Beginning to plan and build such cities as part of America's upcoming 250th anniversary is a fitting way to extend John Winthrop's vision for America as a "City on a Hill." A MadeCity is a living monument to faith, freedom, and entrepreneurship — the very ideals that turned a collection of colonies into the greatest nation on earth.

Washington, D.C., our nation's capital, is the ideal place to begin. Transforming the District into a true MadeCity would restore Americans' faith in their country and give the world a renewed beacon of hope. It would remind citizens of the Founders' deep faith and worship that sustained them through the Revolution and the creation of a new republic. The arts would play a central role, turning our capital into a place of inspiration and reverence rather than just a sterile bureaucracy. Venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and families would drive the transformation, proving that America is not destined to be a nation of elites and dependents, but of creators and builders with shared vision and purpose.

As Proverbs reminds us, "Where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint." Today, too many Americans feel hopeless, taught to rely on government instead of cultivating motivated citizenship. Proper education can change that. We must teach young people the truth: America is the greatest nation on earth — a superpower of liberty, economic freedom, and human flourishing. Our most valuable currency is not dollars but our youth, talent, and leadership.

The Founders — Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington — were men of faith who thought and built on a grand scale. They were entrepreneurs and visionaries as much as statesmen. Franklin revolutionized printing and invention. Washington built a thriving business at Mount Vernon. They and countless others created vibrant cities — New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore — and inspired the rise of Chicago, Los Angeles, and beyond. Their greatest fear was that future generations would fail to keep the republic they sacrificed to establish. Franklin's warning rings loud today: "A republic, if you can keep it."

Yet too often our current leaders and builders operate with short-term, accountant-style thinking — applying band-aids when visionary, long-term transformation is required. Mayors and politicians focus on the next election cycle instead of monuments that will stand for centuries. We went to the Moon with courage and faith. Reaching Mars — and rebuilding our cities — demands the same spirit.

Government has an important constitutional role, but it cannot replace the human drive to create. Our $39 trillion national debt is sustainable only because the world retains confidence in America's future growth and productivity. That confidence must be earned, not assumed. True wealth is not created by trading stocks or relying on today's tech giants alone. It is built by bold minds who invent, manufacture, and construct — the same spirit that produced the iPhone, the assembly line, and the great American cities of the past.

Post-World War II Europe offers a powerful lesson. Nations rebuilt with purpose, drawing on faith and resolve to rise from ruins. America, never defeated, has even greater potential. Washington, D.C., is perfectly positioned to lead a new revolution in urban building — one grounded in faith-based entrepreneurship that honors the "Great Experiment" our Founders began.

We are a nation born in courage, not caution. Our builders must stop fearing failure and start believing again in the possibility of creating the next great American cities. Families need inspiration. Communities need purpose. The next generation needs to see living proof that the American Dream is alive and being built — not managed or regulated into mediocrity.

MadeCities are the answer. They are places where we create the conscious arrangements that make living irresistible and remarkably fruitful, where a quantum currency is realized through specified complexity and manifold beauty. Just as living organisms thrive as the result of the intelligent design and coordination of their many diverse parts, MadeCities promote human flourishing as a consequence of the integrated design of their different essential elements and institutions—whether residential, recreational, commercial, cultural, legal or religious. Indeed, a living and thriving city depends on the intelligent design and planning of its founders inspired by the Way, Truth, and Life of God the Creator.

Here is a bold framework: "How might we create cities that grow in the favor of both God and Man?" A living city where we as citizens are living stones, feeding on living waters, responding to a living God. This is what made America unstoppable and MadeCity's core Movement.

Ryan Higgins, a descendant of one of the founding families in the U.S. said the following about our nation's amazing history: "In 1623, my 13th great grandfather fled a tyrannical government and risked life and limb to come to the New World because he knew the recipe to human flourishing could not be found in a King. As a man of deep faith, Richard Higgins knew the only Hope worth fighting for was a civilization rooted in God, with a heavy emphasis on family and community. Made City is taking that same mindset into 2026 and beyond" and "our current concrete jungles across the US have lost hope, creativity and community. The result is clear to see; isolation, record levels of depression, anxiety and mental health issues." Higgins is correct to point out that what we have been doing for decades is not working.

Washington DC is the place to start. I hope to play a role in continuing America's tradition of faith-driven entrepreneurship and in helping build the next City on a Hill. America cannot remain the land of the free unless it is also the home of the brave, the innovative and the bold.

Charles Ma is the Founder and CEO of The MADE Group Ltd.

