Utopias Don’t Work. Can You Still Live Deliberately?

By Thomas Dichter

Monday, July 13, 2026

 

Even before Henry David Thoreau built his cabin in the Concord woods and holed up there for the better part of two years, the quest for a simpler, less material, more meaningful life periodically appealed to many Americans. As Thoreau said in Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854): “Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”

 

In 1825, Scotsman Robert Owen established what he hoped would be a new kind of community in New Harmony, Indiana. “I have come to this country, to introduce an entire new state of society; to change it from an ignorant, selfish system to an enlightened social system, which shall gradually unite all interests into one and remove all causes for contests between individuals,” he wrote. In 1841, a group of intellectuals (including Nathaniel Hawthorne) took over Brook Farm near Boston. The group proposed “to impart a greater freedom, simplicity, truthfulness, refinement, and moral dignity to our mode of life.” And in Oneida, New York, in 1848, John Humphrey Noyes established the Oneida Perfectionist Community, whose members believed that Jesus had already returned to the world, “making it possible for them to bring about Jesus’s millennial kingdom themselves, and be free of sin and perfect in this world, not just Heaven.”

 

More famous, perhaps, are the Shakers. Shaker communities in the U.S. (from the mid-18^th century on) were also utopian and deeply religious. The core tenets of the Shakers were celibacy, gender equality, community, and withdrawal from the outside world. Simple living and self-sufficiency were reflected in their craftsmanship—most notably the making of plain and functional furniture.

 

These movements (and there were scores and scores of them throughout our history) can broadly be called “countercultural.” Their stories vary. Some put their emphasis on the spiritual, others emphasized an egalitarian ideology. But all were utopian and somewhat purist in calling for smallness, communal cooperation, simplicity, self-sufficiency, and a more meaningful life as antidotes to prevailing currents in American society, such as industrialization, corporatism, and materialism. But the other thing these efforts had in common is that they usually did not last. Thoreau did not stay in his cabin. New Harmony lasted three years. Brook Farm burned down in 1846 and a few months later, the experiment ended. The Oneida Perfectionists kept going longer, until about 1880, but that community eventually faded away. And of course, the Shakers, now numbering three persons, were done in by their own commitment to celibacy. They are largely  remembered today through artifacts in museums.

 

Still, calls for a more meaningful and less materialistic life have persisted. In the 1930s, social philosopher Richard Gregg coined the term “voluntary simplicity,” calling for an intentional giving up of much of material life. This is reflected in the current interest in living “deliberately.”

 

Some present-day Catholic intellectuals are renewing interest in distributism, a set of ideas with roots going back to Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), who envisioned a worker-centric society that put people before riches. Furthered by thinkers like Hilaire Belloc, whose 1912 work The Servile State critiqued both capitalism and socialism, and others such as G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy Day, the distributism discussion among many Catholics today emphasizes cooperative forms of economic organization, family-owned businesses, smallness, and local ownership.

 

There is also evidence of a resurgence of “back to the land” agrarian communities. A 2022 report notes the growing interest in “natural living in the countryside” on the part of millennials. Another recent report on homesteading noted that some 6,000 people attended a 2025 Oklahoma event put together by Homesteaders of America, a fourfold increase over the number who attended a similar event eight years earlier. This interest, the report noted, is in part motivated by a desire to “escape from the disquiet of modern America.” And according to the century-old National Catholic Register, there is also interest today in reviving the early 20^th century Catholic Land Movement “as many young Catholics discover that it articulates their desires to live more simply and self-sufficiently, closer to nature, and within a community of Catholic families.”

 

Still, given the failures of utopian impulses in our past, one has to wonder whether they’ve always been, and will always be, doomed to remain on the fringes of American society. Ultimately, they all seem to come up against constraints that have to do both with practicality and human nature. Can the tendency for a movement to become a cult be avoided? Can raising goats by hand be economically viable? Can a family-owned business successfully handle the matter of succession? Can a small-scale enterprise balance costs and benefits as well as a large enterprise? Can a cooperative avoid internal conflicts, the problem of “free riders,” or derailment by too-ambitious leaders? Can decision-making by consensus ever be efficient? Just as Thoreau could hear the whistle and rattle of the Fitchburg railroad, built within earshot of his Concord cabin, keeping the realities of the larger world at bay turns out not to be so easy.  

 

My own experience attests to these kinds of dilemmas. In the 1970s, disillusioned by academia’s publish-or-perish imperative and endless meetings, I dropped out of that career path and decided to engage in “honest” work, using my hands instead of my head to make a living. I joined a loosely structured cooperative group of about 30 woodworkers in a 12,000-square-foot old factory building in the fading industrial district of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Each of us ran his or her own independent “business,” paying rent based on the square footage we occupied, “cooperating” to the extent of ordering wood and other supplies in bulk, and sharing the cost of maintaining the machinery.

 

Most of us started out with the idea that working with one’s hands was more meaningful than the “grind” of corporate work, or the tediousness of academia. We hadn’t all read William H. White’s The Organization Man, but his talk of the “treadmill,” the “rat race,” and the “inability to control one’s direction” that characterized corporate life was something we implicitly were trying to get away from. Most of us bought into the zeitgeist of the late ’60s and early ’70s, from E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered, to Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, to historian Daniel Boorstin’s analysis in his 1974 book Democracy and its Discontents: “When the getting of more and more comes to mean less and less, when more and more Americans begin to worry about the comparative merits of their increasingly elaborate automatic appliances performing ever-more-trivial functions, is it a wonder that more and more Americans become skeptical of the salvation that lies in wealth?”

