Trent and Caitlin check in with journalist Steven Monacelli, a special investigative correspondent for the Texas Observer, about the evolution and current-day doings of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, the dangers they pose to citizens and noncitizens alike, and the experience of being a journalist observing resistance to
The Republican Congress has signaled they will do whatever it takes to support the largest population expulsion in history.
Adoptees are proof of the cruelty and carelessness at the heart of Trump’s assault on birthright citizenship.
A summary of June 2025 in the second Trump term.
The history of America is a long struggle between the drive for domination and the dream of freedom.
Since the end of the Cold War, it's been easy to see nuclear competition as a thing of the past. As the dust settles over Iran—as Russia rattles the nuclear saber in Ukraine—it's increasingly clear that the question of nuclear weapons has been re-opened.
The Court has suddenly decided to place limitations on injunctions when they were preventing a brazenly unconstitutional executive order.
Caitlin and Trent reconnect with librarian and intellectual freedom advocate Katie Talhelm for an update about the legislative attacks on public and school libraries since they last spoke. She provides a window into the procedure libraries follow to decide which books to acquire. Half the Answer can be heard on
We discuss Mamdani, trade-offs, empathy, internationalism, and the post-Nazi transition.
The philosophical incoherence of originalism prevents the Court from performing its core functions as a supreme court.
Trent and Caitlin talk to their old friend Clay Jackson, a former litigator and current licensed attorney in Texas. They discuss his plans to embrace a life in his new home on the range, recent developments in immigration rights, and the death penalty in the US. They discuss the history
The reactionary right is in ascendance in the Trump administration. It's easy to dismiss them as a cabal of incoherent fools scrambling for Trump's ear. But there is a deeper philosophy animating their political project: one based on a longing for an imagined aristocratic past, a
When elites feared the system would fall apart entirely, they accepted reform.
The radical right has its own canon of intellectuals—aristocratic, resentful, and a profound challenge to liberal philosophy.
Reading Chandran Kukathas' "Immigration and Freedom" during the second Trump administration.
The classical liberals were, after all, liberals, even as we understand the word today. They valued personal liberty and moral equality, and were prepared to undertake radical social reform to advance those values.
Programs of territorial conquest against non-nuclear states must be strongly punished by whatever means available.
Donald Trump is heir to a long tradition of presidential misuse of federal powers and personnel against American citizens.
A great deal of the opposition has stepped up, but the opposition party needs to start truly acting like one.
A new order for America must involve a comprehensive reconstruction of our political, economic, and civic infrastructure.
Rogers has written a useful guide to the western conservative intellectual tradition that runs into trouble when it approaches the conservatives of our day.
The inherent contradiction of abundance conservatism.
How Trump is different from the old imperialists, and how the liberal world must respond.