Dear subscribers,

I’ve indefinitely paused all payments for this Substack. I have been too busy managing Passage Publishing, which is experiencing enormous growth at the moment and is therefore taking up any additional time I might have to write. I will get back to writing soon, but I doubt I will have much time for long form until the New Year.

In the meantime, our Fall/Winter catalog is now out and includes an anthology from the great John Derbyshire, a debut short story collection from First Things editor Justin Lee, and our print edition of volume 2 of Unqualified Reservations. We also have additional reprints of the original Hardy Boys and the original The Storm of Steel that are now available and will make excellent Christmas gifts. Earlier in the summer, we also released an anthology from Paul Gottfried, a memoir from Taki Theodorocopoulos, and a story/essay collection from Rambo Van Halen, Hollywood Samizdat that are all worth your time.

I encourage you to all buy these books and please sign up for the Passage Newsletter (link at the bottom of the Passage website) for information about new releases (of which there will be dozens over the next 6 months) and sales for the Holiday Season. Finally, Passage’s catalog will now be available everywhere books are sold, including big box retailers like Barnes & Noble and Target (something I would not have thought possible even a year ago).

Also, you may have heard that I’ve started a bi-weekly podcast with the great Chris Rufo. While there is a lot we agree on, Chris and I come to the right from a slightly different place and intend to use the show to try to stake out some common ground for where we think the right might move forward from here on out.

If you are so inclined, please subscribe to our Youtube channel, or subscribe on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you don’t subscribe I am going to call Stephen Miller and have you deported.

With great love,

L

Grief

Like many this morning, I feel strongly compelled to do something. I had to have a conversation last night with my 10 year old son to explain that the very nice man he met a few months ago and who graciously walked us around his TV studio and signed him a book was killed for having the same political beliefs as his dad.

This is the kind of conversation that changes you.

It can lead you into some very dark corners. Many, I suspect, have had versions of this conversation with their children or loved ones over the last 24 hours. If they have not had the conversation explicitly, the thought is there, just under the surface. Charlie Kirk was the center of American conservatism. He was neither extreme in his rhetoric nor in his disposition. He was the nice version. He was sincere. Political media is filled with some of the worst people you can imagine. The most selfish and cynical and transactional people anywhere. Charlie was not like this at all. Just a loveable, happy-go-lucky guy who really believed he could talk to people he disagreed with in good faith and try to change their minds.

If he’s what the media calls a divisive and polarizing and hateful figure (as NPR did this morning), what does that make the rest of us?

Charlie, in many ways, was the absolute best we have to offer. As an X mutual said yesterday, “Everyone in this country should be going to bed every night giving thanks to God for still allowing America to produce men of Charlie Kirk’s caliber.”

As many have articulated over the past day, Charlie very much embodied the virtues of the American Republic, so much so that it is almost a cliche to summarize it all. He was nearly a caricature, and maybe if I had not personally met him, I would think these descriptions were merely caricatures, wishful manifestations of a high school civics lesson––a man of profound faith, guided by his love of Christ and his hunger to understand God more deeply, a devoted husband and father, an unapologetic patriot and pious defender of our civil religion, and a model of the bedrock civic virtue of free speech and open debate. On top of all of that, according to every first-hand report, he was a loyal friend and trusted organizer, one whose personal integrity and leadership was beyond any doubt.

It was precisely these qualities that drew sneers from the small and the cynical, yet they are the very virtues that anyone of worth, however privately, longs to have more of. This was, and is, certainly true for me. I am more than ten years Charlie’s senior, but I look up to him in many ways. He is an aspirational figure, not in his achievements or notoriety, but in his character. We would all be better off to be more like Charlie Kirk.

Now What?

There is another side to Charlie. He was a fighter. He understood the game and he knew how to win it. He did not shrink from opportunity. He never cowered and never allowed himself to be neutered. Whatever energy was out there in the world that could be put to positive use, no matter its source, was energy to be seized for concrete ends.

We should not be shy about using this event to fight for the things Charlie believed in. He would’ve demanded this from us. And it is our duty to see it through. The death of Charlie Kirk marks the most consequential political assassination in America since Robert F. Kennedy’s murder in 1968. The gravity of such a moment demands a proportional response, and there will inevitably be two.

The first will be institutional. Here I mean the category of responses that will fall in the realm of hard governance, and must be circumscribed by the legitimate use of state-sponsored action. Laws will be written. Extremist organizations will be dismantled. Assets will be seized. Individuals and institutions that cultivated the conditions for this climate of violence will face criminal liability. These are necessary measures of statecraft that will in large part determine whether we get another Red reign of terror, or whether we emerge from this with our nation intact.

The second response will be symbolic. This will answer how we choose to inscribe Kirk’s legacy into the memory of the nation. Symbolic responses shape the story that a people tells about itself. It is what produces the unspoken norms and directional attitudes that guide our thinking and, more importantly our feeling, which in turn produces the stuff for our ways of being. The symbolic is not secondary to the institutional. These are partner responses. While the right has had some measure of recent success in the institutional battlefield, it is still too often negligent of the symbolic space in which those successes must be permanently enshrined. If we do not fix this event into the national imagination, it will fade and become, like so much leftist violence of the past, a mere historical footnote.

It is this symbolic register that requires our attention now, before the media cycle moves on, and before this moment is deliberately downplayed or replaced by the next Thing or otherwise is abandoned to the arena petty partisan dispute.

The correct course of action must live up to the gravity of the moment and be both bold and durable.

I propose a two-pronged symbolic response that matches the gravity of this moment. The first is the creation of Charlie Kirk National Park, a lasting memorial that fixes his sacrifice into the American landscape and ties his legacy to the 250th anniversary of the Republic.

The second is the establishment of a Smithsonian Exhibit on the Woke Era (2012–2024), a national reckoning that will preserve the memory of this dark chapter and honor those who resisted at great personal cost.

Taken together, these initiatives would ensure that Charlie Kirk’s life and death are remembered as part of a larger struggle to defend truth and free speech and the enduring ways of being of the American People against forces that sought, and have always sought, to extinguish them. One proposal grounds his legacy in the permanence of the land while the other secures it in the permanence of the national record. Both are necessary if this moment is to be commemorated with the seriousness it demands.

Part 1: Charlie Kirk National Park

A Lasting Memorial

• Monuments can be renamed or removed.
  

• Statues can be toppled.
  

• But a national park endures. It embeds memory in the land itself and makes commemoration inseparable from the American landscape.
  

Marking the 250th Anniversary

• The designation should coincide with the nation’s semiquincentennial.
  

• This ensures Kirk’s legacy is woven into the story America tells about itself now and forever. If there is a single figure who ought to represent the best of America as it is, Charlie is as good as it gets.
  

The Meaning

• The park would symbolize the unconquerable American spirit of free speech, the whole suite of civic and personal virtues Charlie embodied, and standing firm even in the face of mortal danger.

The Site

• Utah is the natural location, specifically Grand Staircase–Escalante, with the option of adjoining land in Arizona where Kirk’s organization was based.
  

• It is an impressive and worthy landscape.
  

• Kirk was killed in Utah, binding the site to his life and death.
  

• Democrats have already insisted on its protection, making opposition politically untenable.
  

The Political Value

• Charlie Kirk becomes a lasting signifier of MAGA and the youth movement it inspired.
  

• The park would cement Trump’s legacy by permanently embedding his tenure in the land itself.
  

• The 250th anniversary is marked by a gesture that secures MAGA and free speech as a living principle.
  

Part 2: Smithsonian Exhibit on the Woke Era

A National Reckoning

• The “Woke Era,” spanning roughly 2012–2024, marked a period of radical ideology that sought to undermine our national identity and its spiritual and moral frameworks.
  

• The exhibit would preserve the memory of this tumultuous and deranged chapter in American public life.
  

The Purpose

• To compel the nation to confront the social and moral degradations of the era brought upon by its own institutional authorities.
  

• To honor the men and women who, often at great personal cost, resisted its revolutionary ambitions.
  

• To affirm America’s enduring commitment to free speech and it civil religious virtues.
  

Exhibition Elements

• A historical timeline tracing the rise of woke ideology from academic origins to institutional dominance.
  

• Documentation of the “race revolution” and the violence, riots, and divisive politics it unleashed.
  

• Examination of the gender and sexual revolution, especially the trans movement and its medical abuses.
  

• Analysis of anti-American campaigns to rewrite history and erase shared memory.
  
  

• The story of resistance: parents, citizens, and civic leaders who pushed back.
  

The Political Value

• Establishes a definitive public record of the Woke Era’s harms (and its historic origins).
  

• Forces confrontation of these derangements and abuses of public trust so that the establishment figures and institutions responsible for it are held to permanent account.
  

• Ensures clarity about what was endured and what was defeated.
  

Clarity

None of this brings Charlie back. None of this ensures our political life becomes normal again. And to reiterate, this all depends on concurrent acts of hard governance to root out the networks and ideologies promoting the breakdown of our ways of life. Real consequences must be imposed on people. The symbolic, on its own, is not nearly enough. But without the symbolic, this will easily evaporate into fuzzy abstractions that within a generation, if not a few years, can no longer orient our preferences or ambitions.

If I was writing this about anyone else, I would finish this draft and send it to Charlie and his team. He would read it and give me feedback. If he liked it, he’d invite me on his show to evangelize it and turn it into something real. Charlie’s not here to do that. But we are. And we owe it to him to do something.

I was recently invited to speak at a small meeting of media executives where the central question was where the fragmented conservative media ecosystem goes from here.

Specifically we wanted to answer:

1. What cultural crowns are lying in the gutter?

2. What are the obstacles faced by the right in claiming these crowns?

3. What is the relationship between the internet and real space?

4. What can the right do besides participate in the take economy?
   

I can’t speak on everything that was said at the meeting, but I thought it might be worthwhile to share the outline of my remarks, which are not yet fully formed and probably would benefit from a more thoughtful treatment. Still, there is a seed of something useful here (I think) and keeping with my central premise––that these cultural efforts must be inclusive of a lot of people who, if properly arranged, will not be fighting over a zero sum pie, which has long been the mindset of those participating in this space––I want other people thinking about these topics, if for no other reason than as a starting place for future collaborations.

This is also a placeholder for me to come back to these topics at a later date.

“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”

- William Blake

I. Crowns Lying in the Gutter:

1. Curation: in a world of total access and infinite content, there is a new premium on tastemakers and curators

• Select: Tell people what’s good and worth engaging with

• Contextualize: Tell them why

• Reward: people get positive feedback and experiences for engaging with what is good. Content makers and people with good taste are surrounded by prestige

• Integrate: institutionally formalize what is good so that it permeates the culture and becomes durable

2. Creative talent: there is an entire generation of disaffected creatives who want the freedom to make good and interesting art and work on cool projects that aren’t dominated by politics

• May not be Ideologically aligned, but not hostile

• Attracted to opportunities for prestige

• Do not want to feel creatively constrained

• Turned off by explicit political associations

3. Myth making: The world is disenchanted. Yet people ache for myth, for meaning, for narrative grandeur. The Right can reclaim mythopoesis: building worlds, characters, and archetypes that resonate beyond politics. We have to create an entirely new interior mental universe for people to occupy.

• Be funny: This includes humor that is not nihilistic or merely self-deprecating. It observes the world as it is. And includes cultural memory beyond the last current thing. Dark and layered humor is good.

• Be accessible: a little bit of slop is good. Not everything is a grand epic or intellectually sophisticated. Action and slapstick go a long way

• Be alive. A little bit of eroticism is good. All great art has this.

• Be less moralistic (less scolding): Much higher tolerance for the unexpected and offensive. Not because those are good in and of themselves, but because they are a part of the world as it is.

• Be less sentimental/nostalgic. Conservatives have a tendency to lean too heavily on feeling good about themselves. Not all art is intended to soothe discomfort about the world.

• Be less whiny. No more grievance. No more mere “owning the libs.” That’s fine but there has to be an affirmative vision. Whatever comes next shouldn’t own the libs so much as it confounds them. It should leave them behind.

Everything we make should:

1. Attract young people

2. Resist the defeatism of decline; it requires new, creative will-to-life. We are opening the future.

II. Biggest Obstacles to Cooperation on the Right:

1. Aesthetic Immaturity:

• Much of right-leaning media/art is either:

  • Cringe and amateur (self-sabotaging),

  • Too obsessed with “owning the libs” (reactive, boring),

  • Or aestheticizing defeatism (blackpilled, sterile).

2. New meaningful efforts require independence from the news cycle and partisan reflexes.

• We have to stop reacting to everything

• We can’t live inside the existing social/cultural frame

• Fragmentation by Purity Spirals:

  • Small movements tear themselves apart fighting internal battles over who’s “based” enough.

    • narcissism of small differences

    • it’s a big pie and everyone can get a piece; if you’re not rooting for your allies to succeed, you're out

  • Solution: Be selective in alliances, but generous in spirit.

  • Shared action > shared ideology.

3. Scarcity Mindset:

• Everyone clinging to their small piece of the pie

• No coordination to create a prestige economy

• No coordination on solving infrastructure bottlenecks like distribution

• Ghetto turf wars or indifference

III. Real-Space v. digital. The Role of DC, New York, LA, Dallas, etc.:

1. DC: Mostly irrelevant to culture creation; however it useful for funding, prestige, and institutional integration as described in 1 above. We should be using its museums and exhibition functions.

2. New York: Still the nerve center for the old elite art and publishing institutions, but in steep decline.

• Opportunity: Right-aligned venues can exploit its vacuum.

• Density of high value young people means everything accelerates

3. Dallas and Other 2nd Cities: Emerging hubs include Dallas, Miami, Nashville, Austin…

• second-tier cities are where new movements can physically incubate.

• these places are cheaper, freer, and less ideologically policed.

• rate of movement is slower and less impactful than NYC/LA

4. LA and SF/California: like NYC in steep decline from a cultural perspective. This will change and reclamation can/will be done, but this requires strategies accounting for a longer timeline and is beyond the scope of current efforts

5. Where does the internet intersect with irl:

• Real-space matters more than people think but the internet is still where cultural creation is happening and aggregating.

• The Internet is fragmenting attention, but live events are REAL in a way the internet is not

  • multi-dimensional, multi-sensory, tactile

  • people desire to smell each other

• Real world cultural nodes must touch the internet and vice versa

IV. What Comes After the Commentator, Influencer, and Streamer “Take” Economies:

1. Making over reacting:

• The next wave will value the maker over the taker: those who build things (stories, music, spaces, brands) rather than just reacting to things.

2. New Worlds and Forms:

• Reach for the unexpected

  • films and novels

  • but also…

    • video games

    • anime

    • we have to attempt large projects

3. Communities over Audiences:

• The parasocial audience is fragile; real communities (where people build relationships) will be stronger.

• Curators and organizers of real communities will matter more than social media megaphones.

4. Mystery and Initiation:

• People crave exclusivity and meaning.

• Movements that offer layers of access, rites of passage, prestige, and loyalty

• The future is less “mass media” and more exclusive

• Highly curated content and highly curated experiences

The Epstein story is officially undead. It does no good to pretend as if people don’t care, or shouldn’t care, even if the least consequential version of the Epstein story—that he was an unusually well-connected “fixer” with a taste for underage girls and sex parties, who gained access and favor to influential people through his sociopathic charm and the presumption of importance conferred by relationships with other influential people, and that his initial wealth came mostly from one man, Leslie Wexner (whose own deep connections to Israel were incidental), but was not involved in any kind of intelligence operation or blackmail ring except maybe for the banal purposes of his own self-enrichment, that his plea deal in 2008 was a normal legal outcome given the nature of the charges and only looks more sinister in hindsight, and finally that his suicide was, well, just a suicide—turns out to be the truth.

Do you believe that’s the truth? Does it seem like it might plausibly be the truth?

Maybe, but after everything that has been said about Epstein, and all that we know—and all that we don’t know, and all that appears to remain purposefully shrouded in mystery—one is forgiven for doubting that this is the actual story, and certainly one is forgiven for not passively accepting this story as the default accounting of who this guy was and what he was up to.

Epstein was a real man who lived a bizarre and deeply compromised life that, at minimum, revolved around some of the most powerful institutions and individuals in the Western world. His activities unfolded under salacious and opaque circumstances, leaving behind a trail of unanswered questions with clear political and legal implications. His network was never fully mapped, but it almost certainly included an unusually high concentration of global elites. Major media outlets have repeatedly suppressed serious inquiry into his operations. The high-profile figures most frequently linked to him—Clinton, Gates, Prince Andrew, etc.—have never faced meaningful investigation or consequence. And nearly every aspect of his public identity remains clouded in implausible detail, suggestive of associations far more complex and troubling than anything officially acknowledged.

So yes, Epstein is a real man with a real story, but he is also a symbol of the public’s fears and anxieties about how power actually functions. People generally distrust that what they see on the surface is how things actually are. How could it be otherwise? What they see on the surface is a carnival of incompetence and venal decision-making that doesn’t seem to be administered by any consistent logic. At the very least there doesn’t seem to be a straight line between the expressed interests of the governed, writ large, and the people doing the governing. The assumption is that there is some hidden architecture of forces and interests—elite interests, billionaires’ interests, corporations’ interests, gloablists’ interests, deep state interests, Jewish interests, [choose your fighter]—intermediating between the People’s interests and whatever actually gets done at the highest levels of government and society.

Every once in a while a figure like Epstein breaches the surface—providing something the people can see—suggesting the hidden iceberg underneath.

Are people wrong that there is something underneath the surface? There is a line of “serious” thinking that we ought to dismiss sub-surface speculations as “conspiracy theories.” I have written about this topic at some length, explaining that this dismissiveness is wrongheaded—there is something under the surface—but also that the concrete claims of the conspiracy theorists tend to evaporate under close scrutiny. These claims live in a kind of quantum epistemic No Man’s Land where the moment they are verifiable, the moment they are seen, they cease to be conspiracy theories and instantaneously migrate into the realm of rational inquiry. The conspiracy theory skeptic therefore can never be wrong. His definition of conspiracy theories precludes these ideas ever being verifiably true, even as he depends on the conspiracy theoretical mode of thinking to allow him to uncover and arrive at certain truths he’d otherwise stay ignorant of (Covid lab leak is a good example).

All of that analytical gobbledygook aside, what matters for the Epstein case is that the presently knowable details indicate that some of the sub-surface speculations might be true, or in any case that these speculations are pointing in the direction of what might be true, and the slow-rolling, if not outright suppression of the full Epstein treasure trove of documentation—as promised—creates the exact conditions in which conspiratorial speculation becomes perfectly reasonable and even necessary.

Truth is good for own its own sake and doesn’t require additional justification beyond itself, but if the goal of the administration and its messaging around Epstein is to get people to “move on” from this story and not allow it to be a distraction, the best way to achieve this goal is to, as plainly and transparently as possible, simply explain who Jeffrey Epstein was, what he did, for whom, and to what ends.

As I said in my post about conspiracy theories:

“The antidote to all of this—the paranoia, the schizobabble, the speculative excess—is simple: tell the truth. People sense (correctly) that they are being lied to or denied a full accounting of reality and their (reasonable) response is to gravitate toward whatever most expediently fills in the narrative gaps. This leads to a lot of bad thinking and epistemic traps since there is a lot of complexity and counterintuitive facts about the world and for which Wikipedia and internet sleuthing is not an adequate bridge. But the solution to bad thinking is not to suppress inquiry or dismiss conspiracy theorists as uniquely bad; it is to create conditions where people do not need to rely on speculative narratives to make sense of the world because they’re actually told what is going on.”

So, okay, what does this look like in practice? How might the messaging on Epstein be improved so that it doesn’t continue to metastasize or damage the administration's credibility?12

As with any rhetorical encounter, it starts with demonstrating that the government knows and understands what the public knows, and knows and is sympathetic to what the public feels. The demand here is not some theatrical declassification dump. And in fact not everything needs to be revealed. The admin can continue to withhold information and/or not disclose certain details if it determines doing so might jeopardize national interests. That’s fine. Most people will understand there are tensions and tradeoffs that might include keeping certain state secrets secret.

The operating question is whether the public can trust that what they’re being told—and not being told—reflects good-faith judgment rather than institutional self-preservation. “Nothing to see here,” simply isn’t sufficient. People have a good nose for stories that are being curated to protect reputational interests, and/or are designed to distract them from embarrassing or otherwise compromising information. It is, in fact, in this empty space of non-information where alternative speculations are given the oxygen to grow and become politically active.

The federal government holds thousands of pages of sealed material, including flight logs, financial records, communications, and testimony that could clarify the basic architecture of how Epstein operated and on whose behalf. I don’t expect all of this to come to light. I don’t need to know every last detail. Again, if certain redacted details need to remain so, fine. Most people just want a clear explanation of who this guy was and enough documentation to verify the narrative.

