Category: Opinion & analysis
Why the kids are not all right — and Boomers still pretend nothing’s wrong
Here’s a message Baby Boomers need to hear: The America you were born into no longer exists.
A rising tide of young Americans are embracing socialism at a pace this country has never seen. Boomers often assume that it’s about handouts. It isn’t. Beneath the surface is a decades-long campaign so destructive to middle-class mobility that it threatens to push the nation toward civil conflict. The more you study it, the more coordinated it looks.
A people dependent upon ‘gimme gimme’ socialism is an easily managed population. A demoralized middle class keeps the ruling class secure.
In a way, it was.
Short-term profit-maximizing globalists on Wall Street teamed up with the K Street lobbying blob to drown Americans in cheap Chinese goods while saddling them with student debt, consumer debt, and medical debt.
Young people are being priced out of the American dream.
My urgent message to Boomers — especially those who want to keep influence: The kids are not all right.
The America your kids and grandkids know is not the America you knew. Most Boomers were born in the 1950s, when the country was booming — united by postwar optimism, American industrial strength, shared national institutions, Walter Cronkite on one television in every home, full-fat milkshakes, and Elvis shaking up the culture.
Today, we live in a golden age of technological revolution. We are making remarkable advances in space travel, tech, and medicine — increasingly led by the private sector and unapologetic capitalists. But on the basics — housing, health, education — we’re failing the next generation.
In 1955, the median homebuyer was in his late 20s. In 2025, it’s 56. A minimum-wage worker in the 1950s needed roughly seven years of pay to buy a modest home without a mortgage. Today, it’s around 27.
In 1955, a student could pay college tuition by working a few hours a day at minimum wage. Today, that same student would need to work about six hours a day. If a kid wants Yale or any Ivy League school, he would have to work 26.4 hours a day — an impossible figure that illustrates how detached elite education has become from reality.
Here’s a frightening divide: 93% of Boomers say political violence is never justified; 44% of Gen Z say it “sometimes” is.
Ninety-nine percent of kids are not out for blood, but 100% of them face a massive relative disadvantage. The upward mobility Boomers took for granted has been hollowed out by globalist and left-wing policies sold as progress but experienced as decline.
We spent trillions of American dollars on foreign wars, foreign infrastructure, and foreign elections. We borrowed recklessly. Now the dollar is frail. We allowed millions of illegal migrants to enter the country, fueling crime and pushing Americans out of jobs. Young households are buried in debt — not mortgage debt that builds equity, but consumer debt used to numb the anxiety left by a collapse in community and faith.
Here’s the truth: The populist right and the socialist left agree on the diagnosis. Listen to the first half of Bernie Sanders’ interview with Joe Rogan in June. For an hour, Bernie describes America’s economic troubles. Most people, right or left, would nod along.
Then comes the pivot: Socialism is the cure.
This is the left’s great deceit. Progressives’ proposed “solutions” hurt the very people they claim to help.
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Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Take restrictive zoning and rent regulations — blue-state staples designed to “create” affordable housing. In reality, they choke supply and drive rents higher. Or look at no-cash bail. The neighborhoods hit hardest by serially released offenders are the same minority communities progressives claim to champion. The examples pile up.
So why do left-wing billionaires back these ideas? Simple: Socialism, communism, and their logical end point — fascism — are excellent for entrenched oligarchs. A people dependent upon “gimme gimme” socialism is an easily managed population. A demoralized middle class keeps the ruling class secure.
There is another path.
We must reverse the policies that got us here. Strengthen education outcomes, lower health care costs, rebuild domestic supply chains, expand American energy generation, and restore competence to the workforce.
Boomers, if you don’t lead this shift, your influence will vanish before your next Social Security check arrives. Moderate Democrats already know the socialist tide is rising. They’re afraid to say it out loud.
The Gen Z and Millennial voting bloc will dominate the 2028 election. They are demanding change. Moderates — in both parties — are being replaced by extremists.
You have a choice: Allow yourselves to be absorbed into the socialist machine, or correct the mistakes of the last two decades, return power to citizens, and rebuild access to the American dream.
The Supreme Court takes up New Jersey’s baseless assault on pro-life support for moms
New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin’s office was recently forced to make a stunning admission before the U.S. Supreme Court. During oral arguments, Platkin’s team conceded that although the state issued a sweeping subpoena against a pregnancy center — First Choice Women’s Resource Centers — the office had no complaints against the organization.
That admission stripped away any pretense that the attorney general was protecting consumers. It revealed the real motive: a fishing expedition into constitutionally protected internal records and private donor information for no reason other than First Choice’s commitment to life-affirming support for women. Now the court must decide whether New Jersey’s top law enforcement officer can bully pro-life charities out of helping women and families.
When First Choice made its case before the Supreme Court, it stood up for every American who believes mothers deserve compassion without harassment from the state.
What’s at stake is the work of pregnancy centers and charities nationwide that help women sustain their decision for life. These organizations provide the material and emotional resources mothers need to meet their own needs and the needs of their children.
