Category: Opinion & analysis
Give thanks for the sun, the CO2, and the farmers — not the climate scolds
What if, this Thanksgiving, we offered a small tribute to global warming and the relative abundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? An apparently scandalous idea. Global elites and their media partners insist that these forces promise catastrophe. Yet sound thinking demands the opposite conclusion.
Fifty years ago, the story was reversed. In the 1970s, major outlets warned of a coming ice age. Some scientists called for immediate action to stop the planet from plunging into widespread glaciation.
Abundance is not an accident. It reflects a climate far friendlier than the one our ancestors endured — and a modern economy powered by fuels that make global agriculture possible.
The fear of cold had at least a historical basis. Unlike today’s speculative climate models, past civilizations suffered through genuine cold-driven crises.
The Little Ice Age, from roughly 1300 to 1850, brought centuries of persistent chill. Historical accounts describe crops withering, growing seasons collapsing, and communities starving as food systems failed. The Thames froze solid. Frost fairs became a tradition because the cold was relentless. Entire regions fell into poverty and instability.
People living through those centuries would have welcomed the warmth we enjoy today.
Modern Americans rarely think about that history as they prepare Thanksgiving meals sourced from every climate zone on Earth. Our abundance depends on a long supply chain anchored in one fundamental reality: Plants grow best in warmth, not cold.
Warm periods fed civilizations
Warm eras have repeatedly aligned with human flourishing. During the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period, farmers cultivated crops in regions that are too cold for them now. Warmer temperatures didn’t bring disaster; they supported prosperity.
The present is no exception. Earth has quietly greened since the late 20th century. Satellite data shows expanding vegetation, especially in arid regions. The drivers are straightforward: increased carbon dioxide and a slightly warmer global climate.
CO2 is not a toxin. It’s plant food — an essential input for photosynthesis. Higher concentrations allow crops to use water more efficiently and grow more robustly. This is one of the greatest environmental improvements of the past century, though you would never know it from the coverage.
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The other indispensable ingredient is modern fertilizer, made largely from natural gas. High-yield crops require nitrogen, and synthetic fertilizers supply it.
Energy-dense fuels — coal, oil, natural gas — power nearly every part of modern agriculture. Irrigation pumps, fertilizer plants, harvesters, delivery trucks, and refrigeration systems depend on them. Remove these fuels, and global food systems collapse. The return of famine would be swift.
A simple truth
Climate alarmists warn that warming will devastate global food security. Actual yields say otherwise. For 40 years, production of wheat, corn, rice, and other staples has climbed dramatically. Most food shortages today result from war or corrupt governance, not climate.
Earth’s climate has always shifted. Mega-droughts, severe floods, heat waves, and cold snaps have occurred throughout history. Treating every anomaly as evidence of imminent collapse ignores the long record of natural variability.
So as Americans gather around Thanksgiving tables, remember a simple truth: The feast depends on warmth, carbon dioxide, and the affordable energy that moves food from field to plate.
This abundance is not an accident. It reflects a climate far friendlier than the one our ancestors endured — and a modern economy powered by fuels that make global agriculture possible.
The families behind our veterans deserve more than once-a-year thanks
Every November, America pauses to thank its veterans. As Thanksgiving approaches — and as we mark Veterans and Military Families Month — it’s worth remembering that real gratitude does not begin in ceremonies. It begins in living rooms, workplaces, and communities willing to listen.
When I returned from Iraq, I believed my mission was complete. I had led soldiers through chaos during the invasion of Baghdad and made it home alive. What I didn’t expect was the second battle: reintegration. Purpose felt less defined. Connection felt harder to find. The uniform came off, but the transition demanded its own kind of discipline.
Service doesn’t end on the battlefield. It continues in the boardroom, the classroom, the town hall — and at the dinner table.
Like many veterans, I learned that coming home isn’t an ending. It’s a transfer of duty.
Service that spans generations
That duty is carried not just by veterans but by the families who stand behind them. A spouse manages a household while absorbing the worry that never quite fades. A child learns resilience from absence. A parent hopes each phone call means his son or daughter is one day closer to coming home — and able to stay.
My son is now a second lieutenant in the Army. Watching him begin his own journey reminds me that service does not stop at the edge of a battlefield. It moves through generations. Families carry it alongside us.
The meaning of gratitude
Thanksgiving offers a natural moment to reflect on gratitude — not the polite version, but the kind that demands something from us.
It demands employers who recognize leadership potential behind a résumé gap.
It demands communities willing to listen before advising.
It demands fellow veterans who know that strength includes accepting help, not just offering it.
Most of all, it demands that Americans see military families not as supporting characters but as central figures in the story of national resilience.
