Category: Opinion & analysis
Congress strips merit from the military and shackles the president in one bill
The Trump administration recently released an extremely promising National Security Strategy — but the same cannot be said about the proposed National Defense Authorization Act for the 2026 fiscal year.
The House and Senate’s compromise NDAA appears to be in tension with the goals of the administration’s strategy. While the National Security Strategy prioritizes a hemispheric defense of the American homeland, the NDAA locks decision-makers into maintaining unnecessary overseas troop levels. Despite President Trump’s stated strategic aims, Congress seems intent on safeguarding the national security priorities and infrastructure of previous eras.
The NDAA represents the ‘deep state,’ a combination of entrenched interests, committees, lobbies, and bureaucracies that value continuity over strategy and reform.
Restricting the drawdown of troops stationed overseas, increasingly murky foreign entrenchment through legally binding efforts to sell arms, and dubious clauses requiring congressional approval at every turn, all serve to bind the commander in chief’s hands. All of this reeks of a shadowy order desperately trying to maintain the status quo at the expense of the will of the people who elected Donald Trump in 2024.
This cannot stand.
Section 1249 of the NDAA states that U.S. forces in Europe cannot fall below 76,000 for more than 45 days without presidential certifications to Congress. This is supposed to ensure that troop reductions present no threat to NATO partners or U.S. national security. (Absurdly, the bill requires the U.S. to consult with every NATO ally and even “relevant non-NATO partners.”) But stripping the president of essential discretion through ludicrous legislative roadblocks categorically subverts his authority under the Constitution.
Section 1255 states that troop levels cannot dip below 28,500 in the Korean Peninsula, nor can wartime operational control be transferred without an identical trial by fire of congressional approvals and national-security certifications.
Shifting our military focus to our own backyard was a stated goal of the National Security Strategy. If this vision is to be implemented, Congress cannot serve as a bureaucratic middleman that hinders deployment flexibility through pedantic checklists.
Americans need to understand that the NDAA would obstruct the execution of President Trump’s agenda. As written, it functions as a deliberate statutory barrier to presidential decision-making. This denotes a redistribution of war powers from the elected executive to a sprawling and unaccountable institutional structure.
The NDAA represents what Americans call the “deep state,” a combination of entrenched interests, committees, lobbies, and bureaucracies that value continuity over strategy and reform.
This continuity becomes clear when you look at what the House and Senate didn’t include in the compromise NDAA. The Senate’s original bill contained a provision barring the use of DEI in service-academy admissions — a measure that would have required merit-only standards and prevented racial profiling. Congress stripped that section out. The final bill includes a few weak gestures toward limiting DEI, but none of them meet President Trump’s goal of a military that rejects race and sex as factors altogether.
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Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
As written, the NDAA gives a future Democratic president the opportunity to reintroduce woke indoctrination in the military with the stroke of a pen. And laws favoring DEI at our nation’s most vital institutions could resurface on a whim, using typical “diversity is our strength” platitudes.
Despite its name, the NDAA functions less like a defense bill and more like the legal backbone of America’s global posture. Whatever promises the National Security Strategy makes, they cannot be realized so long as the current NDAA pulls in the opposite direction. Strategy should shape institutions — not the other way around.
In Washington jargon, the NDAA is treated as “must-pass” legislation. That label has no legal or constitutional basis. And even if it must pass, no one claims it must be signed.
The National Security Strategy reflects the will of voters; the NDAA reflects bureaucratic inertia. That is why the Trump administration cannot, in good conscience, approve this bill. Our escape from stagnation, mediocrity, and endless foreign entanglements depends on rejecting it — and time is running out.
Editor’s note: A version of this article was published originally at the American Mind.
The country that mocks America’s ‘culture of death’ has embraced one of its own
Canada loves to lecture America about compassion. Every time a shooting makes the headlines, Canadian commentators cannot wait to discuss how the United States has a “culture of death” because we refuse to regulate guns the way enlightened nations supposedly do.
But north of our border, a very different crisis is unfolding — one that is harder to moralize because it exposes a deeper cultural failure.
A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order.
The Canadian government is not only permitting death, but it’s also administering, expanding, and redefining it as “medical care.” Medical assistance in dying is no longer a rare, tragic exception. It has become one of the country’s leading causes of death, offered to people whose problems are treatable, whose conditions are survivable, and whose value should never have been in question.
In Canada, MAID is now responsible for nearly 5% of all deaths — 1 out of every 20 citizens. And this is happening in a country that claims the moral high ground over American gun violence. Canada now records more deaths per capita from doctors administering lethal drugs than America records from firearms. Their number is 37.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Ours is 13.7. Yet we are the country supposedly drowning in a “culture of death.”
No lecture from abroad can paper over this fact: Canada has built a system where eliminating suffering increasingly means eliminating the sufferer.
Choosing death over care
One example of what Canada now calls “compassion” is the case of Jolene Bond, a woman suffering from a painful but treatable thyroid condition that causes dangerously high calcium levels, bone deterioration, soft-tissue damage, nausea, and unrelenting pain. Her condition is severe, but it is not terminal. Surgery could help her. And in a functioning medical system, she would have it.
