My introduction: College Student Michael Hout wrote an
editorial for Townhall.com on 10/17/25 and I copied and pasted it and will
comment on it. Here it is:
Hout: “
A Warning
Against the Unmooring of the American Right
Michael J. Hout | Oct 17, 2025
Flag of the Know Nothing movement
William
F. Buckley Jr. once said that a
conservative is “someone who stands athwart history, yelling, 'Stop,' at a time
when no one is inclined to do so.” To me, that captures the essence of
conservatism—not a blind resistance to change, but the defense of what endures
when everything around us rushes toward the new. Conservatism begins with the
recognition that there’s an enduring moral order, that society isn’t a contract
to be rewritten at will but a covenant among the living, the dead, and the
unborn. Russell Kirk wrote that politics must rest upon “the permanent things,” while Roger Scruton reminded us
that the task of the conservative is to love what’s ours and to preserve what’s
good.”
My
response: It is wise and necessary to preserve and renew the good in our
traditions.
Hout:
“Conservatism isn’t a purity test, but it does require some shared
understanding of what’s fundamentally true. We should be able to agree that the
sky is blue, that the grass is green, that the sun is hot, and that Hitler was
evil. We ought to be America First without being America Only. We ought to be
able to discuss immigration without descending into 19th-century nativism.
We ought to be able to debate Israel’s policies without wading into the sewers
of antisemitism. And we ought to be able to defend liberty without abandoning
any semblance of decency.
Even
these self-evident truths, though, feel increasingly tenuous. Since the
assassination of Charlie Kirk, something troubling has started to surface on
the Right. These divisions were always there, but his absence seems to have
removed a stabilizing force. The conversation online has grown darker, angrier,
and more conspiratorial. It has begun to fester like an epidemic inside a
movement that has otherwise proven quite robust.
The
question is how these kinds of maladies take hold. Some of the most-followed
figures in the world—the hosts of top podcasts and streams—are the very ones
amplifying this conspiratorial and identitarian mindset. Some believe these
ideas sincerely, perhaps victims of their own echo chambers. Others peddle them
cynically, chasing attention, influence, or money (propheteering, if you will).
Still others seem stuck somewhere in between, half-aware that they’ve mistaken
paranoia for wisdom. Whatever their motives, the effect is the same: a
distortion of conservative thought into something tribal, conspiratorial, and
unrecognizable.”
My
response: We always want to move slowly and think before doing and look before
we leap.
We
need to talk about this honestly—not to excuse the Left’s radicalism, which
remains deeply diseased in its own way, but to admit that there’s rot within
our own house, too. I say this not as an outsider. I did, however, spend years
as a Democrat and watched that party surrender to its most radical elements.
The far Left didn’t just get louder; it took over. Pro-life Democrats were told
they no longer belonged. Support for the Second Amendment—or sometimes even the
First—became heresy. Figures like Joe Manchin were treated as enemies. “Real”
Democrats were defined not by principle but by purity. That suffocating
orthodoxy ultimately pushed me away.
The
populist energy of Donald Trump brought new life—and many new people—to the
conservative movement. But even populism has to rest on principles. The
challenge is channeling that energy without losing the moral high ground.
Modern politics tempts every movement toward excess, but what the algorithms
reward and what’s actually healthy for society are two different things. The
more outrageous the statement, the greater the reach. So political commentary
becomes a performance, not a pursuit of truth. When a movement feeds on outrage
long enough, it forgets what it was fighting for in the first place.
James
Madison warned of factions in Federalist No. 10, describing the danger of passion
unrestrained by reason. Those factions now live not only between parties but
inside them. The Left’s radicals already dominate their agenda. If we don’t
build guardrails for ourselves, we’ll repeat the same mistake—and hollow
ourselves out from within.
Horseshoe theory
helps explain what’s happening. The far Left and far Right, though seemingly
opposite, bend until they almost meet. Spend enough time online and you can see
it: polar opposite extremists retweeting one another, echoing the same
conspiracies, united more by hatred than by reason. When anger becomes the
organizing principle, ideology no longer matters. And anger, once severed from
moral truth, isn’t conservative anymore—it’s revolutionary.
