The Social World

Author: Ben Domenech

  • The National Football League goes international

    On a beautifully gray Madrid afternoon, a group of prominent executives and representatives of America’s most popular sports league gathered to discuss how to divide up the world. There were repeated references to shared values, community engagement, cultural appreciation and “cross-border connection through competition.” The many well-dressed attendees nodded along, doubtlessly hearing each of these totemic invocations for what they really mean – money, in unimaginable sums, and the National Football League’s bold plan to take over the planet.

    This season the NFL has played seven international games. Madrid, São Paulo, Dublin and Berlin each hosted one fixture. London got three. In the coming year, the league will expand even more, with games in South America and a first-time trip to Australia. The ultimate vision is to export the shield, with each team playing at least one international game a season. This would equate to a level of growth once thought absurd by analysts who saw pro football as an exclusively North American phenomenon and dismissed forays overseas as the stuff of preseason exhibition. The leader of today’s league wants to prove them wrong.

    This ambitious project is the dream of the NFL’s divisive and powerful commissioner: Roger Goodell, the 66-year-old quarter-zip aficionado, who started off as an intern at the league’s New York headquarters in 1982 and never looked back. Goodell’s role in America is to be hated. Alone among the league’s executives, he is recognized and routinely booed by fans whose gripes are manifold. After Goodell passed down a heavy penalty for the New England Patriots’ Deflategate scandal, die-hard fan Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports flooded the opening night game with towels and T-shirts emblazoned with a caricature of Goodell bearing a bright red clown nose. But Goodell still got the pleasure of watching Kansas City win.

    In Madrid, Goodell is ubiquitous at the league’s events, but you can tell the crowds here are more unfamiliar with his reputation. As he rounded the field at the massive and impressive Bernabéu Stadium, home to Real Madrid, the boos from the crowd were smattering and outnumbered by respectable applause. He is a stern corporate face on a mission. A vast American flag is spread across the field, followed by a bellowing rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” It is a brazen demonstration of soft power. We will come into your city and in the space of a week take over everything, everywhere. You won’t just like it. You will beg for its return.

    There’s no mystery why. For Madrid businesses, the NFL is great news. City officials estimated that a single game brought roughly $200 million to the local economy, doubling expectations, with hotels at 90 percent capacity and restaurants crammed. The league picks its international travel teams carefully, and here they were wise enough to deem the Miami Dolphins the host team; the Dolphins have a large number of Spanish-speaking fans with connections to the old world. They took to the city naturally, with a massive fan experience at the Plaza de España, three giant inflatable dolphins, fan events at restaurants and bars and Instagram-friendly tours.

    Less impressive was the presence of the Washington Commanders, albeit another capital city with plenty of direct flights to Madrid. Still, they traveled – the game’s total attendance topped 78,000, though some fans seemed rather unclear as to whether to expect paella or tacos on arrival to Madrid. But they were the exceptions.

    There is still skepticism about Goodell’s ambitious global undertaking in some corners of the league and sports media. For American audiences, football is the unchallenged king. Every streaming service wants the league, and most have gotten a piece of it. In a typical year, the NFL accounts for 97 of the top 100 broadcasts (the only exceptions being election night, the Oscars and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade – which is itself a pre-game show for more NFL).

    The commissioner’s recent floating of an international edition of the Super Bowl was roundly condemned by fans and commentators who want to see the championship exclusively hosted in the United States. But the backlash to the headlines ignored the context of Goodell’s remark: he was teasing the possibility of an international franchise – or perhaps more than one.

    The feasibility of such expansion has practical limits. Franchises have already had to navigate the logistics of short weeks and juggling player injuries with flights across the Atlantic – some West Coast teams such as the Los Angeles Rams have come up with novel solutions such as staying on Eastern time to avoid jet lag. But the real solution could come from technology.

    According to the Wall Street Journal, NFL executives traveled this year to witness a test flight in the California desert presenting the XB-1 –  “the first civilian jet to break the sound barrier since the Concorde.” Boom Technology chief executive Blake Scholl says the new plane would cut travel time to Europe in half, enabling not just team travel but perhaps a whole new NFL division overseas. Some league insiders believe the expansion plan can realistically be achieved within the next decade. “It’s inevitable,” Scholl told the Journal. “The only reason they aren’t already is the speed of travel.”

    For Goodell and the massively wealthy corporate groups he represents, the sound barrier is no barrier at all to what is, for them, an expression of global manifest destiny. And as the cultural footprint of the US has declined, with Hollywood putting out fewer and fewer hits that resonate globally every year, it stands to reason something must replace it. The owners, streamers, advertising partners and a network of billion-dollar brands see it purely as a question of money, of expanding beyond the already saturated and financially tapped-out market of the American audience.

    For Goodell, who as a college kid wrote a letter to every franchise to get the NFL internship that then became the first line of his résumé, the aim seems to be something greater. He wants to be the commissioner who conquered the world.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Is MAGA cracking up?

    Is MAGA cracking up?

    In the year since his triumphant reelection, Donald Trump has racked up an enormous list of accomplishments, both foreign and domestic. His sweeping, “move fast and break things” approach to governance has generated a form of accepted normalcy which his first administration never experienced.

    His White House staff and cabinet, once full of leaks and disloyalty, has turned out to be incredibly faithful. On the international scene, he has credibly been suggested as deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. And at home, according to polling averages from RealClearPolitics, Trump is more popular at this point in his second term than either George W. Bush or Barack Obama was.

    Yet within the movement that made all this possible, it seems everyone is at each other’s throats. The long knives are out for people not on the left, but inside the big tent that Trump built. It’s not just a hierarchical fight between social and fiscal conservatives, insiders vs outsiders. It’s MAHA moms and tech giants; tariff lovers and haters; the Wall Street Journal vs the Heritage Foundation; Candace Owens vs Turning Point USA; Megyn Kelly vs based icon Sydney Sweeney; comic Dave Smith vs the Babylon Bee; Ben Shapiro vs Tucker Carlson; and Tucker vs, well, pretty much everyone on Fox News and most people who aren’t. It’s the most vicious, catty, well-coiffed and fully botoxed melee since Anchorman, and no one knows where Marjorie Taylor Greene found that hand grenade.

    The question on the mind of every Republican in Washington: are we witnessing the great MAGA crack-up? And the answer is: almost certainly yes.

    The insiders always knew it was too good to last. Trump’s remarkable political skill is in identifying the one issue that cuts across natural partisan tendencies to create a coalition that seemed incompatible. He won over the broad ethnic working-class coalition that supported him in 2024. He also scooped up the votes of those who wanted crackdowns on crime and those who want nonviolent offenders freed, of drug legalizers and vaccine skeptics, pro-natalists and crypto bros, supply siders and trade hawks, pastors and porn stars.

