The Biden Staff Coup Was The Biggest Conspiracy Against Americans In History

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By Rachel Bovard

Written by Rachel Bovard

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Republicans can’t stop investigating the Biden staff coup until people go to prison

The past week finally blew the lid off the worst political corruption scandal of the 21st century. And if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, that means the criminal conspiracy behind it is already winning.

The revelations of the last seven days indicate that the coverup and exploitation of former President Joe Biden’s deteriorating health by his inner circle were more treacherous than first suspected. Moreover, we now know for sure that their conspiracy is still active.

Exhibit A: Last Wednesday, Joe Biden’s White House Physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, finally appeared before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee after months of delays. He was subpoenaed as part of the committee’s investigation into the former president’s mental incapacity.

As the president’s official physician, O’Connor would have been consulted — and probably conducted neurological assessments on his patient — as soon as Biden started falling down in public in early 2021. He may have also tested and treated him for prostate cancer. O’Connor knows better than anyone when, how quickly, and how badly the president fell into cognitive and physical decline.

He knows who else in the White House knew. He knows what steps were taken to conceal the president’s condition from the public — and how he abetted those deceptions. It was no surprise, then, that when O’Connor’s deposition began, he took the Fifth.

Exhibit B: On Friday, Ashley Williams came in for questioning. Williams was Biden’s deputy director of Oval Office operations while in the White House and still works in his post-presidency office. She had — and has — a front-row seat to Biden’s decline and, like O’Connor, had firsthand knowledge of the White House’s coverup.

Williams did not take the Fifth. She did not have to. As luck would have it, Williams doesn’t remember anything about working alongside President Biden for the last five years.

According to a source familiar with Williams’ five-hour interview, the highly accomplished Ivy League-educated lawyer “could not recall”:

. . . if she spoke with President Biden in the last week, if teleprompters were used for Cabinet meetings, if there were discussions about President Biden using a wheelchair, if there were discussions about a cognitive test, if she discussed a mental or physical decline of President Biden, if she ever had to wake President Biden up and how she got involved with his 2020 campaign.

Congressional Republicans must understand what’s happening here. O’Connor and Williams’ silence is not about covering up Biden’s cognitive decline. It’s about covering up the executive actions that a syndicate of Biden staffers allegedly, illegally discharged in his stead — actions that, if the allegations are true, would be rendered null and land the syndicate in prison.

That’s why there has been so much scrutiny this week about Biden’s — or rather, “Biden’s” — use of the White House autopen to sign thousands of pardons and clemency orders at the end of his term. By late last year, remember, Biden was almost catatonic, “a well‑meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

It’s a matter of public record that Biden was forgetting the names of old associates. Yet the syndicate would have us believe old Joe personally reviewed and approved thousands of pardons and commutations in the final weeks of his presidency?

Ironically, even Biden’s trademark nepotism undercuts the theory. After all, no one doubts that Biden personally signed the sweeping pardon for his son Hunter, the famous painter and crack addict. That was corrupt, sure, but all Biden.

The others? No chance.

That’s why, two days after Williams could not recall — and returned to her day job in Biden’s office! — the former president gave a surprise interview to The New York Times. The headline ran, “Biden Says He Made the Clemency Decisions That Were Recorded With Autopen.”

Except that’s not what the story said. On the contrary, White House emails from Jan. 19 show that it was Chief of Staff Jeff Zients authorizing the midnight autopen pardons. That was the tranche that included the pardons of Anthony Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley, Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, Adam Kinzinger, and everyone else involved with the Democrats’ disgraced Jan. 6 Committee.

The only “evidence” that Biden actually ordered these pardons is assurances from the very people we know lied about Biden’s cognitive abilities all along.

In this context, the events of the last week — O’Connor’s silence, Williams’ amnesia, and Biden’s hallucinations — are not a “smoking gun.” They are a declaration of war. The criminal conspiracy that seized control of the federal government is going scorched earth against the Constitution, the rule of law, and the American people.

They are trying to stall, stonewall, and obstruct justice. To run out the clock on the investigations in hopes that an electoral reversal or Washington’s political ADHD will save their skins.

Congressional Republicans must understand that a strongly worded report, a big document dump, and a finger-wagging press conference are a win for the syndicate.

Congress cannot allow it. Instead, they should follow the precedent set by Democrats’ vaunted Jan. 6 Committee. That committee, remember, threw Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro in jail for refusing to testify. They hired TV producers to stage prime-time hearings. That’s the new standard they set for congressional investigations. Republicans must follow suit.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee can give O’Connor immunity and force him to testify without the ability to plead the Fifth. Flipping low-level hoods, after all, is how you build cases against organized crime. If Democrats on the committee vote to block the immunity, Republicans should force them to do it in prime time, in front of the cameras, over and over again. Force them to join the syndicate’s omerta and defend its corruption. Expose congressional Democrats for what they are — coup co-conspirators after the fact.

To listen to elites, the biggest problem in American politics today is the public’s perpetuation of conspiracy theories about our ruling elites. But that’s 180 degrees backward. The biggest problem — the real scandal — is our ruling elites’ actual conspiracies against the public.

The Biden staff coup was the biggest such conspiracy in American history. Congress has the power and the precedent to hold them accountable. Doing anything less will only make them part of the syndicate themselves.

*****
This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

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Biden Was Never Fit For Office To Begin With

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By John Daniel Davidson

Written by John Daniel Davidson

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Editor’s note: Joe Biden was the ideal State Head for the Deep State: his physical frailty was a uniquely perspicacious symbol for the frailty of the Presidency itself, which under the auspices of the Bureaucracy has become largely a ceremonial office. Donald Trump is changing that. The Executive authority of the United States–now dispersed among a faceless number of government “experts”–represents the greatest amount of power belonging to any political office the world over. What occurred under the Biden Administration was therefore the completion of the Deep State project: the theft of the remaining powers of the President from any democratically accountable person and the total insulation of executive authority from popular answerability. It was the greatest sovereignty heist in modern history. Justice must come, for the sake of this Republic’s well-being, both present and future.

Who approved the Biden administration’s 11th-hour clemency decisions and authorized use of the autopen? Because it certainly wasn’t Biden

At this point, you would be hard-pressed to find any reasonably informed American who honestly thinks President Joe Biden wasn’t in a state of serious cognitive decline at the end of his term in office. Yet the New York Times has at least two reporters who are willing to pretend they believe this.

On Sunday, the Times ran a piece by notorious Russia collusion hoaxer Charlie Savage and Tyler Pager about the thousands of clemency decisions recorded with autopen in the final days of the Biden administration. The piece is meant, on the surface, to be a defense of Biden and his administration’s use of the autopen.

But anyone who reads the entire article carefully will immediately see that its real purpose is damage control: The Trump White House, Justice Department, and Congress are all investigating the high-profile clemency decisions that came down in the final days of the Biden presidency, and it sure looks like Biden’s top aides were making decisions on their own, without the president’s knowledge.

Despite the article’s framing — “Biden Says He Made the Clemency Decisions That Were Recorded With Autopen” — there’s no evidence presented in the piece that Biden personally authorized any of the last-minute pardons. Indeed, the article states that “Biden did not individually approve each name for the categorical pardons . . . Rather than ask Biden to keep signing revised versions, his staff waited and then ran the final version through the autopen, which they saw as … routine”

The overall picture that emerges from the article is that the entire pardon process was directed by top Biden staffers, not by Biden himself. Emails reviewed by the Times “show that use of the autopen was managed by Mr. Biden’s White House staff secretary, Ms. Feldman. She wanted to receive written accounts confirming Mr. Biden’s oral instructions in the meetings before using it to produce the warrants recording the clemency actions, the emails show.” Those written accounts were drafted by aides who themselves were not in the room when Biden supposedly gave verbal authorization for the pardons, and instead came entirely from Biden’s chief of staff, Jeffrey D. Zients, and Biden’s White House counsel, Ed Siskel.

In other words, Zients and Siskel were running the show, and the only evidence we have that Biden was actually authorizing these pardons is that Zients and Siskel insist that he was, verbally, in late-night, closed-door meetings. And the account of these meetings strains credulity: “At the Jan. 19 meeting, which took place in the Yellow Oval Room of the White House residence, Mr. Biden kept his aides until nearly 10 p.m. to talk through such decisions, according to people familiar with the matter.”

So you’re telling me a president in obvious cognitive decline, who clearly could not function after a certain point in the early afternoon, whose White House regularly called a lid at noon, “kept his aides until nearly 10 p.m.” on his last day in office? I’m sorry, but that’s just not believable.

What is believable is that Biden’s presidency was run by a faceless syndicate of aides, lawyers, and senior White House staff — the deep state, in other words. And not just in the final days regarding clemency decisions. Early on in the 2020 campaign it was obvious to anyone who cared to pay attention and be honest that Biden wasn’t all there and wasn’t really in charge. He awkwardly hid in his basement instead of campaigning, using Covid as the excuse. Once he took office, Biden’s decline was undeniable. His routine confusion on stage and in formal settings, his physical frailty and penchant for tripping, and his incessant verbal gaffes and nonsense made it obvious that he wasn’t all there.

Biden once repeatedly looked for a dead congresswomen in the crowd at a White House event and called out her name. That was in September 2022 — long before his disastrous debate performance with Trump made it obvious that he was unfit to run for a second term, let alone serve as commander-in-chief.

All along, the media ran cover for him, insisting anyone who questioned his mental acuity was a conspiracy theorist or acting in bad faith. Some, like CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson, have tried to retcon all of this, writing an entire book about how the Biden White House  hid the president’s mental decline and “deceived” the press. For Tapper to co-author such a book is almost pathologically shameless, since he was one of the major media figures who ran interference for Biden by attacking everyone who noticed the president’s decline.

Like nearly everything else about the Biden presidency, the autopen scandal reveals just how far the deep state was willing to go to keep a mentally compromised figurehead in office. They ran a coup against Biden last summer after the debate with Trump, only once it became obvious and undeniable that Biden wasn’t all there.

The New York Times can cite anonymous sources all it wants to try to “contextualize” the use of the autopen at the eleventh hour of Biden’s term, but like Biden’s obvious unfitness for office throughout his presidency, the truth is right in front of us, plain for all to see. His presidency stands as one of the greatest political scandals perpetrated against the American people in a generation, and eventually someone needs to answer for that.

*****

This article was first published at The Federalist, and is reproduced here with permission

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Shot Heard Round the Web: The Democrat Party, America’s Number One Enemy thumbnail

Shot Heard Round the Web: The Democrat Party, America’s Number One Enemy

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By Catherine Salgado

Written by Catherine Salgado

“The river was dyed with the blood of the slaughtered for two hundred yards,” wrote Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate general, war criminal, future Ku Klux Klan founder, and Democrat, about his slaughter of the surrendering black and white Union troops at Ft. Pillow. “The approximate loss was upward of five hundred killed, but few of the officers escaping. My loss was about twenty killed. It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that n*gro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.”

On July 13, 1821, Forrest was born, a man who would one day have the blood of countless Americans, black and white, on his hands. But he was praised and supported and defended and honored by thousands of his fellow Democrats, both during the Civil War and after the war. He was a hero to decades of Democrats who saw him as a champion of their white supremacist, treacherous, bloodthirsty creed. And so he was. This is the Democrat Party of your grandfathers, your great-grandfathers, and your great-great-great grandfathers. The Democrats, with only alterations of rhetoric, are at their core the same yesterday, today, and forever.

