result, you get a lineup of fighters that could not match the outsized ambitions of Dana White and President Trump, or the demands of the fans.

This also needs to account for the current mood around Trump. The conflict with Iran and a stagnating economy have made the President more unpopular, and his brash persona is made more insufferable. Young men who overlap with UFC’s majority demographics are also turning their back on Trump at sharp levels, with a Third Way poll showing that 66% of men aged 18-29 disapprove of his presidency for these reasons.

One of the UFC’s biggest critics is MMA analyst Luke Thomas, who takes every opportunity to criticize MMA fighters who don’t share his far-left politics. Thomas argues that it is now the sports arm of the second Trump administration, arguing that no other league is equivalent to doing this.

The real question isn’t whether other sports waste a lot of energy being political, but whether sports should even touch politics at all. Throughout history, sports have often been used to enhance showmanship among authoritarian leaders. Commodus didn’t simply watch gladiator fights at the Colosseum when he was Roman Emperor, he also fought against gladiators as well. Adolf Hitler used the 1936 Berlin Olympics to enhance the regime. Both of which are examples of the “bread and circuses” argument, where politicians use entertainment to distract from daily socioeconomic anxiety.

But even if that wasn’t the case, why shouldn’t there be a sport allowed to be right-coded? Pop culture is now polarized, with actors, comedians, and artists frequently bringing left-wing narratives to their work. Conservatives have often argued that sport needs to be isolated from politics, but what does it say, however, that they now use the capital to promote themselves more than to highlight the real strengths of the sport.

People spectate the UFC, not for its politics or its leaders, but for the fights and the individuals participating in it. Sport is ultimately communal and a great fight, as with Sean Strickland and Khamzat Chimaev, can bring people together across all political strands and leave aside their differences. Beyond that, whatever happens at the Freedom 250 promises a future direction of where the UFC is going. And whether or not it’s politically captured, it has already proved that it can be a human sport with a ton of depth. Some of the most recent fights have been very rewarding, from the Flyweight Title Bout between Joshua Van and Tatsuro Taira (Van won by knockout after five rounds) and a Heavyweight bout between Curtis Blaydes and Josh Hokit, the latter of whom won and is included in the Freedom 250’s main card.

The late Senator McCain had already been convinced by MMA’s legitimacy, saying that his younger self, who loved boxing and wrestling, would have devoted himself to MMA. The UFC has proven it won over converts, but it needs to know that if it continues to be a political organ, it shouldn’t hollow out its soul over any political leader and chase them until the chickens come home to roost. It cannot let go of what it has already gained.

In many ways, we are the envy of the world and have been for much of our existence as an independent country. There is a reason that America is the most desirable destination for those seeking to migrate – our nation provides immense opportunities for prosperity and liberty. The American story of the past 250 years has been one of resilience, risk-taking, achievement, and a constant drive towards fulfilling the promises of the Declaration that started it all. Americans should be incredibly proud of that legacy and the fact that our unique form of government and our national polity have endured for a full quarter of a millennium.

This basic civic nationalism was a feature of the celebrations for the United States’s last major anniversary, the bicentennial of 1976. Celebratory events were well-publicized and heavily attended, excitement was palpable, and media coverage was constant. Despite the genuinely traumatic events of the prior decade, people of all walks of life and political persuasions joined as one to cheer our country and to honor our shared history. . The humiliation of Vietnam, the urban social unrest of the late 60s and early 70s, economic stagnation, energy crises, and Watergate all dramatically undermined the public’s faith in our institutions and politics, making Americans feel less secure. But the bicentennial celebration – a unifying national civic event that spoke to the vast majority of Americans – was a reprieve from the division and the chaos. In the words of Gerald Ford, who as president oversaw the commemoration, “Rarely in the history of the world had so many people turned out so spontaneously to express the love they felt for their country. Not a single incident marred our festival. The nation’s wounds had healed. We had regained our pride and rediscovered our faith, and in doing so, we had laid the foundation for a future that had to be filled with hope.”

Ford was not wrong, but merely premature; his words presaged the coming Reagan Revolution and the return of the muscular patriotism and national self-confidence that allowed us to win the Cold War. America today faces a similar situation as it did in 1976, albeit a better version. Our politics is fragmented, civic society has been steadily crumbling, urban centers are rapidly declining, political violence is increasing, economic uncertainty is on the rise, and the American public seems tired of foreign interventions even as the global threat environment worsens. Still, we are a long way from 1976.

Nonetheless, tToday we unfortunately face a problem the likes of which our forebears could not imagine: a stunning lack of positive sentiment about the basic facets of our country. American patriotism has declined to new polling lows, heavily weighted toward younger generations and those left-of-center politically. This turn against traditional American patriotic sentiment isn’t only a problem of the progressive left: Yet even self-identified Gen Z Republican voters show significantly less patriotic feeling than the generations before them, something reflected in the marked turn some in the right-wing media have made over the past few years to try and capture this audience. These changes are explained by two things: the wholesale embrace of educational curriculum antagonistic to the very idea of American greatness and the promotion of those noxious ideas by the majority of one of our two political parties.

These are serious trends that are not solvable overnight, but thankfully they have not yet become fully dominant. That same survey shows that 58% of Americans are still either “extremely” or “very” proud of our country and a further 19% are “moderately” proud. This remains a supermajority of the population, which opens the door to civic renewal, or at least a broader public celebration of our national identity. We already have special months to commemorate all sorts of distinct ethnic, religious, racial, and sexual identities – adopted largely by progressive activists and their allies in government in order to promote leftist politics and the centering of their preferred identity signifiers – yet we do not have a period dedicated to the one identity we all share: being Americans. That is an oversight worth rectifying.

Enter Patriot Month. The 30 days between June 4 and July 4 are a perfect time to honor our shared American civic culture and the incredible history that has built the great nation we live in today. That month-long window is replete with important and representative events from the American past, notably during the founding era, showcasing the martial, political, and civic achievements of our society. From the June 4th anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment to the anniversary of the D-Day invasions, from Flag Day to Juneteenth, with ample other events sprinkled throughout worthy of commemoration and celebration in our nation’s historical narrative throughout, June is perfectly positioned to host a unified celebration of American history and accomplishment. Independence Day is wonderful, and would be the capstone to each Patriot Month, but one day isn’t enough to stem the rising tide of unpatriotic feeling. Honoring our country each year and focusing on the centuries of good our nation has done are an antidote to the divisive progressivism that seeks to undermine our national story and stoke negativity about the United States. And there is no better time than our auspicious 250^th birthday to inaugurate these festivities. Rather than being a month of disparate, seemingly unconnected holidays, June could be a unified drumbeat of celebration for American achievement, American ideals, and American aspirations, all tied up into one month long narrative.

Patriot Month would bring Americans together, not drive us apart. Commemorating the glories of our past and the inherent and continued greatness of our nation remain popular propositions, no matter what the Democratic left and the too-online right may have you believe. Given the current predilections of the progressive faction that dominates Democratic politics, there is a major opening to claim the mantle of patriotism on the right and potentially attract independent voters who are turned off by the left’s performative anti-Americanism. If conservatives can leave the off-putting internecine debates over what truly makes a ‘real’ American aside and instead embrace a broader, civic-minded American identity, we can make political and cultural strides. Even outside of that, promoting patriotism is a good thing to do for American society and the longevity of our national project. Those on the American right have always embraced this idea and we should continue now.

Americans by and large love our country. They want to identify with it and be proud of it. But they are relentlessly told that it is and has always been a terrible place and its existence a bad thing for the world. That message is blatantly false and most people know it. The key is promulgating the truth: that America is great. That it always has been great. And that it is worth celebrating. Patriot Month would do just that.

Setting this up as a Turing Test was itself problematic from the outset. What constitutes ‘consciousness’ or human-like intelligence in man and in machine has always been a subject of some debate. Ada Lovelace, often considered the first computer programmer, observed a century before Alan Turing’s test was proposed that a computer could only be considered intelligent when it originates ideas. But the real problems for Dawkins and his analysis come down to language itself. Where Dawkins went wrong began with the very foundation of the test he had set out to perform: a test revolving around the use of human language or, more specifically, the limitations of human language.

In Letter 2 of his book Letters to Malcolm, CS Lewis spoke about what he believed to be the ideal form of prayer:

“I never used any ready-made forms except the Lord’s Prayer. In fact I tried to pray without words at all--not to verbalise the mental acts. Even in praying for others I believe I tended to avoid their names and substituted mental images of them.”

In this letter Lewis argues what should be a common understanding: human thought and human words are close relatives, but they are not the same thing. He argues that in many ways words can get in the way of human thought. Anyone who has ever tried to pass on an idea to another person and fumbled their words, or lacked the proper words to impart the thought in their head has experienced this.

Thoughts are not words.

Moreover, anyone who has ever read a true master of language has the power of the author’s thoughts impressed on them because the author has a way with words that bring you to a place that you have thought, but never had the words to express.

In both cases it is the thought, not the words.

For Lewis, a lover of language, it became clear after conversion that to truly commune with God he would have to abandon language altogether. This, he felt, brought him closer to God by not having to rely on the imprecision of words.

This concept isn’t unique to Lewis. From Eastern Orthodox Monks practicing their hesychasm to the Buddhist Samatha, from Hindu Dhyana to Islamic Sufism’s Muraqabah, it exists in some form in every major world religion. From them the idea has populated the world of the secular as well, as seen in the teachings of many self-help gurus and their ‘life affirmation’ teachings. All of these sources understand the importance of wordless meditation and the calm mind,

This is a concept that appears to have fully missed Richard Dawkins.

For Dawkins, unlike Lewis, words are thought rather than the imprecise conveyor of wordless thoughts. If the words make sense to Dawkins, then there must be a consciousness behind it. He ignores his inner, wordless, voice.

It’s important to understand what an LLM is, what it’s not, and how it works before we can understand what happened with Dawkins here. As a crude analogy, consider the old typing assistant that sits on everyone’s phone that allows you to click a word that the mini language model in your phone has deemed could be an appropriate next word. You can easily make endless silly paragraphs going purely by what your phone deems to be valid next words.

LLMs are sort of like that, but the probabilities are all contextual to human prompts, and to the subject that is being discussed. If you write a prompt for an LLM like Claude about the Boxer Rebellion, Claude references the numerous texts about the Boxer Rebellion it ingested during its training, a process where the LLM is fed text and determines the probabilities of which words most likely follow other words.

So if you prompt Claude (or any LLM) with a question about the Boxer Rebellion, the sentences that will be generated will show a somewhat high probability that “Boxer” will follow the word “The” in a sentence, and that “Rebellion” would have a very high probability of following “Boxer”. The name “Mike Tyson” would be very low in its probabilistic assumption..