But Jolene lives under socialized medicine. The specialists she needs are either unavailable, overrun with patients, or blocked behind bureaucratic requirements she cannot meet. She cannot get a referral. She cannot get an appointment. She cannot reach the doctor in another province who is qualified to perform the operation. Every pathway to treatment is jammed by paperwork, shortages, and waitlists that stretch into the horizon and beyond.
Yet the Canadian government had something else ready for her — something immediate.
They offered her MAID.
Not help, not relief, not a doctor willing to drive across a provincial line and simply examine her. Instead, Canada offered Jolene a state-approved death. A lethal injection is easier to obtain than a medical referral. Killing her would be easier than treating her. And the system calls that compassion.
Bureaucracy replaces medicine
Jolene’s story is not an outlier. It is the logical outcome of a system that cannot keep its promises. When the machinery of socialized medicine breaks down, the state simply replaces care with a final, irreversible “solution.” A bureaucratic checkbox becomes the last decision of a person’s life.
Canada insists its process is rigorous, humane, and safeguarded. Yet the bureaucracy now reviewing Jolene’s case is not asking how she can receive treatment; it is asking whether she has enough signatures to qualify for a lethal injection. And the debate among Canadian officials is not how to preserve life, but whether she has met the paperwork threshold to end it.
This is the dark inversion that always emerges when the state claims the power to decide when life is no longer worth living. Bureaucracy replaces conscience. Eligibility criteria replace compassion. A panel of physicians replaces the family gathered at a bedside. And eventually, the “right” to die becomes an expectation — especially for those who are poor, elderly, or alone.
Photo by Graham Hughes/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The logical end of a broken system
We ignore this lesson at our own peril. Canada’s health care system is collapsing under demographic pressure, uncontrolled migration, and the unavoidable math of government-run medicine.
When the system breaks, someone must bear the cost. MAID has become the release valve.
The ideology behind this system is already drifting south. In American medical journals and bioethics conferences, you will hear this same rhetoric. The argument is always dressed in compassion. But underneath, it reduces the value of human life to a calculation: Are you useful? Are you affordable? Are you too much of a burden?
The West was built on a conviction that every human life has inherent value. That truth gave us hospitals before it gave us universities. It gave us charity before it gave us science. It is written into the Declaration of Independence.
Canada’s MAID program reveals what happens when a country lets that foundation erode. Life becomes negotiable, and suffering becomes a justification for elimination.
A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order. If compassion becomes indistinguishable from convenience, and if medicine becomes indistinguishable from euthanasia, the West will have abandoned the very principles that built it. That is the lesson from our northern neighbor — a warning, not a blueprint.
The courage we lost is hiding in the simplest places
If you’ll indulge one more cabin story, it’s only because remodeling an unlevel structure may be the clearest metaphor for the challenges caregivers face — and, I suspect, for the condition of America itself.
Out here in rural Montana, you learn quickly that when a project needs doing, you can pay a lot for it, wait a long time, use duct tape, or learn to do it yourself. Usually it’s some combination of the four. And while I’ve adapted to that reality, certain home-improvement tasks still give me the willies — mainly anything with a blade spinning fast enough to launch lumber toward Yellowstone National Park.
There is something life-giving about facing the hard thing in front of us instead of avoiding it.
Who knew you needed a helmet to cut boards?
I’ve been a pianist longer than I’ve been a caregiver, and since my hands pay the bills, I prefer to keep all my fingers intact. Let’s just say that when it comes to carpentry, I can really play the piano.
Recently we removed an old door in our cabin and needed to rebuild the wall. Help was delayed, so I decided to tackle it myself. The wall wasn’t the problem. The miter saw was. When I noticed the blade catching the afternoon light, it looked downright smug.
It knew.
Still I’ve met many builders in our county, and only one is missing a finger. Thankfully none answer to “Lefty.” If they can keep their body parts, maybe I can too. My rule is simple: Measure 17 times, cut once — and do it slowly.
So I got to work. In an old cabin nothing is plumb, so my level and I argued for quite a while. Even so, the studs went in, something close to square took shape, and despite a few caregiving interruptions, the wall was framed by sundown.
I was proud of myself. I took pictures. I bragged a little. Some builders may roll their eyes, but I’d do the same if they bragged about playing “Chopsticks.”
But it wasn’t really the blade. It was the fear behind it — the fear of getting something wrong, of creating a problem I couldn’t undo. And that fear isn’t limited to carpentry. When we let fear or anxiety keep us from picking up the tool and learning, whole parts of our lives remain unfinished.
We live in half-built cabins — studs exposed, projects stalled, confidence untested because we never moved toward the thing that intimidates us.
America was built by people who weren’t afraid to try hard things. They carved farms out of wilderness. Built railroads with crude tools. Raised barns without safety manuals. When something broke, they fixed it; when they didn’t know how, they learned anyway. Imperfectly, but persistently.
