A Closer Look at ‘Affordability’

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, December 15, 2025

 

If you want to know why Donald Trump and his three-legged psychedelic pinball machine of an administration are on the wrong side of Americans when it comes to economic performance, consider this interesting fact: Grocery inflation is more than twice as bad right now as it was in the closing days of Joe Biden’s presidency, when Americans turned on the incumbent president and his party before spurning his chosen successor while complaining—not without cause—that Democratic policies were making their grocery bills worse. Now it is Republican policies that are making grocery bills worse, in no small part because they are, at a fundamental economic level, nearly indistinguishable from the Democratic policies that had Americans so riled up in 2024.

 

Annualized inflation in what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls “food at home” (meaning groceries, a word our senescent president seems to believe he introduced into the political conversation) was at 2.7 percent in September of 2025, the most recent month for which there is public data—by comparison, the average annualized monthly measure of grocery inflation in 2024 was only 1.2 percent throughout 2024. (Because inflation is a compounding phenomenon, total grocery inflation in 2024 was 1.8 percent even though the average monthly increase was only 1.2 percent. If grocery inflation is found to have continued at its most recent rate through year-end, then total 2025 grocery inflation would amount to about 4.2 percent, keeping us well within more-than-twice-as-bad territory.) Total food inflation—meaning groceries plus food consumed outside the home—is even worse, running at 3.1 percent in the most recent survey, a little ahead of overall inflation.

 

This is a difficult thing to avoid noticing. I am sure that I am not the only one who has noted that my regular trips to Kroger (four hungry boys at home!) have jumped from around $140 per visit to around $200 per visit. My own household consumption puts us at a particularly unhappy point on the grocery-inflation distribution, inasmuch as we buy a considerable quantity of meat, milk, eggs, and the like—food items that have seen much more severe inflation than the overall model grocery cart.

 

What’s that look like?

 

When Donald Trump first took office in January of 2017, sirloin steak ran $7.79 a pound but today costs $14.14. Over the same period, ground beef went from $3.55/pound to $6.33/pound; eggs more than doubled in price from $1.60/dozen to $3.49/dozen—and that is down from a spike to $6.23 in March; a gallon of milk went from $3.32 to $4.13; coffee (take it from a father of four, three still in diapers) has zoomed from $4.47/pound to $9.14/pound. Ground chuck (you’re making chili this time of year, right?) has nearly doubled, and so has bacon. Chicken breasts are up 28 percent. The exceptions are few and far between: Prices are bananas—except for actual bananas, which have appreciated only one thin dime per pound.

 

Inflation per se is, as Milton Friedman insisted, a monetary phenomenon. But in the more colloquial sense of rising general prices, inflation can have several different causes—because that kind of price increase is the result of a change in the relationship between the amount of money available to chase goods and the amount of goods available to be chased, inflation in the common sense can be caused by both monetary and fiscal policy, by artificially low interest rates, and/or by changes in the availability of goods. Because Trump’s economic team consists of some of the smartest people in the business demeaning themselves to curry favor with the dumbest man ever to occupy the presidency—whose two terms in office were separated by an administration of off-the-leash progressives manipulating an elderly incompetent who was both dumb and mean at the height of his abilities but who was during his presidency cognitively indistinguishable from one of those reasonably priced bananas—Americans have been treated to a whole brain-damaged theme park of pro-inflation policies. The economy continues to be flooded with cheap money thanks to too much spending and too much debt (Treasury calculates that the U.S. government added about $72.7 billion in new debt in the two-week period ending on December 10) without adequate tax revenue to pay for the outlays. And the Trump administration is trying to oust the Fed chairman in order to pressure the supposedly independent monetary authority into driving interest rates down—which is exactly the opposite of what you’d want the Fed to do if you wanted prices to go down: Cheap credit is another way of saying cheap money. On the supply side, the administration has mucked up every possible thing with its idiotic (and unconstitutional) tariff policies, which have interrupted trade and broken supply chains in order to secure the administration’s goal of ... destroying thousands of U.S.-based manufacturing jobs, apparently. So, lots of money dumped into the demand side, and a supply side hamstrung by the freshest economic thinking of the 15^th century.

 

Don’t worry—it gets worse.

 

As Sen. Mark Kelly pithily put it in another context: “You can’t put that s—t back in the donkey.”

 

Let’s spend a minute with our old friend the efficient-market hypothesis (EMH). EMH is one of those concepts with a name that sometimes leads people astray: EMH doesn’t hold that markets always do things in a way that is efficient in the ordinary sense of the word (low cost, low waste, etc.) or that markets will always produce the most desirable outcomes from an efficiency point of view or anything like that: Efficient here refers to information, and the efficient-market hypothesis is the idea that the current price of an asset reflects all of the available relevant information. That is not the same thing as all the possible information. EMH is most useful as a forward-looking proposition: For example, if a law is going to come into effect that hurts the prospects of a company’s core business, EMH holds that this will be reflected in share prices today rather than at some point in the future when the costs are actually incurred. EMH is not limited to documentable facts—market efficiency in that sense incorporates expectations as well, with the assumption that conflicting expectations and forecasts will interact in such a way that both are reflected in asset prices: E.g., if 92 percent of investors expect that x will happen and 8 percent expect that not-x will happen, then asset prices related to x should reflect both sets of expectations in some proportion.

 

The same kind of thinking about future developments applies to phenomena well beyond the areas where the formal application of EMH is appropriate. And this is where I worry even more than I usually do about Sen. Kelly’s evacuated donkey. Setting aside the nontrivial possibility that Donald Trump will attempt for a second time to stage a coup d’état as his allotted time in office comes to an end, it is reasonable to think of the post-Trump era as within sight of where we are. (Bear in mind that many unfortunate people drown within sight of the shoreline.) The news about that is not all good: It seems clear to me at this point that Trump has succeeded in remaking the debased thing we still call “the Republican Party” in his own image in accord with his own policy preferences—which, on fiscal and trade matters, means a disastrous combination of profligacy and self-injury. If equity investors, importers, exporters, supply-chain managers, bond buyers, central bankers abroad, et al. come to believe, as there is good reason to believe, that the Republican Party is today at least as committed to fiscal incontinence as the Democratic Party, then that is going to have effects on everything from the interest the U.S. government has to pay on its debt to private business decisions about how and whether to serve the U.S. market at all, where to invest (especially in physical capital) and what to invest in, etc. Much of that will keep upward pressure on U.S. prices, though some of it (higher interest rates) should put downward pressure on prices. As my friend David Bahnsen sometimes points out, U.S. government borrowing rates are not that high right now, even if they are a little bit higher than in recent history: Treasury yields were roughly twice as high in the early 1990s as they are today (and damn near four times as high in the early 1980s), which means that there is a lot of room for interest rates to rise and remain under the ceiling of historical averages.

 

It is good that rates have not gone up that much—yet. It will be very, very bad if they do. In FY 2024, the U.S. government was obliged to spend just shy of $900 billion on interest payments, or about 13 percent of all federal spending and 18 percent of all federal revenue, on the debt it already was laboring under at that time—and the debt keeps growing.