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What we owe the next generation
The wars of the last two decades lasted longer than anyone expected. Their consequences will last even longer. We owe it to the next generation — including my son’s — to show that a nation’s strength is not measured only by how it deploys its forces, but by how it welcomes them back.
As we close Veterans and Military Families Month and gather around Thanksgiving tables, we can honor veterans in a simple but meaningful way: not by assuming we understand their experience, but by inviting them to share it. Not by thanking them once a year, but by offering them roles in which their judgment, discipline, and experience make a difference.
Service doesn’t end on the battlefield. It continues in the boardroom, the classroom, the town hall — and at the dinner table.
We’re not a republic in crisis. We’re an empire in denial.
Forms of government are not laboratory specimens. You cannot line them up like competing scientific theories, test them under controlled conditions, and then apply the “correct” model to every nation on earth.
The United States learned that lesson the hard way in places like Afghanistan. The George W. Bush vision of exporting liberal democracy across the world was delusional because cultures differ and human beings are not blank slates. People must be governed in ways that align with their nature and customs.
If conservatives wish to make the United States a republic again, they must begin by admitting what America has become.
Government forms have limits. They are not universal ideologies that can fit any situation, and when nations ignore those limits, they fail. America keeps expanding beyond what a republic can bear and refuses to admit it, with predictable consequences.
In its classical form, a republic rests on a set of virtuous citizens capable of self-government through shared beliefs, values, and customs. Citizenship is limited and precious. It conveys as many responsibilities as rights. Citizens do not gain the vote simply because they reside inside a border. They earn it through constant engagement with the body politic. They are soldiers, business owners, family men, and stalwart church members. They have shown both a willingness to sacrifice for society and the capacity to contribute meaningfully to it.
The phrase “self-governing” can mislead because it suggests isolated, autonomous individuals. That is not what classical thinkers meant. A republic needs the lightest touch of any governmental form because the community reinforces itself. Citizens hold each other to account.
From Aristotle to Machiavelli to the American founders, the assumption was the same: A republic requires a virtuous people bound by thick ties of identity and shared moral expectations. Formal authority exists, but most of the real enforcement happens through custom and communal pressure, with the civil magistrate stepping in only when necessary. A republic works only when its people possess enough virtue and cohesion to govern themselves.
That is why republics are rare. They have a strict limitation: scale.
Most successful republics in history have been compact city-states with contained populations capable of maintaining identity and virtue. Once a republic expands, it must incorporate people who do not share its customs or worldview. In “The Prince,” Machiavelli warns rulers who wish to expand that they should only conquer nations sharing similar religion, language, and heritage. That common ground allows the conquered population to assimilate.
Ruling peoples with radically different cultures is far more difficult because the subjects cannot easily accept the rule of a leader whose assumptions differ so dramatically from their own.
A country that does not share culture, religion, tradition, or heritage cannot function as a republic because the people lack the common ground necessary for self-rule. The gaps are too wide to be bridged by normal political debate. A stronger form of authority becomes necessary to bind disparate groups together.
This is why kingdoms and empires are far more common throughout history. Most populations do not possess the cohesion or virtue required for republican government and must instead be ruled by a king. Empires are simply multicultural kingdoms, held together by an emperor who forces cooperation among groups that otherwise could not form a single polity.
Even classical empires understood the need to respect the character of their diverse subjects. Wise rulers did not attempt to make every people act the same. They allowed local custom to continue as long as taxes were paid and troops supplied. Local leaders were often retained. Sometimes a local king stayed on his throne but only if he showed deference to the emperor. The multicultural empire required a much stronger hand, though wise emperors used that power sparingly.
This historical reality explains much about the behavior of modern liberal democracies. Many citizens wonder why their leaders insist on importing large numbers of foreigners despite popular opposition. Cheap labor and imported voters are part of the answer, but in the end, it comes down to the pursuit of raw power.
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Large-scale immigration introduces deep cultural differences that destabilize the political order, and the only way to manage that instability is more centralized authority. A liberal democracy that becomes too diverse must govern in the manner of an empire. Its leaders must exercise the level of authority required to hold multiple nations together under one state.
The fact is, multicultural societies trend toward authoritarianism. They must. The differences are too great to manage through ordinary civic persuasion. This dynamic intensifies when the state attempts to integrate its various peoples rather than allowing them to exist separately. By transforming their democracies into multiethnic empires, Western leaders acquire imperial levels of power while maintaining the appearance of popular rule.
No republic can survive the level of diversity now celebrated as a civic virtue.
