Auron Macintyre

Americans are looking for safety in an increasingly chaotic country. Mass immigration, collapsing social trust, and weakening civic bonds have transformed many communities from places where neighbors knew one another into anonymous zones governed by suspicion.

Liberals increasingly treat politics as religion . They may have abandoned traditional faith, but they have not abandoned devotion. They possess saints, heretics, rituals, taboos, pilgrimages, and a vision of salvation. That political faith has given progressives the commitment required to capture institutions, build machines, and shape the future.

Voters elected Donald Trump to bring prices down, not to be lectured by Republican influencers about why groceries, gas, and housing are actually affordable.

Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Maura Healey, a lesbian who claims to be Catholic, signed legislation this week liberalizing abortion while surrounded by progressive women celebrating the right to murder their healthy babies up till birth. To conservatives who rightly regard late-term abortion as the killing of a viable child, the scene was grotesque.

When I first entered the public arena, the focus of my work was almost entirely on why the right needed to take power seriously. Conservatives had suffered a devastating string of political and cultural losses because they focused on argument and ideology while paying little attention to the way power actually worked. That criticism drew plenty of hostility from defenders of the status quo who did not appreciate some rookie pointing out why decades of conservative leadership had produced so little.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk was a devastating blow to conservatives, but almost as shocking was the response from parts of the left. Major figures issued the expected denunciations, yet plenty of ordinary progressives celebrated the violent death of a father and husband or mocked his memory online. Conservatives learned that some of their neighbors were perfectly willing to cheer the murder of a political opponent.

For decades, American hiring and admissions have been distorted by a legal and bureaucratic regime that promised equal treatment while repeatedly rewarding institutions for sorting people by race and sex. The Civil Rights Act itself does not exclude white men; Title VII protects employees from discrimination because of race and sex regardless of which race or sex they are. But affirmative action rules, consent decrees, diversity mandates, contracting preferences, and institutional risk management created powerful incentives to treat demographic categories differently.

The Trump administration recently revealed it is drafting a proposal, championed by Vice President JD Vance, to change how the government distributes money already earmarked for child care. The plan would tap the roughly $12 billion Child Care and Development Fund and make some of that money available to married couples with a stay-at-home parent. No new appropriation is involved.