Choosing life for an unborn child is never a one-time decision. It’s a daily commitment made amid financial, professional, emotional, or health-related pressures — and often in the face of serious challenges in securing food, clothing, housing, and other essentials. Women deserve support in every one of those areas so they can pursue their ambitions with their children. Pro-life Americans stand ready to offer that support. Platkin prefers abortion over help for moms.
Research shows that 60% of women who have had abortions would have preferred to choose life if they had more financial security or emotional support. Pregnancy centers and life-affirming organizations across the country confront this reality every day. Last year alone, they provided $452 million in support services, medical care, and material goods — all free of charge.
And the need keeps growing. Over the past two years, pregnancy centers increased their material assistance by 48% to ensure that women have what they need to thrive in pregnancy and early parenting. In 2024 alone, they served 1 million new clients.
When families face challenges beyond diapers and baby supplies, pregnancy centers rise to meet them. At Real Options Pregnancy Center in Texas, staff provided full Thanksgiving meals to local families. In Chicago, a center hosts an annual Christmas celebration so moms can put gifts under the tree. Across the country, community partners working with Her PLAN offer free car maintenance and help women escape trafficking and addiction, secure housing, and receive job training.
Every woman’s story is unique. Pregnancy centers recognize that dignity, which is why they collaborate with trusted community resources to provide comprehensive support tailored to each individual who walks through their doors.
This community network forms the pro-life safety net that Her PLAN strengthens through grassroots engagement and an online directory of vetted service providers across seven categories of care. For women with nowhere else to turn, this wraparound support provides stability, hope, and practical help.
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Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
Women who receive services from pregnancy centers report a 98% satisfaction rate. The real measure of success, however, is the women who later return to help others.
Courtney, once overwhelmed by two unexpected pregnancies, now works at the very center that supported her.
Jean Marie, who escaped human trafficking with the help of a New Hampshire pregnancy center, now runs a center in Vermont, using her experience to counsel vulnerable women.
In Northern Virginia, a maternity home helped Shawnte when she lost her job and housing. Today she works as a peer-recovery coach and credits the maternity home with giving her the strength not to abort “a child I knew I wanted, just because things got hard.”
These women — and countless others — were empowered by the pro-life safety net and now devote themselves to strengthening it for the next mother in crisis.
This is work that protects lives, stabilizes families, and strengthens communities. It deserves support, not intimidation from pro-abortion politicians. When First Choice made its case before the Supreme Court, it stood up for every American who believes mothers deserve compassion without harassment from the state.
Helping women is not controversial. It is love in action.
For once, Medicare is trying something that actually saves money
Medicare is the second-largest program in the federal budget, topping $1 trillion last year. In 2023, it accounted for 14% of federal spending — a share projected to reach 18% by 2032. After years of ballooning costs, something is finally being done to slow the growth. A new Medicare pilot program, the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction model, borrows a successful private-sector tool: prior authorization. And that’s good news.
Medicare Part B premiums now sit at $185 per month — up 28% from five years ago and a staggering 76% since 2015. Last year, 12% of the 61 million Americans enrolled in Part B spent more than a tenth of their annual income on premiums. That burden is unsustainable.
In a system as expensive and fragmented as ours, no one can afford to keep writing blank checks for low-value care.
WISeR, set to launch in Ohio, Texas, Washington, New Jersey, Arizona, and Oklahoma, will require prior approval for a short list of “low-value” services — procedures that research shows are frequently overused, costly, and sometimes harmful.
To some, the idea of Medicare reviewing certain treatments before covering them may sound like red tape. But when done correctly, prior authorization is not a barrier. It is a guardrail — one that protects patients, improves quality, and helps ensure that both tax dollars and premiums are spent appropriately.
The goal of WISeR is simple: Cut unnecessary treatments and shift resources toward more effective, evidence-based care. Critics warn about the possibility of delays or extra paperwork, and those concerns are worth monitoring. But they don’t negate prior authorization’s potential to make U.S. health care safer, more efficient, and more financially stable.
Prior authorization directly targets some of the most persistent problems in health care. Medicare spends billions each year on low-value services. A 2023 study identified just 47 such services that together cost Medicare more than $4 billion annually. Those are taxpayer dollars that could be put to better use.
The private insurance market shows the same pattern: unnecessary imaging, avoidable specialist referrals, and brand-name drugs chosen over generics all contribute to rising premiums. Prior authorization, when used properly, reins in this waste by ensuring coverage lines up with medical necessity and evidence-based best practices. Research from the University of Chicago shows that Medicare’s prior authorization rules for prescription drugs generate net savings even after administrative costs.
Consider one striking example. Medicare Part B covers wound-care products known as skin substitutes. But an Office of Inspector General report found that expenditures on these products skyrocketed over the past two years to more than $10 billion annually. Meanwhile, Medicare Advantage plans — which rely heavily on prior authorization — spent only a fraction of that amount for the same treatments.
