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By Max Frost
The news is always anxiety-inducing. Lately, it’s been particularly so. The temperature feels like it’s rising, the pace increasing, tensions growing.
Yet in September, between the news cycles, I was fortunate enough to find myself in a beautiful B&B in the Hudson Valley, where I was attending a friend’s wedding. The room had a stack of books, one of which caught my attention.
The Right Stuff.
The cover was epic: A rocket ship, shining in the light and bound for the stars. The writer was one of my favorites, Tom Wolfe. So I picked it up, started reading, and was transported to a world that I think almost everyone can agree we need today.
How Van Gogh could turn a night sky into a painting, Wolfe could transform an era into writing.
He would embed himself in a world, soak it in, and translate it into words that millions of people could enjoy. The approach led him to drive across America with a group of LSD evangelists and publish The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1968. The book became a definitive portrait of 1960s counterculture.
In the 1980s, he immersed himself in the world of New York City, from Wall Street to the ghettos of the South Bronx; from cocktail parties to courthouses. He absorbed as much as he could, then converted his experiences into The Bonfire of the Vanities – a novel that captured the tension of 1980s New York City better than perhaps any other work.
I read those books because I was interested in those eras. Counter-culture? Cool. 1980s New York? Crazy. Astronauts and early NASA? Eh. That’s what The Right Stuff was about, so I skipped it. Then I saw it on the bookshelf.
And from page one, I realized it’s not actually about space. It’s about the people who have the right stuff – an undefinable, know-it-when-you-see-it thing that enables greatness. It’s courage mixed with ego mixed with bravery mixed with a whole lot more. It’s what achieves great things, builds great countries. It’s what – I believe most Roca readers agree – we need today.
Days after I picked up the book, Charlie Kirk was assassinated.
Joy was the response for many on the left. A minority, certainly, but many nonetheless. After the platitudes (“Violence is wrong!”) people turned to finger-pointing and “victim blaming” (“He had it coming”; “I mean it’s terrible that Kirk was killed, but he did advocate for gun rights…”).
In a moment, politicians’ “courage” disappeared. Take Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA).
Moulton said after last year’s election that he didn’t want his daughters “getting run over” by “formerly male” athletes. “As a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that,” he said at the time. This was considered a big deal. He was calling his party out of touch and calling for a new way forward. In response, he had staff quit, and his party’s left wing turned on him. It was a bold move that he knew would incur consequences. Perhaps it was some of the right stuff?
The move put Moulton on the outside. So, what does he do next? Seizes on Charlie Kirk’s death to get back in his party’s good graces.
Less than 24 hours after Kirk’s killing, Moulton went on CNN to say that the real issue in the country was “right wing extremists.”
"We need to be honest as a nation about where this violence is coming from," he said. “Of extremist violent murders in America. 76% are from right-wing extremists; 4% are from left-wing extremists.”
The blood was barely dry, the facts were scarcely known, and it was time to score some points!
Not that the Republicans were better.
“There is nothing left to talk about with the left. They hate us,” wrote Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) – who is increasingly being floated as a 2028 presidential candidate – on X. “Our country is too far gone and too far divided, and it’s no longer safe for any of us.”
“To be honest,” she wrote, “I want a peaceful national divorce.”
The right stuff? No. Short-term political points? Check.
And then there was Attorney General Pam Bondi (R), who tossed out years of conservative warnings about the risks of outlawing hate speech. She said, "We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
The right stuff? No. Power grab? Check.
And of course, there was President Trump.
In front of 90,000 people at Charlie’s memorial service, Kirk’s widow Erika declared of Kirk’s killer, “I forgive him.” (The right stuff?)
Then Trump spoke: “I hate my opponent and I don't want the best for them. I'm sorry. I am sorry, Erika.”
A joke, maybe. But the right stuff?
Wolfe makes clear that the first astronauts were not saints. They had egos and affairs. They were often absent fathers. They were personally interested. But fear? No sir. They were willing to strap themselves on top of a rocket (which were known to explode), lock themselves into a windowless capsule with no more than 18 inches of room, and careen into space.
Why? Because they had the right stuff.