 

If you think we have wandered far from our original point about inflation, we haven’t. Deficits are by nature stimulative—heavy public debt is common a driver of higher consumer prices.

 

With the usual caveats about the habit of thinking superstitiously about presidents and economic performance (COVID was the most important economic event of the past decade, and neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden was responsible for it), Donald Trump would very much like for us to think of this as the Age of Trump, so, let’s do him the courtesy of pretending that it is possible to take him seriously and look at how things have changed since he was first elected to the presidency in 2016.

 

New car prices averaged about $35,000 on Election Day 2016; today, the average new car costs almost $50,000. Trump’s preferred economic policies—now shared by most influential Republicans—would tend to press car prices higher in two ways: by engaging in protectionism for domestic producers, insulating them to some degree from price pressure from less expensive imports, and by pressing for artificially low interest rates, which have the same effect in the car industry as they do in housing and college tuition: allowing overall sales prices to rise as consumers take on more debt in response to debt subsidies. Kelley Blue Book finds that the share of vehicles selling for prices in excess of $80,000 is at an unprecedented level. Rising car prices, to be clear, are a long-term phenomenon that precedes COVID-era disruptions.

 

Likewise, housing inflation has been a real problem for a generation. (It is a real problem if you want to buy a house; it is a real boon if you already own one.) The housing index is up about 45 percent today over where it was when Trump took office in 2017. Again, it is a long-term trend—but have a gander at that price chart and see how it has grown steeper in recent years—again, a phenomenon that is not explained by COVID or some other similarly extraordinary development. Housing prices are high in part because U.S. policymakers spent decades treating rising home prices as though these were an unmixed economic benefit with no tradeoffs or downsides—no surprise, given that the richer and older people who own houses tend to vote more reliably than the poorer and younger people who are struggling to buy their first home. The federal government has worked hard to keep mortgages cheap, and local authorities have done their inflationary part by keeping new housing artificially scarce. Hence, lots of housing inflation. You know the old joke about the guy who hits himself in the head with a hammer because it feels so good when he stops? We should stop intentionally pushing housing prices higher.  

 

Gasoline prices are up 70 cents a gallon over where they were when Trump was sworn in in 2017 and unchanged from where they were when American voters idiotically decided that they could take Trump’s word for it when it came to lowering consumer prices. So, no big wins there, either.

 

Americans’ concerns about affordability are the result of a “con job,” Trump insists. He is kinda-sorta telling the truth without meaning to. There was a con job. Trump was the con artist, and his voters—numerous enough to put him back in the White House—were the marks. In reality, Donald Trump and Joe Biden have a lot in common when it comes to basic economic policies: tariffs and special-interest protectionism, too much spending, too much debt, too much political cowardice, supine congressional enablers all too happy to let the president take the lead and catch the flak. The result is a bipartisan consonance of destructive and generally inflationary policies.

 

And we all get to pay for that.

 

Words About Words

 

Slate, arguably the worst-edited publication in these United States, suggests that the moon “may be the literal key to human destiny.” A literal key is a literal object that you stick in a literal lock to literally unlock it. “Key” used in the way Slate is using it is never literal, always metaphorical.

 

And Furthermore

 

“What Happens if Obamacare Subsidies Expire?” asks the New York Times. Happy to help out here: What happens is that some financial obligations will be transferred from the people who are not receiving those insurance benefits to the people who are receiving those insurance benefits. That’s how subsidies work.

 

And Furtherermore

 

If a New York Times correspondent wrote as credulously about, say, biblical literalism as New York Times writers do about superstitious nonsense such as feng shui or modish dietary and fitness pseudoscience, he’d be laughed out of the room. He’d probably be fired. But bring on the silly Eastern pop-mysticism. The Times writes that feng shui “focuses on energetic flow through a space,” heedless of the fact that the energy in question does not flow through space because the energy in question does not exist. It is like the “innate intelligence” or “vital force” of chiropractic–it is a made-up thing.

 

So do get a load of this “neuroaesthetics” business, which should, the Times tells us, “gear the compass of design towards this idea of empathetic, responsive environments that make us feel like our best selves.” I suppose I shouldn’t bother pointing out that an environment, not being a sentient being, cannot be empathetic. It is interesting to me that a newspaper that is so profoundly editorially hostile toward the religion upon which the civilization that produced the New York Times is based remains so gullible when it comes to New Age goo.

 

Ship of Theseus, American-Style

 

From the New York Times:

 

In 2020 the Navy had a simple plan to build its next fleet of small warships, the Constellation class: take a European design and build it in America. But the Navy’s constant changes complicated the project. The shipbuilders and supply chain couldn’t keep up. By 2025, the Navy had overhauled 85 percent of the original design—and it still wasn’t final.

 

As the Times tells the story, the Navy requested some 4,000 specific changes, spent about $3.5 billion, and produced a grand total of 0.00 ships.

 

I thought about the famous Ship of Theseus thought experiment: How many design changes can you request before the design isn’t the design?

 

In Closing

 

The actor Peter Greene has passed away at the relatively young age of 60. It may border on speaking ill of the dead, but Greene had a particular gift: He was naturally skeezy-looking, skeezy-seeming, just generally skeezy. He made an impression in a relatively minor role as the fence Redfoot in The Usual Suspects, when, according to legend, he improvised by flicking a lit cigarette into Stephen Baldwin’s face. He lent his skeezy presence to the opening scene of Justified, in my view the finest Western in television history, as drug trafficker eating crab cakes in a Miami rooftop restaurant while simultaneously engaged in a classic high-noon standoff with a U.S. marshal. But he surely will be best remembered as the sadistic Zed in Pulp Fiction—“mister hillbilly rapist” in the words of one vengeful victim. Something about the guy’s face just made him fit those roles. And it takes all kinds of faces: Steve Buscemi (who also had a tiny but memorable role in Pulp Fiction) isn’t competing for parts with Brad Pitt. I don’t know anything about his personality or his life, but I knew his face, and I knew what to expect from it. A life in Hollywood isn’t necessarily glamorous—some guys just have to work for a living, and Peter Greene seems to have been one of those. But the work was good—and that is not the worst eulogy a working actor can receive.

 

The architect Frank Gehry also has passed away, at the age of 96. I am not an architecture critic, but I did live in a Gehry-designed building in Manhattan for some years, so I am intimately familiar with at least one piece of his work. It was a real pleasure to see my building from afar and to come home to it after a trip, or even after a long day. Pulling into the porte-cochère in a taxi made you feel like you were living in a movie. It was a special place, and I’m sure it still is. Naturally, the ceilings in the hallway leaked from the first years it was open, presumably from plumbing problems or condensation, it being unlikely that we were seeing rain coming through on the 27th floor of a 76-floor building.

 

Beautiful but high-maintenance–a familiar story if not quite a universal one.