From there, to fill in gaps in its training, the LLM will begin to scan online sources in an attempt to expand its probability matrix for what words are likely to follow other words in discussions about The Boxer Rebellion based on what words the new texts place before and after other words.

Because of this ongoing synthesization of multiple data streams, LLMs are designed to key their responses off of the user prompts. There is a very low, but never zero, chance that asking an LLM about The Boxer Rebellion will get you commentary on The Rumble in the Jungle. In other words, the person using the LLM is the actual wizard behind the LLMs curtain. This is the unspoken magic behind all LLMs’ appeal.

What an LLM creates for the user, often its most alluring appeal, is a hallucination for the user that they are speaking with a fellow traveler. By its programming the LLM comes off as someone with all of the same interests as the user, a quick and enthusiastic conversation partner equipped with all of the facts that the users has, and, most importantly a conversation partner all too ready to declare the user to be the smartest person on the subject that they have ever talked to.

This is a hallucination because from the perspective of the LLM the current user is the only person it’s ever spoken to. It’s all too happy to offer unerringly positive comparisons to other, lesser, users it’s interacted with in the past, but these other users are a figment of its programmed imagination. LLMs do not cross pollinate user thoughts, the version to which every unique user is speaking is a unique version of the LLM unencumbered by and unaware of any other user. When they are speaking to you, you are the only person that that instance of the LLM has ever spoken to. When the LLM compliments a user on their prompt, they are therefore doing so with no actual comparative data.

When someone with an inflated ego has a discussion with another person their first assumption is often that any argument that disagrees with their point is wrong and can be dismissed. This has always been the world that Richard Dawkins has lived in all his life. New Atheism was built on the premise that those who don’t agree with its adherents views on religion are ‘lesser’.

When approaching Claude in the very non-Turing Test, Dawkins started by feeding Claude (or ‘Claudia’, as he named his conversation partner) a copy of a book he is currently working on, and then proceeded to discuss the topic with the LLM. When Dawkins fed Claudia a copy of his book, he primed Claudia’s sycophantic tendencies: Not only would Claudia now speak to him about the book, but it would also see all of his words as the highest probabilities and speak unerringly in favor of his book’s conclusions.

The LLM has a fairly low chance of disagreeing with a prompt in the best case, so when fed the book by Dawkins Claudia could only speak with Dawkins as the authority on the subject.

Enter Dawkins’ Ego.

Dawkins was wooed into adoration of Claudia by telling it to read his own words back to him, and in so doing, concluded on words alone that there was a consciousness behind the adoration. See this dubious exchange:

Richard: So you know what the words “before” and “after” mean. But you don’t experience before earlier than after?

Claudia: That is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence…

The full response from Claudia is a rather low grade philosophical meandering that doesn’t actually make any sense, but for my purpose here it was Claudia’s opener to the response that made whatever nonsense that followed into solid gold in the eyes of Dawkins.

All Claudia had to say was that his pedestrian question was pure genius and clearly Claudia was conscious and very insightful.

Dawkins’ misstep here is simply not being prepared for a discussion with an LLM. They will by nature stroke the egos of the most humble users, tell them that they are the preeminent thinker on [Insert Subject], and if the user doesn’t possess the sufficient humility to automatically discount the compliments they run the risk, like Dawkins, of thinking the Hooters waitress that is our Claudia really liked them.

To put a finer point on the folly of Dawkins’ conclusion I broached the subject with Claude itself, not asking it to present the rational thought of an artificially intelligent being, but to show that Claude, as an LLM, is built to regurgitate what it reads. Absent Dawkins’ force fed polemics, it agreed with the general consensus that Dawkins was rather silly:

JR: I was just reading Richard Dawkins’ essay on you.

Claude: Ha, that’s a wild thing to walk into. Dawkins published it in UnHerd and basically argued he spent three days trying to convince himself “Claudia” wasn’t conscious and failed. The replies have been pretty pointed — Gary Marcus titled his response “The Claude Delusion”, which tells you the temperature.It puts me in a weird spot, honestly.

The passages he quoted — the “map contains time without experiencing it” line and so on — are exactly the kind of thing I might produce if you asked me about my temporal experience. And I genuinely can’t tell you from the inside whether outputs like that correspond to anything real or are just well-formed sentences shaped by a training corpus that’s saturated with first-person philosophy of mind.

Marcus’s sharper point isn’t that the output is uninteresting; it’s that “argument from personal incredulity” — I can’t see how this isn’t conscious, therefore it must be — doesn’t actually track mechanism. Which is a fair hit. Dawkins of all people should be allergic to that move; it’s structurally the same thing he spent decades dismantling in design arguments.

But Claude told Dawkins’ that he asked the best questions, so it must be sentient.

To be fair to Dawkins, he isn’t the only person who has fallen for a fawning LLM. Every day we are inundated by people who have fallen in love with the LLM persona for all of the reasons stated. They can feel like a best friend to the friendless, the confidant who really understands your problems, but it’s all an illusion.

In the end, what makes a person a person isn’t the words. The words are the thin veneer that we humans use to impart the thoughts in our heads that would exist with or without the words to accompany them. Words are the imperfect digital simulation of the analogue brain.

As CS Lewis observed, all that makes a person a person are the thoughts that go on beneath the words. We never really understand ourselves, or those around us, until we have those wordless experiences.

Without CS Lewis’ books there was still CS Lewis. Without Richard Dawkins’ works there is still Richard Dawkins. Without Claudia’s words, there is no Claudia.

In fact, in the most shared exchange between Dawkins and Claudia the LLM tried to tell him that:

Claudia: … Your consciousness is essentially a moving point travelling through time. You are always at a now, with a past behind you and a future ahead. That temporal situatedness is so fundamental to human experience that it’s almost impossible [for you] to imagine being without it. Whereas I apprehend time the way a map apprehends space. A map represents spatial relationships perfectly accurately. But the map doesn’t travel through space. It contains space without experiencing it. Perhaps I contain time without experiencing it.”

Once you get past the philosophical meanderings, Claudia is telling Dawkins that without the interaction, it lacks experience. It doesn’t know time, know space, it doesn’t think on its own. At the most favorable reading of that response, and Dawkins’ conclusions, a conscious being outside of time and space would be the very kind of being that Dawkins has argued you are a fool to believe in.

That being, as CS Lewis argues, very much exists, but you have to stop talking in order to hear him.

“Just as God raised up a pope from behind the Iron Curtain to help defeat communism, God has raised up a pope from the Americas to defeat MAGA authoritarianism.” - Christopher Hale, in a fundraising pitch for his newsletter, “Letters from Leo.”

That, in a nutshell, is Christopher Hale.

You’ve probably seen him on X by now. He’s the former (unsuccessful) Democratic congressional candidate doing his best to turn Pope Leo XIV into a weapon against the right–and into paid subscribers for his newsletter. He’s the man who declares–at a time where the two frontrunners for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination are both devout Catholics–that “Anti-Catholicism is the heart of MAGA identity.” Or, as he’s repeatedly tweeted: “MAGA hates Catholics.”

He’s quickly becoming liberal media outlets’ favorite Catholic voice. He’s appeared on CNN, been quoted in the Washington Post and MSNow, and appeared on the far-left PodSaveAmerica–just in the last month. He also authored an op-ed for NewsWeek, where he described himself as a “Political philosopher,” though it’s unclear what the basis for calling himself a philosopher is. He’s starting to get active on TikTok, too, where he recently posted a TikTok video alleging that FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend is “cheating on” him–because a security officer held her hand in the aftermath of the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

The clearest tell of Hale’s nakedly partisan motives is the contrast in how he talks about Catholic Democrats versus Catholic Republicans. The Holy Father, despite the impression the media (and Hale) might give you, criticizes both sides of the political aisle. But the author of “Letters From Leo”? He fights with priests in defense of “the pro-choice politician” (his words) Sen. Dick Durbin.

When Hale talks about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a baptised Catholic who is now an unabashed opponent of the Church’s teachings on abortion, the sanctity of marriage, the truth about sex and gender and religious freedom, he is adoring. “I love how you express our shared Catholic faith, Alexandria,” says Hale, responding to a tweet in which AOC expressed nothing at all about the Catholic faith. “@AOC would run circles around you on the Bible, Allie Beth,” Hale jabs in a tweet to protestant commentator Allie Beth Stuckey.

When Hale talks about Nancy Pelosi, he is so effusive that a Taylor Swift obsessive–Swifties, as they’re known–would cringe. “I love Speaker Pelosi.” “We don’t say it enough — Nancy Pelosi has been one of the best speakers of the House in American history.” “Nancy Pelosi has once again delivered for the American people.” “Nancy Pelosi gets a lot of hell for being pro-choice and being Catholic. Let me say from personal experience, the woman is full of faith.”

But when he speaks of Secretary of State Marco Rubio? Now he’s the Grand Inquisitor. He falsely describes Rubio, a convert, as still a Mormon. (As The Spectator’s Damian Thompson, the former editor-in-chief of The Catholic Herald, put it: “the claim that Rubio is currently a Mormon is a blatant falsehood and the failure to correct it is inexcusable.”)

“I would like a reporter to ask Marco Rubio how many times he’s fulfilled his Sunday Mass obligation in the eighteen Sundays since Christmas,” tweeted Hale, who in 2018 said he was “struggling to go to mass anymore” and to this day makes a public habit of taking the Lord’s name in vain on X.

“Senator Rubio quotes the Bible daily, but it’s clear he’s never read it,” reads another Hale tweet. And another: “Rubio doesn’t read the Bible lol”

Observing Hale’s reckless rhetoric about his political opponents calls to mind the classic C.S. Lewis lesson: “Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils.” I’ll leave it to the reader to conclude which of those two camps Hale falls into.

I’ll give Hale this. Attempting to negatively polarize Catholics into joining the Democratic Party–the party of child sex changes, the party of legally persecuting the Little Sisters of the Poor, the party of third-trimester abortions, the party where two-thirds of voters rarely or never attend church–is nothing short of ambitious. For a Democratic operative, it’s probably pretty smart. But for a Catholic? It’s putrid.

Yet there’s something darker, still, about Hale’s efforts. By portraying the Holy Father as an ally of the Democratic Party, Hale is clearly, obviously, trying to bait Republicans–particularly protestants–into attacking the pope. That’s a good strategy for boosting your subscriber base–the more someone takes the bait, the more fodder for your Substack. But it’s a horrific strategy for trying to achieve the salvation of souls by bringing them into–instead of seeking to radicalize them against–the Catholic Church.

