At Wired, Laura Bullard writes that “Among the relatively few people associated with National Conservatism who do cite Schmitt openly in their own work are Thiel and Michael Anton, the essayist and sometime Trump administration official.”

We may leave to one side the extent to which I am “associated” with National Conservatism. I did not attend its last two conferences, having been invited and then disinvited in 2024 and not invited at all in 2025. I did sign its manifesto, an act I have come to regret for reasons Charles Kesler explains here.

But that is a quibble compared to the real whopper in the sentence quoted above. I have never, to the best of my knowledge—and I assume that I know my own oeuvre better than Bullard does—“cited” Carl Schmitt. A citation is a very specific thing: a quote or an idea attributed to an author that is typically accompanied by a footnote pointing to an exact source. Moreover, one may cite to signify approval or disapproval, or just to show that one is aware of the thing being cited. Bullard implies that my nonexistent citations of Schmitt signify approval. If she can show one instance of that in any of my writings, I promise to send her a set of steak knives. But I’m certain she can’t.

The only times I can recall even writing about Schmitt, the context was the same as now: Schmitt was brought up by my enemies to call me a Nazi. In responding, I naturally had to say something about Schmitt. If Bullard wants to stretch the meaning of “cite” to include these two web-only pieces, which are not footnoted and in which Schmitt is quoted only once (and from a private letter, not from a published work)…well, OK, but she would also have to admit that these are the only two articles in which I have ever mentioned Schmitt’s name in print or pixels, despite having written and published literally millions of words over more than three decades.

So far am I from “citing” Schmitt as an authority, inspiration, or influence, both of the above-linked pieces make precisely the opposite point: that Schmitt is not particularly important to me nor, I think, to political philosophy. I read some of his work in graduate school—which it seems to me is exactly what one should do in grad school: read a lot of books, especially in one’s chosen subject—and then never returned to him.

I also pointed out in those pieces, and here reiterate, that I was made aware of Schmitt by two Jews: Leo Strauss, who died long before I could meet him, and Harry Jaffa, near whom I spent three years. Strauss in print and Jaffa in person both pointed to Schmitt as an important example of the ferment of early 20th-century political philosophy, but ultimately a lesser thinker, more notable for his historical significance than any profundity of insight. Strauss often argued that originality or prominence and/or historical impact are not the same as depth and that, in philosophy, the latter is what matters.

Strauss has always seemed to me far deeper than Schmitt, a judgement Schmitt himself apparently shared, which is illustrated by the one quote from Schmitt that I included in the first of the two of my articles linked above. In other words, the only time I can even remotely be accused of having “cited” Schmitt, it was to quote his own judgment of his own inferiority to Leo Strauss, a thinker I greatly admire, as I have made clear in countless actual citations.

I have no doubt that Bullard is lazy, sloppy, malicious, uneducated in these matters, and doesn’t understand any of this, but also no doubt that even if she did, she would have written her piece the same way regardless. She wanted to call me a Nazi, and since the name “Carl Schmitt” has appeared under my byline, that was all she needed to know. Nearly the entire Left and half the “Right” operate this way today, so I’m used to it, but I still find it disgraceful and depressing.

I also wish to reiterate another point made in the prior two articles—one that is fundamental. Just about the only two things anyone knows about Schmitt are his embrace of the so-called “friend-enemy distinction” and his joining the Nazi Party in 1933. The latter action is said to discredit the former idea, and anyone who accepts  the friend-enemy distinction must ipso facto also be a Nazi. Despite this argument’s extreme stupidity, vapidity, and intellectual bankruptcy, it now commands universal acceptance on the Left and that half of “the Right” which exists to collaborate with the Left.

As I have pointed out many times, the friend-enemy distinction is fundamental to politics, and has been recognized as such in the literature of political philosophy since its origin in Athens circa 440 BC. James Lindsay, the professional X troll, is the latest to deny this from a position of ignorance. Smarting from his failure to make “Woke Right” happen and become the new Great Excommunicator who gets to decide who’s in and who’s out of the respectable Right, Lindsay is now lashing out wildly (and comically). To see this, we must quote (cite?) part of a recent tweetstorm:

What’s actually funniest about it is how they [i.e., the alleged Woke Right Schmittians] try to make the case that it’s [i.e., the friend-enemy distinction] an idea that goes back to Plato or is in the Bible (and Quran) or whatever, but instead of having made the case through Plato, they chose the Nazi, Schmitt, anyway, and now they’re stuck.

Of course, it’s not actually what Plato said, so they couldn’t do that. Plato presented the idea such that Socrates tore it apart such that truth, justice, and wisdom cannot be separated from the political, which is what they want to do. So, they’re just lying, as usual.