That spirit carried us for generations. Today we struggle to find it.
We’ve created a culture that treats effort as optional and discomfort as a crisis. We warn people not to push themselves. We offer labels and excuses instead of encouragement. We outsource everything, including our resilience. Hard things are treated as unsafe instead of character-building.
Many believe our greatest dangers are political, economic, or global. Maybe. But something quieter may be worse: We are losing the courage to try.
I say that as someone who has spent 40 years as a caregiver. Disease, trauma, addiction, aging — none of it yields to effort or skill. Day after day, fighting a battle you cannot win wears down confidence. Caregiving rarely gives you the satisfaction of a finished job or something tangible you can hold in your hands.
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kudou via iStock/Getty Images
But tackling something you can finish, even if it makes the hair on your neck stand up, pushes back against that erosion of self-reliance. There is courage in doing the thing we’d rather avoid. When we take on something small but intimidating, we rediscover a steadiness we thought we’d lost — not bravado, not swagger, just the quiet certainty that we can still learn, grow, and accomplish something in a world that feels increasingly out of control.
And sometimes the payoff is simple. It’s something you can point to. That framed doorway in my cabin isn’t perfect, but it stands as proof that I stepped toward something unfamiliar and did it anyway. In a culture that avoids discomfort, even one small visible victory becomes fuel for courage. It tells you that you can do the next thing too.
As Emerson put it, a person who is not every day conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life. There is something life-giving about facing the hard thing in front of us instead of avoiding it.
That is the spirit America needs again — not bluster or political chest-thumping, but ordinary people choosing to try the hard thing right in front of them.
I will probably always be nervous around saws, but that doorway reminds me that courage often appears in the quiet places where we decide to try.
And there is absolutely no shame in wearing a helmet.
At Three Mile Island, the lights flip on — and a generation sees its destiny
Just over a year ago, the headlines were everywhere: Three Mile Island Unit 1 was coming back online as the Crane Clean Energy Center. A site that once defined an entire industry’s future has done it again, this time as a symbol of hope, optimism, and unity as we move toward a reliable and clean energy future.
For us, young professionals in the nuclear industry, this moment showed what’s possible when communities come together. From union members and business leaders to viral social media posts and major media outlets, everyone celebrated the announcement of the restart. In a society often defined by polarization, this was a rare moment of shared pride and common purpose.
We know that America’s ability to deliver reliable, emissions-free energy will define the nation that Gen Z will lead tomorrow — politically, economically, and environmentally.
As 2025 draws to a close, nuclear energy sits at the center of a new national conversation — one driven by optimism, innovation, and a shared commitment to a cleaner future. Public support for nuclear energy is at historic highs, with six in 10 Americans in favor of its expansion. Companies that defined Gen Z’s childhood, like Meta, Google, and Amazon, are partnering with nuclear producers to power the data centers that keep our digital lives running. For Gen Z, this isn’t just about keeping the lights on: It’s about building a future where clean energy powers our ambitions, our communities, and our planet.
Growing up, many of us felt politics was a binary choice — two parties, two options, and endless division. But today, nuclear energy stands out as something different: a safe haven for young people across the political spectrum. It’s one of the few issues drawing support from both sides, with the Biden and Trump administrations both advancing policies that strengthen nuclear energy’s role in America’s energy mix.
For Gen Z, that bipartisanship represents progress, not politics. We know that America’s ability to deliver reliable, emissions-free energy will define the nation that Gen Z will lead tomorrow — politically, economically, and environmentally.
Now it’s up to all of us to seize this unique opportunity and recognize nuclear power’s potential to redefine America’s energy conversation. Nuclear energy is more than a technology — it’s a catalyst for unity, resilience, and innovation. It can deliver on our generation’s hopes for a cleaner, fairer, and more sustainable world.
Nuclear power doesn’t just create reliable, emissions-free energy: It offers countless societal benefits. Generating stations do more than generate electricity. They can also support system add-ons that produce clean water through desalination and help yield valuable medical materials for diagnosing heart disease and providing crucial cancer care.
When we think back to history class, we learned about iconic generational causes like the space race and the wonders that could be unlocked in the internet age. Each generation had something tangible to rally around, something that brought people together to move the world forward. For Gen Z, that unifying cause can be nuclear energy: a reliable, emissions-free solution that defines progress for our time.
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Photo by Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
We’ve seen it firsthand. We both took the leap to work in the nuclear industry, and more specifically, on a historic nuclear restart. Three Mile Island Unit 1 in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, closed for economic reasons in 2019, hurting hundreds of families whose livelihoods depended on it.
Yet as energy demands surged, the world rediscovered nuclear energy’s critical role. This momentum led to the announcement of the unit’s restart exactly five years after being shut down.
We are both at the beginning of our careers and hope the momentum we’re seeing now will carry forward for future generations. Being part of the nuclear renaissance, which is turning into a national movement, has filled our young careers with pride and purpose.
