As America approaches its 250th birthday, one might expect to see a nation eager to celebrate its inheritance. Instead, American pride has fallen to new lows, and the reason runs deeper than politics. A cultural phenomenon has taken hold within our institutions, eroding national pride at its root.
The problem comes down to a matter of loyalty versus hatred for one’s country.
Both phenomena have a name. The former is patriotism, expressed by a love of home, a national attachment shaped by loyalty to the values and goals of a country.
The latter is seldom identified, but the great British conservative thinker Sir Roger Scruton gave it a name: Oikophobia.
Sir Roger defined it as “the repudiation of inheritance and home.” The Greek root oikos denotes a dwelling place or a home in the fullest sense, which encompasses one’s home country and its inheritance: its history, culture, beliefs, and institutions.
And today, there is a tangible rise of oikophobia.
<div id="attachment_1087107" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1087107" class="size-large wp-image-1087107" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-589704846-864x576.jpg" alt="EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND - AUGUST 15: Roger Scruton attends the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 15, 2016 in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Edinburgh International Book Festival is one of the most important annual literary events, and takes place in the city which became a UNESCO City of Literature in 2004. (Photo by Awakening/Getty Images)" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-589704846-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-589704846-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-589704846-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-589704846.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Awakening/Getty Images</div>
A <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/692150/american-pride-slips-new-low.aspx">2025 Gallup poll</a> asked adults, “How proud are you to be an American — extremely proud, very proud, moderately proud, only a little proud or not at all proud?”
In 2001, 87% answered extremely or very proud. Today, that has fallen by a third to a disheartening 58%.
The remaining 40% certainly fall short of patriotism — 9% claimed they were not at all proud to be American, 11% attested to be only a little proud, and 19% were moderately proud. Nothing to boast about, for this is the grip of oikophobia. And it is exacerbated in certain groups.
Pride in America varies vastly between political parties, pointing to perhaps the root of the problem. Among Republicans, 92% were extremely or very proud to be American, and the figure for independents was 53%. But among Democrats, the rate plummets to 36%.
These numbers reflect a curious trend. For Democrats, their pride seems to fluctuate with current events and politics: President Trump in office, George Floyd’s death, January 6 — the list goes on.
Conservatives, on the other hand, appear to derive their pride from America’s history, its traditions, and its achievements — the unshaking character of our nation.
This is the difference between oikophobia and patriotism.
However, it is important to understand that oikophobia is not just a lack of pride or the expression of criticism. In fact, a healthy nation ought to reflect on its past and seek improvement. Oikophobia, by contrast, rejects national inheritance. It reframes history as something to be dismantled rather than understood.
Since the oikophobe — better, the oik — is so consumed by repudiation, one might expect him to simply leave the home he so thoroughly disdains.
Oddly, they instead choose to rule it. And they can be found across the most critical cultural institutions — museums, academia, and media, to name a few.
But these oiks are not working for the sake of public benefit, mind you. They infiltrate the public sphere and act as operatives of the Culture Wars, bending, or rather reframing, American history to their will: to paint America as systemically racist, oppressive, and cruel, all in order to tell what can only be described, in Scruton’s own words, as “a tale of shame and degradation.”
This tale is told in different ways depending on the institution.
Take first the Smithsonian — the home of America’s national museums that attract visitors from all over the country. As an institution that is nearly two-thirds publicly funded, it bears a responsibility to American taxpayers.
Yet it fails in nearly every way. The National Museum of American History, for instance, cannot even deliver an objective narrative of American history. Instead, it indoctrinates visitors with left-wing ideology and sows shame among Americans, all in an attempt to make them reject their national identity. It treats slavery, imperialism, political polarization, and identity politics as the defining characteristics of the United States.
<div id="attachment_936715" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-936715" class="size-large wp-image-936715" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/GettyImages-2217701221-864x576.jpg" alt="WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 29: A view of the Smithsonian Institution near the National Mall on May 29, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images)" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/GettyImages-2217701221-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/GettyImages-2217701221-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/GettyImages-2217701221-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/GettyImages-2217701221.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Roy Rochlin/Getty Images</div>
Undeniably, these are elements of our history, some more important than others, but when elevated above all else, they cease to inform and instead distort the American narrative. 
And this is where oikophobia becomes most visible — through omission, interpretive framing, and moralizing language. What is emphasized, what is forgotten, and how the story is told is a much more insightful story. 
Institutions like the Smithsonian are respected worldwide, and for them to show such blatant disrespect to the very heritage it is meant to preserve is nothing short of disgusting.
Its leaders also make it abundantly clear that they are oiks themselves. 
Dr. Anthea Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History, never misses the chance to recite lines about how the Smithsonian Institution resides on the stolen land of native tribes or how her white privilege has afforded her her station in life. Both statements are meant to signal that the American story begins and remains in illegitimacy rather than achievement.
Nothing is further from the truth.
Like museums, academia too has been affected. Critical race theory tells young, impressionable students that institutions are not to be trusted, for they are inherently racist. Campuses not only allow but even enable protesters who threaten Jewish students and faculty, harass law enforcement, camp out on shared student grounds, and chant violently, anti-American sentiments. Conservative students self-censor so as not to be canceled. 
The media is not free either. An excellent example of this is the ongoing conflict in Iran. Just a few weeks ago, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth called out the press for its lack of discipline and honesty, for its habitual practice of sowing shame and fear.
Referencing Operation Epic Fury, Hegseth asks why no one has run a story on the bravery and tenacity of American soldiers. Not MSNBC. Not CNN. Not even Newsmax.
Hegseth shamed the press corps for being irresponsible and for “undermining the success” of the American military. “How about we talk about how special America is,” he said, “that only we have these capabilities.” And then he even conceded, “I think it’s too much to ask.”
<div id="attachment_1074159" style="width: 875px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1074159" class="size-large wp-image-1074159" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-2269789867-865x576.jpg" alt="US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speaks during a press briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, on April 8, 2026. The United States and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire on April 7 barely an hour before President Donald Trump's deadline to obliterate the country, triggering global relief alongside apprehension. Tehran has agreed to temporarily reopen the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world's oil, gas and fertiliser passes, easing concerns for the battered global economy." width="865" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-2269789867-865x576.jpg 865w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-2269789867-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-2269789867-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-2269789867.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 865px) 100vw, 865px" />Credit: Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images.</div>
Unfortunately, he may be right. This is yet another example of the ways in which oikophobia now permeates the most influential institutions, degrading national unity by diffusing doubt.
In the 2004 essay <a href="https://www.civitas.org.uk/content/files/NeedForNations2020.pdf">The Need for Nations</a>, in which he coined the term oikophobia, Scruton quotes Goethe’s Faust, “What you have inherited from your forefathers, earn it, that you might own it.”
Though he was writing about Europe of the early 2000s, Scruton’s analysis applies almost perfectly to contemporary America. He says that we must “earn again the sovereignty that previous generations so laboriously shaped from the inheritance of Christianity, imperial government and Roman law. Earning it, we will own it, and owning it, we will be at peace within our borders.”
The trouble with oikophobia is that it makes such ownership impossible. It breeds a class of followers who, set in their ways to redefine the nation according to their disdain for it, feel entitled to reject the very inheritance of their birthright. Thus, they will never earn it. And they will never own it.
Where gratitude should exist toward our forefathers, oiks replace with grievance. They say that America is not a nation striving toward its ideals, but one defined solely by its failures. And when that story is perpetuated through museums, classrooms, and the media — the very venues tasked with shaping national attachment — it does not remain abstract. It becomes formative. It becomes defining. It reshapes how Americans see their country, and ultimately, whether they believe it is worth loving at all.
This is the cost of the rise of oikophobia — a battle to define what it means to be American.
But the answer is simple: our American inheritance is worth conserving.
* * *
Anna Gustafson is a Research Assistant in the Allison Center for National Security at The Heritage Foundation. 
Savanna Donaldson is a former member of Heritage’s Young Leaders Program.