If conservatives wish to make the United States a republic again, they must begin by admitting what America has become. The country has been transformed into a multicultural empire and is governed accordingly. It grants immense power to its ruling elite in the hope that it can manage the instability produced by extreme diversity.
A republic cannot endure under these conditions. America must end immigration, scale back its foreign ambitions, and cultivate a shared, virtuous culture. Without these steps, talk of republican revival is performative. The structure of a republic cannot survive the substance of an empire.
If Americans will not reclaim the unity that makes self-government possible, then they will be ruled, not represented. Republics are earned. Empires are endured.
China is arming itself with minerals America refuses to mine
The global energy system is buckling under the weight of its own contradictions. Electricity demand keeps rising, yet policymakers insist that renewables alone can carry the load. Artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, and a wave of reindustrialization are driving consumption far faster than today’s grid can support. Nowhere is that tension more visible than in the United States, where soaring demand collides with aging infrastructure and unrealistic clean-energy mandates.
America stands at a crossroads. One path deepens dependence on foreign supply chains dominated by China. The other rebuilds domestic energy strength, restores industrial capacity, and creates high-wage jobs. The question isn’t whether a green transition will happen — it is who will own the minerals, the infrastructure, and the economic power behind it.
Energy dominance is not a slogan. It is the practical foundation of American greatness.
Electricity demand jumped nearly 4% in 2024, almost double the decade’s average. Data centers, electrified transport, and manufacturing growth are reshaping the energy landscape. The International Energy Agency projects global data-center power use will more than double by 2030, approaching 1,000 terawatt-hours. In the U.S., these facilities alone could soon account for 10% of national consumption.
Without major investment in reliable, affordable energy, this surge will strain the grid and weaken American competitiveness.
We have already seen the danger of relying on foreign suppliers. While Western governments debated climate rhetoric, China quietly secured control over the minerals the modern economy runs on — lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and rare-earths. Beijing now refines more than 70% of the global supply.
These materials aren’t optional. They are the foundation of EV batteries, grid storage, wind turbines, solar panels, and the defense systems that protect U.S. interests. Allowing China to dominate them puts both the economy and national security in a vulnerable position.
President Trump recognized that threat early. His energy-dominance agenda expanded domestic production, cut regulatory barriers, and revived investment in mining and industrial infrastructure. That legacy now forms the basis for a renewed push to bring extraction, processing, and refining back to U.S. soil.
The economic impact is substantial. Every new lithium mine, copper refinery, or processing plant means high-wage jobs, stronger rural communities, and a revived manufacturing base.
Private enterprise is already moving faster than any government program. BGN International — one of the world’s most dynamic energy and commodities firms — has expanded its American operations in liquefied natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas, the fuels that underpin grid reliability. BGN is also moving aggressively into critical minerals, supplying copper, aluminum, and rare-earth elements essential for the grid, clean-energy systems, and the emerging AI economy.
By linking American producers to global demand, BGN strengthens domestic supply chains and ensures that the value stays in the United States.
Meanwhile, Energy Transfer continues to expand its network of pipelines and terminals that move oil, natural gas, and the feedstocks needed for mineral processing and clean-tech manufacturing. Together, companies like Energy Transfer and BGN form the quiet engine of America’s comeback — building the infrastructure that powers the future, from LNG terminals to mineral-supply hubs in the Midwest.
This is what a real energy transition looks like: not offshoring, not dependence, but American innovation paired with American resources and American workers. The shift to cleaner energy can either hollow out the country or rebuild it. The difference lies in where we source, refine, and transport the materials that make it possible.
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Every ton of copper or rare-earth minerals refined at home is another step toward energy security — and another paycheck for an American worker.
America’s shale reserves, its underdeveloped mineral deposits, and its unmatched private-sector capacity give it every advantage in this new industrial age. What the country needs is leadership that understands the link between energy independence, manufacturing strength, and national power.
By investing in the fuels, minerals, and infrastructure that keep the lights on and the factories running, the United States can secure both its prosperity and its freedom.
Energy dominance is not a slogan. It is the practical foundation of American greatness. The world is entering an era in which whoever controls energy and critical-mineral supply chains controls the global economy. By unleashing its entrepreneurs and trusting its workers, America can lead that era on its own terms.
The next American century will not be powered by dependence or bureaucratic mandates but by free enterprise, industrial competence, and the spirit of self-reliance. Critical minerals and energy independence are not merely economic issues. They are matters of national pride, national security, and American leadership.
The campus left’s diversity scam exposed in 30 seconds flat
Anyone who attends a university event, browses a college website, or strolls through a city park has likely heard a Native American land acknowledgment. These statements now function as the incense of the modern academy — burned at the start of a ceremony, meant to signal moral clarity, and producing the intellectual equivalent of secondhand smoke.