I can imagine a possibility where Trump himself is implicated in the documents. This appears to be what the admin is currently signaling. The reframing of the Epstein Files as a “Hoax,” in parallel to the Russiagate Hoax suggests the admin thinks the information in these files were fabricated and/or shaded in such a way as to cast suspicion on Trump and his associates in order to hamstring his political efforts.

If this is accurate, it might be that Trump appears on flight logs or in third-party testimony or elsewhere in the files that are not fake, per se—i.e., they are not constructed from whole cloth—and which suggest certain patterns of quasi-legal behavior or at least proximity to them. It is also entirely plausible that this information on Trump, however circumstantial, was compiled by some collection of mid-level intelligence bureaucrats and agency holdovers from hostile administrations to keep around as a “just in case” folder to not only harm Trump but whoever might create an existential risk for these agencies in the future.

Or consider the possibility that the maximalist version of the Epstein narrative is true, that Epstein was an Israeli intelligence asset running a state-backed blackmail operation that trafficked underage girls to entrap and control American and other Western elites, with the full knowledge and occasional cooperation of compromised U.S. officials, protected for years by the DOJ and media partners, all to secure political leverage for Israel’s strategic aims.

The disclosure of such a betrayal would undoubtedly detonate a foreign relations nuke that would potentially touch on every last inch of American politics. The collateral damage of something like this is hard to imagine. Such a revelation could conceivably trigger a cascade of reciprocal revelations of further intelligence disclosures that might jeopardize ongoing operations abroad, or disrupt ongoing diplomatic efforts, or even, depending on the scope and nature of Israel-Epstein's sexual blackmail campaign, and what U.S. officials and institutions might have been penetrated or otherwise complicit, could catalyze a total collapse in public trust and destabilize core functions of the U.S. government.

There are dozens of other versions of the Epstein story that fit the known facts that range up and down the spectrum of lurid and existentially significant and very real to mundane and trivial and merely superficially suggestive but ultimately inconsequential.

In any of these versions, including the one where Trump is directly implicated as well as the one that might genuinely threaten political stability, there is still a way to effectively message the truth.

It starts with a sober, non-defensive framing that acknowledges the unusual history of the Epstein saga, that the whole thing is very strange and contains elements that have been suppressed or manipulated, and also acknowledges that the unwillingness of political officials to straightforwardly address it is itself a part of the story.

This must also be paired with a surgical and clear explanation of who Jeffrey Epstein was, how he got his money, his motives, his (illegal) activities, and whatever else was substantively relevant about his life (and death). If this implicates Trump, say so. The public is not naive about how hostile intelligence operations work. We watched Russiagate unfold in real time and will extend Trump all of the benefit of the doubt he asks for. Explain who was involved in constructing this story, and what steps have been taken, or are being taken, to expose and hold these people accountable.

If Israel is implicated, then that also must be stated directly. It is a matter of national self-respect. If certain details need to be withheld to protect ongoing national security interests, so be it, but giving away leverage to a junior foreign power—for fear of escalation—is also a matter of national security interest, and if there is any truth at all to the suggestion (which people will assume anyway) that Israel was “handling” Epstein, then a full accounting of that reality must take place in the open.

A public that is permanently dependent on speculation is not going to organically settle on the equilibrium that there is no there there. The most deranged and damaging version of the story will prevail. I ask that Trump’s comms team, with all due humility and respect, kindly reconsider their strategy.

Thank you for your attention in this matter!

Note: As of this writing—bedtime, June 23rd—it appears the land sale proposal is getting pushed out of budget reconciliation because of the Byrd Rule. Good news. Nonetheless, Mike Lee assures us he will continue to pursue this issue, so this post will remain relevant for the foreseeable future.

Another policy debate has erupted on X over the last couple of weeks regarding Senator Mike Lee’s proposal to sell off between .5% and .75% of public lands across eleven western states (Montana notably excluded). The proposal, which has been shoehorned into the budget reconciliation process, has the stated aims of increasing affordable housing and helping pay down the national debt.

The proposal was first released on June 11th, then revised shortly thereafter with some qualifying language and additional specifications about existing mining, logging, and grazing rights, but went largely unnoticed until June 16th when Benji Backer posted the following tweet:

Lee then made the mistake of responding to the tweet stating that none of the places depicted in the images would be eligible for sale under the terms of the proposal. But he was wrong. Whoops. Turns out all of those places are eligible for sale.

Lee’s false correction, as of this writing, has racked up 4.7 million views on X, mostly from people newly aware, and very angry about the idea of our public lands, which contain much of the greatest natural beauty in the world, being sold-off for affordable housing (or any other reason, for that matter).

There have been attempts by Lee and other proponents of the bill to backtrack and clarify and point to sections of the proposal that might, in theory, narrow the scope of the sale to tracts of land bordering already existing municipalities that don’t get used much or are otherwise mismanaged or unobjectionably better suited for modest development, but these explanations have been unconvincing and have only raised more doubts about the language of the proposal and the true intentions of its backers.

Lee, for example, despite his attempts to moderate his position, has been caught saying he hopes to sell off as much as 98% of our public lands—orders of magnitude in excess of the .75% being floated—and that he’d prefer if our public land was owned by BlackRock. I try not to put too much weight on rhetorical blunders like this, especially in the context of private DMs, but Lee’s admissions don’t exactly shore up the grave and mounting doubts the public has about this land grab.

So, okay, what exactly is at stake here? Where did this proposal to sell off public lands come from? What are “public lands” anyway? Doesn’t it make sense to reduce public land holdings, especially in the western states like Utah and Nevada where as much as 80% of the real estate is in federal hands? Does this proposal actually threaten places people fish and hunt and go camping etc. or is that just a social media fever dream? And isn’t it true that we do actually need more housing and that this proposal could help?

I will answer all of these questions and more below.

1. “People online seem to really not like the idea of selling public land. What’s the deal with that?”

Before diving into the legal specifics or broader political context, it’s important to start with the plain descriptive fact that this proposal is wildly unpopular across the political spectrum, and even in the states where the feds control a majority of the land. Despite what Lee and his supporters insist, the vehement objections to this proposal they’ve encountered online are consistent with all available polling data on this issue.

A recent YouGov poll found that 71% of Americans oppose the sale of public lands to private interests, with just 10% in favor. This opposition is bipartisan:

• 61% of 2024 Trump voters oppose such sales (only 16% support),

• And 85% of Harris voters are opposed (just 6% support).

Even in the American West, where federal land holdings are vast and often seen as a mixed blessing, there is no appetite for mass privatization. According to the Colorado College State of the Rockies Project, an overwhelming 82% of Westerners prefer building more housing within or close to existing communities, rather than selling public lands for development. Only 14% support sales of public land for housing construction in natural areas. This, despite the fact that 81% also express serious concern about the rising cost of living. Even while acknowledging the problem of affordable housing, a vanishingly small number of people see this as a viable solution.

These are strongly and widely held objections that are as much intuitive as they are based on any rational evaluation of the underlying trade-offs. People really really really like their public lands. And any politician who is going to propose selling off even a small fraction of them needs to address the issue with maximum prudence and sensitivity.

This basic political reality seems entirely absent from how the proposal has been messaged and sold. Whatever else one thinks, the concept is political poison for the GOP, and if pursued more aggressively, risks inflicting serious collateral damage on the broader Trump agenda.

This is simply VERY BAD politics.

2. “Where did this very unpopular idea come from, and why now?”

The stewardship of public lands in the west is, as far as I know, a uniquely American system that relies on a Public Trust Doctrine adapted from English Common Law and precedes the settlement of the American frontier. Rodeo Professor, who has been one of the leading voices in opposition to the Lee proposal, has talked in depth about this on X. In short this means that Feds do not “own” the land in the traditional sense…

You, dear reader, own the land.

The land, and the resources it contains, are held in a trust by the government for your (our) benefit and use. The state cannot sell or alienate these resources without strong justification. The presumption is against disposal.

The key statutory framework here is the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 (FLPMA). Before FLPMA, federal lands were largely governed by a patchwork of 19th- and early 20th-century statutes like the Homestead Act that focused on getting the lands into the hands of private citizens and entities for the purposes of settlement, mining, logging, ranching, railroad construction, and the like.

But by the mid-20th century, the mandate had changed. Private settlement, i.e. homesteading, had largely leveled off. Pretty much any piece of land that could produce water and sustain human communities had already been claimed. The FLPMA reoriented public land priorities in light of these realities by formalizing a policy of retention for its land holdings rather than disposal. It instructed the Bureau of Land Management to manage federal lands under the doctrine of “multiple use and sustained yield.” Under this new paradigm, public lands could simultaneously be used for hunting, fishing, grazing, mining, and proactive wildlife conservation, all balanced and weighed according to public input and preference.

Importantly, FLPMA, while maintaining the current status-quo of multi-use public land, does still allow for land sales. The Secretary of the Interior can dispose of public land through sale or exchange if it meets certain criteria and serves the public interest. Yes, it is admittedly slow and procedurally constrained, and must pass through a number of assessments and reviews, but that is a feature, not a bug. It is precisely that the system is designed to discourage impulsive or large-scale sell-offs. It is designed, in other words, to prevent exactly the kind of thing being proposed by Mike Lee.

Attempts to undo this settled consensus have cropped up periodically, most notably in the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s and early 80s, when Western conservatives (especially in Utah and Nevada) pushed for federal land to be ceded to state control. The movement, driven largely by a sort of rugged libertarianism that prevailed in the west—and still prevails, though to a lesser degree—was not without very legitimate grievances.

Many rural communities felt locked out of decisions that affected their local economies and ways of life. Land use plans were drawn up in distant federal offices with little local input. Grazing permits became harder to obtain or more costly. Logging operations faced mounting restrictions. The pace and tone of federal environmental regulation changed dramatically in the wake of the 1960s and early 70s, mostly on account of what many saw as draconian restrictions imposed by the newly crafted EPA and the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and the political right, for good measure, took up public land reform as a minor cause.

But this was a different time, without our current demographic pressures weighing down on western states and without the specter of multi-national REITs or foreign governments licking their chops at the idea of buying out America’s crown jewel. And even then, the idea of selling off these lands proved too politically risky, and Reagan was forced to abandon the issue.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, most serious land reform efforts were narrowly focused on land swaps and easements and occasional pilot programs like the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act (1998), which allowed for limited sales of BLM land around Las Vegas, with proceeds reinvested in local conservation and development. These were slow, technical processes with a narrow scope and usually strong local support. They worked and should be regarded as templates for future efforts.

Over the past decade, especially since the Bundy standoff in 2014 and the Malheur occupation in 2016, land privatization has resurfaced as a political flashpoint. More recently—and in a case some suspect helped spur Lee’s proposal—the issue of public access came to a head in Wyoming over the legality of corner crossings when four hunters used a custom ladder to cross between BLM parcels in a checkerboard section of Elk Mountain Ranch owned by North Carolina pharmaceutical executive Fred Eshelman. Earlier this year, the hunters finally prevailed in federal appeals court, much to the dismay of big private land owners, but the episode has once again raised the question over the use and access to public lands.

It’s an issue that is not going away, and is deeply rooted in a long history of contestation and compromise, with high sensitivities on all sides, making it all the more surprising (and concerning) that Lee would choose the occasion of a budget reconciliation process to jam through the largest reduction of the public domain in the country’s history.

3. “Okay, that’s great and all but what about this specific proposal? I saw a thread from [Serious Online Pundit Man] that Mike Lee’s bill was actually good and the concerns of people like you and other random X users are unfounded.”

Wrong.

One of the more frustrating aspects of this debate has been the widespread insistence—often made with great confidence—that the bill contains ample safeguards and restrictions to prevent abuse and that anyone objecting to its forced inclusion in the reconciliation process is either illiterate, astroturfed, or otherwise opposed to its stated goals. The defenders insist, “It’s only 0.5%. It only affects land near cities. It’s up to local governments. There are protections for wildlife and recreation. The Secretary has to consider infrastructure, affordability, housing. BlackRock can’t buy it. China can’t buy it. Calm down!”

But none of those claims survive close scrutiny. Let’s take a closer look:

Claim 1: “It’s only 0.5% of public land. This is a small, cautious pilot program.”

Not exactly. The bill requires the identification and disposal of not less than 0.5% and not more than 0.75% of BLM and National Forest land. That means somewhere between 2,000,000 and 3,000,000 acres, depending on how the numbers are run. There’s no upper limit on concentration in a given area, and the Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture are required to dispose of all land selected within five years. So, even if there is some amount of unobjectionably useful land that satisfies the stated requirements of the bill (more on that in a bit), the disposal requirements potentially put highly valued acreage at risk if the initial sell-off falls short of the minimum requirement.

Are there 2 million acres of developable land that don’t run afoul of the constraints the bill’s proponents insist exist? Maybe. The problem is we have no idea. No one has taken the time to actually figure this out, or worse, they have figured it out and that’s why they won’t show us the map.

Claim 2: “The bill prohibits the sale of ecologically or recreationally sensitive land. If you are a hunter, fisherman, hiker, etc. you have nothing to worry about.”

False, egregiously so. The only land explicitly excluded from sale is what the bill defines as “federally protected land,” a term that includes national parks, wilderness areas, historic sites, and designated recreation areas, but which designation is actually quite narrow and doesn’t even begin to encompass the totality of national forest and BLM land that is enjoyed by millions of recreationalists.

As I’ve said elsewhere, this is one of those sneaky rhetorical sleights of hand that proponents of the proposal expect most people to overlook. It is either intentionally deceitful and should call their true motivations into question, or else an indication of their own ignorance of what these designations mean and should make you doubly concerned that the very people who authored the proposal do not understand its consequences.

In any event, we can’t know what land will or will not be sold, because the people who drafted the bill have designed it so that the parcels being auctioned off will only be made available to the public 60 days after the bill has passed.

Claim 3: “The bill requires state and local consultation, so the process will be democratic and accountable.”

If you believe this, I have a bridge to sell you. The bill requires that the Secretaries consult with state, tribal, and local governments, yes, but it imposes no requirement that those entities approve the selection or sale of the land. Consultation does not equal consent and is bound by nothing. Nor does the bill require the Secretary to document the outcomes of those consultations or respond to any objections raised. There is no meaningful check on agency discretion. As Charles Haywood points out (as part of a long point-by-point rebuttal of Mike Lee’s claims that is well worth your time), the incentives for local governments to go along with the sales are strong—they receive 5% of the proceeds—and the political pressure from developers in many of these communities will be immense.

Even setting aside the weak definition of consultation, the idea that local governments will be meaningful competitors in land acquisition is mostly fantasy. Most of these municipalities don’t have the cash on hand to buy up parcels at “fair market value,” as the bill requires. They operate on lean budgets, often constrained by state-level tax caps or bonding restrictions, and are unlikely to even enter, let alone win a bidding war with private equity firms or development syndicates. There is no provision in the bill for preferential pricing, no earmarked funds for local purchases, or anything like that that might ensure meaningful public acquisition of high-value parcels. The “right of first refusal” is worthless if you can’t afford to make an offer.

Claim 4: “Only land near cities and existing infrastructure can be sold.”

Also false and suspiciously misleading. The bill does not require that land be near existing infrastructure. It says only that “priority consideration” may be given to land that is adjacent to developed areas or has access to infrastructure. That language is non-binding. There is no requirement to exclude remote parcels. In fact, the same section explicitly gives priority to “isolated tracts that are inefficient to manage,” which is bureaucratic code for backcountry land that could be sold off without too much administrative headache. If the Secretary decides to sell land far from any road or sewer line, there is nothing in the bill to stop him.

This, truthfully, isn’t a problem in and of itself. In principle there is nothing wrong with selling land that is far more remote. But again, it’s indicative of the larger incoherence of this proposal, and/or the attempt to sneak through allowances that circumvent what’s being publicly stated about the bill’s parameters.

Claim 5: “Sales are limited to small buyers. BlackRock/China/Bill Gates/[choose your globalist boogeyman] can’t buy it all.”

False. The bill limits any individual sale to two tracts per buyer. But it imposes no limits on the number of total tracts any one entity can acquire over time, through multiple sales, through shell companies, or through agents. Nothing in the bill prevents a large institutional investor from structuring purchases in such a way that it accumulates massive holdings while remaining technically compliant. Anyone familiar with the way real estate is transacted in this country knows how easily this kind of rule can be gamed.

It’s frankly insulting—and also deeply suspicious—that proponents of the bill regard any of this language as being restrictive enough to prevent these kinds of purchases.

Do they actually believe that?

Claim 6: “The land has to be used for housing, so this will help address affordability.”

This is perhaps the most deceptive claim of all. The bill requires that the buyer submit a “statement of planned use” including how the land will address local housing needs, but the Secretary is under no obligation to weigh that information when selecting buyers. The land must, on paper, be used for “housing or associated community needs,” but that restriction is so vague (“associated community needs”… what does that mean?) and ultimately unenforceable, that it’s meaningless. To make matters worse, the restriction expires after ten years, at which point the landowner can do whatever they want. There is nothing here to ensure that any of this actually leads to affordable housing or serves the public good.

In summary, the bill contains no hard limits, no meaningful oversight, no enforceable restrictions, and no durable public-interest guarantees. Every supposed safeguard is either discretionary or easily circumvented. It might appear cautious, and might even offer its proponents some plausible deniability if/when these deals end up producing high-end vacation condos or bridging private ranches to cut-off access points to cherished hunting grounds, but it leaves open the door for every single abuse its opponents care about. And perhaps most tellingly, its authors refuse to produce even a simple map of which parcels might be sold or which tracts exist outside these supposed restrictions. Why not?

One wonders.

4. “Got it. Fine. But we need more housing. Cities in Utah and Nevada are filled to the brim, and the rest of the west has become unaffordable for young people. Can’t we do something about that?”

Yes. In fact, we can do many things about that. But selling off millions of acres of public land through a rushed and politically toxic reconciliation bill is somewhere in the range of 10 to 20 millionth on the list of best ideas.

If you want to reduce housing pressure, start by reducing demand. Burning political capital on land sales (unpopular) versus accruing political capital on deportations (very popular) is a no-brainer first step for anyone taking this issue seriously.

Here is a detailed look at the specific effects of illegal immigration on housing. In short, the surge in illegal immigration since 2021—amounting to an increase of 6.6 million people (minimum) and 2.4 million new immigrant-headed households—has significantly intensified demand for housing, particularly in high-immigration regions like the major cities in western states. Estimates point to a roughly 12% increase in home prices and rentals from illegal immigration.

Do you really care about increasing affordable housing supply? Okay. Then do something about that.

It’s also the case that we have cities around the country—Detroit and St. Louis come to mind—with massive reverses of unused housing stock that remain vacant for socio-political reasons we’re not allowed to talk about. These cities were built for populations significantly larger than they currently hold and under conditions of sufficient political will can quite quickly be converted into their former glory. Detroit, for instance, once home to nearly 2 million people, now houses fewer than 630,000. The city has an estimated 80,000 vacant buildings and tens of thousands more empty lots. St. Louis has more than 25,000 vacant properties. These already-built homes for young families come with the added bonus of intact plumbing, streets with sewer and electrical lines, schools, libraries, parks, little league fields, and commercial infrastructure.

I have a hard time taking any affordable housing advocate seriously who doesn’t address this problem. Some might say that cities are fertility shredders, and in recent generations this might be correct, but it’s not because cities, which for all of modernity supported family formation, suddenly, by virtue of being cities, somehow, by some logic of density or upward mobility or whatever, ceased to become livable for parents and their kids. Cities can—and should—support more people and more families, and for politicians who want to demonstrate real courage and real forward thinking on this issue, revitalization of our once great cities should be a central focus.

5. “So is there any way to get meaningful land reform out west that better balances state and local control of their own backyards with the interests of public land enjoyers?”

Yes. But it’s going to require a very different legislative approach and very different tone than the one adopted by Mike Lee and his allies.

To reiterate an item from above, we already have a process in the FLPMA for reviewing and disposing of federal lands. If there are areas where FLPMA is too slow or cumbersome, then make that the starting point for reform. This might mean expanding the eligibility criteria, or expedited sales for lands adjacent to municipal boundaries, or including robust claw-back provisions so speculative holdings for mining or unused land get auctioned off, or ten other targeted revisions that help the feds off-load mismanaged land to states and private actors who can better make use of them.

In other words, draft a real bill instead of trying to ram the largest sell-off of public lands in American history in the middle of a budget reconciliation process, without public hearings or maps, and absent any attempt to take seriously the complaints of a public that OVERWHELMINGLY opposes the entire concept.

Please, Mike Lee, if you or one of your surrogates is reading this, try to understand the emotional and spiritual gravity of this issue. For many Americans, myself included, our public lands are as central to our way of life and civic self-understanding as just about anything else. Our public lands, and the unsettled frontier they represent are, as Malmesbury Man put it, “…to the American spirit what the Royal Family is to the English, it’s the saying of mass in the Vatican to Catholics, it’s the Hajj to Muslims, it’s the Chrysanthemum Throne to Japanese. Without it, America is over.”