Roger Scruton Portrait Session

Roger Scruton Was Right About The War On Patriotism

America 250

American History

Heritage Foundation

Legacy Media

Patriotism

Smithsonian Museum

For decades, Americans have viewed their primary adversaries as foreign nationals or international terrorist organizations. Yet this perspective has proven dangerously naive. Over the past 60 years, socialist and Marxist ideologies have taken root within our own borders, often hiding in plain sight. This internal threat operates not from distant shores but from within.
Recent events only underscore this concern. The arrest of a would-be assassin at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — reportedly a former “Teacher of the Year” — is deeply disturbing. It raises a critical question: how have individuals entrusted with educating our children become radicalized to such extremes? And more importantly — where is the line when freedom of speech ends and subversion begins?
<h3>Quietly Reshaping Society From the Inside Out</h3>
This enemy is not a shadowy cabal of spies but a network of socialist and Marxist-influenced elites who have methodically gained influence over key pillars of American life: universities, the legal system, media, political parties, and even religious organizations. Operating under the banners of progress, equity, and social justice, they have advanced while many citizens focused on daily responsibilities. The outcome has been a slow erosion of foundational American values and a deliberate division of people along lines of ethnicity, religion, and sexual identity and even splits amongst once close family members. The result is the gradual weakening of the nation’s core institutions and social fabric.
<h3>The Decimation of the Nuclear Family</h3>
One of the most striking impacts appears in the decline of the nuclear family. This trend began prominently in the black community. In the 1960s, roughly 80% of black children lived in two-parent homes. Today, that figure is reversed with 77% of black children born to <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/washington-secrets/693212/77-black-births-to-single-moms-49-for-hispanic-immigrants/">single mothers</a>. The problem has since spread nationwide. Pew Research Center <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/12/12/u-s-children-more-likely-than-children-in-other-countries-to-live-with-just-one-parent/">data</a> show the United States has the highest rate of children living in single-parent households among developed nations — 23% of U.S. children under 18 live in fatherless homes, more than three times the global average.
Marriage rates have also hit historic lows, undermining the stable family structures historically linked to prosperity, child well-being, and social mobility. A prosperous country cannot long thrive without strong families as its foundation.
<h3>Academic Excellence Subverted into a Marxist Trojan Horse</h3>
Nowhere is the transformation more evident than in education. In public schools, social justice curricula emphasizing systemic racism, gender ideology, and equity have often displaced core academics. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores — the Nation’s Report Card — reveal reading and math proficiency at historic lows, with declines affecting students across demographic groups. Resources flow into DEI initiatives and “restorative justice” programs that prioritize emotional outcomes over measurable skills.
The human cost is profound: <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/most-us-would-fail-u-s-citizenship-test-survey-finds-n918961">surveys indicate</a> only about 19% of Americans under age 45 can pass the U.S. Citizenship Test, with many unable to name the three branches of government or explain the Bill of Rights. Older Americans pass at much higher rates (around 74% in some studies), underscoring that this reflects educational shifts rather than inherent generational differences. 
Teachers’ unions have sometimes embraced ideological language. During the 2022 Minneapolis strike, a union leader framed the effort as a fight against “the patriarchy” and “capitalism.”
Universities, once centers of free inquiry, now exhibit stark ideological imbalance. Faculty ratios have shifted dramatically, with liberal-to-conservative balances moving from roughly 2:1 in the mid-1990s to far wider margins today — often 10:1 or higher in many studies, with even greater disparities in humanities and education departments. In the national survey, Departments of Education faculty self-identify as Radical, Activist, Socialist or Marxist. This is especially concerning because they instruct the next generation of public-school teachers.
<h3>Propaganda Masquerading as Journalism and Advocacy</h3>
This academic capture influences media, law, and advocacy. Organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) have faced scrutiny, including allegations in legal contexts of questionable practices while labeling mainstream groups. Media outlets often amplify such frameworks, shaping narratives through selective coverage. In politics, socialist ideas have moved from the fringes to mainstream Democratic platforms.
In November 2025, New York City elected Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, as mayor — the first Muslim and South Asian mayor of America’s largest city. His administration prioritizes expansive government and redistribution. Similar dynamics appear in Minnesota: Minneapolis City Council includes self-declared Democratic Socialists of America members advancing related priorities amid ongoing challenges with crime and services. The 2020 unrest in Minneapolis, involving organized elements, accelerated “defund the police” experiments rooted in these ideologies.
<h3>Undermining Service to Citizens</h3>
Elected officials advancing such agendas can weaken state capacity and national cohesion. When civic education falters, informed citizenship declines — an outcome aligned with views that see the Constitution as an outdated instrument of oppression.
Religious institutions have also been affected. Some mainline Protestant and Catholic circles have incorporated critiques of “systemic sin,” shifting emphasis toward social justice over personal redemption. Sermons increasingly echo academic and media talking points on privilege and reparations.
<h3>Pattern Recognition and the Path Forward</h3>
This is not paranoia but observable pattern recognition. Socialist and Marxist influences advanced not through overt revolution but via tenure committees, HR departments, grants, and activist networks. They reframed compassion-based concepts like diversity, inclusion, and equity into tools against dissent.
Evidence surrounds us: politicized campuses stifling debate, advocacy groups facing credibility questions, socialist elected officials, schools prioritizing socialist ideology, unions opposing capitalism, coordinated protests and riots, and churches emphasizing liberal politics.
Americans must awaken to this reality. The adversary lectures from podiums, edits content, drafts laws, grades papers, and serves on councils — seldom wearing foreign uniforms. Reclaiming institutions require vigilance: restoring academic excellence and viewpoint diversity in universities, demanding transparency from nonprofits and unions, electing leaders focused on merit and results, and ensuring schools prioritize fundamentals — reading, writing, history, and civics — over grievance.
The republic was not lost overnight but inch by inch. The time to push back is now. Our children’s future and the nation’s character depend on it.
* * *
Kendall Qualls is an Army veteran, business leader, and the leading Republican gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota. TakeCharge is a national nonprofit organization led by Kendall and Sheila Qualls focused on restoring strong families as the foundation for opportunity, dignity, and upward mobility.