During the Biden years, government officials routinely pressured social media companies to silence Americans for questioning the official response to COVID-19. For example, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said that, unless social media companies "voluntarily" removed posts containing "misinformation," the Administration would apply "appropriate legal and regulatory measures." Other members of the Administration sent messages to social media executives, addressing them as if they were poorly performing White House interns. At least one Biden staffer—Deputy Assistant to the President Rob Flaherty—even dropped an F-bomb in an email to Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, inquiring why a post he "requested" be taken down was still up.

In March of this year, the Justice Department signed a consent decree with Louisiana and Mississippi settling a lawsuit brought by the states on behalf of their citizens whose First Amendment rights were violated by the Biden Administration's censorship. The settlement forbids the Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency from threatening social media companies for refusing to remove or limit the viewership of "content containing protected free speech." Unfortunately, some members of the Trump Administration seem to have not read this Executive Order.

For example, Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson—while a vast improvement over his predecessor Lina Khan—thinks the FTC should use its power to punish woke corporations for engaging in First Amendment-protected activity. The FTC recently settled a case, along with eight states, brought against major advertising companies. The suit alleged that the companies worked with progressive media watchdog groups, such as NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, in order to limit the placement of ads on conservative sites. The ad agencies' defense was to claim that they were protecting brand safety.

Brand safety refers to advertising placement agencies avoiding sites with controversial political opinions or objectionable content. One problem with the FTC's case is that being concerned with brand safety makes valid business sense. A business whose customers largely come from a demographic that tends to support progressive politics will not want to advertise on pro-MAGA websites for fear of alienating its existing customers. Similarly, a brand whose customers are mostly conservative will not want to advertise on AOC 2028. The main problem with the FTC case is that organizing boycotts of a business because of the business's political activities is a First Amendment-protected activity.

Boycotts have a long and distinguished history. They were instrumental in the civil rights, labor, and other progressive movements. Boycotts have been used by conservatives—most notably by social conservatives—to pressure advertisers to stop running ads on programs that offended them. Organizers of these boycotts worked with conservative media watchdogs like the Media Research Center. Now, thanks to the precedent set by Andrew Ferguson, the next Democrat FTC Chair could target the Media Research Center and their allies for conspiring to restrain trade by organizing boycotts.

Chair Ferguson also wrote to (then) Apple CEO Tim Cook warning him that Apple could face a federal investigation for "unfair or deceptive or practices." The deception in question is the claim that Apple's news aggregation site is ideologically neutral, when in fact it promotes stories from left-wing sources while ignoring stories from conservative sources. Even if this were true, Apple has a First Amendment right to choose what news sources to feature in its news aggregator. If consumers are dissatisfied with Apple's selection, they are free to use one of the many conservative news outlets on the internet.

Chair Ferguson and government officials like Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendon Carr are not just violating the First Amendment—they are violating President Trump's executive order on free speech. Unfortunately, the President's commitment to free speech is also less than consistent. President Trump and his appointees must stop violating the First Amendment—otherwise America will become a country in which free speech only exists for those who won the last election.

Since life was so much more uncertain over 100 years ago for the average American, it's no surprise that life was equally, if not more uncertain for those who employed the average American. Is it any wonder that fathers were so stern when Reagan was a child?

A century ago a lost job was just that. Not only was there shame and embarrassment, there was also abject fear for the laid off. How to provide when the day you're let go is also the day that the pay stops?

Consider the past while contemplating the news about layoffs at Meta. Anyone who has ever experienced being let go knows how awful the feeling is. It doesn't matter the circumstances, including pivots inside corporations that require a different mix of employees: anyone laid off feels it's a reflection on them to varying degrees. And it stings for a very long time.

Except that it's so much better now, so much less fraught. Meta shows us why. According to the New York Times, "Employees in the United States will receive 16 weeks of severance pay, along with two weeks for every year they worked at Meta." Stop and think about that.

While Reagan's father's job loss correlated with substantial poverty, those let go at Meta will have months at a minimum, and some seemingly over a year at handsome pay as they search for what's next. And there will be next.

Painful as layoffs are, the frequency of them (a George Will column from 2025 indicated that 3 million Americans lose their jobs every year) in the United States is paradoxically the sign that options for those out of work will quickly reveal themselves. That's because rapid job destruction is the surest sign of rapid job creation.

Precisely because U.S. corporations are so persistently looking ahead with reinvention and efficiency top of mind, they're a magnet for investment. Translated, forward-looking investors who create all the jobs tend to direct that investment to U.S. corporations similarly looking ahead.

Which means the talent that won Meta's laid off employees a job there in the first place is what ensures they'll be well employed again soon. And while the sting will as mentioned persist, more than a few ex-Meta employees will look back on what stung as the beginning of something much better as their release positioned them to find work that is much more reflective of their unique skills and intelligence. In other words, layoffs almost certainly benefit the laid off more than they do the corporations.