Whether you are Gen Z or not, clean nuclear energy can be a uniting force in a divided world. The bipartisan support, private investment, and widespread public acceptance happening today didn’t happen by coincidence — it happened because people came together to focus on what works. We can’t afford to lose that momentum. Let’s build on it to create the next-generation cause: a nuclear energy-powered future.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published at RealClearWire.
Your lawmakers’ big drug-price stunt could strand millions without meds
State lawmakers, desperate to address America’s sky-high drug prices, have turned their fire on pharmacy benefit managers. Their chosen tools — outright bans in Arkansas and suffocating regulations in Indiana — will not rein in drug costs. They will close pharmacies, however. And disabled Americans will feel the pain first and worst.
For millions of people living with disabilities or chronic illnesses, the neighborhood pharmacy isn’t just a place to pick up a prescription. It is a medical anchor — often the only dependable access point in a fragmented health care system.
Policy leaders must hold three truths at once: Drug prices are too high, access is too fragile, and for disabled Americans, both problems collide.
When states make it harder for pharmacies to operate, they aren’t tightening consumer protections. They are tightening a noose around the patients they claim to protect.
Proximity is key
Healthy, mobile adults can switch pharmacies with mild frustration. Disabled Americans can’t. They rely on stable, nearby pharmacy relationships to manage complex regimens, limited transportation, and conditions that make in-person care indispensable.
A person with epilepsy juggling multiple medications cannot suddenly travel to a pharmacy two towns over. A disabled veteran with hearing loss cannot sit on hold for an hour to fix a refill problem. A parent caring for a child with developmental disabilities needs a pharmacist who knows her family and can explain changes — especially potential interactions — face to face.
For disabled patients, proximity isn’t convenience. It is continuity, safety, and sometimes survival.
Long before I served as commissioner for the Administration on Disability at Health and Human Services, I was a teacher who learned that real service depends on presence. You must know the person in front of you. The same holds true in every field: the banker who helps you fix a missed payment, the pastor who walks beside his congregation. Their influence comes from relationship.
Pharmacists are no different. They cannot be replaced with apps, compliance checklists, or centralized call centers. Their work depends on knowing their patients — and being close enough to serve them.
What happens when pharmacies disappear?
Imagine telling a cancer patient he now needs to drive 20 miles for treatment because a state ban forced his local pharmacy to close.
Imagine telling a parent managing her child’s seizure medications that she must start over with a new pharmacy because the compliance burden became too much to stay open.
Imagine telling a stroke survivor who no longer drives that “it’s only a few minutes farther.” For many disabled Americans, a few minutes farther means losing independence — or tipping into crisis.
Pharmacies provide far more than prescriptions. They monitor complex drug regimens and catch dangerous interactions. They manage refills when cognitive disabilities make self-management difficult. They offer immediate, walk-in guidance when something feels wrong. They coordinate with doctors on sudden changes. And maybe most importantly, they provide calm, in-person clarity that no software platform can match.
Lawmakers say they want to help, but they are ignoring what disabled Americans need most: stable, nearby pharmacies that can remain open.
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Access is a crisis
Drug prices in America are too high. Disabled Americans feel that burden more than anyone because they use more medications, more often, and for longer durations. Many rely on mail-order programs and already face delays and shortages.
So yes, policymakers should push for lower prices. They should demand transparency from pharmacy benefit managers so patients know what they are paying. They should pressure pharmaceutical companies to create pricing structures that serve consumers instead of shareholders.
But none of that will matter if the pharmacies disabled Americans depend on are regulated out of business.
Policy leaders must hold three truths at once: Drug prices are too high, access is too fragile, and for disabled Americans, both problems collide.
You cannot help vulnerable people by making their closest health care providers harder to reach. If states want to protect patients, they should create a regulatory environment where pharmacies can survive — and where the communities that depend on them can too.
Nativity hijacked by woke priest — archbishop sends thoughts and prayers
Instead of the usual Nativity scene this time of year, St. Susanna Catholic Church in Dedham, Massachusetts, featured something far less Christmasy: a sign reading “ICE was here.” Rather than celebrate the joy of the Incarnation, the pastor, Fr. Stephen Josoma, wanted to suggest that Jesus and His family had been abducted by federal agents and couldn’t make it to Bethlehem.
To be fair, this year’s stunt was tame compared with the church’s 2018 display, when the infant Jesus appeared — in a cage. Back then, the leftist narrative insisted that Trump’s “goons” were snatching innocent immigrant families and throwing their kids in cages while deporting the parents.
Fr. Josoma is at least forthright. The pro-immigration bishops, by contrast, wrap their open-borders stance in warm, fuzzy language about ‘compassion’ and ‘Christian charity.’
When complaints poured in, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Boston offered mild disapproval and asked that the display be removed. One wonders what he would do if a priest used the Nativity to condemn transgenderism — perhaps a bubble of Mary saying, “It’s a boy!” and baby Jesus responding, “Of course I am.” Would the archbishop quietly distance himself again, or would he move to defrock the priest by morning?