Such heady notions are rarely worthy of the political trenches on X, but when it comes to the vast expanses of our western lands we’ll allow such indulgences.

This proposal is treading on sacred ground. This is not something to be done lightly, and there is absolutely no reason to rush it. God has warned us before about making mistakes like this. Take heed.

Today we’re launching Passage TV on YouTube. This will be the new home and delivery vehicle for Passage video content.

Our first video is the debate between Curtis Yarvin and Harvard Professor Danielle Allen from last week.

Please subscribe here.

About a month ago I recorded a nearly three hour conversation with New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat for his new podcast, Interesting Times. The conversation, which was edited down to an hour for publication, was released last week.

Before getting into the meat of it, let me first say that Ross was a great conversation partner and approached our ideological and philosophical disagreements in good faith. The New York Times editors, who I had some reservations about going in, emphasized certain aspects of the conversation that I think maybe weren’t as interesting or important as some others, but it’s their show and their audience and those decisions are theirs to make, and nonetheless on the whole they did a fine job of capturing the tone and vibe of the conversation, and didn’t engage in any deceptive editing at my expense nor distort any of my arguments or anything like that, so I thank them for their efforts and withdraw my reservations.

We discussed many things, but at the heart of the conversation was the question over whether or not the right could wrest back any kind of significant cultural ground after decades of near total domination of American arts and letters by liberals, and if so what the characteristics would be of the new “right” cultural production that would occupy this ground.

These are fair questions, but they get at the problem a little sideways, and so I thought it might be worthwhile to clarify a few points about what we’re even talking about here and what the take-away should be for anyone thinking about the intersection of art and politics.

In the interview, Ross and I began by contrasting the old right that he graduated out of (NRO) with the new right that I graduated out of (Twitter). After explaining some of my criticisms of conservative culture from years past—that it’s too moralistic and didactic, that it traffics in nostalgia and sentimentalism, and that it’s too pre-occupied with grievance, with its own sense of cultural subordination—Ross then asked me to name an example of "successful right-wing art” to help flesh the point out.

On the spot, I came up with three examples:

1. No County for Old Men (book or film)

2. anything by David Lynch1

3. and the HBO series Girls.

Ross then asked the load-bearing follow-up question: “What makes [these examples of cultural production] right wing to you?”

I glibly responded that these things are right wing because I like them and want them to share my political preferences (true), and then followed up by adding that they are right-wing because they tell the truth about the world and about the human condition. Here is the full quote:

What constitutes “right-wing art” — which is, by the way, labeling we’re grafting onto this thing after the fact, so it’s actually a very flimsy labeling, but what these pieces of work are doing is telling the truth about the world in a way that is not compromised by artistic or ideological preferences about how these events and these characters and these people, what society wishes were true about these people.

My thing is that if you are telling the truth about the world, then you are going to make right-wing art.

In short: Is it good? Is it honest? If yes, then right.

This is a rather simple formula, and has the scent of tautology, but is nonetheless perfectly coherent and perfectly adequate as a basis for defining “right wing” art. The problem with this definition is not that it’s wrong, but that the question itself is asking us to conjoin two spheres of human experience that are mismatched in the way that quantum mechanics and general relativity are mismatched. Both art and politics describe the world, but do so for different purposes and at different scales and when you force one set of descriptions onto a space of inquiry that belongs to the other, the math just doesn’t work out.

In other words, politics and art are NOT the same thing. There is a feedback loop, yes, but politics does not circumscribe art. Art is not contained within its boundaries, or not totally, and so to apply ideological labels to art is a fundamental category error that got us into this problem in the first place.

We don’t want to make the same mistake the left did by insisting that art satisfy our political priors. This will distort our creative undertakings in all sorts of ways that will reduce the quality of art and therefore reduce its cultural power (and therefore its political power). Instead, all a new cultural right has to do is tell the truth.

Firstly, what does one mean by telling the truth in art? I have written about this here, spoken about it here, and spoken about it elsewhere here. You can draw this idea down into more and more fragmented claims about epistemology and what it is for something to be true in the philosophical sense—which discussions will get you precisely nowhere, and not incidentally are the foundations for post-modernism—but instead, at a higher level of abstraction, rather than be concerned by truth, you can more plainly identify whether the artist and the art he is making is honest to itself, whether it passes the test of verisimilitude, or, to the contrary, whether it compromises itself because it is forced to or because the artist makes bad (inauthentic) artistic choices.

What in practice does that mean? Here is a straightforward and highly-visible case of dishonest art: anything that requires “sensitivity readers.” Sensitivity readers first emerged in the mid to late 2010s, mostly in the world of young adult fiction, which had already become an ideological wet market for tumblr-style identity politics. Publishers and editors would hire “sensitivity readers” to flag manuscripts for perceived moral offenses. One of the earliest high-profile cases was the novelist Keira Drake’s The Continent which featured a battle royale of warring tribes that were described in “racialized” language. Bowing to political pressure, the publisher shelved the books, hired two sensitivity readers to correct these transgressions, and then had Drake spend six months overhauling the book before republishing it again.

In the years since, the practice has become commonplace. At many major publishers, last I checked anyway, sensitivity vetting has become baked-in to the regular editorial process. In one instance, which I have discussed previously, the novelist Bruce Wagner’s book The Marvel Universe was flagged by a sensitivity reader for the inclusion of a character named “Fat Joan.” Wagner refused the publisher’s demands to rewrite the character and his book was subsequently dropped. More notably, earlier this year, the British publisher Puffin retroactively edited the works of Roald Dahl to remove words like “fat” and “ugly” and to rework gendered descriptions into gender-neutral ones. In one of the more absurd cases, Augustus Gloop of Willy Wonka fame is no longer “enormously fat,” he is just “enormous,” which presumably makes him more morally acceptable. Dahl’s estate and the publisher both justified this bowdlerization of his work with vague appeals to “making the books work for modern audiences,” a euphemism for treating literature as a kind of hazardous material that must be made safe for public consumption, or, even more to the point, a kind of compliance document for whatever political fashions are currently in style.

But of course, these crude and ham-fisted examples of political imposition on creative output are just the visible eruptions of a much deeper cultural condition. The more pervasive and more insidious problem is the quiet, habitual self-distortion that creatives and the culture industry more broadly now perform reflexively, often without even recognizing it as compromise. They learn early on, often before they publish a single word or screen a single scene, what can and can’t be said, what kinds of “representations” will sell to distribution platforms, which characters are “allowed” do this thing but not this other thing, which moral frameworks must be affirmed, which narratives can be subverted and which can’t, who the heroes are, and what constitutes both evil and its salvation. The audience knows this too. We can smell it. And we don’t like what we smell.

This is why the antidote to this is so deceptively simple. If you truly believe that your worldview, and how that manifests as politics, was accurate in its suppositions and predictions about human nature and the social world, then you wouldn’t need to coerce your creative output into alignment with it. This will all happen naturally as a simple function of honesty, of artistic integrity. Just tell the truth. Whether, as in No Country for Old Men, it’s the evocation of civilizational precarity and the nature of entropy, or in the case of David Lynch, the fuzzy, ineffable, semi-permeable veil of reality that our lives all nervously breech from time to time, or in the case of Girls, the cold, bitter consequences of total “liberation,” being honest, being uncompromising in your vision, tapping into the root conditions of the human experience is enough. That will get you as far as you need to go and that is all that art can hope for anyway. Art is not a tool for winning elections. Again, that is a category error.

And so long as your politics are anchored in an honest assessment of how people behave, including their limitations and messy particularities, “honest” art will confirm those politics more powerfully than anything you can say explicitly on the subject. And if it doesn’t, if the true and beautiful things you experience through art keep pointing elsewhere politically, then you should follow where they lead.

If you are on the right and you care about culture, this puts you in a pretty good place. The question Ross posed—what would right-wing art look like, and can the right produce it?—is, in the end, the wrong question. Or rather, it’s the wrong way to solve the problem of reorienting legacy institutions and incentive structures and distribution mechanisms that are artificially gunking up the system and preventing good and better culture from piercing the mainstream membrane. Yes, something is wrong with contemporary culture. Yes, it is politically compromised, often boring, and swarmed by the lamest people imaginable. Yes, there is an opportunity for artists who reject those conditions to make something better. But that better thing will not be made by trying to make it “right-wing.”

The moment you begin with the assumption that art must serve politics, even yours, you’ve already forfeited its power. Stop worrying about that. Make it honest. Make it good. The rest will sort itself out.

The end of April through the end of May is my second favorite time of year. This time of spring is more full of life and potentiality than perhaps any time else. When I look out my window at the new growth on the trees and the animals gorging and transforming themselves and the decaying dead things that have been left behind by winter, I am reminded of that Werner Herzog quote about the jungle:

“It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder…we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order.”

As does Herzog, I love it very much.

Unlike Herzog, I would stress the birth aspect of this time of year, rather than the death aspect, but he was talking about the jungle, not the spring, and anyway birth is not without a lot of violence and suffering so in a sense it is all just one thing.

At a more narrow level, this is my second favorite time of year because it is the prime season for one of my favorite activities, foraging for morel mushrooms.

Foraging for morels is a lot like my favorite activity, fly fishing for trout. They both happen in many of the same kinds of places, scenic and secretive, and follow a similar pattern of frustration and discovery. Anyone who has been following me long enough has seen me post about these things. If I were autistic, these activities would be my trains.

Many years ago I read an evo-psych1 paper showing that brain activity in fishermen almost perfectly matches the brain activity in gamblers playing slot-machines. The argument in the paper was that both activities share the same basic reward schedule. Each pull of the slot-machine lever is analogous to casting for a fish: most attempts yield nothing, but the intermittent and more or less randomized windfall of successful attempts creates addictive anticipation that sustains the whole enterprise. (I have also observed, perhaps not incidentally, that fishermen and gamblers lie about their exploits in pretty much exactly the same manner, especially with regards to their trophy catches/jackpots, and near, tragic misses thereof. Make of this what you will.)

The underlying theory is that our brains, over tens of thousands of years of evolutionary pressure, found a creative way to induce us to fish, by making it inherently addictive. Modern recreational interest in fishing is an artifact of this evolutionary programming, so, too, I suspect, are slot-machines.

Hunting for morels, like its seasonal cousin, hunting for Easter eggs, taps into this same primal reward loop. A lot of nothing, and then, all of a sudden… something. Importantly, it is fun. It gets you outside. It is something to do with kids of all ages and teaches them to be resourceful and observant, and to appreciate nature’s bounty.

It also teaches them vigilance. Before going any further, it is probably prudent to warn you about false morels. False morels are less common than the edible kind, but common enough that you have to watch out for them. False morels (gyromitra) contain a toxic poison called gyromitrin, which, when ingested, metabolizes into monomethylhydrazine, a volatile chemical compound used in rocket fuel, no kidding. Within hours the poison will begin to attack your vital organs, especially your liver, and after the vomiting, internal bleeding, neurological dysfunction, and jaundice can eventually be fatal.

Death and birth. It is all just one thing. That is the lesson of the season.

But we need not worry about that. Identifying false morels is not terribly difficult. See the picture below. False morels have a kind of dark reddish tint. They are easy to spot. They are even easier to identify once you cut them open. Unlike true morels their stems are not hollow and extend all the way up through the cap. If you were to eat them, you will likely have a few very bad days, but probably won’t die, despite the graphic description above.

Little is worth doing that doesn’t entail a bit of danger. Still, be careful.

The trick with addictive reward schedules is that success––whether it is landing a fish, or hitting the bonus feature on a slot machine, or stumbling on a patch of morels in a dense thicket of deadfall––is that the reward has to matter. It has to mean something. In the case of morels, they matter because they are, to my taste, the very best mushrooms for eating that you can get anywhere. I prefer them to truffles, even. They have an incredibly rich flavor, suitable to all kinds of culinary purposes,2 and because they are so seasonally dependent, fresh morels are only accessible for a limited window of time. You only get a couple of months of good morel eating every year, so the value of the hunt is enhanced by this urgency.

When, Where, and How to Forage for the Elusive Morel

(Paid subs only—I would never give away this hard-earned info for free)

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Here is my speech from last week’s Natal Conference in Austin. Thank you to all of the organizers and to everyone at @natalismorg. Despite the focus of my speech, I have a great deal of respect for everyone involved and I’m grateful for their efforts.

[round of applause for the organizers]

[joke]

Now that I’ve softened you up, I’m going to explain why this conference should be disbanded as soon as possible.

This talk is going to consist of two overlapping and intentionally provocative points that by the end I hope to convince you are in fact just plain common sense and align with the interests of everyone in this room.

The first point is that most people need to care a lot less about their kids.

The second point is that I am not a Pro-Natalist and you shouldn’t be either.

Point one, you need to care less about kids: Relatively affluent, high-agency parents—precisely the kind of people in this room—are investing excessive resources, time, and attention into their children. This over-investment reduces the number of children parents feel comfortable having, diminishes parents’ own quality of life, and, counterintuitively inhibits the full maturation and independence of the children subjected to this intense and unnatural parental focus.

A useful model from biology are the concepts of K-selection species and R-selection species. Briefly, K-selected species—such as elephants—have relatively few offspring but invest substantial time, resources, and care into each child’s survival and development, expecting high individual success rates. In contrast, R-selected species—like insects, rabbits, or fish—produce many offspring but offer minimal parental intervention. These offspring are largely left to fend for themselves, with survival dependent on their individual adaptability, resilience, and ability to navigate unpredictable environments independently.

For all of the pedants out there, yes, I understand that humans are a K-selected species. I am not making a technical, biologically precise point. However, given this framework, I am suggesting that parents, again parents within this particular socio-economic milieu, should instead adopt more R-selected parenting strategies as a cultural norm.

Before getting into what a more R-selected parenting strategy would look like in practice and why it’s good, let me first describe what our current over-compensated K-selection strategy looks like and why it’s bad.

Firstly, is the premise true? Anecdotally, yes. Virtually every parent I know of school age children within the category, broadly speaking, of upper middle-class, college educated professionals either has a borderline pathological obsession with their kids’ activities and interests, to the point that it consumes everything they think and do as a family, or else have made an active effort to remove their families from these circumstances.

It is also empirically true. Study after study after study over the last couple decades has documented that parental time investment in child “activities” has doubled since the 1970s, that heightened competition for college admissions has drastically escalated parental resource investment, all premised on a broad cultural shift toward structured, intensive parenting practices with adverse effects on both parents and childrern. As far as I am aware, none of these trends are at all controversial or in dispute.

To illustrate precisely how distorted the incentives driving hyper-intensive K-selection parenting have become, I will draw your attention to a recent—and profoundly misguided—statement by Vivek Ramaswamy from a few months ago. For those who don’t remember, weighing into the Christmas H-1B dust-up on X, Vivek made the incendiary case that the reason top tech companies often prefer foreign-born engineers over native-born Americans is because American culture has supposedly “venerated mediocrity over excellence” for decades. His prescription was that we need to celebrate math Olympiads and Spelling Bee champs instead of athletes, and that American kids urgently need fewer sleepovers, and more math tutoring and weekend science competitions.

While a profound political blunder, Vivek’s statement nonetheless embodies precisely the perverse, anxiety-driven logic that has produced our runaway K-selection problem. Vivek’s diagnosis assumes that childhood itself should be structured as one long resume-building exercise—every waking moment dedicated to narrowly defined academic excellence or competitive STEM achievement. It assumes, disastrously, that obsessive micromanagement is the hallmark of effective parenting, and while parents and the American commentariat rightly criticized him for his presumptuous advice, Americans unfortunately, and increasingly, live according to its precepts.

My prescription instead: Don’t do this. Stay as far away from this as possible. Actively reject this. Your kids don’t want this. It will not help them. You don’t want this. It is completely and utterly the wrong approach to parenting.

So what then would a more r-selected parenting strategy look like in its place? In short it would mean radically scaling back structured activities, micromanaged schedules, and excessive parental oversight. Let your children encounter genuine boredom and require them to develop their own solutions to it. Allow them freedom to explore their own interests—even if those interests don’t seem immediately productive, academically rigorous, or likely to appear on a college resume (including video games and screen time, by the way, in moderation, of course). Encourage spontaneous, unsupervised play, real social interactions with peers without constant adult mediation, and trust them to navigate small risks independently. Your kids will learn “They can just do things.”

Adopting this parenting approach would make the prospect of having more children feel far more manageable and appealing precisely because it reduces both the perceived and actual cost—financial, emotional, and time—associated with each additional child. When parenting is redefined from an obsessive, resource-intensive exercise in micromanagement and resume-building to something much more hands-off and organic, each child no longer represents an exponential increase in parental workload and anxiety. Parents become free to allocate their attention to the things they want to do.

Beyond inducing more fertility, this approach, despite what Vivek would tell you, helps revitalize precisely those cultural values that historically underpinned America’s success. America’s true historical advantage never stemmed from obsessively groomed spelling bee champions (quick, name the most successful Spelling Bee champion—exactly). Our culture of success came from generations raised to experiment boldly, to pursue unorthodox ideas, and to thrive in uncertain environments at the risk of death and destitution.

Finally, teach your children how to live rewarding, successful lives by visibly engaging in rewarding and successful adult lives yourself—write the book you’ve always wanted to write, build the company you’ve always wanted to build, pursue excellence in whatever domain you are best equipped to do so. Include your kids in these endeavors when practical, and let them fend for themselves when not.

The economists in the room will tell you there is very little you can do to improve your children's fortunes beyond the genes you’ve bequeathed to them anyway. Biology remains undefeated. But you can demonstrate for them the possibilities of that inheritance by modeling it yourself. The truth is that most parents who give up on their ambitions once they have a family, do so not because they have to but because they want to. They may not tell themselves this, but it’s true. Do not use your kids as an excuse to give up on the things you want to do with your life. This, more than anything, is the best lesson you can teach them.

Part 2: Why I am not a Pro Natalist™

The first part of this talk was about reducing the pressure of having children, by relaxing the expectations for what it means to be a good parent. I want to apply this same approach to the idea of natalism itself.

So why am I not a Pro-natalist™? I am not a pro-natalist because describing oneself as a pro-natalist admits to the perversion of casting “natalism” into the realm of politics.

Our most basic biological functions and drives are NOT POLITICAL. They are not socially negotiated. They do not depend on, nor are they improved from making them political.

I do not want to participate in their politicization. I do not want to engage in that framing. That framing is itself anti-natalist, since it implies the political legitimacy of anti-natalism. One assumes the other. It suggests there is some way of being that is not natalist, and that it requires whole conferences and policies and political labels to contend against this other way of being.

This is, of course, absurd. I refuse to acknowledge the political legitimacy of anti-natalism by defining myself against it.

Politics has an inherently destructive nature. At bottom, it is a contest of power. Everything politics touches therefore turns into a means of acquiring more power for further political contestation. Having children—or not having children—becomes instrumentalized toward some other goal. And what goal is that exactly? Keeping social security solvent? To outbreed the libs? This is insane.

This has also been tried and does not–because it cannot–achieve its aims. Soviet “pro-natalist” campaigns for example turned reproduction and motherhood into patriotic duty. There were slogans, and incentives, and art created to glorify motherhood, and even “maternity capital” programs to properly incentive would-be parents. The results weren’t increased family flourishing, but cynicism, resentment, and ultimately demographic stagnation. Why? Because Soviet life was miserable, and when politics colonizes biology, it corrupts biology’s essential spontaneity, its intuitive, often irrational authenticity. People feel this, and they rightly reject it. They feel they are being manipulated and they do not like it. It indicates something is “wrong,” and they respond accordingly.

Now, all of that said, I understand why this conference exists and I understand that we are here because–at least at the most fundamental level–we all believe in the goodness of the ongoing existence of the human race. I believe that. Let me state for the record that I believe in the goodness of the ongoing existence of the human race.

I love humans. I love children.

Given that preference I would urge us not to raise the political salience of having kids. I think there may be some short term value in pointing out what is at stake and encouraging some amount of reflection on macro demographic trends (we should be paying attention to these things, and it is perfectly fair for those of you who study this as a matter of niche academic interest to continue doing so) but to the extent we want to see more children in the world it must be an embrace of parenthood as an end unto itself, for reasons that are pre-political, and even pre-social. We are dealing with forces beyond our understanding, and ultimately beyond our reach.

The best things in the world, in life––and there is no question that having kids is one such thing––should be approached only with awe, only with total humility. The miracle of having kids belongs to God, not to Caesar.

If we are still holding this conference in ten years we will have failed. Our goal should be to never have to talk about this. Our goal should be that no one is even aware of the word natalist and that no journalist (let alone several of them) would ever find it compelling enough to travel to a conference in Austin to report on.