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More importantly, prior authorization helps promote evidence-based medicine. It curbs outdated clinical habits and reduces financial incentives to overtreat. Health plans consistently say that prior authorization aligns care with gold-standard clinical guidelines, particularly in areas prone to misuse.
Of course, the system must be designed responsibly. A well-functioning PA process should be transparent, fast, and grounded in strong clinical evidence. Decisions should be made in close coordination with the patient’s treating provider. The appeals process must be straightforward. And both public and private payers should be held accountable for improper denials or harmful delays.
When structured this way, prior authorization is far more efficient than the current “pay-and-chase” model, where Medicare pays first and tries to recover improper payments later.
Prior authorization already works in the private sector. It can work in Medicare.
Public and private payers have an obligation to steward the dollars they spend — whether those dollars come from taxpayers or premium-payers. In a system as expensive and fragmented as ours, no one can afford to keep writing blank checks for low-value care. When implemented wisely, prior authorization keeps coverage aligned with medical necessity, elevates the value of care, and helps deliver better outcomes at a sustainable cost.
My crooked house made me rethink what really needs fixing
Our new addition is finally finished — level floors, wide doors, and a space where my wife, Gracie, can move freely despite her severe disabilities. After years of improvising in tight quarters, we’re grateful to have a place that works for us, even if it’s not perfect.
The new part of the house went up during Trump’s second non-consecutive term; the original part went up during the second term of the only other president to do the same, Grover Cleveland. Joining the two is a bit like welding a Tesla to a horse-drawn buggy — functional, charming, and only slightly defiant of gravity.
When most of life leans, you can still make one crooked thing right.
During construction, the fridge in our tiny kitchen got bumped off the carefully placed shims and tilted just enough to drive me crazy. Admittedly, that’s not a long trip.
I ignored it for about a week but finally couldn’t stand it anymore. Leveling a refrigerator in a cabin built during the Cleveland administration isn’t simple. There are pulleys, levers, questions about physics, and — in my case — a call to the engineering department at Montana State. They were not amused. My neighbor Charles, who often “pity helps” me, wasn’t available. I can’t prove it, but I think he hung up and immediately burst into laughter.
So I did it myself.
I knew it would be a project — and once I started, it could not easily be interrupted by caregiving duties. But exasperation collided with need, and I got down on the floor (at a slant) and went to work. It went exactly as expected: mild swearing, a few tears, and then a small victory. When the bubble on the level finally drifted near the center, I declared success, remembering that old rancher’s saying: “Most things can be fixed with baling wire and bad language.”
It’s level — well, Montana level — but I’ll take it.
Much of what I’ve faced as a caregiver over 40 years can’t be fixed. But small victories, like leveling a refrigerator in a house built when bread was 3 cents and buffalo still outnumbered politicians, remind me that even when most of life leans, you can still make one crooked thing right.
Everyone has a version of that tilted refrigerator — something off-kilter you keep meaning to fix but never quite reach. It might be a strained relationship, a stack of bills, or a heart worn down by too much bad news. You can’t straighten the world, but you can steady what’s right in front of you.
When life feels unsettled, taking time to level something — even a small thing — matters more than we think. Sometimes that quiet act of setting one thing right gives us just enough footing to stand through the rest of it.
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Years ago, city officials talked about “broken-window” policing: Neglect one thing, and the whole neighborhood starts to crumble. The opposite is also true. Fix one small thing, and a bit of order comes back. Leveling even one ordinary object pushes back against the chaos.
Most caregiving must be repeated tomorrow, but every so often something stays fixed. A grab bar anchored in the right place. A ramp that finally fits the chair. The day may still be full of mess and pain, but that one thing won’t need doing again. It stands there quietly, reminding you that not everything leans. Some things still hold. And sometimes that’s enough to remind you that you still can too.
When I turn on the news, I see dysfunction I can’t do anything about. But when I fix dinner, my refrigerator no longer leans.
There’s an old Appalachian saying: “Fix what you can. The rest was never yours to mend.”
Level what you can. Let the rest lean.
Killing drug ads won’t lower prices — it will kill innovation
The United States is one of the few countries that allows prescription drugmakers to speak directly to patients. That simple fact now fuels political calls to “ban the ads.” But restricting direct-to-consumer advertising would do more than change what runs during football games. It would shrink the flow of information to patients and push our system toward the bureaucratic throttling that has turned other countries into innovation laggards.
Advertising is part of a dynamic market process. Entrepreneurs inform consumers about new products, and when profits are high, firms have every incentive to improve quality and expand access.
The pattern is clear: The more Washington intervenes, the fewer cures Americans get.
New, cheaper treatments need to be brought to consumers’ attention. Otherwise, people stay stuck with older, more expensive options, and competition falters. Banning pharmaceutical advertising would hobble innovative firms whose products are not yet known and leave those seeking medical care less informed.