Former President Obama Joins NYC Mayor Mamdani On A Visit To Child Care Center

The Quiet Campaign Weaponizing America’s Youth

DW Opinion

Education

Family Values

Gen Z

Leftists

Minnesota

Propaganda

Teenagers

“Look.” I elbowed James, a Hill comms guy I’d just met in line. “It’s Taylor Lorenz, the founder of, uh, User Magazine.”
“Good lord,” he said.
At 7:57 she scurried up the sidewalk, chin down and shoulders turned in, wearing a surgical mask that was slightly too big — it stretched from the bridge of the nose to the chin, obscuring everything but her wide-set eyes. Two crowd-control lanes had been set up out front, and all us proles were squeezed into one of them. The other was empty, presumably reserved for big celebrities like Lorenz.
“Hey, Taylor!” I said, loud enough that she had to acknowledge it.
“Heeeyyy.” She didn’t quite stop. “What’s going on, guys?”
The “guys” in question were James, me, and a cluster of boomer couples who paused their conversation long enough to look at her, register nothing, and resume it. I considered asking some obnoxious question about her age (Lorenz is famously secretive about the exact birth year) and decided against it. I was worried she’d denounce me as a troll, at which point I’d be frog-marched off the premises of this third and most extravagant New Media Party, promoted by Substack as the founding event of a new American press.
What had been advertised, in the run-up to the night, was a celebrity gathering. Looksmaxxing icon Clavicular was supposed to attend and didn’t. Quentin Tarantino was supposed to attend and didn’t. Gavin Newsom was supposed to attend and didn’t. What did attend was a couple hundred people who write newsletters for a living, a handful of former CNN anchors, a Miami Herald reporter who covers Jeffrey Epstein, and David “Fluoride Stare” Pakman. By any measure, this was a less impressive room than the one I’d been promised. It was also, almost certainly, a more honest one. Every previous new intellectual class — the New York Intellectuals arguing about Trotsky in a City College cafeteria in 1937, the soixante-huitards throwing cobblestones at French police in 1968 — has looked, at the moment of its emergence, like a cheap imitation of the elite it was about to replace. If the Renwick was any indication, the next American intelligentsia was going to look like Jim Acosta threatening to fight Michael Tracey on the floor of a federal museum. Which is, I came to suspect, a more accurate sample of the future than anything happening at the Hilton.
I went through the metal detectors at 8 p.m. sharp. A red-carpeted staircase climbed two stories under a vaulted ceiling, and through the arch at the top of it, I could just barely hear a party. The Grand Salon at this hour held maybe fifty people, all sober, all standing in the unsettled clusters peculiar to early arrivals. I needed a drink immediately. The bartender, an African migrant whose grasp of English was tenuous, took my order for a double tequila soda and reached for a bottle of Tito’s. I corrected him.
“Ahahaha! Sounds just the same, eh?” he said.
“Uh, yeah. I guess so,” I said, and chuckled politely.
He set down the Tito&#8217;s, surveyed his station, and reached for a bottle of Absolut. I corrected him a second time. He started over. He worked at a pace that, by the third round, I came to understand was less a function of skill than of an entire continent’s relationship to time, and possibly to the postcolonial project as a whole.
By the time the drink was in my hand, the room behind me had quadrupled. It operated on a geometry I recognized from every other D.C. event I’d been to — cliques of three and four, each one a closed circuit that opened occasionally to admit someone, then sealed shut behind them. The conversations all had the same posture: people facing each other but looking past each other, scanning for the next conversation while performing the present one. I didn’t know who any of them were yet, but I knew what they were. They were people, by and large, who had figured out that you could leave a real publication, take your Twitter following with you, and charge five dollars a month for what you used to give away for free. Some of them were making more money than they’d ever made. Most were only pretending to.
The first person I spoke to was David Pakman. I found James, the comms guy from outside, deep in conversation with him near the bar, and inserted myself. The subject was Virginia congressional redistricting, on which Pakman had strong views. He was small and quick and never quite still — he held forth on the redistricting question while alighting on James’s words for a beat at a time, then shifting to whatever conversation was happening around him, the way a lemur tracks movement. When he had exhausted the redistricting subject, I mentioned I was writing a piece for The Daily Wire.
“Oh. How is the Daily Wire lately?” he said. There was an accusation in the cadence, like he’d recently read something disqualifying about the place and assumed I had too.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t work there. I’m a freelancer.”
“OK. Well. I’m going to go mingle.”
Then he was gone. I didn’t see him for the rest of the night.
Michael Tracey was easy to find. He was the loudest person in his vicinity, and his vicinity contained two young men in suits who, in the course of about thirty seconds of eavesdropping, identified themselves as Oxford PPE graduates working somewhere or other. I had only ever seen Tracey in his X profile picture, the sort of stylized cartoon avatar a man commissions of himself on Fiverr when he wants to be perceived as a serious thinker — bearded, bespectacled, knuckles to chin. In person he was sweaty, faintly purple, and topped with the kind of hair a bald man might acquire by rubbing glue on his scalp and rolling around on a barber shop floor. He was already belligerent when I joined the conversation. The subject was Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald reporter who has spent the better part of a decade documenting the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein.
“She’s a c*nt,” Tracey said, “and I don’t use that word lightly.”
I said that, on the contrary, I considered her a beautiful angel and one of the most important journalists of our time. The British guys found this funnier than Tracey did. Tracey did not look at me; he continued his train of thought as though I hadn’t spoken, which was probably the most impressive thing he did all night.
Substack had advertised the party as “an ideologically diverse mix.” This was technically accurate but beside the point. What Tracey and Pakman and the several hundred others sipping cutely named cocktails — one was called “The Hot Take” — had in common was not a politics or a sensibility but an enemy. Every person in the room had built an audience on the conviction that the institutions producing the news a mile and a half north, at the Hilton, where the actual White House Correspondents’ Dinner was getting underway, were no longer fit to do so. The two routes were both in the room. Acosta had been pushed out of CNN. Tracey had been on the outside, throwing rocks at it for 15 years. And now they were both under the forty-foot ceiling of the Grand Salon, drinking all night from the same open bar.
A little after 8:30 the music stopped. A man I didn’t recognize was standing at the DJ booth, behind a Marlboro-styled Substack logo, asking for everyone’s attention. There had been an incident, he said. The Renwick was closing its doors as a precaution, which meant that nobody inside would be permitted to leave. Since we were all already here, he added, we were going to keep the party going, and somebody would let us know when it was safe to step out. He thanked us for our patience and the DJ resumed.
He wasn’t telling most of the room anything new. For some minutes before he spoke, the news had been spreading unevenly through the salon. A handful of people had drifted into the side galleries — past the butter cow in its refrigerated case, past a stack of jars called Mount Zeitler — and were pacing on phone calls, faces troubled. For others, the announcement was the first they’d heard of it. Nobody left, because nobody could. The complaint I heard most often in the hour that followed was not about the shooting itself but about Tarantino and Newsom: multiple people informed me, with apparent disappointment, that it was why they hadn’t made it to Substack that night.
While we drank, the Hilton was being evacuated. A man named Cole Allen had charged the security checkpoint outside the ballroom with a 12-gauge shotgun, a .38, and a manifesto he had emailed to his family ten minutes before. The president was being lifted from the dais. The speaker of the House, the vice president, the secretary of state, and the directors of the FBI and HHS were all escorted out in a hurry. The press corps — the people most of the room at the Renwick had built their careers denouncing — were diving under their tables in evening dress.
The Renwick stayed locked for another 90 minutes. None of us could leave. Neither, it turned out, could Julie K. Brown. What happened next, I missed. I had drifted into the side galleries, or to the bathroom, or to whoever I’d been introduced to in line for the bar. Tracey, who at 8:45 had merely been calling Brown a c*nt, had by 9:30 graduated to the physical phase of his plan. Allegedly, he cornered her, started screaming, and blocked her when she tried to walk away.
What I learned the next morning, in pieces, on Twitter, was that several men intervened. Acosta was among them. So was security. Acosta, by his own account and Brown’s confirmation, stood between them and helped escort her away. At which point Acosta turned to Tracey and yelled, “LET’S STEP OUTSIDE.” Tracey accepted, replying, “OK JIM LET’S GO.” Security pulled Tracey out before either of them could leave.
In any case, they couldn’t have gone anywhere. The Renwick was still sealed. But the gesture had been made, and Tracey, escorted out and free of the lockdown that constrained the rest of us, took it with him. He walked east, arriving sometime after midnight at the Hampton Inn on 6th Street, where he’d been told Acosta was staying. He lurked on the sidewalk. At 1:01 a.m., he posted to X that he still had no idea what had happened with Trump that night. Six minutes later he posted a photograph of the entrance with the caption: Jim, I’m literally waiting for you right now, you piece of shit. Acosta did not come downstairs.
The image of a middle-aged man standing alone outside a Hampton Inn at 1 a.m., posting threats at another middle-aged man on a website neither of them owned, was a degraded image. But it was an old one. Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal — members in good standing of the New York literary establishment that produced both of them — had spent the 1970s trying to kill each other at parties. Mailer headbutted Vidal in the green room of The Dick Cavett Show in 1971. He threw a drink at him at a Lally Weymouth party in 1977. Mary McCarthy went on television in 1980 to call Lillian Hellman a liar; Hellman sued her for libel; the suit was still unresolved when Hellman died. None of these men or women were friends. Several of them loathed each other, for legitimate reasons.
Mailer’s grievance with Vidal was that Vidal had compared his writing in print to the work of Charles Manson. McCarthy’s grievance with Hellman was that Hellman had spent decades lying in her memoirs about her Stalinism. They were serious ideological feuds — about American masculinity, about the responsibility of the intellectual to political truth, about what could and could not be said about the Soviet Union — that found, in time, a personal form.
The class that fought through these feuds eventually replaced the older liberal establishment it had grown up wanting to displace. It produced Trilling, Bellow, Sontag, and Hardwick. It also produced Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and most of the intellectual scaffolding for the neoconservative project, including a great deal of what came later in the way of American foreign policy. Sometimes it honored its inheritance — but it often squandered it, too. The record is mixed in a way that should give anyone watching the next emergence pause.
What I’d watched for three hours at the Renwick was, I believe, an emergent class of the same model. The substrate was different — Substack rather than the little magazines. The disputes were smaller, pettier. The people were obviously less impressive and more embarrassing. But the resentments were structured the same way. They will probably win, in the sense that previous classes of this type have won. Whether what they produce will be worth what they replace is a question I’m in no position to answer, and neither, on the evidence I’d collected over three hours of standing in the room, were they.
***
Thomas English