Just as being an effective parent means stepping back from anxiety-driven control of our children, and embracing a healthier, more natural relationship with them, addressing the demographic future of humanity requires stepping back from anxiety-driven politics and embracing a healthier, more natural relationship with parenthood itself.

Our aim is not to “win” a political contest, but to step out of politics entirely. None of what we want is sustainable so long as the term “pro-natalist” has any more meaning than a nonsense word like “pro-breatheist,” or “pro-sunlightest.”

I have great respect for Kevin and all of the organizers of this conference. I have great respect for my fellow speakers, and for all of you in attendance. I love you all dearly. I really do. But I am praying, and I hope you would all pray with me, for the day that we are never asked to gather for a Natal Conference again.

[This isn’t really a book review but I’m going to treat it like one for the purposes of shilling Aaron Moulton’s The Influencing Machine1 (Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw 2022), 205 pages, which you can (and should) buy here.]

My last post was about conspiracy theories and the problem of dismissing the ideas that get labeled as conspiracy theories out of hand. For one thing, conspiracy theories can often teach us something about the world even when they are wrong. But conspiracy theories, or stories about the world that look uncannily like conspiracy theories, often turn out to be real, and if you are reflexively dismissive of these narratives because you find them dangerous or déclassé or self-evidently wrong, you will end up with blind spots that will make the world make a lot less sense.2

What if I told you, for example, that after the Cold War a powerful network of ideological operatives, all directly under the control of George Soros, launched a campaign to reprogram the cultural identity of the former Soviet Union? What if I told you that under the guise of promoting “artistic freedom,” Soros and his sprawling supranational network of nested NGOs and private enterprises, spun a web of well-funded art centers across twenty nations, each acting as a propaganda outpost with the explicit intent to dismantle national traditions and reprogram these societies for globalist integration, relying on handpicked artists, theorists, gallerists, museum curators, and bureaucrats to do so, all in an effort to prime the populace of these newly liberated nations into accepting a program of political and economic “shock therapy” that would reconstitute these societies from within? And finally, what if I told you, that having successfully done all of that, once the program was (formally) shut down in the early 2000s, the world would just kind of forget that it ever happened?

This might sound an awful lot like a conspiracy theory, and yet, it’s all entirely and indisputably true.

i. Aaron Moulton uncovers a sprawling supranational network of coordinated cultural influencers all working at the behest of George Soros over the course of a decade to remake the societies of Eastern Europe. No, seriously.

I first encountered the art critic and researcher Aaron Moulton in early 2023 through an obscure podcast called Verdurin hosted by the academic Pierre d'Alancaisez. Until the recommendation algo dropped this podcast in my lap, I had never heard of Aaron Moulton. I had never heard of Verdurin, and I had never heard of Pierre d'Alancaisez. I had also never heard of the subject of their conversation, The Influencing Machine, Moulton’s just then released book and art project chronicling the too-on-the-nose-to-be-true story of George Soros and the Soros Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA), which through its emphasis on “socially engaged practice,” single-handedly reshaped the art world across post-Soviet Europe.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Neither Moulton nor d’Alancaisez could be described as right-wing, and both seemed almost hesitant—apologetic, even—about the material Moulton had uncovered during his research. They repeatedly reassured listeners—all several dozen of us—that they were fully aware of the “anti-Semitic tropes” their discussion might inadvertently bump up against. Moulton devotes an entire section of his book, pointedly titled “The Boogeyman,” to exploring the difficulty of speaking plainly about George Soros’s vast influence.

In that section he cites the ADL’s position on the matter:

A person who promotes a Soros conspiracy theory may not intend to promulgate antisemitism. But Soros’ Jewish identity is so well-known that in many cases it is hard not to infer that meaning. This is especially true when Soros-related conspiracy theories include other well-worn antisemitic tropes such as control of the media or banks; references to undermining societies or destabilizing countries; or language that hearkens back to the medieval blood libels and the characterization of Jews as evil, demonic, or agents of the antichrist.

Even if no antisemitic insinuation is intended, casting a Jewish individual as a puppet master who manipulates national events for malign purposes has the effect of mainstreaming antisemitic tropes and giving support, however unwitting, to bona fide antisemites and extremists who disseminate these ideas knowingly and with malice.

When it comes to investigating Soros, the ADL might just as well write: “This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.”

So what is a well-intentioned researcher to do when confronted with the efforts of the SCCA, an openly coordinated, well-documented campaign to reshape the cultural foundations of over twenty nations, backed by an immensely powerful individual, the mere utterance of whose name can cast an art critic in good-standing into the outer darkness?

Most people, understandably, choose not to talk about it at all. Aaron Moulton, to his lasting credit, chose to write a book about it and make it the center of years of his life’s work.

Here, in summary, is what he uncovered:

The Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCA) were established in over twenty cities across the former Eastern Bloc beginning in the early 1990s, operating under the umbrella of the Open Society Institute (OSI). These centers, according to Moulton and the hundreds of primary sources he consulted while writing his book, were carefully engineered ideological instruments designed to guide newly “liberated” societies away from their existing cultural identities and toward a Western liberal-democratic model.

Moulton characterizes the SCCA network as “a case study in the paradox of free will and determinism,” where art was not organically produced but steered, curated, and conditioned by institutional mechanisms that rewarded ideological compliance and punished deviation. Each center adhered to a standardized set of protocols laid out in the SCCA Procedures Manual—referred to by insiders as “the Bible” or “the Talmud”—which dictated everything from grant distribution and exhibition themes to the classification of artistic practices according to pre-defined, Western-oriented art-world jargon.

…this manual included guidelines on human resources and other office-culture rituals such as hiring, staff salaries, business plans, what office equipment to buy, how to make an expense report, and how to write a rejection letter. It gave detailed instructions on how to create the SCCA Archive, which was an essential aspect of the stated purpose of the SCCA Network. Within this archiving system there is even a comprehensive vocabulary for labeling art according to materials and themes… This vocabulary of keywords and tags, as well as other systems that the SCCA used to innovate and institutionalize visual culture to produce what Octavian Esanu3 refers to as “SorosArt.”

What the SCCAs promoted above all was “socially engaged practice”—a term that sounds relatively innocuous but functioned as a gatekeeping ideology, privileging identity-based, anti-nationalist, and politically progressive art and artists. The SCCAs had operating budgets that often dwarfed those of the ministries of culture in the host countries, effectively making them the sole arbiters of what contemporary art was and who got to participate in it. In Moldova, for example, the SCCA invented the very concept of contemporary art as it would come to be institutionally understood, and which came to dominate the national art scene.

Artists who adopted the preferred themes and methods—especially those addressing gender, minority rights, migration, and EU integration, etc.—were vaulted into international recognition, while artists working in traditional media or engaged with national culture were systematically excluded. As Irina Cirois, the director of the SCCA in Bucharest put it, “The SCCA reduced the number of those who were seen as legitimate artists to a very small number… In reality the SCCA, the avant-garde of the open society, was paradoxically an elite club.”

“Socially engaged practice” neatly dovetailed with the application of “coercive philanthropy,” a term first coined to describe the work of the Ford Foundation but perhaps nowhere is more evident than in the practices of the SCCA. Briefly, coercive philanthropy is a type of selective cultural funding that appears neutral on its face but is intended to shape ideological outcomes under the guise of benevolence. According to Moulton, the SCCAs succeeded at institutionalizing this approach, offering grants and opportunities only to those artists whose work aligned with Open Society’s political and cultural goals. Rather than overt censorship, which becomes too obvious and can elicit counter-reactions, the SCCA crafted a complex reward architecture that promoted the right kind of art, and marginalized dissenting art without needing to suppress it directly. Open calls appeared democratic, but the criteria for inclusion—often framed in the language of progressivism, and “Human Rights” liberalism—functioned as ideological filters.4 In this system, artists were not told what to make, but through the reward architecture of grants and positive critical response, understood what kinds of projects would be approved, published, and exhibited. Over time, the SCCAs became what art researcher Lioudmila Voropai called “monopolists of the cultural-political markets.” Under these conditions, more organic artistic expressions were simply made institutionally irrelevant.

Moulton’s research draws on dozens of interviews with former SCCA directors, curators, collaborators, and OSI officials. He documents the emergence of a new class of curator-bureaucrats, many of them in their twenties and thirties, often with no prior curatorial experience, who were recruited by the SCCA’s Executive Director Suzanne Mészöly5 —please make sure to read the footnote—to operate as on-the-ground cultural engineers. These individuals were supplied with budgets, institutional support, and international legitimacy that made them, in effect, sovereign over their local art scenes, though entirely beholden to the interests and demands of OSI and its extended network. Through annual exhibitions and grant-making, the SCCAs became the discourse, creating what Serbian art historian Miško Šuvaković later dubbed “Soros Realism,” which flooded out any potential competitive artistic vision for these countries.

Moulton says of these exhibitions:

Much of the language of exhibition-making coming out of the Network is very unique to this story: herculean bureaucratic tactics; reimagining public space; using sacred, out-of-context venues; reframing the exhibition as an exclusive site of cultural production; treating the artist as medium; and unifying artistic practices. And, as we’ll see, unifying art worlds. Each of these turns would manifest in an unprecedented way through the Annual Exhibitions, and would thereafter be virally synchronized across the entire network. It was like a force of nature.

Maybe most disturbingly, the entire operation has been essentially memory-holed. Despite its scale and success, the history of the SCCA network has received almost no attention in mainstream art history or critical theory (the SCCA doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page). Major institutions and scholars who were involved at the time have omitted their participation from public-facing records; archives are missing or unavailable; and those who might speak about it have often refused. In short, the SCCA network redefined—or really, produced from scratch—the artistic culture of an entire region of the world, in both the aesthetics it promoted and also in the structures of legitimacy and influence it installed—transforming the post-Soviet cultural landscape in a way that continues to shape how art is made, funded, and understood across much of Europe and beyond—and it did so in a way that made its own operations nearly invisible to history.

ii. Why this matters, and what we might take from this curious recent episode of cultural history

The legacy of the SCCA is a bit hard to track and is mostly opaque. The SCCA as an organizing body formally dissolved in the early 2000s, but has left behind a few successor entities scattered across the Eastern Bloc in places like Slovenia and Romania, while most of the centers were quietly shuttered. Meanwhile, many of the curators, directors, and artists cultivated by the network now occupy leading roles in contemporary art institutions and academic programs throughout Europe and the United States. A Google search of the names of the early participants reveals a still very active and deeply embedded roster of cultural scene-makers, all more or less still committed to the same meta-politics of Western-liberalization.

It’s hard to assess the importance and impact of this kind of program, but it is at least non-negligible and you can assume that someone like Soros would only spend this kind of money because he thought it mattered. It reveals, if nothing else, that culture can be manufactured from above—and that aesthetics, intellectual currents, and even moral frameworks can be shaped not through a strategic distribution of resources that doesn’t rely on the heavy-hand of censorship.

The SCCA exposes the machinery behind what often appears to be spontaneous cultural development. We know this intuitively. We know there are coordinated forces at work that push things one way or the other according to a logic that is separate from genuine artistic or cultural merit. The SCCA lays these mechanisms bear. It gives us a rare look at how the sausage gets made, how managed, ideologically filtered incentives, imposed neither by the state nor “the market,” but by some other third thing, by unelected networks of scene-makers operating under the banner of philanthropy so often are managing the stage.

Of course, the same tactics—coercive philanthropy, perception management, the use of artistic institutions as vectors for ideological enforcement—have become dominant within American cultural life as well. It has always been thus. In the decades following World War II, the CIA famously infiltrated the Western art world, operating through organizations like the Congress for Cultural Freedom and with the help of front groups such as the Ford Foundation, actively promoting Abstract Expressionism as a cultural counterweight to Soviet Realism. Frances Stonor Saunders carefully details these efforts in his book Who Paid the Piper? The Cultural Cold War, and connects the dots on how Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and others became ideological assets in a battle over the moral superiority of Western liberalism. The public story was one of spontaneous genius and aesthetic freedom. The reality, as in the case of the SCCA, was far more orchestrated.

Today, major museums, art schools, and funding bodies in the U.S. operate with ideological guardrails that closely resemble those put in place by the SCCA and one is forgiven for wondering how much of these practices are direct descendants of previous cultural engineering schemes. Grants require diversity statements. Exhibition proposals must align with values of “equity,” “decolonization,” or “social justice.” Failure to conform means exclusion from the institutional economy which, though it isn’t censorship exactly, functions in the same way. The use of art as a soft-power instrument is now openly acknowledged, often lauded, and embedded in the institutional DNA of contemporary cultural production. What gets funded, what gets shown, what gets written about, sold, memetically reproduced… all of it. It’s all carefully managed.

Recognizing this flow of resources, ideology, and artistic expression, doesn’t require believing in shadowy cabals or omnipotent puppet-masters. In fact, what makes the SCCA story so compelling—and so unsettling—is how brazen it is. There was no secrecy, no deep cover, no encrypted memos. The network was an open conspiracy. The documents were published, the procedures outlined, the funding sources acknowledged. It’s just that no one really cared. It was operating in plain sight, its effects normalized through repetition and institutional authority. That, in a way, is the lesson: if you want to see where power resides in culture, don’t look for what’s hidden. Look for what’s everywhere.

iii. Personal coda

I have to confess I’m still not entirely sure what to make of all this. When I first heard the podcast, then read Moulton’s book, and followed up with some of my own research into this strange and largely forgotten chapter of recent history, it felt like my suspicions about George Soros and his malignant influence had been confirmed. Much of the art itself struck me as deliberately perverse—bad in the specific way so much contemporary art is bad, reveling in transgression for its own sake—and it was easy to see how such work might function as a softening agent, preparing a population for the more disorienting and atomizing effects of Soros-style liberalism.

But there is another potential story to be told here. I could easily recast the sinister, conspiratorial vision of the SCCA that began this post in a far more sympathetic light. It might go something like this:

What if I told you that after the Cold War, George Soros funded a network of contemporary art centers across twenty countries in the former Soviet bloc to promote artistic freedom? These Soros Centers for Contemporary Art provided much needed infrastructure, training, and international exposure to artists in countries where state-sponsored art had long been rigid and ideologically constrained by Soviet repression. Working with local curators and cultural workers, the SCCAs introduced new ideas, media, and global conversations to regions that had been isolated from the world and from their native traditions for generations. Their goal was merely to offer platforms for creative engagement during a time of immense social transition. Once local institutions matured, the SCCAs quietly shut down, leaving behind a generation of artists fully equipped to sustain a local culture freed from the yoke of their communist past.

Do I believe this version? No, not really. It’s at least as naive as the first version is cynical. And anyway the precise motivations are not really the point. Soros has done a lot of damage to the world and there’s absolutely no reason to soft-peddle the extent of it. But this more sympathetic version does help me understand something about why modern political and cultural life seems unable to escape his grasp, and why, when we look around, we see him everywhere.

Soros so often “wins” because he understands the basic mechanics of power and its relationship to meaning. To the question of why, he might tell himself a story of benevolence, where we might see his villainy, but to the question of what and how the story is the same either way: George Soros shows up. He sees a vacuum and he fills it. He funds infrastructure where none exists. He staffs it with personnel who share his beliefs at the highest levels of abstraction and he lets them do whatever they are going to do.

If others want to contest the vision he promotes, they would do well to start by taking culture as seriously as he does—as both the precursor to power and as power’s favorite tool for amplification. If the history of the SCCA teaches us anything, it is that culture is not merely reflective of society; it produces it. And those who build its institutions shape the world we come to see as real.

This is a topic I’ve written about before (and also spent several years teaching to undergrads). The first part of this post is a direct rehashing of an article I wrote for a now defunct magazine called Asylum in 2022. The second half is more about why conspiracy theories—especially those about Epstein and Jews broadly—are increasingly prominent, and throws some cold water on the overheated reactions to this trend.

1. What are conspiracy theories?

To begin with, I do not like the term conspiracy theories. Not because it was invented by the CIA—it wasn’t—but because the term, much like its cousin-term “misinformation,” once you attempt to define it, reveals itself to be meaningless. Whatever definition one can come up with will either be much too vague and end up including ideas that are not commonly understood to be conspiracy theories, or much too narrow and exclude those that are.

Instead these terms operate as rhetorical cudgels to delegitimize whatever ideas and speakers the person leveling the accusation does not like. That is all. Richard Weaver called this kind of language “devil terms.” If you drill down on what is meant by “conspiracy theory,” its distinct elements as a category of belief, how conspiracy theories are functionally different from other kinds of narratives that attempt to explain the causes of various events and circumstances, you will find nothing there. The edges bleed out; the center is empty.

And yet, surely, the term must mean… something. In a somewhat new semantic twist, people espousing “conspiracy theories” have begun to self-consciously refer to themselves as “conspiracy theorists.” For example, on a recent episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast (which has received a A LOT of attention since it aired last week, and which is the reason I decided to write this post), he and his guest, Ian Carroll, open the podcast by calling themselves conspiracy theorists and riffing on why they find conspiracy theories so compelling.

Read more

Fights over the NEA and NEH, and public funding for arts and culture more generally, are nothing new. Since their inception in 1965 and the passage of The National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities Act, the American people and their representatives have been in a constant tug-of-war over how to appropriately balance the importance of cultivating a national culture against the problem of how that culture is defined and by whom.

In 1989, the controversies surrounding Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” and Robert Mapplethorpe’s “The Perfect Moment”—both supported by grants from the NEA—became flashpoints in this debate, and struck at the core of the American people’s concerns over the use of their tax dollars to support the arts. Conservatives rightly began to wonder whether it was possible to sustain these programs and promote a national culture in a way that wouldn’t inevitably succumb to ideological capture, moral and political degradation, and outright waste.

By the mid-90s the issue came to a head when a newly elected Republican congress sought to dismantle these agencies and phase them out completely over a two year window. This outcome was ultimately forestalled, but not without deep cuts to agency budgets and significantly stricter grant guidelines.

Today, we face a similar decision point. After a decade of near total ideological capture by liberal activists, the NEA/NEH and other federal cultural programs are once again on the chopping block. The newly elected MAGA administration, along with both houses of Congress, and its clear mandate from the American people to enact its vision for the country, must decide whether to do away with these programs all together, or attempt to restore their mission to curate a proud and authentic expression of American cultural identity.

The path forward hinges on two fundamental questions:

1. Does the state have a legitimate role in fostering a national culture and ensuring the dissemination and preservation of that cultural knowledge, or should this responsibility be left entirely to private institutions and market forces?

2. If the state does have such a role, are the existing agencies—the NEA and NEH—along with their current leadership, the appropriate instruments for this task?

On the first question, critics present a strong case that the United States government has no business in shaping a national culture. They argue that such endeavors, in practice, become vehicles for ideological extremism, consistently co-opted by political activists who use government resources to promote cultural narratives that are hostile to the values, traditions, and beliefs of the majority of Americans. They will contend that this is not only an improper use of taxpayer dollars and a gross overreach of government responsibilities, but also a subsidy for individuals and groups actively working to erode our values and way of life.

However, withdrawing from the cultural battlefield is not a neutral act; it is an act of surrender. Public investment in the arts and humanities is crucial not only for preserving a shared national identity but also for countering the forces that seek to divide and redefine the country according to their own ideological imperatives. The absence of government engagement in culture does not mean the absence of cultural formation—it merely cedes the ground entirely to entrenched private interests, academia, and legacy media, all of which have demonstrated a relentless commitment to zeroing-out the remaining balance of our cultural heritage.

The notion that eliminating public funding will lead to a more organic or ideologically neutral cultural environment is a naive illusion. The institutions that currently dominate cultural production will persist, more or less unchallenged, advancing their agenda with little regard for their popularity or the continued divestment from cultural life by the general public. Abandoning the fight is not the same as winning it. If conservatives wish to reclaim and restore American culture, they must actively engage with the institutions that shape it. They must have a clear vision, a concrete strategy, and the resolve to use the tools available—including the NEA and NEH—to enact that vision.

This is not simply an opportunity for the Trump administration; it is an obligation. Reclaiming the NEA and NEH from their current leadership and redirecting them toward a cultural program that truly serves the American people is as essential to the MAGA agenda as any economic, immigration, or foreign policy initiative.

As to the second question, the answer is clear: the NEA and NEH remain powerful vehicles for cultural influence, but their existing leadership and personnel have long abandoned their duty to serve the nation as a whole. In their current form, these agencies function as extensions of a hostile cultural elite, animated by a perverse ideology that denies bedrock reality at the same time it demonizes the American story, and seeks revolutionary upheaval of our most sacred beliefs. If these institutions are to fulfill their intended purpose, they must be fundamentally restructured, reoriented, and placed under leadership that is genuinely committed to fostering a culture that reflects the history, values, and identity of the American people.