Critics warn that “a growing proliferation of ads” drives demand for costly treatments, even when less expensive alternatives exist. Yet a recent study in the Journal of Public Economics finds that exposure to pharmaceutical ads increases drug utilization across the board — including cheaper generics and non-advertised medications. In short, advertising pushes people who need care to make better, more informed decisions.
A market-based system rewards risk-taking and innovation. Despite the many flaws in American health care, the United States leads the world in medical breakthroughs — from cancer immunotherapies to vaccines developed in record time. That success wasn’t created by government decree. It came from competition: firms communicating openly about their products, fighting for patients, and reinvesting earnings into the next generation of lifesaving discoveries.
Sure, some regulations are adopted with good intentions. But drug ads are already heavily regulated, and a full ban would create serious unintended consequences — including the unseen cost of innovative drugs that will never reach patients because firms won’t invest in developing treatments they are barred from promoting.
American health care is now regulated to the point of satisfying no one. Patients face rising costs. Physicians navigate a Kafkaesque maze of top-down rules. Taxpayers foot the bill for decisions made by distant bureaucracies. Measures associated with socialized medicine continue creeping into the marketplace.
Price controls in the Inflation Reduction Act are already cutting into pharmaceutical research and development. One study estimates roughly 188 fewer small-molecule treatments in the 20 years after its enactment. The pattern is clear: The more Washington intervenes, the fewer cures Americans get.
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The answer to the problems in American health care isn’t more government. It’s less. Expected profitability drives investment in biomedical research. Imposing new advertising bans or European-style price controls would mean lower-quality care, higher mortality, and the erosion of America’s leadership in medical innovation.
The United Kingdom offers a warning. Once a global leader, it drove investment offshore through overregulation and rigid price controls. Today, only 37% of new medicines are made fully available for their licensed uses in Britain. Americans spend more, but they also live longer: U.S. cancer patients outlive their European counterparts for a reason.
Discovering new drugs is hard. Every breakthrough begins with the freedom to imagine, to compete, and to communicate. Strip companies of the ability to inform patients, and you strip away the incentive to develop the next cure. Competitive markets — not centralized control — will fuel tomorrow’s medical miracles.
Settling Afghans here puts America last
I have a longtime friend — I’ll omit his name because he is somewhat politically prominent — who has been very involved in the extraction of Afghans who allegedly helped us from Afghanistan and resettlement of them in the United States. My friend already has a demanding job, but he has often worked through the night, forgoing sleep to help with this task.
I have several strong political disagreements with him, but I would never question his patriotism. He voluntarily served as a soldier in Afghanistan after overcoming great obstacles to be accepted into the military. But I would strongly question his political judgment and the judgment of anyone who thinks we should be settling Afghan refugees in America.
‘The second the US military backed out, their men folded and refused to fight for what we gave them. We don’t owe them, they owe us.’
Unfortunately, a number of our former soldiers, no matter how sincere their beliefs, seem to sympathize more with people in a foreign country whom they believed, rightly or wrongly, to be allies rather than with the interests of the only country to which they owe their allegiance.
Joe Kent, an Afghanistan combat veteran and director of the National Counterterrorism Center, argued on social media for the deportation of all of our “Afghan allies.”
“Vetting a foreigner in a war zone to determine if he will fight a common enemy is vastly different than vetting a foreigner to see if he is suitable to live in our country,” Kent wrote.
As journalist Daniel Greenfield notes, the targeted attack on two National Guardsmen by an Afghan national in Washington, D.C., the day before Thanksgiving was not a one-off. It’s part of an extensive series of assaults by Afghans whom we have foolishly allowed to resettle in the United States.
Unbridgeable inequalities
Having lived briefly in a third-world country and having traveled for many years in various countries of that description, I have quickly learned to be wary of “friendships.” It is not that people in these countries are inherently bad or incapable of genuine friendship in principle. It is that the gap between you (a well-off American) and them (a third-world citizen who, even if relatively affluent, is often at a huge disadvantage versus an American) is astronomical.
And that gap is not just financial and legal, but also based on traditions and customs. Relationships that may feel like genuine friendship for a time usually come with future requests or pleas for assistance. Again, I don’t necessarily blame these people — I might do the same in their shoes — and of course genuine friendships in such situations are possible, but they are far rarer than idealists might wish them to be.
What applies in basically peaceful third-world countries applies a thousandfold in an impoverished, war-torn, and primitive country like Afghanistan. It is monstrously arrogant to think the American political class understands deeply the inner workings of these countries and the motivations of the people there, given that we spent almost $1 trillion to occupy Afghanistan, only to see all of our efforts collapse within a week after we removed our military as a threat of force.
Wade Miller, the executive director of Citizens for Renewing America and a U.S. Marine combat veteran, responded to the claim that resettling Afghans was the moral thing to do since they “fought alongside our own” soldiers, rightly calling it a “BS metric.” As he noted, “1. Many played both sides. 2. Many only did it to make money. 3. Many were plants. 4. Many had long-standing tribal grudges against the Taliban.”