Arizona State University, where I teach philosophy, posts these statements on the webpages of the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and the Hayden Library. The library even affirms that “we are on Akimel O’odham land, and that always needs to be at the forefront of our thinking.”
Pluralism, the real kind, permits disagreement and debate. What we have now resembles stage-managed pluralism: You read the script you are handed, or you stay quiet.
The implication is clear: U.S. sovereignty becomes an open question. That is the point. These acknowledgments aim to “problematize” the legitimacy of the United States, a central goal of the academic decolonization movement.
For six years, ASU’s New College has required faculty to listen to one at the start of every meeting.
A harmless ritual? A gesture of respect? A symbolic nod?
I wondered the same — until I conducted a small experiment.
A revealing reaction
At last week’s New College faculty meeting — a meeting of state employees conducting public business — I asked a straightforward question.
“Given our commitment to diversity, may I also read a land acknowledgment of my own before each meeting?”
My acknowledgment was not provocative. It thanked the generations of settlers, farmers, builders, capitalists, and families who transformed the Salt River Valley into a place capable of supporting a world-class university. It affirmed that we serve all students and help them prosper.
I made a motion.
Discussion required only a second. Not approval. Not endorsement. Only a willingness to debate the proposal.
Not one person seconded it.
I did not ask colleagues to agree with my acknowledgment. I asked only to read it. In fact, I would gladly see everyone read their own. Let every faculty member present a statement, a grievance, or a cause they feel compelled to highlight. Why limit the practice to one perspective?
Yet the official record now shows that not one faculty member at ASU’s New College would second a motion to expand diversity.
Appearance vs. reality
The episode highlights a distinction philosophy once taught clearly — the distinction between appearance and reality. Faculty preach diversity in language that collapses into ideological uniformity. Many cannot describe a competing view without reducing it to a script: oppressed versus oppressor. Anyone who falls outside their categories becomes a threat.
My request challenged the boundaries of that framework. To the decolonization mindset, my acknowledgment represents the wrong category — heritage tied to “settler guilt” or “oppressor identity.” The ideology cannot imagine anything beyond that narrow frame.
Pluralism, the real kind, permits disagreement and debate. What we have now resembles stage-managed pluralism: You read the script you are handed, or you stay quiet.
The academic left rose to influence by praising inclusivity and toleration. Once in power, it exempts itself from those principles because tolerance, in its view, cannot extend to anyone labeled “bigot” and inclusion cannot extend to anyone lumped into the category “fascist.” Only the Marxist dialectic survives the screening.
The ideology behind the script
Some readers may think these acknowledgments amount to harmless gestures. They are not. They originate in decolonization theory, rooted in works like Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” which defines decolonization as the overturning of settler society. Practitioners describe their own project as Marxist; that is the label they choose.
Land acknowledgments do not describe history; they advance ideology. They treat land as permanently tied to racial or ethnic groups, a “blood and soil” logic the same theorists claim to reject. They question private property, Western legal concepts, and American national legitimacy.
Seen through that lens, the reaction to my request becomes predictable. The ideological system divides the world into oppressed and oppressor. My acknowledgment, in their view, inserts the “oppressor” and threatens the narrative.
Hypocrisy becomes impossible to miss. Faculty who go along to avoid conflict now face an uncomfortable truth: The ideology they tolerate openly rejects the pluralism a university claims to defend.
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Academic reasoning is out
One hopes university professors — presumably trained to evaluate arguments — could step outside ideological commitments long enough to examine their assumptions. The job once required that. But critical theory, as taught in many departments, closes off that possibility. It demands that every fact, dispute, or policy fit into a predetermined narrative of oppression.
Herbert Marcuse, in “One-Dimensional Man,” argued that intellectuals must not describe reality as it is but reshape society toward liberation from capitalism and Christian tradition. That approach leaves little room for honest debate.
The real remedy
Critical theory teaches that man is a victim of systems and structures. Scripture teaches that man is a sinner in need of redemption. Marxist theorists believe society must be remade. Christians believe the heart must be reborn.
Jesus told Nicodemus, “You must be born again” — a direct claim about the human condition. Our deepest problem is not a defective system but a corrupted heart. No bureaucratic revolution can fix that. Ideologies that promise liberation from greed or power often create something worse when handed authority.
The human dilemma runs deeper than political structures, and the solution rises higher than any academic program. Here is the acknowledgment I would like to hear at our university: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
Blue cities reject law, reject order — and reject America
Allow me to shock some of my readers by declaring my opposition to President Trump’s plan to send the National Guard into crime-ridden cities. My objection has nothing to do with constitutional authority. Having studied the matter, I believe the president does, in fact, have the power to deploy federal forces to address rising urban crime.