    “Trump is so unique of a political figure, when he’s focused on governing, it’s actually time that daddy is spending away from the kids,” says one longtime GOP insider. “He brings back gifts whenever he comes back from one of his trips, but while he’s away at work or just not paying attention to us, we scrap like cats and dogs and start every day with bruises on our shins.”

    The fights often take place on X – the site where everything is happening, which for many on the right these days seems to make everything about Israel, all the time. Ongoing squabbles can become so internecine as to be more difficult to follow than the plots of prestige TV shows. The strife is often colored by personal relationships: former employees feuding with past bosses or personnel fights with gripes held over from the first Trump term, or the different responses to January 6. This stretches all the way up to the President himself, who refused to endorse his former critic, Virginia Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, in the state’s recent gubernatorial race. It might not have made a difference, given her double-digit failure at the polls. But it was still a reminder that old wounds linger.

    On the surface, the MAGA cohort should be enormously pleased with how things are going, even despite the Democratic success in the off-year elections. Yet rumbling underneath, multiple asymmetric fights are being waged, all of which can be viewed through the lens of who is up or down in controlling and directing the next generation of MAGA. Typically, conflicts of this nature are based on which ideological faction supports whom as the next presidential candidate. But in the case of the current fracas, such lines are often unclear. With even Marco Rubio reportedly acknowledging that J.D. Vance is the frontrunner for the 2028 Republican nomination, there isn’t really a competing candidate coalescing support for an uphill run… yet.

    The Heritage Foundation’s struggles in this moment are a microcosm of the crackup’s tangled motivations. The story goes like this: in the aftermath of the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in September, a violent moment that both unified and depressed the coalition of the right, various figures began to position themselves to inherit all – or a portion – of Kirk’s role as the titular leader of the younger MAGA base.

    It quickly became clear that this was about more than just reaching right-leaning college students and that it actually reflected competing visions about both Kirk’s and Turning Point’s attitudes toward Israel and anti-Semitism. Fights and arguments conducted via text messages and DMs spilled out into the open, with some conspiratorially minded figures claiming (without any evidence) that Kirk was actually assassinated over his shifting views on the subject. No personality exploited this moment more than Carlson, whose appearance as a speaker at Kirk’s memorial event included him comparing the young activist’s murder to the death of Jesus Christ. He invited the audience to “picture the scene in a lamp-lit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus,” painting the hummus-eaters as the ones who engineered the crucifixion. As he typically does, Carlson pretended the suggestion of anything untoward about his anecdote was ridiculous. But afterwards he brought a longtime Kirk antagonist, the aggressively misogynist and racist troll Nick Fuentes, onto his show for what essentially amounted to a softball promotional interview.

    The interview broke something open. Conservatives already uncomfortable with Carlson’s pro-Russia and Qatar-spinning tendencies turned on him. This turned explosive when the leadership of Heritage, the central think tank for American conservatism and the creator of the Project 2025 agenda that has guided much of Trump’s second term, decided to weigh in on Carlson’s side. Heritage president Kevin Roberts released a video defending the broadcaster, claiming that “we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda,” and that “conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.” He denounced Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition” and suggested that criticism of the Fuentes interview amounted to an attempt at cancellation.

    The statement prompted widespread condemnation. Texas Senator Ted Cruz denounced it, conservative publications and op-ed pages decried it, long-tenured scholars resigned from the think tank, Heritage’s dedicated committee to tackle anti-Semitism considered assigning staffers to observe Shabbat. Ultimately, Roberts’s chief of staff took the fall and left his post. Roberts himself was compelled to hold a lengthy apology session. In the face of calls for his resignation, he held on to his position with the mantra: “I made the mess; let me clean it up.”

    At that session, a young female staffer provided a view of why that “mess” happened in the first place, standing up to say: “I condemn Nick Fuentes’s hateful rhetoric. That being said, I would like to point out that some of the most vocal people against Tucker Carlson have been calling him an anti-Semite since he started to hold more anti-interventionalist views. A handful of young colleagues and I had no issue with the points you made in the original video… Gen Z has an increasingly unfavorable view of Israel – and it’s not because millions of Americans are anti-Semitic. It’s because we are Catholic and Orthodox and believe that Christian Zionism is a modern heresy… as a young person, many of us are generally tired of foreign entanglements, while our problems in this country worsen.”

    While the old guard GOP might like it to be otherwise, the young staffer speaks for a growing number of solid MAGA voters who have become frustrated with the state of things. In a cycle when Democrats are embracing a political message emphasizing “affordability” and Trump seems to be spending outsized time on legacy-building projects instead of addressing the problems of inflation and growth, even some of his most loyal supporters are beginning to sound like critics. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Representative who became the first Republican to call Israel’s actions in Gaza “genocide,” has become the recipient of a dramatic degree of strange new respect from everyone from Wolf Blitzer to Bill Maher to the harridans of The View. Her message is essentially that America’s leaders are spending too much time looking at other people’s problems and need to get back to focusing on their own. The critique is clearly aimed at Trump and those around him: the Donald’s focus has been decidedly more international in recent months.

    It’s hard not to see this as sour grapes from supporters who expected a different Trump 2.0 than they are getting. As author James Kirchick summarized in the Washington Post: “Though Trump campaigned as an isolationist, he has certainly not governed as one. He has recently pulled a U-turn on Ukraine, imposing fresh sanctions on Moscow and calling off a proposed summit with Putin in Budapest. Trump is also ramping up action against Venezuela, citing dubious legal pretext to launch airstrikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and amassing military assets off the country’s coast for a possible attack on the mainland. And with Operation Midnight Hammer, he joined the Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear program. Even in symbolic ways, like changing the Defense Department’s name to the War Department, Trump has taken American foreign policy in a more interventionist, even bellicose direction.”

    When Trump was making the decision to attack Iran in the summer and Carlson intoned, publicly, that such a strike would be likely to spark World War Three, the President responded by noting that he alone decides what “America First” means. The central question for the MAGA coalition is now who, once Trump is no longer behind the Resolute Desk, gets to decide what America First means?

    For Vance, the man who seems likeliest to inherit that role, there seems to be recognition that things aren’t headed in the right direction. “We need to focus on the home front,” the Vice-President tweeted in response to the electoral drubbing the Republican party received earlier this month. “The infighting is stupid. I care about my fellow citizens – particularly young Americans – being able to afford a decent life, I care about immigration and our sovereignty and I care about establishing peace overseas so our resources can be focused at home. If you care about those things too, let’s work together.”

    Whether Vance can hold things together through this moment of crack-up could determine whether this coalition, forged originally by Trump’s political ingenuity and force of will, can endure beyond the man himself.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • Why Thomas Sowell still matters

    Why Thomas Sowell still matters

    New York socialist Zohran Mamdani is hailed as the social media sensation of American politics. He knows how to talk directly to young people, we’re told. Yet an account called “Thomas Sowell Quotes” has almost twice as many followers on X as Mamdani.