A successful reclamation of the NEA and NEH will depend not only on policy but on personnel. Leadership must be selected with care, ensuring that those entrusted with overseeing these agencies are wedded to a positive cultural vision. This means identifying individuals with the intellectual and moral clarity to resist ideological capture, as well as the strategic wherewithal to implement a transformative agenda in the face of inevitable resistance from entrenched bureaucratic interests. Choose fast, but more importantly, choose wisely.

Personnel alone of course is not enough. These agencies must be given a new mandate—one that explicitly prioritizes the promotion of American cultural excellence, the preservation of our nation’s artistic and historical legacy, and the fostering of a shared civic identity. This cannot be achieved through vague platitudes about “inclusivity” or “diversity” that have long been weaponized against the very people these institutions are meant to serve. Instead, it requires a deliberate and unapologetic assertion of national character through funding initiatives that celebrate America’s artistic, literary, and historical achievements, revitalize neglected cultural traditions, and ensure that public resources are no longer directed toward those who seek to dismantle our nation’s heritage.

To that end, the administration must pursue a bold and comprehensive cultural agenda, identifying specific programs and priorities that will restore the NEA and NEH, as well as other government funded cultural initiatives, to their rightful function. This moment calls for a wholesale cultural revival, from historic exhibitions and public art, to education, literature, and media initiatives that embrace the best and most vital aspects of our national identity. Below is a list of eleven initiatives that should be considered in the effort to reshape these agencies into institutions that serve, rather than subvert the American people.

1. America250

America’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence is right around the corner. This is a seminal event in our nation’s history, and provides the unique opportunity to firmly declare our national identity, our heritage, our stories, who we are, and where we are going.

The current Semiquincentennial Commission does not inspire confidence to make the most of this opportunity. Its public statements so far lack clarity or any kind of inspiring vision. We cannot depend on this commission to execute on this enormous undertaking. The Trump administration must either reconstitute the commission as an immediate first step, or else make plans to bypass it entirely and assemble personnel and resources to deliver a proper celebration outside of its purview.

This event should be the main priority for our cultural efforts over the next two years. A detailed program and plan for the semiquincentennial will be the subject of a follow-up article. Here is a longer post I did on this a few months ago. In short: this should be an all-hands-on-deck, once-in-a-lifetime celebration worthy of the momentous occasion.

2. Old, Weird America

A traveling exhibit celebrating the strange, idiosyncratic, and deeply rooted traditions that have long thrived on the margins of our mainstream culture. This initiative would recognize and support the folk artists, storytellers, and institutions that keep alive the “weird” spirit of medicine shows, traveling carnivals, and vaudeville; professional wrestlers, strong-men, lion tamers, and gunslingers; jug bands, shape-note singing, and backwoods fiddling; outlaw moonshiners and folk magicians; roadside curiosity cabinets, dime museums, and spirit photography.

This would also include an exploration of America’s “X-Files.” Our cultural landscape has long been shaped by its deep fascination with the unknown—the liminal territory between the physical world and our imaginations. From the spiritualist séances of the 19th century to the UFO frenzy of Roswell, the country has cultivated a rich folklore of conspiracy, mysticism, and the supernatural. This initiative would celebrate the uniquely American tradition of questioning official narratives and seeking meaning in the strange and unexplained.

It would explore the legends of cryptids like Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil, and Mothman. It would highlight the secret societies like the Freemasons and the Bohemian Grove that have fueled generations of speculation about the hidden powers that rule the world. It would preserve the stories of the dreamers and outcasts—figures like John Keel, whose writings on UFOs and high strangeness blurred the line between fact and myth, or Manly P. Hall, whose obsession with esoteric wisdom shaped the mystical undercurrents of American thought, or Art Bell, the late-night radio host whose Coast to Coast AM became the nation’s most essential portal into the world of conspiracy theories, paranormal encounters, and extraterrestrial speculation.

By funding research, exhibitions, and performances dedicated to these eclectic and oft-forgotten traditions, this initiative would not only preserve America’s wild, untamed cultural past but ensure that its strange and vibrant soul continues to shape the future.

3. The Future Arts Project

Grants that support boundary-pushing and experimental art that expand the Overton Window of creative expression while remaining rooted in the values, legacy, and risk-taking inherent to our national identity. Too often, innovation in the arts has been ceded to those who reject our heritage and seek to vandalize it, but experimentation and artistic boldness need not be in opposition to honoring who we are and what we came from.

This initiative would support new artists pushing the limits of form and media, including new technologies and distribution platforms, especially those who operate outside the institutional art world—from immersive public performances to radical reinterpretations of classical techniques. It would fund site-specific installations, experimental theater, and bold new movements in visual, literary, and musical composition, fostering an artistic renaissance that embraces audacity, intellectual rigor, and deep engagement with history and myth.

Throughout history, avant-garde movements have driven artistic evolution—from the Futurists, to literary modernists, to the pioneers of abstract expressionism and multimedia storytelling—ensuring that culture does not stagnate but is constantly renewed. America must cultivate its next generation of visionaries, artists who dare to challenge convention while still building upon the great traditions and narratives that define us.

4. American Foundations

A homeschool curriculum that immerses students in American history, literature, art, and film while reinforcing civic and cultural values. It would introduce young learners to folktales, historical documents, and classic literature like The Last of the Mohicans, Little House on the Prairie, and Huckleberry Finn. Older students would study foundational texts such as The Mayflower Compact, John Winthrop’s “City Upon a Hill”, Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death”, and key Revolutionary-era writings, including Common Sense and The Federalist Papers. The curriculum would also explore American art and music, along with films that reflect the national experience, like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Searchers. This initiative would provide a well-rounded, civic-minded education, fostering both historical understanding and an appreciation for our national heritage, that could be delivered to students across the country at any age group and in any educational setting.

5. Red Flags

This exhibit critically examines the Progressive Era (1890s–1920s) as a time not just of reform, but of radical agitation, political violence, and ideological extremism. As industrialization advanced, militant labor movements and anarchist groups resorted to bombings, assassinations, and mass strikes in pursuit of their revolutionary goals. The exhibit explores the Los Angeles Times bombing of 1910, in which union extremists killed 21 people. It revisits the Sacco and Vanzetti case, where two Italian anarchists—executed for their role in an armed robbery and murder—became posthumous revolutionary icons, despite overwhelming evidence of their guilt. The 1919 Red Scare and a wave of anarchist bombings targeting government officials underscored that these radicals sought not just labor rights, but the complete overthrow of American society.

Through archival footage, radical pamphlets, court transcripts, and law enforcement records, this exhibit reveals how these extremist movements worked to destabilize democracy and push America toward foreign-inspired revolutionary upheaval.

6. Live on Main Street

This initiative seeks to revitalize American theater, particularly in small towns and rural communities, by providing grants, resources, and support for local productions that celebrate the nation’s rich theatrical and musical heritage. At the heart of the program is a commitment to bringing live performance back to Main Street, restoring local theaters as cultural hubs where communities can gather to watch classic American plays and selections from the Great American Songbook. Grants would fund performances of works by playwrights such as Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O’Neill, as well as classic Broadway productions that defined American storytelling. Additionally, the initiative would support concerts featuring the music from the likes of George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Stephen Foster, Scott Joplin, and others.

Finally, this initiative would also introduce a Traveling Debates Program, bringing spirited, civil discourse on important national issues to local theaters and community centers. Modeled after the great public forums of early America, these live events would feature scholars, writers, and public intellectuals engaging in structured, participatory debates on pressing political, cultural, and historical questions. By hosting these debates in small-town theaters and historic venues, the program would restore the tradition of public argument as a civic art.

7. The Garden of American Heroes

A national public art project honoring the bold pioneers, warriors, statesmen, visionaries, and innovators who shaped the United States through courage, ingenuity, and action. The vast outdoor park would feature commissioned sculptures and public art pieces paying tribute to the great military leaders and fearless lawmen who upheld order and defended American ideals, our frontiersman and settlers who stretched our borders across the vast American wilderness, as well as technologists and inventors, our aviators and astronauts, the great industrialists and business leaders whose ambition and innovation built the nation’s economic power, our sports heroes, our great scientists, our builders and doers. Rather than reflecting passing ideological trends or quotas, this collection would be guided by a single standard: extraordinary achievement in service to the nation.

8. The Library of American Pulp

This program would focus on preserving and celebrating the raw, imaginative, and uniquely American storytelling traditions found in pulp fiction, folk narratives, science fiction, fantasy, horror, noir, romance, and adventure literature. This initiative would publish definitive, archival-quality editions of works by the likes of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and the frontier sagas of Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey. It would also revive the forgotten voices of folk storytelling, tall tales, dime novels, and serialized pulp fiction. By curating and preserving these works, the Library would safeguard America’s core literary traditions, honoring the authors who defined the country’s popular imagination.

9. American Odyssey

A children’s television/film initiative that brings American history to life through compelling storytelling, adventure, and character-driven narratives, instilling a love of country while showcasing the courage, ingenuity, and perseverance that shaped the nation. Episodes would explore great explorations, frontier survival, scientific breakthroughs, industrial innovation, and pivotal battles, presenting figures like Daniel Boone, Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark, Clara Barton, and the Wright brothers in a way that is engaging and accessible. Story arcs could follow a group of young travelers experiencing key moments in history firsthand, blending live-action dramatizations, animation, and documentary elements to create an immersive experience. Themes of self-reliance, bravery, hard work, and resilience would be central, inspiring children to see themselves as part of an ongoing American story. By incorporating folk tales, tall tales, and legends alongside historical fact, the series would also preserve the mythic and adventurous spirit that has always been central to the American experience.

10. Digital Age Art

The Internet has unleashed an explosion of strange, surprising, and innovative cultural and intellectual achievements, reshaping how culture is created, consumed, and understood. From the rise of meme culture to the “found art” of YouTube, from troll humor to independent scholarship, the internet has democratized artistic expression in ways unimaginable just decades ago. Independent creators, freed from traditional gatekeepers, have pioneered new forms of storytelling, rivaling the depth and influence of established media. The blurred line between high and low culture has given birth to absurdist humor, vaporwave music, and experimental video essays, while blogs, forums, and social media communities have revolutionized the way ideas form and evolve. The internet Age has proven to be an era of radical experimentation, participatory culture, and intellectual reinvention that deserves a broader examination than what we have so far produced.

11. America: The Story of a Nation

This capstone initiative would produce a sweeping documentary series, in the tradition of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, that explores the history of American culture as a grand narrative of creativity, ambition, and innovation. Spanning literature, music, art, architecture, film, philosophy, and popular traditions, the series would trace the evolution of the American identity—from the sermons of the Puritans to the jazz of New Orleans, from the novels of Melville and Hawthorne to the rise of Hollywood, from the folk traditions of Appalachia to the skyscrapers of New York. Each episode would examine how artists, writers, musicians, and visionaries shaped and responded to the American experience.

More than a chronology, this series would tell the story of American culture as an epic tale of exploration, triumph, and reinvention, revealing how its defining values manifested in the arts. This documentary would be both a celebration of American achievement and a deep reflection on the forces that shaped its cultural landscape, offering a definitive account of America’s artistic and intellectual legacy.

These initiatives are just a start. Given the right leadership and personnel at these agencies, as well as the focus and will to get things done, a lot more is possible. I’m confident the Trump admin can do this, but it only makes sense if they are willing to go all in. No half measures. These agencies, and our approach to culture, needs to be totally restructured.

If you have your own idea for cultural programming, please leave it in the comments below. You might be surprised who might see it.

This week, I have something a little different. It’s a written interview with one of my favorite new fiction authors, V.N. Ebert. Ebert’s debut short story collection was recently published by Passage Press (which you can buy now by clicking on the link).

The back jacket of the book describes the stories thusly:

In this debut collection of short stories, author V.N. Ebert cuts deep into the heart of the American South. Haunted by ghosts of ancestral battles and violent histories, these stories explore the lives of flawed but heroic characters, each fighting an existential war for reclamation. Some win, some lose, and some have already lost, their struggles playing out amidst the decaying, jasmine-scented ruins of a world outside of time.

This book first came across the transom when I started the original Passage Prize in late 2021, a contest I’d hoped would draw out some of the hidden artistic and literary talent that had been left to languish during the era of radical censorship and cultural decay that had taken root in the previous decades.

Ebert’s titular story ended up winning First Prize for the fiction category. Among the many entrants, his writing above all was a vindication of my thesis for the contest, that indeed highly talented people were out there who, for petty political reasons, had been denied the opportunity to have their work taken seriously by the legacy gatekeepers. While green in certain respects—as virtually all unpublished writers are—Ebert’s command of language, his unique style, his understanding of the elements of story, and the inexplicable magic of this combination of native talents, all compelled me to demand of him a book-length manuscript to publish.

Two years later, Georgia Buddha finally came to fruition. This is a remarkable collection that achieves moments of incredible poignancy. It is also very funny, darkly so, and unlike so much contemporary literature tells compelling stories full of action and excitement.

I am as proud of this collection as any editor or publisher has a right to be of someone else’s work. V.N. Ebert is a remarkable talent who I firmly believe will help revitalize the world of American letters. Over the last several weeks, Ebert and I had the following exchange in which we speak about his collection, his thoughts on writing, his thoughts on the current political and cultural environment, and what comes next for him.

Enjoy.

Lomez: It seems to me that the main character of Georgia Buddha is its setting. In these very different stories of very different kinds of people, the throughline is the place where they all live. Southern writers seem to be especially aware of the physical environment of their stories and its spiritual qualities. I am thinking of Faulkner of course, but some of my other favorite southern writers like Barry Hannah, Harry Crews, and Padget Powell who all treat the south as a living thing which, like their human characters, has motivations and interests all its own. So what’s going on here? What is it about the south–the geography, its history, its people, its spirits–that gives rise to this perception?

V.N. Ebert: Southern whites are unique among white Americans in having lost a total war on their own soil. That’s the starting point, I think, for Southern writers, white Southern writers and the white Southern experience. The second point is that Southern whites think of ourselves as native to the South, as not having immigrated here, but of this being our native soil.

To explain that, the South had a failed national awakening. It is unique in having that experience, the Confederacy which in practice was a collective suicide attempt. And the South spends over a century, maybe now a century-and-a-half, as a defeated nation trying to retrench itself and decide it fits into the larger American culture. What’s left, because of the destruction of the Old World, slave-holding, plantation dominated culture of the antebellum South, which itself required an act of redefinition, of deciding what the South was in its defeat. The South produced a posthumous national epic, or a sub-national epic, in Gone with the Wind, which is not good history but remarkable national mythmaking. And, because the South is part of the national culture, that becomes the biggest movie Hollywood ever made, and so it’s that process of the South defining itself and its own place in the national culture.

So, the South has a spirit, a tragic spirit. The South is the tragic part of America. The South is also, paradoxically and relatedly, the most American part of the country and the part of America most alienated from the rest of the country. How sons and grandsons of Confederate generals saw action in World War II, or guys today who fly large twinned American and Confederate flags from their lawns.

This all gives the South a particular sense of place, and a sense of history and of a people traveling through history that has acted on them in a very powerful and irrevocable way. And there’s other elements, of course, including being a self-consciously aristocratic and racially stratified society that throws a wrench in the egalitarian self-image of the larger nation.

In a literary way, I think the history seeps into the landscape and the people. Writers and the intellectuals of the South have a way of investing history and a tragic sensibility into both of those. I certainly do, it informs and probably helped inculcate my interest in transience, in inevitable defeat and survival after defeat, and in the transcendence that can arise from spiritual crisis.

I’m a writer of crisis. I’m more interested in defeat than victory, and I think that’s common to Southern writers. We’re intellectuals living after the defeat, and so our victories are necessarily limited and temporary, and circumscribed, as are the victories and successes of our characters. That condition is spiritually and aesthetically interesting, and it’s the Southern condition. I suppose it’s also the Human Condition, but it’s very apparent in the Southland.

Along these lines, the book also seems to be interested in acts of stupid and chaotic violence. Reading through many of these stories, I was reminded of a Coen brothers movie. These characters are not always redeeming, but are very often agents of unforgiveable and unthinkable villainy to the point it becomes morbidly funny. Is the connection between violence and humor something you are conscious of while writing your fiction?

I am—I have a dry, dark humor, and an absurdist streak. I thought the book was funny, not laugh-a-minute-funny, but, how you put it, morbidly funny.

I wear my influence from Flannery O’Connor on my sleeve, her interest in violent and grotesque, comic characters who wrestle with God. And, to pull in the previous question, the South has that violent and comic element, both in its history and in its stereotypes, back-slapping old boys with shotguns.

Especially starting with the title story, Georgia Buddha, I was interested in how extreme a character could be and still be sympathetic. My process, my experience of writing is that I’m spending time with the people involved in my head, and maybe aspects of that are wanting to capture the fullness of the person. Say, Medea Gothic, which is I think the most pitch-black story in the collection, was also one where I thought, these people are funny. It’s the Coen Brothers, or the literary antecedents of the Coen Brothers like, among others, Jim Thompson and Elmore Leonard, crime writers who wrote about criminals who were bumbling idiots and demanded to be taken seriously.

There’s also a position that someone else articulated, I can’t remember who at the moment, that comedy at its best was the greater spiritual vehicle than tragedy. That tragedy is recognizing the tragedy inherent in being alive, and crying, while comedy is recognizing that tragedy and laughing. And violence is tied into that, in people who are absolutely in over-their heads, and responding poorly and chaotically.

Maybe this treatment of violence and humor and the human animal as such brings us finally to the spiritual center of this book. The title, Georgia Buddha, points our compass east, but also stories like “Floating World,” “Death Poem,” “Mother Kali” and others have unmistakably eastern spiritual undertones (and even overtones). This collision of the Far East and the South is not something I think I’ve encountered before. It creates such a complex metaphysical texture to the writing. There’s a great moment at the end of “Floating World” where a southern officer is visiting Japan after World War II and has a tender moment with a geisha, telling her, “I got beat by the Yankees, too.” Such a funny and poignant scene.

I don’t really have a question here. Tell me more about this collision–or fusion–of worlds, Far East and American South. Is this unique to you as an author, or is there something more fundamental about this relationship?

Maybe both? Or, there’s a commonality which I haven’t seen explored by other writers, and I was positioned to write on it. Or had flat enough associational gradients to recognize it. A branch of my family has been over-educated for four generations, and has an eccentric streak, or a strain which produces idiosyncratic seeker personalities.

My grandmother would have done well born to professors in the Bay Area and instead she was born very poor in East Texas and migrated within the South, but she was a product of the post-World War II expansion of the university system and completed a PhD and became a college professor which, given her background, would be impressive even today and for the time and place she did it in, the early 1960’s in Texas and the Deep South, was remarkable. But, she was New Agey, she changed religions a few times in her life, and later in life she was deeply committed to Psychoanalysis, so she would talk about Jung in a strong Southern accent to her ten year old grandchildren, and not even the like personality inventory Jung but the, we are all ascendent spiritual beings and eventually we will become omniscient Jung, which maybe gets to some of why I am how I am.

So, there’s an atypical New Agey strain in my Southern family. I half-jokingly say that I’m a Calvinist Buddhist. Maybe that’s the starting point. Because there’s a long tradition of Americans finding something in Japan, or what they imagine Japan is, or East Asia more generally. Alan Watts, the Beats, Joseph Campbell, other people who I imagine were difficult to deal with. Most of whom were also not likely to interpret what they saw through a Southern lens. Bay Area or prototypical Bay Area, California tends to show up in my work as a metaphor for escape, the West Coast where people reach the sea and can’t go any farther, and it’s also the farthest place, spiritually, from the South. So, they were people who tended to see the Zen, but ignored or downplayed that, say, D.T. Suzuki was also a booster for the Empire of Japan before discovering pacifism in defeat. Or that Hinduism also has caste and sati and a devouring Shiva, among other aspects which don’t fit well with the kind-of Americans most likely to become interested in India.

Because there are commonalities. Japan and the South particularly were both aristocratic, militaristic, racialized societies that came into conflict with and were crushed by the greatest power in human history, the productive capacity of the American military-industrial complex, and were partially remade in the image of the victorious power. Hence, “I got beat by Yankees too,” which I liked, too. They are both nations that live their defeat, and are trying to find their place after a civilizational crisis.

So, there’s that, a commonality almost of mood, and of a shared impulse to self-annihilation by violence. And, relatedly, there’s a part of the East Asian, religious and philosophical tradition that I think becomes deracinated and woo-woo-ish when it’s being handled by Yankee pacifists. Because it’s a tradition with a great capacity for violence, and thoughts on violence, and morally complicated elements that deserve to be taken seriously instead of being written off. Much of which could also be said of the American South.