And none of them necessarily has a long-term loyalty to America, which is the first step to assess before even beginning to consider a claim of residency.
All of this would be obvious to anyone who does not let suicidal empathy overwhelm good sense. But unfortunately, we have lost that common sense, even among many of our supposedly hardened fighting forces.
‘We don’t owe them’
Miller punctures the lie that we owe these Afghans for “doing America a favor,” pointing out that we did them a favor by expending American lives and treasure to help them govern themselves without the Taliban. But “the second the U.S. military backed out, their men folded and refused to fight for what we gave them. We don’t owe them, they owe us.”
This is a harsh assessment, but in the aggregate, it is not unfair.
Or consider what Mark Lucas, an Afghanistan veteran and founder of the Article III Project, has written: “Afghans were untrustworthy allies who sold their children to pedophiles, ritually raped little boys, and beat their women.” He notes that without male soldiers guarding them, countless local Afghans made clear that they would have raped the women who were attached to their detachment.
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Lucas points out that even asking simple questions of potential Afghan asylum-seekers, such as whether they support putting apostates to death, child marriage, Sharia for non-Muslims, defense of suicide bombings, polygamy, and honor killings, would quickly disqualify them. The vast majority of Afghans, he says, support one or more of these views — none of which are compatible with the American way of life.
One of the few Afghan refugees who resettled in my own state of Montana promptly raped a Montanan shortly after his arrival. Unsurprisingly, the crime and its implications were shamefully underreported by local media.
Toward a more sober policy
Even assuming we have an obligation to those we believed helped us in Afghanistan, it would mean we were obligated to get them to safety — not get them to America. If we had made it clear at the outset that relocating to America was not on offer, we would have see a drastic reduction in the number of “refugees.” We can and should resettle them in other countries. Making arrangements to do that is a worthy use of American soft power.
The notion that resettling Afghans in America is a moral duty reflects Joe Biden’s poor political leadership. His administration and previous ones before it had become arrogant about their ability to control events and remake complex societies and peoples far different from our own. In reality, their policies promoted cultural arrogance under the guise of friendship. They abandoned our own in favor of those from distant cultures and lands.
Let us hope that President Trump’s promise to refuse all new Afghan visas and to remove postwar arrivals and resettle them elsewhere is the start of a more sober, realistic, and serious refugee policy that will put the interests of America and its citizens first.
Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.
Washington’s new favorite lie: ‘Most migrants are safe’
If anyone from a backward and unstable country could be vetted for anti-American hostility, it would have been someone like Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the Afghan national who allegedly shot two National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C., the day before Thanksgiving. He had been vetted by the CIA, worked with our military in Afghanistan, and was later approved for asylum alongside his wife and five children.
And still, he turned his gun on the very country that took him in. How many more reminders do we need before we shut off the spigot?
Tackling America’s economic challenges will be tricky. But an immigration shutoff is easy. Trump can — with the stroke of a pen — halt all entries that threaten national security.
In response to the attack, President Trump vowed to “permanently pause migration from all third world countries.” Many Americans hoped this meant fulfilling the pledge he made nearly a decade ago: “A total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”
On Thanksgiving Day, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow announced a “full-scale, rigorous reexamination of every green card” holder from “every country of concern.” When pressed, Edlow pointed to the 19 countries listed in Trump’s June 4 proclamation, “Restricting the Entry of Foreign Nationals to Protect the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats.”
That June order established two tiers of restrictions.
Full restriction: Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen.
Partial restriction: Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, Venezuela.
This week, the White House announced its intention to pause all immigration from all 19 countries and freeze naturalization applications from nationals already here.
It’s a start. But it doesn’t address the larger reality: Even a total shutdown of these 19 countries barely dents the scale of Islamic-world migration into the United States.
By my calculations, these countries account for only 27% of Muslim-origin immigration in 2023 — and just 18% of our intake from the Islamic world over the past decade.
Ten of the 19 targeted countries are majority-Muslim. But there are 39 other majority-Muslim countries — most overwhelmingly Muslim — from which we admit well over 100,000 green-card recipients each year.
Here is the updated breakdown of immigration from all majority-Muslim countries in 2023 and over the prior 10 years:
Blaze Media
This is a numbers game. You simply cannot import roughly 175,000 Muslim migrants every year — not counting tens of thousands more on student and temporary visas — without replicating the social unraveling we have seen in Europe.
Trump’s expanded ban would block about 47,000 of these arrivals annually. But it leaves massive sending countries — Bangladesh, Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Uzbekistan — effectively untouched.
Blaze Media
The problem with limiting the moratorium to these 10 Islamic countries (plus nine other hostile or unstable states) isn’t just numerical. It’s philosophical. The order implies that we are only concerned with countries that have poor diplomatic relations or inadequate data-sharing with the United States.
But the challenge of Islamic migration has never been solely about vetting. Most individuals who embrace Sharia supremacism, support suicide attacks, or reject Western norms are not sworn members of al-Qaeda or Hezbollah. The issue is ideological — a form of unreformed Islam that never passed through the Enlightenment and remains fundamentally incompatible with liberal Western society.