 

We were all in our 20s and 30s. About a third were former graduate students in literature or the social sciences; one was a young dentist (who joked that he wanted to do woodwork because he was tired of drilling tiny holes); another third were people who had gone to art and design schools, and a few were people just trying things out, unsure of what they wanted in their lives. Only one member of our group had had a real apprenticeship in woodworking.

 

In the beginning we were excited about becoming craftsmen, which we thought of as a noble calling, not to mention the satisfaction of making something and finishing it. We had one hard and fast rule, and that was that all machines were to be turned off at lunchtime, when we’d gather on stools and half-finished pieces to eat and talk. Out of those lunchtime talks came the idea of making furniture “for the people”—that is, handmade, functional pieces that the “people” could afford.

 

But as we soon learned, if we were to make furniture that the “people” could afford, we ourselves could not afford to do it. Crafting things by hand was simply too expensive. Beginning to catch on to the challenges of making a living, a couple of us experimented with mini versions of mass production. I made a dozen coat racks in oak and brass and tried to sell them to local stores; I invested in an air-powered nail gun to make toy boxes on wheels. These efforts failed. Many of us ended up turning to larger-scale work, seeking out and taking on contracts for store fixtures (counters and shelves), linking up with architects to do kitchen renovations for wealthy people or fancy cabinetry for lawyers’ offices. Some of us got into house construction. In short, we became business people, engaging in “sales,” hiring and managing employees, learning how to sequence the ordering of materials, and managing inventory. We learned the hard way that if you bought 20 sheets of walnut veneer plywood and did not think through how to cut the pieces with the least waste, your profit would go out the window.

 

Inevitably we moved away from handwork. We invested in jigs and templates that enabled the standardization of some processes. Purism and perfectionism gave way to the realities of living in a modern marketplace. And, to our surprise, we ended up using our heads just as much as, if not more than, our hands.

 

Edward Lucie-Smith, a British practitioner of arts and crafts as well as a trenchant observer of craftsmen, has said: “To become a professional craftsman is a radical decision, often undertaken as a form of protest against a dehumanizing environment and way of life. Our attitudes towards the people who make this kind of choice are a curious mixture of jealousy, envy and honest admiration.” Whereas we may have started out heroically, soon enough this was no longer us, and within a few years most of the members of the group had gone back to their previous careers or chosen a new path (bankruptcy law, for example). In my case, though I still make things at home for my own use, I made my living as a practicing anthropologist working in developing countries.

 

Will the countercultural impulses of today be doomed like those of the past? For those who adhere to a purist canon of what is good and what is bad, probably. But in our fast-paced and fluid social media age, where everything is subject to questioning, where there are fewer widely shared societal and cultural anchors, where parts of daily life that used to be separate are now blurred (two days a week working at home, three at the office; doing business on your phone while you hike in the woods), purism seems wont to revert to the mean. Utopian ideals and life’s practical imperatives meet in the middle, creating a hybrid watered-down version where we keep our day jobs but ruminate about “work-life balance.” With so many people today saving commuting time by working from home, it’s simply no longer necessary to “drop out,” to run off to join a commune; instead, we can use that extra time to find meaning “after hours” in cooking, knitting, enameling, bead work, wood work, carving, painting, etc. These are hobbies, not vocations, and they are growing especially among young people.

 

Indeed, the do-it-yourself (DIY) market, around for decades now, is alive and well, slated to grow at a rate of close to 7 percent in the next few years. Such data strongly suggest that more and more people are trying to fix and make things at home themselves, driven of course by economic necessity as always, but also by the need for a respite from the “rat race,” to exert “control over one’s direction.” Huge numbers of people turn to YouTube to see instructions on everything from how to change the windshield wiper to how and when to prune a rose bush. Not just to save money, but because it is satisfying to master and complete a physical task.

 

In our new hybrid age, where so many lines are blurred, people who feel the need to “escape from the disquiet of modern America,” or to redress any kind of spiritual or ideological imbalance in their lives, might find ways to have their cake and eat it too—to inject meaning (a human necessity almost as vital as food and shelter) into their lives just when they need it. Tinkering in one’s garage workshop on the weekend isn’t as radical as the purism of the Shakers or the Distributists. But it may well provide satisfactions that last longer.

A Free-Speech Meltdown

By Gal Beckerman

Saturday, July 11, 2026

 

On Thursday morning, PEN America, the free-speech organization, posted an article detailing the “isolation and exclusion” many Israeli and Jewish writers have felt since October 7, 2023. The authors describe being blacklisted at publishing houses, boycotted by activists, pressured to downplay their Jewishness, and called out in online witch hunts including a viral crowdsourced spreadsheet that asked: “Is your fav writer a Zionist???”

 

Drawing attention to such suppression would seem to fall squarely within the mandate of this watchdog group, whose motto is “the freedom to write.” And yet, publication of the article—which makes no policy recommendations and is written in a mournful, rather than accusatory, tone—was enough to make PEN America’s president, the novelist Dinaw Mengestu, decide to resign in protest within hours.

 

PEN America currently sits on a widening fault line, one that divides old-school liberalism, which treats the right to speak as more important than any particular ideology, from a surging and fiercely ideological left that sees Israel and Zionism as its enemy. Still, it was a shock to learn that this article—mainly a collection of writer testimonials—set off an eruption.