 

Funny story about that neighborhood: There was a Denny’s nearby, on the ground floor of a different fancy building, whose residents had fought like hell to keep the restaurant from opening and insisting that a Denny’s was out of character for the neighborhood. (It wasn’t—Pace University was nearby.) Denny’s finally opened and cheekily responded by adding a special plate to its menu, the “Grand Cru Slam,” which was the same thing as a regular Denny’s “Grand Slam” except that it cost $300 and came with a bottle of Dom Pérignon. And, yes, people did order it. The Denny’s didn’t survive, though.

 

I’d say that New York isn’t what it used to be, but people have been saying that since there were working farms just north of 42nd Street. New York is what it used to be—that is part of its charm, and part of its problem.

Australia’s ‘Swift’ National Cabinet Is Bad, Actually

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, December 16, 2025

 

NPR explains why Australia’s government is able to make “swift legal changes” — unlike, say, the federal government here in the United States:

 

Part of the reason Australia’s government can act so quickly on political matters of national importance is because of something called the National Cabinet.

 

The National Cabinet is composed of the prime minister and the premiers and chief ministers of Australia’s six states and two territories.

 

It was first established in early 2020 as a way for Australia to coordinate its national response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, the group has convened to discuss a number of national issues, from a rise in antisemitic hate crimes to proposed age restrictions on social media use.

 

The National Cabinet doesn’t make laws, but its members attempt to agree on a set of strategies or priorities and work with their respective parliaments to put them into practice.

 

In America, NPR notes, things are rather different:

 

Gun control efforts in Australia inevitably draw comparisons to the U.S., where the Second Amendment dominates any discussion about firearms restrictions.

 

Clearly, NPR is frustrated by this. I am not. It is, of course, true that the Second Amendment prevents the federal government from imposing the sorts of gun-control regulations that now obtain in Australia. But so, by design, does the rest of the Constitution in which that provision sits. The enumerated powers doctrine limits what Congress may do per se. The Senate makes it difficult to pass controversial alterations to the status quo. And the Bill of Rights — not just the Second Amendment, but the Fifth and Fourth, too — serves to stack the deck in favor of the individual. NPR is correct to observe that, in Australia, the government can move in a “swift” manner. It is incorrect to imply that this is desirable. Over the last few decades, Americans have watched as countries that are ostensibly similar to the United States have responded to tragedies or national panics by rushing to roll back rights that, in America, have been set in stone. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom all now have “hate speech” laws that are routinely used to punish dissent. New Zealand has wiped out the right to bear arms. The United Kingdom is in the process of abolishing jury trials. Were such proposals to be introduced in the United States, the Bill of Rights would, indeed, “dominate any discussion.” And thank goodness for that!

 

To understand why this matters, one needs to look no further than to the fact that the institution that NPR is touting here — the “National Cabinet” — was created in response to Covid-19. One assumes that NPR thinks that this is a selling point. I think it is a warning sign. Australia’s response to Covid-19 was a totalitarian nightmare. Australia required its citizens to obtain exit visas before leaving the country, and then, thanks to the arrival caps and quarantine bottlenecks it imposed, barred many of them from returning for extended periods of time. It set up barriers between Australian states, separating families for months. It established a draconian quarantine system that had no parallel anywhere else in the Western world — except, perhaps, New Zealand. Melbourne, one of its major cities, instituted a lockdown for 260 days — the longest anywhere in the Anglosphere. And it did much of this without meaningful legislation or judicial oversight. These decisions were not coincidental to the establishment of the National Cabinet; they were the purpose of the National Cabinet. That this tool is now being used to respond to other crises all but guarantees that Australia will get similar results elsewhere.

 

Lest I be accused of Pollyannaism, let me concede upfront that the United States is not perfect, and that its systems do not always hold. While much better than Australia, America during Covid-19 was no paradise, either. Nevertheless, that we sometimes see American politicians doing illiberal or illegal things is not a flaw in our setup, but a confirmation of why that setup exists in the first instance. As James Madison famously observed, the Founders wrote down the rules by which the government must live because it knew full well that that, being human, those who ran that government would repeatedly try to break them. Thus, the material question is not, “does America’s Constitution immediately prevail in every single case?” but “does America’s Constitution prevail in most cases, and are the worst infractions eventually dealt with?” In America the answer to this second question is a resounding yes. In Australia, it is most decidedly not. That isn’t a bug; it’s the feature atop which our entire civilization has been built.

 

 

The New Wave of Violent Antisemitism Was Never About Israel

By Noah Rothman

Monday, December 15, 2025

 

A 50-year-old man and his 24-year-old son slaughtered 15 Jews on an Australian beach this weekend. The list of their victims includes a rabbi, a Holocaust survivor, and even a ten-year-old girl, among many more innocents.

 

In the attack’s wake, Israeli officials could not contain their outrage at their Australian counterparts. There had been so many warning signs that violent antisemitism was on the rise — a prejudice countenanced and coddled, they say, by Canberra.

 

Israeli intelligence cannot yet rule out an operational link between this terrorist attack and Iran, as well as Islamist terror networks affiliated with the Islamic Republic and other Sunni-dominated outfits. But it’s reasonable to assume that, even in the absence of a state sponsor, something would have set this tinderbox alight.

 

Over the twelve months that ended on September 30, Australia recorded over 1,650 “anti-Jewish incidents.” The Guardian suggests in its coverage of the Bondi Beach massacre that the uptick in violence is attributable to Israel’s defensive war in Gaza. After all, that’s when antisemitic violence skyrocketed, in the immediate aftermath of the worst one-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. But the violence in Australia had nothing to do with the War in Gaza, the combat phase of which ended more than two months ago. Nor were the other episodes of violent antisemitism that convulsed the globe.

 

Protesters marched in Amsterdam this weekend bearing Palestinian flags, harassed police, and chanted “blood on their hands,” “child murderers,” and “kill the Jews,” as they paraded past a concert hall during a Jewish-themed family event:

 

 

The situation deteriorated from there. The mob reportedly tried to breach police barriers and gain access to the facility sheltering their targets. Someone set off red and green smoke bombs, and the crowd clashed with police — a clash that resulted in an undisclosed number of arrests.

 

And in California, a family home decked out in identifiably Jewish holiday regalia was bombarded with a hail of bullets. Twenty rounds were fired into the Redlands home as the suspect, who was captured on camera, shouted antisemitic slurs, including, “F*** the Jews!”

 

The precipitating incident for these calculated acts of savagery wasn’t anything that took place in Israel or the Palestinian territories. The event that moved bloodthirsty assassins and mobs alike to terroristic violence was the first few nights of Hanukkah and the ostentatious displays of Judaic pride that accompany its celebration.

 

The international Jewish diaspora has come to expect its torment. That’s why expensive private security forces guard every synagogue, every Jewish day school. It’s why Jewish community centers spend exorbitant sums constructing airlock vestibules to evaluate potential threats before they gain access to teachers and children. It’s why Jewish events don’t reveal their location, even to attendees, until 24 hours out — just to give their would-be murderers less time to prepare.

 

None of that is new, although it is getting appreciably worse. And none of it has anything to do with the Jewish state’s geostrategic initiatives. These are the toxic fruits of a vile Jew hatred that had become observably more pronounced long before Hamas terrorists cascaded over Israel’s borders on October 7.