The bishops’ real position
By now, it’s no secret that many Catholic bishops share Fr. Josoma’s immigration politics. Their public statements this year made that obvious: endless denunciations of border enforcement and deportations and near-total silence on the humanitarian crises created by Biden’s failed border policies — including the disappearance of some 400,000 migrant children, many of whom ended up in forced labor and sex trafficking.
Pope Leo XIV has only magnified this confusion. Though he recently muttered a few words denying he supports open borders, his actions and rhetoric signal the opposite. He consistently encourages mass migration into the West, especially from the poorer regions of the Global South.
Passive-aggressive rhetoric
All this might be tolerable if it weren’t so passive-aggressive. Fr. Josoma is at least forthright. The pro-immigration bishops, by contrast, wrap their open-borders stance in warm, fuzzy language about “compassion” and “Christian charity.” They never explicitly endorse illegal mass migration, but every message they send clearly communicates support for it.
Worse, they frame the debate as a false dilemma: either welcome millions from the Third World with open arms and open wallets, or turn everyone away and treat them like garbage. In their telling, unrestricted immigration is Christian charity; any attempt at regulation is moral failure. Like the Good Samaritan caring for the mugging victim, Americans are told to fund luxury-hotel stays and generous entitlements for ex-convicts from Haiti.
Little is said about the profound cultural and social challenges posed by non-Christian mass migration. Western Europe’s experience with Muslim migration is well-documented: spikes in crime, poverty, and urban decay.
In the United States, Muslim and Hindu migrants increasingly form self-segregated enclaves, complete with their own customs and sometimes their own informal legal norms — communities where Christian Americans are outsiders in their own towns.
Some progressive Christians claim this is an opportunity for evangelization. Yet no one in the church seems interested in actually evangelizing. Instead the faithful are browbeaten to be more “accommodating,” while bishops host endless interfaith dialogues with leaders who preach backward belief systems fundamentally at odds with liberal democracy.
Follow the money trail
Why then have bishops embraced such a self-destructive position? Two reasons stand out.
First, many bishops are simply committed leftists. Under Pope Francis — for most of the woke era — this meant preaching climate dogma and celebrating the LGBTQ agenda. Under Pope Leo, it means promoting open borders and a global welfare regime. The ideology changes, but the political alignment remains.
Second, mass migration pays. State and federal governments funnel enormous sums to Catholic NGOs for immigrant resettlement. “Caring for the stranger” has become a lucrative business. Vice President JD Vance, himself a Catholic, was blunt when he said much of the bishops’ outrage at border enforcement comes down to the billions of dollars at stake.
By shutting the border and deporting illegal migrants, the Trump administration is threatening a revenue stream.
Lingering hypocrisy
For conservative Catholics, the bishops’ partisan protests have become intolerable — especially after their submissiveness during COVID. Having failed as shepherds when it mattered most, they still presume they possess the moral authority to demand open borders forever.
It feels reminiscent of the Catholic Church’s reaction to the Black Death. As Barbara Tuchman recounts in her excellent history of the 14th century, the Catholic Church ramped up the sale of indulgences to replenish its coffers after the plague. Revenue rose. Respect collapsed. The peasant uprisings that followed eventually swelled into a continent-wide revolt that split Christianity.
Photo by Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Today’s immigration racket is unlikely to cause that level of destruction, but it is still a serious problem. Younger Catholics — anyone not a Baby Boomer — now tune out the clergy’s homilies about “harsh treatment” of migrants. They know it isn’t true. The Catholic Church in America is already as diverse and welcoming as a religious institution can be.
I was reminded of this recently at a Mass celebrating the feast of the Immaculate Conception. The only service I could attend was the evening Spanish Mass. Among Filipinos, Vietnamese, Latinos, Tejanos, and a handful of fellow gringos, I listened to our Indian priest celebrate the liturgy in Spanish, accompanied by a choir singing mariachi-styled hymns.
Nothing about this scene matched the bishops’ narrative of a hostile, unwelcoming Catholic Church. Perhaps if more of them bothered to attend or celebrate such a Mass, they would drop the sanctimonious posturing and address real problems.
That alone would be a welcome Christmas gift.
This Supreme Court case could reverse a century of bureaucratic overreach
Washington is watching and worrying about a U.S. Supreme Court case that could very well define the future of American self-government. And I don’t say that lightly. At the center of Trump v. Slaughter is a deceptively simple question: Can the president — the one official chosen by the entire nation — remove the administrators and “experts” who wield enormous, unaccountable power inside the executive branch?
This isn’t a technical fight. It’s not a paperwork dispute. It’s a turning point. Because if the answer is no, then the American people no longer control their own government. Elections become ceremonial. The bureaucracy becomes permanent. And the Constitution becomes a suggestion rather than the law of the land.
A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.
That simply cannot be. Justice Neil Gorsuch summed it up perfectly during oral arguments on Monday: “There is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.”