For decades, small-scale migration masked this reality. But we have admitted roughly 3 million Muslims since 9/11. They cluster, build Qatari-funded or Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated mosques, and reproduce the same ideological ecosystem from which they emigrated. High-volume flows reinforce the problem exponentially.
And contrary to the foreign-policy establishment’s assumptions, hostility does not only come from “enemy” states. In fact, migrants from “friendly” governments often pose greater risks. Regimes such as Egypt and Jordan suppress their own Islamist movements. Uzbekistan bans full beards. These governments contain radicalism at home — and we import the very people they fear.
We’ve seen the consequences repeatedly. A sampling:
- Akayed Ullah, who arrived from Bangladesh in 2011, detonated a pipe bomb in the Port Authority Bus Terminal, declaring support for ISIS. Bangladesh now sends more than 18,000 immigrants annually.
- Sayfullo Saipov, who came from Uzbekistan in 2010 on a diversity visa, murdered eight people in a truck attack in Manhattan while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”
- Dilkhayot Kasimov, Abdurasul Juraboev, Abror Habibov, all Uzbeks, conspired to support ISIS, discussed attacking President Obama, and scouted U.S. military targets. We continue admitting over 5,000 Uzbeks per year through the Diversity Visa Lottery — a program Trump should end immediately.
- Muhammad Khair Alabid, a student from Egypt, plotted a Fourth of July vehicle-bomb attack in Cleveland.
- Mohamed Sabry Soliman, also from Egypt, firebombed a pro-Israel rally in Boulder in 2025, killing one and injuring 12. He and his family were admitted by the Biden administration and overstayed. We have issued more than 100,000 green cards to Egyptian nationals in the past decade.
- Muhammad El-Sayed, admitted from Jordan on a diversity visa, built an ISIS-linked terror cell in Minneapolis, scouting military bases and Jewish centers.
- Abdullah Muhammad Zain-ul-Abideen, a student visa-holder from Jordan, provided material support in the Garland, Texas, terrorist attack on the “Draw Muhammad” event.
Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images for BAFTA
The most glaring case of false security is Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, a Saudi military trainee brought here on an A-2 visa. In 2019, he murdered three American service members at Naval Air Station Pensacola. He was here because our government trusted Saudi vetting.
This is the pattern: Working with a regime is not the same as trusting its people. In many cases, these governments fear their own populations. Yet we continue importing those populations at scale.
For example: The United States and Israel prop up the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan precisely because its people are more radical than their rulers. Yet we have brought in over 72,000 Jordanians in the past decade. If those populations are too dangerous for their own government, why do we assume they are safe for ours?
When it comes to transformational immigration policy, there is no such thing as “lukewarm hell.” Trump should impose a full moratorium on all Islamic-majority countries and abolish the Diversity Visa Lottery entirely.
Tackling America’s economic challenges ahead of the midterms will be tricky. But an immigration shutoff is easy. Under Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, Trump can — with the stroke of a pen — halt all entries that threaten national security.
He has already done it for 19 countries. He has no reason not to finish the job.
5 truths the climate cult can’t bury any more
“Peak oil” isn’t real. “Energy transition” isn’t happening. And the people claiming otherwise can’t even tell you the difference between a man and a woman.
Everything, everywhere, has become upside down. Wind on, wind off. Coal out, coal in. Up is down. Down is up. And the loudest activists insist we are seconds away from climate Armageddon unless we obey their every whim.
But whether anyone wakes up or not, the reality is the same: Fossil fuels will lead the energy future because no alternative can meet human need.
A political scientist calls this polarization. A driller and fracker like me would call it something else: BS.
Energy isn’t political. The world runs on it. And whether the professional hand-wringers like it or not, the world still needs us. So let me spill the beans.
Truth No. 1: The world needs more oil, and only we can deliver it
Under Joe Biden’s administration, oil and gas became the national punching bag. The Inflation Reduction Act jacked up federal royalties by a third. Banks and hedge funds blacklisted producers. Universities, churches, and even the pope lectured the industry.
Meanwhile, Ivy League dilettantes wrote policies so dumb they managed to create debt without decreasing emissions or improving the environment.
The same people who shriek “climate denialist” invented their own version of denial — blind faith in renewables and a refusal to acknowledge battery production’s ugly realities: strip mining, deforestation, acid rain, toxic sludge, heavy metals. All the things they accuse us of, they are doing at scale.
The irony is unbearable. And the truth they hate is simple: Without oil and gas, there wouldn’t be a tree or whale left alive.
Natural gas displaced coal and drove down atmospheric carbon dioxide. High-rate fracking kept lights on, raised life spans, and offered Sub-Saharan Africa its only shot at prosperity.