 

Mengestu had been in his position for only seven months following a few years of turmoil at the organization, much of it over Israel and Gaza. When I reached him, he described the PEN article as a possible threat to the constitutional rights of those who advocate for shunning Israeli products (including art) according to the standards of the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement. Apparently setting aside the question of defending free expression for Israeli and Jewish writers, he focused on the rights of pro-Palestinian activists. A document like this from PEN, he felt, could provide more fuel for legislation that targets proponents of BDS. Such legislation already exists in most states, though it is usually aimed at businesses and individuals seeking government contracts. “It’s the first amendment that allows all of us to engage in boycotts, not PEN America,” Mengestu wrote in an email. “PEN America as a free expression organization is supposed to defend that right.”

 

I spoke with several current and former PEN staffers and board members who characterized his position, expressed in emails he wrote to the board, as highly partisan. From their perspective, the leader of their organization was arguing that merely reporting on the stifling of one group’s free expression amounted to suppressing the rights of another.

 

Some PEN staffers came away feeling that his worry about the free speech of pro-Palestinian protesters and student activists foreclosed any defense of Israeli and Jewish writers—even writers, such as the Israeli novelist Etgar Keret, who have condemned the war in Gaza and have suffered consequences both outside and inside Israel. (It should go without saying, though maybe it needs to be said, that it would be meaningless to have free-speech organizations if they defended only speech they agreed with.) These staffers also expressed sadness that even a small effort to fulfill PEN’s mission by describing the experiences of writers under political stress was met with such a dramatic gesture of rejection, seemingly because of those authors’ identity.

 

PEN does in fact defend the rights of people who want to engage in boycotts, even though it “emphatically opposes” organized efforts to shut down speech. In practical terms, this might mean condemning a literary festival’s ban on a group of writers but defending an individual’s refusal to attend. As Mengestu and others pointed out to me, the organization amended its guidelines on this point and reissued them on Thursday, at the same time as the article was posted. “We see no contradiction between opposing boycotts ourselves, and defending the right of others to engage in them,” the new language reads, in part.

 

Many people inside the organization, including its co-CEOs, Summer Lopez and Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, believed that publishing the article about Israeli and Jewish writers was a matter of principle. When they first began serving as interim leaders last fall, after two years of organizational crisis marked by protests following October 7, Lopez and Rosaz Shariyf went on a “listening tour.” (Their positions became official in February.) They heard again and again from authors who described a chilled environment for any books related to Jewish themes or involving Jewish characters. As with any issue that affects the freedom to write, this one felt important for PEN to investigate.

 

The resulting document took months to produce—an unusual length of time, I was told, in part because of the scrutiny that such reporting would surely face. The authors of the article spoke with people such as Deborah Harris, a prominent literary agent who represents many Israeli authors. She described being unable to sell any works of literary fiction by them in the American market since the October 7 attacks. “The standard line is, ‘I wouldn’t know how to publish this author right now,’” Harris said.

 

Some of the information in the report was highly anecdotal; for instance, a romance novelist named Meg Keene says she was told by her agent to strip out all Jewish references from her book and to change one character’s name from Yael to Sue. But there was also some attempt to offer hard data, including the fact that a hotline set up by the Jewish Book Council for reporting “anti­se­mit­ic lit­er­ary-relat­ed inci­dents” has so far received 350 self-reported complaints over two years.

 

The article does not conclude that all of these experiences were the result of BDS. In fact, it considers a constellation of factors: “It is difficult to assess how much of what the writers PEN America spoke to are experiencing stems from cultural boycotts and broader efforts to protest the war; how much from anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, or antisemitic sentiment; and how much reflects matters of business or taste, which are also shaped by geopolitics.” The objective of the article was rather to describe the effect: a sense of diminished opportunity for free expression and the feeling of being targeted because of one’s “identity, nationality, or views.” The release also mentions the “dire consequences” that Palestinian and pro-Palestinian writers and artists have faced over the past three years, including “arrests, harassment and threats, deportation attempts, and detention.”

 

The document does not project the authority or condemnatory conclusions of an official PEN America report. The report produced last fall about the cultural destruction of Gaza, “All That Is Lost,” represents a far more comprehensive effort to capture the result of Israel’s war. This new article, in contrast, felt to some PEN America outsiders more like a “blog post”—and an equivocal one.

 

“PEN does not muse that the removal of a Toni Morrison novel might be a matter of taste,” Allison Lee, the former head of PEN America’s Los Angeles office, told me, referencing the group’s many reports that have condemned book bans over the years. “Only one group of writers, it seems, must have the case for their suppression respectfully contextualized before the harm done to them can be acknowledged—and even then, only provisionally.”

 

Most discussion of Israel and Palestine has devolved into a zero-sum game. The simple act of drawing attention to what Israelis and Jews might be experiencing was always going to be read as a position statement for the organization. “The blog post was brave and right,” Andrew Solomon, a former PEN America president and current honorary board member, told me. He opposes the current Israeli government, but he does not see why that should preclude him from defending Israeli writers. He has also done work in Ukraine—he risked his life to deliver vehicles to Kharkiv earlier this month—and said he would still speak up against the mistreatment of Russian writers, regardless of what Vladimir Putin does.

 

“Why would anyone complain of acknowledging the suffering of anyone else?” he asked. “Is the lie that some people’s suffering matters more than that of others the role of an organization dedicated to free speech and truth? I don’t deny Palestinian suffering and don’t see that acknowledging and representing it means I cannot acknowledge suffering in Israel too.”

 

Solomon’s position is shared by others on the board, a fact reflected in the decision of the organization’s leadership to stand by the article. But Mengestu was named president in order to solve a serious problem at PEN America, one that this new crisis threatens to expose again.