    Sowell turned 95 this year. He is an unlikely influencer and yet hour-long interviews with him, published by Stanford’s Hoover Institution, have been watched millions of times. In his most popular video, Sowell argues for personal responsibility over dependence on the state and is meticulous in his use of empirical evidence. Black men who read newspapers and own library cards have had the same income as their white counterparts since 1969. Married black couples have the same poverty rate as white couples and have done for decades. And then comes the understated, Sowellian kicker. “Apparently lifestyle choices have consequences.”

    This is Sowell at his intellectual finest, cutting through stupidity and receiving wisdom with precision. There are those, he argues, who have an unconstrained view of politics, in which elites can create a perfect world. Then there are realists like him, who accept that humans have flawed natures and that much about our lives is unknowable.

    Those utopians are not just misguided but dangerous, harming the very people they hope to help. What follows from this relentless logic leads Sowell and his followers toward a kind of libertarian conservatism. We’re told that MAGA has killed the old Republican mantra of small government and free markets. And yet Sowell is more popular than ever.

    I joined a recent celebration of his life at the Hoover Institution, watching as prominent conservatives and libertarians met to talk about his ideas and influence. There was a surprising amount of emotion as people discussed a man who has remained intensely private even in his role as a “public” intellectual. Sowell appeared in a brief video message from his office.

    Those who know of Sowell know the official story. He was born in 1930 in the Jim Crow South and was raised in a house without electricity or running water. He was orphaned as a child, sent to live in racially segregated Harlem with his aunt and then, somehow, turned his life around. At 16 he dropped out of school and was hired by Western Union, delivering telegrams. Walking the streets, he watched New Yorkers and wondered why some lived in splendor while others led lives of squalor.

    This question, one of social justice, led him to Harlem’s public libraries where he found the works of Karl Marx. Sowell joined the Marines during the Korean War, learned the value of discipline, left for the civil service in DC and night school. From there he made it into Harvard – and a life of research and argument. He is still a social justice warrior, not the shrill kind that he debates but a warrior armed with truth and reason.

    During his time in Korea, Sowell learned how to use a camera and developed a love of photography. It seems appropriate for a man whose life has been about accurately representing the world. Back at the Hoover Institution, some attendees expressed surprise at an artistic display of his photography, featuring grand images of Yosemite and the Pyramids of Giza. Sowell is a man of many talents.

    He has also seemingly met, mentored, or influenced every prominent black conservative you can think of, from Walter Williams to Shelby Steele to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas took the stage to share stories of his own deep friendship with the man. As a young student and an anarchist anti-war protester, Thomas said he once threw one of Sowell’s books into the trash out of furious disagreement.

    He must have taken it out of the trash because, just a few years later, he met Sowell and, like a groupie, asked for his signature. The Supreme Court Justice told how Sowell’s thought has been like “an oasis in the desert,” inspiring him to stand against a sea of critics. Thomas had to pause at one moment, the room quiet as he tried not to be overwhelmed by emotion.

    On stage, too, was Peter Robinson, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, who reminded Thomas that he’d once toured his Supreme Court chambers and saw a large brass plaque etched with the Sowellian phrase from the Griswold decision: “Do not emanate into the penumbra.” When Robinson rushed with glee to tell Sowell about it, the economist replied: “I know – I gave Clarence that plaque.”

    Robinson is now known as the bespectacled host of Hoover’s Uncommon Knowledge interview series, appearing in many of the most popular clips with the latter-day Sowell, teeing up quotes from the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates for the wiser man to demolish. In one of the happy accidents of longform interviews, the interactions are easily clipped for the era of YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, even TikTok.

    The format is repeated: Robinson poses a seemingly daunting, complicated question and Sowell responds by lacing a heater over the right-field wall (a chance he never got when, as a high-school dropout, he tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1948 – he failed the necessary fielding test). Sowell’s gift for the pointed jab can be traced back to his days as a student, when he admits he once described a classmate from England that he found particularly irritating as “nasty, British and short.”

    Sowell’s acerbic intellect is a joy to watch; you can almost imagine his fans giggling as this gentleman in large-rimmed glasses and a sweater delivers pithy put-downs of (mostly) leftist ideas. There are also a quarter of a century of columns to read from too, for those not yet inured to the social media age. Of the Democratic socialists, he writes: “The fatal attraction of the government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices paid by others.”

    For the race-hustling reparation advocates: “Anyone who wants reparations based on history will have to gerrymander history very carefully. Otherwise, practically everybody would owe reparations to practically everybody else.”

    For anyone in particular: “It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.” What disabused him of the Marxism of his youth? Facts and analysis, of course.

    Sowell’s appeal is that he refuses to be confined to just one lane of commentary and he has no fear of controversial topics – particularly criticism of liberal weaponization of white guilt. Look, he says, armed with statistics and evidence, at the effect that well-meaning governments have on black Americans. He was scrutinizing the same arguments made by Ibram X. Kendi, Nikole Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project decades before they made them.

    Coleman Hughes, the young essayist known for his insights on race and culture, told of a conversation he’d recently had with his New York finance fiancée. “She said, ‘Did you know that the British Empire ended slavery?’” Hughes discovered that she, too, had seen Sowell’s videos on her timeline, delivering truth in the clear and certain tones of a well-read man.

    For all his achievements, Sowell’s work has remained at the outskirts of the academy. Scottish historian Niall Ferguson told us that he learned about Scottish history from Sowell’s writings and yet says Sowell is “utterly exiled from graduate courses.”

    Victor Davis Hanson, who also works at the Hoover Institution and has lunched with the man every week for decades, says Sowell has a way of infuriating those who object to his views. “Tom understands how much he frustrates people simply by force of experience.” The irony is that Sowell’s rejection by academia has coincided with an explosion of his commentary as it reaches new generations and an online audience.

    Hughes said the appeal of Sowell in this era of social media is partly down to his distrust for the established intelligentsia and his rejection of its convoluted language. “The expert class bamboozles with big words. Sowell despises that and expresses it in these direct terms,” Hughes says. “Sowell cuts through the noise with deep insight, straight to the point.”

    For an author whose books would weigh down even a strong back, Sowell’s aphoristic style fits the era of short attention spans. Even at 95, his charm and intelligence are enough to intimidate his academic foes and inspirational enough to make Clarence Thomas cry.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • How Israel won the war – and lost the PR battle

    How Israel won the war – and lost the PR battle

    Regardless of the ultimate outcome of the Gaza peace deal brokered by Donald Trump, the past two years have seen Israel achieve an unprecedented litany of military accomplishments in the Middle East. The level of damage done to Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis is difficult to comprehend. The end of the Assad regime and, with American support, the demolition of the Iranian nuclear program – setting it back years at the least – were steps that many once thought impossible. Israel has emerged from the post-October 7 period unquestionably stronger in every way except one: its support around the globe, particularly among the youngest voices in the West.