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Freedom and Nationalism

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By Daniel Sutter

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

Editors’ Note: Although this essay was written for the July 4th celebration, his commentary on Libertarian opposition to MAGA was spot on. Too many Libertarians are hung up on their theories of free trade and mass migration, and align themselves with the Totalitarian Left. Nationalism, and putting America first, is the core of MAGA, and it is not incompatible with being a classical liberal. We have some libertarian friends who make a fetish out of sending us every negative article they can find, typically from that bastion of freedom, the New York Times.  Suppose you believe in limited government, or no government. How can you support unelected elites that order the world around through unrepresentative and unelected organizations like the UN, IMF, WTO, WHO, the World Court, and the EU? MAGA has its faults, but on the big picture–the nation state versus international bureaucratic control through central planning–they have it correct, and many Libertarians miss the forest for the trees of mass migration. We have a right to preserve our freedom and culture. We are not required to allow any and all persons into the country and put them on public support, which is what open borders do. As libertarian Milton Friedman pointed out, you can’t have an open border with a welfare state.

I have always found celebrating America’s independence to be a joy. America was the first nation founded on [an] idea, and that idea was freedom. The celebration should be even more special this year as we approach America’s 250th birthday and are already beginning the anniversary of the rebellion which produced independence. I realize that not all Americans celebrate our nation. Marxist, Post-Modernist, racialist progressives, I know, believe our nation embodies everything wrong with humanity. But classical liberals and libertarians who value freedom should celebrate our national heritage, right? Except some claim that proponents of freedom are hostile to even American nationalism.

Personally, my immediate reaction was that this must be a joke. I have never seen any tension between freedom and nationalism. World government, the antithesis of nationalism, has always to me appeared enormously detrimental to freedom. I have always favored U.S. national sovereignty over international organizations like the United Nations. I was consequently surprised to learn about the alleged tension between classical liberalism or libertarianism, and nationalism. I believe I first encountered this thesis in Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism. I began to recognize the globalist bent of libertarians and libertarian organizations. Indeed, many free market economists whom I know champion globalist positions like open borders and unrestricted international trade.

I see this as all wrong. Freedom arises when a group of people decide to achieve freedom for themselves; that is, to create a free nation. Throughout the history of civilization, many humans have tried to subjugate others through force, fear, and intimidation. The conquerors have never abandoned their efforts because some folks asked to be left alone. A free nation only comes into existence because the people constituting the nation make a hard commitment to protect each other from subjugation and with no ulterior motive of subjugating their allies of today after defeating the conquerors. This was the essence of the American Revolution and the source of American exceptionalism. A free nation is profoundly moral, perhaps the apex of human morality. Classical liberal theory may hold that all humans are  morally equal, but we are not physically equal. Although we might all contribute to our common defense, the strong and brave contribute more than others. When the strong and brave join in mutual defense as opposed to domination of the physically weaker, this represents the very best behavior of people.

The ideals of libertarian theory remain a pipe dream until or unless a group of people band together to fight for and maintain their freedom. The world is full of predators and defense against predators looking to conquer and exterminate those showing weakness or possessing wealth is always an absolute necessity. If external predators are kept at bay, the problem of who guards the guards arises. In a free nation the guards must choose not to try to dominate other citizens. George Washington returned to Mount Vernon after winning our independence, and he did not use the Continental Army to subjugate Americans. Forging a free nation must involve significant trust, first trust those who do the heavy lifting to secure freedom will not in turn subjugate those they have defended against foreign predators, and second that citizens will not irresponsibly pick fights with others, creating messes for the group.

We should celebrate any nation coming remotely close to realizing the ideal of freedom. And those fortunate enough to be born into a free nation, we should honor those who established and protected this freedom, deliberately choosing not to dominate the fellow citizens they protected.

To be clear, nationalism can be a form of collectivism and has served as cover for efforts to curtail individual freedom. But the voluntary commitment to mutual defense at the core of a free nation is to be celebrated. 

I find the ambivalence and perhaps even hostility of libertarians most surprising because Ayn Rand, a dominant intellectual force of modern libertarianism, was a true patriot for her adopted United States. She always rejected any moral equivalence between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, argued that a free nation could invade an unfree nation whenever it chose, and advocated for rational self-interest in national defense. As just one illustration, consider the following passages from her essay, “The Roots of War”:

A dictatorship is a gang devoted to looting the effort of the productive citizens of its own country. When a statist ruler exhausts his own country’s economy, he attacks his neighbors . . . A country that violates the rights of its own citizens, will not respect the rights of its neighbors . . .

Needless to say, unilateral pacifism is merely an invitation to aggression. Just as an individual has the right of self-defense, so has a free country if attacked.

Ayn Rand was a true America Firster.

We should recognize and applaud the universalism of classical liberalism. The political philosophy was not applicable to only some humans. The principles and rules were based on human nature, specifically our ability to reason and cooperate. Brad Thompson details this for America’s founders in America’s Revolutionary Mind. The rules of just conduct could potentially apply to everyone. This was not a political philosophy patched together to defend the acts of one nationality, race, or religion but one which all humans could live by and up to. Classical liberalism’s universal message conflicted with those seeking to defend and maintain slavery. Phil Magness in The 1619 Project: A Critique highlights the tension between liberalism and Southern efforts to defend the peculiar institution. Defenders of slavery understood the need to reject the entire liberal, free market project to justify continued human bondage. Recognizing the applicability of a system of peaceful cooperation to all humans signifies moral progress and comprises an admirable element of liberalism.

Proponents of liberty seemingly forget, however, that while everyone can potentially live by the rules of freedom, many humans do not embrace this. While we might offer philosophical tracts about the rights and freedoms of all humans, which all should possess. Many humans continue to want to subjugate others or to serve them. Others wish to compel their neighbors to live or worship as they command. In such a world people only have the rights and freedoms they can make others accept. Achieving freedom requires a group to recognize the value of each individual and commit to defend their freedom. A nation – a free nation – is the only way to approximate the classical liberal and libertarian ideal.

American libertarians should also not be ashamed to feel patriotism. Emotions are an automatic human response when we observe good in the world. This was another theme of Miss Rand. Consider this from her essay “Apollo 11″ on watching the rocket’s blastoff:

I found myself waving to the rocket involuntarily, I heard people applauding and joined them, grasping our common motive; it was impossible to watch passively, one had to express, by some physical action, a feeling that was not triumph but more: the feeling that the white object’s unobstructed streak of motion was the only thing that mattered in the universe . . . That we had seen a demonstration of man at his best, no one could doubt – this was the cause of the event’s attraction and of the stunned, numbed state in which it left us.

Freedom is good. Stories of the Americans who chose to put their lives in danger to protect freedom should cause an emotional response. Feel free to cheer at Fourth of July fireworks or get misty eyed watching a documentary on the American Revolution. Freedom isn’t free and the moral choice people make to fight for a nation’s freedom should move the rest of us. Founding and maintaining a free nation is among the best that humans can do.

*****

This article was published by the Heartland Institute and is reproduced with permission.

Daniel Sutter is Affiliated Senior Scholar at the Mercatus Center and Professor of Economics at the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy at Troy University.

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This Land Is Your Land thumbnail

This Land Is Your Land

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By Tony Francois

Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

Senator Lee should introduce the New Frontier Homestead Act of 2026

Should the federal government auction less than one percent of non-conservation status public lands to alleviate housing shortages and reduce the federal debt? This is how Utah Senator Mike Lee tried to frame the question when he included a provision to this effect in the Senate version of the Big Beautiful Bill. Alas for Senator Lee, the New Right’s resounding answer has been hell no, and he has beaten a hasty retreat. Perhaps to his relief, the Senate Parliamentarian ruled the public land sale provision ineligible for the reconciliation procedure under which the BBB was being handled. Mr. Lee lives to fight another day, but can the New Right be warmed up to his proposal?

For many years, Western Republicans have chafed at the federal government’s poor management of public lands, which make up most of the acreage of several states. California is almost half public land, while Nevada is more than 80%. Western states average about 50% public lands.

These lands were open to homesteading until 50 years ago, just as was the vast American valley of the Mississippi. But where the Great Plains were rapidly settled with farms and towns, the arid Mountain West saw far less settlement. Late 19th-century technology was inadequate to access the water resources necessary to farm most of the high desert, so homesteaders stuck to the very few fertile stream valleys. The rest of the land remained free for mining and cattle grazing.

Some of it was eventually settled in the first half of the 20th century thanks to large irrigation projects, and vast areas were classified as national forests, preserving them for timber production. Dozens of national parks were added to the mix at the dawn of the environmental movement in the 1960s, and federal legislation ended homesteading in 1976. The frontier, long practically closed by technological and cultural limits, was now formally and legally closed as well.

The conservation and recreation values of these millions of acres of public land are high, and for many millions of Americans (and a notably strong cohort in the New Right) the opportunity to hike, backpack, camp, fish, hunt, and just be more human is an essential element of our American heritage.

Much public land is in various types of “conservation status”: wildlife refuges, wilderness areas, and the like. But many millions of acres are “generic” and managed (or mismanaged) by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service for mining, grazing, and timber production. It is a mistake to think of every acre of public land as pristine wilderness fit only for permanent preservation and enjoyment in its natural state. But it is also a profound error to think of public lands with spreadsheet-brain proneness to maximize measurable financial value.

These are the teeth of the trap into which Senator Lee stepped.

Reopening the Frontier

What policy problem was Lee’s bill meant to solve? Not fire danger, not reduction in productive resource development, not revitalization of struggling rural towns—all of which haunt the West after decades of federal ineptitude. No, it was introduced to help pay down the national debt and solve the conundrum of housing affordability, which congressional allies then restated as affordable housing, which most people know is not even the same thing.

Lee wanted to sell areas of public land suitable for housing development near cities, with priority given to isolated tracts with existing infrastructure services, and excluding pretty much everything in conservation status. Many New Right critics argued that nothing in the bill prevented the sale of non-conservation lands that nonetheless have high recreational value and use. But I don’t think that was the biggest problem with the bill.

In my view, it was that the legislation would not help solve the problem Lee wanted to address. Outrageous housing costs are caused by local land use practices, not federal land ownership near cities. If Senator Lee’s bill was passed and signed by President Trump, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum could designate a perfect area of land in Solano County, California (let’s stipulate that nobody would object to this specific sale), and sell it to Silicon Valley billionaires trying to show the world they can build a new city in California. The tech bro town fathers would still be completely helpless when they apply to the Solano County Planning Commission for permits to build California Forever. Some new housing, maybe someday—but not so affordable.

Any undeveloped land the federal government transfers into private hands would then be fully regulated by state and local governments, under whatever rules those zoning overlords impose. And the only players likely to prosper in such environments are large-scale developers with substantial capital who currently operate those systems effectively.

There is another feasibility problem with Lee’s bill. Who would anyone trust within the federal land bureaucracy to carry out such a program effectively, and would other federal laws allow it to move forward? Lee’s bill had no exemptions from federal environmental review or the Endangered Species Act. The discretionary selection of lands to be sold under his bill would languish through years of planning, interagency consultation, and environmental review, followed by more years of litigation extending so far into the future that we would be dealing with Elon Musk’s breakaway Republic of Mars long before anyone sells your favorite MAGA influencer’s favorite hiking trail to BlackRock.

So should Senator Lee avoid introducing another public lands bill in the future? No.

Many critics of Lee’s bill conceded that some disposal of public lands could be in the public interest. The real questions are: Which ones, what for, and how to ensure that the purpose is achieved?

The state of water technology closed the frontier to new settlement decades before Congress repealed the Homestead Act in 1976. But the technological frontier has remained open, and lack of water is not the same barrier it was a century ago for at least some settlement of the arid West. Conservation, building, well technology, and the increased feasibility of non-agricultural settlement make it possible to found new communities in areas that once lacked adequate water resources.

What was impossible in 1925 is possible today: the reopening of the Western frontier to new settlement.

A generation of Americans yearning to build something good in their own country should be allowed the opportunity to try what their grandparents succeeded wildly at. The Western half of the United States should be open to technologically feasible settlement in the same way the Eastern half was. New towns that could grow into new cities would foster the Golden Age that everyone is tweeting about—which need to be built in real time. Just doing things is better than endless planning, consulting, assessing, and other forms of bureaucratic morass that engulf everything it touches.

