TLP Weekend Edition (November 22-23, 2025)

What we're reading and checking out.

New Zealand’s Tamaiti Williams during the Haka at the 2025 Quilter Nations rugby match against England. The All Blacks are in Cardiff Saturday for the final match of the autumn series against Wales. (Getty Images)

🎤 “Keynote Address: Gordon S. Wood,” delivered at AEI’s 2025 Irving Kristol Award Presentation. The eminent American historian Gordon Wood, who calls himself “one of those liberals mugged by reality” like Kristol himself, focused his award presentation remarks on the upcoming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and what this means for American identity.

When Lincoln declared in 1858 “all honor to Jefferson,” he paid homage to the Founder who he knew could explain why the United States was one nation, and why it should remain so. Half the American people, said Lincoln, had no direct blood connection to the revolutionaries of 1776. These German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian citizens either had come from Europe themselves or their ancestors had, and they had settled in America, “finding themselves our equals in all things.” Although these immigrants may have had no actual connection in blood with the revolutionary generation that could make them feel part of the rest of the nation, they had, said Lincoln, “that old Declaration of Independence” with its expression of the moral principle of equality to draw upon. This moral principle, which was “applicable to all men and all times,” made all these different peoples one with the Founders, “as though they were blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration.” (Lincoln’s invocation of this biblical image takes my breath away.) This emphasis on liberty and equality, Lincoln said, shifting images, was “the electric cord…that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”

In Jefferson’s Declaration Lincoln found a solution to the great problem of American identity: how the great variety of individuals in America with all their diverse ethnicities, races, and religions could be brought together into a single nation. As Lincoln grasped better than anyone ever has, the Revolution and its Declaration of Independence offered us a set of beliefs that through the generations has supplied a bond that holds together the most diverse nation that history has ever known.

Since now the whole world is in the United States, nothing but the ideals coming out of the Revolution and their subsequent rich and contentious history can turn such an assortment of different individuals into the “one people” that the Declaration says we are. To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something. That is why we are at heart a credo nation, and that is why the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration next year is so important.

(H/T: What the Hell is Going On? by Danielle Pletka)

🇺🇸 “What I Saw and Heard in Washington,” by Rod Dreher. The former American Conservative writer Rod Dreher visited Washington, D.C., earlier this month and reported on the discussions he had with a litany of Republican officials, including Vice President JD Vance. Among his insights written on his Substack were discussions with party staffers who fear that the GOP’s antisemitism problem is worse than people realize. His main takeaways:

1. The Groyper thing is real. It is not a fringe movement, in that it really has infiltrated young conservative Washington networks to a significant degree.
2. Irrational hatred of Jews (and other races, but especially Jews) is a central core of it. This is evil. If postliberal conservatism requires making peace with antisemitism and race hatred, count me out.
3. It cannot be negotiated with, because it doesn’t have traditional demands. It wants to burn the whole system down. It really does.
4. At the same time, the gatekeepers of the Right aren’t going to be able to make it go away, because they have less power than ever. Dealing with this is going to require great skill and subtlety, and courage.
5. This malign movement didn’t just appear from nowhere. There are within it legitimate grievances. And, as I keep saying, it emerged in a culture that, per Hannah Arendt’s diagnosis, is primed to believe totalitarian things.
6. The Left got there first. This is not a case of “whatabout”; for almost two decades, left-wing radicals have marched through institutions and imposed illiberal, race-based leftist policies that openly intended to discriminate against whites, males, and anybody who dissented. You cannot understand the rise of the Groypers without understanding this first.
7. Conservatives like me had hoped that Trump’s anti-woke pushback would simply restore the meritocratic status quo. It turns out that the Zoomercons don’t want that. They want revenge.
8. This has the potential to destroy conservatism politically. In actual existing America, a white nationalist party that demonizes non-whites who would otherwise be drawn to a conservative message will alienate those voters. Even if all whites voted for the white nationalist party, it still wouldn’t win. But very many whites, including white Christians, will want nothing to do with it.
9. It also poses the risk of wrecking the new, post-MAGA conservatism, whose natural heir is JD Vance. There will be old-school normie conservatives like Sen. Ted Cruz who will do their best to hang Fuentes and Jew-hatred around JD Vance’s neck. There are enough living Boomers and normie Republicans who would rather vote for a suboptimal candidate like Cruz than take their chances with a candidate who, fair or not, has been tarred with the evil of anti-Semitism and race hatred via Fuentes and Carlson.
10. Anti-Semitism is spreading like a virus among religious conservatives of the Zoomer generation. They’re getting it through online influencers, but apparently their pastors and parents are either not fighting back, or have lost authority in the minds of these young people. This is irrational. For example, I heard from a number of Zoomercon Christians that Zoomer trad Catholics are making antisemitism part of their spirituality—this, despite the fact that the Catholic Church explicitly condemns it. The same phenomenon, I am hearing, exists among Zoomercon Orthodox and Protestants. Putting aside politics, this is total spiritual poison.
11. I anticipate that the liberal media is going to have a field day with this, in part to distract from the ugly fact that antisemitism is triumphant among Zoomer progressives, and that the new face of the Democratic Party is Zohran Mamdani, a woke young Millennial who has made a career of intense hostility to Israel, bordering on anti-Semitism, if not actual anti-Semitism (I believe he is anti-Semitic, but it’s arguable.)
12. Conservatives—Jewish, Christian, and agnostic—who support Israel are going to have to think very hard about how to proceed. Support for Israel has collapsed among the young, and it’s not coming back anytime soon. This is the political reality we have to deal with. We can’t wish it away, or cancel it away.
13. The intra-conservative fight is here, and we can’t avoid it. Nor should we, for the sake of party unity. In The House Of Government, Yuri Slezkine said that the willingness of parents to indulge their radical children played a significant role in the eventual triumph of Bolshevism. Some of these parents comforted themselves with the thought that their adult kids would grow out of their revolutionary fervor. Others may have hated what their kids believed, but didn’t want to risk alienating them, so they stayed quiet, and passively supported them, hoping for the best. VP Vance said publicly last week that this conservative “infighting” is a pointless distraction. I told him personally, and respectfully, in a meeting last Friday that I disagree, and why. And I told him why I think all this is a direct threat to his political future.