    Polling is consistent, showing increased opposition to Israel and even support for Hamas among younger voters

    The polling on this question has been consistent and widespread, finding a clear trendline toward increased opposition to Israel and even support for Hamas among younger voters. In America, the widely respected Harvard-Harris poll found last month that nearly half of Generation Z respondents supported Hamas over Israel, and more than a third of millennials shared their views.

    Gallup’s July survey found support among those aged 18 to 34 for Israel’s military actions in Gaza and Iran to be just 9 and 15 percent respectively. A Quinnipiac survey which previously showed strong majorities believing it is in America’s interest to favor Israel found support had fallen from 69 percent in December 2023 to 47 percent today, driven by a significant increase in skepticism among younger voters.

    And a major study released in October by the conservative Family Research Council that surveyed American Christians found just six in ten regular churchgoers believe it’s important to pray for Israel, and a majority did not believe it was important for the United States or for their churches to support Israel. Consistent with other polling, churchgoing Gen Z respondents ranked the lowest in favoring any kind of support – prayer, verbal, or financial. In the wake of the October 7 attacks, it would have seemed ludicrous to predict this level of dropoff. But for those who consistently conduct polling on this topic, the trend is both undeniable and the reasons too convoluted to explain with simple questions.

    “For young people on the left, it’s a racial thing, a victimhood thing,” one pollster told me. “On the right, I think it’s more complicated. There’s a strong narrative that’s taken hold in a younger generation that claims American foreign policy is still overwhelmingly being dictated by the Jews, not ‘America First’ influences. So being an Israel skeptic has become a transgressive revolt against the establishment – and people need to understand that even for those who support him, Trump is the new establishment.”

    What has helped this trend take hold in the minds of some young conservatives is that sometimes the actions of Israel’s most vociferous supporters trigger callbacks to the speech codes of the American left. A survey over the summer conducted by Turning Point USA of roughly 7,000 attendees who participated in their major student activist conference in Tampa, Florida, found that 73 percent self-identify as pro-Israel. But that doesn’t mean they don’t recoil at what they view as a tendency by some Israel supporters to frame criticism of the nation or its political leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu as anti-Semitism.

    “One of the things that’s driving more people away from Israel is when you shut them down and don’t say they’re allowed to ask certain questions,” Andrew Kolvet, Charlie Kirk’s producer, said in a NewsNation interview outlining the results of the survey and a series of focus groups. “We have lived through an era where they were called racist if they felt like DEI was a problem. A lot of these kids have been steeped in a world where they were told they couldn’t say something, then the floodgates broke open and now they can say it, and now they feel like the anti-Semite word is being thrown out just like the racist word was a few years ago.”

    The effort Kirk and his team placed on navigating the complicated feelings on campuses about Israel, even gathering multiple Jewish and non-Jewish influencers to discuss the questions he was getting from fans in the weeks prior to his death, indicates how much this area has become a minefield for the young right.

    The Mike Huckabee generation of America’s baby boomer Christians who looked forward to their church’s annual trip to the Promised Land may still be in key positions within the Republican party, but they no longer dominate the conversation online or among younger voters. And for people raised on the idea that a core principle of “America First” foreign policy is avoiding entangling alliances which risk dragging the United States into needless wars, Israel is the number one example.

    Yet for some avowed supporters of Israel, the real story here isn’t entirely or even mostly an organic one, but is driven by a number of intentional actors with their own agendas, backed and promoted by foreign or anti-American interests. Mark Levin, the radio host and Fox News anchor, has taken to labeling these forces “the enemy within,” a combination of media figures and politicians he believes have seen their rhetoric boosted and shared across social media in an attempt to break the America-Israel alliance.

    The ongoing feud on this question between Levin and his former colleague Tucker Carlson (Levin calls him “Chatsworth Qatarlson”) has been just one of many to play out on social media and across a vast diaspora of podcasts, many of which have stronger consumption among politically engaged young people than the cable-news programs that once dictated the direction of foreign-policy debate.

    In the grand scheme of things, this is a battle that is not going away so it cannot be considered lost

    Just as the degradation of power held by the Democratic media establishment has furthered the fortunes of radical candidates like Zohran Mamdani, the fear among some pro-Israel activists is that diminishing strength of leadership on the right could lead to critics of the Israel alliance – like once-MAGA darling Marjorie Taylor Greene – taking on larger roles within the coalition. And behind it all is an abiding concern about the future of the Republican party after Donald Trump. As much as Trump has cemented his place in the minds of many as the most pro-Israel President in American history, his heir apparent is viewed with significantly more skepticism. The potential of a J.D. Vance contest against the likes of Marco Rubio for the GOP nomination in 2028 could become one where differences of opinion on Israel take center stage.

    There is near-universal acknowledgment on the part of American Jewish activists that there is a problem here for their cause, but the question of what to do about it prompts little in the way of answers. AIPAC, the much criticized pro-Israel lobbying group, recently rolled out an ad campaign to rebrand their organization as “America First” to online derision. The elevation of Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News by David Ellison, who is very public about his pro-Israel views, has prompted hopes for more pro-Israel commentary from a network that has courted controversy with their coverage.

    But there is a noticeable lack of vibrant leadership making the case for Israel to young audiences – a fact that becomes all the more noticeable with the loss of Kirk. “We know the kind of voices we need, we just don’t have them right now,” one Jewish activist told me. And in their absence, anti-Israel voices such as Nick Fuentes’s can fill the void.

    When CBS News’s Tony Dokoupil put the question to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, citing a poll showing just 14 percent of Americans under 30 support Israel, his response was clear-eyed. “I think the first fix is to finish the war as speedily as possible, something that I have sought to do against all these contrarian propaganda… so, first, you want to end it, end the war speedily, because in the TikTok age and in the television age, letting wars go on too long is going to cost you precisely what it cost you. There’s a real battle on the social media. It’s a big battle. It’s a battle for truth, really.” Netanyahu’s answer implies that Israel is losing that battle.

    In the grand scheme of things, this is a battle that is not going away, so it cannot yet be considered lost. The lack of bipartisan support for Israel has been an acknowledged problem for years, and now the danger of real opposition within both parties is a growing concern that can’t be ignored. For now, Israel backers can hold on to the reality that they continue to get the votes they need and the backing of many of the most prominent American politicians.

    So long as Donald Trump is the leader of the GOP, he defines “America First” – as he reiterated when some of his MAGA supporters were invoking the prospect of World War Three during the debate over striking Iran. He has given no indication of handing over the reins to anyone else.

    It is important to remember that there is a time for war and a time for peace. The debate over the Israeli alliance takes on a different nature in both contexts in American politics. The emergence of an emboldened anti-Israel faction of the American right has been driven not just by prominent voices but by the images from Gaza blasted across TikTok. With a ceasefire in place, a renewed conversation can be had. Israel’s focus remains survival above all else, even if the destruction of its enemies has come with a critical loss of western support. In the hierarchy of needs, staying alive matters most. The arguments can wait for another day.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • Why does the left hate J.D. Vance so much?