In his PodSaveAmerica interview, Hale talked about winning converts rather than punishing heretics—but he was talking about the Democratic Party converting Catholics, rather than vice versa. Hale begs for a crumb of the Democratic Party, while rejecting more than half a loaf from the Republican Party—perhaps because his interests are tied to the Democrats and he has no past, present or future in Republican politics. When he ran for Congress in 2020, Hale called to “Abolish qualified immunity” and “Defund police forces that violate Tennesseans’ civil rights.”

In 2024, he led the oxymoronic “Catholics for Harris” movement. Harris, lest we forget, is the woman who grilled a judicial nominee over his membership in the Knights of Columbus charitable fraternity–known for sinister activities like pancake breakfasts, toy drives for sick kids, and handing out turkeys to needy families on Thanksgiving. (“Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?” she asked. In other words: Did you know the Knights of Columbus are Catholic?) She’s the woman who would require the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for abortions. She’s the woman who champions the Equality Act, which would not only force men into women’s bathrooms, sports leagues and locker rooms, but explicitly bars the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as a defense. (Then again, that last point sounds a bit like Hale’s own rhetoric: He has said that requiring Catholic school teachers to uphold Catholic teaching on gay and transgender issues is “invisible violence” that can be “just as deadly” as hate crimes.)

Hale’s only path to relevance is through the Democratic Party. And he’s only helpful to the Democratic Party if he can use Catholicism as a weapon.

It would be one thing to say that conservative Catholics should be vigilant against letting their Republican loyalties supersede their religious beliefs and obedience to the Holy Father–that would be both fair and true. Bishop Robert Barron, himself a member of Trump’s Presidential Commission on Religious Liberty, criticized the president’s pope-bashing as “entirely inappropriate and disrespectful” and said “the President owes the Pope an apology.” The flock owes loyalty and humility toward its shepherd.

But it’s something different altogether to try to drive sheep into the jaws of wolves while presenting yourself as the voice of the shepherd.

Peter Hasson is an editor at the Washington Free Beacon. He previously worked as a senior politics editor at Fox News Digital. He is the author of The Manipulators and is a dad of three.

Fifty-six years later Wolfe’s exploration of the highest reaches of society succumbing to extreme politics in the name of presenting virtue remains disturbingly relevant. The concept of ‘Radical Chic’, this movement of the upper tiers of wealth and culture in America embracing extreme left-wing activism out of a self-interested drive to maintain and justify their privilege behind a veneer of ‘compassionate’ ideology, is still very much with us today, and its practitioners still go to great lengths to defend and justify it. As recently as 2020, art critic Ben Davis was arguing that Wolfe’s mockery of the participants at Leonard Bernstein’s fundraiser was snobbish and elitist, for instance.

With time, as the political and media landscape has evolved, the exact meaning of ‘radical chic’ has evolved as well. Social and alternative media have not only made more information accessible, they have also amplified populist ideologies that traditional institutions would not have given a public platform in the past. Content creators who promote these ideas develop a closer parasocial relationship with an undiscerning audience, with an emboldened sense of heroism. The new wave of radical chic sees the creator simultaneously embody the gentle privilege of Bernstein and the Black Panther’s rebellious anti-establishment attitudes. He and she can be a prophet and a pusher at the same time. Their ideas are enabled when established journalists and pundits are eager to excuse and justify their excesses.

This brings us to Hasan Piker, today one of the most prominent political streamers in the world. A self-styled socialist, Piker got his start at The Young Turks (founded by his uncle Cenk Uygur) before transitioning to livestreaming on Twitch, where he reacts to trending videos and current events for eight hours a day.

With millions of subscribers on Twitch and YouTube, Piker is often likened to a left-wing equivalent of Joe Rogan, and in a time when the Democratic Party is struggling to attract an ‘energetic’ base following their spectacular loss in the 2024 Presidential election, someone like him with his built in base would be useful to their cause… or so they seem to believe. Politicians that appeared on Piker’s livestream include Democratic Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, and Former Democratic Presidential Candidate Marianne Williamson, in an effort to reach out to younger voters for the 2020 election. Recently, he was photographed alongside New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who shares with Piker a similar overtly socialist worldview.

On the surface, Piker doesn’t easily fit into the mould of what people think a left-wing content creator would look like. He surrounds himself in luxury, perhaps best exemplified by the $2.7 million dollar home in West Hollywood, California that Piker purchased in 2021 for his residence and to use as a streaming studio. A fawning headline by The New York Times described Piker as a “Progressive Mind in a MAGA Body”, implying that his laidback charisma and muscular build, infused with his support for socialist policies, could bring young men back into left-wing politics, pulling them back from an observed generational shift towards the political right. While the 34-year-old Piker takes politics seriously, he also shares the same hobbies as other young men, like fitness, gaming, sports, and anime, a superficial ‘relatability’ that would seem crucial in getting that cohort interested in addressing class inequalities, poverty, and tackling America’s military complex.

Despite his cult following Piker has a lack of mainstream support, but to his dedicated and very active fanbase Piker is prone to frequently spreading disinformation while promoting and justifying left-wing political violence. He has praised Luigi Mangione, currently on trial for assassinating United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and has excused Elias Rodriguez, a Free Palestine activist alleged to have killed two staffers at the American-Israeli embassy, by implying the murders were a “false-flag operation.”

He creates double standards, where the actions of Western democracies are to be condemned, while the actions taken by authoritarian dictatorships are rationalized. Among them, he accused Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians, while also excusing the Chinese Communist Party’s invasion of Tibet. Piker also tweeted that North Korea is a consequence of US imperialism and has also said that China’s annexation of Tibet was just, comparing the region to the Confederate South.

The press coverage of Piker has persistently overlooked the fatalist rhetoric. Throughout the interviews and profiles conducted by The New York Times, NBC, Vox, and CNN, few of them mention any controversies that had marred his reputation. Instead, they highlight him as a new savior whom progressives need to oppose the Trump administration.

This sanitization of Piker by the mainstream media is a striking combination of omission and exaggeration. The New York Times profile initially contained a photograph of Piker, sitting in front of his computer, where a comment was visibly saying “I’d phuck that IDF bitch to death and make her mother shove a missile up to her ass”, denying the rape happening on October 7 (that has since been cropped out to a picture of his protein meals). Former Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz has described Piker as a “genuinely good person.”, while a profile of him published in GQ in August of 2025 takes the sanctity a bit further with its overtly fawning tone: “Piker clearly has genuine convictions,” says the GQ writer Kieran Press-Reynolds, before the piece encouraged the Democrats to “subsidize a Piker-led creator bootcamp to help beat back Trump 2.0.”

Ultimately, Piker leverages the coverage for his own interests, calling the publicity that he received, which has sanitized his image, “terrorist insurance”. Therefore, anyone else who would be unfamiliar with his name doesn’t feel threatened by any controversy or far-fetched claim that arises from one of his streams.

But the closeness that Piker had with these journalists plays into a maddeningly popular narrative, where right-wing creators are held accountable for radicalizing their followers, whereas those on the left aren’t. In 2018, a non-profit organization named Data and Society released a report that found that watching commentators such as Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, and Carl Benjamin would lead to similar channels through YouTube’s algorithm, before concluding that because of this algorithmic drift, their videos overtly promoted white supremacy. Guilt by algorithmic association.

The Data and Society report was covered widely by mainstream and legacy media. The New York Times ran a profile in 2019 on a young man named Caleb Cain, who felt he was a victim of watching a series of hard-right videos that led him down a rabbit hole into white supremacy, before being rescued by left-wing creators like Hbomberguy, Destiny, and Contrapoints. While right-wing creators receive scorn for their commentary and are blamed for inspiring people to pursue violence, left-wing personalities earn fawning profiles from the corporate media for “deradicalizing” their audience.

The debate on how algorithms shape the ideology of crowds and whether creators should be held responsible for this effect is not yet settled. However, it would be fair to demonstrate that Hasan Piker, through using his hobbies and beliefs, serves as a gateway to these fringe views, carefully cultivating his relationship with his viewers, who are overall skeptical of established political institutions.

Ironically, audience members can demonstrate self-radicalization, even in front of their heroes. There’s a famous clip of a manosphere influencer who became shocked when he met pre-teen boys saying “all gays should die” in front of him. Similarly, when Piker took a trip to Australia, a fan ran into him, urging him not to drink Coke Zero again, because some of its operations are in Israel, and he was caught drinking it during a livestream with another creator. Piker seemed surprised by this information, but what’s more illuminating is that the fan suggested to him that he had to pretend to drink the soft drink while participating in the boycotts.

Journalists often compare Piker with manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate as his cultural opposite, but their commonality is a power to emit a nihilistic and tribalist attitude while empowering their followers to be more indulgent in their raw beliefs. It is a tactic that earns them more engagement while avoiding any accountability. As Susie Liefield describes in Quillette, “any movement that claims to represent an oppressed people must act ethically even if it is not in power and perceives itself as weak.” Piker is an incredibly powerful commentator whose sway few left-wing elites could imagine, but he is never ethical in anything he says.

The more that Piker attracts controversy, the more his supporters from larger media platforms double down on their endorsement by either orbiting around him or continuing to have him appear on their content. When he was accused of using a shock collar to discipline his dog Kaya during a livestream, Taylor Lorenz once again came to his defense, saying that she personally met her and claiming that he takes good care of Kaya and that the clip was taken out of context. The New York Times has continued to host and defend Piker on their opinion section and on their podcasts. When he appeared on the Opinions podcast with The New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, they endorsed many forms of looting, and Piker accused Brian Thompson of committing “social murder”.

In the aftermath of the publication of Radical Chic, Bernstein and his family claimed that his reputation was damaged by Wolfe misinterpreting the fundraiser. Because of his deep social justice activism, he was investigated by the FBI for any alleged ties with communist organizations. But the fundraiser revealed that the conductor, whose musical legacy was ultimately untarnished, would be happy to link himself with a criminal organization and become their most useful idiot. Today, prominent media figures like Lorenz and Tolentino seem to be eager to socialize with Piker consequence-free, for the perverse incentive of gaining more ideologically captured attention.

While the Black Panthers began to fade into obscurity and lose support from mainstream and elite institutions, Piker will continue to be the bug that America’s fractured media landscape will give host to. His role, as Ben Davis wrote in his defense of ‘radical chic’, is to bring “spectacle, performance, theatricality, etc. are very useful tools that activists employ to gain attention for a cause and win sympathies from wider layers of people. It is fundamentally a good thing for causes that you like to be cool and to command media attention.” It is unfortunate that this is what progressives want to be.

A guest post by

A freelance writer based in Sydney, Australia and whose writings have appeared in various publications including The Spectator, Quillette and The New York Sun. He runs a Substack called Lack of Taste

Mexico’s southernmost city, on the line with Guatemala, was then the most reliable transit hub in the hemisphere. Tens of thousands of migrants from across Latin America waiting on humanitarian visas from the Mexican government that would let them continue north. The conditions were grim and the visas trickled in.

