Category: Opinion & analysis
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.
RELATED: Trump faces drugmakers that treat sick Americans like ATMs
Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
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.
RELATED: Trump makes America dangerous again — to our enemies
Jim Watson/Getty Images
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.
RELATED: Bill Gates quietly retires climate terror as AI takes the throne
bymuratdeniz via iStock/Getty Images
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.
RELATED: Free markets don’t need federal babysitters
Afry Harvy via iStock/Getty Images
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.
RELATED: Young, broke, and voting blue: 2025’s harsh lesson for the right
Photo by Jon Cherry/Getty Images
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.
Illegal drivers, dead Americans — this is what ‘open borders’ really mean
Wherever you’re reading this, your day almost certainly began on an American road. You might have driven your kids to day care, headed to work, or grabbed a coffee. Even cyclists rely on the same system. Those routines rest on one basic assumption: The people operating massive commercial vehicles are trained, vetted, and accountable.
The assumption is disintegrating because the country is still digging out from the chaos of the Biden administration’s border collapse. President Trump is trying to put the pieces back together, but the wreckage didn’t disappear overnight — and we see the consequences on our highways.
America’s highways shouldn’t become another casualty of Washington’s failures. Neither should American workers.
A recent tragedy in Florida makes the point. A 28-year-old man from India made an illegal U-turn on the turnpike and allegedly killed three people. He reportedly entered the United States illegally and still obtained a commercial driver’s license. In California, a 21-year-old — also allegedly in the country illegally — slammed his semi into stopped traffic on Interstate 10, killing three more. Authorities say he crossed the border in 2022 during the peak of the Biden administration’s open-border surge.
These cases aren’t flukes. They reflect a system that stopped taking seriously who gets behind the wheel of an 80,000-pound vehicle.
The incentives run in one direction. The trucking industry faces a driver shortage. Instead of raising wages and restoring what used to be a proud, middle-class profession, too many companies cut corners by hiring illegal labor willing to work for less. That choice endangers families on the highway and robs American truckers of the wages they earned by playing by the rules.
Every illegal driver creates two problems. First, a safety threat to everyone sharing the road. Second, downward pressure on American workers’ earnings. Flood the labor market with illegal labor, and you weaken the people who keep the country moving.
Trucking remains a central pillar of the American economy. Nearly everything in your home arrived on a truck. These jobs once supported families. They now absorb the fallout from policies that ignore the consequences of illegal hiring.
Fixing this requires basic seriousness. That means, at the very least, strict verification, no loopholes, and no more rubber-stamped licenses issued without proof of legal status. And no more pretending that illegal immigration leaves public safety and wages untouched.
Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The country depends on trucking. The system works only when drivers are properly trained, thoroughly vetted, and in the country legally. It fails when policymakers encourage shortcuts and lower standards to satisfy an open-border ideology.
This debate isn’t abstract. It’s about safety. It’s about economic fairness. It’s about recognizing that border policy shapes everyday life — including the safety of your morning commute.
America’s highways shouldn’t become another casualty of Washington’s failures. Neither should American workers. Both deserve leaders willing to enforce the rules that keep this country safe and prosperous.
The media just told you their 2026 strategy: ‘Lies, but better!’
Let me explain what the New York Times just did to the Washington Post over Thanksgiving weekend. The Post tried to turn Secretary of War Pete Hegseth into a war criminal for blowing up maritime drug runners. But the attack didn’t gain traction — partly because Republicans are getting better at starving these narratives of oxygen.
So the New York Times read the room, climbed to the top rope, and elbow-dropped its own ideological ally to prevent serious blowback against the propaganda press. The Times wasn’t defending truth. It was defending future lies. The ability to run effective psyops in 2026 was on the line. And when the Times pretends to be an ombudsman, the calculus is always political.
You think sweating out one red-state special election against a hellish candidate who despises her own constituents is bad? Wait until November 2026.
Don’t kid yourself: No ethical journalism happened here. The Times simply concluded, “We will sell no psyop before its time.” They weren’t going to let DataRepublican or Steve Baker rack up millions of views muckraking the Post’s latest collapsing narrative. So the Gray Lady hit the panic button and aborted the mission.
What should we learn from this? The temptation on the right will be to ask why the corporate left-wing press broke ranks on the eve of maybe flipping a Tennessee district Donald Trump won by 22 points to a Democrat who is on tape saying she hates her own city and its constituents.
But that question misses a foundational truth I repeat constantly on my show: Worldview is destiny. And outside the biblical worldview, every worldview boils down to a will to power.