    Why does the left hate J.D. Vance so much?

    Freddy Gray’s latest Spectator cover piece on J.D. Vance’s status as the heir apparent for Donald Trump, well-above the scrum of potential alternatives despite his relative youth and the fact he has been an elected politician for not even three years, brings to mind an underrated aspect of his appeal. I am often asked by conservatives across the country some version of the question: Why does the left hate J.D. Vance so much? Why does he prompt so much vociferous loathing? The answer is somewhat disguised by his uniqueness in background and resume, but the truth is: They hate him because they view him as a traitor to their class, after they welcomed him with open arms.

    You can hear the feelings of betrayal in this recent appearance by leftist podcaster Jennifer Welch on MSNBC: “Here’s two things about J.D. Vance. Number one, he used to say Trump is America’s Hitler. So he has regressed,” said Welch during an appearance on All In with Chris Hayes. “And then number two, he is married to a woman of Indian descent. He has mixed race children. So to all of the MAGA voters out there, if this man will not defend his wife and will not defend his kids, do you think he gives a crap about you or anything to do with you?”

    When Vance penned his Hillbilly Elegy memoir, he had a story to tell that arrived with perfect timing for a political landscape dominated by people on the center left trying to make some sense of (or offer some dismissive explanation for) the Trump phenomenon. Obviously written without anticipating the degree to which it would take over the conversation, the success of Vance’s book and its fortuitous timing elevated him immediately into the echelon of the world of media profiles, Aspen Ideas, and powerful circles extending from the pages of The New York Times to big names in Hollywood. Here was someone from Appalachia who offered an explanation for why Trump was happening while also criticizing the man himself, even to the point of sharing in some of the extreme rhetoric deployed against the man beyond 2016. He went on Charlie Rose to call himself as a “a Never Trump guy,” wrote a piece for the The New York Times calling Trump “unfit” for the presidency, and joined Terry Gross on NPR to call Trump “noxious” and warn that he “is leading the white working class to a very dark place.” He even did the most humiliating thing you could do at that time in that position, which was cast a vote in 2016 for Evan McMullin. He’d proven which side he was on.

    This was a perfect critic for the American leftist elite to elevate – a walking, talking human avatar of What’s The Matter With Kansas, with a lovely mixed race family and a Hindu wife, the Ivy League credentials, the venture capital resume, The New York Times bestselling memoir, and a life story perfect for a Netflix movie which Hollywood didn’t just make, they got it nominated for Academy Awards. Forget writing from the lowly ranks of anonymous posts at FrumForum; Vance had set himself up for a lifetime fellowship at Brookings and a permanent seat at the table of the media elite, telling endless stories about how the right went wrong. 

    For someone without a sense of principle or political reality, all this would go to your head. You have the opportunity to be at the top echelon of elite voices, rake in the money on the speaking tours, and be a voice of constant Christian moralizing against the racist bigots from whence you came who just don’t know what’s good for them. Who would turn it down? 

    Well, Vance did. As it turned out, like more intellectual conservatives than would readily admit it today, he saw what Trump did in his first term and he didn’t just change his tune – he switched sides. The left hates this. They think insults matter more than policy, and that if you couldn’t stomach Trump’s tweets, it definitely makes you a hypocrite to say he’s doing good things, too. And deep down, they know Vance is really quite good at it. The vice president has an even better understanding of the elite world he had briefly navigated. Seeing its weak points fueled an even greater talent at making the case for the Trumpian policies he now supports. Today you’ll oftentimes find him arguing the case with those same media entities and figures who once welcomed him into the fold. His talent makes the shift all the more frustrating. So does his beard.

    So when the left rails against Vance, understand that they do so from a position of deeply felt personal betrayal. Imagine, as bizarre as it might seem today, a J.D. Vance who on an alternate earth chose all the treasure the establishment had to offer and became a Democratic Senator from Ohio in 2018 instead. Is there any realistic scenario where he would not be a leading candidate for their 2028 presidential nomination today? But no – instead, Vance chose the other path, to walk away from the world they offered him and the media elites were left to drown their sorrows with the latest headlines from David French. You can understand why that feels infuriating.


  • Schrödinger’s covert action

    Schrödinger’s covert action

    While much of the pushback from the right wing to Donald Trump’s international hawkishness has come from voices focused on the Middle East, and feared potential for wider wars prompted by support for Israel, the actual test of a break within the Republican coalition on foreign policy disputes could come over the president’s stepped up focus on Venezuela.

    The most recent development, with Trump issuing a rare public acknowledgement that he has authorized covert CIA actions on land. “I authorized for two reasons, really,” he explained this week. “Number one, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America. And the other thing are drugs, we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela and a lot of the Venezuelan drugs come in through the sea.”

    Think of it as Schrödinger’s covert action – does it really stay covert once you announce it? This would also seem to go against Trump’s stand against starting new wars, particularly those with a mind on regime change, which some of the president’s more hawkish supporters would clearly like to be the ultimate aim. It also includes newly ordained Nobel Prize winner Maria Corina Machado, who took to the airwaves in an interview with Christiane Amanpour this week practically begging Trump to greater action against Nicolas Maduro’s regime.

    The sheer amount of resources the United States has moved into the region is impressive, well beyond the drones being used to take out a series of Venezuelan drug shipments at sea. As The Wall Street Journal reports:

    “The U.S. has moved advanced weaponry into the Caribbean and in the skies north of Venezuela, including eight Navy warships, an attack submarine, F-35B jet fighters, P-8 Poseidon spy planes and MQ-9 Reaper drones. The Pentagon has deployed elite special operations forces, including the Army’s secretive 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the ‘Night Stalkers,’ a U.S. official said. Large troop-carrying and attack helicopters are part of the mix, with some aircraft conducting training flights fewer than 90 miles from Venezuela, the official said.”

    This is definitely a significant force, but what it isn’t is a prelude to a land invasion of the sort likely necessary to take on Maduro’s armed forces. Instead, for now at least, Trump seems happy with the kind of actions that disturbs Rand Paul and Thomas Massie, but doesn’t commit larger troop numbers or personnel to a regime change project.

    A fundamental aspect of the Trump tenure in his second term is that everyone is mindful about the future and what it will bring – namely, if his personally defined version of America First is the enduring approach of the GOP, or if there is a shift toward either further pullback around the world or back toward a default pre-Trump Republican security policy.

    There are plenty of observers on both sides who emphatically believe they will be the beneficiaries once that post-Trump sort happens. Their reactions, and the reactions of voters on the American right, to whatever does happen in Venezuela in this ramped up non-covert covert action could determine where the wind is blowing headed into 2028. Or it could become an object lesson in how even the president most resistant to starting new farflung foreign wars might end up in one much closer to home.