Just Doing Things

Senator Lee should introduce a different bill: the New Frontier Homestead Act of 2026.

The first task is defenestrating state and local land use veto holders from the conversation. If reopening the frontier to technologically feasible settlement on public lands is a congressional objective, then the county planning commission is just going to have to pound sand. The tech bros aren’t going to build California City if the Solano County planning Karens have anything to say about it. The New Frontier will have to be opened under federal protection.

The second task is like the first: preventing federal laws and bureaucracy from killing it. To be exempt from state law, the land will have to remain in federal ownership or control while development occurs. But for any desirable development to occur under federal protection, several elements of federal law will have to be explicitly waived as well. This list of federal anti-development statutes can be copied and pasted from the congressional authorization to build the border wall. Presto—no environmental review, no decades-long interagency consultation over habitat for gnatcatchers. Instead, this is about “just doing things.”

With those obstacles surmounted, how would the Act work?

The current Interior Department and Forest Service (perhaps a DOGE-type team within each) should propose a list of non-conservation lands to be opened (the percentage of non-conservation public land in the original Lee bill, which was between .5 and .75%, is probably about right). Congress could then put that list in legislation. Or it could distill the list into a clear set of criteria for parcels. Proposing a list before the legislation is enacted would demonstrate the competence of the GOP and the Trump Administration, and help build the cultural and policy case for the New Frontier Homestead Act.

If the NFHA is wildly successful, more might be done in a future round. If it flops, relatively little harm will have been done. In any event, the conservation ethic will remain strong and serve as a natural check on the disposal of large amounts of public land, as will the usefulness of much of it, particularly for mining strategic metals and rare earths. Once the lands are determined, they should be catalogued into 40-acre parcels for disposal, just as with the original Homestead Act.

Only adult, natural-born citizens would be eligible for a New Frontier homestead. No shell companies, no layers of corporate bureaucracy concealing pension funds, insurance companies, multinationals, or sovereign wealth funds. These would be the only qualifications for eligibility.

Requiring individuals to take responsibility at the front end helps vet applicants and limits them to only one entry. The Lee bill allowed any type of entity to win two parcels per auction cycle. But the Tocquevillian spirit of the original Homestead Act, focused on small holdings and personal development, is needed to open the New Frontier.

The original Homestead Act allowed anyone to stake a claim and then build a home and farm the claimed land over five years. If a threshold percentage of the homestead was farmed over those five years, the Land Office transferred ownership to the homesteader. Farming was the necessary foundation for a new community in the 19th century.

This is clearly not true today, with new technology and new economics. One should still be allowed to establish title through farming part or all of the land. But other ways of improving land should be counted, including starting businesses that employ a given number of people who live on the 40 acres, building homes with related amenities (like a church, school, clinic, or community store) and similar measures of development.

For simplicity and to minimize the amount of judgment and discretion exercised by federal bureaucrats charged with approving the final patents, the qualification for obtaining the land grant should be very clear and enforceable. This will lead to some oversimplification and perhaps gaming the requirements, but the alternative is endless fights over whether a homesteader has done enough to earn the patent. We want this to succeed wildly, not be a federal program to install rural broadband.

If the homesteader doesn’t develop the homestead adequately, he loses his investment, and it goes back to the pool for reallocation. Great rewards require great risks and are not for the faint of heart. Tolerating risk of loss is a necessary filter for the pioneers we want on the New Frontier.

The Lee bill awarded parcels to winners at auction. The biggest war chest would win twice in every auction cycle. Instead, the way to choose the pioneers without advantaging the oligarchs is by lottery. Anyone with a dream can get land, not just the wealthiest auction bidders, and if anyone can win, more people with good ideas or energy will try it.

Various lottery methods can be used. Entrants could be aggregated nationwide, with the entire pool chosen from for each parcel. Or entrants could designate one or a small number of parcels to be considered, and then the lottery for each parcel could be among those most interested in it. Though once your number is pulled, you are then ineligible for another parcel in the lottery.

What will the winning pioneers pay? Processing costs. If we want the New Frontier settled by young builders with vision, energy, and optimism, we can’t give them the student loan treatment. Yes, they will get an enormous benefit for very little land cost if they succeed, and no, this won’t help pay off the $37 trillion national debt. But today nearly everyone in the Western portion of the Mississippi Valley lives on land that was once given by the federal government to a homesteader. We all idolize the pioneer spirit of those homesteaders, our great-grandparents who made something out of nothing and built a nation. We don’t resent the fact they were given 40 acres of Mississippi Valley farmland for $10 as part of a strategic policy to settle a nation.

So there we are: the New Frontier Homestead Act. Natural-born citizens are eligible to enter a lottery to be awarded 40 acres of public land. If they develop to specific benchmarks within five years, free of both state and federal regulation, the federal government grants them title upon payment of processing costs.

Do you want to renew America? This is a pretty good start.

*****

This article was published by The American Mind and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Oklahoma land rush Wikimedia Commons

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The Coming Revolution

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By Bruce Bialosky

Written by Bruce Bialosky

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

I have read a multitude of articles and opinion pieces on the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary election for mayor of New York City. Many have been informative and insightful, but have not addressed some essential points. This column is meant to do that.

This happening is a manifestation of the education system manipulating the minds of their targets – the students. That trend is delineated in Christopher Rufo’s terrific book, America’s Cultural Revolution. 

The Left took control of the education system and altered the minds of the last two generations. They made them into environmental zealots with little science behind what they promoted, and they turned them into people willing to vote for a person who calls himself a ”socialist” and tells these people he will give them many free things. That education system never taught them that the form of government that Mamdani wants has never worked anywhere. It always ends with people’s rights being destroyed and failure.  Telling them that would be a buzz kill, so the Leftist professors just groom their students and leave them to suffer the consequences while the professors live their cushy lives in the overpaid environments.  

The Wall Street Journal analysis states Mamdani was propelled by young college graduates. You must be college-educated to fall for this malarkey. It is always the so-called “educated” who lead the revolution. In this case, it is white liberals and often Jewish white liberals who know better than everyone else because they are “educated.” As I have often said, the most dangerous people in America are white liberals.  

Because of their orientation from their education, they do not recognize the fact that the government caused the problems that have been created. Their solution is to advocate for more government. They live in a state that has 20% less population than the state of Florida. Despite the difference in population, the New York State budget is $252 billion versus $115 billion for Florida. That is $12,602 per person versus $4,828 for Florida, or more than 2.5 times as much per person. One might say that New York City is not New York State, but it is 42.5% of the population, and we all know NYC is the tail wagging the dog. The flow of New Yorkers out of the state to Florida tells you where they think life is better — and it is not just the weather.  

New York City folks are unhappy about their rent. Everyone except these folks know that the rent control apparatus in New York has virtually destroyed the market. Last year 26,310 apartment units were held off the market because the owners cannot make economic sense of renting them because of rent controls and other oversight factors.  13,000 have been held off for two years. Landlords cannot afford repairs. There are 38,600 units registered as vacant. New rent controls will continue to crush the market. Rents controls have been in place in NYC since 1943. If rent controls were effective, you would think that apartments would be affordable and plentiful.  As always, they say “They just haven’t been done correctly, try it this way.” Mamdani will make things even worse.

Mamdani purports to be a man of the people. He is not. He moved to the United States to live in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, one of the most exclusive addresses in the entire country.  He went to an exclusive private school through the eighth grade.  He attended Bowdoin College, a pricey exclusive private university.  He has zero personal experience being part of the working class.  

Mamdani has a dysfunctional understanding of economics. He is proposing a new income tax of 2 percent on residents making more than $1 million a year, which he estimates would bring in roughly $4 billion per year. That will never materialize. He does not understand the world as it exists. If he were to impose that tax, he would see the people who produce that income disappear. It has happened repeatedly. It is happening now in Britain where a new tax is driving people out of the country. Read about it. Wall Street has significantly moved to Palm Beach and has a central core there already. That would entice so many more to relocate their operations. They do not have to start from scratch. As much as they love New York, many will say enough is enough. Broadway and bagels can only hold people for so long.  

All this is demonstrated in the elected individuals running the three largest cities in America. Los Angeles’s Karen Bass and Chicago’s Brandon Johnson. Those two are doing their best to destroy these cities. They care more about the homeless than the housed. They care more about illegal immigrants (you will never catch them using the term “illegal”) than the Americans born here. Bill de Blasio did his best to run NYC into the ground. Eric Adams is at least trying to save it.  But white liberals may ride to the rescue of Mamdani and once again bring NYC to its knees.  

If you do not believe he is a Communist from these proposals, note that in 2021 he stated he believes in the need to “seize the means of production” which is directly from Karl Marx and the Communist Manifesto.

If these white (supposedly) educated people would leave us alone and not stick us with these Communists in charge of our largest cities, then we might have some salvation. Mamdani supposedly is charming. Communists all have charm — until they are in charge. 

*****

This article was published by FlashReport and is reproduced with permission from the author.

Image Credit: YouTube Screenshot 12 News

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The Conservative Chorus: Tweet, Tweet, Tweet

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By The Editors

Written by The Editors

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Editor’s note: this is the first in a new series of articles, one of which the Prickly Pear will publish each weekend. In this series, we attempt to engage with the rest of the Conservative world and the issues and ideas they have highlighted during the past 7 days. If you enjoyed this article, please subscribe to our monthly subscription, as this series will be behind the paywall in the near future.

 

 

In the final analysis, Islam is a value system and a way of ordering values. In the West, through the traditions of Christianity, the natural law, and the English Common Law, two values have become pre-eminent: liberty and the concept of human rights.

Both values are alien to the Islamic world, and indeed, antithetical in most senses to Islamic values. In trying to understand the influence of Christianity on Western political philosophy, it is useful to consider the relationship Christ established between God and man: that of Father and child, or the relationship he established between all persons, that of friend and friend–“I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.”

As such, a political society where “everyone is equal” is modeled on the original Christian society Christ founded 2000 years ago, where no one “lorded it over the others as the gentiles do” (Matt 20: 25-28), where there was no “Jew or Greek, slave or freeman, male or female” (Gal 3:28). The goal of a government which is “a servant” to the people rather than “a tyrant” comes directly from a Christian spirituality of authority which Christ modeled among his Apostles millennia ago.

In Islam, conversely, the relationship between Allah and his creatures is slave and master. As one Islamic scholar phrased it, “I did not say servant, I said slave.” Thus, every relationship in an Islamic society–from the one between man and wife to the one between citizen and state–is modeled on the slave/master dynamic. To simplify: Why is there so little freedom in Islamic societies? Because there is so little freedom in the relationship between Allah and his slave-creature, which all other relationships “should strengthen” and to which all other relationships “should lead us”.

Islam is also total: it does not recognize any sphere of human activity outside of its authority. Charlie Kirk is drawing attention to how the spread of Islam constitutes the spread of Islamic theories of authority-and therefore the spread of authoritarianism (which is the Islamic theory of authority).

 

 

As John Daniel Davidson noted this past week, immigration and amnesty are proxy issues for a more fundamental dilemma: what is the American identity? Citizenship is how American identity belongs to a particular person.

For many years, we have heard a mantra: America is the place to find a better life! This is undoubtedly true, and is itself a miracle, but bastardizes the notion of citizenship, since it suggests America is merely a means of improving one’s material circumstances.

Everyone in the world wants a better life in the sense that America’s economy can provide one: shelter with running water and heating and cooling, a living wage, education for one’s children, healthcare, personal vehicles, and technological amusements galore. Most people of the Third World can only dream about such luxuries, which is why millions have crossed our border illegally seeking them out.

But emphatically NOT EVERYONE wants to become American. i.e. Not everyone values ordered political liberty, gun ownership, freedom of worship, self-reliance in the Emersonian sense, etc. Not everyone wants to learn our language.