The Circus Barbershop. 1890 Engraving of a Busy Circus Dressing Room and Barbershop

That Night At The Renwick

Substack

White House Correspondents’ Dinner

For the ninety seconds when members of the media were diving under tables at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, watching as politicians and cabinet members were yanked from the room by security, you have to wonder how many had the honest thought: did we do this?
The repeated media normalization of assassination fantasies on the American left hasn&#8217;t been a quiet trend. A decade after Kathy Griffin posed with Donald Trump&#8217;s severed head, their attitude is the same as Steve Schmidt&#8217;s in the immediate aftermath of this latest attempt: to the extent anyone is to blame for repeated attempts at Trump&#8217;s assassination, it&#8217;s the man himself — and then maybe his supporters for having the audacity to elect Orange Hitler twice.
Remember the Rutgers study that found more than half of Left-of-center respondents said it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Donald Trump? When the &#8220;radical Left&#8221; describes such a vast portion of the Democratic electorate on the question &#8220;should the president be unalived,” believe them.
The legacy media has declared who they want dead. They continue to platform the Left&#8217;s voices who urge his death. They rely on the violent Left&#8217;s bark being worse than their bite — even as those who bay for blood continually show their eagerness for the exact outcome that motivates the president&#8217;s would-be murderers.
Hasan Piker&#8217;s call to murder capitalists and drench the streets with their blood gets the New York Times and Conde Nast imprimatur. &#8220;Your cool murderous communist message is such a song of the summer vibe, tell me more, lol.&#8221; That casual endorsement of bloodshed isn’t fringe — it’s increasingly mainstream by the same people who claim democracy dies in darkness. Well, it almost died in the sun in Butler and West Palm and the bowels of the Washington Hilton. How many more cracks does the media want their psychotic fellow travelers to take at this? How long will they stand by Senate Democrats who have blocked security funding in the midst of war and blatant terror threats? Or should we just get used to a political reality where we refuse to treat violent rhetoric as the incitement it is?
The WHCD attack was not an isolated incident of random violence. It was the predictable outcome of years of rhetoric, glorified in newsrooms, popularized on campuses, featured on podcasts, and given serious, intoned consideration in the pages of glossy magazines by the same people who claim to be standing against hate. The Left’s open celebration of political murder did this, and it will continue to do it, fueled by a legacy media that knows a click is a click, no matter the motivation.

“No Kings” Protest In San Francisco

The Legacy Media Is Complicit In America’s Assassination Vibes

assassination attempt

Political Violence

For years, the legacy media has uncritically pointed to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as an authoritative source on extremism, frequently relying on its designations of &#8220;hate lists&#8221; in coverage of political and cultural issues, going so far as including Christian groups alongside neo-Nazi organizations and the KKK.
On Tuesday, however, the Justice Department accused the SPLC of secretly using donor money to pay leaders within white supremacist groups. The SPLC, which labels organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom as a hate group, was charged with multiple financial crimes, including money laundering and bank fraud. 
Prosecutors say the SPLC directed more than $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to such individuals while obscuring the transactions through accounts tied to &#8220;a series of fictitious entities.&#8221;
The charges come years after legacy media outlets have repeatedly cited the SPLC in reporting on conservative organizations and activists. 
The New York Times, for example, frequently refers to SPLC experts in articles on conservative figures and movements, including the late Charlie Kirk, whose Turning Point USA was labeled a “hate group.” In an article published on the day of Kirk’s assassination, the Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/us/politics/trump-charlie-kirk-ally.html?searchResultPosition=12">wrote</a> that his “rhetoric was long cast as racist, xenophobic and extreme by groups that study hate speech, including the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
The paper&#8217;s obituary of conservative activist David Horowitz also <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/us/politics/david-horowitz-dead.html?searchResultPosition=28">quoted</a> the SPLC, which labeled him “the godfather of the modern anti-Muslim movement.”
Other outlets have similarly relied on SPLC reports and designations. When the conservative grassroots group Moms for Liberty was added to the list in 2023, NPR <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/06/07/1180486760/splc-moms-for-liberty-extremist-group">reported </a>that the SPLC compared the parental rights group to “pro-segregationist parent groups.” CBS News, in its coverage, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/gov-desantis-appoints-moms-for-liberty-co-founder-to-state-commission-on-ethics/?intcid=CNM-00-10abd1h">pointed</a> to the SPLC&#8217;s claims that the group had a history of &#8220;harassing community members, advancing anti-LGBTQ+ misinformation and fighting to scrub diverse and inclusive material from lesson plans.&#8221;
The SPLC&#8217;s designation of groups opposed to transgender ideology on kids or that hold to traditional Christian beliefs has received much coverage over the years.
One article from NBC <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/groups-opposed-gay-rights-rake-millions-states-debate-anti-lgbtq-bills-rcna21016">cited</a> the SPLC to identify groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, and the American College of Pediatricians as the core of the “anti-gay movement.&#8221; Similarly, the Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/10/09/colorado-flag-program/">turned</a> to the SPLC to label the group Gays Against Groomers as “an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group.”
Groups concerned about Sharia law have also faced criticism from the SPLC. An article from NBC <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/smart-facts/what-shariah-law-n859981">pointed</a> to the SPLC as a source in a report about momentum to ban Sharia law in the United States. It noted that one anti-Sharia group had been labeled a hate group by the SPLC. 
The Guardian <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/22/white-nationalist-hate-extremist-groups">framed</a> the SPLC&#8217;s 2024 hate list as driven by people critical of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. 
Reporting in 2017 on the annual hate group list, CNN ran a headline titled “Here are all the active hate groups where you live,” providing a “hate map” that included groups that held traditional Christian beliefs. They later changed that headline to “The Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups” after <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/302442/cnn-modifies-story-on-the-southern-poverty-law-centers-bogus-list-of-hate-groups-adds-editors-note/?utm_source=chatgpt.com">complaints</a> from conservatives.