  • The Democratic establishment has fallen

    The Democratic establishment has fallen

    For nigh on two decades in Washington, the political right has envied the ability of the left to control its ranks and silence its extremists. As Republican consultants and donors groused about the irascible “jihadi wing” of their coalition through the Tea Party and MAGA eras, the Democrats exercised control over their far-left cohort using a combination of bribery and fear.

    The old guard of the left, the neoliberal and corporate-friendly media, has lost control

    Given how often the pens of Washington observers hailed the masterful ability of Nancy Pelosi to herd cats, you’d think she had aspirations of transitioning from America’s best investor to the next Andrew Lloyd Webber. What was often left out of the equation was any recognition of how the fealty of the far left was achieved: through a series of gatekeeping institutions owned or funded by Democratic donors and ideologically sympathetic corporations known to the public as the media. They were the ones whose coverage could guide and determine the limits of what the party should abide, rejecting the extremes as unacceptable to the country’s voters, tolerating their fairy tales and underpants-gnome strategies to a degree of op-ed page blather – only to stomp them whenever elections got serious. There is still only one Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez only exists in the public eye because she snuck up and ambushed an out of touch ten-term boomer.

    It has been hard, very hard to break through the Democratic gatekeepers, who still wield power on a completely different scale than anyone on the right – but there were signs it could be done. The left’s volunteer army of socialist aspirants who were denied their hopes in 2016, 2020 and again in 2024 – when the Democratic-media complex cleared the path for Hillary, for Joe and then (shockingly) for Kamala – are finally seeing their work come to fruition. The old guard of the left, the neoliberal and corporate-friendly media which entertained extreme racial politics and environmental doomerism (so long as it didn’t hurt their bottom line) has lost control. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the experience of America’s largest and most important city.

    The Democratic voters of New York rejecting a Cuomo, even one with as troubled a history as Andrew, for Zohran Mamdani, an honest-to-goodness Democratic Socialists of America member, would have been laughable under the old regime. In the run-up to his primary victory, nearly every corporate media outlet of significance spoke out against Mamdani’s brand of hammer and sickle policies – the Atlantic warned “Zohran Mamdani Won’t Make Groceries Cheaper,” CNN fretted “Do Democrats have a Zohran Mamdani problem?” and the New York Times editorial board said that, given his extreme views and lack of experience, they “do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots.” All for naught. The 33-year-old failed rapper, whose big idea is a network of city-run grocery stores, triumphed in the ranked-choice system.

    Cuomo and the scandal-ridden incumbent Eric Adams (who eventually dropped out of the race entirely) were forced to turn to other policy positions to retain their chances. And almost as soon as Mamdani won, the Democratic establishment lost interest in his calls to “globalize the intifada” and arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes the next time he came to the United Nations, and started to accentuate the positives. Condé Nast publications went full throttle with their glowingly soft coverage of the mayoral aspirant.

    The New Yorker followed Mamdani’s Instagram-fueled glad-handing with fans at the US Open (“Zohran Talks Love and Deuce With New Friends”), Bon Appetit talked to him about the challenge of eating with his hands (“For Zohran Mamdani, Food Is Personal, Political, and Powerful”), and Vanity Fair gave him the cover treatment and compared him to JFK (“The Legend of ZOHRAN”).

    Media concerns about Mamdani’s pie-in-the-sky promises vanished overnight. Having failed to stop his rise, the party organs had a different job to fulfill: whitewashing his defects for a credulous public while reassuring themselves that things would still be OK. Kathryn Wylde, a spokesman for the largest corporations in her role as president of the Partnership for New York, said on CNBC that the city has proven resilient enough to survive bad mayors in the past. How much could those grocery stores cost taxpayers, anyway?

    Yet this attitude presumes that Mamdani is a one-off, a fluke brought on by scandal-spattered opponents and the far left’s backlash against Donald Trump’s return to the White House. In reality, it’s far more likely that this energetic young socialist represents a future where the old-guard institutions of the left, including their most prominent leaders, no longer exercise determinative power over the direction of their coalition. Pelosi is no longer the cat-wrangler, and the two most powerful Democrats on paper, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, could do nothing to prevent Mamdani’s ascent – despite both being from New York. It’s possible that the last great hurrah of the Democrat-media complex was clearing the path for Kamala Harris, whose flameout was so gigantic it brought the whole system down with her.

    A sign that this dynamic is potentially a permanent reality for the left is that the media outlets in question are no longer attracting the eyeballs they once did. In the past, the deployment of mass opposition to a fringe leftist by the guardians of the party’s political hopes could have worked. But the younger leftist electorate is not consuming media as their parents did. Mamdani’s rise was fueled by the massed power of TikTok, Instagram and social media combined with an existing volunteer structure built out of the city’s active DSA community.

    Social media’s influence far outstrips the legacy media that once played the tune for the left to dance to

    Combined, their influence far outstrips the legacy media that once played the tune for the left to dance to. Instead, the magazines and cable news shows and even the podcasts of the Obama-era establishment figures (who once bucked the party leadership with similar online fervor) are taking their lead from the trends they see dominating social media, not the other way around. That’s why you see one billionaire-owned entity after another bowing to the musings of a candidate who says “I don’t think we should have billionaires” – and in the case of some of them, donating money to fund his efforts directly. It’s the cost of staying relevant, even if it requires you to resemble the “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme.

    A leaderless Democratic party now risks being taken over entirely by radicals who cannot be controlled or guided by any sense of a need to appeal to the mainstream. Even the great neoliberal hope of 2028, California Governor Gavin Newsom, is smart enough to see the shift. His latent campaign, which seems largely based on his ability to swear a lot, is an attempt to model the attitude of an aggressive progressive rather than the Fox News-watching Clintonian centrist he once aspired to be. The inevitable walkback of his comments that policies around trans people playing single-sex sports are “deeply unfair,” made in his first podcast interview with the late Charlie Kirk, will be something to behold. Perhaps he can make up for it by calling for government-owned franchises of the French Laundry.

    What Democrats are currently experiencing is the inevitable danger of failing to incorporate and subsume the party’s extremes into a negotiated arrangement where the socialists remain content with a slim piece of the party’s agenda. But that was based on a misunderstanding: the Marxists were always going to demand control once the opportunity presented itself. They were not going to be kept down by the people who made peace with corporate powers and deployed a compliant media to maintain their hold on the reins. And the political pablum dished out by Democrats hoping for a palatable centrist – an Andy Beshear, a Josh Shapiro, a Wes Moore – will not be enough to satisfy the crew that can’t get enough of the Zohran.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • The joke’s on Dave Chappelle

    The joke’s on Dave Chappelle

    The problem with Dave Chappelle taking his comedy to Saudi Arabia isn’t the money they paid him. It’s what they bought.

    We’re all familiar with the reputation laundering that the Middle East has engaged in on a grand scale in recent years, spending big to get into sports, entertainment and now hosting more than fifty of the biggest names in standup comedy for a Riyadh Comedy Festival. Chappelle’s performance was notable for its direct attack on the quality of free speech rights in America – and a claim that Saudi Arabia of all places is actually more free.