Many illegal immigrants coming in do not learn English, and a huge percentage immediately seek out the support of government welfare programs. Some immigrants come from closed religious or racial societies, or societies marked by rage-driven violence, and upon coming here, elect those who parrot parochial grievances or explicitly anti-American sentiments. Some have been granted the opportunity to study at our precious educational institutes, but have used their new-found right to freedom of speech to advocate terror or to predicate values, policies, or perspectives wholly repugnant to our way of life.

Amnesty for illegal alien farm workers is grotesque in the proper sense of the word because it affirms the idea that American citizenship is merely a form of economic opportunity and has nothing at all to do with adopting an American value system, way of life, customs, or historicity. It is another way of saying, “federal immigration law is selectively enforceable.” Amnesty for illegal alien farmers designates a political class which is favored arbitrarily, granting them a privilege not even citizens themselves possess: namely, dispensation from abiding by the law.

 

 

In witnessing Pam Bondi’s attempt to defend her about-face on the Epstein list-I-meant-file, a phrase from the Bard cometh to mind: Methinks the Lady Doth Protest Too Much!

No one, including yours truly, knows if there was or is an Epstein list, but this debacle has classic characteristics of a deep state scandal: government storyline stuttering, high-ranking officials suddenly contradicting themselves, and a memo issued by intelligence agencies–unsigned, meaning no one is willing to direct responsibility to himself–the drift of which essentially boils down to “Trust us. There is no Epstein list.” Why is the memo unsigned? I surely don’t know, but I do know that Deep State lies are usually anonymous. One can never trace them back to any particular face, name, or voice.

Moreover, at the heart of the new official narrative lies a cartoonishly stupid falsehood: no evidence was found to predicate an investigation into third parties. Wait, what? Jeffrey Epstein trafficked hundreds of girls and young women . . . for himself and no one else? If a man runs drugs or guns, is it a stretch to assume he has clients? I suppose it’s possible that Epstein had no clients, just as I suppose it’s possible that Jasmine Crockett has a higher IQ than my pet puppy, but both logic and evidence in both cases discourage such conclusions.

We sincerely pray that Donald Trump does not underestimate the appetite of the American people for truth, no matter how difficult and horrific the revelations. Given the secrecy and the total lack of transparency which heretofore marked the handling of the Epstein case, many people seem to be using the Epstein affair itself as a litmus test for the Trump Administration’s dedication to exposing the depths of elite corruption. The President should not overlook that fact. 

The American people hate lies more than most other populations, because they have finally awakened to how many freedoms, institutions, and how much political sovereignty was taken from them through the use of lies.

Are there plausible explanations for what generally appears to be a cover-up? Rep. Tim Burchett has suggested the most damning evidence against Epstein and any “third parties” was destroyed during the Biden Administration.

Perhaps there is another calculus: there are so many people necessary to the functioning of the financial world, the corporate world, the entertainment world, and the political world that to expose them all at once–or at all–would bring about a cataclysm in the functioning of normal society too enormous to be worthwhile.

Then again, some of us believe there is nothing better for a society that has been under a tyranny of lies than to experience the truth, for if “you know the truth, the truth shall set you free.” 

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John Brennan, James Comey Perjured Themselves, New CIA Memo Appears To Show thumbnail

John Brennan, James Comey Perjured Themselves, New CIA Memo Appears To Show

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By Robert McGreevy

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey may have perjured themselves while insisting under oath that the discredited Steele Dossier was not the basis for their 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), a new CIA memo revealed.

Brennan and Comey repeatedly insisted the 2017 ICA, which concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered with the 2016 election with “a clear preference” for President Donald Trump, was not based on assertions from the infamous Steele Dossier.

This claim appears to be directly refuted by new evidence revealed in the CIA’s June review of the ICA.

The review, commissioned by CIA Director John Ratcliffe, concluded that Brennan pushed to include the Steele Dossier in the ICA.

The dossier was compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele on behalf of Fusion GPS — a research firm indirectly hired by Hilary Clinton’s campaign through the law firm Perkins Coie, the Associated Press reported.

The Steele Dossier has been widely discredited, including by legacy media organizations like the New York Times (NYT).

“CIA’s Deputy Director for Analysis (DDA) warned in an email to Brennan on 29 December that including it in any form ‘risked the entire credibility of the paper,’” the CIA’s memo wrote.

This appears to directly refute multiple testimonies Brennan made, including one under penalty of perjury.

“And the CIA was very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment,” Brennan testified to the House Judiciary Committee in May 2023.

This was a double down from his sworn 2017 testimony to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Then-Republican South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy asked him, “Do you know if the Bureau ever relied on the Steele Dossier as part of any court filings, applications, petitions, pleadings?”

“I have no awareness,” Brennan responded.

“Did the CIA rely on it?” Gowdy asked.

“No,” Brennan responded.

“Why not?” Gowdy asked.

“Because we didn’t. It wasn’t part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. It was not in any way used as a basis for the Intelligence Community Assessment that was done. It was not,” Brennan answered.

Brennan also told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in 2017 that he had not even read the document.

Other high-ranking intelligence officials in the Obama administration echoed Brennan’s assurances.

“The IC has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions,” former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper said in a 2017 statement.

The basis of the Obama spies’ denials center around their claim that the Steele Dossier was not included in the main body of the ICA, but rather in Appendix A.

“We decided to enclose a one-and-a-half-page summary of it, but not as a formal part of the Intelligence Community assessment, in the highly classified version of it,” Clapper told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in a 2017 interview.

“It was significant enough and consistent enough with other intelligence that it ought to be included, but it wasn’t sufficiently corroborated to be in the body of the Intelligence Community Assessment,” Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a 2020 hearing, according to Real Clear Investigations.

Despite insistences that it was only included in the appendix of the ultimate ICA, a reference directly from the Steele Dossier appeared “in the main body of the ICA as the fourth supporting bullet for the judgment that Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win,” the CIA memo stated.

Two high-level CIA officials pushed back against including the uncorroborated Steele Dossier, arguing it failed to meet “the most basic tradecraft standards. Brennan allegedly ignored these objections, according to the CIA memo.

The document claimed Brennan “appeared more swayed by the Dossier’s general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns.”

The backlash to these revelations have included former subordinates to leaders like Brennan and Comey to call for their imprisonment.

“These men deserve to rot in prison, along with anyone in the Obama White House or Clinton campaign who colluded with them,” former CIA officer Bryan Dean Wright wrote of Comey and Brennan in a scathing Fox News op-ed.

Comey and Brennan are now the subjects of a federal criminal investigation after Ratcliffe referred alleged evidence of wrongdoing by Brennan to FBI Director Kash Patel, Fox News reported Tuesday.

*****

This article was published by The Daily Caller News Foundation and is reproduced with permission.

Image credit: Youtube screenshot Fox News

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The Difference Between an ‘Ally’ and a ‘Protectorate’

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By Sumantra Maitra

Written by Sumantra Maitra

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

There’s a certain observable pair of traits that dominate President Donald Trump’s foreign-policy calculus: He understands good and daring optics, but he hates protracted attritional conflicts. He likes a performative display of short-term strength; he hates the idea of Americans dying under his watch, and has no interest in joining a fray that might lead thither.

We saw these traits at play when Ukraine scuttled the peace talks with Russia, after a long-planned decapitating drone strike that took out a third of the Russian strategic bomber fleet. The president was clearly impressed by the Ukrainian strikes, even when it actively nixed his diplomacy. He appreciated the Israeli first strike on Iran. But he was also very impressed by Iranian missiles, which required a lot of American assets to shoot down. A visible show of strength simultaneously appeals to him and deters him from long term engagement. He likes those who pay their “fair share.” He hates those who freeride and leech. The man loves a “deal.”

Nowhere was this more visible than at the NATO summit that just concluded in Europe, where the NATO secretary general, the classic wily Dutchman Mark Rutte, managed to mollify Trump and have a drama-free summit that advanced a potential European promise of 5 percent of GDP in defense spending—a non-binding target that goes from the current aspirational 2 percent of GDP to 3.5 percent by 2035, and 1.5 percent additional for infrastructure and other defense-related outlays. Progress will be reviewed by the time of the next American general election.

All he had to do was call Trump “Daddy.” For what it’s worth, he didn’t directly call him that. Rather, when Trump described Israel and Iran as two errant children, Rutte mentally translated what was perhaps a great joke in his mind, and landed in a weird pickle, further proving the political rule of thumb not to let Northwestern Europeans (other than Anglos) ever joke at a political summit. Britain pledged to buy nuclear-capable F-35s, pushing their second strike capabilities to air for the first time since the end of the Cold War. But Spain refused to pledge 5 percent of their GDP to defense, and rightly so. They face no threats from Russia; the very idea is absurd. “Rachel Ellehuus, director of the defence think tank Rusi sees evidence of a spending split within Nato, along geographical lines,” the BBC reported.

The NATO commitment was desacralized after the Biden years, but was still deemed “ironclad” by the United States. Europe pledged to underscore “their enduring sovereign commitments to provide support to Ukraine,” a far cry from the heady days of 2022, when Ukraine was the battle for democracy. “The summit’s official declaration mentioned nothing about Ukraine joining the alliance, a longstanding point of discussion. A meeting between Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Trump yielded no specific promises about peace talks, although Mr. Trump said it was possible that the United States would send more Patriot air defense systems to Ukraine,” reported the New York Times. It is unclear why the U.S. should send Patriots to Ukraine when it was the Ukrainians who ended talks between the U.S. and Russia, but no one was there to remind Trump of that, given the Iran–Israel business.

For all these words, no business was settled at the summit, nor did any reorientation of the fundamentals of U.S. grand strategy happen, because the basic theoretical tension remains within the American foreign policy. The reality is that hegemons do not have allies; they have protectorates. Normal empires and normal great powers have allies and limited interests based on geography. The British Empire was an ally of the U.S. when NATO was formed; it had comparable manpower and military heft. Alliances show some form of relative power and independence of foreign policy. Imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire were not equals, but they were allies. Britain and France today are allies. But the U.S. and the rest of NATO are not allies.

Some Western European countries, especially France, but also Britain and Germany, perhaps have the capability to undertake occasional independent actions, but they have not been willing to do so, with the exception of France in Africa. The rest are basically protectorates. Same in the Middle East. There are no hegemonic challenges to the U.S. in either region.

Protectorates are either good or bad. Good protectorates are force multipliers. A hegemon might come to save them when they are threatened or attacked for in return for some structural benefits during peacetime—raw materials and mining, or manpower and manufacturing. Bad protectorates are those who want to chain-gang you into a war of choice. Most U.S. “allies” are, by that definition, basically bad protectorates.

Using the term “protectorates” instead of “allies” is useful, as it makes it clear which affiliates are beneficial and which are corrosive. It puts the burden on those who want American protection to make themselves useful to America. It deters them from dragging their hegemonic protector into their petty ethnic or regional rivalries, begging for protection when the inevitable retaliations materialize. It prevents the development of an Electra complex in foreign policy. It is a true, objective, and quantifiable measure of determining which countries are useful and which are not. And officials around Donald Trump, or aligned media influencers, should start using the term to influence the president’s decision-making more.

Great power equilibrium is the greatest virtue in international relations. It is also the most truly conservative position of all. As in Eastern Europe, so in the Middle East; the greatest cause of instability is reckless protectorates frustrating efforts toward peace.

*****

This article was first published at The American Conservative, and is reproduced here with permission

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Another Word For American thumbnail

Another Word For American

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By Conlan Salgado

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

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The delirium over the Big Beautiful Bill–given that it was signed into law by the hand of Donald Trump–is both predictable and boring. The Democrats, entirely without power and therefore, in envy, extra-concentrated on the destruction of the American spirit, have made even the most exciting pitches of human emotion monotonous and dull.

Bless them.

