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Culture The Civil War’s Inglorious Last Chapter An October conference examined the legacy of the Siege of Petersburg, a grim episode in America’s “great single tragic event.” The late Gore Vidal once recounted how Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative intellectual and longtime editor of Commentary, was flummoxed by Vidal’s persistent interest in the American Civil War, which to Podhoretz was “as remote and as irrelevant as the War of the Roses.” Vidal, who chronicled American history through his series of bestselling novels, was struck by this distant and alien sentiment, since “the Civil War was—and is—to the United States what the Trojan War was to the Greeks, the great single tragic event that continues to give resonance to our Republic.” Though it’s little talked about, the Siege of Petersburg represents the last chapter of the war in the east, lasting 292 days—a fifth of the Civil War’s whole duration. The seventh largest city in the Confederacy and the second largest in Virginia, Petersburg was a major transportation hub in addition to possessing several iron foundries and tobacco depots. General Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia hunkered down to protect their supply routes and the Confederate capital of Richmond, holding off encroachments from Union Generals Ulysses S. Grant and George Meade and their Army of the Potomac. This was not a campaign of glorious bayonet charges; there was no Gettysburg moment. Soldiers were “living like a rat underground” for nine months, explained a local guide, dying in ever-tightening trenches amid continuous offensives which foreshadowed the combat of the First World War. In the local Blandford Cemetery—the second largest in Virginia, after Arlington—30,000 Confederates are buried, but only a little over 10 percent are identified. This was a fitting spot to host an October conference headlined, “1865: A Year of Reckoning,” the 29th annual symposium held by Pamplin Historical Park, site of the National Museum of the Civil War Soldier and the “breakthrough” battlefield that ended the Petersburg siege on April 2, 1865. The first symposium began modestly enough in a hotel with a dozen Civil War aficionados. (One couple in attendance had been to all 29). But these days it is a disciplined, three-day event that attracts a sustainable crowd of over fifty registrants, with a predictable census: overwhelmingly elderly, mostly male (75 percent), and exclusively white. “Always nice to see some guys who aren’t on Social Security,” a park guide said to me and a friend, both young millennials.  This year’s topic focused on the end of the war: the concluding military campaigns, the terms of Confederate surrender, the intentions of the Lincoln administration (cut short by his assassination), and how the American people faced the future in 1865. Professor Brooks D. Simpson of Arizona State University lamented that his students are always interested in how wars start, but that “we don’t study how wars end.” President Abraham Lincoln personally visited the battlements at Petersburg and witnessed the guns firing. With the apparent end of the war at the forefront of his mind, Lincoln composed what Harold Holzer, Director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College in New York, referred to as “the greatest inaugural address in presidential history.” A speech of less than 10 minutes, the shortest since George Washington’s second inaugural and until Franklin Roosevelt’s fourth, Lincoln’s second inaugural laid the basis for what he hoped would be a sectional and racial reconciliation: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds….” Lincoln was “a sucker for sentiment,” chimes Holzer, who supposes “maybe we could try for that [forgiveness] again” to heal current national divides. When his position in Petersburg finally became untenable, Lee withdrew with 50,000 men composed of dismounted cavalry, old draftees, militia, and local call-ups, “not the army he started with” in 1862. Although denying any consideration of surrender for another week, after his route of escape was cut off and his expected resupply of food confiscated, Lee stopped his army’s march at Appomattox Court House to surrender his sword on April 9. “Let them up easy,” had been Lincoln’s instruction for Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, both of whom understood the instruction and agreed with the magnanimity. Grant paroled Lee’s men, and sent 25,000 portions of captured rations to the former Confederates before letting them go home. Sherman’s terms to General Joseph E. Johnston on April 17 were just as generous, and as explained by Craig Symonds, formerly of the U.S. Naval Academy, the two generals even tried and failed to craft a broader peace agreement. Although there would be Confederate armies in the field until late June, the war was effectively over. When one of Lee’s lieutenants suggested dispersing the army into the mountains to continue the fighting as guerillas, Lee declined. “General, you and I as Christian men have no right to consider only how this would affect us. We must consider its effect on the country as a whole.” That sentiment for peaceful