    “Right now in America, they say that if you talk about Charlie Kirk, that you’ll get canceled,” he said according to the New York Times. “It’s easier to talk here than it is in America.”

    During his set, Kevin Hart – no stranger to the appeal of a dollar – was even more obsequious. “I love what y’all are doing here,” Hart said. “I’ll continue being a positive ambassador of your change to the world.” Who knew that amount of cringe could come in such small packages?

    Of course, the conditions for these men and others to go to Saudi Arabia in the first place was to break faith with the whole mindset of comedy. Entering a country where all media is government approved and massive legal sentences can be directed at people who flaunt the most basic conventions is easier when you’re a paid guest – but they still had to sign on a dotted line of a contract that included this prohibition:

    “[Artists] shall not prepare or perform any material that may be considered to degrade, defame, or bring into public disrepute…The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, including its leadership, public figures, culture, or people; B) The Saudi royal family, legal system, or government, and; C) Any religion, religious tradition, religious figure, or religious practice.”

    The actual problem isn’t accepting the money. Plenty of artists and performers and businesses have done the same. The problem is signing away the whole reason your comedy became popular in the first place. Hart is one thing – he’s always been a corporate shill, Jumanji, Draft Kings, Saudis, what’s the difference? No one would be surprised at him making the hand prints in the sand ceremony.

    Chappelle was different. He made a career skewering the hypocrisy and posturing of right, left, and middle for years. He made a recurring hilarious joke of going after George W. Bush. And the only real threat he ever experienced to free speech in America was when he ran afoul of the trans mob, who endeavored unsuccessfully to get him canceled from Netflix.

    When Chappelle signed up for the Saudi cash, he was giving something up by agreeing to their terms and going above and beyond to criticize America along the way. He was agreeing not to keep it real, lest anything go wrong. And the Saudis knew it, and were happy to pay for it. That’s because what they were buying wasn’t comedy – it was compliance.

  • How does the American right move on?

    How does the American right move on?

    At the time, it was audacious. Guy Benson, now a commentator for Fox News and Townhall, recalls being approached by an Illinois teenager who wanted Chicago high schoolers to listen to conservative ideas. He offered the same advice to the gangly 6ft 5in youngster that anyone would suggest to a man with a mind on politics: keep hustling, go to a good school, get a degree and an internship at a think tank. But the precocious Charlie Kirk had different ideas. “He was smart enough to completely reject my advice,” says Benson. Neither of them could have known how that decision, and the Turning Point USA organization Kirk then founded, would go on to change the country.

    Instead of pursuing the traditional path, Kirk built something new based on a combination of a natural charisma, a skill for fund-raising and social media and a smiling face of good-natured Midwestern sincerity. He embarked on a relentless campaign of campus debates, parachuting himself behind enemy lines at universities across the country. For eager students long-starved of conservative thought on campus, it was a jolt of inspiration to stand up for their ideas and, if not to win every argument, at least to win over many in the crowd.

    Kirk was calling on Americans to get married, to have kids and to return to the church

    In environments where silence about beliefs was the key to success and sympathetic professors were few and far between, Kirk offered more than just entertainment value: he became a living symbol for all those who wanted to push back against the dominant ideas of the woke left. It was a crusade with small beginnings, but one that led to events packed with thousands of young people with Charlie at its center. He had that winning “aw-shucks” patriotism. He was ready to take on all comers – and that’s exactly what he was doing on a bright sunny day in Utah when an assassin’s bullet struck him down at the age of just 31.

    It’s rare in a time of such constant news and disaggregated focus for an event to become the only story that matters. Kirk’s death became this instantly, on every network, dominating discussion not just in politics but in every corner of American life. Stadiums across the country filled with hundreds of thousands of fans saw moments of silence, prayers and player dedications for the young man. Heartfelt condolences were offered by everyone from Supreme Court justices to Marvel stars, from former presidents to members of Coldplay.

    The success of Kirk’s effort was no forgone conclusion. He started out long before presidents were going on comedy podcasts and at the time, the left was riding high on a feeling of permanent social change. Coming out of the Tea Party era, and the cultural dominance of Barack Obama when so many in the Republican cohort wrote off young voters as unwinnable, Kirk’s aspirations for a turning point in American history seemed naive to his critics – even those on the right who hoped for success. A decade later, Kirk and his operation would help return Donald Trump to the White House with stunning levels of support among young men and historic gains among the under-30s. “College and non-college males shifted so significantly in the Republican direction, it can be argued it was by itself the deciding margin in multiple swing states,” pollster Wes Anderson told me. “And TPUSA and Charlie were a massive piece of that rightward movement.”

    But Kirk wasn’t just offering arguments to use in class. He was calling on American citizens to get married, to have kids and to return to the church. “What Charlie tapped in to, on the front end, many of us didn’t think that stream existed,” Anderson says. “Yes, he was bringing conservatism to a lot of young people who had never heard of it, but more importantly, we’re talking about a generation that is the least churched ever, the least aware, with no exposure to religion – at a level unseen since modern polling began. But something very strange has happened: as Gen Zers enter the workforce, they are becoming exceedingly angry. In focus group after focus group, they tell us their frustrations, that everything they’ve been taught about how to order their lives by those indoctrinating leftist institutions is not working. Some of them radicalize even further to the left, but others are desperately searching for answers and not just politically, but about life. And to these people, Charlie was a man in the desert handing out cups of water.”

    In the context of the American right, Kirk also took on a role that effectively dictated the Overton window of conversation around multiple topics. His support for including gay people in the conservative movement in opposition to some social conservatives was well known, as was the inclusion at TPUSA events of critics of Israel – a decision that became especially controversial as one of his former compatriots, podcaster Candace Owens, engaged in increasingly conspiratorial anti-Semitic rants.

    Even as the success of this mission made Kirk an aspirational symbol for the right, he came to symbolize everything the American left hates – his Midwestern pleasantness transformed into a portrait of a smarmy jerk. How much the left hates him wasn’t fully evident until after his death, when social media posts celebrating his demise, users inventing false quotes and tweets mocking his mourning supporters led to hundreds of firings and suspensions, including among prominent media figures such as MSNBC’s Matthew Dowd and the Washington Post’s Karen Attiah.

    The outpouring of sympathy for Kirk’s young wife Erika, who gave a passionate on-camera speech mourning her husband, was one side’s natural reaction. The other side spread shockingly callous remarks about Kirk, along with an aggressive attempt to spin the alleged assassin as having impossibly vague motivations, or being himself a right-wing extremist. There was a desperation in this false depiction, embraced en masse by CNN hosts and the largest leftist Substackers. When the alleged killer’s text messages were released, his motivations became hard to deny. He was a smart young student from a conservative religious family whose reported relationship with his transgender roommate seemingly pushed him toward regarding Kirk as a fascist, an advocate for hate, just as the left-wing media had told him over and over again. “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out,” Tyler Robinson texted his partner. Yet an ABC News reporter said his messages were “so fulsome, so robust… so touching,” praising him for “speaking so lovingly about his partner.”