I feel the obligation to tell our readers that no, the work requirements enacted under the Big Beautiful Bill pertaining to Medicaid and SNAP benefits do not equal the Holocaust (remember Hakeem “millions will die” Jeffries?), or the other mass atrocities of recent memory.

In brief, the work requirements for Medicaid are as follows:

  • Recipients must work, volunteer, or attend school for at least 80 hours per month (approximately 20 hours per week) to maintain eligibility.

  • States are required to conduct eligibility redeterminations every six months starting December 31, 2026, to verify compliance, which may lead to coverage loss if administrative requirements are not met.

People affected?

  • Applies to able-bodied adults aged 18–64 without disabilities.

  • Parents with children over the age of 14 are included in the work requirements, with exemptions for parents of children aged 14 or younger.

  • Exemptions are provided for pregnant women, caregivers for dependent children, and individuals with particular disabilities (such as blindness, intellectual and developmental disorders, and substance abuse disorders).

In brief, the work requirements for SNAP benefits are as follows:

  • Able-bodied adults without dependents aged 18–64, and parents with children aged 7 or older, must complete at least 80 hours per month of work, training, or volunteering to qualify for SNAP benefits.

Allow me to reiterate: in order to meet the work requirements newly enacted, one must work less than one part time job per month. LESS THAN ONE PART TIME JOB PER MONTH! Nor does one have to work, strictly speaking; community engagement (including volunteer work) and time spent attending Educational programs also count toward meeting those terrifying new work standards.

Thus, the most honest way of summing this up is: the Big Beautiful Bill requires able bodied adults without young dependents to spend 10% of their monthly existence doing something verifiably useful–both for themselves and their community.

There’s an end of it! 

The left’s mind-losing and hysteria-pimping reactions, while honoring the traditional deranged response to a Trump victory, reveals how deeply necessary the Largesse State is to the Democrat political vision. The work requirements of the Big Beautiful Bill are remarkably light, considering that many Americans work full time jobs or multiple part-time jobs, while at the same time being staunch parents, spouses, caregivers, and community volunteers.

The Democrat ethos is not only one of dependence on the government for the necessaries of life–health, wealth, housing, food–but also an ethos directly opposed to even the littlest measures self-improvement.

Of course, the foundation of their ethos is even darker, and more explicitly anti-American; to understand why we must grasp that self-reliance is an essential American virtue, since it is the man who is reliant on himself who most fiercely values freedom for the self.

It is not so strange when one considers how a man who has his own thoughts–lots of them–and many which ONLY belong to him, will surely have a larger and more valuable freedom to speak than a man who says what every other person in the world says or might say.

The second man will certainly appreciate being able to open his mouth and bleat, may even consider it his right, but when he does exercise “the right to free speech” it is only to indicate what an enslaved mind he possesses.

In the end, the government need not restrict the speech of a parrot; a parrot may talk as much as he likes, because he has been restricted at a much more fundamental level already: his capacity for free thought, which is the prerequisite for free speech.

If it can be so articulated, our God-given rights are acts of faith, hopeful anticipations of our one day fully realizing our human capacities. When a government protects your right to freedom of speech, it protects the permanent possibility of you one day becoming an eloquent and fluent defender of truth. 

That is a profound and important relationship, the one which exists between freedom and self-reliance. Someone who depends upon The State for housing, for health, for food, or for his livelihood, will perhaps still be granted “liberties”, but his condition of dependence changes the character of the liberty he is granted.

A population utterly reliant on government generosity and too indolent to redeem itself through hard work cannot ask the government to be less generous; it can only ask the government to expand, to interfere more, to confiscate more responsibilities and therefore restrict corresponding rights.

Such is the nature of rights: a self-reliant man must have the right to private property, to his own land. Someone who lives in government housing has already forbidden that right to himself. The government need take no further action.

The Democrats hate “work requirements” in the same way they would hate “virtue requirements”, or “think your own thoughts” requirements. They hate self-reliance, because it is another word for freedom.

And they hate freedom because it is another word for America.

*****

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Trump Admin Should Purge IRS Of Officials Who Targeted Conservatives

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By Tom Jones

Written by Tom Jones

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

If the administration wants to show they are serious about lasting reform and an end to lawfare operations, they should empower Long to drain the leftist fever swamp at the IRS. 

On Wednesday, a conservative group appeared in court in its ongoing lawsuit that challenges the same provisions the IRS weaponized against right-leaning groups seeking nonprofit status more than a decade ago. The case is a reminder that Americans’ least favorite federal agency has long been used by the permanent bureaucracy to target conservative organizations and donors. But with Billy Long in place as IRS commissioner, the Trump administration has a rare opportunity to strike a decisive blow against rank partisanship and lawfare operations run out of the permanent bureaucracy.

DOGE was an encouraging start to the long campaign against waste, fraud, and abuse, but those victories will be all for naught if openly hostile, corrupt, and partisan executive agencies remain intact. Long no doubt understands that the lawfare operations used to target President Trump were at least inspired by the successful IRS targeting of conservative groups during the Obama administration.

Under Lois Lerner’s leadership, the IRS unfairly denied conservative groups tax-exempt status on the basis of their political leanings. In the ensuing investigation, Lerner, who served as director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Unit, admitted to targeted denials for otherwise deserving organizations due to their conservative leanings.

Lerner resigned in disgrace in 2013, but few Americans comprehend that the scandal had almost zero effect on the agency. Instead of following her out of the agency, many of her co-conspirators remained and have since been promoted through the ranks. Unsurprisingly, many other IRS employees with enforcement authority are serial Democrat donors who flaunt their opposition to the Trump administration and support Democrat policies on social media. In fact, anti-conservative bias seems key to getting ahead at the agency.

A decade of lawfare against conservatives is simply too long. We can no longer give partisan bureaucrats the benefit of the doubt. If Trump and Long want to effect lasting reform and eliminate bias, here are a few problematic actors who must go:

Robert Choi, acting commissioner of Tax-Exempt and Government Entities, was a deputy to Lois Lerner and took part in the first wave of targeting conservative organizations. He served as the director of Exempt Organizations, Rulings and Agreements, when the IRS began targeting conservative groups in 2010, and, alongside Lerner, apparently signed off on the discriminatory decisions.

When the scandal broke, Choi was interviewed by members of Congress but faced no actual punishment and continues to hold an important leadership position in the organization. Choi is a decades-long registered Democrat.

Holly Paz, who serves as commissioner of the Large Business and International Division, was an integral part of Lerner’s targeting of conservatives. She worked under Choi and took his place as the director of Exempt Organizations, Rulings and Agreements.

Paz briefly faced consequences for her participation in this scandal, being placed on administrative leave in 2013, but was back in the agency before too long. Under the Biden administration, she was elevated to her current senior position. Outside of her work with Lerner and Choi to discriminate against conservative organizations, Paz also personally financially supported President Obama’s campaign.

Elizabeth Kastenberg took part in the targeting of conservatives under Lois Lerner and even admitted that the targeting was due to political affiliation. Her acknowledgment of discriminating against Americans due to their political beliefs did not disqualify her from becoming the acting director of the Office of Professional Responsibility. The IRS must operate under a different definition of “professional responsibility” than we do.

During Lerner’s tenure, Kastenberg was responsible for reviewing audits of conservative-leaning nonprofits. Emails that are a matter of public record demonstrate that she was instructed to “be on the lookout for a teaparty case,” and that she was explicitly instructed to deny tax-exempt status to two conservative organizations.

In another email, she acknowledged the bias in the treatment of conservative applicants for tax-exempt status, writing in 2011 that “these cases are held back primarily because of their political party affiliation rather than specifically any political activities.” Despite knowingly perpetrating a politically motivated, discriminatory campaign against the right, Kastenberg and her accomplices remain in charge of major parts of the group responsible for collecting U.S. federal taxes and administering the main body of the federal statutory tax law.

Removing these actors is a start. But Republicans must realize that we need more than showy public hearings. That means striking a blow against rank partisanship. Today’s IRS leadership structure suggests that extreme partisanship is not just tolerated, it’s rewarded.

Many higher-ups in the IRS publicly demonstrate anti-Trump and anti-conservative biases. Directors of major departments are Democrat donors, giving money to Biden, Obama, presidential candidate Kamala Harris, several other Democrat campaigns, and liberal political organizations. Social media posts endorse discriminatory and unconstitutional DEI hiring policies; support the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement; and criticize DOGE’s attempts to cut spending and root out waste, fraud, and abuse.

After more than a decade of lawfare, including actions meant to sway the outcome of elections, we can no longer give nakedly partisan bureaucrats the benefit of the doubt. If the administration wants to show they are serious about lasting reform and an end to lawfare operations, they should empower Long to drain the leftist fever swamp at the IRS.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

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Augustus Tolton: The Slave Who Became the First Black U.S. Priest

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By Catherine Salgado

Written by Catherine Salgado

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Augustus Tolton escaped slavery while still young and battled severe racism to become America’s first black priest—and a saint.

Ven. Tolton, who died on this day in 1897, and who is now being considered for canonization, had a truly remarkable life, one in which he too often encountered as obstacles the very worst of sinful human nature. But his steady faith and kindness, amidst persecution and disappointments that could understandably have embittered him, ended up inspiring thousands. Like Jesus Christ, Tolton repaid injury with charity, and converted hearts because of it.

Augustus “Gus” Tolton’s life story reveals the ugliest parts of America’s history, but also its heroes. Tolton himself, who struggled through slavery, poverty, intense racism, great difficulties finding a seminary (every U.S. seminary rejected him based on race, so he had to go to the more open-minded Vatican), and bad health, was the greatest hero of all. But his brave and uncomplaining mother, his friends and family, the priests who wouldn’t let him give up on his dream of priesthood, and the large crowds of both white and black Americans who came to hear him preach also provided praiseworthy examples.

St. Benedict of Nursia had a famous motto, “Ora et labora,” which means “Pray and work.” Those three little words also sum up the life of Augustus Tolton. Always throughout his life, Augustus worked intensely and prayed fervently.

“[Britannica.com] Tolton was born into slavery. His parents, Peter Paul and Martha Jane (née Chisley) Tolton, were baptized Catholics who had been granted permission to wed by the neighbouring Catholic families who owned them. At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Tolton’s father escaped enslavement to join the Union army and was subsequently killed in battle. Soon after Peter Paul’s escape, Tolton’s mother fled with her three children at night and, aided by a handful of Union soldiers, crossed the Mississippi River into Illinois. They soon settled in the town of Quincy, where they joined a Catholic church whose congregation largely consisted of German immigrants.

Tolton was encouraged by his mother to pursue an education. When he attempted to enter local schools, however, he faced harassment and discrimination by classmates and their parents, and his education in both public and private schools was limited. Discussions with his pastor, [Irish] Father Peter McGirr, [Tolton’s firmest friend and champion,] inspired Tolton to consider entering the priesthood, yet no American seminary would admit a Black student. Tolton was therefore tutored privately by local priests until St. Francis Solanus College (now Quincy University) admitted him in 1878 as a special student. In 1880, with the support of McGirr and other priests in Quincy, Tolton began studying for the priesthood at the Collegium Urbanum de Propaganda Fide in Rome [where he was welcomed]. After six years of study, Tolton was ordained a priest on April 24, 1886.”

National Catholic Register notes that Tolton loved his time in Rome, and that he was popular among his fellow students and respected by professors. But now he had to return to the United States and face once again all the heartache of racism. “Fr. Gus” didn’t complain or feel sorry for himself, though. And his courage received an immediate reward when he arrived back in his hometown of Quincy—a crowd of people, including white and black residents, both Catholics and non-Catholics, was waiting to greet him.

