Junto

Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination last September, Candace Owens has waged a podcast-and-Twitter campaign against Turning Point USA and much of the mainline conservative right. The claims have been outlandish and the evidence thin where it exists at all, but her audience is vast and devoted, and she has turned it into an army of badgering critics aimed at Turning Point, Erika Kirk, and anyone else within range.

America is the moral protagonist of the modern world. Sorry, Europe. 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.

I. 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.

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.

Editor's Note: This is a republishing of an essay from 2025. Philip's father would pass six months after this was written, and you can read his reflection here. Father’s Day is often celebrated with cards, ties, and simple gestures of affection. For me, the holiday is more complicated. 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.

On October 6, 2018, the Ultimate Fighting Championship held its 229th flagship event with Conor McGregor, once the biggest name in the sport, headlining the main card again Lightweight champion Khabib Nurmagomedov. One of the fights within the main card was a heavyweight match between the American fighter Derrick Lewis and the tall Russian Alexander Volkov.

We are fast approaching the 250th anniversary of American independence, a genuine triumph for our nation and the truly radical and freedom-centric ideals its founding represents.

In a May 2nd article on the website UnHerd Richard Dawkins, one of the stalwart horsemen of the New Atheist movement, sat down for several days to have a running dialogue with Anthropic’s Large Language Model (LLM) Claude with the intent of running it through the Turing Test, a test proposed by mathematician and early pioneer in computer science Alan Turing in 1950 to determine a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior.

“I don’t plan to get involved in partisan politics. That’s not what the church is about.” - Pope Leo XIV “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.

In 1970, Tom Wolfe wrote a now-famous story for New York Magazine called Radical Chic. The essay details a fundraising event held at composer Leonard Bernstein’s home to raise money for the Black Panthers, after 21 of their members had been arrested by the FBI for conspiring to bomb shopping malls and police stations in New York City. The list of Bernstein’s elite friends in attendance at the party included actress Jean Seberg, the anchorwoman Barbara Walters, and director Otto Preminger.