 

***

 

In 2024, PEN America went through something like an internal revolt after a large number of prominent writers, including Naomi Klein, Michelle Alexander, and Lorrie Moore, issued a series of letters making escalating demands that the group take a harder line on Israel, and specifically that it characterize the war in Gaza as a genocide. (The new article uses the word—but among Mengestu’s objections is that the designation was attributed to “experts” and other organizations.) A group of writers attacked the then-CEO, Suzanne Nossel, calling for her resignation. In one of their letters, they describe Nossel as having “longstanding commitments to Zionism, Islamophobia, and imperial wars in the Middle East.” So many writers pulled out of the 2024 World Voices Festival and that year’s literary awards that both events were canceled, and the annual gala was nearly called off too. (Nossel, who ran the organization for more than a decade and left in October 2024 partly in response to the protests, had grown PEN America’s membership and influence as well its revenue, which increased fivefold.)

 

An organization that had prided itself since its creation in 1922 on protecting free speech and the defense of writers—no matter who they were—was thus overtaken by a passionate and sizable contingent that demanded the group become vocal advocates on behalf of Palestinians and in opposition to Israel. One of this constituency’s central demands (they called themselves Writers Against War on Gaza, or WAWOG) was that PEN America be more accepting of BDS and not condemn writers who joined calls for a blanket cultural boycott.

 

When Mengestu assumed office, WAWOG announced in an Instagram post that it had achieved “VICTORY AGAINST PEN AMERICA” (the same group today offered a “salute” to Mengestu’s “principled decision” to resign). But in one early interview, the new president promised to “mend and rebuild.” Since then, PEN America has focused considerable attention and resources on Gaza. In addition to its extensive Gaza report last fall, the organization has spent as much as $500,000, according to several insiders, on helping Palestinian writers and artists.

 

Besides helping Palestinians artists, PEN America has made other efforts to keep the protesters inside the tent. In January, the group released a statement condemning the cancellation of performances by the incendiary Israeli comedian Guy Hochman—in keeping with its general stance against “ideological litmus tests”—but later withdrew it in response to backlash. At this year’s World Voices Festival, which included more than 140 writers from more than 40 countries, not a single Israeli was part of the program.

 

In light of these shifts, last week’s article came as a genuine surprise, including perhaps to Mengestu. The PEN America board does not have any editorial control over the work of the staff. But after the release of the report on the cultural destruction of Gaza, the organization decided to share potentially controversial publications with board members in advance. They saw the article two days before it was published, and a number of them decided to meet to discuss it. I could not confirm whether Mengestu was part of these conversations. When I asked him about it, he didn’t respond to the question. Board members are held to confidentiality about their internal discussions. (Among these members is the Atlantic staff writer George Packer.) Mengestu delivered his judgment on the article and decision to resign in emails to the board.

 

The next president of PEN America will decide the group’s course—and that course is hard for anyone to predict. The decision by Lopez and Rosaz Shariyf to publish the article was described to me by many people I spoke with as an act of “courage.” (I should acknowledge that others who declined to speak with me might feel very differently.) And yet they expressed no desire to return to the tumult that the organization experienced in 2024. The younger members of the staff who, according to Mengestu, were upset by the article’s appearance, and the hundreds of writers who have signed petitions opposing PEN America in the past, cannot be ignored without imperiling the organization’s future.

 

Maybe the most revealing aspect of this eruption, though, is just how little it took to set it off. Thursday’s article nodded to the curtailed freedoms of Israeli and Jewish writers without taking any ideological side. It was far from a battle cry or a shift in priorities. It was just a way of acknowledging, in the measured but principled language common to PEN America, that the past three years of discourse have had an effect on a large group of writers. For anyone who has spoken to Israeli or Jewish artists—as I have—this is undeniable; you hear it everywhere. This reality does not neutralize the cause of pro-Palestinian writers or the suffering in Gaza and elsewhere. The fact that the article was perceived that way, and that it led to the resignation of a president, tells us all a great deal about the hair-trigger moment we live in, and about the precarity of the liberal principles on which PEN America was founded.

Any Advice for the Soon-To-Be Politically Homeless?

By Jeff Maurer

Monday, July 13, 2026

 

I’m a comedian, but I did not find Donald Trump’s political ascendence funny. Funny is a monkey in a tuxedo; funny is a cartoon skunk with pre-MeToo values pursuing a cat. Choosing a president who has all of the qualities of the president in Idiocracy except for the good ones isn’t funny; it’s just a bad idea.

 

When Trump became supreme leader of the GOP, I felt schadenfreude watching some conservatives—many of whom are now Dispatch readers—react with revulsion. That was petty on my part, and I don’t defend it, but please remember: I, an Obama liberal, had many erudite, all-caps shouting matches with those folks on Facebook message boards. Remember Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women”? Remember Barack Obama’s tan suit? Oh, we had fun back then! It’s odd to have sepia-toned memories of calling someone “Super Hitler” in a fight about Obama’s mom jeans, but here we are.

 

Now, Democrats are going through something a lot like what happened to Republicans a decade ago. The left’s online id has taken corporeal form and scored a few primary wins. Now, the takeover is far from complete; it’s not guaranteed that the 2028 nominee will be either Lenin’s reanimated corpse or someone even worse. But for the first time, I’m contemplating the possibility of a Democratic Party that shares none of my values, which include empiricism, free speech, and being able to say words other than “oligarchy,” “Zionist,” and “don’t judge me by my old tweets.”

 

I may be politically homeless soon. So, I have a question for Dispatch readers: What’s that like? How does one mentally navigate having political views that are as in-the-zeitgeist as barbershop music? Many Dispatch readers have been clinging to wreckage in the Sea of Political Isolation for roughly a decade—any survival tips for someone whose ship might be about to plunge beneath the waves?