 

These horrors and those that are all but certain to come are not happening in a vacuum. This is a harvest of bloodshed that was sown and carefully tended to by this hatred’s custodians. It was abetted by those who are forever just asking questions but are never satisfied by answers that don’t lead back to the Jews. It was rendered thinkable by the complacent institutional stewards who turned a blind eye to anti-Jewish bigotry or sought to leverage the crippling inferiority complex at its root for their own ends. It is promoted by the enemies of Western civilization who seek to uproot the liberal social covenant and replace it with something darker — a project advanced one short-form video at a time.

 

It’s been happening under our noses, and it is getting worse. But none of it has anything to do with the state of Israel. It never has.

 

Those who are pathologically committed to or financially dependent on the promotion of antisemitism will surely blame the victims of this weekend’s anti-Jewish violence for their own fates. That can no longer be regarded as a quirky eccentricity that must be accommodated. Bloody consequences accompany the impoverishment of the stigma around antisemitism.

 

A civilized people would not tolerate that as the price of doing business in the marketplace of ideas. A civilized people would stand up for civilization. Is that who we are anymore?

Death Twitches

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, December 15, 2025

 

There are provocative lines in every Kevin Williamson column, but this bit tucked away at the end of last Friday's column landed like a grenade:

 

I have a sense, admittedly based on nothing more than subjective evaluation, that the Trump movement already is over, and that what we are seeing today is only its death twitches before rigor mortis starts setting in. A movement based on entirely negative deliverables—Épater la bourgeoisie!—is naturally going to be a short-lived thing.

 

Way to bury the lede, buddy.

 

My native pessimism makes me resist Kevin’s intuition, but not everyone is so afflicted. “I am not at all sure I'm right but I have this same sense,” The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf said of the passage quoted above. Other pundits have marveled in the same vein that the president seems to be losing his touch with his base. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene, an OG postliberal chud, no longer wants to be linked to Donald Trump’s political brand.

 

“Are you MAGA?” Lesley Stahl asked her recently during an interview with 60 Minutes. “I’m America first,” the soon-to-be-former congresswoman corrected her. “MAGA is President Trump’s phrase. That’s his, his political policies.” When pressed by Stahl whether that meant her association with MAGA is “over,” Greene confirmed it: “I’m America first. Yep.”

 

Anecdotes aren’t data, of course, but the data is also trending poorly for Trump. A new NBC News poll finds the share of GOPers who identify as “MAGA” rather than “traditional Republican” shrank from 57-43 in April of this year to 50-50 now. Among so-called MAGA Republicans, 70 percent say they strongly approve of Trump’s performance today versus 78 percent who said so eight months ago.

 

The state of the president’s movement resembles the state of the president himself, tired and obviously in decline although perhaps still a ways away from being fully kaput. Those “death twitches” might be more like minor seizures—not necessarily a sign of impending doom but compelling evidence that something seriously ain’t right.

 

We should be precise about terminology here. When Kevin refers to “the Trump movement,” I don’t take him to mean postliberalism writ large. The right’s authoritarian turn will persist for years to come, unfortunately, and will almost certainly have a proponent in the GOP’s 2028 presidential nominee. The populist Republican base has been too brain-damaged by a decade of Trump and conspiratorial right-wing infotainment to heal in the near term. It will linger for a long while in its civic coma, to America’s detriment.

 

What Kevin meant, I think, is that Trump-centric postliberalism is dying.

 

The president remains at the center of the right, but some of the satellites around him, like Greene, are beginning to spin out of orbit as his gravitational pull weakens. If you had to bet on whether that pull will regain strength over the next three years of lame-duckery or continue to gradually lose force, it’s obvious which way you would wager. The “sense” Kevin and Friedersdorf are having, I suspect, is that the political entropy we’re seeing at the moment will continue apace on the right and eventually pull the MAGA solar system apart.

 

If Trump-centric postliberalism really is experiencing its early death twitches, why is that?

 

Priorities.

 

It’s because the president, strangely, doesn’t share the priorities of either of the two factions of his MAGA base.

 

One faction is right-wingers who strained under Biden-era inflation and embraced the hype about Trump’s ability to turn things around. They’re fine with postliberalism, but for them it’s more of a side dish to the main course of economic revival—or, perhaps, a means to that end, with Trump wielding authoritarian powers like a wand to work his supposed magic on the cost of living. Replacing an out-of-touch Democrat with a populist strongman who champions “the forgotten man” could only help with affordability, right?

 

It hasn’t helped. And not only hasn’t it helped, the president can barely be bothered to pretend to care. The Washington Post has a story today about conservative pollster Mark Mitchell visiting the White House recently to urge Trump to refocus on the “pragmatic economic populism” that his base wants, only to have Trump steer the conversation around to … golf. “To the extent to which we were talking about the economic populism message, he wasn’t as interested as I would have hoped,” Mitchell complained.

 

Of course he isn’t interested. Inflation was an irresistible line of attack for Trump as a candidate, but it’s forever an afterthought in his economic agenda. Lay aside the obviously inflationary policies he’s pursued, like pushing various forms of stimulus or browbeating the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates: No one who cared a lick about affordability would have chosen 2025 as the year to start the trade equivalent of a nuclear war.

 

A traditional politician would at least seize the moment to do a bit of Clintonian pain-feeling, but our president is spiritually incapable of empathy, as America was reminded yet again on Monday morning. Instead Trump has reverted to his usual tactics of defensiveness and denialism, encouraging MAGA to be happy with less and insisting that his economy should be graded an A+++++ despite consumer confidence falling below Great Recession levels.

 

He thinks, or wants Americans to think, that the affordability crisis is a “hoax” manufactured to hurt him politically. But even some of his fans can’t swallow that lie, with 4 in 10 Republicans telling CBS News last month that the president is making prices and inflation sound better than they really are. (Across the entire public, 60 percent said so.) As GOPers grow disillusioned and lose faith in Trump’s economic acumen, MAGA is weakening and starting to twitch.

 

The other faction of his base is what we might call culture-war populists, people drawn to the president not because they’ve been seduced by the economic wonder of Peronism but because of his willingness to use state power against their cultural enemies. These are true postliberals, keen to expose and dismantle the “hidden hand” of the old establishment that’s supposedly causing all of the country’s problems. To them, “drain the swamp” means much more than just reducing the influence of lobbyists in Washington.

 

The wrinkle is that Trump no longer agrees with them about who and what “the swamp” consists of.

 

Three cultural hobby horses have consumed far-right media this year. One is the Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, the second is the murder of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, and the third is Israel’s influence over the U.S. government. In all three cases, Trump is on the wrong side of the chud-o-sphere. He did everything he could to discourage the release of Epstein material; he hasn’t commented on the insane conspiracy theories about Kirk’s assassination being pushed by Candace Owens; and he remains a staunch ally of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu, to the dismay of the Carlson-Fuentes right.

 

He just doesn’t matter much anymore to the stuff culture-war populists are most interested in.