The New York Times Co. Post An 82 Percent Decline In 2nd Quarter Profi

Legacy Media Relied On SPLC’s Hate Rankings To Bash Conservatives

Department of Justice

New York Times

Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)

There is a long-honored pattern among progressive media figures when it comes to any form of new media. Prolific X (formerly Twitter) user David Burge (@Iowahawkblog) made <a href="https://x.com/iowahawkblog/status/664089892599631872">this observation</a> in 2015, and it has not been stated better since:
<blockquote>
1. Identify a respected institution. 
2. kill it. 
3. gut it. 
4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect. <a href="https://x.com/hashtag/lefties?src=hashtag_click">#lefties</a>
</blockquote>
This weekend, during White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD) and festivities, Substack will be hosting its own third annual invite-only party at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. Substack has sold this as a form of counter programming to traditional media, like network news and newspapers, and has always billed itself as a “New and Independent” media enterprise.
Except there is no longer anything new or independent about Substack, which over the last year has largely become a sanctuary catering to former corporate and legacy partisan journalists. For the first time, President Donald Trump will be in attendance, and several of the journalists he regularly spars with will be attending the Substack party instead.
Substack’s exclusive, invite-only party will feature a cadre of so-called independent media voices. Kara Swisher, Mehdi Hassan, Chuck Todd, Chris Cillizza, Jennifer Rubin, Jim Acosta, and more mainstream media cast-offs who now all lay a claim to Substack and who Substack is turning to for their audiences, and it goes without saying that they are the farthest thing from “independent” media.
There is also one more addition slated to appear — the looksmaxxing <a href="https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/politics/white-house-correspondents-dinner-weekend/65-ab37e62c-8089-4749-a4db-e8f9d8647df8">online influencer Clavicular</a>, who has made waves of late in Florida and seen cavorting around with far-Right nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes. As someone who makes a great deal of his living from Substack and has for the past three years, the glaring shift in ideology and mission has been hard to ignore, as have the algorithmic changes that now favor those very same journalists — the ones who will be partying this weekend. What independent voices on Substack see is The David Burge Effect happening in real time.
It wasn’t even five years ago that mainstream media figures and outlets were publishing hit pieces against Substack, calling it a platform <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/pressure-builds-newsletter-company-substack-stop-paying-nazi-writers-rcna132593">that hosts white supremacists</a>, dangerous vaccine disinformation, <a href="https://judedoyle.medium.com/substack-is-still-a-problem-dec84cb84188">transphobic, and lacking proper moderation</a>, that these same journalists and media figures were successful at hollowing out platforms like Facebook and Twitter of voices they found problematic, until Elon Musk purchased Twitter. Several prominent media figures, like Kara Swisher, abandoned Twitter because they stated they could not participate on a platform owned by Elon Musk.
In actuality, what happened is they lost the power, through Twitter, to silence voices they disagreed with. Gone were media allies Vijaya Gadde and Yoel Roth, the heads of (former) Twitter’s so-called “Safety Team,” which was disbanded under Musk, and with the release of the Twitter Files, revealed how they worked closely with journalists to censor voices on the platform, oftentimes conservative or Right-leaning in nature.
After Donald Trump&#8217;s second election in 2024, several media institutions began recalculating their business models. Resistance porn was no longer effective, and their audiences were dwindling. Several prominent journalists and media personalities found themselves out of a job. CNN’s grandstanding partisan personality, Jim Acosta, refused to be moved to late-night. Chuck Todd was out at NBC’s Meet the Press, and social media punchline and Wrongest Human Being on Earth Chris Cillizza had also departed CNN.
That’s where Substack stepped up, not only offering its platform to voices and institutions that had disparaged it in the past, but also pursuing promotional partnerships. Earlier this year, Head of News and Politics Catherine Valentine <a href="https://x.com/redsteeze/status/2019375521105383662">partnered with Cillizza to offer a Substack “Masterclass”</a> for journalists laid off at the Washington Post. Valentine also reached out on her public timeline for an anonymous CBS anchor unhappy with CBS News’s direction under new Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss.
Cillizza, who once famously stated that “for the billionth time, journalists don’t root for a side,” had only recently joined Substack but was clearly being promoted by the platform as a new and important voice for content over less prominent long-time users of the platform.
Last year, Substack made a push into video and live video, and there are rumors of Substack wanting to become essentially a new online television network, with the development of <a href="https://likeandsubscribenews.substack.com/p/scoop-substack-is-launching-a-tv">a live TV app</a>. Substack sent out a promotional email to users and subscribers (like my Substack, Versus Media). Who were they promoting with this new direction? Jim Acosta and Katie Couric — two well-established detractors in the media of the political and cultural Right.
Valentine’s X bio states that she is helping “to lead a new media revolution.” She’s a former CNN, Politico, and Washington Post journalist herself, which explains the urge to turn Substack into a newer version of those biased outlets; the same outlets that targeted Right-leaning and independent voices on social media over some of the biggest news stories of the last five years, including the origins of Covid and the resulting vaccines, Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, and the Hunter Biden laptop story, which journalists actively assisted Twitter at the time in stopping the sharing of the story on social media platforms.
To her credit, Valentine and other heads of Substack have been open to concerns about catering to legacy media partisans, but that doesn’t appear to be slowing this trend. It’s being lavishly celebrated and catered to, even with more of these promotional partnerships. Of <a href="https://substack.com/leaderboard/us-politics/paid">the Top Ten Bestsellers on Substack</a>, eight of the top 10 are progressive personalities or former corporate media journalists, and they will all likely be in attendance at Substack’s counter party to the WHCD.
Substack can no longer lay claim to being “New Media” when they have turned their platform over to the most prominent partisan voices of old media personalities from the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC. If Substack wants to become the platform of the media it helped destroy in the first place, that’s certainly their choice.
After journalist/activist Don Lemon was arrested in Minneapolis earlier this year for his role in a church protest, during which congregants said Lemon blocked a doorway and would not let them exit, Substack released a <a href="https://substack.com/@substack/note/c-207583763">statement</a> defending Lemon, another former CNN personality, as an act of free speech and journalism.
It wasn’t.
While there was spirited debate among members of Substack&#8217;s leadership about religious freedom and the right to worship in peace, there was no mention of the First Amendment rights of the congregation that were being violated by Lemon and the protestors, with whom he was working.
What made Substack special in the beginning, and what made it thrive, was that it was a model that stood up to those very same institutions, which have largely been discredited by dwindling audiences and a lack of credibility. It didn’t cave to pressure and accusations of being a transphobic platform that also gladly hosted Neo Nazis. Now, Substack is throwing lavish invite-only parties for those very same people.
Substack is becoming South By Southwest and Coachella. What was once a fledgling, daring independent music festival featuring some of the boldest independent and undiscovered bands and musicians became a sell-out corporate media playground that hosted progressive politicians for TED Talks.
Coachella, once a bold four-day music festival featuring independent acts, is now simply a fashion orgy for the rich and the celebrity elite. The question we are all asking ourselves now is where we go from here, after Substack’s party for the media elites.
***
Stephen L. Miller is the host and producer of Versus Media Podcast on Substack. He has written for The Spectator magazine, National Review, the New York Post, and Fox News. He can be found on Twitter @redsteeze