 

For example: How granular can I get describing my views before people will want to hit me with a pipe? When the conversation turns to politics, should I call myself a “Neo-Keynesian ‘abundance’ capitalist with classically liberal social views,” or is it less embarrassing to say “My IBS is going full Krakatoa” and leave? What matters more: A precise description of my beliefs, or having better social skills than, say, a guy who steers every conversation to the finer points of salamander breeding?

 

How enthusiastic should I pretend to be about obviously doomed third-party candidates? In this dystopian future, I’ll surely throw some votes into the hopeless, black void that could be called The Evan McMullin Zone. Do I need to pretend to believe that my candidate could win? Should I send texts to my friends like: “NEW POLL: Billy Blandass at 0.04 percent, DOUBLE HIS NUMBER FROM THE LAST POLL!!! HE’S GOT BLANDMENTUM!!!”? Or should I just admit that I’m making a sad little stand, like when my dad declared a fatwa against McDonald’s in 1986 (they forgot his fries) and stubbornly stuck to it even as McDonald’s became the most successful restaurant in the galaxy?

 

Which brings me to maybe the most important question: Should I hold out hope? Which is worse: Losing all hope, or having your hope unrequited forever? Is it good to dream of a sane leader riding over the ridge and seizing the throne, or is that like maintaining a laser disc library in the hope that technology will circle back around? Should I move on, or pray that Pete Buttigieg will win the nomination after being struck by a meteor that magically makes him straight? It seems like a renaissance should be possible; it seems like Americans would like their leaders to be sane. But it’s seemed like that for a while, and yet we keep electing these five-star, museum-quality lunatics.

 

And there will be no home for me if the Democratic Party is taken over by the Democratic Socialists of America. I can’t pretend that Bernie Sanders has good ideas. I can’t deny that parts of the leftist project emit an antisemitic stench so intense that you can practically see the stink lines. I can’t believe that some people are failing to pick up “piece of s—t” vibes from Hasan Piker, which are surely detectable in distant galaxies. This is bad stuff—and if this is what it means to be a Democrat, I’m out. And I don’t mean to overreact to a few races where a pretty-far-left candidate was beaten by a very-far-left candidate, but to return to the shipwreck metaphor: Recent events have caused me to begin counting lifeboats and make a mental list of which passengers I’ll eat first if I find myself adrift.

 

So: I’d love to hear any survival tips you might have! And if I do end up bobbing in the icy waters of political irrelevance with you, I give you permission to float on a door while I become a popsicle—after all, you got there first! I really hope it doesn’t come to that, but I’m listening and taking notes just in case.

The Damning Case Against Tyler Robinson

National Review Online

Monday, July 13, 2026

 

Within hours of Charlie Kirk’s tragic assassination, conspiracy theories started spreading on social media about his gruesome killing. Promoted most notoriously by the execrable Candace Owens, they mushroomed and became more outlandish over the past year. These irresponsible actors purporting to be searching for the truth have implicated Israel, Kirk’s friends and colleagues, and even a grieving widow, Erika Kirk herself. Sometimes they’ve suggested — this allegation is a Tucker Carlson favorite — that the government never properly investigated the killing and it all had something to do with pressuring President Trump into a war with Iran.

 

But in pretrial hearings this week, prosecutors provided a glimpse into the vast trove of evidence the government has compiled, and it all points to the obvious explanation that no rational, good-faith person ever doubted — that Kirk was killed by left-winger Tyler Robinson, who acted alone.

 

Owens claimed that she had a “source” who informed her that Robinson never even was on the Utah Valley University campus where Kirk was murdered. Actually, prosecutors have video of him on campus. They also found his DNA on the rifle that matches the type of bullets used to kill Kirk.

 

Robinson confessed multiple times to his roommate and lover Lance Twiggs. Robinson left a letter in their home that read, “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk, and I took it.” He also confessed after the murder, in a Discord message. On the day after Kirk’s murder, Twiggs has testified, Robinson showed up at their home. “I just asked him in person if what he said the night before was true, and he said it was,” Twiggs recalled, referring to a prior confession.

 

In a text message sent after the shooting, Robinson said of Kirk, “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Robinson also reminded Twiggs that he had been engraving bullets, and indeed there were multiple casings found with engravings on them. One messaged etched into an unfired round read, “hey fascist! CATCH!”

 

In other words, prosecutors have forensic evidence tying Robinson to the gun that was used in Kirk’s shooting, video of him at the scene at the time of the shooting, multiple confessions, a clear motive, and evidence of premeditation.

 

If this isn’t case closed, nothing is.

 

Of course, conspiracy theorists are never motivated by the pursuit of the truth, nor are they swayed by evidence. The likes of Owens will surely adjust to the mountain of evidence by declaring that the conspiracy is deeper and more elaborate than they initially suspected. That doesn’t mean that audiences have to believe them.

 

We hope that, in addition to delivering justice, the Tyler Robinson trial will put a dent in the influence of the lunatics and cynics who have perverted this case for their own abysmal ends.

California’s DEI Bloat Clashes with Newsom’s Pivot to ‘Normal’

By Jim Pettit

Monday, July 13, 2026

 

As California Governor Gavin Newsom positions himself for a presidential bid, he’s saying Democrats should stop dwelling on identity and gender-affirming pronouns to be what he has called “culturally normal.” A great place for Newsom to start is to dismantle the bloated diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy he created.

 

During his nearly two terms as governor, Newsom has dumped resources into committees, personnel, meetings, and reports, all of which are portrayed as accomplishments. Beyond just embedding identity politics into governing, Newsom’s record thus far is unleashing incoherent and uncoordinated DEI programs that erode core government functions. Despite the governor’s changing  political rhetoric, the promotion of DEI continues.