With that hermeneutic, you can see exactly what the Times leaders are doing. They’re thinking far past Tennessee. They’re signaling that they have an entire arsenal of new lies ready to deploy to steal the midterms. It’s that Don Draper meme — hands outstretched, smirking: “Lies … but better!”
Remember: The godless do not have limiting principles. Why wouldn’t they lie if lying helps them capture power? It doesn’t matter whether it’s godless atheism, godless occultism, or godless Islam. Where the one true God is absent, the father of lies dances to a raucous tune. Hell has denominations, too.
But in the biblical worldview, the hallmark of everything is repentance, redemption, and restoration. You know a tree by its fruit. So if you want to discern whether something reflects the kingdom of God or the spirit of the age, the first question isn’t “do I like this person?” or “is this how I would do it?” The first question is: Does it produce repentance, redemption, and restoration?
Look at the Charlie Kirk memorial. Several people spoke whom no one expected to have deep, serious thoughts about Christianity. Yet the event unmistakably pointed people toward repentance, redemption, and restoration. That’s the kingdom of God. Don’t focus on the proxy on the outside. Focus on what God is doing on the inside. That’s the through-line from Genesis to Revelation.
The spirit of the age rejects all of it. It is will to power, front to back. Which means you cannot analyze the opposition the same way you analyze our side.
RELATED: How GOP leadership can turn a midterm gift into a total disaster
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Sure, Republicans won that Tennessee special election by nine points. But they lost the Nashville precinct — the same place the Democrat said she hated. That’s how cults behave. And that’s why political messaging on the right must account for the environment normie voters live in — the tension between two very different kingdoms vying for their attention.
The normie voter either doesn’t know about those kingdoms or doesn’t care. He just wants what he wants: an economy that boosts his bottom line and border and anti-crime policies that keep him safe. Voters want elections to be about them.
That’s why Hegseth taking out foreign drug traffickers instinctively sounds like a pretty good deal — something even the New York Times could grasp, if only for tactical reasons.
So here’s the math going forward: Leftists can lie all they want — and sometimes lie badly, as we just saw — but the GOP will still lose if it fails to fix the economy and security.
You think sweating out one red-state special election against a hellish candidate who despises her own constituents is bad? Wait until November 2026. With better lies behind her and normie voters feeling betrayed by lukewarm people in power, she — and people like her — will absolutely win.
Turns out that Hegseth’s ‘kill them all’ line was another media invention
Under his authority as commander in chief, the president can blow up pretty much anybody on Earth whom he deems a national security threat. He does not need permission from Congress, the media, or a panel of self-appointed commentators. The missile strikes on drug-running vessels operated by a designated terrorist group are lawful, routine, and predictable. What made the episode explosive was that it enraged exactly the faction that always reacts this way: the political left.
Impeachment is the only real consequence available to the administration’s critics, and after two failed efforts, that prospect does not keep President Trump awake at night. Republican control of the House makes even a symbolic attempt unlikely.
It is time to put a moratorium on the online laws-of-armed-conflict ‘experts’ who materialize whenever a strike hits a target they sympathize with.
So the disloyal opposition defaults to its remaining weapon: information warfare. Media outlets, activist networks, and hostile bureaucrats have been carpet-bombing the information space with false claims designed to sow dissension among the ranks and mislead the public.
The country needs a president who can act decisively in defense of national security, without media gatekeepers, rogue judges, or partisan lawmakers running armchair military campaigns from the sidelines. The “Seditious Six” tried to undermine the president’s authority and cast doubt on lawful orders. The Washington Post attempted to turn that fiction into fact by quoting anonymous sources with unverifiable claims.
The central allegation is that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth issued an order to “kill everybody” on the vessel. The Post framed it this way: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. ‘The order was to kill everybody.’”
The headline amplified the accusation: “Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all.”
A “spoken directive” means no record. The quote is a paraphrase. Nothing indicates that the source actually heard the Hegseth say those words. This is an anonymous, secondhand characterization of an alleged statement — precisely the sort of raw material the Post loves to inflate into scandal.
Even if the words had been spoken, the context would determine legality. If a commander asks, “How big a bomb do we drop on the enemy location?” and the answer is, “Use one big enough to kill everybody,” that exchange would not be criminal. It is a description of the force required to neutralize a hostile asset.
If these anonymous sources truly believed the secretary issued an illegal order, they were obligated to report it through the chain of command. Their silence speaks louder than any paraphrase. The most plausible explanation is that someone misunderstood — or deliberately distorted — an aggressive statement by Hegseth and nothing more.
The United States targets terrorists. The implication behind the Post’s story is that survivors remained after the first strike and that either the secretary or JSOC ordered a second engagement to kill them. No evidence supports that claim. No one outside the direct participants knows what the surveillance picture showed or what tactical conditions existed immediately after the first blast.