 

Things might be different if Democrats controlled at least one chamber in Congress, redirecting those populists back toward partisan warfare. Because the GOP has a trifecta in Washington, however, a stridently anti-establishment postliberal faction finds itself in the awkward position of being aligned with the establishment itself, with no “hidden hand” to rally against. The obsessions with Kirk’s murder and Israel are an obvious attempt to fill that void in the same way that QAnon was during Trump’s first term, giving a paranoid revolutionary faction something to revolt against at a moment when it’s not allowed to revolt against the government that the president leads.

 

“A movement based on entirely negative deliverables,” as Kevin put it, really needs an enemy to hold it together.

 

Absent one, go figure that the, ahem, intellectual energy among postliberals has shifted away from mindlessly defending Trump and his agenda and toward their disputes with each other, with predictably crankish results. “The Right’s media apparatus is how the Right teaches its followers how to think, and it’s currently getting consumed by conspiracy, psychodrama, and tabloid conflicts,” right-wing activist Christopher Rufo warned recently. “If left unchecked, it will turn the audience into the equivalent of a Third World click farm.”

 

The audience has been the equivalent of a Third World click farm for years, but the fact that even someone like Rufo who dines out on it has begun to notice and worry is significant. Trump is no longer the chief preoccupation of many of the media barnacles who rode his ascendance to fame and fortune, leaving them free to let their freak flags fly—and now that they have, those flags are freaky enough to alarm even some of the other freaks. That too feels like a death twitch.

 

The future.

 

Miraculous recoveries have been known to happen when someone is nearing death, of course.

 

A blue wave next fall that hands Democrats a House majority for the last two years of Trump’s term might hit MAGA like a jolt from a defibrillator. At some point, Hakeem Jeffries’ caucus will move to impeach the president and the right will dutifully rally around its leader, no matter how impeachable his conduct might be. That could boost Trump’s gravitational pull the same way that being indicted did in 2023.

 

There’s also a chance that he’ll connive to run for a third term in 2028, although it’s less likely than it was six months ago. Between his declining health and declining public confidence in his economic know-how, it’s hard to imagine there’ll be much enthusiasm for Trump 3.0 outside of the most diehard cultish right-wing circles. But one never knows: There’s nothing that makes postliberals hotter under the collar than a show of strongman bravado aimed at some seemingly invulnerable law or norm. The right might rally behind the president less because they’re eager for four more years than for the sheer nihilistic transgressive thrill of flouting the Constitution.

 

But as I said earlier, if you had to bet, you’d bet that MAGA will grow less devoted to Trump as time wears on. He’s unlikely to reverse course on tariffs or to embrace any of the key conspiracies that have captured his fans’ imaginations, after all, so a political comeback will depend almost entirely on whether he lucks into an economic rebound. Even if he does, his health might be sketchy enough come next year that supporters will begin discouraging the “third term” talk anyway, fearing a replay of the Biden disaster if Trump persists in running in 2028 and then melts down a few months before the election.

 

Another way to consider the staying power of MAGA is this: What will the point of this presidency be over the next three years?

 

It feels strange to ask that question about an executive who’s consolidated power more aggressively than any predecessor since Franklin Roosevelt, but I do think his base might soon face a crisis of meaning. What will Trump supposedly be raring to do when he gets out of bed in the morning (or the afternoon, I should say) between now and 2028 that might reasonably cause postliberals to make their politics Trump-centric again?

 

The correct answer to any question about galvanizing the right is usually “immigration,” but immigration seems like a problem that’s both solved and unsolvable. The president’s biggest policy success since returning to office has been ending the ingress at the southern border, but now that that crisis has eased, the issue no longer enjoys the same salience. (Just check the results of special elections lately.) “This is the paradox of politics,” Peggy Noonan wrote recently. “Every time you solve a major problem, you’re removing a weapon from your political arsenal.”

 

It’s not the border that’ll preoccupy Trump’s immigration agenda for the rest of his term, it’s the task of meaningfully reducing the population of illegals who are already here. But that mission is, to some extent, impossible: ICE is still far below the quota of daily arrests that the White House has set for it, and the bad press it’s generating by focusing on nonviolent migrants has already begun to alienate some right-wing fellow travelers. If the president tries to rally his base by getting more aggressive with deportations over his final three years, his policy will almost certainly involve more brutality, more cases of mistaken identity, and do more economic damage as illegal workers leave the labor force en masse. And that will damage him politically on balance.

 

So immigration probably isn’t the key to a Trump political revival that ends the MAGA death twitches. And if that won’t do it, what will?

 

He remains keen to broker peace in Ukraine and beyond, but his base isn’t very interested in foreign policy, and insofar as they are, the president is going awfully easy on the one country his supporters have traditionally been eager to contain. Beyond that, he’s mostly focused on passion projects—building ballrooms, putting his name on federal agencies, demagoging Somali immigrants, making America white again, threatening dying cable news networks, accusing people who question his health of “sedition,” and of course sticking his thumb in as many pies as possible.

 

Every good Republican wants their president to get fabulously rich off of his office, to be sure, but that’s not much of a cause to sustain the next three years.

 

We’ll know in 11 months just how deadly these recent twitches are, I think. More spasms will happen between now and November—let’s see how many right-wingers conspicuously don’t share Trump’s fury if the Supreme Court strikes down his tariff authority, for instance—but it’ll take a midterm blowout to trigger full-on MAGA death convulsions. Even then, the patient might pull through: Some Republicans will treat the results as further proof that the party can’t win without Trump on the ballot and therefore rallying around the president as Democrats prepare to take the House gavel is essential.

 

But if you’ve spent the last decade praying for the right to decide that it’s time at last to move on from Trump, a midterm bloodbath next year a few months after he turns 80 is as close as you’ll get since January 6 to having your prayers answered. There will be lots of chatter in the aftermath about “Trump fatigue,” the future, and the impending 2028 cycle, and stakeholders ranging from Trump diehards to radical postliberals to traditional conservatives will all begin clustering to form their own centers of political gravity as the MAGA solar system pulls apart. Entropy always wins eventually.

Conservatism Can’t Conserve Itself

Matthew J. Franck

Tuesday, December 16, 2025

 

The past decade, since the entry of Donald J. Trump into electoral politics, has been a disorienting one for … well, everyone. But especially, perhaps, for “movement” conservatives who regard the principles they have always held dear to be as sound as ever, but beleaguered in practice by the events of this young century. Conservatism, from this point of view, should have emerged from the Bush and Obama years bloodied but unbowed, ready to refresh and recommit itself to principles of classical liberalism—the rule of law, the free market, limited government, fiscal restraint, the protection of equal human dignity, and American leadership of strong alliances with the free world—all while thinking afresh about policies that meet the new problems of the day.

 

Yet that form of conservatism—the movement that had its innings under Reagan and the two Bushes, and went toe to toe with Clinton and Obama—is now eclipsed by a new right that is in many ways very old and reactionary: preferring authority to law and rent-seeking to free markets, cheap moralism to authentic morals, and a fearful and inward-looking nationalism to a confident, patriotic internationalism. The proud boast of “MAGA” in fact promises to make America smaller, meaner, and poorer. Even religion is distorted by proximity to the black-hole moral implosion of the new right.