Writing of his first Mass in Quincy, Tolton said, “Everyone received me kindly, especially the Negroes, but also the White people: Germans, Irish, and all the others. I celebrated Mass on July 18, in the Church of Saint Boniface, with more than 1,000 whites and 500 colored people present.” But that popularity sadly ended up drawing the ire of other priests, the very men who should have supported him most, and Augustus Tolton found himself being unfairly targeted yet again. Britannica tells this story too:

“Although there had been speculation that he would be sent on a mission to Africa [after ordination], Tolton was assigned to the United States. He returned to the United States in July 1886, delivering his first [M]ass at St. Benedict the Moor, a largely Black church in New York City, before returning to his hometown of Quincy as pastor at the mainly Black St. Joseph Church. In Quincy Tolton became such a popular preacher that he attracted some members of local white—mostly German or Irish—congregations; he therefore also faced discrimination from other local priests, who resented what they perceived as competition.

The St. Augustine Society, an African American Catholic charitable organization, contacted Tolton about moving to Chicago to help its members found a congregation. In late 1889 Rome granted Tolton a transfer to Chicago, where he became the city’s first African American priest and was granted jurisdiction by the archbishop over all of Chicago’s Black Catholics. At the beginning he ministered to a Black congregation that met in the basement of Old St. Mary’s Church. Through the combined efforts of Tolton and the St. Augustine Society, as well as a private gift, enough money was raised to build most of the structure for a church building, and in 1893 Tolton held mass in the new St. Monica Church on Chicago’s South Side. Tolton soon developed a national reputation as a [priest] and as a public speaker, yet he devoted the majority of the remainder of his life to his congregants, most of whom lived in poverty, and to the completion of St. Monica Church. He died shortly after succumbing to heatstroke.”

What a truly great man, an American hero, was Fr. Augustus Tolton! No matter what hardships came in his way, he never stopped struggling and he never stopped loving God and God’s children. He fought for material freedom and then to set others free spiritually. Tolton didn’t convert everyone, of course—there will be racists and jealous backbiters as long as sin exists—but he touched countless lives for the better. He should be more known and loved, and his intercession sought by Americans during this critical time in our country’s history. Augustus Tolton always turned evil into good, and we need his help desperately now.

Ven. Augustus Tolton, pray for us!

This article was republished with the permission of Catherine Salgado from Pro Deo et Libertate.

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Did They Know They Would Be Birthing a Great Nation?

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By Bruce Bialosky

Written by Bruce Bialosky

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Those who are regular readers of this column know I believe there was divine intervention that so many great men with such immense wisdom and bravery were in one place at the time of our country’s formation.  I was reminded of that on a recent trip to Washington D.C.

The Beautiful Wife and I had not been to DC for 17 years, since the end of my term as a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. It was time for a refresher course due to the long absence even though we had been countless times before. We were invited at the behest of our special friend Keith Sonderling, Deputy Secretary of the Department of Labor. He runs the day-to-day operations of the department. He and his wonderful staff arranged special tours for us, and we threw in some other requests of our own.  

One of the must-see places for us was the Capital Jewish Museum. It opened in 2023 and recently became well known but for all wrong reasons. That is because two wonderful young Jews, Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lishinsky, were murdered in front of the building while leaving an event. I posed for a photo wearing my Jewish Lives Matter shirt right next to a make-shift memorial for them. We made sure that whoever thought they could break the Jewish people found out we will never break, we will never bend, and we will always stand strong. The museum itself was is marvelous exhibit featuring the great history of Jews in our capital and our country.  

Our first tour was of the Dept. of Labor. The building is named after Francis Perkins, the fourth labor secretary and the first female member of a president’s cabinet. It is massive (1.8 million square feet) as it houses many bureaus and agencies. Mr. Sonderling took us to the rooftop where there is one of the most majestic views of our capital city. What a treat. The building serves to protect the hardworking men and women of this country that make it the model for the world where anybody can rise from a simple laborer to running their own business.  

A special experience was touring the Library of Congress. This was a religious experience for me as an avid reader and writer. We had not been there since they built the Thomas Jefferson room. Jefferson sold 6,487 books to form the Library in 1815 after the British burnt the Capital. In 1851, two-thirds of the collection was destroyed in a fire at the library. In 2008, they opened a new library replacing all the lost books except for 250. We got to see the collection’s dedicated area in the Jefferson building of the Library. This is just a small but essential part of the estimated 39 million books held by the library, not including manuscripts, maps, and recordings.

Revisiting the Capitol building was emotional. Standing in the center of this magnificent structure was a chilling reminder of where we were when we were rushed out of the building in the moments after the plane hit the Pentagon on 9/11. This beautiful building, the heart of our government, still stands strong.   

The best part of the trip was tours of the White House East and West Wings. We have been fortunate to attend many White House Hanukkah Parties in the East Wing. It was great to see it again updated with more recent presidents.  In the main foyer, there is chilling painting of President Trump being moved off the stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, with his bloodied ear and his fist up. It brought me to tears, not because of the person or the hideous act of violence. It is because it symbolizes the strength of our country and what we stand for.  

A young teenage girl took a photo standing in front of the painting with her tongue out and her thumb pointing down. That was obviously a different reaction to mine. I walked over to her and said, “The remarkable thing about this country is you can stand here in this place and do that, and no one will stop you or arrest you. That is the greatness of the country in which you are blessed to live.”  

That evening we had a private tour of the West Wing. We were first shown the building opposite the White House, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB). There we saw things including a wonderful new display lining the hallways in several directions. It features different photos and stories (via scannable QR codes) about the founding of our country.  Thank you to the fabulous people at PragerU for this. It is quite special.  

We also saw the Vice-President’s desk. The one Harry Truman used and maintained even after becoming president as he was used to working in the EEOB.  Inside the drawer there were signatures of many V-P’s who had worked at the desk that is no longer used.  

We then went over to the West Wing. We had to wait for DJT to exit from the Oval Office. He exits out of sight of visitors for obvious reasons. We got to see all the greatness of our country. We even got to see the end table where they found Hunter Biden’s cocaine. The Oval Office is quite magnificent. It was good to see (the bust of) Winston Churchill back in his spot and all the rest of the magnificence of the room. The Press room was special as well.  Every news agency’s seat is marked with a name plate in the various aisles, showing a sort of “pecking order.” Then I got to mount the podium and tried out for the position of press secretary. I think I would be particularly good at the job. 

Seeing all this made me think about whether those 56 people dared to dream they would create this magnificent country when they gathered 2-1/2 centuries ago. That 250 years later  we would be the most important country in the world that has given freedom to more people than any other country ever they would quite appreciate.  

It reminds me of what Ronnie (President Reagan) said, “It’s the American vision of creating a new nation of free people, a country that would be a light unto the nations, and a shining city upon a hill.”

Let us keep it that way.

*****

This article was published by FlashReport and reproduced with permission.

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Divisions Among Friends–Part II

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By Neland Nobel

Written by Neland Nobel

It would be fair to say debates about foreign policy started almost from the outset of the republic. Some result from a clash between idealism and necessity. The battle lines are typically drawn between those who advocate for strict adherence to noninterference and those who believe foreign entanglement is necessary or even desirable. In terms of the nascent modern Conservative movement, it likely started as a reaction to the socialistic excesses of the New Deal and the entry into World War II. Many Conservatives did not want to get involved in World War II but quickly joined the fight after Pearl Harbor.  Even Charles Lindbergh flew secret combat missions in the Pacific.

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From CCP Lies To The Fight For Freedom: How I Became an Undercover ‘Loser’ for America thumbnail

From CCP Lies To The Fight For Freedom: How I Became an Undercover ‘Loser’ for America

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By Anonymous

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Story of a Chinese National’s Survival in an American University

I am a Chinese living in Europe, and I just want to share my story in the early hours. For personal privacy reasons, I am doing so anonymously.

Perhaps it sounds like a kitsch compliment, but it’s also a fact: traditionally, those Chinese who pro-liberalism (classical liberalism) have had a deep love for the United States, seeing her as the spiritual homeland. Out of a sense of hypocritical national dignity, they rarely say this outright—often choosing to veil it behind symbols like the flag of the Republic of China. But deep down, that feeling is real. And as for me, I suppose I’m one of those unfortunate souls, the difference is that one thing I’m brave enough to admit to myself is—I am an American patriot who was born in China. 

For those of us who live under the weight of traditional Chinese culture and its political system but still yearn for freedom, America holds a powerful appeal. It might be hard to imagine, but for a liberal born into a society that judges people by origin and rank, encountering the idea that “all men are created equal” for the first time is nothing short of a revelation. In that moment, the spark of rebellion is quietly but deeply planted in the heart. 

I grew up surrounded by lies. The Communist government constantly tried to convince me of the evil of America, using academic jargon similar to what you’d easily find in Western “woke” universities to frame every moment in American history as “racist” or “paving the way for capitalist development.” Yet, despite all the back-and-forth, their core message remained the same: a one-party socialist government with no elections or freedom of speech is the “true” democracy. 

I found their education system nauseating. That’s why I was never considered a “good student” while in China—my so-called political sensitivity was always lacking. In the end, it cost me my academic future. One of the unspoken prerequisites for pursuing higher education at a public university in China is passing a political screening. Most private institutions that are more lenient in this regard tend to have a poor reputation; they’re often seen as places where you simply pay for a diploma.

After graduation, I was labeled as someone with “political problems,” which meant I couldn’t become a teacher or a civil servant. Like many ordinary people, I took on humble but honest work. Maybe by some stroke of luck, I eventually became a mid-level manager at a small company, and for a while, life seemed to settle into something stable. I tried to stop thinking about politics—I was afraid that doing so might cost me everything I had. But some things, I suppose, are written into your fate.

Spending a lifetime as a middle manager at a private company in China isn’t a bad life—especially in a small firm. During that time, my Steam library was packed with AAA games, and of course, I had a VPN to get through the Great Firewall. But still, moving into senior management would have been a major personal milestone. When I found out that my direct supervisor was set to retire in just a few years, I felt I had a real shot at moving up. In fact, I was the only candidate for the role—just like an election in China. The only thing standing in the way was an advanced degree—any degree, really, from any university.

Because of my political history, I couldn’t go the usual route and “buy” a degree through one of China’s adult education programs. So my only option was to “buy” a degree abroad instead—just like many Chinese students you might’ve seen — studying a business program that is almost entirely staffed by international students, using the opportunity to relax a bit and see it into a fun little trip overseas. 

Unfortunately, I was one of those Chinese international students who talks too much—and someone who genuinely believes that all people are created equal. So I never felt the need to agree with everything just because the other person was a local, middle-class student. That was especially true when I saw the all-too-familiar sight on campus: overweight, blue-haired, Jabba the Hutt self-proclaimed “comrades” waving Soviet flags. Something about that flag triggers a kind of Jedi knight instinct in me—as if it’s my duty to bring them to justice with my lightsaber.

They were full of themselves, convinced that pursuing a degree in the social sciences was somehow a grand, noble endeavor. Anyone who disagreed with their views was quickly labeled a “loser” or “uneducated,” even as they claimed to be fighting for the underprivileged. Unfortunately, when I—someone who actually came from a communist country—tried to share how people like me view their ideology, I suddenly found myself counted among the “losers” and the “uneducated.” So, after some painful reflection, I decided to do what they did: I enrolled in a social science program, hoping to raise my own level of education (definitely not in postmodern gender studies).

Fortunately, overseas, I no longer needed a VPN. Unfortunately, I saw many young people who had lived their whole lives in China, who loved freedom but may never have touched the land of the free world, still relying on VPNs for the humble taste of freedom of speech. But under such unequal power of speech, they were mocked by tankies, by privileged Chinese students who cosplay the same elegance as modern liberals, by Chinese economic immigrants who infiltrate the free world but love the CCP— those assholes who had no empathy and stood outside the wall, ridiculing those longing for freedom, calling them rats and losers. These tankies, eating cookies and drinking high-end coffee, told young people in China who longed for liberty that they should love their country, or else they were pro-colonial mindset losers. 