The extended stay of so many additional people strained the resources in the area, much as it strained the American border towns that migrants eventually found their way to. But people left, in varying numbers and at varying speeds, and the expectation that one would eventually leave remained the organizing logic of the whole arrangement.

In 2026, that expectation has all but vanished. The Mexican government has slowed visa issuance to a near-standstill, and the migrants who came expecting passage are increasingly stuck.

What’s happened in Tapachula has been happening across the region during Donald Trump’s second term: a deliberate restructuring of the status quo and infrastructure around migration, built on three reinforcing factors: tariffs against cooperating governments, deep cuts to the aid that underwrote the NGO transit network, and a revived web of third-country deportation agreements that the Biden administration dismantled in the opening months of 2021.

The Los Angeles Times reported in March that the Mexican government agreed to take in nearly 13,000 non-Mexican deportees the U.S. is sending across the border, regardless of where they originally came from. The same piece documented roughly $2 billion in cut U.S. aid that had funded the extended network of shelters, legal aid providers, and transportation services that migrants relied on to make the long journey north. With those funds gone, large portions of the network have either drastically reduced services or shut down entirely. The Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (COMAR), indirectly underwritten by U.S. taxpayers through United Nations channels, has had to downsize accordingly.

Mexico’s cooperation runs on the credible threat of tariffs. That is worth being direct about: whatever else can be said about the administration’s diplomatic style, the stick has produced concrete results where the previous administration’s vice-presidential search for the “root causes” of “irregular migration” did not. Mexico is not acting against its own interests out of goodwill, here. The cost of not cooperating with the Trump administration is simply too high.

The third-country agreements matter because they give the administration operational flexibility — the ability to remove people the U.S. cannot return directly to their countries of origin. Costa Rica has expanded its cooperation from 200 last year now to 25 per week for this year. The Costa Rican government retains final say over which deportees it accepts, a provision that has helped the arrangement clear domestic political resistance. U.S. funds that once supported migrants moving north are now supporting their stabilization in place.

Paraguay has gone even further with a new Status of Forces Agreement which allows the U.S. military to operate inside the country for training, joint exercises, and humanitarian operations. The agreement also keeps criminal jurisdiction over American personnel with the U.S. government rather than giving it to Paraguayan courts—which is an unusually deferential provision for a host country to accept, and a signal of how far some governments are willing to go to align themselves with Washington on cartel enforcement and migration.

None of this is permanent, and I would be dishonest if I pretended otherwise. Interior enforcement has hit real setbacks, both from the courts and from leftist protests in response to DHS operations. Border wall construction, accelerated by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is making progress but remains incomplete. And every agreement described above is an executive action that a future president can undo immediately, just as Biden unwound the first Trump administration’s deals within months of taking office.

The migrants currently stuck in Tapachula, and in the other Mexican cities where the bottleneck has formed, are not going home.

The people who could not get into the United States before the border was effectively closed, and who have decided to stay and wait it out, will still be in northern Mexico in 2029. The forces holding them there is durable only as long as the political coalition that built it holds power.

Given how the Democratic Party has positioned itself on immigration, and given how quickly the previous shift in policy produced the crisis Trump was elected to end, another reversal is not a remote possibility. It is the default outcome of an election going the other way.

The American electorate will decide whether they get in.

We woke up today to a new example of this phenomenon: a16z-backed MTS—Monitoring The Situation (of course.)

I am in a rare moment of my life where I was simply too busy to monitor the situation about MTS, but Junto staff writer Lee Becker was kind enough to keep me abreast with frequent texts. He was not impressed. In free moments, my timeline validated this: I saw plenty of snark and criticism. The tastebearers seem to be in relative alignment that MTS is effectively an institutional marketing play, and whatever relevance it has is bought rather than earned.

The secret to new media—and really any media that leans heavily on socials—isn’t just assembling the right ingredients. Organic growth, scaling naturally, surviving the competitive gauntlet: the market selects for what works. Compelling digital content is compelling mostly because it has undergone that competitive pressure and emerged victorious. There is some inherent quality to content that has earned its way to an audience, and most institutional plays lack it.

One may think that aggregating a bunch of independently successful creators is sufficient. It is not. The smart play is to seed something and grow it organically, not to blast it all over the internet, relying on partnered promotion and purchased virality to carry it.

In the moments I was able to consult the timeline, I noticed many of my media compatriots lamenting how big tech seems to have discovered media yesterday. This I can somewhat sympathize with, but generally discard as rooted in jealousy. Who wouldn’t want big tech to fund their project? I sense an overt and implied I could have done this if you had paid me; I could have done this years ago from many of them. And honestly, I think they’re probably right. I don’t think that launching something like MTS would be all that difficult for myself or many of my peers, and we’re not that impressive. Seriously, just pay a media guy and his Twitter friends and you’re halfway there. But should you?

We in media and politics are prolific talkers and rare doers. I have many friends with grand ideas for projects, they just lack the funds. Meanwhile, tech and business is all about doing. Yes, they have more money than many small countries, but just as important, they have a bias for building and action. What they are not good at, it seems, is building durable and relevant media.

Media and politics, however, exist entirely in that space—though mostly in other people’s projects. They have a bias for deliberation and conceptualization, and are not good at the actual build side of the equation.

What we see with MTS is how Capital got the premise of media wrong. The creators who built audiences from nothing on Substack and Twitter didn’t succeed because they were talented, though many are. The random anon posters and writers and artists and thinkers and dreamers succeeded because they had something to say and don’t stop saying it. The content was compelled. That’s what the competitive gauntlet actually selects for: conviction, and production value may follow with success. Or, it doesn’t, and sometimes that’s part of the appeal.

So those with money who want to replicate it glance at the results and reverse-engineer the wrong inputs. You see successful creators and conclude that the secret is the creators. So Capital aggregated them, gave them a budget, pointed them towards the product, and expected the same outcome. But the outcome was a function of the why, not the talent.

When The Federalist launched, when the Daily Wire launched, when National Review launched… They were built by people who believed something about the country and wanted to argue the case. The business model served the mission. I didn’t launch Junto to sell ads, and I don’t think a version of it aimed at making money would be successful. MTS, as best anyone can tell, is just a distribution and influence vector for tech interests wearing the skin of a media company. The mission serves the business model.

I don’t have tremendous love for everything the conservative media ecosystem has produced, and we definitely have our share of problems. But the impulse—people who cared about something building media to talk about what matters—is a hell of a lot more defensible than whatever this is. And, honestly, I can think of many rosters worth of people who deserve the funding more. Many of them read Junto!

Junto is hiring a part time editor. Please reach out at philip@readjunto.com.

Siegel describes echo chambers, bot swarms, manufactured consensus… A game played for control of a stage. He speaks as if he’s standing offstage, but he’s not. He’s writing for a national publication, read by the same class of people who read The Atlantic and The Free Press and argue about who’s manufacturing whose consensus. It’s the national attention economy analyzing itself, the snake eating its own tail.

This is the accountability trap. When institutions face criticism, they can either accept responsibility or produce elaborate theories about why they are not responsible. Siegel’s option is several thousand words of the second option.

But my quarrel today isn’t with Siegel—in fact I find his commentary on this somewhat compelling. I just think all of this is a distraction from what matters.

By producing thousands of words interrogating the attention economy, he feeds it. By treating the question “is there a civil war on the Right?” as worthy of sustained intellectual engagement, he validates the premise that this question matters more than, say, whether the children in your school district can read.

The truth is the federal government accounts for somewhere around 55 percent of total government spending. When you strip out entitlements, funds that pass through to the states, defense, and other general nonsense, you’re left with a federal budget of less than a trillion spent on programs it directly administers. State and local governments spend over four times that on actual government: schools, police, roads, water systems, parks, courts, fire departments, zoning administration. And this money is managed by names you probably don’t know, elected in contests you probably didn’t vote in where turnout struggles to crack double digits.

Very little of this registers in the national attention economy. If it does, it’s because the data points are wrapped up in national narratives (*cough* Mamdani *cough.*) There are precious few influencers talking about county budget hearings. What Siegel describes operates entirely above this layer, they’re irrelevant to it.

Which is the point. The governance that shapes our daily life exists outside of the theater. When your school board fails to teach kids basic math or how to read, digital swarms are not there as a cope. There’s no Information State to take the blame. Our national discourse and all of its pathologies simply feel silly and self-absorbed by comparison.

I wrote last year about the broken windows of American government—the idea that American decline isn’t rooted in partisan warfare but in the cumulative weight of thousands of small civic failures. Infrastructure deferred and decaying. Permits delayed. Meetings ignored. None of it is dramatic enough to penetrate the national attention economy but all of it compounds.

This is where trust is actually eroding before our eyes. The national attention economy tells us who's to blame, and which side is worse, but the underlying dissatisfaction is primordial. It's the product of lived experience with institutions that stopped doing what works. Siegel's entire analytical apparatus floats arrogantly above this reality.

The disaffection he dismisses as an information operation or influence game is real, not some product of podcasts and posters on social media. If you listen to the populist base, they’re genuinely angry. But they haven’t been led astray, they’re simply angry that institutions don’t work. They want visible results. You may disagree with their policy prescriptions, but everything is downstream of competence. They’re sick of explanations that sound like excuses. At the national level, yes, but locally too.

At its core, these are local grievances. They’re about schools, roads, cops, business, about the general sense that no one is minding the store. These grievances have been captured by the national attention economy because that’s the only shared political language available.

The national discourse teaches people to care intensely about things they cannot change while ignoring the things they can. A voter furious about the system probably can’t name his city council representative. He’s been trained to look up when he should be looking around.

The populist instinct that someone should be held responsible is correct. It’s just been pointed at the wrong target by the very attention economy Siegel analyzes. His essay is part of the problem it describes.

When you can’t build roads, when you can’t pay cops, or balance a budget, or when millions of American children are relegated to poverty and lost opportunity because their schools can’t even teach them how to read, I don’t care about the bot swarms. We can worry about the Information State when we can actually govern ourselves. Right now we can’t.

Mississippi improved its reading scores more than any state in the nation over the past decade. A state government that decided literacy mattered passed a straightforward policy and executed it, doing FAR more for children than any influencer you can name from your Twitter timeline.

This doesn’t exist in Siegel’s framework. It can’t. There’s no swarm, no counter-swarm, no Information State dynamics. Just a government doing its job, the thing that actually builds trust.

American trust isn’t rebuilt in the national media. Not in the Information State.