For now, however, it's worth celebrating how Meta handled the news that no one enjoys getting, and that no one enjoys giving. About the giving part, ask any CEO, president or supervisor what they hate most about being CEO, president and supervisor: they'll almost all say they hate laying people off. This was awful for the Meta executive suite, and all others enlisted to give bad news.

What's worth celebrating is that American corporations are increasingly so rich that they would never announce layoffs anywhere near Christmas, let alone let people go on Christmas Eve. Exactly because they're so prosperous they can move people out with dignity, and with a financial cushion that allows fathers, mothers, and employees in general to go home from the bad news knowing that whatever awaits them, none of it will have anything to do with poverty.

The hysterical and abnormal behavior of the Islamic Republic in Iran indicates that this mafia-like and coup-driven regime has entered a phase of pure "survival mode." Tehran no longer behaves like a stable and self-confident regional power. Instead, it increasingly resembles a worn-out, isolated, illegitimate, and heavily pressured structure whose primary objective is merely preserving the regime and preventing collapse. The Islamic Republic remains a symbol of repression and destabilization in the region, and today it faces one of the deepest crises of legitimacy and structural decay in its history. Ultimately, the Iranian people themselves will deliver the final blow to this criminal and repressive system.

One of the clearest signs of this condition is the regime's attempt to redefine its aggressive and destructive actions through legal and economic language. Maritime extortion in the Strait of Hormuz is rebranded as "maritime insurance" or a "security fee" in an effort to normalize Tehran's control over one of the world's most critical energy corridors. This follows the classic pattern of mafia-style systems: create insecurity, then sell security. Without formally declaring war or announcing a blockade, the Islamic Republic uses intimidation, threats, and psychological pressure against shipping and Gulf trade in order to increase the cost of confronting Tehran for governments and corporations, while avoiding direct responsibility for a major military conflict.

At the same time, the regime is under pressure from the United States at sea and therefore has expanded overland routes through China, Pakistan, and Iraq in order to bypass sanctions and maritime pressure. This demonstrates that Tehran is shifting part of its "survival economy" away from the Persian Gulf toward Asian logistical networks. An economy dependent on sanctions evasion, opaque financial structures, smuggling networks, and regional black-market operations is not a sign of strength; it is a sign of weakness and isolation. The regime's growing dependence on China, Russia, and the anti-Western axis is also not evidence of strategic success but rather proof of political and economic failure. A regime that once promoted the slogan "Neither East nor West" now relies heavily on Beijing and Moscow simply to sustain itself. Tactical support from China and Russia may prolong the regime's survival, but it cannot reverse the deeper structural erosion consuming the Islamic Republic.

The continued support for terrorist proxy organizations across the so-called Shiite Crescent — including Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis — is not merely ideological. It is a mechanism for preserving strategic depth and exporting crises beyond Iran's borders. Tehran understands that if it loses influence in the region, pressure will rapidly shift inward toward the regime itself. This is why the Islamic Republic simultaneously advances two contradictory narratives: on one hand, it claims to be the "guardian of Persian Gulf security," while on the other hand it actively undermines regional stability through proxy warfare, tanker threats, destabilization campaigns, and intimidation. This contradiction is central to the regime's strategy of fear and coercive control.

Domestically, the regime also attempts to repackage economic collapse and structural corruption under the rhetoric of "resistance" and "steadfastness" in order to suppress public anger and redirect blame toward the West. Economically, politically, and socially, the Islamic Republic faces severe pressure and declining legitimacy. However, this does not necessarily mean the regime will collapse tomorrow. Even weakened systems can survive for extended periods, particularly when external crises or regional conflicts provide them with security justification and emergency conditions. Yet history shows that the most dangerous phase for such governments often comes precisely when they feel weak, surrounded, and threatened. Under those conditions, they frequently become more aggressive, unpredictable, and repressive. There is no meaningful sign of flexibility, reform, or moderation within this rogue regime.

As a result, internal repression and information control have intensified dramatically. The government understands that its social legitimacy has eroded severely, and therefore censorship, internet restrictions, organized intimidation, and hidden executions continue. The gap between the Iranian people and the ruling establishment grows deeper every day. Many inside Iran increasingly view Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi as a more organized and coherent alternative to the current system. At the same time, the ruling establishment still believes that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the security apparatus, ideological propaganda, and the machinery of repression remain its essential tools of survival and control. In reality, nearly all the regime's energy is now devoted to "crisis management" and buying time.