WHCD afterparties in Washington DC

Substack Is Captured By The Media Elites

Media Bias

Artemis II

The Media Does Not Want To Talk About This Historic NASA Launch. Here’s Why.

Elon Musk

Matt Walsh

Medicare

Moon

NASA

Opinion

Space

It is said that the first casualty of war is truth. Perhaps so. But consider the compensating benefit: the humor to be found in the frantic, self-infatuated verbiage that gushes in to coddle the lies and float the narrative.
The propaganda press has been working overtime since February 28, when Donald Trump determined to end the war that Iran started in 1979.
Many connoisseurs of political pathology have commented on the presence of aggravated Trump Derangement Syndrome in the coverage of the war. There is certainly no shortage of TDS in the fabrications that the media have been passing out about the war. But behind the unbridled hatred of Trump is the more abiding hatred of American and Israeli military prowess.
Where to start?
A few days ago, <a href="https://x.com/ishapiro/status/2037167715635404844?s=20">a protest in Philadelphia</a> featured the applause line “For every US soldier who comes back in a casket, we cheer!” Then there are the many “expert” reports claiming that, appearances notwithstanding, America is actually losing the war. We have taken out Iran’s entire leadership, sunk nearly all of its navy, obliterated its air force, crushed its air defenses, exploded more than 90% of its stockpiles of missiles and drones, and leveled most of its war-making infrastructure.
Is The Economist magazine owned by Iran or some other opponent of America? I ask because its surreal, reality-free writing about the war has descended from the tendentious to the preposterous. Just a few days ago, they ran a cover story under the title “<a href="https://x.com/TheEconomist/status/2037126183649689877?s=20">Advantage Iran</a>.” “A month of bombing Iran has achieved nothing,” that once-sober publication whimpered. “Will Donald Trump escalate, or talk? For now, at least, the advantage lies with the Islamic Republic.” Really? Tell that to <a href="https://x.com/davidharsanyi/status/2034973352331268380?s=20">these chaps</a>. Or maybe tell <a href="https://x.com/EYakoby/status/2036987387616628859?s=20">Alireza Tangsiri</a>, head — rather, the late head — of Iran’s Navy. He was checked out just a couple of days ago.
If it were not that unbridled displays of insanity are inherently disturbing, such anti-Trump rhapsodies would be merely amusing. As it is, the element of pathetic mendacity renders them more contemptible than amusing. Consider “<a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/03/20/us-trump-victory-iran-war-dangers/">Why U.S. Victory in Iran Would Be Bad for Washington—and the World</a>,” a recent column in Foreign Policy by Howard French, a professor at Columbia University. It is not often that one encounters such a confection of blinkered, ideologically driven nonsense. French begins by telling his readers that the political situation in the United States is not “normal.” He does not directly name the source of the putative abnormality, but it soon emerges that the primary cause of our discontents is — yes, you guessed it — Donald Trump. Things are so far out of whack, French says, that both the American public and world opinion “should simply not wish for a U.S. victory in the country’s 3-week-old war against Iran.”
Why is that? Why would you not wish America to win a war against the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, a misogynistic totalitarian death cult that for forty-seven years, ever since the installation of Khomeini’s lunatic Shia regime, has murdered hundreds if not thousands of Americans while avidly pursuing nuclear weapons and the extinction of Israel?
Instead of offering an argument, French offers a series of sentiments. We should not want victory in Iran because the United States and Israel are engaged in a “senseless war.” What makes it “senseless”? French says that “U.S. President Donald Trump himself has never given a remotely coherent vision of what a victory in Iran would consist of.” But from the very beginning, <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116147082884192486">President Trump said</a> that his aims in the war were to deny Iran the capacity to acquire nuclear weapons, to make it impossible for them to harry their neighbors with drones and ballistic missiles, to dismantle their network of support for terror exporting proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, and finally to make it possible for the Iranian people to rise up and take back their country from the Mullahs. Those very specific goals define the “sense” of the war.
President Trump and his lieutenants have <a href="https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/2035102800074432620?s=20">iterated those desiderata</a> early and often. French faults President Trump for failing to have “sought authorization from Congress, as the U.S. Constitution calls for him to do.” Let me introduce Howard French to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution">War Powers Resolution </a>of 1973, which explicitly authorizes the president to deploy the military for 60 days without congressional approval.
But all this persiflage about process was really just what Kierkegaard called a “preliminary expectoration.” What really bothers Howard French are two things — or rather, two people: Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. “The far bigger problem that underpins all of these realities,” French says, “is that the United States is governed by a malignant narcissist whose megalomaniacal tendencies have bloomed alarmingly before the world’s eyes during his second term in office.” Oh dear. The TDS is far advanced in this one. So is the NDS. Israel, he says, “has become addicted to permanent war as a substitute for politics and reason in its own region, and thereby empowering and emboldening another malignant politician, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”
Neither Trump nor Netanyahu is popular in the corridors of Columbia University or the pages of the propaganda press. Ask the Iranian people, though, or Americans uncorrupted by the clarity- and testosterone-sapping virus of elite opinion. French warns about “a future in which Washington has lost most of its other alliances” because of this war. But in fact new allies all over the Middle East are flocking to Washington’s banner. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are among the nations who have <a href="https://x.com/_GlobeObserver/status/2037156692966642016?s=20">refused to consider a ceasefire</a> until the Iranian regime is gone, and both are putting boots where their mouths are, so to speak, promising to send nearly <a href="https://x.com/mitchellvii/status/2037147014383689735?s=20">300,000</a> troops to join battle.
The single worst president in dealing with Iran was Barack Obama, who sent them billions in cash as a bribe but merely accelerated their nuclear program and enabled them to fund their terrorist proxies more lavishly. It should come as no surprise, then, that Howard French holds up Obama as the man whose policies could lead the way forward to “dialogue and mutual reassurances.” What a fool.
Howard French’s embarrassing column proceeds with, “An expert’s point of view on a current event.” His subhead tells us that “the possibility of Trump imposing his personal whims on another nation is even more frightening than U.S. failure.” Some wit on X had the perfect response. It, too, features the rubric, “An expert’s point of view on a current event.” But his subhead gives the game away: “<a href="https://x.com/JTAlexander_/status/2036829710987190705?s=20">Why SPQR Victory in Gaul Would Be Bad for Rome </a>—and the World. The possibility of Caesar imposing his personal whims on another nation is even more frightening than Roman failure.” Touché.
* * *
Roger Kimball is Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of <a href="http://www.encounterbooks.com/">Encounter Books</a>.