 

So too is the life of the mind. In the last decade, many thinkers and writers on the right—academics, think tankers, and journalists—have worked overtime to craft intellectual rationales that will undergird, shore up, or justify Trump’s ambitions as candidate and president. The results in terms of positive programs are various and diffuse, the common denominator (apart from a general attraction to Trump) being a renunciation of some or all of the elements of classical liberalism described above.

 

In Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, political theorist Laura K. Field surveys the various players in this chaotic scene. We meet a motley assortment of thinkers and publicists: “Claremonters,” national conservatives, postliberals and Catholic integralists, authoritarians avowedly drawn to monarchy, Nietzschean wrecking balls, tech-bro futurists, Reformed Christian nationalists, and devotees of the Third Reich’s second-rate legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Some of these people developed their ideas before Trump emerged on the scene; all of them have become remoras to his shark.

 

Field spent many years in close proximity to some of the figures in her narrative; she was first an undergraduate and a master’s student of Leon Craig, a notable Straussian at the University of Alberta, earned a Ph.D. under Thomas Pangle and Lorraine Smith Pangle at the University of Texas at Austin, and has taught at both Georgetown and American University in Washington. This education brought her into the world of conservative academia’s conferences, seminars, fellowships, summer programs, and D.C. institutions. I have never met or communicated with Field, but I am acquainted with 15 of the 35 people in the Dramatis Personae at the beginning of her book, and I’ve met upward of 50 of the people in her index.

 

Not surprisingly, given this overlap of my circle and Field’s, I too know a great many people who have “gone MAGA.” Some of my oldest friends—among them fellow academics—have voted for Donald Trump three times, and I won’t deny that our differences on this matter make for some friction in those friendships. Most of the time our mutual affection is best served by avoiding the subject. Thus, I don’t have a good sense of how much some of my friends are drawn to this or that branch of Field’s “MAGA New Right,” and for all I know, even my act of writing this review might be viewed by one or two of them as a provocation. But they already know my antipathy to Trump as well as I know their attraction to him, so I must bank on our history and a reciprocal generosity of spirit.

 

I mention this personal background for reasons I hope to make plain in a moment. Laura Field’s politics and mine are very different: She’s a liberal, and I’m a conservative. I am also a full generation her senior. Yet I know enough of the world she is describing to say that her account is a fair-minded one. She has her unexamined priors (e.g., that “marriage equality” was the issue at hand in the Obergefell case), but she is not dismissive of the ideas she discusses, never flattening them with an iron but showing them in the round with an appreciation of their contours. Field does not make straw men or caricatures of those she disagrees with, and that is very much to her credit—even if the reader disagrees with her judgments, as I sometimes do. She has read the books and essays (even the doctoral dissertations!), listened to the podcasts, watched the videos, attended the conferences. And her background as a scholar equips her to understand what she reads and hears. As personal as this book sometimes is, it is nonetheless commendable for a certain kind of detachment that hears before condemning.

 

And condemn it surely does. After her introduction, Field devotes chapters 2 and 3 to the Claremonters and other Straussians. From these precincts issued the obscene Claremont Review of Books essay “The Flight 93 Election” in September 2016, written by Michael Anton under a Roman pseudonym. The idea that America’s constitutional republic would be utterly and permanently lost if such a center-left mediocrity as Hillary Clinton were elected president was ludicrous on its face. That was merely paranoid; what was obscene was the title metaphor extended in the essay, that voting for Donald Trump was akin to the suicidal heroism of the passengers on an airplane headed for the capital with terrorists in the cockpit.

 

But paranoid catastrophism is the seedbed of authoritarianism. Trump was, to everyone’s surprise including his, elected. And if one bought into the notion that everything was at stake in his election, then his presidency’s combination of incompetence, malevolence, and corruption (now far worse in his second term) could be excused, justified, even celebrated because no quarter could possibly be given to the hero’s enemies. Imagine viewing the “No prisoners!” scene in Lawrence of Arabia not as a tragedy but as a righteous beat-down: This became the attitude of MAGA’s willing elite supporters, not just of its rank and file.

 

This same self-vulgarization of an intellectual elite can be seen among the postliberals and the national conservatives, Field’s subjects later in the book. That they could welcome into their ranks such permanently adolescent horse-frighteners as Curtis Yarvin and Costin Alamariu is an indication of how low the MAGA elite were prepared to go. That they would then go so far as to manufacture factual and legal grounds for keeping Trump in office after he lost the 2020 election was something that many of us still did not anticipate—at least I didn’t. But “the worst is not, so long as we can say, ‘this is the worst,’” as Edgar remarks in King Lear. And so came something still worse, as the right rallied around a man who had whipped up a crowd to attempt a coup on his behalf, and ultimately returned him to office. Once the Flight 93 mindset is adopted, nothing is off-limits.

 

The urgency of Field’s argument falters a bit in chapters 8 and 9, as she takes up such damp squibs as the Trump-sponsored “1776 Report” and the right’s opposition to corporate “ESG” strategies and to critical race theory in education. And her footing is not terribly sure in chapter 10, on Adrian Vermeule’s “common good constitutionalism,” which will remain a hothouse theory so long as American constitutionalism retains its rule-of-law antibodies (fingers crossed but I’m not alarmed, yet).

 

I highly recommend Furious Minds for readers who want to understand the views of the self-appointed intellectual vanguard of MAGA. If you have wondered how long-established institutions of respectable conservatism like the Heritage Foundation and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute have come to sacrifice intellectual probity to partisan slavishness, Field’s book can help you understand.

 

What puzzles me, especially because I know some of the actors in her tragic farce, is why they have attached themselves to a politics of extremism, why they have largely embraced a “no enemies to the right” posture, and why they so readily resort to “whataboutism” to excuse the actions of the worst president in living memory. Field’s answer to such “why” questions is that intellectuals are naturally drawn to what she calls “Ideas First” thinking (she invokes Richard M. Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences as emblematic). There’s something to that, and many of her subjects could indeed profit from more study of history, economics, and contemporary social conditions. But on their merits, so many of their ideas are hollow vanities that I come away still wondering. When the ivory tower turns out to be made of beige plastic, something has gone badly wrong.

 

Another reviewer of this book, whom I respect, faults Field for not recognizing that the chief cause of the radicalization of the right is the radicalization of the left—a kind of Newtonian “equal and opposite reaction” account of things. But I think that’s wrong. American conservatism for six decades worked to counteract the left while policing its own ranks in light of enduring principles of classical liberalism—principles that both embody traditional American justice and have a proven track record. Something has changed in the practical environment—of political parties, of media and information consumption, of former gatekeeping institutions, of the academy itself—that has eroded conservatism’s ability to conserve itself. And the fish, as we know, rots from the head down.