But the sniveling green fussbudgets? They don’t care about prosperity. They care about performance art. How exactly do they think humanity survives without fossil fuels? How do they think poor families can afford electricity under California-style economics and the onslaught of artificial intelligence?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told us the world ends in 2030. We’re halfway there. But Bill Gates now says we’re cool. So which is it?
Truth No. 2: Even ‘clean’ energy pollutes
I know fossil fuels pollute. So does every other energy source. Prospecting, drilling, producing, transporting, refining — yes, there is impact. That is Big Oil’s dirty truth.
But Big Shovel’s “clean energy” comes with its own filth: strip mines, solar dead zones, toxic smelting, and oceans of waste. Those industries just hide it better, with political cover from bought politicians and media stenographers who won’t touch the cons.
Humans need energy. Energy creates pollution. So the question isn’t whether we pollute.It’s how we keep 10.3 billion people alive in the next 50 years.
And right now? Renewables are a rich man’s game.
Africa proves it. Over 20% face hunger every day. Cheap, abundant energy could fix it. But activists want to force the people into windmills and solar panels whose components are dug out of slave-run mines.
Look at our southern border. Millions are pouring north not for “equity,” but because America has the best quality of life on Earth — which exists because we consume more energy than anyone.
Energy means survival, prosperity, and dignity for billions of people.
Truth No. 3: The haters suddenly need us again
Oil producers aren’t hated as much now — we’re just disliked. I’ll take it.
Even Silicon Valley is crawling back. Its AI data centers run on natural gas. Funny how the moral sermons stop the moment the servers start overheating.
Remember Engine No. 1, the ESG crusaders who infiltrated Exxon’s board to “transition” it? Four years later, they’re trying to take over Chevron … to buy natural gas.
Money talks. Ideology walks.
Truth No. 4: Oil is hurting, but opportunity is coming
Prices are descending. Layoffs are beginning. At $60 oil, we’re stuck in neutral. At $50, we hit reverse. And if we go down, so does steel — each horizontal well uses five miles of it.
But downturns create opportunities. Out-of-favor assets become bargains. And I’m betting on growth now, not later.
Because within a year, oil may flip into contango — where future prices rise above today’s. Why? No spare capacity, underinvestment, poor exploration results, the coming twilight of U.S. shale, and low reserves will finally move prices up.
Even with short-term builds of 2 to 4 million barrels per day, prices are holding. In real demand destruction, we’d be in the 40s. We’re not. Because the world still needs more oil.
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China’s demand is climbing. India’s demand is just beginning. U.S. consumption is higher this year than in recent years. Europe is crawling back to coal, oil, and gas.
OPEC and the International Energy Agency — some of the greenest bureaucrats alive — both agree: The world will need 123 million barrels a day within 20 years. That’s up from around 105 million barrels today.
And don’t forget: Oil declines 5% per year if not replenished. You need over 5 million barrels per day just to stay even.
Truth No. 5: Reality always wins
In a world with rising demand and shrinking supply, something’s got to give. Maybe the ideologues will finally admit we need every energy source. Maybe the public will tire of being lectured by activists gluing themselves to asphalt. Maybe logic returns.
Maybe — just maybe — we stop treating oil like a villain and start treating it like civilization’s backbone.
But whether anyone wakes up or not, the reality is the same: Fossil fuels will lead the energy future because no alternative can meet human need.
You can deny reality. But reality won’t deny you.
Why the laws of government physics remain undefeated
In an age when government grows with the regularity of the sunrise and the humility of a bonfire, Dan Mitchell’s “20 Theorems of Government” land not as abstractions but as reminders of truths America’s founders understood almost instinctively. The theorems, devised by the co-founder of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, capture the recurring failures of centralized authority and the virtues of free people operating in free markets.
These theorems are not predictions. They are explanations of what government always does when left unchecked and how society always suffers when the state’s reach exceeds the citizen’s grasp.
The problem is not the quality of the people in government. The problem is the nature of government itself.
Mitchell’s First Theorem, which describes how Washington actually functions, could be carved above every federal agency door. Politics rewards the spending of other people’s money for other people’s benefit. The entire system is designed to avoid accountability and to maximize political reward. Once you accept that incentives drive outcomes, the rest of the theorems follow naturally.
The Second and Third Theorems make this point bluntly. Any new program will grow, metastasize, and waste money. Centralization magnifies inefficiency because bureaucracies face no competition, no profit-and-loss constraint, and no personal consequences for failure. When the private sector gets something wrong, it pays for its mistake. When government gets something wrong, it demands a larger budget.
Theorems Four through Seven widen the gap between political rhetoric and economic reality. Good policy can be good politics, but incentives push politicians toward superficial fixes and short-term gratification. Even strong ideas rot inside bureaucratic execution. And the larger the government becomes, the more incompetent and unresponsive it grows. Bureaucrats answer to political pressure, not consumer choice, and the results are inevitable: waste, rigidity, and indifference.
The Eighth through 10th Theorems confront the moral dimension of government overreach. Politicians who obsess over inequality rarely seek to lift up the poor; they seek justification for more control. Crises — real or imaginary — become tools for expanding that control. And politics almost always overwhelms principle. This is not cynicism. It is observation backed by centuries of evidence.
