The American Mind

With tensions in Iran still boiling and our national debt hitting $40 trillion, it’s time to take a hard look at the military’s budget. We should preserve what the military needs to be capable and prepared—and cut the waste. One little-known program has not only failed its mission but also driven excess government spending. The good news is that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has already announced a review. The bad news? This program is so fundamentally defective that it should be abolished outright.

Ten years ago today, September 5, 2016, Michael Anton’s “The Flight 93 Election” took the internet, and the Right, by storm. Anton’s essay made the case for Trump in the face of furious, well-funded opposition from elite conservative intellectual and political circles. The electoral choice was easy: Trump was a risk; Hillary was a certainty. On Trump, though, Anton went further.

Editors’ Note This piece is based on Noelle Mering’s book, No Contact: How a Seductive Ideology Broke Families and Friendships and How We Can Repair Them, which will be published by Forum Books on September 8. Mark exited his family group chat after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election and, shortly after, stopped speaking to his family entirely.

Optimists have lately claimed that wokeness was a fad that has gone out of style. To their credit, there has been evidence to support this. “Woke 1 was crazy,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in August on ABC News. “Rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric we would use today.” Progressivism’s biggest champions seem eager to distance themselves from its recent excesses. But the Jason Arday scandal shows that wokeness is not over, not by a long shot.

The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host. FIRE Challenges Trump’s Deportation of Pro-Gaza Immigrants | The American Mind Podcast Richard Lim, historian at Prager U.

Will marriage survive the internet? It’s a question no one was asking in the 1990s, even as the World Wide Web became part of our everyday lives. Yet here we are more than halfway through the 2020s, and it’s fair to say the digitization of our social lives has drastically unsettled the relations between the sexes. As scholar Patrick T.

According to John Adams, if you cannot fail, you’re not truly free. In his last public statement, honoring the 50th anniversary of American Independence in 1826, Adams wrote that the American Revolution would be A Memorable epoch in the annals of the human race; destined, in future history, to form the brightest or the blackest page, according to the use or the abuse of those political institutions by which they shall, in time to come, be Shaped, by the human mind. That was not a new thought.

Vice President JD Vance recently drew criticism for questioning the benefits of the dollar’s reserve currency status. In a 2023 interview, he argued that it encourages Americans to consume too much, describing it as a “resource curse.” If you’ve followed Vance during his time in Congress, these comments are not particularly surprising.

Last summer, European news outlets reported that “volunteers” from Mexican and Colombian drug cartels had infiltrated Ukraine’s military—considered the world’s “drone superpower”—to learn cutting-edge drone warfare so they could use the knowledge to kill their enemies back home. Claims that this problem is ongoing have not yet been publicly verified by the U.S. intelligence community or the media. As yet, however, they remain undisputed.

For a long time our most heated public and academic debates have been almost uniformly characterized by false dichotomies. We are supposed to choose between “realism” and “idealism” in foreign affairs and ethical theory; John Rawls’s excessively egalitarian “theory of justice” and Robert Nozick’s untenable “minimal state”; post-liberal dogmatism and a decayed liberalism that is increasingly oblivious to the moral foundations of democracy.