RELATED: White House names names in new ‘media bias tracker’ in wake of ‘seditious’ Democrat video
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
President Trump stated publicly that Hegseth told him no order was given to kill survivors. The fact that U.S. forces recovered two survivors from the submersible drug vessel undercuts the Post’s narrative even more. Pete Hegseth is far more credible than Alex Horton and the newsroom that elevated this rumor.
It is time to put a moratorium on the online laws-of-armed-conflict “experts” who materialize whenever a strike hits a target they sympathize with. They insist that the presence of wounded combatants instantly transforms a hostile platform into a protected site and that destroying the vessel itself becomes a war crime. Even the New York Times — no friend of the administration — punctured that claim:
According to five U.S. officials … Mr. Hegseth’s directive did not specifically address what should happen if a first missile failed to accomplish all of those things … and his order was not a response to surveillance footage showing that at least two people on the boat survived the first blast.
The mobs demanding Hegseth’s scalp will be disappointed. The voters who supported this administration expected firm action against terrorist cartels and open-ocean drug networks. Another hostile vessel was reduced to an oil slick, and most Americans see that as a success.
Costco attacks the tariff plan that puts America — and Americans — first
Costco is suing the Trump administration.
Yes, Costco. The warehouse temple of middle-class stability where Americans stock their freezers, fill their carts, and feel briefly insulated from the chaos of the broader economy. Costco thrives when the American consumer thrives.
Remember, when faced with a choice between standing with the American worker or protecting the globalist status quo, Costco sided with the status quo.
So why file suit against the administration? The company’s board donated heavily to Democrats in the 2023-2024 cycle, and now its leadership wants its tariff money back. The lawsuit doubles as a political favor and a financial windfall.
In short, Costco refuses to accept the new populist moment.
Fighting the populist tax revolt
Trump’s tariff program funds his most audacious promise: eliminating income taxes for working Americans and issuing a $2,000 tariff “dividend” as early as next year. This would mark the largest direct transfer of economic power to workers in modern history.
Costco wants to stop it.
The company that markets itself as the moral alternative to Walmart now positions itself as the moral critic of tariff-driven tax abolition. For decades, Americans have trusted Costco as the “good” warehouse store — high quality, honest pricing, reliable value. But the rotisserie chicken glow fades fast when the company sues to block a working-class tax cut.
Costco insists its lawsuit is about fairness. Please. It’s all about politics.
Stuck in a pre-Trump mentality
Trump upended the left’s narrative by putting workers — not donors, not multinationals — at the center of national policy. The tariff-funded tax revolution threatens decades of Democratic posturing about “helping the little guy.”
So Costco’s leadership had to intervene.
The company claims it fears a pending Supreme Court ruling that overturns tariffs without refunding the money companies paid. In reality, Costco wants a heads-I-win, tails-I-win scenario.
If tariffs stay, Costco raises prices to recoup costs. If tariffs fall, Costco demands a refund. What it will not do is refund customers who paid higher prices.
Costco argues that tariffs fall under Congress’ taxing authority. A federal circuit court agreed, ruling that tariffs are a core congressional power. That argument never troubled Democrats when they rebranded an Obamacare tax as “not a tax” to shove it through the courts.
When Democrats extract revenue for their political projects, the courts call it progress. When tariffs return money to American workers, Costco calls it unconstitutional.
The truth about taxes
Income tax is the burden of wage earners, not the wealthy. Costco knows it. Democrats know it. Everyone knows it.
The wealthy use capital gains, trusts, foundations, and investment shelters. Eliminating income taxes barely touches them. It liberates the working class — precisely the group Democrats once claimed to defend while quietly shifting their coalition toward illegal aliens and the ever-expanding alphabet of sexual identities.
Trump exposed the contradiction: Democrats talk about workers. Trump delivers for them.
RELATED: Is a tariff a tax?
Photo by Kevin Carter/Getty Images
Costco chose poorly
Costco’s lawsuit will not collapse its business model. Americans will still buy their bulk salsa, tires, kayaks, paper towels, and of course, the hot-dog combo that has famously resisted inflation for decades.
But they will remember this moment.
When faced with a choice between standing with the American worker or protecting the globalist status quo, Costco sided with the status quo. A company famous for its generous return policy may soon see a return movement of its own as consumers decide they want their tariff-inflated dollars back.
The company’s lawsuit reveals something not so flattering about the “good” big-box store: Liberal elites love talking about helping workers — as long as it never requires losing money for workers.
The Trump tax-and-tariff revolution threatens that arrangement. And Costco’s leadership made its position clear. I’ll still eat their hot dogs after making a few returns and taking a few extra free samples.