Overall, the current image of the Islamic Republic is the image of a "surrounded but dangerous regime" — a system that no longer possesses the capacity for natural expansion of power and instead relies on geopolitical extortion, proxy networks, domestic repression, and dependence on Eastern powers simply to preserve itself. The Islamic Republic has entered a stage of "structural erosion," and its behavior increasingly resembles that of a weak, exhausted, survival-driven government rather than a confident regional power. The regime came to power through terrorism, sustained itself through terrorism, and ultimately it will be pushed toward the graveyard of history through a multilayered confrontation shaped by both domestic resistance and regional pressures.

Erfan Fard is a Middle East Analyst focused on Iran, terrorism, and regional security affairs. My work has appeared in Fox News, The Hill, The Dallas Morning News, The Jerusalem Post, and Israel Hayom.

On Maritime Day 2026 this is welcome news.

The SHIPS for America Act, the Administration's maritime executive order, the Maritime Action Plan, China-focused trade actions, and new funding proposals all point in the same direction. America has rediscovered that ships, shipyards, ports, and mariners are not niche transportation issues. They are the foundation of deterrence, supply-chain resilience, and wartime sealift.

As growing instability spreads around the globe, the United States is realizing something previous generations understood well: maritime power matters.

But there is still a critical gap in the national conversation: ships do not sail themselves.

For all the attention now being paid to shipyards and steel, far too little attention is being paid to the men and women who actually command the vessels America would rely upon in war. Without highly trained, militarily obligated American merchant marine officers, the nation's strategic sealift capability simply does not function.

This reality is not widely understood outside maritime circles, but it needs to be.

More than 90 percent of the equipment, fuel, food, ammunition, and supplies needed to sustain the U.S. military overseas moves by sea. Tanks do not fly. Fighter squadrons cannot operate without parts and fuel. Armies cannot fight without constant resupply.

During Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, U.S. sealift moved 2.7 million tons of cargo and equipment aboard 537 ships from 50 ports worldwide. This vast operation effectively transformed America's commercial port network into a wartime deployment system.

The scale of sealift is difficult to overstate. A single Fast Sealift Ship can carry the equivalent cargo of more than 200 C-5 aircraft loads, a reminder that airlift moves urgent cargo, but sealift moves armies.

Merchant mariners have been the mainstay of every major American conflict from World War II to Iraq and Afghanistan. In many ways, sealift succeeds so quietly that Americans rarely think about it until the stakes become impossible to ignore.

Today, those stakes are rising.

The era of uncontested American logistics is over. Our adversaries understand that America's ability to project power depends on its ability to move and sustain forces across oceans. As we are seeing in the current conflict with Iran, commercial shipping routes are increasingly vulnerable to disruption. Ports and logistics networks face cyber threats. In any prolonged conflict, the ability to sustain sealift operations becomes a decisive strategic advantage.

And yet America faces a serious shortage of qualified merchant mariners needed to sustain military sealift operations. Multiple analyses have warned that the United States lacks the manpower required to fully crew its surge sealift fleet during a major conflict.

That should concern every American, regardless of politics.

The United States Merchant Marine Academy (USMMA) plays a uniquely important role in addressing this challenge. USMMA graduates - all of whom are service-obligated licensed merchant marine officers - make up the overwhelming majority of the Navy Reserve's Strategic Sealift Officer (SSO) Force.

The USMMA's mission critical Sea Year training program, which places cadets aboard working commercial vessels operating around the world, provides hands-on operational experience that cannot be replicated in a classroom. These commercial vessels serve as the backbone of the nation's sealift in a war.

Maritime Day is not simply an opportunity to celebrate America's maritime heritage. It recognizes a strategic reality: military strength depends not only on ships, aircraft, and weapons systems, but also on the ability to move and sustain forces across the globe.

In a future great-power conflict, logistics may determine deterrence itself. An adversary that believes America cannot deploy and sustain forces at scale does not necessarily have to defeat the U.S. military; it only has to delay it.

America is finally beginning to rebuild its focus on maritime power. This is a necessary and welcome development, and we owe a round of applause to policymakers in Washington who are leading this charge.

But maritime strength is not just measured in ships. It is also measured in the service-obligated American merchant marine officers willing to sail into harm's way when their country calls.

Steel matters. Shipyards matter. Ports matter.

But ships don't sail themselves.

Captain James F. Tobin is President and CEO of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy Alumni Association and Foundation.

Judson is a senior in high school. He also has profound autism. He's 18 years old, and while he blessedly has some capacity for speech, I've never had what you would call a conversation with him. And I assume (though I can't really know) that he has no clue that today isn't just any old school day like he's had since fourth grade. Today, Judson Hancock Trende will have his last day of class. He'll get off that bus, and he'll never get back on. When his schedule-obsessed brain prompts him to seek reassurance by asking "school tomorrow?" on Sunday, the same way he has every Sunday for well over a decade, we will have to figure out a way to let him know that, no, there's no school tomorrow, and not the next day or the next one. Not ever.