When the streets of Hong Kong were filled with stars and stripes, when a Chinese girl in a concert in Beijing threw out copies of the Declaration of Independence to the people and called for revolution, when a Chinese teenager raised a Stars and Stripes flag at the very summit of Mount Tai, when The Star-Spangled Banner is sung by the oppressed during protests in totalitarian countries, those blue-haired Hutts, claiming to fight for the oppressed while rocking their damn electric wheelchairs, said: “America is a racist country.” And those idle postcolonial theorists in universities said: “Democracy and freedom are colonialism. 

I had no choice but to give up everything in my past life and fight against these people—becoming, quite literally, an alt-right loser. But I will always be proud of how I became a loser. Because the world today has become so pathetic that it takes “alt-right losers” to defend democracy and freedom, and to fight for the underprivileged.

I’m constantly baffled when I hear overweight, blue-haired Marxists talk about starting a “revolution” in a constitutional republic like the United States. I’ve never understood why they insist on calling their counter-revolution a revolution.

And if that day ever comes, maybe I’ll have no choice but to fly from Europe to join the American Civil War as an international volunteer—to stand with the American patriots and help crush those counter-revolutionaries, and strike a real blow with the second amendment to the United States Constitution against one privileged old white male whose name is Karl Marx.

Because I am an alt-right loser who gets teary-eyed at the sight of the Stars and Stripes, who loves freedom and democracy, who respects the Founding Fathers of the United States, and fights for the oppressed and underprivileged, I have no choice but to be this way.

*****

Background: I run a group on FB of hand selected members who are serious and thoughtful about saving our Republic. It’s a no “BS” group called GASP – Global Anti-Socialism Project. In 2020 when Trump lost, my foreign members left the group because they were afraid. One of the members was from Venezuela and he had written a devastating account of the the horrors of the communist government that has taken over there and it was a warning to American.

The post you’ve just read above was received a couple of days ago. I’m hoping the foreign members will come back. 

I encourage you to share this article. There’s a tendency for people to generalize and categorize using black and white think. The danger of it is that we don’t get the full spectrum of reality and we make decisions about people and issues based on limited knowledge. Not all Chinese are spies. 

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Shot Heard Round the Web: Democrats, Slavery, Illegal Aliens, and Civil War thumbnail

Shot Heard Round the Web: Democrats, Slavery, Illegal Aliens, and Civil War

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By Catherine Salgado

Written by Catherine Salgado

The Democrat Party hasn’t been this angry since the Republicans took away their slaves. And in fact, their reasons for rage are much the same as last time, when they launched a Civil War — namely, they lost a major election they had tried to rig, and they are losing their cheap, exploitable labor which they prefer over hiring American citizens. If only Donald Trump would learn from history and realize Democrats will use any and every ruthless and unconstitutional method to win, and unconditional surrender is our only option.

Donald Trump again indicated support for giving illegal alien workers amnesty — even though he was elected specifically to enact mass deportations, his base overwhelmingly opposes amnesty, and farms/businesses that hire illegals do so because they’re cheaper, not because Americans don’t want the jobs. Charlie Kirk is right that RINO and Democrat Big Business, Deep State, and congressional leaders who benefit from cheap illegal alien labor are pressuring Trump to grant mass amnesty, but Trump is a fool if he falls for their transparent lies.

John Quincy Adams, the president and abolitionist born to Founder John Adams on July 11, 1767, warned…

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Tehran Tucker: An Exercise in Imagination

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By Conlan Salgado

Written by Conlan Salgado

I admit I am biased enough to miss the days when American journalists did not amplify the voices of America’s enemies, if indeed those days ever existed. This weekend, Tucker Carlson had the impulse to interview the head of state of a nation which was, but a few days ago, actively engaged in hostilities with the United States. However odd the impulse itself was, considering Tucker Carlson as an American (and, he’ll vigorously tell you, a PATRIOTIC one), it was perhaps understandable in his capacity as a journalist. What was exceedingly strange and not at all understandable from the perspective of a journalist was his strenuous avoidance of any confrontation, even confrontation that would have solicited important, tense, and informative reactions from Pres. Pezeshkian for the benefit of a curious, if uninformed American audience.

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How 24 Hours in a Remote Greenland Village Showed Me Its American Spirit

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By Nick Solheim

Written by Nick Solheim

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

My conversations with young Greenlanders showed me that they are interested in a deal with the U.S. 

As we neared Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, population 508 and home of an outpost of Arktisk Kommando, Danish Arctic Command, everyone on my flight was astonished by the emptiness of it all.“There’s like . . . no one here,” one of my travel companions weighed in from the back of the plane.

It was true. We had been flying over Greenland (total population: 57,000) for approximately 25 minutes and had not seen a single house, road, car, or any evidence of human habitation at all. 

Kangerlussuaq sits at the end of a 100-mile-long fjord, 31 miles north of the Arctic Circle. It was once home to the U.S. Sondrestrom Air Force Base, which closed in 1992. The village contains an airport (at the site of the closed U.S. Air Force base), a restaurant (located in the airport), three gift shops (two of which are in the airport), and a small, Aldi-like grocery store that sells .22 rifles off an open shelf (mercifully, across the street from the airport). Kangerlussuaq now seems to be a shell of its former self. 

After we landed and took a short bus ride to the terminal, I was left to wander around the town. I walked a mile east and then back a mile west (inland), and I was struck by not only the remoteness, but also the general sense of abandonment. Large satellite dishes, which had long been a part of the over-the-pole early radar detection system, sat abandoned and decaying in stubborn grass and moss. A garbage dump—really, just a field of junk—contained rusted Caterpillars, luggage carts, and scrap metal. Shipping containers full of food, medical supplies, and other necessities—brought six months of the year when the fjord isn’t packed with ice, a local told me—sat just outside of town to the west, a lifeline for the isolated people during the nearly three months of winter darkness.

The sense of abandonment was confirmed when I talked to the habitants of the Kangerlussuaq. “They don’t really come here,” a dishwasher commented when I asked him about the Danish presence. “Unless they’re sent by the military.” The most exciting recent guest according to several locals I asked: Morgan Freeman, who had visited two weeks prior. 

Back in my hotel room—also located in the airport—I slept under the near-midnight sun. This time of year, the sun doesn’t set; it just wanes into a pale gray around 3 a.m. local time.

The next day, I started with sausage, hard-boiled eggs, and coffee. At breakfast, I spoke with a young man I had seen working the cash register at the restaurant the night before. “You’re here from America?” he asked. When I responded in the affirmative, he put his fist up in the air and said, “Make America Great Again!” with a big, toothy grin.

Caught off-guard, I shook his hand with a wry smile and departed for another hike—this time, off to find some American airplane wreckage from the 1960s.

I hiked down a few miles of dirt road. The only passerby was a dump truck on its way to the junk field. Upon reaching the end of the road, I looked left to a steep incline with deep, muddy puddles, and a warning sign for musk ox. Thinking back with regret to my visit to the grocery store with the .22s, I started up the mountain.

Fifty minutes of huffing and puffing later, a vista opened. Straight ahead of me lay a lake without a name, like most lakes in Greenland. To the west, I could see a faint glimmer of Kangerlussuaq. What I couldn’t see, however, was made up for with sound. I heard the steady rumble of an old propeller plane getting ready to take off from Kangerlussuaq airport—I discovered later it was a training mission for new pilots in the Danish Air Force.

The drone of ancient aircraft in my ears, I started around the lake, searching for any hint of the wreckage. Back in 1968, during a whiteout, three U.S. training jets crashed just miles away from Kangerlussuaq. Mercifully, no men were killed, although one did sustain a broken arm during the crash. I wandered around for some 30 minutes, but could find no plane remnants, aside from a roughly 3×6 piece of scrap metal that could just as easily have been carried over from the junk field by the wind.

Frustrated, but also exhausted from the several inclined miles I’d hiked already, I started back down the mountain.

Greenland is full of potential. As I scrambled over rocks and clinging moss, I thought about the myriad of conversations I’d had in my short time in Kangerlussuaq. In many ways, they mirrored conversations I’d had with friends, neighbors, and people I’ve met all over America, which boiled down to: “If only someone would give us a chance.”

Denmark gives 3.9 million DKK (approximately $615 million) to Greenland every year. This grant alone is 20 percent of GDP and over 50 percent of public spending in Greenland. But private Danish investment in Greenland is minimal. This was a recurring theme in every conversation I had: “The Danish hate us,” “The Danish think we’re dumb and backward,” “The Danish treat us like children,” and so on. It’s not as if Greenland is a worthless wasteland. It’s home to some of the largest deposits of rare earth minerals. Greenland is also geo-strategically located within five hours of most of the North Atlantic and hosts some of the best deep-sea ports in the world.

As I returned to Kangerlussuaq, haggard and covered in mosquito bites (as in Alaska, the mosquitos in Greenland are almost the size of Volkswagen Beetles), I stopped back at the airport/restaurant/cafeteria and enjoyed what seemed like the best bowl of spaghetti I’d ever had.

After my carb load, I wandered back over to the counter, where my Greenlandic MAGA compatriot from breakfast now stood.

“Do you have any extra MAGA hats?” he asked, pointing to one of my fellow travelers sporting the red cap known around the world.

Unfortunately, we did not, but as some of the Greenlander’s young friends arrived for lunch, they waxed enthusiastic about their love of the New York real estate giant, reality TV star, and two-time president.

“What do you guys think about becoming a part of America?” one of my colleagues queried.

They replied, “We love America, please, we want to be in America!”

To be honest, though I had heard reports of this attitude from the youths of Greenland, I was gobsmacked by their sincerity and genuine enthusiasm. In the recent Greenlandic election, five of the six political parties (left, right, center, unionist, and anti-unionist) formed a coalition government to box out the second-highest vote-getter—Naleraq, which is the only political party that supports closer alignment with North America than with Europe. A sign of what’s to come, perhaps.

I’ve studied, lectured, and dreamed of Greenland for almost a decade. What I saw in this little town, on the edge of civilization, that I reflected upon during the flight home was the total rugged American-ness of it all. The harsh terrain, brutal conditions, the struggle to make something of your place—but also the desire for something more and greater.

Maybe Greenland can be America after all.

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Men Listen To Podcasters Like Andrew Schulz Because Women Have Invaded Their Real-Life Spaces

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By Richard Cromwell

Written by Richard Cromwell

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Editors’ Note: A growing debate appears to be emerging over why Democrats have lost a significant portion of the male vote. The Democrats themselves are throwing big money at the problem. Still, if we had to listen to a long-form podcast with a pusillanimous liberal, we would not suddenly become interested simply because the format mimics Joe Rogan. The author gets closer to the problem when he suggests that popular podcasts offer men a space of their own. Since the 1970s, feminists have made significant inroads into the culture and the educational system, and it has often been overtly hostile to men. Remember “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle?” Having once achieved “equality”, men often lost jobs to female applicants because companies wanted to show they were on board with feminist trends. Merit has little to do with it.  Masculine behavior is considered “toxic”.  Female teachers would rather drug rambunctious boys than deal with them. Women, to their credit, are on a mission (You Go Girl!), while men have no similar vision for themselves. Instead, they are constantly told they are at fault for every ill in the world. As we have mentioned previously, political views often come in a package. Suppose you think men are the source of all evil. In that case, you likely are a Democrat who believes in transgenderism, open borders, socialism, believes police should be defunded and replaced with therapists,  and hates the military. Men are aware of the “package” that comes with being a Democrat and increasingly want nothing to do with it. Many are tired of being told their failure to embrace the likes of Hilary Clinton is just a sign of their hidden misogyny. They are tired of being blamed for everything. They accept that women should not have been discriminated against in the past, but, like in the question of race, the worst solution to past discrimination is present and future discrimination. In short, men are rebelling against the current culture and its politics. Younger men are seeking out mentors like Jordan Peterson, who suggests that the best masculine traits are worth striving for.