And so, I was interested in driving that commonality as far as I could. In seeing if Sri Ramakrishna could be situated, not just in India or in California, but in the Southland. In sparse ink-wash paintings of the Deep South. So, I think I’ve worked my way to more definitively saying, it’s both. There’s a fusion of the two cultures that is suggested from a certain perspective, and that perspective might be idiosyncratic enough that I was an appropriate writer to see it. To the extent that they gesture to a universal philosophy, Ramakrishna and the Buddha have to be in the South as much as they are in India.

Your above answer talks some about your biography, but you’re writing this under a pseudonym, and outside of some generic details I don’t know anything about you—and I’m your publisher! The audience knows even less.

This is par for the course for this online space we’re in and where I discovered your writing (the titular story won 1st place for fiction in our first ever Passage Prize), but is less common for mainstream publishing. Despite the so-called “death of the author” made famous in the 60’s by Roland Barthes, identity in authorship is perhaps more important now than ever. Whether the author is a woman, gay, black, disabled, [insert favored identity category here] seems to be all that matters in fact.

So how do you think about anonymity in your case? Why is it necessary? Or is it necessary? Or anyway what is the function of anonymity as a writer/artist in the Current Year?

In my few interactions outside of Passage, there’s been some ambiguity as to whether it was a pseudonym. As well as to what V.N. actually stands for. I think I’ve given you my name, at least it’s on some of the forms somewhere, although actually I signed the contract as V.N., now that I think about it.

On some level, I like being V.N. Ebert. I think writers, or writers who aren’t writing autobiography or thinly-veiled autobiography, have an impulse to become other people. It’s freeing, you escape the judgment of others, and free yourself from being yourself. And, I’m a private person - there’s a particular variation of attention-seeking introvert that probably describes authors. It’s a field where even if you do well, no one actually knows what you look like.

There’s also, semi-seriously, it helps with my actual life. It wouldn’t, it’s not as though I’d lose my job, or be driven underground, but it would be at best an awkward conversation I’d have to have and, from then on, like it’d be something I’d have to say about myself. As though I’d have to introduce myself as, here’s me, and oh, I also write and have some things published, don’t worry, you’ve not read them and I don’t want you to. Most of my family doesn’t know I do this, and very few of my friends. It makes it easy to compartmentalize my life.

So, I suppose it’s not absolutely necessary, but it helps. I have some idea that V.N. arose to write a series of works, gothic fiction set in the postwar South, about God and violence and the passing away of things, and then he’ll pass on himself. Embody the theme. Or I get doxxed and just use some version of my actual name in the reprinting, which is less romantic and more practical.

Maybe, to try to answer the larger question, anonymity creates a blank slate. I like the work being read as the work, rather than being refracted through my biography. It lets me be read on my terms, which is in the tradition of Southern writers, and as an American writer, which I suppose is not totally a blank slate, but then again it’s probably what someone would expect from reading the book. In the premodern world, Camille Paglia I think discusses this somewhere, actors were almost unique in taking new names, stage names going back far into history. And pen names also have a long history, I think there’s a long impulse in trying to shape how the work is received, and how a writer or creative can operate, by taking on a pseudonym.

In the Current Year, I suppose it’s the only way to have the work be read as the work, instead of being forced into a box. I wouldn’t like to be stuck as an identity-politics writer. And, like I put it already, it does help compartmentalize. That’s maybe the enduring value, it lets a person be who that person is, and who that person is as a writer or artist, and for people who for various reasons personal and psychological need distance between those things, anonymity lets them be writers or artists. There’s an element of self-transformation in creative work, I think it helps with that.

One of the bets I’ve made with Passage is there’s a bunch of untapped literary and creative talent out there that for a variety of complicated reasons have been gatekept out of traditional literary circles over the last several decades. By positioning Passage outside of that network—politically, culturally, aesthetically, etc.—the idea was that we could draw that talent out and maybe find some escape from the broad cultural malaise we are in. You are one such example of that talent.

Do you have any thoughts about where the culture is going broadly speaking and how your writing and/or this project fits into that assessment? As a writer, what did the existence of Passage mean for you, and/or do you have any sense of whether we might be able to solve the problem identified by the New York Times recently as the “disappearance of literary men?”

Put more plainly: do you accept the premise that literary culture in America is in a deep depression at the moment, and if so what can be done to fix it?

I’ll start with saying, thank you and everybody else at Passage for making me part of that bet. It’s been a great experience, and I had never thought that I’d be able to come this far as an author.

Passage was a unique opportunity for me to be a traditional author, with a book that exists in the physical world and the legitimacy and opportunity that brings with it. It opened a door, and I’ll discuss this a little more later, for me to pursue writing with the possibility that what I’m writing will actually find an audience. It's a symbiotic relationship, because searching for talent encourages that talent. And it has been really incredibly creatively stimulating, I had a certain amount of material ready for this book when you first reached out to me but the period after that has been very fruitful. It’s difficult, not impossible but difficult, to be entirely internally or intrinsically driven. Writing purely for yourself, I do that, I have done that, and plenty of writers do, but it is incredibly rewarding to write for an audience. A book, someone said this once and I liked this description, is a conversation held by an author with unknown readers. Passage, in my way of thinking, provides authors who, for whatever reason, are outside of the traditional literary network, with an interested and receptive readership. In my own, personal, small way, the times people on Twitter reach out or mention this book, those have always made my day.

I tend to think that literary culture in America is maybe very narrow? I guess that’s a kind of depression. American literary culture, from my outside perspective, seems like it’s very good at nurturing a particular kind of talent and putting out a certain kind of book which appeals to a certain kind of reader. Whatever is on the front table at a Barnes & Noble, or a local bookstore, the kind-of book which has a tendency to be described as brave or urgent or important. The machine has an assembly-line quality to it, with this year’s model book. Maybe that's depression, a kind-of creative stasis. It’s simultaneously, and perhaps relatedly, very faddish, and I suppose I have doubts that the best-reviewed American novels of the last few decades have much staying power.

I don’t have any great thoughts on fixing the culture. It would be nice if literary culture were more open to novels which appealed to men, or expected more of the reader, or had a stronger sense of literary history, or the Western Canon generally. I had a creative writing teacher who once gleefully started listing significant novels and saying that none of them would be published now, which struck me then and has stuck with me. I don’t know if that’s a matter of the audience’s taste or the publisher’s, but that seems less than ideal to me.

That said, I do think the internet has also stimulated the classics, meaning broadly the Great Books, at least for a certain variety of the terminally online. I have no idea if that means anything to the wider world, but at least there’s some community that keeps the classics going. A different teacher, who I liked a bit more, said that the thing about the classics is that they never sell a lot in a given year, but they always sell something in a given year, and will forever. Hopefully the forever part remains true, but I’m optimistic that some people will keep reading, even if the stereotype about the kinds of people who are over-literate might shift over the next decade or so. Maybe it’s all about searching for an audience, the literary men, who probably are still out there unless there really was a great die off, and getting them contemporary material that they would actually like to read.

What are V.N. Ebert’s plans? What do you intend to work on now that you’ve completed this book? When I put on my editors’ hat, I see the seeds of a few novels in these stories waiting to sprout. Do you have any ambitions in that direction?

I guess this is a good time to announce that I’ve been working on a novel, provisionally titled Boll Weevil, and am about a month from finishing the manuscript. I would describe the novel as a child of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood and Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 with a Zen Buddhist upbringing and wartime combat experience. I’ve been picking it up and putting it down for years, working on a couple variations on the same characters and setting and never quite being happy with it, and shelved it while I tried to get Georgia Buddha finished under deadline.

To back up a bit, I had originally thought that I would write a novel before trying a short story collection, I had written “Georgia Buddha” and “Sky Burial” already but thought I would try something on a grander scale. I wrote part of what would have been a multi-part novel during COVID before abandoning the project. I actually got V.N. Ebert out of that book, incidentally, the pseudonym used by a character that was based on me. In retrospect, it reminds me of what I think Larry Brown said about his first novel, that he needed to get the crap out of him before he could write something good. Or maybe that every writer needs to write a million bad words before he can write a single good one, something to that effect.

And, this involves a little bit of a glimpse behind the curtain on the production of this collection, there was some lag time between the manuscript being substantially completed and the book coming off the press, and during that period I kept working on short stories. I had momentum, and every time I went back to the novel I conked out. I decided that I would try to get to the point where I had enough finished material that I could put out a second collection, and then I would go back to the novel.

I ended up having a very productive period, and I reached that point sooner than I had expected. As an aside, one of the stories from that batch, “Tar Paper,” which is available on my WordPress, would probably serve as the title of that collection if it ever appears. And the novel ended up coming together. That weird way that a switch gets pulled and suddenly it’s working creatively. For a while I had an early version of the first two chapters on my site, I pulled those and ended up changing the structure, I stripped the book down and found that it moved much better.

So, from here, I’m trying to finish up that novel, there’ll be some amount of editing and revision but I think it has good bones. And I do have two that are outlined, one of which would be derived from actually one of the shorter stories in the collection, “Eumenides County,” and probably share that title. It would be a crime story set in the South shortly after World War II, about a corrupt declining family of planters, and a Western agent of an industrial concern seeking to invest in the county, being pulled into a murder of a local girl, and a character like the avenging character in Eumenides County, Hoss, also appearing.

The other might end up, assuming I ever actually write it, I’m bad about changing projects, being closer to a linked short-story collection, but would share a setting and tone with the last story in this collection, “Appomattox Courthouse,” in the Deep South and the dying days of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction.

Generally, I’m working on how to get stuff out there. I’ve been toying around with starting a Substack, but I’ve been running around in my personal life and have been willing to carve out time to write but not to figure out how to market the work. But, I’m much farther along than I ever expected to be, and I’m grateful. I’m really just happy to be able to write something worth reading with the expectation that, sometime, someone will actually see it.

Yesterday I caught up with right wing activist and Panda Express chief of recruitment, Chris Rufo, to digest the last 10 days of political…

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No matter that final outcome, now is a good time to do a post-mortem on this episode since it feels unique in many ways and is likely to be replayed over and over again in the coming years. There are some important lessons to be taken from the last several days—the arguments and the meta arguments and the manner in which the arguments happened—so taking a snapshot of it all while it is still fresh may be useful down the road.

1. You Matter

Firstly, dear humble poaster, YOU ARE IN THE ARENA. There is a shopworn notion, mostly leveled by a kind of teenage goth above-it-all style of thinker hiding his own insecurities in his edgy performative indifference, that says whatever is happening on X is only fun and games, politically irrelevant, and that you are shouting into the void (don’t ask him what exactly he’s shouting into by pointing this out). In any case, if you still believe that, there is no hope for you. These lesser posters, those who failed the test of the election or who feel embittered about their own modest audience relative to larger accounts will insist that anons are wasting their time with this stuff. Don’t believe them.

You can take my word for it.1 The things you are saying are being read and considered by the people who matter. X discourse is not just trivial recreation. These ideas trickle up. The tweets themselves trickle up. They land in the laps of the people in Palm Beach and D.C. You are being heard. Your objections are being noted. Your good arguments improve the chances of the things you want to see happen actually happening. Your bad arguments hurt those chances. Policy is getting hashed out in real time and you have a say in it.

And in large part Elon Musk is to thank for this. None of this is possible without Musk buying Twitter and reforming it into the platform he promised to make it: the vehicle for free speech and real debate, the digital public square. Whatever your differences with the man, don’t lose sight of that. He is owed a tremendous amount of deference and respect. Elon, thank you.

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I get it. This was the prudent th…

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I can’t resolve that problem, but I will try to offer some clarity around the topic that will at least keep the term legible, separate out its adherents from its detractors, and maybe most importantly explain how its successor ideology has transmogrified into the ruling ethos of the Global American Empire.

Part II.

After the Cold War ended in 1991, neoconservatism had become one of the most powerful forces in American politics, but without an obvious next step. For decades its foreign policy agenda had been firmly anchored to the fight against global communism, but with the collapse of the Soviet Union that raison d'être vanished and there was no longer an obvious enemy to focus its energies or cohere the right-of-center coalition that Reagan had managed to knit together during the 80s. So where were neocons supposed to pivot in the wake of Soviet collapse? And for that matter, how was the right going to redefine itself without the clarity of purpose that had shaped its agenda since the end of World War II?

Exacerbating the confusion was the fact that the domestic issues around which the neocons first raised their profile seemed increasingly “solved” or in any case thoroughly absorbed into mainstream Republican and Democratic platforms. The social and cultural upheavals of the 60s and 70s became far less salient as hippiedom forfeited its cultural ascendancy to yuppiedom and the emergent “moral majority.” Reagan’s War on Drugs and Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill set in motion the most dramatic reduction in crime the country had ever seen, and the issue of welfare dependency, which was maybe the first and most frequent target of neoconservative critique, was effectively put to rest when Clinton passed welfare reform in ‘96.

American life was pretty good. NAFTA, which passed in ‘92 but only went into effect in ‘94, hadn’t quite yet gutted the interior. Reagan’s amnesty and the 1990 Immigration Act would have disastrous downstream consequences (which remain at the center of our politics today), but in this post-Cold War period were mostly concentrated in a few border states. A sense of optimism prevailed. Economic liberalization, suburbanization, and the “culture of narcissism” that defined the boomers had come into full maturity and resulted in a largely depoliticized society.2 To the extent there were salient socio-political questions, they revolved around a totally new set of priorities, mostly driven by the Christian right. Issues like abortion, school prayer, and the sanctity of marriage supplanted earlier debates around drugs, crime, and urban decay.

In such a context, the neocons of old didn’t really have much to contribute. Not only did the neocons not care as much about these questions, their more academic, data-driven approach––so useful in debates over welfare and crime––didn’t apply as well to debates on abortion. Further, as pointed out in Part 1, if you take Alexander Bloom’s assessment seriously that the early neocons were primarily motivated by a deep-seated fear of anti-semitism,3 the 80s and 90s made that fear a literal joke. American Jews enjoyed unprecedented levels of social and cultural assimilation during this period, and the rise of Christian evangelical support for Israel in the 1980s created an unlikely but powerful alliance that reinforced Jewish security in the American political landscape. You’d be hard pressed to find a place and time in history where Jews had it so good.

With their relevance on domestic questions made more or less obsolete, and the old generation of neocons now giving way to the new generation (famously in the case of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz to their sons, Bill and John), the neocons turned their attention to the unsettled debate over how to assert American military might in a world devoid of the Soviet threat. How the neocons are perceived now, and their reputation as reckless chickenhawks is based largely on the reorientation of their politics starting in the 90s. Where you start or which figures or writings you choose to include to make sense of this shift is an open question, and again, for the third time, I’m almost certainly leaving something out, but for the sake of “good enough” I will look at three main texts: “The Unipolar Moment” by Charles Krauthammer which was published in Foreign Affairs in 1991, the Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guide from 1992 authored by Paul Wolfowitz under the purview of Scooter Libby, and “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” by the Project for a New American Century published in September of 2000.

Krauthammer’s 1991 article in Foreign Affairs is the place to start not only because it clearly spells out the neoconservative foreign policy vision of the 90s and beyond–– both its practical and moral justifications––but also explains the post Cold War departure from neoconservatives like Jeane Kirkpatrick whose more realist foreign policy approach prevailed during the Reagan administration.

As the Cold War drew to a close, Kirkpatrick wrote an essay that ran in the National Interest titled “A Normal Country in a Normal Time”4 where she argued that America could retire its foreign policy obsessions and recenter its efforts on domestic concerns, that the world and America no longer faced the same degree of existential threat from abroad as it did in the decades prior, and that we should therefore relinquish any presumptions to being the world’s sole global superpower. She writes:

Foreign policy becomes a major aspect of a society only if its government is expansionist, imperial, aggressive, or when it is threatened by aggression. One of the most important consequences of the half century of war and Cold War has been to give foreign affairs an unnatural importance. The end of the Cold War frees time, attention, and resources for American needs.

…

Most of the international military obligations that we assumed were once important are now outdated. Our alliances should be alliances of equals, with equal risks, burdens, and responsibilities. It is time to give up the dubious benefits of superpower status and become again an usually successful, open American republic.

But few have the constitution to throw the ring into the fires of Mount Doom once it is in their possession. Kirkpatrick may have been right, but her fellow neocons were not persuaded. Krauthammer’s “Unipolar Moment,” published shortly after “A Normal Country,” explicitly rejected Kirkpatrick’s view, asserting instead that the world remained fraught with threats that required active U.S. leadership (citing the first Iraq War as evidence of this fact), and that moreover the U.S. had an obligation to act as the guarantor of global stability and to shirk from this responsibility would be inviting chaos into the international system that would ensure more and worse military aggression in the years to come. For Krauthammer, war was the natural condition of the world, and to the extent you weren’t fighting one, you were staving one off. For Krauthammer, there was no such thing as a “normal time.”

In the essay Krauthammer goes on to reject a number of other foreign policy approaches. According to Krauthammer, isolationism or Kirkpatrick-esque retrenchment leaves a power vacuum, Kissinger-esque realism overestimates the possibility of muli-polarity where countries like Japan or Germany can effectively balance power in their region, and liberal internationalism is a delusion that falsely imagines that the U.N. or the fiction of “International Law” can ever mean anything if not enforced by the U.S. military, that liberal internationalism is in effect just American unipolarity but dressed up in toothless formalities we might as well do without.

Karuthammer puts it like this:

“The true geopolitical structure of the post-Cold War world, brought sharply into focus by the gulf crisis [is this]: a single pole of world power that consists of the United States at the apex of the industrial West…. American preeminence is based on the fact that it is the only country with the military, diplomatic, political and economic assets to be a decisive player in any conflict in whatever part of the world it chooses to involve itself.”

Where it gets more interesting is deeper in the essay where Krauthammer pays lip service to the isolationist position, speaking more or less directly to Pat Buchanan and Jeane Kirkpatrick who represented the other path in the fork conservatives were facing at the time.

“I have great respect for American isolationism. First, because of its popular appeal and, second, because of its natural appeal. On the face of it, isolationism seems the logical, God-given foreign policy for the United States.

It is not just geography that inclines us to it––we are an island continent protected by two vast oceans, bordered by two neighbors that could hardly be friendlier––but history. America was founded on the idea of cleansing itself of the intrigues and irrationalities, the dynastic squabbles and religious wars, of the Old World.

…

Isolationists say rather unobjectionably that America should confine its attentions in the world to defending vital national interests.”

But here Krauthammer pauses and signals the exception to his sympathy for isolationism that would predict the next two decades of interventionist war on behalf of the “unipolar” worldview. This is perhaps the most important paragraph in the essay and in many ways the key that unlocks the post Cold War neoconservative approach to foreign policy:

“Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and hegemonic designs on Arabia posed as clear a threat to American interests as one can imagine––a threat to America's oil-based economy, to its close allies in the region, and ultimately to American security itself. The rise of a hostile power, fueled by endless oil income, building weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them regionally and eventually intercontinentally (Saddam has already tested a three-stage rocket) can hardly be a matter of indifference to the United States.

If under these conditions a cadre of influential liberals and conservatives finds that upon reflection (and in contradiction to the doctrine enunciated by the most dovish president of the postwar era, Jimmy Carter) the Persian Gulf is not, after all, a vital American interest, then it is hard to see what ‘vital interest’ can mean.”

Go ahead and re-read that. All of it. What is being defined here as a “vital” American interest? Is what he describes as “clear a threat to American interests as one can imagine?” The presumptive yes Krauthammer expects you to answer these questions with, and the military obligations implied by that answer becomes the defining feature of the neocons from this point on.

Two foundational documents emerged in the subsequent decade that gave institutional shape to Krauthammer’s vision: the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), primarily authored by Paul Wolfowitz, with recommendations from Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Richard Perle, and eight years later a report from Project for the New American Century (PNAC) titled, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” published in September of 2000. Together, these texts formalized Krauthammer’s assertion of American global dominance as a moral and strategic imperative and paved the way for what was to come in the wake of 9/11.

The Defense Planning Guidance, leaked in draft form to The New York Times in 1992, set out an explicit strategy to prevent the emergence of any rival power that could challenge the United States’ global supremacy. It identified the dissolution of the Soviet Union not as the culmination of America’s global responsibilities but as the beginning of a new era requiring active measures to consolidate the unipolar world. Wolfowitz and his co-authors argued:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival… This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

The DPG’s focus on preempting regional hegemons across Western Europe, East Asia, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union echoed Krauthammer’s warning against isolationism and multipolarity, and it took them a step further by operationalizing this principle: the United States must, at all times, be using its military and economic might to actively shape the global environment to ensure no competitor could rise. The document prescribed a military posture capable of swift interventions, noting that “deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role” was a fundamental objective. Wolfowitz’s guidance also reified the moral dimension of this strategy, conflating the spread of democracy and open markets to U.S. security interests.5

The strategic framework established through the DPG went somewhat dormant during the Clinton years. Clinton’s more liberal internationalist approach came under heavy attack from the pages of The Weekly Standard,6 which by the late 90’s had supplanted Commentary as the neoconservative magazine of record, and made a routine of bashing Clinton for his reticence to fully embrace America’s global obligations, hedging military engagement and getting bogged down in bureaucratic entanglements with the U.N. and NATO, and thereby squandering opportunities to cement American dominance by failing the test of the Balkans and elsewhere. The story the neocons told of the impotent, half-cocked liberal approach to foreign policy of the mid-90s was full of holes but ultimately convincing since no one could explain how the “multilateral institutions” beloved by liberals could justify their authority apart from the sheer fact of American military might. America was the undisputed strongest nation in the world and Americans rightfully believed they should, if responsibly exercised, flex that power however they pleased.