Judson came into the world on Aug. 5, 2007, a little spark of joy unnoticed by most of the world, but who quickly became our entire world. He was our first child, and as I liked to brag, my first son. All parents irrationally believe that their babies are as special to the rest of the world as they are to them, but it seemed that way to us. The first year was the usual parental sequence of late-night feedings, stressing out because we had forgotten to wash the bottles on sanitary (ha!), play dates, and the general exhausting joy of the first year of the first child.

I don't remember exactly when I started to notice things weren't right. He was a rough eater and had to be bottle-fed earlier than expected, but hey, he's just a rough-and-tumble growing baby boy! When he would squirm off my lap as I tried to read to him at night, crawling over to open and close the closet door repeatedly, I thought he was just a little engineer at heart, trying to figure out how things worked. Sure, his speech was delayed, but family lore had long said my parents were worried about my own delayed speech until one day I spurted out, "Mommy, turn the light out."

All doubt was removed on Dec. 2, 2009. As I like to tell people, we went into a doctor's office wondering whether our son might one day be president. We walked out wondering if he would ever potty train. We also learned that his therapies would cost around $3,500 per month. My initial response was "there's no way that we can do this." My wife - an absolute visionary who is behind almost every good thing that has ever happened to Judson - made it clear that we would figure it out. RealClearPolitics helped cover the cost, for which I'm eternally grateful. My wife gave up her lifelong dream of being a stay-at-home mom to go back to work at a law firm. We realized our agreed-upon goal of five children was likely not going to be realistic, given the attention and resources Judson would probably need.

Judd started his ABA therapies in a small private school that met in a church basement. We owe so much to the couple who started this school, and to his aides who helped us learn that "different, not less" wasn't just a slogan. When people talk about "everyday heroes" who don't realize the impact that they had on people's lives, we get it. We've been blessed with a multitude of them. Miss Jen, Miss Pam, and Miss "Kwisten" helped Judson learn to eat with utensils, drink from a cup, and, in an absolute life-changing move, to potty train. At first, he developed quickly, hitting all of his IEP goals and developing basic speech. By the time he was four, he functioned at a three-year-old level. Everyone expected his life trajectory to follow a "mildly" autistic path. Incidentally, there was a family at the adjacent church preschool for typical kids who invited Judd to their son's birthday party. Thank you. I'm sorry I don't remember your names, but it is the only birthday party for a neurotypical peer, other than close friends or family, to which Judd has ever been invited since his diagnosis. I don't think he gives it a second thought (but who knows!?), but your action meant the world to us at the time.

We discovered that Ohio offers a substantial school voucher to children with autism, and that as a result, there are around half a dozen schools nearby that charge a little bit above the voucher amount, while public schools compete for those voucher dollars. We moved immediately, with my wife moving into a bigger, more demanding law firm with higher pay. Judson started at a private school for autism, where teachers and aides like Miss Britt, Miss Artim, Miss Busch, Miss Kelsey, and Miss Gates (most were married, but "missus" is a bridge too far for Judson) all marveled at his joyful attitude. We also discovered a thriving community of "autism parents," drawn to Central Ohio by the voucher and Nationwide Children's Hospital, who provided a much-needed support system. Judd got to do things (through my wife's prodding, often over my objections) that we wouldn't have dreamed possible: He played Miracle League baseball, went to special sensory showings they have at movie theaters, and found favorite restaurants to eat at. Mr. Rob taught him to swim at a program developed by Ohio State University for kids with special needs. He still loves to swim.

I don't know why he stopped developing, and I've found it's best not to think about it. We now have the world's biggest three-year-old, we like to say. Whenever I get angry at God about that, I quickly remind myself that this is also how we learned our most important life lesson: As George Will once put it with respect to his own son (who has Down's Syndrome), a less-than-perfect life is still very much worth living. We always say that we just want our kids to be happy, and Judson is the test case for that. He won't go to college, he won't work a job, and he'll almost certainly die without having ever kissed a girl. But as he walks down the hall, you realize that he doesn't have a care in the world. He's almost always happy. When a teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grows up, he responded, "a good boy." If there are disappointments about the path his life has taken, they're our own, not Judson's.