We
can be a broad coalition—libertarians, traditionalists, populists, and former
Democrats like me—but not a coalition without boundaries. A conservatism that
embraces everything ultimately stands for nothing. The Republican Party rightly
calls itself a big tent, and it should stay that way. But being a big tent
doesn’t mean we ought to become a circus. A movement that wants to represent a
great and diverse nation must be broad, yes, but it also has to be serious. We
can’t make Faustian bargains with Mephistophelian figures whose ideas betray
everything we claim to defend. Inclusion without discernment isn’t magnanimity;
it’s self-destruction.
I
spent four years as a high-school history teacher, teaching about 20th-century
totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Communist China.
These were subjects I talked about every day, and the experience shaped how I
understand what happens when moral clarity disappears. That’s why I’ve always
been critical of the Left’s habit of calling every Republican a fascist or
every populist another Hitler—it’s lazy, and it betrays ignorance of what those
systems truly were. But it’s also why I’m critical now of the far Right’s
disturbing flirtation with those same ideas. When people on “our side” post
admiringly about Hitler or indulge antisemitic conspiracies, it isn’t “edgy.”
It’s abhorrent. And it shows just how far some have drifted from reality.
Since
2020, I’ve lived in Warsaw, a city that bore the consequences when reason
collapsed and extremism devoured truth. Living here, surrounded by reminders of
what totalitarianism does to nations, has made me even more grateful for the
American experiment. It’s also made me more determined not to see it corroded
by hatred and ignorance. Too many Americans, Left and Right alike, have lost
touch with history. They throw around words like “fascist” or “communist”
without grasping their weight. They don’t know what those ideologies actually
did to human beings—or to civilization itself. That ignorance isn’t entirely
their fault. We’ve built an education system rich in technology but poor in
moral literacy. We’ve spent years replacing history with cynicism.
Despite
what some progressives think, to be conservative isn’t to be hateful. It’s not
to be racist, or sexist, or closed to compassion. True conservatism, as Burke,
Buckley, and Kirk understood it, is a moral disposition before it’s a political
one. It’s the effort to conserve what’s good and to improve what’s not. For
those of us who are Christian, it’s to try—imperfectly—to model Christ in
public life. For others, it’s to live honorably, keep one’s word, and seek
order, gratitude, and virtue. What drove me from the Democratic Party was the
unrelenting hatred I saw there. I don’t want to see that same hatred consume
the Right. And I’m not talking about the “hate” the Left accuses us of—I mean real
hatred, the cold, poisonous kind that corrodes the soul.
This
is more than a question of party health; it’s a question of national health.
Once the moral dam cracks, it’s hard to repair. Charlie Kirk, for all his
differences with people across the movement, served as a kind of linchpin—a
reminder that energy and principle can coexist. Since his death, the fractures
have become more visible, but they were always there. What we do with them now
will decide whether we restore coherence or slide further into chaos.
Electorally,
the stakes are obvious. The Democrats’ indulgence of their extremes has cost
them the trust of ordinary voters. If Republicans follow the same
pattern—alienating moderates, independents, and former Democrats like me—we’ll
squander what we’ve gained. Imagine a world where the Left finally starts to
temper its excesses while the Right drifts deeper into its most conspiratorial
corners. That would be a disaster, politically and morally.
We
can avoid that fate by building a movement that’s broad, but principled. A
healthy Right welcomes debate but rejects what is reprehensible. It argues from
facts, not fantasies. It knows that liberty without virtue becomes license—and
that the point of freedom isn’t to indulge our passions, but to govern them.
That’s
my warning, and my hope: that we not repeat the unraveling I already saw on the
Left. Let’s ground ourselves in the wisdom of Burke, the clarity of Buckley,
the reverence of Kirk, and the moral seriousness of Scruton. Let’s maintain
populism’s fire but guide it with an unmistakably conservative conscience.
Conservatism, at its best, isn’t mere opposition; it’s stewardship—the quiet
work of keeping a nation steady through the storm.
If
we can do that, the Right won’t drift into the abyss that’s already consumed
the Left. It’ll remain what it was meant to be—the ballast that keeps the
republic steady.
My
response: Well said.