History also shows such interventions can work. The drop in violence in Washington, D.C., after federal forces arrived to restore order is evidence enough.
If residents wanted leaders who took crime seriously, they would vote for them. Their refusal to do so exposes their political priorities.
I also concede that a case can be made for this step in the District of Columbia. Washington is under congressional jurisdiction, and the president, operating within that framework, has made the city safer for residents, political leaders, and foreign visitors. The mayor has even expressed appreciation for the assistance, although the District’s electorate — heavily black, heavily Democratic, and deeply hostile to the administration — continues to seethe at the very idea of federal involvement.
And for the record, the president is entirely justified in directing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to pursue illegal aliens with criminal records. These offenders have no right to remain in the United States, and the Democratic effort to preserve them as foot soldiers for the party is as cynical as it is transparent. The administration deserves credit for removing these “high-value” assets from the Democratic client network.
Ungrateful, unwanted
My problem arises with Trump’s call for federal intervention in cities where the local government — and most of the population — passionately opposes it. Even if the president can deploy the National Guard without a governor’s approval, prudence suggests he shouldn’t.
I can think of few officials more odious than Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) or Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D). Yet both remain far more popular in their city than Trump or the GOP. Johnson’s approval is collapsing, but it is almost certain that whoever succeeds him will be another black or Hispanic Democrat who wins votes by railing against our supposedly “fascist” president.
Residents of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods express emphatic disapproval of Trump’s plan. These are people who live amid constant danger yet habitually vote for leftist mayoral candidates. The same pattern holds in Portland, Charlotte, St. Louis, and Baltimore — cities Trump proposes to “liberate” with federal intervention.
Voters chose this
I cannot imagine why Trump should insert himself where voters clearly do not want him.
If residents wanted leaders who took crime seriously, they would vote for them. Their refusal to do so exposes their political priorities. I consider those priorities misguided and even self-destructive, but it is absurd to claim “the people are demanding” help when most are vocally rejecting it.
Voters should be allowed to live under the governments they choose. If they wanted different policies, they would stop electing Democrats who call for defunding the police, eliminating bail, and condemning crime prevention as racist. Despite the Fox News narrative, minorities who vote this way are not “victims” of Democratic manipulation. That idea is as fanciful as the GOP refrain that today’s Democratic Party is simply the slaveholding party of the 1830s. Voters who elect leftist Democrats are not trapped. They are expressing, clearly, the type of society they want.
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The vote that counts most
Ben Shapiro recently said something that rattled some listeners but which I find eminently defensible: If you abhor the politics of the place where you live, move. He followed his own advice, leaving deep-blue California for increasingly red Florida. Some interpret this as a call to uproot families and abandon long-standing communities.
But what exactly is the alternative? Should the federal government override election results because a city or state radicalized itself? Should Trump nullify votes? That will not happen. Nor can we easily disenfranchise those who lawfully exercise the franchise and continue electing the mayors, prosecutors, and governors responsible for our collapsing urban order.
Those who reject the leftist agenda retain one real option: vote with their feet. This path frees citizens from majorities who have democratically chosen anarcho-tyranny — not only for themselves but for everyone else who lives under their jurisdiction.
If a community insists on preserving violent disorder, permissive prosecutors, and ideological governance, the federal government cannot save them from themselves. Only the voters can. And until they do, they deserve the government they support.
Chip Roy’s immigration blitz hits the lawless left and the squish right
Let’s face it: Republicans are staring at a wipeout in the midterm elections. The economy is battered, GOP leadership looks unfocused, and swing voters show signs of fatigue with the endless drama surrounding Trump. The trend lines point in one direction.
But another truth sits alongside it: Republican voters still want a reason to show up. The base will not match the left’s turnout intensity unless the party gives them a fight worth having. And no issue energizes the conservative electorate more than immigration. If Republicans intend to use their remaining political capital, this is where to use it.
At a minimum, Trump should return to his original 2015 promise: Pause immigration and restore sanity to a system voters believe is broken beyond recognition.
Last week, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) introduced exactly that fight.
What the PAUSE Act does
Roy’s PAUSE Act freezes all legal immigration — except temporary tourist admissions — until the federal government establishes permanent enforcement against illegal entry and against categories of immigration voters have opposed for years. The bill sets clear conditions for lifting the moratorium.
- Reversing Plyler v. Doe, allowing states and localities to deny illegal aliens access to public schools.
- Reforming birthright citizenship so that minors receive citizenship only when at least one parent is a U.S. citizen or green card holder.