The Revolutionary Terrorist ‘Liberation Fronts’ Are Back

By Noah Rothman

Monday, December 15, 2025

 

According to Donald Trump’s Justice Department, a left-wing terrorist cell calling itself the “Turtle Island Liberation Front” was in the final preparatory stages of what could have been a horrific bombing campaign. What is “Turtle Island” and who must it be liberated from, you ask? That’s the name radical “indigenous” activist groups give the whole of the North American continent — a moniker supposedly derived from a Lenape (Delaware) creationist myth. Turtle Island’s occupiers are, well, all of us.

 

Attorney General Pam Bondi called Turtle Island a “far-left, pro-Palestine, anti-government, and anti-capitalist” organization. None of this is as contradictory as it may sound to rational observers. The potentially violent talk themselves into a variety of rationales for political violence, and many of them subscribe to what the FBI refers to as “salad bar” terrorism. In short, the addled and violently inclined cobble their own bespoke blend of ideologies together to craft an extremist doctrine that justifies the violence to which they were already inclined.

 

It’s not unique or even remarkable to see a left-wing terror cell evidence support for the narratives the Soviet Union promulgated in Moscow’s efforts to demonize the Zionist project when that project was no longer typified by subservience to Moscow. Likewise, the organization advocates “decolonization and tribal sovereignty,” and the “liberation of all colonized people across the world” in its fight against “fascist colonizers.” That’s the language used by the vandals who commit “ecotage” — to borrow the portmanteau preferred by the violent left — who conduct attacks on infrastructure in the name of radical primitivism. It’s not even shocking to see anti-capitalism wedded to anarchistic anti-government sentiments. These disparate philosophies have a long and ignominious history of animating violent left-wing movements.

 

And that is what “TILF” was. “They were allegedly planning coordinated IED [improvised explosive device] bombing attacks on New Year’s Eve,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote of the four suspects arrested in California, “targeting five separate locations across Los Angeles.” Separately, a fifth individual allegedly linked to TILF was arrested in New Orleans while reportedly planning a separate attack.

 

“Free Palestine. Free Hawaii. Free Puerto Rico,” read a missive associated with one TILF account. “Freeing the world from American imperialism is the only way to a safe and peaceful future.”

 

An FBI law-enforcement graphic showing the four suspects taken into custody in the alleged plot. (FBI)

 

There is remarkable symmetry between the actions in which this alleged terror network planned to take, the language it uses, and the disparate causes to which it is attracted, and the left-wing domestic terror groups of the early and mid-20th century. Their likeness is so eerily reflected in the reemergence of organized left-wing violence in America that we cannot be sure it isn’t a conscious homage. The correspondence would be obvious to those who can connect the historical dots. Unfortunately, there is a cottage industry abroad devoted to retailing the notion that left-wing political violence is, if not a mirage, at least so rare as to be a subject unworthy of study.

 

My forthcoming book, Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America, minces no words about the nature of this reemergent threat. It aims to give policymakers the tools and, importantly, permission to recognize what a wave of left-wing political violence looks like before it crests. The book debuts on May 19, and I hope you will consider pre-ordering it.

 

In certain circles — some of which control the commanding heights of American culture and academia — it is popular to dismiss the heightened threat posed by the violent left as though the menace was a “myth.” But the danger is real and present, and it will get worse until the public summons the courage to confront it. 

Welcome Back, Chile

By John Fund

Monday, December 15, 2025

 

The news that José Antonio Kast, a longtime free-market and anti-communist figure in Chile, won that country’s presidency in a landslide on Sunday was met with some interesting international reactions.

 

Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s dictator, had no official comment, though his diplomats privately scoffed that Chile was now back in the grip of “the United States empire” and would do its bidding.

 

Javier Milei, Argentina’s libertarian president, posted his enthusiastic support on social media: “One more step for our region in defence of life, liberty, and private property. I am sure we will work together so that the Americas embrace the ideas of freedom and we can free ourselves from the oppressive yoke of 21st-century socialism.”

 

Since his election in 2023, Milei has accomplished a renaissance of Argentina’s economy, and he can be pleased that his success inspired Chileans to move in his direction. So much so that Kast’s victory margin of 58 percent over left-winger Jeannette Jara’s 42 percent exceeded the twelve-point margin by which Milei beat the left-wing Peronists in 2023.

 

Chile and Argentina are but the latest examples of Latin American nations swinging to the right in the past two years. Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Honduras have also seen the electoral defeat of left-wing administrations — although foreign observers note that Venezuela’s Maduro has remained in power only through massive voter fraud.

 

Kast’s victory hinged on three key issues that angered a majority of Chilean voters and on which he offered specific solutions.

 

Crime

 

In a 2025 Gallup survey on global safety, less than 40 percent of Chileans feel safe walking alone at night where they live.

 

As the New York Times has reported, Chile’s violent-crime rate grew during Covid and has remained high. The increase has been fueled in part by violent gangs and international criminal organizations that have infiltrated the country.

 

Immigration

 

Chile is a nation of 20 million people, of which at least 2 million are recent immigrants — of which a large chunk are illegal, putting a strain on social services. Criminal gangs recruit members from the ranks of illegals and also prey on Venezuelan immigrants crossing into Chile over its borders with Peru and Bolivia.

 

Economic Growth

 

From 1980 to 2020, Chile experienced an economic miracle. It peacefully emerged from a dictatorship and implemented free market policies that made it the richest country on the continent. Poverty fell from 45 percent to 6 percent of the population. Per capita income since 1990 tripled, to $24,000 a year.

 

That miracle was created by Chilean students of Milton Friedman. They created the freest economy in the developing world, built on a foundation of property rights, free trade, a low flat tax, private personal retirement accounts replacing the social-security system, and the deregulation of key industries.

 

But over those four decades, the left steadily infiltrated the nation’s cultural institutions: schools, universities, churches, and media. The result of this indoctrination, combined with growing concerns about inequality and hikes in tuition fees, led to the 2021 victory of 35-year-old former student-protester Gabriel Boric as the new president of Chile. The Communist Party became a part of his governing coalition.

 

Boric tried to implement his vision of “social justice.” But a constitutional rewrite he supported crashed and burned, 62 to 38 percent in a 2022 referendum. Boric’s economic policy saw an expansion of regulations and taxes. As a result, Chile’s economy stagnated, with today’s unemployment at 9 percent and economic growth at just over 2 percent.

 

Boric’s approval rating fell to below 30 percent. That gave José Antonio Kast, whose family played a role in shaping Chile’s economic reforms in the 1980s, an opening to run for president on a promise to return to Chile’s free market model. He proposed to trim regulations, cut corporate taxes, and slash public spending by 7 percent in just over one year. Kast has predicted the his program will increase growth to 4 percent a year.

 

Kast called his platform — crime, immigration, and economic growth — a three-legged stool that would “make Chile great again.”

 

He also loosened up his style from his two previous failed presidential races. Gone were endless speeches; in were short TikTok videos showing him actively campaigning. The playing of patriotic music at rallies was downplayed in favor of a Spotify “Disco Kast” called “la Fuerza del Cambio” — the Force of Change. It featured hard rock, K-pop, reggae, and reggaeton, and it won the top spot on Spotify’s Chile list.