The secret formula the podcasters have figured out is that audiences want to be talked to, not talked at

In the 2024 election, candidate appearances on podcasts were huge, yuge even. Donald Trump showed up on an array of them, from Theo Von to Joe Rogan to Barstool Sports’ Bussin’ With The Boys. Kamala Harris did fewer, with Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy being the most notable. After Trump’s resounding win, some Democrats blamed Rogan for the victory, though even John Oliver cautioned against that notion. (Also, Rogan gave Harris an “open invitation” to come on his podcast, but she declined his terms.)

More recently, Democrats announced they’re prepared to spend $20 million to figure out why they lost men in the election, with podcasts being listed as part of the solution to bringing them back. The thing is, though, while almost anyone with a pulse could explain why Democrats are losing men, they’re still missing the forest for the trees when it comes to why podcasts have taken an outsize role in American life, particularly for men. Fortunately, as they’re unlikely to listen to him since he voted for Trump, comedian Andrew Schulz recently offered a case study in why the medium is taking off in an interview, which you can watch here, with The New York Times’ David Marchese.

The entire thing is worth your time, but Schulz gets to the gist of the matter fairly early in the interview when Marchese presses him on whether he felt he did the “necessary work of asking [Trump] difficult questions.” To this, Schulz replied:

I don’t know what you think the goal of journalism is specifically. Is it to ask the things you’re curious about? Do you have a responsibility for your audience within The New York Times? Do you have a responsibility for the New York Times audience? Are you responsible for people in Dubai? China? Japan? They might have certain curiosities that you didn’t address. You’re going to let somebody down. What I’d like to see more is people asking the questions that they are curious about themselves, instead of trying to pander to what their audience is curious about. With the Trump interview, I had three things I wanted to ask him about, and I asked him those things.

An individual, in this case Schulz, was personally curious about some things, which he asked Trump about. His audience may have wanted different questions, but given the popularity of his show, he’s apparently doing something right. And that something is what the corporate media gave up on long, long ago: offering authenticity rather than trying to signal their own views, their own “correct” thinking, via their lines of questioning.

What a novel concept! Why didn’t anyone ever think of this before? It’s not like it’s a new concept. Bill and Ted tried to warn us, way back in 1989, that “the only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.” That wisdom, formally known as the Socratic method for some reason, is a great foundation upon which to conduct an interview. Schulz simply follows that dictum rather than assuming he knows something and then trying to lead the audience into agreeing with him.

Granted, the longer form of podcasts allows for this much more effectively than corporate media’s typically short interviews. It gives the guests time to relax and settle into a conversation rather than focusing on spitting out a few soundbites before heading to the next microphone. It increases intimacy and decreases how guarded a person is. It gets them talking, which goes back to the authenticity angle.

But there’s more to it than that. I am admittedly biased in this area as I produce the long-form podcast Cookin’ Up A Story. While we split our shows into two episodes, we typically record for three to four hours every Tuesday night. The first hour is often just about getting the guest settled in and comfortable, though there are naturals who hit the ground running. The thing is, though, that the audience listens to all of each episode, even the slow parts. Sometimes, ones we think went terribly end up getting hugely, yugely even, positive responses.

What draws our listeners in, like those who listen to Schulz or Rogan or any of the heavyweights, is that they feel like they’re in the room with us. It’s like listening to a conversation they might have with their bros while sitting around a campfire. Too many of our listeners don’t have any bros to sit around a campfire with. And while that can be great for podcast numbers, it’s not so great for the country.

Without delving into the pros and cons of more sex parity in the workplace and the reduction in sex-segregated schooling, men don’t have spaces in which they can just be men. They don’t have avenues in which they can express vulnerability. (Sure, they may have wives, but most prefer their husbands to be more stoic.) They don’t have places to just be with the bros and blow off steam.

So they created podcasts in which they can do that, and then other men started listening. Would it be better for them to find others to have those conversations with rather than seeking virtual brotherhood through the internet? Of course, which is also what the podcast bros, as they’re often known, are truly pushing. It’s not about politics or policy or even mixed martial arts. It’s about men being men.

It’s also why the podcasters have more influence than the media. Schulz himself said that, like politics, podcasts are downstream from culture. They’re not pushing an agenda; they’re expressing genuine curiosity in their fellow men and women. They’re having conversations, which is something we used to do in real life in the days before the 24-hour news cycle. They’re aware that everyone has a story to tell and are letting them tell that story.

In short, the secret formula the podcasters have figured out — the one that seemed to largely baffle David Marchese — is that audiences want to be talked to, not talked at, just like they do in person. They also want to be heard. And until the corporate media learn that lesson, they’re going to continue failing, lecturing us along the way to their final whimper.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

Image credit: Shutterstock

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Zohran Mamdani—Bastard Son Of 33 Liberty Street thumbnail

Zohran Mamdani—Bastard Son Of 33 Liberty Street

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By David Stockman

Written by David Stockman

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Editors’ Note: You could say that the vast inequality that is growing in America is at the bottom of both the right-wing populist movement and the left-wing socialist/communist movement. The same underlying condition is bifurcating our politics. The author makes a sound observation that the Federal Reserve primarily causes this, and we would add that it must finance chronic deficits primarily through currency debasement or inflation. The deficits and the overspending are a product of our politics. These policies are, in turn, mostly a product of quasi socialist programs invented by Democrats. In short, chronic deficits are caused by socialist policies, and the Federal Reserve serves as a central planning agency used to finance these policies. Neither is a feature of a capitalist economy, but capitalism always seems to be the fall guy blamed for the failures of socialist experiments.

Sure, Zohran Mamdani, surprise winner of the Dem primary for New York City mayor, is an ultra-left-wing wackadoo. But it occurs to us that this veritable assault on sanity— via the election of a 33 year-old nincompoop who wants rent controls, free day care, communist grocery stores, and confiscatory taxes on the wealthy who already pay most of NYC’s income taxes—deserves a more profound rebuke than the one the Donald fired off this AM.

To be sure, Trump is busy with other matters: trade, war and peace, and with his beloved bill. So he apparently only had time to come up with a sophomoric dis that would likely not pass muster even among the 10th-grade mean girls crowd.

Still, as flaky as the New York City electorate has proven itself to be over the years, there is surely something more going on here than a large plurality of NYC Dem voters showing their true colors by voting for a “Communist Lunatic.”

So let us suggest that the madness at the NYC polls yesterday might have been brewed down at the bottom of Manhattan at 33 Liberty Street. That is to say, the mad money printers at the Federal Open Market Committee have pleasured the top 1% with such an outrageous windfall of ill-gotten wealth that it may well be brewing a populist uprising that could threaten the very foundations of capitalist prosperity.

The fact is, the pattern depicted in the graph below does not represent the free market at work in any way, shape, or form. A rising tide of wealth gains over the past 35 years did not even remotely lift all boats, as would happen under a regime of sound money.

Aggregate Wealth Gains, 1990 to 2025:

  • Bottom 50% (blue line): 5.4X.
  • Top 1% (Green line): 10.1X.
  • Top 0.1% (red line): 12.5X

Stated in whole dollars, the 67.5 million households in the bottom 50% gained $4.3 trillion of net worth—even as the 1.35 million households in the top 1% gained $45.5 trillion, of which $21 trillion went to the 135,000 households at the tippy-top in the highest 0.1%.

Aggregate Net Worth Indexed To Q1 1990

Moreover, when you break the data down to a per-household level, the rising tide proves to be dramatically uneven indeed. In 2025 constant dollars, the real net worth of the average top 0.1% household grew nearly three times faster than the net worth of the average household in the bottom 50% over the same 35-year period.

Real Net Worth (2025 $) Per Household: 1990 versus 2025 and Compound Annual Growth Rate:

  • Bottom 50%: $38,500 vs. $59,700=1.26% per annum.
  • Top 1%: $12.6 million vs. $36.6 million=3.09% per annum.
  • Top 0.1%: $47.8 million vs. $164.8 million=3.61% per annum.

Stated in absolute dollars, the real wealth of the average household among the bottom 50% increased by $21,000 over the past one-third of a century. By contrast, the real net worth of the average household among the top 0.1% rose by $117 million. That’s about 5,600X more.

To be sure, capitalism is meant to generate large—even huge—net worth differences between the top wealth producers and those at the average or the bottom tiers of the economic scale. But there is absolutely no reason for this inherent gap, as evident in the 1990 figures, to expand so dramatically during just the last 35 years.

Needless to say, what has also expanded insensibly and aberrantly during the last 35 years is the Fed’s balance sheet relative to the underlying output and income of the US economy. To wit, since 1990, the GDP has grown by 5X, from $6.0 trillion to $29.7 trillion.

At the same time, however, the Fed’s balance sheet has exploded by 24X, rising from $300 billion in 1990 to a recent peak of $9.0 trillion and still $7.1 trillion after three years of QT.

There is no mystery as to where all the excess central bank credit ended up during that three-decade interval. It was ultimately absorbed by the financial markets in the form of relentlessly inflating financial asset prices.

And the mechanism by which this occurred is not hard to identify, either. To wit, the Fed’s “put” under the stock market and its repeated financial bailouts dramatically reduced the risk of gambling in financial assets, even as it has drastically lowered the carry cost of ultra-leveraged speculation.

For want of doubt, the most concentrated form of leveraged speculation in the financial markets is represented by the notional value of outstanding futures, options, and other financial derivatives. According to GROK 3, the aggregated value of financial derivatives stood at about $15 trillion in 1990, but has since soared to $750 trillion.

The most favored instruments of financial speculations and leveraged gaming have expanded by the stunning sum of $735 trillion or 50X during the last 35 years. So, if you want to know where all the excess of the blue bars (central bank credit) in the graph relative to the national income represented by the red bars ended up, the derivatives market is the place to look.

Index of Fed Balance Sheet Versus GDP From 1990 to 2025

Needless to say, there is also no mystery as to why financial asset inflation ends up in the bank accounts at the tippy top of the economic ladder. It happens that 53% of financial assets are held by the top 1% and upwards of 90% by the top 10%.

By contrast, the distribution of residential real estate at market value is not nearly as skewed. Accordingly, only 13% of housing assets are held by the top 1% and just 45% are held by the top 10% of households.

Distribution of Financial Assets Versus Residential Real Estate by Top Wealth Percentiles

As it happens, Wall Street is far more amenable to central bank-enabled leverage and gambling than are the Main Street markets in residential real estate. During the same 35-year period since 1990, the market value of owner-occupied real estate (blue line) has risen from $7.1 trillion to $48.1 trillion or by 7X.

By contrast, household equity holdings have soared by nearly 24X since 1990, rising from $2.0 trillion to $46.6 trillion. That is to say, the top households own a two times larger share of the equities than of residential real estate, even as the market value of the former has soared 3.5X faster than the latter.

At the end of the day, that is not surprising either. More than two centuries ago, Richard Cantillon postulated that the first sectors to get the inflationary money gain the most as it eventually diffuses its way through the entire economy. Self-evidently, the sites of first landing when the Fed runs its printing presses red hot are the Wall Street bond dealers and the financial traders and gamblers who form their ecosystems.

Stated differently, one of the very worst inventions of modern times was the Fed’s Open Market Committee, which operates cheek-by-jowl with the traders and gamblers down in the canyons of Wall Street. Like most other government institutions, the FOMC has been captured by the gamblers lock, stock, and barrel, thereby accounting for the anomalous distribution of post-1990 wealth gains demonstrated above.

As we have frequently averred, therefore, free (bad) central bank money is the mother of inflationary windfalls on Wall Street and the atrophying prosperity on Main Street. 

Perhaps the potential election of a quasi-communist mayor at the very epicenter of today’s monetary debauchery is a warning that root-and-branch reform of the Keynesian central banking model initiated by Alan Greenspan in 1987 cannot wait much longer—lest Mamdani clones begin to crop up all across the land.

Index of Household Real Estate Versus Equity Holdings Since 1990

*****
This article was published by the Brownstone Institute and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Grok AI

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