The first astronauts had been test pilots – highly-trained military flyers who would test experimental aircraft to evaluate their performance, design, safety, and limitations. This job required them to push jets to their absolute limit, flying them as fast as they could; taking them as high as they could; turning them as aggressively as they could. It was one of the most dangerous jobs on Earth. In the 1950s, as many as one in four would die in crashes. Any flight could result in a jet flipping one end over the other until it crashed to the ground. This wasn’t for clout. Much of the public scarcely knew they existed.
A small group of these test pilots was selected to be the first people in space. They didn’t know what they were getting into. Many were actually disappointed by the selection, because they wanted to keep on flying their planes, pushing the limits of what was possible.
But they were called on to do something remarkable, and in the end, they did it.
Since Charlie Kirk’s killing, we’ve needed the right stuff.
In September, US Attorney Erik Siebert resigned under pressure after he didn’t bring charges against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. A more pliant DoJ has since charged both of them and Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton with a range of crimes.
Trump supporters say that this is fair, given the actions those three people took to undermine Trump. Take AG James, who ran in New York on a campaign promise of investigating Trump. Or Comey, whose handling of the Trump-Russia investigation led a large chunk of America to deem Trump an illegitimate president (James used those exact words, opting to call Trump “that man in the White House” rather than “president”).
Point taken. But are cycles of retribution good for the country? When will it stop?
When a leader has, to quote Wolfe, the right stuff.
One more example.
In Virginia, we’ve got Jay Jones running for attorney general. In repeated text messages, he said that if given two bullets and put in a room with Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert (R), Hitler, and Pol Pot, “[Gilbert] receives both bullets every time.” He didn’t say this in a one-off text. He said it repeatedly, and that he would “piss on” the graves of dead Republicans. He wished the death of Gilbert’s children, “little fascists.”
You’d think that this would be disqualifying; that Abigail Spanberger – the Democrat running as a moderate for Virginia’s governorship – would tell Jones to step aside. Isn’t that what a leader would do? Tell him to quit?
But that would take – the right stuff!
So, no, she hasn’t told him to drop out. She just “spoke frankly with Jay about my disgust” and continued her campaign.
But not to be outdone! This week, Politico obtained the texts of a group of “Young Republicans,” ranging from nobodies to a state senator and assistant to Kansas’ attorney general. The texts called for putting their opponents in gas chambers (“We gotta pretend that we like them. ‘Hey, come on in. Take a nice shower and relax’. Boom - they’re dead”), celebrated Nazism (“I love Hitler”), and were blatantly racist (Regarding watching the NBA: “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball” or “Bro is at a chicken restaurant ordering his food. Would he like some watermelon and kool aid with that?”).
So what did VP Vance do when asked about this?
“Kids do stupid things,” he said. “Especially young boys.” Of course, these were men – aged between 22 and 35 – and some were in positions of political power.
Vance and Jones and Spanberger and everyone else have their own political considerations. They have their reasons for condemning or not condemning things; for bringing charges or launching investigations; etc., etc. Everyone thinks they’re justified in what they do. I mean, come on, even Stalin and Hitler thought they were the good guys!
The point here isn’t to criticize one person or party. It’s to say that this tit-for-tat, lowest-common-denominator attitude is bringing the country down, making everything worse.
It’s me-above-all thinking. And it shows that none of these people have the right stuff.
In the end, the astronauts did what they had to do: They strapped themselves in and launched themselves into orbit – because it’s what the country called on them to do and, most importantly, they had the right stuff.
One has to read the whole book to understand what, exactly, the term means. But in one sense, Wolfe says it’s this:
It obviously involved bravery. But it was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life…
The idea….that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness to pull it back in the last yawning movement….and, ultimately, in its best expression, do so in a cause that means something to thousands, to a people, a nation, to humanity, to God.
We’re not asking our politicians to risk their lives in a hurtling piece of machinery. Really just the last part.
But who would climb in that rocket ship today? Who would take the risk and push the boundaries for the good of a people, a nation, humanity?
Does anyone today have the right stuff?
Editor’s Note
We made today’s email free for all readers. If you enjoyed it, please consider becoming a Roca member.
Does anyone have the right stuff? Is anyone looking out for something bigger than themselves or their political party? I hope so. Let me know if anyone comes to mind by replying to this email. Also, this was a departure from our typical content. Let us know if you enjoyed it (or hated it) so we can inform our writings in the future.
And check out our most recent stories here if you haven’t read them yet:
That’s all. Thanks for reading.
—Max and Max