coexistence and an end to the bloodshed was shared by the legendary Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who despite expectations surrendered his 8,000 cavalrymen. Forrest instructed his men: Civil war, such as you have just passed through, naturally engenders feelings of animosity, hatred, and revenge. It is our duty to divest ourselves of all such feelings; and as far as it is in our power to do so, to cultivate friendly feelings towards those with whom we have so long contended, and heretofore so widely, but honestly, differed. As I chronicled previously in The American Conservative, post-2020 cultural arsonists have torn down and destroyed statues of both Lee and Forrest, among other Confederate veterans. Professor Brian Steel Wills of Kennesaw State University said the act of taking down these statues gave “success to the wrong kind of message and the wrong kind of people.”  Whether attendees traveled to Petersburg from the north or south, and whether their ancestors wore the blue or the gray, there was a distinct sense of kinship among these people who remember better than anyone how bitter political divides can lead to bloody and unpredictable results. “Wars promise more than they deliver. And they deliver more than most would care to promise,” explained George Rable, professor emeritus at the University of Alabama. Carlton Lowry, a retired carpenter and member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, has volunteered at Pamplin Park for 14 years. “My advice to people when they come and ask me certain questions about history is to take the time to read the journals from these soldiers that actually fought in this conflict and the history that people wrote about back then and apply it to yourself,” he told TAC.  “There are plenty of people here who have mentioned that if you place yourself in their time, you’ll understand more why what was happening did happen. I feel strongly that we’re getting ready to repeat another civil war because too many people are ignoring what happened in the last one,” Lowry surmised. The post The Civil War’s Inglorious Last Chapter appeared first on The American Conservative.

UK Special Coverage The Trans Debate Still Rages in the UK A Scottish employment tribunal and the British Supreme Court are on a collision course. UK Special Coverage Late on Christmas Eve 2023, a 50-year-old nurse, Sandie Peggie, had an altercation in the women’s changing rooms of Victoria Hospital Fife with a transgender doctor, Beth Upton. She was dealing with a heavy period and objected to undressing before a male-bodied trans woman. She said he had no right to be there. The doctor reported Peggie for a transphobic “hate incident,” and this led to her being suspended from her job by NHS Fife. Peggie fought against her suspension and took NHS Fife to an employment tribunal, claiming victimization and discrimination under the UK Equality Act 2010. The issue became a cause célèbre in the raging culture war in Britain between those who believe the doctrine according to Stonewall—that trans women are women—and so-called “gender-critical” feminists who believe that sex is innate, binary, and that trans women are, essentially, men. This week, after two years of intense debate and public demonstrations, the tribunal finally reported that Peggie had indeed been “harassed” by the hospital authorities. Compensation will follow.  This has been interpreted by her sympathizers, and by many in the UK media, as a victory for sex-based rights.  But it was one step forward, two steps back for Peggie and believers in biological essentialism. The judge ruled that the Fife Health Board had acted unreasonably in the manner in which it suspended Peggie for misconduct simply on the basis of Upton’s claims. It delayed, obfuscated, and was wrong to tell Peggie not to discuss the case. However, the tribunal rejected Peggie’s claim that she had been discriminated against and victimized, either by NHS Fife or by the transgender doctor. The judge, Alexander Kemp, appeared to rule that Upton had a right to use a women’s changing room because, well, he looked a bit like a woman. Now, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled in a landmark case earlier this year that, for the purposes of equalities law, “sex” means biological sex. The assumption of everyone, therefore, including the Equality and Human Rights Commission in its guidance to public bodies, is that single-sex spaces, like toilets and changing rooms, should be confined to biological females—to women—not just men wearing a skirt and make-up. The EHRC is about to issue updated guidelines to this effect. But the Employment Tribunal judge appeared to disagree with the UK Supreme Court. Kemp said in his judgement that it had “not been unlawful” for Upton to use the female changing room at Victoria Hospital—at least before Peggie complained about it. This was, the judgement said, because he had “feminine clothes, hairstyle and voice… consistent with what is generally regarded as feminine in style.” This has infuriated many women who regard these as outdated and superficial stereotypes of womanhood and think it is offensive to define sex in terms of appearance and style of dress. They also took exception to