Yet for more than a century, the administrative state has grown like kudzu — quietly, relentlessly, and always in one direction. Today we have a fourth branch of government: unelected, unaccountable, insulated from consequence. Congress hands off lawmaking to agencies. Presidents arrive with agendas, but the bureaucrats remain, and they decide what actually gets done.
If the Supreme Court decides that presidents cannot fire the very people who execute federal power, they are not just rearranging an org chart. The justices are rewriting the structure of the republic. They are confirming what we’ve long feared: Here, the experts rule, not the voters.
A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.
The founders warned us
The men who wrote the Constitution saw this temptation coming. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers hammered home the same principle again and again: Power must remain traceable to the people. They understood human nature far too well. They knew that once administrators are protected from accountability, they will accumulate power endlessly. It is what humans do.
That’s why the Constitution vests the executive power in a single president — someone the entire nation elects and can unelect. They did not want a managerial council. They did not want a permanent priesthood of experts. They wanted responsibility and authority to live in one place so the people could reward or replace it.
So this case will answer a simple question: Do the people still govern this country, or does a protected class of bureaucrats now run the show?
Not-so-expert advice
Look around. The experts insisted they could manage the economy — and produced historic debt and inflation.
The experts insisted they could run public health — and left millions of Americans sick, injured, and dead while avoiding accountability.
The experts insisted they could steer foreign policy — and delivered endless conflict with no measurable benefit to our citizens.
And through it all, they stayed. Untouched, unelected, and utterly unapologetic.
If a president cannot fire these people, then you — the voter — have no ability to change the direction of your own government. You can vote for reform, but you will get the same insiders making the same decisions in the same agencies.
That is not self-government. That is inertia disguised as expertise.
A republic no more?
A monarchy can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A dictatorship can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A constitutional republic cannot. Not for long anyway.
We are supposed to live in a system where the people set the course, Congress writes the laws, and the president carries them out. When agencies write their own rules, judges shield them from oversight, and presidents are forbidden from removing them, we no longer live in that system. We live in something else — something the founders warned us about.
And the people become spectators of their own government.
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Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP via Getty Images
The path forward
Restoring the separation of powers does not mean rejecting expertise. It means returning expertise to its proper role: advisory, not sovereign.
No expert should hold power that voters cannot revoke. No agency should drift beyond the reach of the executive. No bureaucracy should be allowed to grow branches the Constitution never gave it.
The Supreme Court now faces a choice that will shape American life for a generation. It can reinforce the Constitution, or it can allow the administrative state to wander even farther from democratic control.
This case isn’t about President Trump. It isn’t about Rebecca Slaughter, the former Federal Trade Commission official suing to get her job back. It’s about whether elections still mean anything — whether the American people still hold the reins of their own government.
That is what is at stake: not procedure, not technicalities, but the survival of a system built on the revolutionary idea that the citizens — not the experts — are the ones who rule.
Mexico has cartel armies. Blue America has cartel politics.
Detroit is synonymous with autos, Los Angeles with motion pictures, and Texas with oil. Pittsburgh still conjures steel. When a product or service anchors a region’s economy, that sector has power. Politicians court industry. Industry demands representation and, ideally, protection.
What’s true regionally is just as true nationally. That’s why K Street exists and lobbyists make big bucks. Fortunes rise and fall, but if our GDP slips even 3%, the usual talking heads sprint to the cameras to declare the American economy on the verge of collapse — and always under whichever Republican is in office. When a Democrat presides over a faltering economy, the political media prefers to drive the getaway car.
Harassing users did nothing to stop the poison. Blowing up supply at sea does. Every sunken shipment dents the cartels’ profits. Every explosion represents a tangible loss.
If any of us invented a product that added 3% to national GDP, we’d enjoy the influence over policy and legislation that naturally comes with living in a representative republic with a market economy. Innovation and competition fuel prosperity.
So here’s a question the blue-city, blue-state establishment doesn’t want asked: What percentage of its GDP comes from narcotics trafficking?
Recently a member of our self-styled House of Lords, Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, erupted in outrage over the Pentagon’s lethal targeting of drug traffickers in the Caribbean. He said he was “deeply disturbed” by these operations. Was Reed ever equally disturbed by narcotics deaths in Providence or Pawtucket?
Some Democrats insist the traffickers are “impoverished fishermen.” Reed himself defended them on the grounds that “they are just trying to make money,” as if they weren’t waging chemical warfare on our civilian population. And he reassured us that the men killed weren’t running fentanyl — only cocaine. As though cocaine were some kind of civic improvement!
By any honest analysis, an overnight eradication of drug addiction in America would collapse an entire NGO ecosystem — along with the payrolls of the consultants, therapists, and bureaucrats who perpetually “mitigate” our crises of addiction, alcoholism, and dereliction. Given the nature of addiction, that blessed day will never come.
Look south. By my estimation, two-thirds of Mexico’s economy is directly or indirectly tied to narcotics. No, that’s not the Wall Street Journal’s number; nobody has the real statistics because the books are kept on scraps of paper known in DEA argot as “Pay/Owe” sheets. My estimate comes from observing the level of protection the trade enjoys at every tier of Mexican governance — local, rural, national. Narcotics are so economically essential that cartels decide who can run in elections with preordained outcomes. Their influence rivals that of the Democratic Party’s super delegates, if you’ll pardon the comparison.