- Ending chain migration and the diversity visa program; limiting entries to spouses and unmarried minor children; ending extended-family preference categories.
- Prohibiting the entry of Sharia-law adherents, Chinese Communist Party members, known or suspected terrorists, and members of foreign terrorist organizations.
- Barring noncitizens from accessing means-tested federal benefits such as SNAP, SSI, TANF, Medicaid, Medicare, WIC, federal student loans, and public housing.
- Ending adjustment of status for H-1B visa holders and abolishing the unconstitutional optional practical training program that displaces American tech workers.
The bill accomplishes all of this in fewer than 10 pages. Original co-sponsors include Reps. Keith Self (R-Texas), Brandon Gill (R-Texas), Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Eli Crane (R-Ariz.), and Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.).
A long-delayed agenda
Conservatives have pushed these reforms for nearly two decades. Some ideas surfaced in the Trump years through executive actions, but courts blocked several and entrenched others — especially anchor-baby citizenship and taxpayer-funded K-12 education for illegal aliens.
Other essential reforms, such as ending optional practical training, halting visas from China, or barring Sharia-law adherents, were never attempted.
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The genius of Roy’s bill is simple: It creates a standing incentive for courts, presidents, and future Congresses. If judges want legal immigration to continue, they must revisit the policies that created the crisis in the first place.
Staring at political reality
If Trump focused his attention on this bill — and forced congressional Republicans to choose — he could unite conservatives heading into primary season. A transformational immigration fight would energize GOP voters at a moment when the party shows weakness across the map.
Democrats have over-performed by an average of 15 points in recent special elections. That surge alarmed Republicans enough that they pulled Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) from consideration for U.N. ambassador for fear of losing her district, which Trump carried by 15 points. Democrats are now pouring money into Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District, which Trump carried by 20. A party that cannot defend safe seats is a party in trouble.
If Republicans can’t win in red America during a bad economy, it’s not because voters demand new talking points. It’s because the party has failed to deliver on the core issues that animate its base.
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The choice ahead
Trump could offer a fresh economic vision or finally follow through on repealing Obamacare. But at a minimum, he should return to his original 2015 promise: Pause immigration and restore sanity to a system voters believe is broken beyond recognition.
The window is closing. If Republicans refuse to use the power they still possess, they will lose it — not gradually, but suddenly.
The PAUSE Act gives them a chance to reverse that trajectory. The question is whether they will take it.
Trump faces drugmakers that treat sick Americans like ATMs
President Donald Trump struck a second deal last month with the world’s largest drugmakers, promising lower costs for American patients. The industry claims cooperation, offering help for consumers and expanded domestic production. Yet those same companies have raised prices on nearly 700 prescription drugs since January.
Big Pharma hopes the most unconventional president will fall back on the most conventional policy: granting the largest firms regulatory advantages, taxpayer-funded promotion, and freedom to keep ratcheting prices upward.
Trump should expose the game Big Pharma has played for years and force the industry to compete in a real marketplace.
Trump’s instincts are right. Americans pay inflated prices, and he has confronted the industry’s excesses. But Big Pharma spent decades building cartel-level dominance. Few industries mastered regulatory capture more effectively. The pharma industry wins higher prices while concealing the system that keeps costs rising.
The industry’s tactics follow a predictable pattern. With its right hand, Big Pharma announces a partnership with the White House. With its left, it secures guaranteed government contracts, political protection, and federally promoted products. Independent analysts warn that rebate schemes encourage price hikes. The dynamic mirrors a retailer inflating list prices before Black Friday to create the illusion of deep discounts.
The federal government helps tip the scales. Regulatory frameworks favor the largest drugmakers and block smaller competitors, keeping profits high and patients in the dark.
Patients pay the price
What the industry calls reform resembles a shell game that protects profits and punishes patients. The Food and Drug Administration created an “accelerated approval” pathway to speed lifesaving treatments. In practice, the system advantages the largest corporations. A 2020 study found that increases in FDA regulations boosted sales for major firms while cutting sales for smaller companies by 2.2%. Smaller manufacturers cannot absorb substantial compliance costs, which means cheaper or more effective drugs never reach the market or arrive years late.
Patients pay the price. Follow-up studies for expedited approvals lag for years, and many drugs never show clear benefits. Harvard researchers found that nearly half of cancer drugs granted accelerated approval fail to improve survival or quality of life. The FDA withdrew one in four such drugs and confirmed substantial benefit for only 12% of the rest. The drugs generated revenue, but they offered little hope to patients who paid dearly for treatments that did not deliver.