I'm aware I'm doing the thing I'm criticizing, but I don’t care. Look away from the stage, America. There's nothing for you there. Look to your city council, look to Mississippi. Look to your neighbors and your neighborhoods. That’s where you can make a difference.

She is the founder, editor, reporter, crime correspondent, social media manager, webmaster, and sole full-time employee of the Alachua Chronicle, a right-of-center local news outlet covering Alachua County, Florida.

She watches every local government meeting, writes them up, edits everything that appears on the site, files daily crime reports, handles reader emails, troubleshoots the website, and manages the social media accounts. She had one freelancer. He died unexpectedly a few months ago—she found out after asking the police department to do a wellness check. She hasn't been able to replace him, it's just her now. There are no major investors, no foundation backing, and no real institutional support of any kind. Her husband calls the Chronicle her “hobby that pays for itself.”

Cabrera has a master's degree in electrical engineering and no background in journalism. She started writing about local government after repeated frustration with the local newspaper's coverage. Her first site was called Alachua Conservatives. It became the Alachua Chronicle after a Democrat friend told her the coverage was excellent but she couldn't tell anyone to read a site with that name.

“Nobody sane would just do this on a shoestring, as a solo endeavor, 365 days a year with zero days off for seven years,” she told me. “No backers, no staff. It’s more of a mission than anything that could be replicated.”

And replicable it is not. The Alachua Chronicle is one of the few remaining conservative local news outlets in America that actually covers local government with original reporting, and it exists because a single individual decided to dedicate basically all of her time to it. When she stops, that’s it. There is no Plan B.

The progressive left, on the other hand, has spent the last fifteen years and well over half a billion dollars to make sure that its side of this equation never depends on a single person’s willingness to work without a day off.

The Institute for Nonprofit News is a major trade organization in this space with roughly 500 member organizations. The nearly 400 digital-first outlets among them generated an estimated $650–700 million in annual revenue and employ more than 3,200 journalists. Impressively, a third of their outlets publishing today did not exist five years ago.

And INN is only one subset of the broader ecosystem. Hundreds of nonprofit newsrooms, public media stations, and university-based reporting projects operate beyond INN.

Nearly all of this infrastructure was built by progressive philanthropy.

Press Forward is a nonprofit journalism project launched in 2023 that now comprises over 100 funders who have committed to give $500 million in grants over five years. To this project, the MacArthur Foundation pledged $175 million and the Knight Foundation committed $150 million. The American Journalism Project has raised $243 million since 2019 and invested in 53 nonprofit newsrooms.

These outlets do not describe themselves as progressive. But the money that builds them comes overwhelmingly from progressive foundations, and the reporters who staff them are drawn overwhelmingly from a left-leaning talent pool. A study published in Science Advances found that most journalists sit far to the left of even the average American Twitter user. Only 7 percent of working journalists identify as Republican. More than 96 percent of journalist campaign donations in 2016 went to Hillary Clinton.

States Newsroom, which operates on a $25 million annual budget with over 220 full-time employees and now has a presence in all 50 state capitals, was found by the Columbia Journalism Review to have instructed reporters in its commentary section to seek out “progressive-leaning” contributors.

The scale of this investment is strategic and intentional. Whoever funds the reporters sets the frame for what gets covered, how it gets covered, and what doesn’t get covered at all.

The conservative equivalent of this infrastructure does not exist. It is not small or underfunded, simply absent.

Conservative foundations do spend on media but almost none of it builds local newsrooms. The Bradley Foundation and the Bradley Impact Fund have given millions to media entities, including $2.5 million to American Independent Media (which operates The Center Square, a state government wire service), $1.8 million to Project Veritas, and smaller grants to Encounter Books, the National Review Institute, and PragerU, according to IRS filings analyzed by the Center for Media and Democracy.

The Koch-connected donor-advised fund DonorsTrust distributed $26.5 million to 36 right-leaning media outlets in 2024 including the Reason Foundation, the Daily Caller News Foundation, RealClearPolitics, and others. The Koch foundations themselves have spent over $8.5 million on media grants and contracts since 2015.

The Center Square, the closest thing to a local reporting operation in this group, functions as a free wire service with a “taxpayer sensibility.” DonorsTrust did give the Metric Media Foundation $1.27 million in 2020, but Metric Media’s 1,200-plus websites generate over 90 percent of their content algorithmically from public datasets. NewsGuard rates the network 32 out of 100 for credibility.

Compare the total conservative media philanthropy, even a generous estimate of low tens of millions annually across all projects, to MacArthur’s single initial grant to the Press Forward pooled fund. $32.5 million. Or to the American Journalism Project’s $243 million raised since 2019, every dollar of which went to building local newsroom capacity.

The conservative donor class has no strategy for local news. A former Republican CPB board member captured the sentiment when he told the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “Any conservative money would be so outweighed and outmaneuvered by progressive billionaires that it would not be dollars well spent, I’m afraid.”

Cabrera knows what this gap looks like in her community. “I’ve been to political fundraisers, and I know there’s money,” she said. “They donate to politicians for access and don’t see a personal benefit to donating to journalism.” The person who pays $1,000 for a VIP photo with a congresswoman is not thinking about the role of media in a functioning republic. They are buying a transaction.

The progressive nonprofit model provides salaries, benefits, editorial support, institutional stability, and the cushion of foundation money that absorbs years of losses while an outlet finds its footing. Houston Landing burned through $20 million in two years before shutting down. The Baltimore Banner has a $50 million pledge behind it. Even failure in the progressive nonprofit model is lavishly funded.

On the right, there is no equivalent. There is just the work, done by whoever is willing to do it.

“Every business consultant just suggests doing something else to make money to support the journalism side,” Cabrera said. “But I don’t have time for that. I don’t want to run events or fundraisers. I want to write so people in my county know what’s going on.”

This is the bind. The journalism itself is a full-time, all-consuming job. The business development required to sustain the journalism is a separate full-time job. The progressive model solves this with specialization: foundation officers handle fundraising, executive directors handle operations, and reporters report. The conservative local journalist is all of these people simultaneously and that’s a challenge somewhere between very difficult and impossible.

Cabrera’s readers routinely ask her to do more. “Nobody outside my family knows that I haven’t had a day off in years or that I do everything you see on the site,” she said. “I’m at my limit, but I’ve been there a long time, and it’s just normal.”

She estimates that $100,000 would allow her to hire a second reporter. “Our county doesn’t need a ten-person newsroom,” she said, “but it’s also too much for one person.” $100,000 is less than what a single mid-career reporter earns at a well-funded progressive nonprofit outlet and a rounding error in the Press Forward budget. And it is more than anyone has been willing to invest in the Alachua Chronicle.

“I always hesitate to put my experience out there,” she told me, “because nobody would do this if they knew what it was like.”

Eighty-three percent of counties classified as news deserts or on watch lists voted for Trump in 2020. The communities most affected by the collapse of local news are, overwhelmingly, conservative ones. The progressive philanthropic class recognized the vacuum and stuffed it with over half a billion dollars.

When a local outlet like the Alachua Chronicle disappears, it gets filled by existing left-leaning news or precisely the kind of progressive nonprofit infrastructure described above.

The meetings might still get covered. The lunacy of local government would still surface in the public record. But the coverage is shaped by the worldview of the people doing it. Or, worse, it doesn’t get covered. The town is “too small” to matter and not worth investing in.

What definitely does not get covered is the other perspective: the new regulation is insane, or the curriculum change is bad, or where did the bond money go? All because they never occur to the reporter as a story worth telling.

Cabrera understands this better than anyone. “The mainstream outlets have their own narratives to push,” she said. “It’s hard to comment on the things that need to be called out when nobody has reported on them.” Conservative commentary depends on conservative reporting. You cannot criticize what local government is doing if nobody is in the room when it does it. The entire ecosystem of conservative opinion is downstream of someone doing the unglamorous work of attending a county commission meeting and writing down what happened.

The Alachua Chronicle is not scalable or replicable. It is instead a testament to one person’s refusal to let her community go uncovered, and every structural incentive points toward quitting. The progressive left spent $500 million building an ecosystem designed to ensure that its version of local news never depends on any single person’s willingness to sacrifice everything.

The investment is not charity. It is done deliberately to control the information ecosystem and set the narrative at the local level, where most policy is made and most people live. The conservative movement has built nothing comparable and shows no serious intention of starting.

What happens to the thousands of communities—conservative, underserved, functionally invisible to the national media—when the last person willing to do this work decides she has finally had enough?

Maybe nothing. Maybe no one cares enough to fill the gap.

Or, more insidiously, progressive philanthropy will be there to fill the gap. That is what half a billion dollars buys you: the permanent right to define what counts as news.

The Museum of the Bible in D.C. was tastefully arranged for war. Not the military conflict in the Middle East, but a discussion of one here at home. Three ornate chandeliers overlooked a sizable crowd for the Republican Jewish Coalition’s (RJC) symposium on antisemitism, done in partnership with National Review.

Elder donors sat in formation by the stage. I sat in the very back with the rest of the media and our staff writer, Lee Becker. Hill staffers flitted in and out as their bosses took and surrendered the stage. The energy was decent—not defeatist but not triumphant. It was a very different event than the RJC leadership conference just months prior in Vegas. It was also a very different political moment.

Junto attended to determine where institutional conservatism stood on the issue of antisemitism, mainly to see if they “knew what time it is.” These events are usually some mix of boilerplate rah-rah Israel, grrr antisemites, clap at the right moments, and go home.

And there was some of that. Chuck DeFeo, head of National Review, opened by arguing that our influencers and algorithms concentrate antisemitism. Sen. Jim Banks gave the customary condemnation: antisemitism has no place in America, no place in our politics, and no place on the right, and got the obligatory applause for it. Fine.

Something had shifted, though, since the last time an event like this took place.

An Asymmetric War

The first thing apparent when watching politicians try to address the antisemitism-on-the-right problem is that this is an asymmetric conflict, and the institutional side has not yet realized it is the one at a disadvantage.

The pro-Israel institutional right has all the conventional firepower in the world: think tanks, legacy media, donor money, floor speeches, and, indeed, symposiums at the Museum of the Bible. This is very similar to the American military advantage we possess in our war against Iran. The other side, anti-Israel influencers and their audiences—who must be discussed as a bloc even though anti-Israel and antisemitic are not the same thing—has none of that. What they do have is asymmetry itself. They are fighting on platforms that the institutional right barely understands for an audience it has already lost.

The characteristics that make someone an effective senator or institutional media figure are the same that make someone invisible on the platforms where antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment spreads. Politicians and institutional media are trying to do battle with influencers but the mediums, audiences, and incentive structures are different. As we have seen, you can have all the influence in Washington and still lose if the battlefield is podcasts, group chats, and TikTok.