 

This year, the state’s pension fund for government employees, known as CalPERS, hired a new Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer. It’s hard to determine what this person actually does. The job description states the individual will serve as a “thought leader” and speak to the financial community about the importance of DEI. It is unclear how this relates to CalPERS’s purpose of administering retirement and health benefits. Such DEI-induced mission creep in state departments and agencies is pervasive.

 

For example, state agriculture department employees conduct meetings throughout the year to recognize selected groups through its DEI committee. A recent “LGBTQ+ Pride Month” panel discussion begins with a reference to the 1969 Stonewall riot in New York City. Yes, this event helped establish gay rights, but what does this have to do with California agriculture? Taxpayers and farmers might wonder what value there is in government employees agreeing among themselves on the importance of gay rights.

 

If administration leaders feel the state workforce needs DEI lessons, California’s Racial Equity Commission would appear suited to the task. Established by a Newsom executive order, the organization has seven staff members and an eleven-member commission. The organization is charged with providing DEI technical assistance to government. Their specialty, however, is writing lengthy reports with vague language that nobody has time to read.

 

Their primary work product, a racial equity “framework,” is 334 pages of lofty aspirations such as “promoting healing.” Favored words are “tools and toolkits,” references that appear over 500 times. One of these tools, called “restorative practices,” is said to help government entities support what are deemed marginalized communities. Presumably with the ill-defined tool, state government can be more attentive to certain zip codes, or whatever criteria bureaucrats choose.

 

While the Racial Equity Commission is supposed to help government navigate its diversity quest, other state organizations and personnel have the same mandate. Another agency, California Government Operations, is tasked with embedding diversity, equity, and inclusion in state operations. To that end, the governor appointed the state’s first Chief Equity Officer, whose job description includes providing a DEI framework for California departments and agencies. It’s not clear how this framework is any different than the Racial Equity Commission framework.

 

Meanwhile, the California Department of Human Resources has its own DEI toolkit which features web-based tutorials such as how to add preferred pronouns to an e-mail signature block. Its so-called language guide admonishes people to say, “the public,” instead of “Americans.” The HR Department’s DEI survey enables employees to assess what is described as their organization’s DEI journey. Questions include whether employees feel their managers are culturally competent.

 

More DEI is entrenched in state government. California’s transportation departments and agencies, such as CAL Trans, are guided by an interagency equity advisory committee. Over a dozen members are to develop recommendations and yet more tools for transportation planning and funding programs. The California Department of Finance has a DEI workgroup to develop an inclusive workforce. Several departments and agencies have senior-level DEI executives. Perhaps they too dabble in frameworks and tools.

 

Newsom-supported measures insert state government into private sector personnel matters as well. Among California’s Civil Rights Department requirements are determining an employee’s gender identity by scrutinizing records of self-identified pronouns. Companies with 100 or more employees must submit the report, which includes government-identified racial groups. A rulemaking process is underway to require venture capitalists to survey company founders to determine racial and sexual orientation categories.

 

California’s DEI bureaucracy exists in parallel to traditional human resources and equal employment opportunity offices in state government. Non-discrimination in hiring practices and employment is based on long-standing federal and state law and legal precedent. Newsom’s changing views on the importance of identity politics reveal what California’s DEI regime really is: government-sanctioned support of a passing political fad.

Is Erdoğan NATO’s New Heavyweight?

By Hannah Lucinda Smith

Monday, July 13, 2026

 

Turkey’s broadcasting censor recently issued a new directive to the country’s television channels: There was to be no criticism of NATO on the airwaves. In the run-up to the alliance’s landmark summit, which was held in the Turkish capital of Ankara last week, good vibes were state-mandated, and Turkish journalists were warned that all reports should “fit in with the national security perspective.”

 

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was duly hailed, both at home and abroad, as the leader who managed to bring a reluctant Donald Trump to the summit, and Turkey’s defense industry was touted as the possible answer to Europe’s weapons procurement quandary. On Wednesday, after a brief bout of petulance over his European allies’ criticisms of his attacks on Iran, Trump exited the meeting apparently full of renewed enthusiasm for the alliance that, on multiple occasions, he seemed determined to undermine. NATO’s bureaucrats will be exhaling in relief.

 

There is, of course, a deep irony in the fact that criticism of an organization whose founding principles are the defense of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law was banned by a state diktat. But observers of Turkey will not be surprised: Under Erdoğan, who has been in power since 2003, the country has descended into near-total autocracy, with opposition figures and critical journalists jailed, media outlets shuttered, and the courts and state institutions wholly politicized.

 

For a period, that illiberal trajectory took Turkey to the outskirts of the NATO alliance, where it was spoken of as an unreliable ally and excluded from the F-35 fighter jet program. Today, because of global circumstances and Erdoğan’s skill in navigating them, it is back at the center. The censor’s decree is a sign of the total foreign policy swivel that has taken place in Ankara over recent years, turning it back toward Europe after a decade in which Erdoğan appeared far more interested in building links with Russia and China.

 

For much of his tenure, Erdoğan was largely uninterested in foreign policy. In the early years, he left international strategy to his chief adviser and foreign minister from 2009 to 2014, Ahmet Davutoğlu, who pursued a policy of “zero problems with neighbors” by building ties with countries in the Middle East and Africa while maintaining Turkey’s traditional alliances in the West. That changed with the outbreak of the Arab Spring revolutions in the early 2010s, when Erdoğan began patronizing Islamist movements, mirroring his lurch toward overt religiosity in domestic politics. For a decade after that, and particularly after ousting Davutoğlu in 2016, he used foreign relations primarily to further his own agenda. In the lead-up to elections, he stoked rows with Europe and launched military campaigns in Syria and the Aegean Sea to ignite and then feed off nationalist sentiments, and to present himself as a strongman who could stand up for Turkey on the world stage.