In second grade, we decided to try public schools. Judson has always been a "tweener" - not so high-functioning that he really needed to be in public schools, but not so low-functioning that he didn't gain from having typical peers. We were mildly terrified, but were once again blessed by terrific teachers like Mr. Holly, Miss Silcott, Miss Sowers, Miss Gallmeyer, and Mr. Scheid. The autism scholarship meant that he had one-on-one aides most of the time, through whom (at times helped along by my wife's prodding) he was able to participate in choir, Special Olympics (fourth place statewide for basketball skills!), pep rallies, homecomings, and field days. His special needs class arranged prom and homecoming dinners, and aides served as Judd's "date" to prom this year. They set up (at my wife's suggestion) the "signing day" table specifically for Judd, as he inked in his acceptance letter to a group home. Along the way, he changed lives too; he has inspired multiple teachers and aides to go into careers in special needs teaching and therapy. Whenever I hear the song "This Little Light of Mine," I think of Judson, childlike, in many ways unaware, but sending sparks of light everywhere he's gone.

I would love to name that small army of school aides, some of whom turned into home aides, but it would stretch on for a page. Thank you all. You are honestly heroes, taking on a difficult job for little pay and little obvious reward as you patiently watched him work so, so hard while struggling to make progress, sharing your obvious joy with us at every little step he took along the way. And thank you to the students at these schools, including my two younger sons. What you did was make school Judson's "place." You are his "people." Those schools were the places he organized his life around, where he looked forward to going every day. I've often commented that far too few people will love Judson for how great he is, but you are the exceptions. Every one of you matters.

This brings us (finally) to the bus. As I've mentioned, almost all of the incredible things that Judson has done have come about with my wife's vision and pushing, while I anxiously watched, praying things would work out. But the bus is mine. In Fourth Grade, I suggested that perhaps he could start riding the school bus. On this one, my wife was anxious, but his teacher and I agreed he could make it. And for once, I was right. He loved riding the bus, from day one. When we needed to motivate him to get out of bed in the morning, "you're going to miss the bus" always did the trick. On those days when he missed the bus, he was visibly upset. Who can tell exactly why, but I've half-convinced myself that he loves the feeling of independence and being just like the other kids when he rides.

Today, that's over. I know every high school graduate's parents feel this way. I know that there are parents out there who would give anything for their children to have made it this far. It's a blessing that he ever rode the bus in the first place. It just seems to hit differently here, because this was one place where I know I made a difference in his life and made him a little happier. And, selfishly, school was the last "typical" thing he did. Parenting Judson has been beyond wonderful, but there was always a touch of jealousy or melancholy as I watched classmates, cousins, and neighbors enter activities and institutions that were closed to him. School was the last link to the "typical" world. That ends too. In August, we'll do what so many graduating seniors' parents do: pack up his belongings, and drive him away. His destination won't be college. It'll be a group home. I'll be spared the concerns that most of those parents have; he won't get into drugs, won't flunk out, won't struggle to find a career. I'll have different ones: What if someone is cruel to him, what if he isn't getting his favorite foods, what if he's unhappy? He lacks the means to express any of that. If nothing else, I hope those bus rides are memories he can look back on with joy.

So, what's the point here? I suppose, like a lot of parents of typical kids around this time of year, I realize that something important is coming to an end, and I'm waxing nostalgic. Some of this is just wanting to thank people who probably don't understand the impact that they've made. Some of this is knowing that somewhere, some parent right now is getting the same news that we got on Dec. 2, 2009. Maybe they'll read this, and it will help them realize that it can be alright. It won't be the same: I remember walking with Judd and seeing the neighborhood dads having a beer together after their sons' first little league game, and realizing I was always going to be different (middle school all over again!). But that doesn't mean less. It can be alright. Joyful even.

At the bottom, there's this: All parents have their irrational anxieties about their children. I can remember waking up in the middle of the night, consumed with a need to check on my kids to make sure they're still breathing. I've moved on from that, although I've learned from others' tragedies that this fear isn't always irrational. Still, other weird fears have moved in. At night, when the demons come, my current fear is this: What if when I die, there's no one to remember Judson? What if there's just a handful of people at his graveside, and he becomes a curiosity in the graveyard, an old man mysteriously laid to rest next to his parents. People passing by might invent stories - "I don't know honey, must be an old man whose heart was broken and never married" - with the wonderous reality of his life slipping into myth. Rationally, I know this is where almost all of us end up sooner or later, but for some reason, it just hits harder thinking about him: a gentle, loving soul who never gossiped, never insulted anyone, never lied, and who for some reason never got a chance to even try to write his name in the history books. The internet is a strange sort of place of suspended animation for ideas; maybe someday someone will Google his name out of curiosity and learn something about the little spark that came into this world on Aug. 5, 2007.