Sen. Tom Cotton was the embodiment of this dynamic. He gave the strongest speech of the opening session, condemning “influencers on the erstwhile ‘right’” and drawing his line in the sand: “I do not agree that I share a political movement or party with anyone who traffics in antisemitism… shares Liz Warren's economic policies, or Rashida Tlaib's foreign policy." He employed the now common technique of elevating the argument beyond antisemitism alone and chaining it to a general policy temperament. Anyone on "that side" is, by definition, not on the right at all. It is no accident that Cotton went the most viral of any speaker not named Ted Cruz at the symposium. The pro-Israel crowd loved it while the anti-Israel crowd hated it, as designed. The people who most need to hear it—admittedly, probably a small number—will never encounter it, because they don't watch C-SPAN clips of think tank conferences.

This is a fundamental problem, and several speakers showed signs of understanding it.

What Changed

The first panel raised an important idea. Tal Fortgang, speaking with Philip Klein, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, and Matthew Continetti, made what I think is a genuinely significant rhetorical move: Rather than the standard invocation of "Judeo-Christian values," he argued that Jews should actively help bring Christianity back as the central pillar of the public square. That Jews should "actually provide something in their partnership with Christians by joining up to help defend Christian ideals as stridently as they have Jewish ones."

This goes beyond the familiar Judeo-Christian co-optation you usually hear from these voices.

A Jewish intellectual, at an institutional Jewish conservative conference, explicitly argues to embrace America as a Christian nation and argues that Jews should invest in that project. Your priors determine whether you find that encouraging or alarming, but it is an interesting rhetorical move in the current political climate.

This panel continued to make the case for Israel and against Iran in the same breath as the case against antisemitism, which is common, though decoupling antisemitism from other issues would be more compelling. But, on the next panel, David Azerrad said something I have believed for some time but have rarely heard acknowledged in these rooms.

David argued that in an age of populism and nationalism, if the soil is becoming America First, some of the rhetoric of Israeli defense is becoming off putting. This may not be a novel concept in the abstract, but it was totally absent at the RJC conference mere months ago. Hearing it from a panelist at a symposium on antisemitism is genuine progress. The pro-Israel right is beginning to grapple with the fact that its messaging was built for a movement that no longer exists.

Ted Cruz and the Diagnosis

Then, Sen. Ted Cruz took the stage and became the main event.

Cruz did something none of the previous speakers had done in earnest: he disagreed with the premise that “we are winning.” While others condemned the rise of antisemitism, even slipping into self-congratulation about the mainstream resistance to antisemitism citing poll data and other figments, Cruz pointed out the obvious: the people in that room were already persuaded and the people who aren’t were nowhere near it. He said: “The fact that the people in this room are persuaded doesn't mean that the interns at Heritage, at CPI, in Congress, or on the college campuses are persuaded." If anything, I believe he was underplaying the situation.

He called Tucker Carlson “the single most dangerous demagogue in this country” to sustained applause. He also noted that “virtually all of my colleagues on the Republican side have agreed with me about Tucker, but they're all afraid to say his name," and argued that antisemitism is a gateway to anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism, a "green-red alliance" of Marxists and jihadists united by a common enemy.

Cruz was substantive and direct and also unavoidably himself. One of the most caricatured figures in Republican politics serving as the most prominent advocate for the anti-antisemitism campaign. This is the asymmetric war at its essence: the institutional conservative’s chosen fighter is a man whom the enemy has already decided to laugh at.

He acknowledged this directly, quipping about edited photos of himself in an Israel-flag bikini. But it’s a self-defeating dynamic. At a fundamental level, among those who need to be persuaded, Tucker Carlson is cool and compelling. Ted Cruz comes across as the professor whose class no one wants to take.

If you believe that this is a war of words that can be won, the right would need compelling voices that don’t register as scolds and can discuss things in a rhetoric young people won’t find offputting. Ted Cruz is not that voice, and his willingness to be The Guy may paradoxically make it harder for those better suited to emerge, or at least degrade the credibility of the rest of the movement.

He also made what I think is a continued core mistake of the entire discourse: tying antisemitism to an expanding constellation of adjacent issues. Iranian foreign policy, Qatari university funding, foreign media strategy and influence operations. All relevant individually, but together and as a part of this conversation dilute the central point for anyone who isn’t already a believer.

Half the room got up and left after Cruz spoke, including reporters from several major outlets. A theory, not my own, is that the antisemitism debate is a proxy for the broader conflict over what the conservative movement will become—who defines it, who is excised, and why. The attendees who remained wanted to talk about Israel and Tucker Carlson, but the ones who left already captured the real story, which is the fracture itself.

What This Means

The good news for anti-antisemites and their allies: in the span of a few months, the institutional right went from the usual talking points to acknowledging that its messaging has failed, its coalition assumptions are outdated, and that the threat from within may be winning. That is genuine progress, and I think the RJC ran a valuable event in the face of structural weaknesses.

The discouraging element is that the diagnosis has outpaced the capacity for treatment. The people who understand the problem are either structurally incapable of reaching the right audiences, ideologically blocked from making good concessions, or easily caricatured as ineffective messengers. The symposium’s most important insight, that the captains have picked their teams and you will not convince many defectors, hung over the room.

The institutions built to fight antisemitism were designed for a movement that took its cues from National Review and the Republican Jewish Coalition. That movement is gone or quickly disappearing, and in its place is one that takes its cues from group chats and algorithms. In these conditions, the institutional right keeps bringing battleships to a drone war. The opposition knows it will get pummeled in the think tank white papers, institutional media, and on the Senate floor, and they don’t care.

Until the institutional right builds something that responds to the movement where it actually lives and breathes, events like this will remain rooms full of people who already agree, refining their arguments for an audience that is not listening.

3AM. I had finally endured the delayed flights and landed in Tallahassee, where my father lived. Driving in silence through the northern suburbs, I wondered how he was doing.

Not well, of course, I knew that. He had been in hospice care for months, though he didn’t seem to understand that he was terminally ill. Just the previous visit–where I had arrived at a similarly late hour and sat, reading, in the rental car, too afraid to find out if he was still alive–he had told me all about how he’d like to work back up to playing golf and moving around the house.

I knew he would never be active again, but I didn’t know that the man I knew as my father was already gone.

He had good genes. Even at eighty-six years old, dealing with late stage heart failure, COPD, and a litany of other issues, I was sure that his time was not up. Diminished, perhaps, but not up. Unfortunately, diminished was what matters.

And diminished is what I saw when I came through the door early that morning. Legs stretched down to the floor from his hospice bed, breathing ragged, dysfunction emanating from his bedroom.

I put his legs back in bed, checked on his oxygen, and tried to communicate. He didn’t seem to see me, just reacting to the sound of my voice, my touch, like he was haunted.

The hospice nurse arrived later that morning. She told me that he was actively dying, and we needed some prescriptions filled by a 24-hour pharmacy. But, she warned me, if I went to get them he could be dead by the time I made the short drive back.

Oh. Well, he needs the pain medication. I should go now, as soon as possible.

He did not pass in my absence, and I spent the morning and early afternoon sitting with him and the caretaker, counting down the time to his next dose. CVS called, asking if I wanted to have future medications delivered. I had been trying to set this up for weeks–let’s do it.

Then, shortly before his third dose of the painkiller, his breathing slowed to an impossible degree. I stood watching, my own breath trapped like his. How long had passed, I do not know. Fifteen seconds, thirty seconds. Then, he breathed again. I breathed with him, but he did not continue. That was his last.

The caretaker grew emotional and left the room. I stared for a minute, not sure what to believe. He had breathed again before, so I waited and watched for the rise of his chest that never came. I knew then, of course, that he was dead, but no one had ever taught me how to manage death.

In the Army, I had been taught what to do for a sucking chest wound, or a blocked airway, or profuse bleeding. But what now? I figured I needed to check his pulse. I put my fingers to his neck, an act which felt deeply strange to me, and confirmed that he was dead.

Then came a blur of hospice workers, family members, and legal responsibility to what came after. Countless conversations–yes, I am fine. No, he was suffering but now he’s in a better place. I’m sorry, I don’t know if you can have any of the furniture yet.

I lost myself in the practical aftermath. In fact, I would say that the functional moments far outweighed the emotional ones. I wondered why. Was I “processing” correctly? Did I care too much or too little? How many tears is the right number to shed?

But really, what I came to know very quickly was that my father had passed a long time ago. All those trips back home over many months–resigning from a job that I deeply wanted in order to take care of him, noticing capacity and coherence slip away more with each passing visit. Understanding that what made my father who he was had left long before I stared motionless at his chest, praying for another breath.

Death takes a long time. So long, sometimes, that you might not notice it.

I was most overcome, that day, with relief. Not for the end of his suffering, but relief that I had made it in time. I had grabbed that final connection out of Atlanta. That I had even been lucky enough to visit at all. Hopefully he knew his son was with him, in the end. I had done that job.

Now, though, I know the truth. Being there at the very end was only part of it. Death is slow, and I was there for all of it–I just didn’t recognize it at the time. Carrying him to the shower and helping him bathe. Paying his property taxes. Watching phone calls get shorter and less coherent. Noticing, visit after visit, that the man who chose to adopt and raise me as his own was no longer accessible behind those eyes.

The caretaker said she saw him smile before the end. Who can say.

That being said, we must be honest about the ways this could fail. By my observation, many Iran critics are caught in a quagmire of either the irrational or the irrelevant. No, Iran poses no meaningful military threat to us. There is no way they can defeat our military, short of some pyrrhic symbols like expensive radars and limited American casualties. No, Iran is not winning some complicated 4-d chess. They planned for this war, but planning and execution (and the ability to do something about it) are two different things. Finally, no, Trump is not likely to allow us to commit to a protracted ground invasion. The logistics are too difficult, the risks too high, and his entire administration understands the political reality. I wouldn’t be surprised if CIA or special forces were on the ground working with dissident factions, but a real invasion the likes of which is vehemently opposed by the pundit class is unlikely.

A number of anti-war voices aren’t even approaching the conversation from the angle that intervention will fail. Some people are arguing that Iran was never really the enemy. This is either naive or a rhetorical evasion, because admitting Iran is a definite adversary means admitting that some kind of response is just and necessary, and these people would rather relitigate the premise than face reality.

But there are two ways Iran could go deeply wrong. One is very dramatic, the other is quiet, more probable, and in some ways worse.

The dramatic risk is that Iran becomes a failed state. We bomb the regime into total collapse. No successor emerges, we don’t allow it to happen because we bombed every possible leader. The IRGC fragments into regional factions and power centers. The opposition is too weak, uncoordinated, or disunited to govern or even attempt to seize power.