US-POLITICS-BRIEFING-LEAVITT

The Propaganda Press Cannot Stomach Victory And Its Mendacity Shows

Donald Trump

Iran

Middle East

Trump Derangement Syndrome

U.S. Military

Since 2021, more than 80 churches across Canada have suffered <a href="https://ccrl.ca/">arson attacks</a>. The most recent casualty is the <a href="https://x.com/RebelNewsOnline/status/2036815655941353570">reported</a> fire at the historic Christ Church Anglican in Maugerville, New Brunswick.
If Canadian media covers the fires at all, they will claim a total of 30 to 35 churches have burned across Canada, meaning churches that have burned entirely to the ground. The media will often use phrases like “arson is suspected” and “motives remain unclear.” By that description, one would think a Walmart had burned down. An attack on a house of God, however, is treated by the media as an incidental detail. This is not a stylistic tic — it is the prose of a society willfully blind to the crisis in which it is engulfed.
One need not be Socrates to see the obvious. These are not random accidents but episodes in a larger campaign: an open war being waged against the West. Our collective silence does not assuage it; it shields it and helps it spread.
Every Canadian understands, though few will confess publicly, that these burnings are half-applauded as revenge. Our previous prime minister <a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2024/01/18/church-burnings-canada-unmarked-graves-246978/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIt%20is%20sad%2C%E2%80%9D%20Horgan,%2C%20including%20against%20Catholic%20churches.%E2%80%9D">assured us</a> they are “understandable,” albeit regrettable, responses to the “discovery” of mass graves at residential schools. Except there is one problem: it was and is a lie.
Nevertheless, hints became headlines, headlines became dogma, and dogma became license.
<div id="attachment_1067267" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1067267" class="size-large wp-image-1067267" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/stat-can-1024x315.jpg" alt="Source: StatCan" width="1024" height="315" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/stat-can-1024x315.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/stat-can-300x92.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/stat-can-768x236.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/stat-can-1536x472.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/stat-can.jpg 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Source: StatCan</div>
To the Left, whether it corresponds to the truth is secondary to the permission it grants. It conceals under the guise of “justice” a hatred that long predates the tale. Much of what now presents itself as moral outrage is little more than repackaged hatred of Western civilization: of its God, its truth, and its nobility. Old resentments have now learned to call themselves righteous.
To refuse to name this as such is not neutrality but complicity. Consider Canada’s nominally Catholic Prime Minister, Mark Carney. He is known to thunder like a prophet when it comes to Trump or climate change. And yet here he is conspicuously silent. Indeed, he takes great pains to avoid invoking the terms “the West” or “Western civilization.” One gets the impression Mr. Carney prefers to deliver its eulogy rather than defend its inheritance.
This silence is instructive. It educates citizens, especially the young, that nothing is sacred, least of all its own civilization. Resentment, not reverence, becomes the proper orientation towards the highest things. Our enemies, both foreign and domestic, understand precisely what must be erased if the West is to be disarmed.
<div id="attachment_1067255" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1067255" class="size-large wp-image-1067255" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-2156422264-1-864x576.jpg" alt="" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-2156422264-1-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-2156422264-1-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-2156422264-1-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-2156422264-1.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Toronto, ON &#8211; June 10: Investigators survey St. Anne&#8217;s as they begin to piece together what caused the fire. Historic St. Anne&#8217;s Anglican Church at 270 Gladstone Ave. was destroyed by a fire early on June 9th. (Photo by Nick Lachance/Toronto Star via Getty Images)</div>
These fires, however, did not begin in sanctuaries but in the seminar rooms of our universities. Our reigning orthodoxy and radical relativism, pushed by the Left, have filtered down through every institution: from our classrooms to our boardrooms and even our bathrooms. The church burnings are simply where theory meets action: where the lit match meets our steeples.
For decades, we have taught students that all ways of life are equal; that any claim to superiority is a disguised will to power; and that distinctions between noble and base, just and unjust, good and bad, and above all, true and false, are instruments of “oppression.” Relativism came promising peace. We were told that wars and persecutions arose from the conviction that one’s own way is best. Reduce all virtues to “values,” all truth to “opinions,” and civilization to “cultures,” and the source of conflict would dissolve. After all, if there is no truth, there is nothing over which to fight.
But relativism produced not gentle tolerance but a new and fanatical intolerance. “Everything is relative” except, of course, relativism. This alone is absolute and unquestionable. The one unforgivable sin is precisely what the West at its best affirms: that our way of life is superior not by race or conquest, but because it is true; therefore, it is good, just, and noble.
For these radicals, the West represents a rival claim to their tyrannical rule. The West does not simply assert that it is true: we boldly proclaim it is true by both God and nature. Our founding is constituted by the twin roots of Jerusalem and Athens: biblical revelation and reason. Despite their differences, both converge on the same point: there is the Truth; there is a best way of life; and there is a standard that stands both outside and above us.
This is why our churches must burn. Our steeples are the most visible symbol of the biblical half of our inheritance. It is no wonder these steeples were once the highest structures in cities and towns, rising above parliaments, banks, and homes. Our steeples served as silent reminders guiding our eyes, and with them our souls, upward to the highest things, higher than political power, commerce, or comfort.
When the Christian claims that Jesus is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” it is a living rebuke to these radicals. It not only condemns them as inferior or unequal, but exposes them as false. The Church testifies that there is an order and law greater than ourselves and accessible to all through our reason: we are neither our own Creators nor legislators. For leftist radicals, this is intolerable. For, when there is God and Truth, then everything is not permissible.
<div id="attachment_1067257" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1067257" class="size-large wp-image-1067257" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-2156422018-864x576.jpg" alt="Toronto, ON - June 10: St. Anne's Reverend Don Beyers looks towards the remains of his church. Historic St. Anne's Anglican Church at 270 Gladstone Ave. was destroyed by a fire early on June 9th. (Photo by Nick Lachance/Toronto Star via Getty Images)" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-2156422018-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-2156422018-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-2156422018-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-2156422018.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Nick Lachance/Toronto Star via Getty Images</div>
Our American friends should not delude themselves into thinking this is some uniquely Canadian phenomenon. The same doctrine, the same hatred for the West, and the same fanatics are already entrenched in your universities, bureaucracies, and halls of power. They look north and see not an aberration but a guiding model. Given the opportunity, they would happily bury your churches under ashes, too.
And yet, our enemies pay us great compliments. Hatred and resentment always look upwards: inadvertently, they betray our superiority. If we were truly inferior, the proper orientation would be pity or indifference. Confident victors do not waste precious time and energy making war against defeated opponents. One does not attempt to murder a corpse.
In this way, we owe our enemies thanks. The vehemence of their rage is proportional to the threat they perceive. Our enemies declare that the West is not dead: it is alive and well and remains the greatest obstacle to the tyranny they wish to institute. Our enemies understand this; it is we who have forgotten.
The proper response is not to hide or to apologize for existing, but to regain a seriousness equal to that of our opponents. If they judge this way of life dangerous enough to burn, then it is time we judged it once more worthy of living and of defending in full.
* * *
Dimpee Brar currently serves as the Director of Engagement for Allies for a Strong Canada. She is a writer whose work can be found in the Federalist, the Western Standard, and the Toronto Sun. She appears frequently on various podcasts and radio shows. You can follow her on X: @isthisdimpeeb