I don't want to end on a note like that, so I'll add one more thought. Technology is amazing, and our understanding of the brain grows by leaps and bounds every day. Maybe someday, after I'm gone, they'll come up with a "cure" for autism. I put "cure" in quotes because for many people, autism is a personality trait, something that allows them to see the world in a different light, and for them, trying to "cure" autism makes about as much sense as trying to "cure" someone's artistic talent. I take that seriously, though that isn't Judson's story. I've also thought that "curing" Judson at this point might border on cruelty. Whatever uncertainties lie on his pathway, I don't know that it would be fair, or even humane, to have someone pick up an entirely new life in their 20s or 30s, especially when they seem happy overall.

As an exercise in daydreaming, though, it's pleasant to imagine a happily married Judson with his own children one day browsing the internet and finding this piece. If I didn't get a chance to meet that version of Judson and never had a chance to have a conversation with him, I would just want him to know that I tried. I know I made mistakes and wasn't always the best version of a dad that I wanted to be. The times I lost my temper and yelled, or didn't pay enough attention to you, or couldn't comfort you because I couldn't figure out what you needed, I'm sorry about them. This goes for all your brothers, but I hopefully can muster the courage to tell them that along the way. For you, it's hard to really explain or put into words, so maybe I'll just say this: When you were a kid learning to talk, we'd read to you at night. You always loved to say (from memory) the last sentence of the book, and they're etched into my memory forever. "And it was still hot." "Ask me tomorrow, but not today." "Goodnight noises everywhere." Judson, just know that while it might not always seem like it, you've made this tree so happy. Daddy loves you (and mommy too!), all the way to the moon and back.

God is up to something. Hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered together, not for a protest or a political rally, but to pray. They gathered to give thanks and to rededicate this nation to the God who blessed it when it was founded.

The media may not have seen it coming. The polls did not predict it. But people of faith showed up anyway.

The idea that spirituality is dead in America is a misnomer. I don't believe America is in a spiritual decline, but rather, that we are right on the precipice of awakening. We are seeing Generation Z turning to Jesus in record-breaking numbers. Bible sales continue to increase, and church attendance is rising.

But we shouldn't be entirely surprised.

Young people are exhausted from doomscrolling. Celebrity culture is dying. I've talked to many members at my church who confirm that the vain pursuit of wealth is unfulfilling. When people reach these epiphanies, they begin to search elsewhere, and for something more wholesome and eternal.

This represents a spiritual hunger in this country that no government program can fill. Every day, more people are recognizing the simple truth that they have a soul to tend to, not just a body. While we are seeing hopelessness, despair, moral relativism, and spiritual apathy, underneath it all, a hunger for God is present. Hunger means life. You do not hunger for something that is already gone.

As Americans undergo these personal paradigm shifts and softening hearts, they begin to realize that America was not founded on agnosticism, atheism, or as some sort of secular utopia. It was founded on a Judeo-Christian value system that cannot and will not be denied. In fact, the principal reason our founders fled Europe centuries ago was that they were tired of being told they had to worship a certain way. They wanted to express their faith freely, without the government telling them how to do it.

And by God's grace, that's what they got.

God over man and man over government is not a political platform; it is at the core of our great nation. Through genuine repentance, revival, and reformation, America is now rediscovering its roots.

The number one battle in America today is not between the donkey and the elephant. The battle is between the serpent and the Lamb. Colossians 2:15 reminds us that the Lamb, Jesus Christ, already defeated the serpent. The most powerful spirit on this planet is not division. Not fear. Not darkness. The most powerful spirit in America is still the Holy Spirit.

That is not a talking point or an empty analogy. That is a track record. Every time this nation has faced its darkest hour, faith did not retreat. It advanced.

I have advised three presidents. I have led the Latino evangelical community for more than two decades. To have the reset this nation needs, we have to make the main thing the main thing. It begins with humility. Acknowledging that we have a sovereign God who created us. Then we must pursue righteousness and justice, truth and love. Seeking God's Word changes everything.

This is not a religious sentiment. This is the only reset that has ever worked in American history.

The founders would be optimistic if they could see America today. But they might also sound the alarm. They would be disappointed to see the discord, the chasm, the perpetual victimization that is consuming our culture today. They would loathe the dependency on a government that was never meant to be our savior.

But, still, they would look at what happened on that Mall on Sunday with hope. Because the America they built was always meant to be a nation that knelt before God, not before its own ambitions.

Because there is still spiritual hunger in America. And where there is hunger, revival often follows. Every great awakening this nation has experienced did not begin with legislation, but in the hearts of ordinary people who decided that God was worth returning to. We are there again.