Judge Kemp’s reference to sex being “assigned at birth,” rather than observed. This encapsulates the Stonewall doctrine that sex is not binary but mutable, and that some people are born in the “wrong” bodies. Hence the slogan “trans women are women.” Even more contentious, Kemp concluded there was “very far from sufficient reliable evidence” to conclude that a trans woman poses a “greater risk” to women in female changing rooms than another woman. This is disputed, to say the least. There is apparently incontrovertible evidence, throughout history, that men are more likely to harm women than other women are. The judge had clearly imbibed large quantities of transgender Kool-Aid, for this is another argument put forth by Stonewall and other transgender activist groups, as well as by the former First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon.  She always claimed that transgender people pose no threat to women—even though there was clear evidence that transgender sex offenders in Scotland had been changing their “lived gender” to gain access to women’s prisons. In his ruling, Kemp also censured Peggie for robustly expressing her gender-critical beliefs and even claimed that some of her comments amounted to “harassment” of Upton and could have constituted a “hate incident”. She had, in conversations with colleagues, called him a “weirdo” and “a man in a dress”. The judge said that this could be seen as “transphobic”—which is actually a hate crime in Scottish law. The tribunal report, while technically a victory for Peggie, actually amounted to a character assassination. The tribunal also heard that Peggie had made offensive remarks and jokes about Muslims. In conversations with colleagues she had said she was worried about the building of a mosque in Kirkcaldy and feared the introduction of Sharia law. She was alleged to have said she had “a good mind to post bacon through their letterbox.” These had nothing to do with her relations with Upton, but were used by the Fife Health Board to demonstrate her allegedly bigoted character. This entire case appears to have been a classic example, in microcosm, of the cultural clash which has been disfiguring public-sector bureaucracies and much of corporate Britain for the last decade. On the one hand, fully paid-up members of the lanyard class of credentialed elites who obsess about politically correct speech and believe that trans women are essentially female; on the other, a working-class woman unversed in the correct language to use about race and gender, who calls a spade a spade and will not submit to the biological absurdity that people can change sex. The Supreme Court of the UK was on Peggie’s side, but this didn’t appear to matter to the tribunal. Throughout over a year of hearings, a succession of health-service bureaucrats and equalities officers, invariably themselves female, gave evidence promoting the doctrine according to Stonewall. Isla Bumba, the Equality and Human Rights Lead for NHS Fife, told the tribunal in July that she “didn’t know” her own sex because “no one knows what their chromosomes are”. This is classic gender sophistry. It is not necessary to investigate chromosomes to determine sex, as any gynecologist would agree—it would make their job impossible were it so. The HR department of Fife Health Board had been captured by transgender ideology in much the same way as the Scottish Government itself, which had, at the same time as Peggie’s complaint in 2023, become mired in controversy over allowing a double rapist, Isla Bryson, to be placed on remand in Cornton Vale women’s prison because he had self-identified as female after being charged with his offense. Other male-bodied sex offenders had also been placed in women’s prisons following guidance from the Scottish Government affirming that trans women should have their social gender recognized rather than their biological sex. Kemp had clearly been influenced by the evidence from Bumba and other HR officials. He had “educated himself,” as progressives call it, and was fully versed in the metaphysics of non-binary gender ideology. Hence the suggestions that people are not born with a sex but have one “assigned” to them, presumably by transphobic midwives. Kemp’s ruling held that “gender reassignment” was a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010 and that trans women therefore had equal rights to those of biological women when it came to using women’s facilities. He ruled that the legal definition of “sex” as biological sex does not automatically prohibit a trans woman from using a female changing room. This is in direct conflict with the ruling by the UK Supreme Court in April 2025 in For Women Scotland v. The Scottish Ministers. This case had arisen initially because the Scottish government in 2018 started appointing trans women to public bodies and counting them as women for the purpose of meeting gender-equality quotas. “Real” women in the campaign organization For Women Scotland claimed that this erasure of women was contrary to equality law. The Supreme Court looked at all the arguments and decided that sex must mean biological sex, as recorded at birth, even if the trans woman possesses a Gender Recognition Certificate that says