 

The turning point was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, said Gönül Tol, a founding director of the Turkey program at the Middle East Institute, a Washington D.C.-based think tank. The conflict has allowed Erdoğan to offer his relationship with Vladimir Putin, once a serious concern for NATO, as a mediating tool. It has also refocused the alliance’s attention—away from the domestic behavior of its allies and toward the external threat now facing Europe. Magnifying both of those factors is Trump, whose own wavering commitment to European security has left NATO with few other options.

 

“The international context is in Erdoğan’s favor, and he is playing his cards well,” Tol said. “If you look at the new world we are in, there are conflicts in Ukraine, Iran, the Caucasus, North Africa, and Turkey sits at the center of all that.”

 

Turkey also occupies a strengthened position in the Middle East following the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. When the dictator fled Damascus on December 8, 2024, Russia’s influence in the region collapsed. Where Erdoğan had once been the weaker partner in his relationship with Putin, often forced to concede to the Russian leader, he is now able to exert far greater influence in Moscow. The new Syrian government is ideologically and politically close to Ankara, and it is through Turkey’s support that Russia has been able to maintain a reduced military presence at its base in the Syrian port of Tartus. The war in Ukraine, too, has turned Turkey into an economic lifeline for Putin; the country has served as a transit hub for restricted goods moving in and out of Russia.

 

These developments have allowed Erdoğan to pursue an independent policy on Iran amid the U.S. and Israeli attacks on that country. While Trump and Erdoğan currently enjoy a warm relationship, and Turkey itself was targeted by Iranian missiles in the first weeks of the conflict, the Turkish leader has kept a distance that has prevented him from being sucked into another regional war, and blocked Israel’s plans for Kurdish-led regime change in Tehran. (Syria, too, has resisted Trump’s attempts to bring it into the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.)

 

Diplomats who dealt with Erdoğan in his early years recall how he used to defer to his foreign ministry and seemed ill at ease in international settings: Foreign policy was never his natural forte. More recently, though, Erdoğan has “learned how to exploit international crises and provide Turkey’s services,” Tol said.

 

He has also been extremely lucky. Today, there is far less of a focus on democracy and human rights in Brussels; it has been overtaken by concerns over European security and efforts to fill the gaps left by Trump’s prevaricating Washington. Turkey, as the second biggest military in NATO and the country occupying the alliance’s eastern flank, has become central to that question.

 

Alienating Erdoğan is no longer an option. He has already proved that he is willing to stall the work of the alliance if he feels it is of benefit to him; in 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine, he used his veto power to stall Sweden and Finland’s accession to the bloc. Such a move could be fatal to NATO in 2026. Whatever Erdoğan is doing domestically, and however that clashes with NATO’s enshrined values, he is guaranteed a warm welcome in Brussels. In the immediate term, that is realpolitik. In the longer term, however, welcoming an autocrat could undermine the alliance: The test will come when Erdoğan’s aims inevitably diverge from NATO’s once again.

Africa’s Hypocritical Reparations Demand

By Wilfred Reilly

Sunday, July 12, 2026

 

One hundred and fifty years or so after the Western abolition of slavery, we have seen a busy few months for those who enjoy declaring their opposition to it.

 

A group representing most of the world’s African and Caribbean nations recently called for “a formal apology for transatlantic slavery” from every country to benefit from it. This demand hardly stands alone. As I noted back in November 2025, the African Union also launched “a new push for slavery and colonial reparations,” demanding tens of billions of dollars to compensate for “transatlantic slavery and the slave trade.” The General Assembly of the United Nations, meanwhile — a body generally sympathetic to Third Worldist demands — voted in March 2026 to recognize the white-run Atlantic portion of the historical slave trade as the “gravest crime” in all of human history.

 

To point out the politically incorrect obvious, there is an almost amusingly large logical problem with all of this. The list of every country “to benefit from slavery, colonialism, and conquest” at some point includes virtually every state in Africa — if not the world. As I noted in an earlier piece, most of modern Ghana — the nation that brought forward the apology resolution to the UNGA — is the territory of the “still-legendary Ashanti Empire . . . whose national economy was based almost entirely on trade in precious metals and in slaves.” Per a note in one scholarly resource, the sizable Ashanti army functioned primarily as “an instrument for capturing [slaves] in war.”

 

Modern-day Benin, for her part, is composed of the former kingdoms of Dahomey and Benin, which were some of the most legendary slave-trading states in history. Dahomey was long ruled over by the ruthless King Ghezo (1818–1858), who was responsible for perhaps the most widely cited quote about African slaving: “The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and glory of their wealth. The mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery!” Ghezo also, negotiating with European trading partners, once stated his market position as this: “We want three things — gunpowder, [musket] ball, and rum. We have three things to sell: men, women, and children.”

 

For her part, today’s rising regional power of Nigeria was home to the well-armed Aro Confederacy — which operated as “one of the leading exporters of slaves to Europe and the Americas from 1690 to 1902 [!],” selling almost 900,000 battle captives and other enslaved persons — and the even more formidable Sokoto Caliphate. Following its 1804 establishment by the Muslim general and scholar Usman dan Fodio, the caliphate grew by conquest to incorporate huge chunks of modern-day Niger, Burkina Faso, and Cameroon. More notably for our purposes, Sokoto is generally considered to have been the second-largest slave society in modern world history. At its peak, the massive overall population included between 1.1 and 2.5 million slaves.