Their argument is stupid too. It’s that war is the bottommost state of politics, so it’s the essential concept (Begriff) of the political. The friend-enemy distinction is the concept of war, but, even if we allow Clausewitz, war is the most DEGENERATE state of politics, not its fundamental basis. I’ve tried to compare it to the idea of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. They’re collapsing the political wavefunction to its most degenerate state and considering it to be the only real way to think about it, but it’s just wallowing in degeneracy. And the argument over the friend-enemy distinction in a vacuum is nonsense because of Schmitt’s underlying (rather Hegelian, strongly de Maistrean) statism, which is really totalism, which is really totalitarianism. This is why they can’t go back to Plato too (who also wasn’t at all right about all things statecraft—his Republic was a dictatorial monstrosity too).

Let’s unpack this, shall we? As we do so, I will provide citations for the Bullards of the world who want to follow along, primary and secondary sources in hand.

I grant Lindsay this much: there does seem to be a renewed interest in Schmitt among the autodidact, anonymous, online Right. To what extent any of them have actually read Schmitt is another question. I suspect not much. I venture to guess that some relish Schmitt, or easy summaries of Schmitt, because the friend-enemy distinction strikes them as a welcome, blunt rejection of the globalism they despise. Others no doubt enjoy the trollish frisson and the shocked reaction of others generated by signaling admiration for a despised Nazi. I hesitate, especially in these intellectually corrupt times, to steer kids away from reading any book; but I would also advise them that they can do better than Schmitt, and further that if they persist with Schmitt, they should see and use him as a lowish rung on a very tall ladder.

Lindsay, however, goes off the rails rather quickly after that. First of all, he contradicts himself within a single sentence. He says that “they try to make the case” that the friend-enemy distinction “goes back to Plato,” but then he immediately takes that back: “instead of having made the case through Plato” (emphasis added). Which is it? Anyone who knows anything about Plato (or Socrates or philosophy) knows that, Emerson’s oft-quoted witticism aside, the principle of noncontradiction is fundamental to dialectic and hence to philosophy. Lindsay violates it in a single sentence, on the topic of Plato no less, and doesn’t even realize that he has done so.

We must also ask: Who are the “they” in that sentence? Who are these people who could have made their case through Plato but instead “chose the Nazi” and now are “stuck”? No one is “cited.” But one suspects from the context that Lindsay’s “they” is meant to be all-comprehensive: everyone he disagrees with and/or doesn’t like.

Whether Lindsay specifically had me in mind, I do not venture to speculate. Yet I am one of those who have tried to make the case “through Plato” that the friend-enemy distinction is fundamental to politics and to political philosophy. Lindsay attempts to show that this interpretation is “not actually what Plato said” and therefore “they” couldn’t use Plato to make the case. He is wrong on both counts. In fact, I rested my entire argument on Plato; I did not “cite,” quote, or refer to Schmitt even once. Which is illustrative of my larger point: one does not need Schmitt to become aware of or understand the friend-enemy distinction; everything true and valuable in Schmitt is already in the ancients, along with many other treasures not to be found in Schmitt at all. The flipside is also true: what is wrong or inadequate in Schmitt does not mar the ancients.

As to “what Plato said,” three definitions of justice are presented in Book I of the Republic. The central one is that justice is helping friends and harming enemies (332a-b). Contra Lindsay, Socrates did not tear this opinion apart. As Strauss points out (History of Political Philosophy 36-37, City and Man 73), this opinion is not only not refuted by Socrates, it is the only one of the first three definitions of justice that is incorporated into the fully just city, or “city in speech,” presented in the Republic’s positive or constructive part.

Furthermore, in Republic Book II, Socrates makes completely clear that the city will always have enemies (373d-e), which is why a guardian or warrior class is needed (375b-376c). Then, in Book III’s famous “noble lie” passage, he says that even in the perfectly just city, the citizens must share fellow-feeling with fellow citizens only and regard others as outsiders (414d-e). Inconveniently for Lindsay’s “argument,” this passage is bracketed between two specific references to the perfect city’s “enemies” (414b, 415d).

Yet those of us who point all this out are, according to Lindsay, “just lying, as usual.” I leave fair-minded readers to consult Plato’s text for themselves and draw their own conclusions. (I could make a similar case with recourse to Plato’s Laws or Aristotle’s Politics but, in the interests of time and space, won’t.)