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Meanwhile, prices keep climbing. Since Trump left office after his first term, cancer drug prices rose faster than Biden-era inflation. Median list prices for new medicines more than doubled between 2021 and 2024, surpassing $300,000 a year. In 2023 alone, drug companies raised prices by 35%. The Rand Corporation found that Americans spent more than $600 billion on prescriptions in 2022 — almost triple what patients in other developed nations pay.
Competition, not cronyism
Families facing cancer now shoulder thousands more out of pocket while Big Pharma posts record profits. Trump deserves credit for recognizing how unfair practices and Democrat policies pushed drug costs beyond the reach of average households.
A better path is within reach. Real reform depends on competition rather than political connections. Trump can break the illusion by opening the market, lowering barriers to entry, and cutting regulatory burdens that keep smaller firms out. He should expose the game Big Pharma has played for years and force the industry to compete in a real marketplace.
How the Senate’s phony ‘deliberation’ crushes working Americans
The United States Senate is broken, and most Americans know it — including President Donald Trump. A chamber that once passed laws with a simple 51-vote majority, a practice that held for more than a century, now demands 60 votes for nearly anything of consequence.
Defenders call this the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” guarding minority rights. In reality, the 60-vote threshold is a rule the Senate invented in the last century — and one it can discard tomorrow.
The filibuster transformed from a test of stamina into a tool for avoiding hard votes — and, today, a convenient excuse to delay or kill the America First agenda.
Article I lists exactly seven situations that require a supermajority: overriding vetoes, ratifying treaties, convicting in impeachment, expelling members, proposing constitutional amendments, and two obscure quorum rules. Passing ordinary legislation is not on the list.
The Senate’s tradition of unlimited debate — the seed of modern filibusters — wasn’t designed to create a supermajority requirement. It was an accident.
In 1806, on Aaron Burr’s suggestion that the Senate rulebook was cluttered, the chamber deleted the “previous question” motion, the mechanism the House still uses to end debate and vote. No one understood the implications at the time. Filibusters didn’t appear until the 1830s, and even then they were rare because they required real endurance. Senators had to speak nonstop, often for days, until they collapsed or yielded.
How the filibuster became a weapon
Everything changed in 1917. After 11 anti-war senators filibustered Woodrow Wilson’s bill to arm merchant ships on the eve of World War I, the public revolted. Wilson demanded action. The Senate responded by creating Rule XXII — the first cloture rule — allowing two-thirds of senators to end debate.
Instead of restraining obstruction, the rule supercharged it. For the first time, a minority didn’t need to speak until exhaustion. They only needed to threaten it. The majority now had to assemble a supermajority to progress.
The filibuster transformed from a test of stamina into a tool for avoiding hard votes — and, today, a convenient excuse to delay or kill the America First agenda.
The Senate has rewritten its filibuster rule many times since. In 1975, it lowered the cloture threshold from two-thirds to three-fifths (60 votes). In 2013, Democrats eliminated the filibuster for most presidential nominees; in 2017, Republicans applied that same exception to Supreme Court justices.
These changes all point to the same reality: The filibuster is not a sacred tradition. It is a standing rule, created and amended by simple-majority votes. The Senate can change it again any time.
The myth of ‘unprecedented change’
Filibuster defenders insist that ending the 60-vote rule would be radical.
It wouldn’t. In reality, it would restore the practice that governed the Senate for its first 128 years — unlimited debate, yes, but no supermajority threshold for passing laws.
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Defenders also claim the filibuster forces compromise. History says otherwise. The biggest legislative achievements of the last century — Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — all passed when the filibuster was weakened, bypassed, or irrelevant.
What we have now is not deliberation. It is paralysis: a rule that allows 41 senators, representing as little as 11% of the country, to veto the will of the rest. The Senate already protects small states through equal representation and long tenures. Adding a 60-vote requirement for routine governance is not what the framers intended.
The fix
The solution is straightforward. The Senate can return to simple-majority voting for legislation. It can keep unlimited debate if it wishes — but require a real talking filibuster that ends when the minority runs out of arguments or public patience. Or it can leave the system as it is now and watch President Trump’s America First agenda stall for another generation.
The filibuster is not a 230-year constitutional safeguard. It is a 108-year experiment born in 1917 — and it has failed. The Senate invented it. The Senate can un-invent it.
Hamas floods the feeds to sway clueless Westerners
As President Donald Trump toured Israel and the region celebrating his newly brokered Gaza ceasefire agreement last month, several Israeli families received unexpected video calls from their loved ones still held captive in Gaza.
After more than two years without information, many suddenly found themselves staring at the faces they feared they might never see again. “I love you! I can’t wait to see you already!” cried one shocked mother.