Theorems 11 through 15 dismantle common misconceptions. Big business is not the same thing as free enterprise. In many cases, it is free enterprise’s most persistent enemy. Corporations often work hand in hand with government to protect themselves from competition. Meanwhile, anyone who opposes entitlement reform is endorsing massive, broad-based tax hikes, because arithmetic leaves no other option. You cannot fund European-style welfare states without European-style taxation. And history shows voters resist paying for the bloated government they claim to want.
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This leads naturally to the 16th and 17th Theorems. Economic progress becomes a race between private innovation and public consumption. When government grows faster than the private sector can produce, stagnation follows. Worse, when dependency becomes a norm, the cultural foundations of liberty erode. A nation that forgets how to rely on itself cannot long remain free.
The final three theorems complete the picture. Climate policy becomes hypocrisy when elites demand sacrifice from others while refusing it themselves. Politicians operate under incentives that reward short-term benefit at long-term cost. And the fiscal results — from rising deficits to ever-multiplying promises — are exactly what those incentives predict.
Taken together, Mitchell’s 20 Theorems point to a conclusion Milton Friedman drew decades ago: The problem is not the quality of the people in government; the problem is the nature of government itself. A government that grows without limit will, eventually and inevitably, burden the citizens it claims to serve.
If Americans wish to preserve both prosperity and freedom, they will have to internalize these theorems as practical truths, not relics of libertarian theory. The path forward is not mysterious. Limit government. Unleash markets. These principles are old — and their urgency has never been greater.
A 9-point win becomes a ‘humiliating near-loss’? Please.
Republican Matt Van Epps has won a special election in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District — a race the media immediately framed as “shockingly close,” a supposed omen of GOP collapse heading into next year’s midterms.
That is how the Independent described it. Nearly every major outlet followed the same script: Van Epps “squeaked through,” “barely won,” or “scraped by” against flaky Democrat Aftyn Behn — a candidate so culturally radical she publicly insists that men can give birth and openly sneered at the people and culture of the district she sought to represent.
The Tennessee race did not expose a Republican crisis so much as it exposed the cultural realignment reshaping the country.
The narrative writes itself: If a progressive activist who hates her own potential constituents nearly flipped a House seat in deep-red Tennessee, then “fascist” Donald Trump and the Republican Party must be in free fall.
The problem? None of that holds up.
Van Epps did not “squeeze through” anything. He won by nine points against an opponent backed by a tidal wave of out-of-state woke-capitalist money. Democrats outspent Republicans roughly 2-1. Even so, Van Epps secured a solid victory, not the “humiliating near-defeat” hallucinated by the Daily Beast and dutifully echoed across left-wing media.
Context also matters, and the press prefers to ignore it. In 2022, Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District was redrawn to pull in more of deep-blue Nashville. Van Epps’ predecessor, Rep. Mark Green, warned that packing more of the city’s electorate into the district would narrow future margins. That change did not stop Trump or Green from running up impressive totals in their home territory, but it guarantees a steeper climb for any Republican candidate.
Viewed in that light, a nine-point GOP win looks less like a crisis and more like a stable hold in a reshaped district.
Another reality the press downplays: Republicans carried their traditional coalition — small-town and rural voters, self-identified Christians, the suburban families who still vote their interests. GOP turnout operations clearly did their job in a midterm environment that does not exactly thrill Republican voters.
Urban support for Republicans, however, continues to erode, and that pattern now shows up nationwide. The notion that “wokeness is over” or that the left has moderated itself belongs to fantasy. More than 80% of Nashville voters lined up behind Behn, a candidate who often sounded like a woke caricature conjured by a far-right blogger. New York City voters backed Zohran Mamdani in overwhelming fashion. Seattle just elevated a Mamdani clone to the mayor’s office. Claims that woke politics melted away do not survive contact with the vote totals.
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The role of upscale left-wing donors — woke capitalists — also deserves attention. These people do not operate as Marxists or socialists in any serious sense. They behave like cultural revolutionaries with money and influence, eager to use redistribution as a tool to reshape society. They have no problem talking about higher taxes on “the rich,” because the true cost lands on the working and middle classes through lower wages and higher prices. They bankroll candidates like Behn because they want a different country — one less anchored in the values of the people who actually live in places like Tennessee’s 7th.
The special election in Tennessee reflects the same class conflict now defining national politics. Cultural polarization keeps intensifying, and Tuesday’s special election showcased that reality in miniature.
“Affordability” only partially explains the anti-Trump, pro-left tilt in certain electorates. A far worse economy, with rampant inflation and rising medical and food costs, did not prevent the Biden administration from outperforming expectations in the midterms. Something deeper drives that trend.
The Tennessee race did not expose a Republican crisis so much as it exposed the cultural realignment reshaping the country. That shift will not simply fade away, no matter how often the media insists otherwise.