 

Paler North Africans, whose countries are also part of the African Union, were as bad or worse historically. Algeria, “in particular, was the home base of the legendary Barbary Pirates, who were huge players in the [global] slave trade, enslaving both Africans and Europeans.” The pirates were so global a problem, for such a long time, that they directly inspired the “Shores of Tripoli” line in the United States Marine Corps Hymn.

 

Egypt, too, has been described as “[moving] human chattel overseas at least as far back as 641 AD, following the conquest of that ancient state by the Rashidun Caliphate.” That strikes me as a conservative estimate: I note in my own previous writing that “they didn’t build those pyramids with backhoes.” Morocco, similarly, was known for capturing and selling not only black Africans and other Caucasian Muslims but also “Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Greeks, Portuguese, Italians, the Irish, Scandinavians, Russians, Georgians, and any other nationalities sailing in inadequately armed sea-faring vessels.”

 

As all of this indicates, the global slave trade was a good deal more multicolored than it has recently been conventional to think in middle-class America. Ohio State professor Robert C. Davis famously estimates that perhaps 2 million white Europeans, in total, were sold to Muslim and/or black African masters during the course of the Barbary slave trade.

 

An even more fascinating and awkward point regarding historical slavery is that the West’s truly unique contribution to the global bondage trade was ending it. As a wise man once said, “While white European countries were no better than any others for most of history . . . the scope of their unique and solitary commitment to cleaning up this ancient vice during the past two centuries should never be under-estimated.” By 1808, the United States had banned the slave trade, while Britain established an entire West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy to “do battle with slavers and freeing slave captives.” Over five decades, the Squadron set 150,000 to 180,000 slaves free — while losing more than 2,000 men.

 

In contrast, where the Wicked Colonizers™ never landed, or stayed only briefly, slavery — and similar practices such as serfdom, debt peonage, and actual caste systems — persisted far longer. Far away from the (straight, two-edged) sword and the Cross, Bhutan banned slavery in 1957, Niger in 1959, and Saudi Arabia and North Yemen in 1961. Oman did so in 1970, Papua New Guinea in 1982, Niger in 2003, and Mauritania (in practice) in 2007. Chad did not fully criminalize the Peculiar Institution until 2017 — and Afghanistan just brought a “mild” version of it back following America’s withdrawal under President Joe Biden.

 

Tragic, to be sure. But, given the fact that fairly major nations practice slavery today, and that roughly 50 million human beings are slaves now, it also seems obvious that the white-led portion of the historical slave trade alone was not definitively The Worst Thing in History. It would, in fact, be impossible to actually define any such thing. As legendary Chicago columnist Mike Royko once said, in a joking column about whether “toughest man of all time” Cassius Clay could actually take down Saladin — or “Ung the Rock Eater” — all time is a very long time.

 

The Atlantic slave trade, which involved the transshipment of at least 12 million enslaved Africans to the New World (400,000 to the young USA) was obviously a horrific crime by modern moral standards, or any standard. But, speaking frankly, it does not stand out hard against the red record of human history. The Mongol conquests — which defeated China, Russia, Iran/Persia, Iraq, Korea, and every “Stan” — killed so many people that they cooled the planet by 2–3 degrees. World War II, in our own time, took 60 million to 85 million lives and included the Holocaust. The conquest of the New World, led by ambitious knights such as Cortés and Pizarro, wiped out 95 percent of a sizable indigenous population.

 

While it feels more than a bit tacky to “rank” in this fashion, the Atlantic slave trade was not even the largest or worst human slave trade. The Arabic/trans-Saharan trade lasted far longer, and included at least 17 million Africans along with millions of other human beings. The ancient Romans owned tens of millions of slaves across the lifespan of their empire and treated them far more harshly than even the coldest Confederate or Moorish master — often making half-naked prisoners of war fight literal lions and hippos in Rome’s famous arenas. Real-life gladiators could not, one recalls, leave or change jobs at will.

 

Although we wish to avoid total relativism, an obvious point underlying all of this is that laws and moral standards genuinely do vary across eras — heavily influenced by the incentives in play and the level of technology then available. Applying contemporary dorm-room morality to the deep past would not work out very well for anyone’s ancestors, and this does not mean that everyone’s ancestors were wicked orcs. Prior to the development of modern farm machinery and functional detention facilities for large numbers of tough prisoners, slavery was a universal human practice, and one considered marginally more humane than . . . the only other effective way of dealing with boatloads of war captives.

 

As the United States ambassador to the U.N. noted in response to the latest reparations demand: Few major nations “recognize a legal right to historical wrongs that were not illegal under . . . law at the time they occurred,” and a full review of the past using modern metrics would not paint the West in a worse light than any other civilization.

 

This is especially the case as it is, empirically and practically, very difficult to balance the total set of benefits versus harms associated with race wars that occurred 500 years ago. The previously discussed European conquest of the New World’s civilized Indians also introduced the Old World to tobacco, cocaine, and STDs such as syphilis — which have reaped a Western and Asian death toll reaching into the billions by now. The descendants of abused Africans in the Americas, particularly in the U.S. but also in such states as Bahamas and Barbados, are by far the richest and most culturally influential black people on Earth.

 

Perhaps the fairest and most obvious answer to the question of who owes what to whom is that no one owes anyone, at least at the group level. We can — and almost certainly should, for comity’s sake — simply choose to keep the deep past in the past.