they are female. Under UK law, transgender people are allowed to change their legal sex under the Gender Recognition Act, passed by the Labour government in 2004. Under this statute, a trans person can apply for a Gender Recognition Certificate confirming the change of legal sex provided he or she has had a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria and has lived in their acquired gender for two years. A GRC allows them to change their birth certificate from male to female or vice versa. This law has never been repealed. There has therefore been some confusion as to whether the GRC allows people with male bodies the right to access women’s single-sex spaces. Yet the confusion is not as significant as may appear. The 2010 Equality Act specifically permits that trans women be excluded from a women’s group “as a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.” A group supporting female victims of sexual violence would be justified in excluding male-bodied trans women. This immediately imported biological sex into equality law as early as 2010. At any rate, the Supreme Court decided that this 20-year-long confusion had to end, hence its affirmation of the common-sense view that sex is binary, immutable, and observed at birth. But transgender dogma is one of what are sometimes called the “luxury beliefs” of the educated classes. It is a kind of intellectual vanity which differentiates the bien-pensants elites from the uneducated lower orders with their supposedly bigoted attitudes. The battle over biological sex is largely over, thanks to the Supreme Court, but as the Peggie case confirms, the culture war is still raging in the UK. Various women’s sex-based rights groups are already preparing appeals against the ruling of the Employment Tribunal. We may be hearing again from the Supreme Court before this war is over. The post The Trans Debate Still Rages in the UK appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs European Nationalists Welcome Trump’s Civilizational Turn But are Western patriots ready to unite?   Credit: Maja Hitij/Getty Images Making Europe great again is now officially a vital interest of the United States. The ambitious policy was codified in the latest National Security Strategy (NSS), which the White House published last week. Europe faces “civilizational erasure,” the document warned, and “certain NATO members will become majority non-European” over the next few decades, possibly undermining their alliances with America. The NSS depicted a Europe suffering from out-of-control migration, over-regulation, and restrictions on free speech. It said the Trump administration would cultivate “resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” The document has met a negative, even apoplectic, reaction from mainstream European leaders and American media. An article in Axios said the NSS had cast Europe as a “geopolitical villain.” Josep Borrell, a former top diplomat of the European Union, called it a “declaration of political war on the EU.” Many European politicians saw the NSS as proof that Trump was abandoning European allies in favor of Russia. But right-wingers across the old continent take a very different view, seeing Trump as a useful ally for European nations that have already been betrayed—by their own leaders. Their warm reception of the NSS comes as no surprise, yet is more significant than suggested by most American media, which has tended to vilify or ignore European nationalists. The high-ranking Polish parliamentarian Krzysztof Bosak told me in an interview that he agreed completely with the criticisms of Europe laid out in the NSS. “Maybe Europe needs a shock from our good old friend America to start a true debate,” he said. In the view of Bosak and other “Euroskeptic” figures, the NSS was not a challenge to Europe per se, but to a bloated EU bureaucracy that has grown ever more oppressive and liberal since its founding in 1993. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk offered a very different reaction. Writing on X shortly after the NSS was published, Tusk gave voice to anxieties that have gripped European capitals since Trump returned to the White House this January. Tusk wrote: Dear American friends, Europe is your closest ally, not your problem. And we have common enemies. At least that’s how it has been in the last 80 years. We need to stick to this, this is the only reasonable strategy of our common security. Unless something has changed. That post went viral, and in the days following, European leaders normally reticent about their negative opinions of the U.S. president found the courage to speak out. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Tuesday that certain passages were “unacceptable to us from a European perspective.” But in Germany, as in Poland, the political establishment differs markedly from the nationalists who challenge it—and who are growing ever more popular amid economic stagnation and a worsening immigration crisis. In an interview and subsequent email exchange, Filip Gaspar—a political advisor and parliamentary assistant in the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party—sounded just as positive about the NSS as Bosak had. When I recited its warnings about Europe’s political oppression and rapid demographic transformation, Gaspar replied, “I couldn’t have said it better myself.” Gaspar highlighted a deep compatibility between the NSS and the AfD’s political program, which centers the interests of Germans in both foreign and domestic policy.  