Big Narco commands private armies, armored vehicles, anti-tank missiles, machine guns, uniforms, rules, and courts. The narcotics sector has effectively stalled Mexico’s political maturation.
And it’s affecting us too.
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Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
In past administrations, the so-called war on drugs looked more like a war on addicts and their families, with only token strikes on the international criminal organizations moving the product. The Trump administration has reversed that. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is hitting the cartels directly. Harassing users did nothing to stop the poison. Blowing up supply at sea does. Every sunken shipment dents the cartels’ profits. Every explosion represents a tangible loss.
The hysterics from Jack Reed and others suggest these interdictions are hurting the economies of blue cities and states more than they care to admit. You’d think the destruction of cocaine, heroin, and fentanyl — inflicting daily carnage — would spark celebration. In Los Angeles County alone, the coroner processes six dead Americans per day from overdoses. Last year, it was eight. Fathers, mothers, runaway teens, derelict addicts — Americans, dead every day.
And yet Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) — raw with presidential ambition — insists the leading cause of death for young Californians is firearms. This is false of course. But to blue-city politicians, gun control makes for better PR than confronting thousands of overdose deaths. Meanwhile Sacramento’s ruling cabal has passed a thicket of laws, regulations, and policies that effectively protect narcotics trafficking in the Golden State.
Guns hardly register in California’s GDP. Big Narco does.
Schools made boys the villain. The internet gave them a hero.
After Nick Fuentes catapulted into the spotlight following his appearance on “The Tucker Carlson Show,” Americans faced an unwelcome reckoning: Who is this person, what are “Groypers,” and is he really so revered by young boys and men?
The media frenzy produced predictable reactions. Republicans insisted he doesn’t represent them. Democrats blamed Donald Trump and “fascism.” Reporters rushed to diagnose “extremism” in young men. Everyone condemned the boys who followed him. Almost no one asked what made those boys susceptible to Fuentes’ content in the first place.
In today’s school culture, behaving and learning like a boy are treated as failure.
We labeled these boys racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic without ever considering how we got here. It is easier to scold than to understand. But when it comes to Gen Z and social media-saturated boys, we default to quick, reductive narratives that ignore the larger picture.
Here is the real crux of the issue: If you ignore boys’ needs in school, the red-pill internet is more than happy to fill that void.
One father of an 11-year-old boy went viral after describing what he saw at his son’s elementary school band orientation night. “I despise the Groyper movement,” he wrote, “… [but] as the night went on it became obvious to me why young men rage against the larger social system.”
He described classrooms covered in DEI messaging, trans Pride flags, and “basically ever[y] sort of race and gender social justice messaging you can imagine.” He also noted the political commentary from teachers and the strict behavioral expectations placed on boys throughout the school day.
He shared two points that reflect what millions of boys experience today: “The boys are treated almost as though they are defective girls,” he wrote. His son even came home excited because he had seen a male teacher at school.
That is the reality for boys across the country. Thousands of families report a growing feminization of schools that leaves boys bored and disengaged. As author Richard Reeves put it on “On Point,” many parents feel their sons are square pegs being forced into round holes.
Boys just aren’t engaged. I wonder why?
But it isn’t just boys. The ongoing assault on male teachers — and their resulting exodus from the school system — leaves boys without anyone to look up to.
Scott Yenor captured what is happening in a recent article for the Federalist. “Today’s schools emphasize belonging and nurturing at the expense of objective standards,” he wrote. Turning in work on time is no longer imperative; loose grading is expected; schools are now run by inclusivity and “gentle parenting.”
Yenor ends with a pointed observation: “Men should be given enough credit to know where they are not wanted.”
With schools shifting ideologically and male teachers disappearing, boys lose crucial role models. Research shows male teachers — especially in elementary and middle school — boost test scores, engagement, and behavior. Young boys, particularly those from unstable backgrounds, rely on male teachers for support they cannot get elsewhere.
The effects on boys who are “treated like malfunctioning girls” go far beyond academics. Boys are falling behind both emotionally and developmentally. They read at lower levels, enter kindergarten less prepared, and take on fewer leadership roles.
In today’s school culture, behaving and learning like a boy are treated as failure.
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Olga Yastremska via iStock/Getty Images
So the internet, in all its damaged glory, fills the void. As Rolling Stone’s Eli Thompson observed, Fuentes’ content once popped up on Instagram occasionally, but now his voice is everywhere for teenage boys.
“But even when he makes comments they see as fringe, it boosts his popularity because he’s edgy and willing to say whatever comes to his mind,” Thompson noted. “That has become his perfect recipe to get young male fans.”
Thompson identifies a hard truth: It is not the extremist content that hooks them. Boys don’t necessarily identify with what is being said. They identify with being identified.