I do not wish to spend much time or effort on Lindsay’s final paragraph quoted above, except to point out the nowadays all-too-common bad habit of larding up one’s tweet-prose with names and terminology meant to signal high intelligence. But what do they all mean? What is “totalism” and how does it differ, as Lindsay indicates it must, from “totalitarianism”? What the hell does any of this have to do with quantum mechanics?

Instead, I will close with the following three observations. Clausewitz did not say that “war is the most DEGENERATE state of politics.” To the contrary, his most famous utterance by far holds that “war is a continuation of politics by other means” (On War I 1.24). Clausewitz had (rightly or wrongly) great respect for war as a moral, intellectual, and physical endeavor; contra Lindsay, one of his greatest fears was that war unmoored from its political aims would itself degenerate.

Second, lumping Schmitt together with Hegel and de Maistre is laughable. I suppose one might try to say that the first and third are at least joined by being “on the right,” but their versions of the Right are entirely different. And to link ancien régime apologist de Maistre with end-of-history, rational-state Hegel is beyond a joke. Lindsay’s point seems to be that they all preferred a powerful state, but that’s like lumping together Trump, Obama, and Bush because they all watch football. The form the state takes and the ends it pursues are decisive; by these criteria, those three thinkers could not be more different.

Finally, Lindsay dismisses Plato’s Republic as a “dictatorial monstrosity.” The confidence with which the Internet-famous (to be fair, of both Left and Right) blithely dismiss and declare their superiority over cornerstones of civilization continues to amuse and amaze me. Never in the field of human endeavor has so much unearned overconfidence been directed at denigrating the genuinely sublime as in the Twitter era.

That said, Lindsay has a point: few today would wish to live in Plato’s Republic. But he completely misses the far larger point of what the Republic is really about. That is to say, he entirely misses its ironic qualities, its pedagogical and hortatory purposes, and all the ways in which it begins politically and then, before it is even half complete, starts to transcend politics, culminating in perhaps the most important and least political idea in all philosophy.

And he completely misses Plato’s numerous indications that the “city in speech” is not a serious practical proposal, of which I will mention only two. First there is Socrates’s assertion that the only way to make the city in speech work is to expel everyone over age ten. Somehow all the adults in the city will voluntarily leave home forever, leaving behind their children, whom they will never see again, to be raised by the new philosopher-king rulers (540e-541b). Does Lindsay seriously think Plato means that entirely in earnest? Did he not notice that the dialogue does not address any of the massive practical problems that proposal entails? Such as: How are the new rulers going to convince those people to leave? If they can’t, what other recourse do they have? Force? If they can, how are they going to prevent a city of children from being conquered by a foreign power? Etc.

Second is the so-called “nuptial number” (546b-d) which, even if Lindsay can’t figure out the math (I’m not being snarky here; it’s hard), shows that the whole breeding or eugenics program on which the city in speech depends will inevitably fail. For the city in speech stands or falls by a proper mixture of gold, silver, and bronze souls. The proper ratio is produced by the breeding program overseen by the philosopher kings; when (not if) the ratio becomes imbalanced, the city will fail. Socrates says this bluntly three times (546a, 546b, 547a).

In other words, Lindsay doesn’t understand the Republic at all. So why is he mouthing off about it on the Internet?

The answer is: to call me and others Nazis. That’s really all there is to it. He and Bullard and millions of others are just mean-spirited character assassins out to hurt and delegitimize the half or so of the population they can’t convince or control. To return to the fundamental idea under consideration here, how are we supposed to be fellow citizens with people like this? Why would we want to be?

I do have some advice for Lindsay (and others of his ilk) which I am sure will not be heeded but is nonetheless sincere and well-intentioned. Get off the Internet. Read real books. Discuss them with real people who aren’t constantly kissing your ass.

One of the problems Socrates identified early in his philosophic endeavors was “subjective certainty” (the term is actually Strauss’s, but the concept is Socratic). The reason, or one reason, Socrates went out into the Agora and talked to real people was to test his arguments. So long as he was thinking by himself, or even conversing with friends, he was in danger of accepting error simply from not being adequately challenged.

The Internet is subjective certainty on steroids mixed with cocaine. All one needs to do is develop a following—which, considering the fools who’ve managed it, can’t be all that hard—and one can count on one’s followers to reinforce whatever one says. So one can say manifestly erroneous things and be sure that his online flying monkeys will call him a genius. This is not good for one’s ego, for discourse, for the search for truth, for the flying monkeys, or really for anything beyond dopamine hits.

Alternatively, if going offline is too hard, at least tweet about something other than the Great Books—something you actually understand. What that is, I don’t know, but I’m sure there’s something. If I had Twitter (which I never will), I would probably tweet about lap-swimming and knife-sharpening.