In 2000 Bush came into office with the explicit mandate to reassert American military dominance abroad. The braintrust at Project for a New American Century, a think tank founded by the editors of The Weekly Standard, published a report titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” that expanded and updated the Krauthammer-DPG foreign policy vision in the aftermath of Clinton’s eight years of “strategic drift.” PNAC’s signatories and staff included a who’s-who of the eras conservative figureheads––Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Elliot Abrams, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, Francis Fukuyama, Eliot Cohen, John Bolton, Jeb Bush, Steve Forbes, our old friend from Part 1, Norman Podhoretz, and many others––who all came to together to identify a clear strategic objective:

“The United States must retain sufficient forces able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars.”

This ambition underscored the PNAC’s commitment to maintaining American military dominance through significant investments in defense, the modernization of U.S. forces, and the expansion of military capabilities into every corner of life, including the internet. It also identified the Middle East, particularly Iraq (please take note of why Iraq keeps coming up over and over again) as a central theater for asserting U.S. influence, arguing for regime change as a necessary step to stabilize the region and protect American interests.

The practical application of these ideas became a fait accompli after 9/11. The Bush administration, populated largely by the neocons listed above, had finally found the pretext to implement the policies outlined in these documents with almost total carte blanche from a freshly wounded and blood thirsty American public. The event was so well suited to the neocon agenda that even the most hardened skeptic can forgive 9/11 conspiracy theorists for drawing certain connections. Strange, improbable things happen. Fate conspires toward its own ends. Fine. But one might at least raise an eyebrow for good measure.

In any case, the neocon moment had arrived. The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 embodied of the broader vision articulated in Krauthammer’s essay, the DPG, and the PNAC report. The Iraq invasion, in particular, reflected the neoconservative belief that regime change could transform an entire region into a stable, democratic, pro-American bloc—a conviction rooted in the idealistic strain of neoconservatism totally at odds with the steely-eyed pragmatism its practitioners applied to just about everything else. The wisdom, or catastrophic hubris of the neoconservative worldview would finally be proven out on the battlefield.

Suffice to say, the battlefield won. The invasion quickly turned into a disaster. The occupation was marked by strategic failures, from insufficient troop levels to the disbanding of the Iraqi military, which fueled a violent insurgency and gave rise to terrorist groups that would haunt us for the next decade. The neocons who held the line were reduced to sputtering cope. David Frum, for example, a then speech writer for Bush, insisted that the war was necessary despite its challenges, resorting to moralistic abstractions and asserting that anyone who rejected the wisdom of the campaign was an “unpatriotic conservative.”

But many neocons jumped ship and the American people jumped ship with them. Major media figures and public intellectuals like Francis Fukuyama and Andrew Sullivan, once staunch proponents of the war and neocon-style interventionism more broadly, now led the charge against it in places like the Atlantic and the neocon home turf of the National Interest. Even William F. Buckley, while not a neoconservative per se, called the war “a failure” and argued that it was fundamentally “a mistake.” Their arguments followed from a public increasingly skeptical of the war’s aims and outcomes.7 The promise of a swift liberation followed by democracy-building was replaced by grim images of sectarian violence and an endless insurgency that claimed thousands of American lives. Our people were dying. And for what exactly?

A giant Israel-shaped elephant stalks the room.

Reading through these seminal neoconservative documents it is actually quite surprising how little Israel is mentioned. Krauthammer doesn’t mention Israel at all in “Unipolar Moment.”8 The DPG doesn’t either (at least not in the excerpts that were leaked to the New York Times in 1992). In the PNAC report the word Israel only shows up once, in a throwaway sentence about “Israeli and Saudi citizens donn[ing] gas masks in nightly terror of Scud attacks.” But the absence of the word “Israel” does little to obscure the shape of the negative space it occupies in all of these writings. Even the most ardent neoconservative apologist cannot deny the centrality of America’s “special relationship” with Israel in the neoconservative foreign policy mission.

How far you want to roll back the clock on this issue is a matter of taste. As I said before, this whole topic requires a book, and I only have this (now very long) post, so keeping with the focus on the 90s through the Iraq War, the first place to turn is the policy paper A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, authored by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser for Benjamin Netanyahu when he first took office as Prime Minister of Israel in 1996.

A Clean Break explicitly called for a shift in Israeli policy away from territorial concessions and peace negotiations, instead advocating for aggressive unilateral actions, including regime change in Iraq and the destabilization of Syria. The authors envisioned a “clean break” from the Oslo Accords and proposed a strategy focused on “weakening, containing, and even rolling back” regional adversaries to secure Israeli dominance. Remarkably, the policy’s recommendations—particularly the emphasis on removing Saddam Hussein and reshaping the regional order—aligned almost perfectly with the subsequent U.S. actions in the Middle East under the George W. Bush administration. However you perceive the motivations of the authors of the document, you’d have to be wilfully blind not to recognize the almost perfect 1:1 overlap between this paper and the broader neoconservative agenda as it was put into action after 9/11. Whatever daylight between Israel’s strategic interests expressed in A Clean Break and America’s military operations, you’d have to strain to find it.

You’d have to strain even further to conclude that the totality of this overlap was incidental. As John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt argued in their widely criticized but poorly refuted paper9 The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, the policies championed by the neoconservative movement in the post-Cold War period—and especially after 9/11—aligned remarkably with the interests of the Israeli state, often to the detriment of America.

Keeping in mind that the core of neoconservatism’s post-9/11 foreign policy was the idea that democratizing the Middle East would stabilize the region and, by extension, secure Israel’s safety, Mearsheimer and Walt write:

“Within the United States, the main driving force behind the Iraq war was a small band of neoconservatives, many with close ties to Israel’s Likud Party… Although neoconservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq, the broader American Jewish community was not.… Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52% to 62%. Thus, it would be wrong to blame the war in Iraq on ‘Jewish influence.’ Rather, the war was due in large part to the Lobby’s influence, especially the neoconservatives within it.”

As detailed above, key neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith had long advocated regime change in Iraq as part of a broader strategy to remake the Middle East in Israel’s favor. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, and eventually Iran all posed existential threats to Israel’s security and it is no wonder why these nations and regimes have become the central focus of U.S. military efforts in the middle-east for the entirety of the 21st century.

The problem, of course, was that these neoconservative priorities often ran counter to America’s own strategic interests. Iraq, which had been a secular counterbalance to Iran, became a vacuum for chaos after the U.S.-led invasion, empowering Shia militias and allowing Iran to extend its influence throughout the region. The unintended consequence was a badly fragmented region that unsurprisingly to everyone but the neocons invited only more chaos and danger. As Mearsheimer and Walt observe, “Israel was becoming a strategic burden,” and our ability to deal with terrorism and “rogue” Middle-East states was made more difficult, not less-so by ensnaring ourselves in narrow concerns over Israeli security.

Whether you find Mearsheimer and Walt’s arguments compelling or not, it’s hard to refute that the results of neocon-led foreign policy efforts in the Middle East have been catastrophic for American security. The destabilization of Iraq birthed al-Qaeda and later ISIS, while U.S. policies inflamed anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world, creating new threats that demanded further interventions, and badly damaged our credibility and capability to deal with emerging threats elsewhere.

Even Israel itself did not emerge unscathed. By closely aligning with neoconservative policies, Israel became more straightforwardly a client-state of American empire, rather than a self-sustaining state of its own, and which made it an even larger target for regional hostility. Furthermore, the reliance on American power to secure its interests reduced Israel’s own incentives to pursue a sustainable peace with its neighbors. As Mearsheimer and Walt write, “Israel’s dependence on American support has given it the confidence to pursue policies—including expanding settlements in the West Bank and using disproportionate force in Gaza—that have made a two-state solution virtually impossible.”

Whether cynical or genuinely believed, motivated by selfish ethno-religious interest or belief in “Judeo-Christian” American might, or some other third thing, the neoconservative foreign policy strategy to wed itself so completely to the perceived mutual interests of Israel and the United States has done either country, or the world at large, little good.

As Americans started to intuit these contradictions at the close of the Bush years, the neoconservative project, over-extended and having lost sight of the warnings leveled by both its realist detractors and its more sober adherents like Jeane Kirkpatrick, collapsed under the weight of its failures. As the Obama presidency began, the neoconservative establishment did not vanish exactly but instead went underground, subtly repositioning itself within the new political landscape.

Its major figures seemed to pay little professional cost for their role in the foreign policy disasters that occupied the center of U.S. politics at the time. Figures like Robert Kagan and Max Boot became regular contributors to major publications like The Washington Post and The New York Times, reframing their arguments to appeal to a liberal audience that was increasingly wary of the GOP’s post-Bush turn toward populism.

Meanwhile, the Obama presidency’s foreign policy, while ostensibly a rejection of Bush-era interventionism, provided a surprising avenue for neoconservative influence. The more full-throated hawkish rhetoric preferred by people like Krauthammer was slightly softened by Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, but shared all of the same belligerent moralism that had justified the neoconservative attempt to export liberal Democracy to the rest of the world a decade earlier…

The third wave of neoconservatism that emerged during the Obama years, and then really hit its stride during the Trump Era is going to require a Part III, I’m afraid. I was going to try to squeeze it all in here, but I am already nearly 5,000 words in, and the transition is a bit complicated to explain, and the Thanksgiving holiday, and so on... This should give you plenty to chew on until next time.

So please stay tuned. Like. Comment. Subscribe. Etc.

[Part 2 can be found here]

A few weeks ago on Twitter/X there was another semi-regular flare-up where people try to define what a neocon is. Shrugging your shoulders and declaring the term meaningless is perfectly reasonable, but it got me thinking that trying to earnestly answer the question and put the term in the context of the Trump Moment might be a worthwhile effort for my new Substack (which you should become a paid subscriber to immediately).

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Approaching the topic of neoconservatism with any degree of thoroughness requires a very long book. There have been books about the neocons, some of them pretty good, mostly about its rise to prominence during the Cold War and up through the end of their ascendancy during the Bush years, but the meaning and consequence of the neocons has been profoundly scrambled during the Trump Era and deserves an updated account.

I don’t have the time or inclination to write a book on the subject,1 and I’m well aware that anything I can fit in a single post will exclude important details, so yes, my apologies in advance for not mentioning “that other thing.” My ambitions for this post are fairly modest. Think of this as a Wikipedia-ish article but inclusive of the thornier details that Wikipedia can’t talk about. Who are these people? Where did they come from? What distinguishes them from other kinds of conservatives? How did they get so much power and influence? And how did they screw everything up so badly?

Everyone knows the neocons were (are) mostly Jewish and were (are) foreign policy hawks,2 but beyond that the term is indeed something of a floating signifier. Still, there is no other ideological movement of the last half-century that has taken up such a large share of the political imagination, for the left as a catch-all bogeyman to describe “far-right” excess (mistakenly, since the neocons are not really right wing at all), and for the right as the scapegoat for two decades of failed military adventurism (not so mistakenly). 

The left has a hard time understanding the internal nuances of the right and for them neoconservative can mean anything from “conservative I really don’t like,” to “those Jewish foreign policy obsessives you see on Fox News.” There is this idea that if you add the modifier “neo” to conservative it makes you sound like your opinion is especially well-informed. I had one experience where a liberal colleague accused Trump of being a neocon. By this he just meant, “Trump is extra bad.” There is a lot of confusion out there.

On the right, the meaning is more narrowly tailored but still with very loose boundaries. It generally refers to the collection of politicians and talking heads, including some Democrats, from Bill Kristol to Lindsey Graham to John Bolton to Victoria Nuland, who seem to always be agitating for war or regime change somewhere in the world. It can also mean “those Jewish foreign policy obsessives you see on MSNBC.” This is true, but also incomplete.

Neoconservatism has come in three waves: its origins in the 1960s through Reagan, its apex during the Bush years, and its realignment (or decline) in the Trump era.3 What it is now bears only a vague resemblance to what it began as, but its origins are nonetheless central to understanding its trajectory all the way to the present. I’ll spend this post talking about the first wave of neoconservatism. Part 2, which I’ll publish next week (hopefully), will cover the 90s to the present. Much of this history mirrors what is happening with our current political realignment in the death throes of the Great Awokening so pay close attention.

Part I. The 60s, Kristol and Podhoretz, “mugged by reality,” the Cold War, Reagan, and the Post-War Right

The turmoil of the late sixties and its leftist social projects rearranged the political map and gave rise to many strange bedfellows and Frankenstein ideologies to accommodate it. The combination of militant black radicalism, the subversion of gender and sexual norms, “countercultural” revolt in the arts and media, targeted political violence, plus the codification of these trends in the overreach of the civil rights regime produced a number of social pathologies liberal moderates began to quietly turn away from throughout the mid 70s. Crime spiked. Divorce rates spiked. Church attendance plummeted. Drug use spiked. Welfare dependencies spiked. Cities fell into disrepair. Education standards plummeted. Et cetera. Et cetera. It’s all the same stuff as now, but with a little more woo and a lot more blood.

These problems also produced a wave of defections from inside the left (also like now4), in particular a small group of Jewish academics and public intellectuals who had been “mugged by reality,” and could no longer countenance the revolutionary zeal of their co-ideologues. Leading the exodus was former anti-Stalin Trotskyist and member of the Fourth International, Irving Kristol, the so-called "godfather of neoconservatism.” Though he quickly abandoned Marxist orthodoxy, its economics specifically, the underlying Trotskyist impulse toward moral universalism and the need for a vanguard to initiate global ideological struggle stayed more or less intact. All one needs to do to square this circle is replace “one-world communism” with “one-world liberal democracy.”

But in reality Kristol was not really focused on fighting wars overseas or exporting liberal democracy to the rest of the world. Though support for Israel was a neoconservative obsession from the start, mostly framed around shared democratic values in opposition to Soviet influence in the middle-east, the singular emphasis on foreign policy would come later. During the first wave of neoconservatism both Kristol and his neoconservative co-founder, Norman Podhoretz, a liberal “Truman-Democrat” who ran neoconservatism’s most influential media organ, Commentary magazine, spilled most of their ink on the country’s domestic problems. 

You go back and read through this stuff (stop and check the footnote5), tweak a few details here and there, and you can easily imagine these articles running in Free Press or Quillette or wherever today’s “classical liberals” inveigh against Wokism. This is not meant to be a criticism. Inveighing against leftist excess is always admirable, especially when done as forcefully as the early neocons. It is only to say that for anyone who does not believe history is cyclical, an afternoon in the archives is all it takes to be disabused of the notion.

The neocons were remarkably effective as social commentators. Commentary and the Public Interest (Kristol’s magazine which was even more domestic policy oriented) had massive readership and recruited a wide swath of highly accomplished figures with major institutional backing into their orbit. Just as now, the right suffered from a certain amount of status-anxiety over their lack of mainstream credibility, which the erudite and highly-credentialed neocons helped alleviate. People like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James Q. Wilson, Nathan Glazer, Samuel Huntington, and a number of other Ivy League academics with backgrounds in economics and the social sciences––as well as the neocon founded high-brow arts and culture magazine New Criterion––inflected the right with a degree of sophistication and intellectual seriousness that among the people who covet the approval of the New York Times editorial board helped normalize conservative critiques against the left.

But this also created a rift within the right. The Old Right, more literary and philosophical by nature, raised on Edmund Burke and Chesterton rather than Marx and Freud, had significant ideological disagreements and––let’s call them––aesthetic differences with the neocons that made for an uneasy truce. The neocons’ emphasis on data, social science, and the various academic fashions of the day often put them at odds with the old right even when they were on the same side of any given issue. For example, over the question of some welfare program, a writer in Commentary would likely present an empirical argument using data to suggest the program didn’t work as intended, or the funds were being misspent, whereas the writer at National Review would be more likely to rely on first principles, arguing that expansive welfare programs violated the Constitution through federal overreach, or that welfare undermined traditional values like thrift and community charity.

Both arguments could simultaneously be true, and both might achieve the same policy goal in the short term, but there were limits to how far these two distinct analytical frameworks and approaches to government could be conjoined before coming into conflict. Importantly, for all of their biting rhetoric aimed at the era’s leftist derangements, the neocons were in the end just moderates, administrative pragmatists who rejected the “night watchman” model of government favored by the libertarian faction of the old right, and instead wanted to preserve a bureaucratically managed welfare state; they just wanted to do it better and more efficiently than their former allies on the left.

Exacerbating the rift were the obvious theological and cultural differences between the neocons and the rest of the right. The most salient fact about the neocons is that they were (are) Jewish (not all, but most of them), and what gave rise to their ideology––across every dimension, and undergirding whatever internal differences might have been layered over the top––was their fear of anti-semitism and by extension the question, “What is good for the Jews?”

Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming in their excellent book, The Conservative Movement, provide a quote from Alexander Bloom’s book about the early neocons, The Prodigal Sons, that is worth reproducing here in full:

“Although psychohistorical explanations have substantial, built-in limitations, it is apparent that the development of neoconservatism in the last twenty years has consisted of a reaction to one major trauma—the fear of anti-Semitism. Since, of course, not all Jewish intellectuals are neoconservatives nor are all neoconservatives Jewish, a conventional disclaimer of universality should and must be entered. Despite the caveats, however, there can be little doubt that the Holocaust constituted the seminal event not only for European Jewry but for many American Jews not far removed from their East European or German heritages.”

To this end the neocons perceived themselves as fighting a two front war. On the one hand, anti-semitism from the left came in the form of ethnic grievance politics in which Jewish interests were subservient to the interests of competing ethnic political blocs, blacks domestically (see Malcolm X, e.g.), and Arabs abroad (revolutionary Palestinian groups especially). 

On the other hand, the neocons could not bring themselves to fully embrace their newfound allies on the right either. They reserved a certain paranoia for a domestic right-wing uprising rooted in the still very much living memory of World War II. Gottfried and Fleming also point out via Isidore Silver that the neocons were hugely influenced by Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism and in particular her contention that anti-semitism’s most virulent strain is the one arising from populist, blood and soil sentiments. In the American context this meant the neocons felt they had as much to fear from an army of Roscoe Jethroes as one of Malcolm Xs. The neocons were wrong of course. Ironically, it was precisely the Roscoe Jethroes who would come to be the most ardent supporters of Israel, most eager to embrace neocons as political partners, and most readily enlist to serve the neocons’ foreign policy interests in subsequent decades, but a fog of suspicion nonetheless hung heavy over this new allegiance.67  

On the other hand, it’s worth noting that concerns over anti-Jewish sentiment were not entirely hallucinatory. Critiques of American Jewry, and skepticism over whether the neocons could ever have a home on the American right, were a non-insignificant feature of conservative discourse. Questions over the degree to which ethno-religious differences could be tolerated, in turn led to questions over the degree to which those questions could be tolerated, which in turn led to more questions over the degree to which ethno-religious differences could be tolerated, and so on and so forth. Everything old is new again.

This never got fully worked out since whatever the differences between neocons and the old right (and for that matter the new right, a coalition of conservative forces that would be largely defined as the evangelical right in the coming decades), were papered over by Ronald Reagan and the more urgent matter of the Cold War and defeating Communism once and for all. On that issue, the entirety of the right was aligned. Ronald Reagan, with his well earned reputation for coalition building, successfully united these diverse forces by leveraging widespread animosity toward leftist excess—which attracted many working-class voters to the Republican Party—and embracing a hyper-aggressive foreign policy exemplified by neocons like Jeanne Kirkpatrick, his leading foreign policy advisor, whose belligerence toward America’s perceived enemies would shape U.S. military strategy all the way up through the Global War on Terror.

For the time being, the coalition appeared rather strong. Credit where it’s due, the Reaganites won the Cold War and the era of leftist excess in culture and politics was (at least temporarily) put to bed. The neocons played a major role in these successes and their efforts were duly rewarded with increasingly prominent positions in the GOP power centers, in think tanks, in op-ed pages, and at the White House and the Pentagon in particular. The neocons had made good on their promise to fight the commies at home and fight the commies overseas and the vast majority of Republican voters were more than happy to count them as their own.