Pointing to harsh criticisms of the NSS from figures in the Berlin establishment, Gaspar maintained that the AfD was the only German party able to navigate the new paradigm of transatlantic relations inaugurated by Trump. “While the German mainstream reacts to the National Security Strategy with moral outrage and defensive rhetoric,” he said, “the AfD has long developed a coherent doctrine built on sovereignty, controlled migration, cultural stability and realist statecraft.” Over in France, the same divide is on display: The political establishment has lambasted the NSS—one official called it a “brutal clarification of the United States’ ideological posture”—while Jordan Bardella, the leader of France’s National Rally party, told the BBC that he broadly agreed with it. “Mass immigration and the laxity of our governments in the last 30 years with regards to migration policy are shaking the balance of European countries, of Western societies, and namely French society,” Bardella said.  And yet, Bardella also expressed wariness about the Trump administration’s efforts to influence European politics. “I’m French, so I’m not happy with vassalage, and I don’t need a big brother like Trump to consider the fate of my country,” he told the Telegraph in an interview published Tuesday.  Of course, an undercurrent of anti-Americanism has long tugged at the French right wing. But nationalist parties in other European countries, too, won’t simply bow down to the Trump administration, however much they agree with its diagnosis of European decline. Even Bosak suggested that the criticisms of Europe in the NSS were one-sided and out of place in an official strategy document. “I can imagine a European strategic document with some criticisms of America,” Bosak said with a smile. András László, a Hungarian member of the European Parliament and president of the Patriots for Europe Foundation, offered a similar view as Bardella and Bosak. The NSS, László said in an interview, offered a surprisingly accurate view of Europe’s civilizational crisis. “There’s a profound change going on in Europe, and that’s the exact change reflected in this National Security Strategy,” László said. “But this is something we need to fix ourselves, not because it’s something the U.S. wants us to.” The Trump administration may find that a civilizational grand strategy, especially one that seeks to boost Europe’s right-wing parties, runs up against international divisions. Right-wing parties in Poland and Hungary, for example, sometimes clash over the Russia–Ukraine war. But the European right should be able to overcome such disagreements, László told me. “There are of course differences, but we are united by the view that the EU is going in the wrong direction,” László said. “That’s absolutely a common perspective between us.” But other, deeper tensions arguably exist between the civilizational framework expounded in the NSS and Trump’s America First foreign policy, which seeks a retrenchment from Europe and eschews lecturing other countries about their values. The foreign policy analyst Sumantra Maitra—a contributing editor of The American Conservative and founder of Clio Strategic Consulting—says the NSS departs in some ways from the pragmatic realism of America First. “If the U.S. wants to burden-shift, which is a prudent instinct, Washington, DC must be prepared for a relatively independent Europe, which is also good for us,” Maitra told me. “President Trump says he doesn’t want to run Europe. VP Vance says U.S. foreign policy shouldn’t be about hectoring. Well, guess what, stop hectoring Europe then. Let them take their own responsibility.” Of course, America First conservatism is not inherently at odds with a civilizational vision of world affairs. Pat Buchanan, cofounder of this magazine and an ideological precursor to Trump, often thought in civilizational terms and expressed affection for Europe as the wellspring of America’s own heritage. But translating that sweeping vision into foreign policy may prove a hard trick to pull off. With the NSS, the Trump administration has, rather boldly, signaled an intention to try. The post European Nationalists Welcome Trump’s Civilizational Turn appeared first on The American Conservative.

More than 70 additional photos from the estate of convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein have been released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee on Friday released a batch of photos of Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump and other prominent officials and public figures, a small portion of what they said were thousands of images recently provided by Epstein's estate.

GOP House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said he plans to commence contempt of Congress proceedings against Bill and Hillary Clinton for ignoring the committee's subpoenas related to its ongoing probe into the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.