In a post-truth environment, Hamas has learned how to set the terms of debate, frame Israeli actions, and pressure global institutions.
Behind each hostage stood a Hamas militant in a green headband and full face covering. Before release, the militant gave a command in broken Hebrew: “Post this on social media. Put this in the news.”
It was a scene both surreal and deliberate. For Hamas, the call was not simply a gesture ahead of a ceasefire. It was the final stroke in a propaganda campaign the group has refined into a core battlefield strategy.
Across the war, Hamas moved far beyond the low-tech, grainy videos of earlier terror groups, like al-Qaeda 25 years ago. Borrowing lessons from Russia, China, Iran, and ISIS, it adopted a multi-platform media operation built on drone footage, high-definition body cameras, Telegram networks, curated databases, and a constellation of Instagram influencers.
The goal was simple: Demoralize Israelis, energize supporters, and sway public opinion abroad — especially in the United States and Europe, where diplomatic pressure could yield concessions no battlefield victory could deliver.
Instagram combatants
Influencers became frontline assets. Saleh Aljafarawi, a 27-year-old Instagram personality, chronicled rubble tours and took selfie videos with children and activists, overlaying them with music to evoke sympathy. His content racked up millions of views.
Motaz Azaiza, another influencer, surged to more than 16 million Instagram followers while documenting scenes on the ground and conducting street interviews. A graphic video credited to him — viewed more than 100 million times and widely disputed — showed what appeared to be bleeding toddlers pulled from wreckage.
Hamas-aligned Telegram channels such as Gaza Now and Al Aqsa TV amplified their posts around the clock. Western media outlets often ran these images uncritically, including allegedly starving children later shown to have congenital conditions unrelated to the conflict.
But the visual blitz was only one part of the strategy. Hamas understood that controlling the premises of the debate mattered as much as controlling the images. That is why organizations such as the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs relied heavily on casualty numbers supplied by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health. Those tallies — widely framed as disproportionately civilian — drove international diplomatic pressure on Israel and fueled student protests across American campuses.
‘Broadcast the images’
A recently declassified memo from Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar revealed the strategic logic behind the group’s media doctrine. Mixed among military instructions were orders to create “heart-breaking scenes of shocking devastation,” including directives for “stepping on soldiers’ heads” and “slaughtering people by knife.” Body-camera footage from the Oct. 7 massacre reflected that intent.
To execute the strategy, Sinwar empowered a spokesman known as Abu Obaidah, who was killed in an Israel Defense Forces strike last year. Under his direction, Hamas expanded its propaganda arm from roughly 400 operatives during the 2014 conflict to more than 1,500. Every battalion and brigade gained its own deputy commander for propaganda, each trained in field filming, livestreaming, and rapid editing inside decentralized “war rooms.”
One category of production featured Israeli hostages forced to deliver scripted messages from tunnel captivity, urging Israelis to protest their government. These videos were released with trilingual subtitles and high-end visual effects. They accelerated domestic pressure inside Israel to accept a deal on terms favorable to Hamas.
During the January 2025 exchange, Hamas choreographed the release events with precision. Operatives filmed every moment with high-definition lenses as hostages were paraded before Red Cross representatives and instructed to wave to crowds. Slogans appeared in Arabic, Hebrew, and English — some tailored to Israeli politics (“we are the day after”), others crafted for Western activists (“Palestine — the victory of the oppressed”).
Iran funds roughly $480 million annually in state propaganda efforts through its IRIB broadcaster. It is reasonable to assume Hamas directs a significant share of its estimated $2 billion budget into communications.
RELATED: The genocide that isn’t: How Hamas turned lies into global outrage
Photo by ZAIN JAAFAR/AFP via Getty Images
Perception shapes policy
The investment has paid off. A Quinnipiac poll found that half of Americans — and 77% of Democratic voters — believe Israel committed a “genocide” in Gaza. A Cygnal survey shows Israel at -21 net favorability among voters younger than 55. Younger Americans, who consume more social media, are almost three times more likely than older voters to view Hamas favorably.
Substance remains another story. A majority of Americans — 56% — oppose or remain ambivalent toward the two-state plan frequently cited by foreign governments and activist groups.
But perception is shaping policy. Hamas has become a dominant force in the narrative battle, feeding imagery, statistics, and talking points directly into Western media ecosystems. In a post-truth environment, the group has learned how to set the terms of debate, frame Israeli actions, and pressure global institutions.
Israel and its allies cannot afford to treat communications as an afterthought. Effective messaging is a force multiplier — not a cosmetic accessory. It frames the battlefield, shapes public opinion, and constrains diplomatic options.
The war showed that Hamas understands this. It is time its opponents understood it too.