Does Nick Fuentes promote views we wouldn’t want spreading in a democratic society? Certainly. Is he anti-Semitic, racist, and everything we don’t want boys absorbing? Yes. Boys do need better media literacy so that they aren’t enthralled by money-driven influencers like him.
But none of that changes the basic reality: In times of isolation, boys look for connection.
What can schools do to keep boys from turning to Nick Fuentes? Stop ignoring them. Bring back male teachers. Use instructional methods that recognize the strengths of both boys and girls. Pair boys with strong adult male mentors who teach them to channel their strengths, not suppress them. And when inviting guest speakers, bring in men who model discipline, purpose, and genuine success.
Boys aren’t broken. They’re ignored. Fix that, and the red-pill internet — and Nick Fuentes — lose their grip.
When Bernie Sanders and I agree on AI, America had better pay attention
Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) warned recently in the London Guardian that artificial intelligence “is getting far too little discussion in Congress, the media, and within the general population” despite the speed at which it is developing. “That has got to change.”
To my surprise, as a conservative advocate of limited government and free markets, I agree completely.
AI is neither a left nor a right issue. It is a human issue that will decide who holds power in the decades ahead and whether individuals retain sovereignty.
As I read Sanders’ piece, I kept thinking, “This sounds like something I could have written!” That alone should tell us something. If two people who disagree on almost everything else see the same dangers emerging from artificial intelligence, then maybe we can set aside the usual partisan divides and confront a problem that will touch every American.
Different policies, same fears
I’ve worked in the policy world for more than a decade, and it’s fair to say Bernie Sanders and I have opposed each other in nearly every major fight. I’ve pushed back against his single-payer health care plans. I’ve worked to stop his Green New Deal agenda. On economic policy, Sanders has long stood for the exact opposite of the free-market principles I believe make prosperity possible.
That’s why reading his AI op-ed felt almost jarring. Time after time, his concerns mirrored my own.
Sanders warned about the unprecedented power Silicon Valley elites now wield over this transformational technology. As someone who spent years battling Big Tech censorship, I share his alarm over unaccountable tech oligarchs shaping information, culture, and political discourse.
He points to forecasts showing AI-driven automation could displace nearly 100 million American jobs in the coming decade. I helped Glenn Beck write “Dark Future: Uncovering the Great Reset’s Terrifying Next Phase” in 2023, where we raised the exact same red flag, that rapid automation could destabilize the workforce faster than society can adapt.
Sanders highlights how AI threatens privacy, civil liberties, and personal autonomy. These are concerns I write and speak about constantly. Sanders notes that AI isn’t just changing industry; it’s reshaping the human condition, foreign policy, and even the structure of democratic life. On all of this, he is correct.
When a Democratic Socialist and a free-market conservative diagnose the same disease, it usually means the symptoms are too obvious to ignore.
Where we might differ
While Sanders and I share almost identical fears about AI, I suspect we would quickly diverge on the solutions. In his op-ed, he offers no real policy prescriptions at all. Instead, he simply says, “Congress must act now.” Act how? Sanders never says. And to be fair, that ambiguity is a dilemma I recognize.
As someone who argues consistently for limited government, I’m reluctant to call for new regulations. History shows that sweeping, top-down interventions usually create more problems than they solve. Yet AI poses a challenge unlike anything we’ve seen before — one that neither the market nor Congress can responsibly ignore.
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Photo by Cesc Maymo/Getty Images
When Sanders says, “Congress must act,” does he want sweeping, heavy-handed regulations that freeze innovation? Does he envision embedding ESG-style subjective metrics into AI systems, politicizing them further? Does he want to codify conformity to European Union AI regulations?
We cannot allow a handful of corporations or governments to embed their subjective values into systems that increasingly manipulate our decisions, influence our communications, and deter our autonomy.
The nonnegotiables
Instead of vague calls for Congress to “do something,” we need a clear framework rooted in enduring American principles.
AI systems (especially those deployed across major sectors) must be built with hard, nonnegotiable safeguards that protect the individual from both corporate and governmental overreach.
This means embedding constitutional values into AI design, enshrining guarantees for free speech, due process, privacy, and equal treatment. It means ensuring transparency around how these systems operate and what data they collect.
This also means preventing ideological influence, whether from Beijing, Silicon Valley, or Washington, D.C., by insisting on objectivity, neutrality, and accountability.
These principles should not be considered partisan. They are the guardrails, rooted in the Constitution, which protect us from any institution, public or private, that seeks too much power.
And that is why the overlap between Sanders’ concerns and mine matters so much. AI is neither a left nor a right issue. It is a human issue that will decide who holds power in the decades ahead and whether individuals retain sovereignty.
If Bernie Sanders and I both see the same storm gathering on the horizon, perhaps it’s time the rest of the country looks up and recognizes the clouds for what they are.
Now is the moment for Americans, across parties and philosophies, to insist that AI strengthen liberty rather than erode it. If we fail to set those boundaries today, we may soon find that the most important choices about our future are no longer made by people at all.