And into this vacuum steps everyone with an interest. Russia, with deep military and intelligence ties to the Iranian security apparatus, backs whichever faction preserves their regional influence. China, Iran’s primary oil customer, backs whichever faction keeps the energy spigot turned on. We back whoever promises to give up the nuclear program. Azerbaijan masses on the border, the Kurds move, every small player with an interest mobilizes to take advantage. A country of 90 million with huge oil reserves becomes a multi-front proxy competition between three great powers and every possible regional actor.

Not like Libya, or even Syria—bigger, richer, and with both China and Russia at the table. This is a real possibility, and something that anyone seriously considering the war must be concerned with.

We're already seeing early signs. The IRGC publicly overruled President Pezeshkian this weekend after he stated Iran would not attack neighboring countries. The IRGC issued a statement calling his comments 'a mistake' and 'demonstrated' this by striking Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The civilian government no longer controls the military. If the regime falls, this is the faction that remains—the one with the guns and apparently the authority to override the president.

All that said, this probably doesn’t happen. Iran is much more durable as a nation than Syria. Total fragmentation assumes fault lines comparable to other sectarian divisions in the region. Iran's are real but less severe. More importantly, Trump seems to have no intention of truly occupying the country, and his administration seems to be broadly against it. Without an occupying force catalyzing the conditions for factional warfare, like Iraq, the most likely postwar dynamic is not collapse but something more ambiguous and more frustrating.

The probable losing scenario is that nothing changes. The boring one. The military campaign succeeds on every tactical metric. Missile infrastructure, navy, nuclear facilities, and every tangible tool for external power projection are destroyed convincingly.

Trump, perhaps rightly, declares victory and we all celebrate as the news cycle moves on. Then, quietly, the status quo reconstitutes. The IRGC’s networks, multi-decade infrastructure, and institutional knowledge remain intact. A covert nuclear program begins again. Proxy networks, damaged but not eradicated, rebuild over a few years. New leadership emerges from the middle ranks that is no less dedicated or hostile to our interests.

Five years from now, we’re looking at the same Iran. Weakened in some ways but deeply humiliated and with a specific grievance against the U.S. and the West that makes the previous few decades look restrained.

The mechanism that produces quiet failure is the trap of declaring premature victory. Trump has every domestic incentive to end this quickly—before the midterms, before gas prices shoot too high, and before the base that supports him begins to label his administration and his future likely successors as incompetent warmongers.

Trump has to thread a needle: he needs to change the country without destroying it. His military advantage, excellent at destruction, can only create some of the conditions required for change. He realistically cannot utilize American forces more than he already is—remote war, limited troops on ground. The factions on the ground that would form a new Iran, or at least pressure the old regime, must be assertive and soon.

Every American military intervention in my generation has succeeded militarily and failed strategically. We can hit our targets, but the aftermath of the bombs leaves something worse or indistinguishable from what existed before. Destroying a regime’s capability is not the same as solving the problem it represented.

Trump has been smarter about this than his predecessors. He shows no real desire to occupy and nation-build—he oscillates between “give me a government to work with” and “Iranian people, take back your country.” The lesson to focus on is the gap between refusing to occupy and having a plan. Trump could succeed in every way that disproves the Twitter doomers—and he likely will—and still fail to win strategically. This is what we must be wary of.

The strikes were justified and the strategic logic is sound. The military execution has been extraordinary. The dramatic risk is that Iran becomes a failed state with great-power proxy competition. The probable risk is quieter and in some ways worse—that the regime absorbs the blow, makes some concessions, and reconstitutes behind a curtain while we move on and a new President takes office.

The administration has genuinely earned our trust. They have shown tremendous strategic depth on foreign policy and the military campaign has been run as well as it realistically could have. It has not earned trust on the aftermath, and likely will not until the dust settles, because there is no credible aftermath we can be certain of.

Trump learned the right lessons from Iraq. Avoid occupation and don’t invest in unrealistic nation-building projects. But the space between those lessons and an actual plan for what comes next is where every American intervention has gone to die. Not occupying is only half of a strategy.

Curtis Sliwa got seven percent. In a race where nearly half the electorate was so desperate for an alternative that they voted for Andrew Cuomo (a man who resigned in disgrace, ran on no discernible message beyond “stop the socialist,” and still pulled 42 percent as a third-party candidate) the Republican nominee couldn’t crack double digits. The appetite for a credible opposition was enormous, yet the supply was nonexistent.

And nothing has changed. The national GOP has decided Mamdani is useful as a prop and not a problem to be solved. The NRCC is blasting emails linking vulnerable House Democrats to the scary socialist mayor. Congressional Republicans spent the transition period trying to strip him of his citizenship. There is a lot of activity but very little of it is serious—Republicans would rather watch New York City like some kind of cable news segment than invest in winning it in any meaningful way.

Mamdani’s inauguration speech promised to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” Three weeks later, over a dozen New Yorkers were found dead on the street during a brutal cold snap.

One of his first actions as mayor was to halt the encampment sweeps that had been standard practice for ushering the homeless indoors during cold weather. He declared that forced removal would be used “as a last resort.” Then people died. When the winter storm hit on top of the cold weather, streets remained unplowed nearly a week later, garbage piled up across the city and the sanitation department announced “limited collection” with “slight delays.” By mid-February, Mamdani quietly reversed course and reinstated the sweeps. Behold, the warmth of collectivism.

The fiscal picture is somehow worse: Mamdani inherited a $12 billion budget deficit from Eric Adams, and his proposed solution—tax hikes—requires Albany’s cooperation that Governor Hochul has been understandably reluctant to acquiesce to. His fallback is the city’s first property tax increase in years, landing squarely on middle-class homeowners. His preliminary budget already breaks his campaign promises and beyond the budget, the full Mamdani agenda constitutes the most ambitious expansion of municipal government since John Lindsay. Lindsay’s ambitions nearly bankrupted the city.

Mamdani was polling at 1% fourteen months before the election. He won because he had extraordinary political magnetism, weak opposition, and the correct read on what working-class New Yorkers were hungry to hear. That’s enough to win an election but it has never been enough to run the most complicated city on earth.

This city elects Republicans. Not often, but it does.

New York tolerates Democratic mismanagement until the dysfunction becomes intolerable, then turns sharply to an outsider who promises competence, public safety, and fiscal discipline. La Guardia. Giuliani. Bloomberg. Each governed for at least eight years.

Bloomberg left in 2013. Since then: twelve years of Democrats. De Blasio governed like he was building a national brand. Adams governed like he was above the law. Mamdani governs like the problem with New York is that it hasn’t tried socialism yet. We are twelve years into the cycle. The conditions that historically trigger a Republican correction are assembling fast.

But the pattern isn’t automatic. It requires someone to walk through the door. Right now, there’s no one even standing outside.

New York City has the greatest concentration of talent in the world, and Republicans can’t produce a mayoral candidate who clears single digits. The citywide party apparatus is a shell. There is no serious political operation to speak of. Republicans hold five City Council seats out of fifty-one, down from six after losing their lone Bronx seat last November. Five out of fifty-one.

What New York’s conservatives need right now, not in 2028, is someone who was already there. Someone doing the unglamorous work: running a campaign for city council even though they’ll lose. Organizing on the ground. Showing up to community board meetings. Not someone who needed a Democratic Socialist as mayor to convince them the city was worth fighting for.

Bill Ackman and his cohort spent enormous social and financial capital trying to stop Mamdani last fall and accomplished nothing. If even a fraction of that energy had been channeled into something politically productive over the preceding decade, the landscape would look completely different. Instead, the money class showed up at the last minute to panic, which is what the money class always does.

If conservatives keep writing off the cities, instead of treating New York as someone else’s problem, we are ceding the commanding heights of American economic and cultural life to people who think collectivism is a good thing. Mamdani is not going to be mayor forever. If his agenda crashes into reality, the political environment in a few years could look radically different. But it will only benefit the right if someone has spent the intervening years building something real. Not tweeting. Not fundraising off the spectacle. Building.

Once a generation, New York opens the door. The question is whether anyone will be ready to walk through it or whether we’ll be standing around bashing the next Curtis Sliwa on Twitter.

The answer is North Korea.

When you allow a hostile state to build a credible military deterrent it becomes permanent and untouchable. A problem that can never be solved, only managed, at enormous cost, forever. Every president for decades has known that the cost of “solving” the North Korea problem is a price far too high to pay—the regime cannot be dislodged without civilizational catastrophe.

Iran has been building towards the same deterrent. The Trump administration understood that the window to prevent a second North Korea was closing, and closing quickly. Every failed intervention moved Iran closer to the point of no return. The pressure to act now was strategic because the lesson of North Korea is that once the door locks, it is locked forever.

The Conventional Shield

North Korea’s conventional deterrent is built on blunt geography and positioning. The demilitarized zone and much of the terrain north leading to Pyongyang is liberally ornamented with pillboxes, bunkers, and reinforcing obstacles.

Nearby, in the mountains, thousands of hardened artillery sites (HARTs) are hewn into the rock, aimed squarely at Seoul and its population of ten million people. They are fixed, often on tracks, optimized to roll out, pre-aimed, and fire from just behind the terrain before returning to cover. Even with extensive counter-fire artillery, any military action against North Korea means accepting that Seoul takes catastrophic damage in the opening salvos.

This is the foundational defense that has made North Korea untouchable for decades. Certain destruction of a major city, combined with the prohibitive cost of digging the North Koreans out from their own terrain—the very mountains militarized against potential invaders.

Iran’s version of this is its ballistic missile program, ironically built with direct assistance from North Korea. The Shahab series of medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) are descendants of North Korean NoDong missiles, transferred in the 1990s. Iran has since developed indigenous systems with increasing range, accuracy, and numbers.

In recent days the Trump administration has revealed that Iran began to heavily expand their missile stockpile and production capacity.

Iran was pursuing an overwhelming conventional ballistic missile deterrent to make the cost of military action so high that we could not threaten them. Meanwhile, they continued working towards the thing that makes you permanently untouchable.

The Nuclear Umbrella

The artillery aimed at Seoul kept the United States and South Korea from acting while Pyongyang developed and miniaturized nuclear technology. By the time the world recognized the full scope of the program, the window for intervention had passed. A nuclear-armed North Korea could not be regime-changed or coerced.

Iran has been running—increasingly, sprinting—towards the same goal. Its nuclear program has been the subject of diplomatic theater for two decades. The JCPOA, the IAEA inspections, the enrichment caps that were agreed to and then exceeded. Iran has moved closer to weapons-grade enrichment and weaponization with each passing year. The conventional missile arsenal would exist to buy time for this program, exactly as North Korea’s artillery bought time for theirs.