Catholic church in Morinville destroyed by fire

Churches Are Burning, And The Lie Fueling It Still Holds

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Secretary of War Pete Hegseth didn&#8217;t just drop bombs on the IRGC today; he nuked the mainstream media’s &#8220;fake news&#8221; narratives that have been shielding a crumbling Iranian regime.
Speaking from the Department of War, less than two weeks into a conflict that has redefined modern warfare, Hegseth delivered a &#8220;bottom line up front&#8221; that should send shivers down the spines of the mullahs—and some editors at CNN. The reality on the ground? The Iranian military is functionally extinct.
Hegseth, a veteran of the media world himself, didn&#8217;t hold back:
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Some in this crew, in the press, just can&#8217;t stop. Allow me to make a few suggestions. People look up at the TV and they see banners. They see headlines. I used to be in that business. And I know that everything is written intentionally.  For example, a banner or a headline, “Mid-East War Intensifies,” splashing on the screen the last couple of days alongside visuals of civilian or energy targets that Iran has hit because that&#8217;s what they do. What should the banner read instead? How about “Iran Increasingly Desperate.” Because they are. They know it and so do you, if it can be admitted.
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“Or more fake news from CNN,” he continued. “Reports that the Trump administration underestimated the Iran war&#8217;s impact on the Strait of Hormuz. Patently ridiculous, of course. For decades, Iran has threatened shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. This is always what they do: hold the Strait hostage. CNN doesn&#8217;t think we thought of that. It&#8217;s a fundamentally unserious report.”
“Another example of a fake headline that I saw yesterday: ‘War Widening,’” he noted. “Here&#8217;s a real headline for you for an actual patriotic press. How about ‘Iran Shrinking, Going Underground’? You see, Iran&#8217;s leaders are hiding in bunkers and moving into civilian areas. The only thing that is widening is our advantage.”
Hegseth detailed an unprecedented air campaign, a lethal symphony between the U.S. Air Force and the Israelis that has conducted over 15,000 strikes in less than two weeks, more than 1,000 strikes a day. He said Iran has no air force and no navy—at least not one that isn&#8217;t currently decorating the floor of the Persian Gulf. Their missile volume is down 90%, and their drone capability has been slashed by 95%.
But Hegseth emphasized the most critical blow: it’s not just what they’ve lost; it’s what they can never replace.
&#8220;Every company that builds every component of those missiles has been functionally defeated, destroyed,&#8221; Hegseth declared. &#8220;Buildings, complexes, and factory lines—all across Iran—have been destroyed.&#8221;
The Secretary also pulled back the curtain on the state of the Iranian leadership. He described the &#8220;so-called not-so-supreme leader&#8221; as a wounded, disfigured coward hiding in a bunker, unable to even produce a video or voice recording to prove he’s still functional.
&#8220;Who&#8217;s in charge? Iran may not even know,&#8221; Hegseth said, contrasting the &#8220;confused&#8221; regime with the &#8220;unshakable&#8221; will of the American people and President Trump.
Despite the tragic loss of a U.S. KC-135 tanker crew—heroes Hegseth promised to meet at Dover—the mission remains clear: Peace through strength. Hegseth confirmed that today will see the highest volume of sorties and bomber pulses yet.
With President Trump’s hand &#8220;firmly on the throttle,&#8221; the objective is total victory: the destruction of the defense industrial base, the elimination of the navy, and the absolute denial of a nuclear weapon. As Hegseth put it: &#8220;We’re going up. They’re going down.&#8221;

US-POLITICS-SECURITY-HEGSETH

‘I Used To Be In That Business’: Hegseth Exposes Media’s Iran War Spin

Hegseth Decimates Media's Iran War Coverage: 'I Used To Be In That Business'

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This Insane Moment Belongs In A Dystopian Novel

George Orwell

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The era of the &#8220;paper of record&#8221; is officially dead, and the bank statements at 1301 K Street have the receipts to prove it.
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The Washington Post, the crown jewel of the billionaire-funded activist press, reportedly hemorrhaged more than $100 million in 2025, according to a report from <a href="https://www.wsj.com/business/media/washington-post-losses-topped-100-million-in-2025-85076aae">The Wall Street Journal</a>.
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This staggering deficit follows a $100 million loss the previous year, and a $77 million loss in 2023, highlighting a catastrophic downward spiral for the Jeff Bezos-owned outlet that has failed to find a pulse in the modern media landscape.
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The financial bloodbath has already triggered a &#8220;painful&#8221; restructuring, with the Post slashing its staff by a massive 30% earlier this month. In a candid internal meeting held Wednesday, acting CEO Jeff D’Onofrio and Executive Editor Matt Murray laid bare the dysfunction. D&#8217;Onofrio revealed that while newsroom costs surged 16% over the last five years, productivity cratered; the number of stories published by the outlet has plummeted by 42% since 2020.
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“We’re not a paper of record; there’s no such thing anymore in today’s world,” Murray told the shell-shocked newsroom, a stunning admission of defeat for a publication that once lived by the self-important slogan &#8220;Democracy Dies in Darkness.&#8221;
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The financial ruin comes amid a total collapse of the Post’s internal leadership. Just weeks ago, CEO Will Lewis abruptly <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/washington-post-ceo-steps-down-days-after-mass-layoffs">stepped down</a>, claiming he wanted to ensure a &#8220;sustainable future&#8221; for the company. His departure followed a brutal year of buyouts and resignations.
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The Post has been &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/absolute-exodus-washington-post-bleeds-talent-as-experienced-staffers-take-buyout">bleeding talent</a>,&#8221; as veteran liberals—including columnists Jennifer Rubin and Jonathan Capehart—fled the building. Many of these exits were prompted by Bezos’ attempts to steer the paper back toward &#8220;timeless American values&#8221; and &#8220;personal liberties,&#8221; a move that reportedly infuriated a newsroom more accustomed to acting as a megaphone for the D.C. establishment than a balanced news source.
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As the Post struggles to remain solvent, its desperate pivot to technology has only worsened its credibility crisis. The recent launch of &#8220;Your Personal Podcast,&#8221; a customizable AI-generated audio tool, turned into an <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-washington-posts-ai-podcast-rollout-has-been-a-train-wreck">unmitigated disaster</a>. The AI began &#8220;spitting out fake quotes&#8221; and inventing commentary, forcing editors to scramble to fix errors delivered at scale.
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Internal communications showed editors were &#8220;infuriated&#8221; by the botched rollout, which occurred just as the Trump administration intensified its criticism of the outlet as a top &#8220;media offender.&#8221;
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The Post’s reporting has also faced embarrassing public rebuttals from the Pentagon. Earlier this year, the paper published a widely circulated hit piece on War Secretary Pete Hegseth, alleging he gave a &#8220;kill them all&#8221; order during a naval operation. The report was swiftly and flatly refuted by Navy Admiral Mitch Bradley, who told Congress the order was never given, exposing the Post’s reliance on &#8220;anonymous sources&#8221; to push partisan narratives.
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With sports departments shuttered and international bureaus shrinking, the Post is now attempting to reinvent itself as a lean, national-focused outlet. But as the &#8220;exodus&#8221; of both readers and writers continues, it remains to be seen if even the deep pockets of the Amazon founder can save a legacy institution that has effectively alienated half of its potential audience.
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DEATH OF A LEGACY: The Washington Post Hemorrhages $100M+

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