It’s worth also noting that Emily Jashinsky, a reporter for UnHerd who TLP has interviewed on the podcast, has pushed back against Dreher’s claims of just how widespread the “groyper” phenomenon is among Republican Gen Z staffers based on her own reporting (though she still believes the share is higher than anyone should accept).

📚 Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh, narrated by Jeremy Irons. Brideshead Revisited is one of the great books of the 20^th century, and it is beautifully read by the incomparable Jeremy Irons. If you ever listen to audiobooks, listen to this one.

Selected by Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the century and called “Evelyn Waugh’s finest achievement” by the New York Times, Brideshead Revisited is a stunning exploration of desire, duty, and memory. Read by Jeremy Irons, star of the acclaimed 1981 television series based on the novel. The wellsprings of desire and the impediments to love come brilliantly into focus in Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece—a novel that immerses us in the glittering and seductive world of English aristocracy in the waning days of the empire. Through the story of Charles Ryder’s entanglement with the Flytes, a great Catholic family, Evelyn Waugh charts the passing of the privileged world he knew in his own youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh’s early satiric explorations and reveals him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity.

🏟️ Quilter Nations Rugby Series: Wales v New Zealand, at the Principality Stadium, Cardiff. After a proper thumping by England last week, the focus is on the All Blacks this weekend to close out their fall tour of the UK with a victory in Wales. But the Welsh won’t make it easy:

At the All Blacks’ Cardiff Bay hotel, a journalist from New Zealand asked Robertson [NZ head coach] about the pressure on his team and how he was trying to lift spirits.

“You are really talking this up,” replied the head coach with a smile. “You’re quite dramatic, aren’t you?

“We focus on what we could have done better last week and get on with it. There was some really good stuff in there and you look at that.

“We won every stat, but the scoreboard is the most important one, so how can we get that right?”If Robertson [All Blacks head coach] is under pressure now in one of sport’s most intense jobs then a first defeat by Wales since 1953 would have the knives out.

That is unlikely given Steve Tandy’s side needed a last-gasp kick to beat Japan 24-23 and end a 10-Test losing streak in Cardiff.

Wales, ranked 12th in the world, have conceded 50-plus points to both England and Argentina at Principality Stadium this year.

Home expectations are extremely low—a plucky loss would be toasted as progress—but Robertson is wary of a side that, unlike his own, will play without pressure.

“One thing about the Welsh is that you put them under a roof, they sing the anthem and will dig deep,” he said. “Put a black jersey against them and they will find their best.”

“Their backs are against the wall and they’ve got nothing to lose. When you are the opposition coach that’s when you feel you have to be right on it. Wales will be spirited.”

The match starts at 10AM EST and will stream on Peacock.

🎵 Memories and Empties, by Colter Wall. Ol’ brother Colter Wall is back with a cracking new record of traditional country tunes about working, riding horses, singing songs, drinking, and messing up. It's not clear how the Canadian youngster got a voice this worn in, but you gotta love it.

Colter Wall and The Scary Prairie Boys are on tour this December and in early 2026. You won’t want to miss these guys; it’s a heckuva a good ride. Get yourself “a buckskin beer and pedal steel guitar” and enjoy the weekend!