    Charlie was unafraid to go anywhere and make the case for what he believed

    Author Walter Kirn weighed in with his prediction on X about the next steps in the left’s narrative: “How this all started is not how it will end. A story that began with a clear traditional moral shape, an innocent victim, a vile perpetrator, will be transformed using secondary characters, new revelations and other dramatic elements into its very opposite – a story of forbidden love, persecution by religious bigots, a poignantly rebellious heartfelt protest against a World that Doesn’t Understand.”

    But for a generation which, as FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff has found, consistently supports more censorship and less free speech, including the banning of extreme views on campuses, Kirk’s death could instill the notion of the assassin’s veto. Conservatives are emphatic about the need to take up Kirk’s mission, but do college officials really want the possibility of copycat crimes on their quads?

    From the 2017 attempt to kill a group of congressional Republicans at softball practice, the steady increase of politically motivated violence in America has largely emerged from the radical left. The underlying motivation to consider such violence is clear: a recent YouGov poll found that 77 percent of Republicans believe it is always unacceptable to feel joy at the death of someone they oppose politically, while just 38 percent of Democrats feel the same. If you’ve been told over and over again that your opponents are Nazis, fascists and white supremacists who are literally killing people and who represent an existential threat to the future of the nation, why would you allow them to speak anywhere, let alone to impressionable college kids? Such people should be hounded from polite society – and worse. And if the end of your political effort is a bullet with “hey fascist, CATCH” written on its casing? Well, maybe you shouldn’t have been a fascist.

    As for many Christian conservatives such as Texas Congressman Chip Roy, the loss of Kirk is about more than a sad moment in American politics – it’s a time to reflect on what matters most. “The loss of Charlie is profound because it’s not just about the organization or who’s carrying it forward, but about an individual uniquely gifted by the Lord, who combined principle and courage with a level of goodness and kindness,” he told me.

    “There’s a new generation that is growing out of TPUSA, new people not yet known to us, who can reignite the American spirit and carry it forward. If they can do that, there is hope for not just the nation, but for a real Christian revival when people are hungry for it. Charlie was unafraid to go anywhere and make the case for what he believed. Not being dissuaded by this moment is key – we have to encourage and be encouraged by the people who were encouraged by him,” Roy said. For the American right, that could be the difference between the revival they hope for and the revolution Charlie Kirk feared.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • Charlie Kirk saw himself as holding back a revolution

    Charlie Kirk saw himself as holding back a revolution

    Charlie Kirk was, from an incredibly young age, the sort of person willing to try things that seemed impossible. Last night, in his remembrance of meeting Charlie for the first time, my Fox colleague Guy Benson realized that he was probably one of the first conservative speakers Kirk had invited to share ideas to students in Illinois – at the ripe age of around sixteen. In lieu of a typical trajectory for a person with political ambitions, Kirk took a different path, believing that through engagement, debate and organization, he could achieve a mission many political professionals thought was a fool’s errand: win young people over for conservative ideas

    In the midst of the Tea Party moment, when the American right was synonymous with boomer (and older) voters and Barack Obama was the coolest thing on campus, riding high with millennial voters, this concept was absurd. But Kirk believed it was possible. He invested all his effort in pursuing it, he built a team across the country to make it happen and, most incredibly of all, he actually pulled it off. He was the biggest difference maker in a movement that saw an influx of young activist voters that changed the course of the country. And for that, he was murdered.

    The truth about Charlie Kirk is that he believed in the power of engagement. He would consistently do what the American left refuses to do: walk into the places dominated by opinions from the other side, and take on all comers, welcoming their disagreement and arguing not in an attempt to demonize but in an attempt to evangelize. Despite the left’s active campaign to describe him as a white supremacist, a radical, a reactionary, comparing him to Nazis and the Klan, Kirk was one of the most forthright and emphatic voices against that extreme of the far right. His assassination is so jarring in part because he is such a mainstream figure. He was beloved by millions of young conservatives across America not because he was a frothing at the mouth provocateur, but because he was a clean-cut earnest patriotic inspiration, someone who showed them how to stand up for what they believe on campuses where the number of academics who share their traditional Republican views are practically nil. And along the way, Kirk showed you don’t have to lose your soul in the process – openly embracing faith and family as the most important things in life, calling his young followers to think beyond the political realm.

    Kirk exemplified a belief in the American values of civil debate. His free-speech battle truly was part of a happy war, one that actively seeks out those who disagree not to destroy them but to prove a point. The overwhelming number of people ensconced at networks or as late-night hosts would never be brave enough to do what Kirk did on an active regular basis: to put themselves in a position where they are surrounded, and attempt to win the debater, or more often the audience, to your side. And in their cowardice, they chose to lie regularly about him instead – even in death, as the same ghoulish leftists who regularly hope for Donald Trump’s death and cheered Luigi Mangione rejoiced publicly on social media, as if to say if they can’t get Donald or Elon, they’ll settle for Charlie.

    In the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, there was a brief moment where people of both parties seemed to hope that it would mark a change in direction for the course of the country – an end to the demonization of the other side, a tamping down on the tone of our virulent political debate. That was as fleeting as an election cycle. But now with Kirk’s bloody violent murder while doing exactly the same thing he encouraged so many young people to do – using free-speech rights to stand up for what they believe, publicly and without fear of debate with the other side – the lesson many on the right may take away is that there is no future for such engagement. 

    The consequences of such a move would break from Kirk’s mission, and serve to accept the message the American left, from its most powerful elites to its core electorate, has been sending loud and clear since 2016: that there is no place for Republican views in society, that they are Nazis and fascists and existential threats, people who should be hounded and punched, and whose deepest pain is your path to joy. And why shouldn’t they take that lesson? There is no purpose to debate when at the end, the other side just wants you dead all the more. Can we even share a country with these people who hate us so much?

    The reason not to take that path is because it’s the opposite of what Kirk himself believed and exemplified, as he told us over and over again. In a profile in Deseret published on the eve of his fall campus tour just last week, he vocalized his purpose as calling his fans and fellow young conservatives to something higher than just hating the other side:

    “My job every single day is actively trying to stop a revolution,” Kirk said. “This is where you have to try to point them toward ultimate purposes and toward getting back to the church, getting back to faith, getting married, having children. That is the type of conservatism that I represent, and I’m trying to paint a picture of virtue, of lifting people up, not just staying angry.”

    The worst thing the young American right could do now in this moment is turn Charlie Kirk’s martyrdom into a lesson fundamentally at odds with his mission. Really, after all this, could you blame them? The American left hated Charlie Kirk. They mocked his approach to debate. They smeared him for his conservative beliefs. But they and the country may be about to learn what comes next, and learn it hard.