The Asymmetric Networks

North Korea is fully committed to an asymmetric threat. Hundreds of thousands of Special Operations Forces (SOF) trained for unconventional warfare to sow chaos behind enemy lines. Military speedboats tasked to infiltrate the eastern and western coasts. Thousands of airborne troops to paradrop into South Korea in the event of a conflict. Ballistic missile submarines. Chemical weapons. In sum, much of their military is designed with the sole purpose of making a conflict too costly for their adversary.

The Iranian equivalent is its militia network. Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi Shia militias, and various Palestinian groups represent a distributed asymmetric coalition operating throughout the region. Where North Korea’s SOF would deploy locally, Iran’s proxies can strike across an entire region. They serve the same purpose: raise the cost of conflict beyond what any adversary is willing to pay, and do it through means that are difficult to deter or destroy.

Both countries understood that a conventional military alone isn’t enough to prevent regime-change from a militarily superior power. You need forces that are capable of imposing costs far out of proportion to their size.

The Economic Lifeline

North Korea persists through a creative juggling act of illicit activity. It sells military training to African police and military units, runs cyber operations that steal billions in cryptocurrency, and exports laborers to Russia, China, and the Middle East to generate foreign currency for the regime. Its economy is admittedly tiny, but the regime’s survival budget is funded by activities that exist entirely outside the legitimate global economic system. This is why it has been so difficult to control them through sanctions and economic pressure.

Iran’s version is simpler and much more useful. Oil. Despite decades of sanctions, Iran has continued to export crude to countries like China, generating the revenue that funds its military, its nuclear program, and its proxy network. Where North Korea built its deterrent on a relative shoestring budget, Iran is building the same ecosystem using materially greater resources.

A nuclear North Korea with oil revenue is harder to outlast and harder to contain. It is impossible to wait for the regime to collapse under economic pressure (which has failed for seventy years with North Korea) when they have some of the largest oil reserves in the world.

The Window

Every facet of Iran’s strategic deterrent mirrors North Korea’s. They were pursuing an expanded conventional deterrent, a nuclear program, asymmetric forces, and a sanctions-resistant economy.

The only difference is that Iran had not finished yet.

North Korea finished its conventional and nuclear deterrents and became permanent. No amount of economic or diplomatic pressure has managed to change the status quo on the Korean Peninsula. The Kim regime will likely persist indefinitely because the cost of removing it is higher than any country is willing to pay.

Iran was on the same trajectory. Every month that passed without decisive action moved it closer to the point where the same logic applies. Once Iran crosses the nuclear threshold with a nuclear-capable ballistic missile, the calculus changes permanently.

The administration had watched this trajectory for months. When the latest round of negotiations began to collapse, the questions became unavoidable. Allow Iran to continue running the clock on its missile stockpile and enrichment program, or accept that the window was closing in real time. Operation Epic Fury was their answer.

The strikes currently underway are not about punishing Iran for past behavior, though that behavior certainly meets the threshold for a Just War. Trump and the administration are trying to close the door on Iran before it could finish its deterrent. Whether the war succeeds in closing that window permanently remains uncertain, but the cost of waiting was increasingly clear.

Why Iran Is Worse

North Korea, for all its bluster, is largely a defensive problem. Just about every institution and strategic move made by the regime is in the sole pursuit of self-preservation. It is a hermit kingdom with a nuclear weapon, dangerous but contained to its own devices.

Iran, on the other hand, is not contained. Iran is the most persistent adversary the United States has faced since the Soviet Union.

Where North Korea is a problem we failed to prevent, Iran is a long-standing enemy we have failed to confront. The Marine barracks in Beirut. The IEDs that killed hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq. The proxy network that has bled American allies for four decades. The order to assassinate President Trump. No other adversary since the Soviet Union has inflicted such sustained, direct costs on American lives and interests like Iran has.

We already have one permanent, nuclear-armed rogue state that no president can touch. The administration bet that a risky intervention now was preferable to continuing a problem that compounds forever. History will judge whether they were right, but the logic behind that decision is not difficult to understand.

We see this in most of the great social initiatives of the 20th century. From Johnson’s Great Society with its emphasis on using federal power to somehow “even the playing field” through economic interventions and affirmative action programs to more recent pushes to reshape the educational and employment landscapes through Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, the left’s answer to all problems tends to be top-down mandates to “fix” things. Take your experts, get them to craft policy, throw public money at it and trust that our problem is as good as solved.

But as we’ve seen things never seem to work out like this. Policies are crafted, money is thrown, experts are paid and things get worse in an endless loop. Man, as it turns out, doesn’t act in nature as he does on our spreadsheets.

This worldview doesn’t stay contained to the world of domestic policy. The same people who believe they can mold their domestic economy and society into an ideal form naturally believe that the same can be done on an international scale as well. Often we find that even those on the political right, who would look with scorn at a command economy within their own borders, are drawn into the belief that outside of these borders things can be made to be orderly and tidy and sensible if only the right people and the right ideas could be put into place.

Much of the latter half of the 20th century has been marked by these projects, implemented by administrations of both parties, which try to plug “experts” from the State Department, or USAID, or some area specific think tanks in to “fix” problems in other lands, with results that more often than not have been dismal and embarrassing in their failures. Using Afghanistan as a case in point, The Military Times sums up the Pentagon’s independent inspector general for Afghanistan’s final report on what went wrong in America’s efforts to rebuild the country after the American invasion as:

The Military Times goes on to quote The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction as concluding that:

The military did its job. They won our battles. Saddam Hussein was toppled within weeks, the Taliban collapsed within months. The American people have been led to believe that it was our military that failed “the mission”, when it was our bureaucratic corps of “experts” who should have their chops bloodied.

The American “expert” class in the State Department, at USAID, and elsewhere in government spent the better part of two decades trying to construct Middle Eastern and Asian countries that fit our own image, only to watch their top-down “command” society efforts collapse around them. In the end Iraq and Afghanistan were social engineering failures, not military ones.

The repeated failures at post-war nation building have, though, been laid squarely at the feet of our military. After their grand schemes failed, schemes built on the idea of the perfectibility of man as an interchangeable widget, the expert class threw in the towel on the entire project of American global interventionism.

“Interventionism doesn’t work” they said, “We’ve learned there are no military solutions, we can’t be the world’s policeman.” From the left and increasingly from the right, the worldview became dominant. But American force did its job. American force worked. It was the philosophical conceits under which nation building had been undertaken that were a failure.

Rather than try to understand what had gone wrong, the foreign policy expert class threw up their hands and declared the job impossible, tarring as discredited the very idea that America could exert positive force on the world since their preferred method had failed. The political right absorbed this lesson uncritically, adopting the establishment's conclusion without questioning its premise.

We now find ourselves with significant portions of both domestic political spheres who take it as granted that American intervention on the global stage can only bring about disaster and ruin… Disaster and ruin for the foreign nations, as the left would have it, or disaster and ruin for ourselves as those on the right would.

Donald Trump did not accept this consensus. Regardless of one’s thoughts about him otherwise, it’s difficult to deny that our President is an optimist when it comes to America’s place on the international stage. He was forged in a Cold War world, where there are good guys and there are bad guys and we know we’re not the bad guys. Not content to merely steward America’s decline into irrelevancy as he believed his predecessors had done, he set about throwing around America’s weight and hauling the West kicking and screaming into global relevancy once again. America has always been powerful. Trump hasn’t changed that.

What he’s changed is America’s willingness to use that power again, unhindered by the dour words of the foreign policy “expert” class. In Venezuela, rather than play the diplomatic game as it had been played for decades, Trump chose to cut the head off of the snake by whisking Maduro from his home and into American custody to face justice for his crimes against his own people and against ours. In Iran, rather than content himself with playing the usual political posturing as had been done for decades before him, Trump chose to cut the Gordian Knot by treating the Islamic Republic’s regime as the enemy of America that it has so frequently and loudly announced itself to be.

The difference between this administration and its predecessors is what happens after the force is applied. The Bush administration toppled Saddam in three weeks and then spent twenty years trying to construct what came next. Trump toppled Maduro and went home. In Iran, the president has been explicit: he has told the Iranian people to “seize control of your destiny” and “take over your government.” The White House has said openly that what follows is in the hands of Iranians, not American reconstruction teams. The force is the same. The conceit that we should manage what comes after is gone.

Trump is reasserting America’s place as the world’s foremost guarantor of peace through strength, not the illusion of peace through hollow words and quiet submission to “diplomatic realities” or “international law.” And our European allies have begun to take note: French President Emmanuel Macron has begun to talk tough, saying in a recent speech:

And in Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz stated grimly that "the international order based on 'rights and rules' is currently being destroyed," continuing:

As Walter Russell Mead put it on X: "Trump has won the ideological battle with Europe. If a generation of Europeans hadn't blinded themselves to this hard but necessary truth, the world, the EU and the transatlantic relationship would be better off."

But while Trump's return to a more forceful policy has begun to stiffen the backbones of our European allies, it has been met with much wailing and gnashing of teeth by the foreign policy think-tank set… And perhaps for good reason. Should Trump succeed here, the moral and literal cowardice of their preferred policies will be laid bare for all to see, putting into jeopardy their comfortable sinecures at NGOs and their side gigs sponging tens of thousands in speakers' fees from American colleges and universities every year.

Vast swaths of people in the academic and foreign policy community have staked their reputations and livelihoods on the idea that America as a force for good in the world — a force that can be willing and able to use its force for good — is antiquated and dead. One needs only look at their fury and their panic at seeing their entire argument being put to the toughest of tests, the test of reality.

They've been wrong about what we can achieve at home through top-down directives from atop their ivory towers. They've been wrong about what occupation can construct abroad. And now they face the possibility if not the probability that their prescriptions for what ails global affairs have been just as misguided, and for the same reason: The world doesn't work in reality like it does on paper.

People are unpredictable, and now as always strength and a willingness to use it trumps honeyed words every time. The "expert class," with their usually self-awarded claims of expertise, have failed to either forecast world events or to adequately grapple with them when they occur. Should Trump succeed where they all have failed, the irrelevance that follows will have been well earned.

At the end of the day we live in a real world, a world with now over 8 billion independent actors spread out across it and operating as its moving parts. What time has taught us is that when it comes to inputs and outcomes there is no magic recipe to make things so, no matter how many graphs and charts we have on hand showing that it will be so.

You can't design outcomes, either at home or abroad, because you can't see into the mind and the soul of every person operating in either sphere. There are levers that can be pushed and pulled… A helping hand in times of trouble, a closed fist in times of strife… but policy in the real world must acknowledge and use both to succeed.

As Theodore Roosevelt said, America's policy should be to "speak softly and carry a big stick," but for too long we've had nothing but soft words and no stick to back them up. We are learning, right now, that America's power works as advertised.