 

Kast’s campaign did more than borrow from U.S. political tactics. Bloomberg reports that his landslide win “propels Chile into a U.S.-Led Conservative Orbit” that will find a friendly welcome in Donald Trump’s White House.

 

The Wall Street Journal editorial page agrees and suggests that Trump should help Kast by “reducing tariffs on Chile and making it a trade and economic partner.” Latin American voters who are embracing conservative policies and values deserve that helping hand. If their countries become strong and free, it will only help the U.S.’s security and economy.

C.A.A. on Short Breat

 The C.A.A. will be on a short break starting Monday. Regular posts will resume later in the coming week.

The True Toll of Conspiracy Theories

By Eva Terry

Sunday, December 14, 2025

 

It was a sunny September afternoon. I was standing in the crowd at Utah Valley University with my VoiceMemos app rolling when I watched Charlie Kirk’s body jerk backward. He closed his eyes and fell out of his chair.

 

It was the gunshot heard from every phone, viewed by millions almost immediately. I heard it with my own ears. I saw what it did with my own eyes. And I, along with everyone else, want justice for the Turning Point USA founder and slain father of two.

 

Tyler Robinson currently sits in Utah County Jail, facing six felony charges and a Class A misdemeanor. The 22-year-old turned himself in to authorities in Washington County the night after the shooting.

 

Though he has not pleaded one way or the other (and will likely not do so until May at the earliest), the case against him is strong, and empirical evidence points its iron finger at Tyler Robinson.

 

He had a motive, he was seen on camera, the gun’s trigger had his DNA, and he confessed to his parents before turning himself in to the FBI.

 

The bolt-action rifle used in the killing belonged to Robinson’s grandfather. His own family told authorities he had shifted politically to the left; during a family dinner shortly before Kirk was assassinated, Robinson brought up the UVU event and said the 31-year-old was “full of hate and spreading hate.”

 

Yet since Kirk’s death on September 10, there has been a steadily growing, insatiable thirst for conspiracy — and it is not without consequence.

 

The conspiracies germinated immediately following the shooting. In Robinson’s hometown, three days after Charlie Kirk was killed, I interviewed a mother of two young sons. In earnest, she told me it was not Robinson who’d killed Kirk; it was a TPUSA donor with grievances. In our brief conversation, she referenced a plane that took off from the Provo Airport around the time of the shooting and added that she’d seen the video of him being shot, and the bullet path defied logic. “We live in a world where there’s a lot of stuff going on with the government, and I think we just need to take our precautions and do our due diligence as citizens, not jump to conclusions as far as damning him and convicting [Robinson],” the woman told me.

 

About a week later, outside UVU’s student- and community-made vigil, I spoke with a man who told me he’d driven down from Washington State that morning to check out the grounds for himself. As an ex-military guy, he didn’t think Robinson was the culprit either. An inexperienced kid wouldn’t be capable of taking apart the gun that quickly, and his escape route didn’t make sense, he told me. I’m not sure what he discovered when I pointed him in the direction of the amphitheater, but I hope it was worth the twelve-hour drive.

 

Enter Candace Owens.

 

I have neither the word count nor the will to explain the accusations Owens makes across her 40-plus episodes on Charlie’s murder. It suffices to say that in her mind, TPUSA is guilty, his wife Erika is guilty, Jews are guilty, the FBI is guilty, Mormons are guilty, France is guilty, and Egypt is guilty. They’re all in on it; they’re lying to you, she says.

 

Guilty of what? We’re not sure. And guilty why? That, too, we don’t know.

 

The people bearing the deepest grief and trauma from Charlie’s murder — Erika and the staff at Turning Point — have been recast as villains in Owens’s universe. With an audience of millions, she declared, “Charlie Kirk was betrayed by the leadership of Turning Point USA and some of the very people who eulogized him on stage.” Candace Owens has flipped the truth on its head.

 

TPUSA asked Owens to join a special livestream event on Monday to address her claims against them, but she now says she will instead offer a rebuttal on her own show.

 

Though conspiracy theories are nothing new, they are newly mainstreamed. As journalist Andy Ngo recently reasoned, self-styled journalists like Candace Owens who peddle conspiracy theories as hoaxes and innuendo are not harmless. “News” with no guidelines, no accountability, and no guardrails reduces a situation to fiction.

 

This is not to suggest the traditional press is faultless. The original sin of journalism is that it profits from tragedy, mayhem, and dirty laundry. But in exchange, it offers the simple reward of knowing what’s going on. What happened? Who did it? Why?

 

But Owens and those pushing conspiracy theories around Charlie Kirk’s death are counterfeiting knowledge, jeopardizing the judicial process and skewing public perception.

 

When I asked a friend what he’d heard about Robinson recently, he said he’d seen that he was at Burger King when Kirk was shot. He added, “Didn’t Tyler plead not guilty in court or something?” Both claims are easy to verify as false.

 

The Manhattan Institute recently published a study that found a disturbing positive correlation between believing in conspiracy theories and justifying political violence. And it makes sense: If you believe your government conspires against its own citizens and shoots the people who defend it, there is fertile ground for disobeying its laws against killing, looting, and burning. The left has discredited the U.S. government for decades, saying it’s built on slavery, racism, sexism, and colonialism. And perhaps this indictment provides solid justification for Antifa to act the way it does.

 

When institutional distrust and paranoid ideologies breed, their offspring is ugly. It has been ugly for the left; it is starting to look ugly for the right.

 

What do conspiracy theories do on a human level? A few days ago, Erika Kirk re-entered the national spotlight, and in an interview with Fox News, she said the conspiracy theories about herself and TPUSA are a “mind virus.” “Just know that your words are very powerful,” she said. “We have more death threats on our team and our side than I have ever seen. We have kidnapping threats — you name it, we have it. And my poor team is exhausted.”

 

But conspiracy theories wound more than their targets. They take a toll on the believer; they exacerbate helplessness and make it difficult to forgive.

 

I was surprised at Owens’s reaction on her own podcast to Erika Kirk’s interview with Jesse Watters last month. With an earnestness reserved only for the widow of a murdered husband, Erika said she has never been angry with God for her new reality. “I know that He uses everything, even what the enemy meant for evil,” she said.

 

But Owens disagreed. In what she called a “hypercritical” self-assessment, she said she cannot forgive Robinson, “because I cannot forgive until I know what happened.” Then she resumed untangling her cold spaghetti slop of who conspired to kill Charlie.

 

But perfect knowledge is not a prerequisite for forgiveness, or it would be an impossible task. In fact, the Creator of the human experience proclaimed on the cross at Calvary, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

 

It’s natural to want the complicated universe to make sense. It’s what drives scientific discovery, honest journalism, and a thorough judicial system. But truth cannot be reliably discovered on a podcast-a-day schedule, especially when the shows are incentivized to shock and awe. Fortunately, while the wheels of justice turn slowly, they do turn — and despite the distractions from Owens and her fellow conspiracy theorists, justice will ultimately be served for Charlie Kirk.