But the ideological tensions between the neocons and their coalition partners were never entirely resolved, even under Reagan. Neoconservatism, for all its intellectual rigor and policy sophistication, remained a fundamentally alien presence within the conservative movement, tethered to its ethno-religious origins and latent Trotskyism more-so than any ideological tentpole it shared with the rest of the right (especially in the absence of the the communist threat).

The neocons would have to answer whether they believed the United States should be viewed as a distinct nation composed of a distinct people with distinct interests, or as an ideological vanguard in a permanent global struggle for liberal democracy. Moreover, could the neocons coexist within an intellectual milieu where critiques of Jewish-centered politics could be fairly leveled, or would there be a prohibition on such topics, leading to stale thinking, dogmatism, and ultimately bad decision making, as is the case for any topic on which people cannot speak freely? Would the paradox between the treatment of democracy as a near religious precept on the one hand, and the elitist, anti-populist tendencies on the other, ever come to a head? Would their posture of moderate pragmatism at home ever come into conflict with their revolutionary moralism abroad? Would their commitment to political centrism eventually lead them to isolation and eventual obsolescence?

(You see where this is going…)

As I mentioned at the outset, and it bears repeating here, this essay only scratches the surface. The history of neoconservatism is dense, its influence sprawling, and its contradictions worthy of a more detailed examination. In Part 2, I’ll try to do some of that, going beyond the honeymoon period of the Cold War consensus and into the period where the neocons truly came to define themselves as the architects of an interventionist foreign policy that would squander all of their good will in the aftermath of 9/11.

I’ll also try to explain how this failure eventually devolved into the tragi-comic spectacle of the Global American Empire and its misguided and often bizarre obsession with “Human Rights.”

Subscribe and stay tuned.

…I stood in the rain, far from home at nightfall
By the Potomac, the great Dome lit the water,
The city my blood had built I knew no more
While the screech-owl whistled his new delight
Consecutively dark.

Stuck in the wet mire
Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city
I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.

-Allen Tate, Aeneas at Washington

I. The Age of Anti-Heroes

When I tell people that I love Donald Trump, they think I am joking or at least exaggerating. When I say this to liberal friends and family they think it is a put-on, a kind of elaborate troll to make them uncomfortable. “You couldn’t possibly love him,” they say. They draw the word “love” out when they repeat it back to me and usually laugh in the condescending, self-satisfied way liberals treat all kinds of right wing opinions. Even right wing friends, some of them anyway, those who stake their reputation on being “reasonable,” think I am egging them on.

“No. I actually love him,” I insist.

The conversation usually stops there. How or why anyone would love Donald Trump is too impenetrable a mystery to inquire about any further. 

Granted, this is an odd thing to say, let alone earnestly feel. Americans are not meant to love their politicians. Secular liberal democracies stand in opposition to these kinds of sentiments. To love a man like Trump is to fall victim to a “cult of personality.” Devotion, loyalty, deference to a man––a mere man––is considered pathological. Something to be mocked, for the chuds. Instead, we are supposed to regard our politicians with suspicion, even contempt. And it’s true that politicians are, for the most part, uninspiring people. That has always been my impression of them. I cannot think of a single politician in my lifetime, other than Trump, that I have felt any positive emotion toward at all. At best, like a good referee, I don’t notice them at all.

Historical figures are another matter––or used to be. We were once allowed a certain reverence for the founders: Jefferson’s fierce independence, Washington’s selflessness, Franklin’s eccentric genius. These men were as near to demi-gods as a Christian nation will allow. I was in awe at Remini’s Jackson when I encountered the abridged biography in high school. Here was a true man of history. I had similar feelings about Teddy Roosevelt. Lincoln, too, though I have revised my view of him in recent years, is a man who nonetheless stood above his time and circumstances.

But would any of us say this about their modern counterparts? About either of the Clintons? The Bushes? Romney? McCain? Kerry? It’s laughable. Not too long ago, some liberals may have believed Obama would go down as a historically significant figure, but that star appears to be fading. He will be remembered as the first black president, sure, but his accomplishments are unimpressive, his legacy entirely overshadowed––and largely undone––by his successor, and as this last election demonstrated his cultural influence is minimal. More importantly, does anyone love him? Does he stand above the mundane cultural circumstances of his time in office? Could he fill Madison Square Garden to capacity with adoring fans, and with tens of thousands more waiting outside?

Even Obama’s most ardent supporters know the answer is no.

One might conclude, simply, that the Age of Heroes is over. We have become too disenchanted and too cynical to accommodate them. Public life is much too transparent for one thing. The problem with high definition TVs is that they reveal every flaw and blemish of the actors on the screen. Even the most beautiful woman, the most angelic face, at a sufficient level of clarity shows the wear and tear of age. I mean this literally, but it also applies to the microscopic scrutiny to which all public figures are subjected. Every indiscretion, every pronouncement, every faux pas, every cringe and regrettable thing anyone has ever said or done is recorded and remembered, made permanent and instantly retrievable by the perfect memory of the machines. We become our imperfections.

Likewise, the great heroes of the past are dug up and their corpses re-examined in the harsh light of modern political sensibilities. Are we allowed to hold the same reverence for the founders that I was taught in school? They were all racists and misogynists, after all. Anti-semites. Chauvinists. Benighted science-deniers. Do you know Lincoln wanted the freed slaves deported back to Africa? Look this up for yourself. FDR, the giant of modern progressivism, referred to blacks as “semi-beasts,” said Asians were biologically unassimilable, and remarked that the Germans’ complaints about Jews were “understandable.”

Conservatives and “classical” liberals find themselves caught in an impossible bind when confronted with the revisionist histories of the left. The 1619 Project was wrong about a lot of things, but it’s dead right that the men we elevate to the pantheon of history were, ultimately, just men—with beliefs that would make them pariahs in modern America. As my friend Covfefe Anon puts it, “Woke more correct.”

The problem is much deeper than this of course. The problem is not just one of technology or the chattering class’s petty moralism, but a spiritual emptiness that has hollowed modern life to its core. The world has been flattened. It has become measured, quantified, cataloged and made to be managed. A world that gets mapped according to the spreadsheets does not lend itself to the sublime. The global village, its hot-pot of undifferentiated slop, offers only mere life, sustenance for its own sake. Great men, and the veneration they inspire, have no place here.

Put simply, our civil religion is dead and so are its gods. If it is true what John F. Kennedy said that “a nation reveals itself by the men it honors, the men it remembers,” or Carlyle’s version that a nation’s heroes tells us what that nation “longs inexpressibly to be,” then what does it say about us if we no longer have the capacity to honor anyone? 

Erik Erikson, the mid-century psychologist, came up with the concept of “charisma hunger” to describe what happens in a society that has given up on religion, civil or otherwise, and given up on the notion of national heroes. We become like oprhaned children, wayward and terrified, clamoring for guidance and protection from parental figures that are nowhere to be found. We become deranged and frenzied in their absence, unmoored from meaning and incapable of true self-understanding. Who are we exactly? Where did we come from? What do we aspire to become?

This feeling of loss is not new and resonates in every corner of the culture: 

“Where is my John Wayne?
Where is my prairie song?
Where is my happy ending?
Where have all the cowboys gone?”

This is the charisma hunger talking. The archetypes handed down by the Greeks––the embodiments of Aristotelian poetics like Achilles and Odysseus––or their later iterations in Shakespeare, in Tennyson, in Racine and countless others (I’ll spare you the complete lineage), they have long since passed. 

It is no coincidence that just as Nietzsche declared the death of God, the classic hero vanished with Him. The two are not the same but run along parallel tracks and describe a similar terrain. In the 19th century, a new archetype emerges as the dominant character of our narrative imagination: the so-called anti-hero. This figure appears in many forms. Most of us picture him as gruff, troubled, rudderless, casting about in a darkened, chaotic world. He is misunderstood, a victim of circumstance, but is offered redemption, if he gets the “good ending,” in the opportunity to demonstrate his courage (however reluctantly) and improve our fallen world by just a little bit. In the “bad ending” he is resigned to further alienation, his efforts a meaningless whimper amidst the great sucking sound of cosmic indifference.

Musil called him the “man without qualities.” That’s partly right. He is defined by an absence, but not so much of “qualities” as the absence of a divinity to guide him. The anti-hero, unlike his Greek predecessors, is hemmed-in by the world as it appears to us. There is nothing outside. There is no heavenly realm to appeal to. Whereas the hero is an instrument of the gods, subject to their explicit commands, the anti-hero is profoundly alone. There is no intervention from above or beyond. There is no conference with the angels. There is no descent into the underworld to retrieve wisdom and bring it back to the world, or perhaps (an even more grim possibility), there is only the underworld, hell-baked through and through. 

“What does any of this have to do with Donald Trump?”

If you asked me a year ago, I would have probably said something like this: Trump is the anti-hero of our age. It’s an argument that practically makes itself. Trump stands-in as the ultimate expression of society’s decadence even as he postures against it. I mean “ultimate” here in both senses, the fullest embodiment of our cultural decline, but also its final chapter. Trump is the final boss of the boomers, representing the triumph of 20th century Pax Americana and also the opportunities it squandered. He is not Washington. He is not Caesar. He lacks their disciplined gravitas. He is a showman and a real estate mogul. He is a celebrity, as a vocation. More parvenu than aristocrat. Mostly he is a fuck you to the self-serious scolds and mediocrities who presume to rule us. He is crass and undignified and exactly what we deserve. He is earthly and low, so far from god and the numinous the notion is a joke.

I have always liked Trump. I have always supported Trump. I have always thought Trump was a very good politician, a much better president than he gets credit for, and also a much better person, a much better character than his public image suggests, but he is an anti-hero if he is anything at all. That’s what I might have said a year ago.

II. Peripeteia

This all changes at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on the evening of July 13, 2024 at approximately 6:15 p.m. when eight shots are fired in the direction of Donald Trump, grazing his right ear and fatally wounding Corey Comperatore. Trump falls to the ground. He is swarmed by his secret service detail. The crowd is oddly subdued. Everyone seems to be waiting for something to happen, for history to make a choice…

This is the image that sticks with me more than any other. The more famous one, the image of him standing defiantly with his fist in the air, as well as all that has come after (and all that came before), is a consequence of whatever was happening down there. You can tell by the blood streaks on his face that he had yet to wipe any of it away. His hands are in penitent repose, palms slightly up. Out of context he appears to be in genuflection. It is at this moment, in all likelihood, that he first tasted the blood, first realized he’d been shot, first became aware that his life had been spared.

It’s almost a minute before he stands up again. There is a decision to make. The secret service are almost certainly telling him to stay low and crawl off the stage to safety. By now the shooter is dead but who knows who else might be out there. We know from the audio that Trump has lost his shoes. The secret service is telling him that he needs to get to the car.

“Wait,” Trump commands them.

He pushes himself out from the scrum of agents and raises his fist to the stunned audience. This is where he yells fight. What compels him to do this? This is a Trump we have never seen before. There is anger in his eyes. There is rage. We have seen Trump speak sternly, speak with hostility, but never like this. At this moment he is no longer Trump the showman, Trump the comedian, or even Trump the president. He is something else, something unexpected, an older and more elemental type. History indeed makes a choice, and in sparing him, confers upon him a new role, one of strange consequence that is not so easily explained, but rather felt.

We would come to find out that the bullet that grazed Trump’s ear should have, in all but one chance out of a million, split his skull open and ended his life, his candidacy, and the MAGA movement forever. But for a random turn of the head at just the split second the trigger was pulled, it all would’ve been over, everything changed. 

Some have suggested that Trump’s assassination might’ve sparked a civil war. I highly doubt it. Most likely, we would’ve entered into a period of uneventful malaise. There would have been a few somber retrospectives on Fox and maybe CNN, Joe Biden shuffling to the Rose Garden podium to slur through five minutes of an unintelligible eulogy, bi-partisan pleas to “tone down the rhetoric.” This brief stage of national mourning, mostly insincere, would be followed by admonishments to begin our “national healing.” The Republican Convention would have been a bizarre exhibition of grief-stricken loyalists juxtaposed with manic and impotent appeals for optimism. There would be no agreement on a successor. J.D. Vance had not yet been chosen as the V.P. and would have been wise to bow out of contention. Trump’s Silicon Valley donors would have quietly stepped away from the wreckage. The MAGA base would have retreated back to their natural home of political apathy. Mourning would have given way to despair. Then resignation. The conservative media, with some muted relief, would have comfortably slipped back into their doom loop. Biden in absentia would have cruised to reelection, virtually unopposed, and we would have sunken deeper, perhaps permanently, into cultural and political decay…

III. Retrocausality, Virgil the prophet, Rome again…

The miracle of July 13th, and it was a miracle, is the most significant political event since 9/11. Like 9/11 it initiated a kind of radical break from the course of events that preceded it and will affect all others that come after. I do not think it will resonate in quite the same way as 9/11. I do not think the date of July 13th will hold much significance in the collective consciousness even a year from now. It will be largely hidden away from view. There will not be any memorials, holidays, or anything like that. July 13th will recede into the background. Future generations may not think of it at all, except the famous photo which will likely grace high school textbooks, a minor curiosity––among many––of what will almost certainly be called the Trump Era. 

One runs the risk of over-indexing an event like this. Recency-bias is another way to describe this trap. I am aware of the problem. But my theory of why the assassination attempt creates an inflection point in history is not so much what it means for the future, or even right now, but what it means for the past.

What we have experienced is a rare instance of retrocausality. We think of the arrow of history only running forward. We can never be unburdened by what has been (this was always a strange and nonsensical rhetorical indulgence), but surely what has been will always remain unburdened by what will be. Events of the past must remain unaffected by whatever comes after them. This is basic stuff. Except, well… one starts to wonder.

I have been rethinking the meaning of Trump over the last four months––his pre-political life, his unlikely candidacy, his even more unlikely presidency, his persecution while in office, his loss, his exile, his resurgence, his further persecution, his near death, his return, his victory, and now, it appears, his quest for vengeance. The narrative arc looks very different now than it did before July 13th. It is like an optical illusion where a change in perspective reveals that an array of disjointed dots is actually a dynamic scene of figures and forms that were always there.

The future does not merely follow the past, but instead influences the past in ways that revise its meaning and its purpose. In the case of Trump, the near-death experience acts as a hinge on which the entire structure of his legacy turns, shifting him from a symbol of our period’s decadence and tragi-comic death-march, to a potential, even inevitable catalyst for its rebirth.

What I am groping at is the realization that Trump is not, and never was, an anti-hero. Or he is both that and something more than that. The assassination attempt has reached back in time and revealed––actually reconfigured––a very different story to tell about his life and about the time we are living in. It has remade history.

Again, some prudence is in order. Trump is just a man. And it is Trump the man on which most analysis of his presidency and historical significance ought to be framed. It is Trump the man making policy and personnel decisions. It is Trump the man who diagnosed the American situation and through some combination of once-in-a-generation political instinct, guile, and showmanship defeated both the Clinton and Obama factions of the Democratic party, defeated the Bush, neocon, and Koch factions of the GOP, and out flanked the media on every important question of public sentiment from the time he came down the escalator to announce his candidacy in 2015.

But there is another dimension, one that Henry Kissinger anticipated in his reflections on Trump as a “phenomenon” rather than simply an individual man. What Kissinger sensed is that Trump has come to subsume and symbolize a moment in history—a confluence of forces that transcends any single person’s talents or intentions.

I will leave it to the wonderful writer, Librarian of Caelano, to describe the critical turning point:

By pure coincidence, shortly after it became manifestly clear that Joe Biden was unconcealably senile and would obviously lose the general election, a young man with no criminal background, whom despite studying computer science had no social media presence whatsoever, decided for reasons about which law enforcement remains solidly uncurious to assassinate Trump at a rally. His bullet missed by centimeters, leaving one man dead and Trump with a bleeding head wound. Before the whole world he stood and shook his fist at death. He told his supporters to fight.

Everything changed at that moment. I knew then that whatever else happened Trump would win the election. I felt the difference. Rising from what had been certain death and continuing was a demonstration of his total commitment to hazard his life for his people. Trump was no longer running for president. Trump had become a king.

I don’t mean that in the literal sense that he made some claim to monarchy. I mean that in that moment he transcended politics to become a figure beyond party or cause. The Emperor of Austria once told Theodore Roosevelt that his job was to protect his people from their politicians. It was to this ideal, this archetype that Trump ascended. If it can be said of a man in his seventies, he matured, but went far beyond that in becoming a kind of patriarch, possessed of more charisma, gravitas, and personal authority. The Mandate of Heaven settled upon him.

In other words, Trump became a hero in the classical sense. He became, though unbeknownst to us had always been so, an instrument of fate. That’s what I mean by retrocausality. Fate is not forward facing. It is not oriented in one direction or the other. It is fixed in place and outside of time.

The Homeric heroes like Achilles and Odysseus are more complex, more agentic, and better epitomize universal poetic virtues. Rather Trump, like Virgil’s Aeneas, is more purely the expression of manifest destiny. To the question of Roman v. Greek, Trump is clearly the Roman type. Trump, like Aeneas, does not profess to understand nor even desire his fate. No one would confuse Mar-a-Lago for Carthage, or a retirement of golf and filet-o-fish for Dido, but Trump was plenty comfortable in Florida and after his initial attempts to refound Rome were rebuffed, he could have and probably wanted to stay put.

In 2020, Trump had been challenged and defeated. He had made a good run at it but his enemies in D.C., the “occupational class” to whom he was meant to be a direct rebuke, won out in the end. His loss in the reelection campaign, amidst the almost supernatural fact of a global pandemic and however suspicious the circumstances, should have been the end of it. In all meaningful respects he was removed from public life, facing bankruptcy, and counted few remaining allies. Had they left him alone, he may have never returned to the campaign trail, but the zealous lawfare against him gave him no choice. It was win or go to jail. It was as if his enemies, however unwittingly, had intervened on his behalf. Much like for Aeneas, who finds himself shipwrecked by Juno’s storms, it was only through the malign influence of his antagonists that the necessary path to his return was set in motion.

Aeneas does not found Rome without first failing. His hardships become prerequisites for his eventual triumph. Trump’s success now––the electoral sweep of the swing states, the popular vote, control of both houses, and the taste for revenge that animates him and his newfound allies, the titans of Silicon Valley who would have otherwise remained sidelined––does not happen had Trump and Pence and his former team of bellwether hangers-on somehow prevailed and limped through another four years of lawfare and administrative obstruction. In that version, Trump, for all his merits, is still just another president, his legacy marred by scandal and legal trouble, and mostly thwarted in his administrative agenda. The swamp obtains.

But that’s not the version we got. That’s not the version fate had in store for us. The world that Yeats describes of his Seanchan, which conditions the destiny of ordinary men, is transcended by Trump the phenomenon. A superior and higher authority pulls him forward and out from modern life’s rigid and pedestrian constraints. It pulls him back into a past of grander heroes. Into the mythic. I don’t know how else to describe it.

IV. “Love. It’s about Love.”

I can feel myself reaching for a feeling that cannot be fully articulated. Perhaps not by me, or not quite yet. For one thing, the story is not over. Much of it is untold, and just as July 13th had the effect of reconstituting the past, so too might future events reconstitute what I am describing about Trump. I am as charisma hungry as the next man and it is possible I have imagined an oasis where there is only more sand.

The story of Aeneas, as the embodiment and symbol of Rome, rests on the credo, vincit amor patriae. “The love of my fatherland prevails.” 

For both Trump the man, and Trump the phenomenon, this is equally apt. If there is anything I can say with certainty about Trump it is that he loves America and the American people. It is his primary quality, and is as authentic and apparent as anything about him.

A friend wrote to me shortly after Trump’s acceptance speech:

My main observation watching the speech was his complete emotional control. It seemed that he knew it would happen. There was no sense of relief or emotional release. It was as though this was his destiny and he had fully expected and been prepared for it.

He continued on:

I have a level of respect and love for Trump that is pretty primal. My feelings for him are as close as I can imagine to the reverence one might have felt for Caesar or a long serving monarch. I can imagine the country accepting him as a “Great Father.”

As another friend put it, “Trump is the living Constitution.”

Time will tell. It is not ours to judge. Whether Trump ushers in a reawakening of our civil religion and the proper conditions to accommodate a hero, a man of destiny, a man who stands above his circumstances, and comes to initiate and symbolize whatever God has in store for our nation as it stumbles out of its End of History hangover, I cannot say. The signs are there, the story is pre-formed. I am certainly optimistic. I have never felt even close to this level of positive potential for America in my adult life. It has been a long time coming and I can see clearly out to a very bright future, one literally among the stars. American dynamism has been tamped down for decades by bureaucratic dead weight and the spiritual lethargy of the longhouse. The doorway out is now opened, and we need only to walk through it. The Good Timeline is right in front of us.

And even still, if it is only a mirage, if it is only Trump the man we are graced with, the ultimate anti-hero, I will love him no less. At least he made us laugh.