Think More: Friday, April 24, 2026
Lyceum's Friday reading: the Machiavellian Moment, three states on the same trajectory, and two reckonings with the SPLC indictment.
The Machiavellian Moment Returns
Cost argues that American renewal requires a return to the Machiavellian foundations the Founders understood through their Florentine and Atlantic inheritance: civic virtue, armed citizenship, and the hard arithmetic of power. The republic’s moment of self-confrontation is not a metaphor. It is the question of whether a free people still has the nerve and the habits to remain one.
The SPLC Targeted Me. Now Its Reckoning Has Come.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali | The Free Press
In October 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center placed Hirsi Ali on a blacklist titled “A Journalist’s Manual: Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists,” alongside the reformist Maajid Nawaz, David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, and eleven others whose views were thereby delivered to newsrooms as toxic. Writing now against the 11-count federal indictment, she offers the view from inside the experience of being labeled. The charges, she writes, came as no surprise to those who knew what the organization was. The surprise is that the reckoning took until 2026.
Who Owns American History?
John Fonte | The American Mind
As the Republic approaches its 250th birthday, Fonte argues that the slavery debate has stopped being a historical question and has become a question of ownership. Who inherits the American story, who is permitted to tell it, and on what terms is it passed to the next generation? The argument is no longer about what happened. It is about who decides what it meant.
Red State, Blue Universities
A standing dossier of headlines from Oklahoma’s public universities. Drag-queen spending at the University of Oklahoma exceeding $56,000. An OU Writing Center seeking “antiracist” tutors who will “accept all Englishes.” A Chinese Communist Party branch established at Oklahoma State. A required reading assignment titled “How to Blow Up a Pipeline.” After a state executive order banning DEI, an administrator confirming that “no one is losing their jobs” — the program was simply rebranded. As Christopher Rufo has observed, state universities are public institutions that must reflect the values of the public. In one of the reddest states in the country, they do not.
How VA Becomes CA
Head uses Wednesday’s California gubernatorial debate as the preview reel for where Virginia is heading under its newly drawn congressional map, which projects a Democratic advantage of as many as 10 of 11 U.S. House seats. Housing-first homelessness policy that has produced record encampments in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Medi-Cal style benefits extended to illegal immigrants at a projected $8.4 billion a year. A tax regime that now drives out middle-class families faster than it builds infrastructure. One-party dominance erases the friction that used to catch fraud and correct bad law.
Cosplay Fantasy Battle in a Sewer
Chris Bray | Tell Me How This Ends
Bray watches the same California gubernatorial debate and sees a political class performing opposition to Donald Trump while the Los Angeles mayor and a county supervisor sit in the Oval Office asking him for money. The state, he writes, is a sustained mental breakdown that pretends to be a state. The question is no longer who will govern California. It is whether California is still a thing that can be governed.
SPLC Caught Funding an Array of ‘White Supremacist’ Groups
eugyppius | A Plague Chronicle
Writing from Europe, eugyppius places the Southern Poverty Law Center indictment in the broader pattern of Western advocacy organizations that manufacture the very problems they claim to exist to combat. The postwar progressive consensus draws its legitimacy from seeming to oppose nefarious, illiberal forces. The difficulty, he observes, is that in 2026 those forces are in genuinely short supply. The indictment describes what an institution does when its founding enemy goes extinct.
Liberal Men Are Becoming Extinct
Johnson carries Peter St. Onge’s demographic data on the political composition of American fatherhood: roughly one in eight American children has a liberal father. The public schools and the credentialing class are working hard to make up the gap, but the arithmetic is not on their side. A political tendency that does not reproduce itself is, in the long run, borrowed time.