We can't let this past Sunday be a memory. It ought to be a mandate. Because God is not done with America, and America is not done with God.

The Department of Energy could save up to $229.2 billion over the next several years by changing the way it disposes of nuclear waste, according to the Government Accountability Office. A vague and poorly understood law from the 1980s makes the process overly burdensome and expensive.

Key facts: The Department of Energy is in charge of treating water, soil, equipment and more that were contaminated from nuclear weapons production during World War II and the Cold War.

Disposing of "high-level" radioactive waste is time-consuming and expensive. It must be stored for years to let some of its radioactivity decay, and then it is buried deep underground. "Low-level" waste, which has less radiation, is easier to get rid of. It gets placed in a steel or concrete drum and is buried just a few feet below ground.

Waste of the Day 5.22.26

Open the Books

But, according to the GAO, the definitions for each kind of waste are ambiguous and have not been updated since 1983. There is no standard way to measure what federal law considers "highly radioactive."

To be safe, the Department of Energy errs on the side of classifying nuclear waste as high-level. It spends billions every year on the expensive storage and burial of waste that would likely be classified as low-level if the 1983 law were updated. The department told the GAO that otherwise, it might be sued by environmental advocacy groups for not following a strict interpretation of the law.

Nuclear waste treatment plants are located in New York, South Carolina, Idaho and Washington. The Washington site alone could save up to $210 billion in 14 years by classifying 80% of its high-level waste as low-level without sacrificing safety, according to the GAO. The other three sites could save a combined $19.2 billion.

Search all federal, state and local salaries and vendor spending with the world's largest government spending database at OpenTheBooks.com.

Summary: Congress should consider updating the legal definition of high-level radioactive waste if cost savings can be realized without compromising safety.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com

The longer I've contributed, the more I've realized something uncomfortable: my retirement plan isn't built for the world I actually live in.

Like many in my generation, I came of age during a period of profound economic change. Companies stay private longer. Technology, infrastructure, and energy companies increasingly raise capital outside public markets. The most dynamic growth in the economy often happens before a company ever reaches a stock exchange. When I look at my retirement options, I'm locked out of that world.

Instead, we see a familiar menu consisting of a handful of mutual funds and some index options that quietly steer me toward a standardized allocation. These are not bad investments, but they represent only a fraction of real economic growth.

For my younger peers just entering the workforce, this gap is even more consequential. The directions are thus: start early, take advantage of compounding, and think long term. If we each had a dollar for every time we got the lecture about the "time value of money," we'd all retire tomorrow. But we are also being funneled into portfolios that exclude entire categories of assets like private equity, private credit, real estate, and infrastructure that have historically delivered higher long-term returns and meaningful diversification.

Brett Arends at Market Watch incorrectly asserts that opening retirement plans to these assets would expose workers to high fees, illiquidity, and complexity. He misses a more important question: compared to what?

There's real asymmetry. Institutional investors regularly allocate 20 to 30 percent of their portfolios to private markets. They do so because these assets offer diversification, illiquidity premiums, and exposure to parts of the economy unavailable in public markets. Ordinary workers are confined to a narrower universe because litigious zealots neutered the system, compelling fiduciaries to avoid risk at all costs.

This narrowing of investment options originates in the legal environment surrounding employer-sponsored retirement plans. Under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), plan sponsors face an onslaught of litigation. The risk of lawsuits compels employers to increasingly default to the safest legal options rather than to the best outcomes for participants, thereby directly limiting potential returns.

Even if you set aside litigation, the deeper issue is structural. The retirement system hasn't kept pace with the evolution of capital markets.

The proposed rule from the Department of Labor deserves serious attention. At its core, the rule introduces a safe-harbor framework for evaluating "designated investment alternatives" in defined-contribution plans. The definition encompasses everything from traditional mutual funds to more complex vehicles, including those that can incorporate private assets.

The framework is asset-neutral. It outlines how fiduciaries should choose. Plan sponsors are obligated to evaluate investments using a set of common-sense factors: fees, performance, liquidity, valuation, benchmarks, and complexity. If they do so objectively and analytically, they are presumed to meet their fiduciary obligations.

The White House's Council of Economic Advisers suggests that younger participants could benefit from allocating up to 30 percent of their portfolios to private markets. Institutional investors have approached portfolio construction using private markets for decades.

Yet parts of the proposed rule undermine that very goal. A 15 percent cap on private assets—derived from SEC Rule 22e-4—would limit exposure, a particular problem for collective investment trusts, which are regulated differently and historically operated without such constraints.

Angela Antonelli offers helpful insights. Georgetown Univerisity's research from the Center for Retirement Initiatives and other CRI analysis, even relatively modest exposure to private real assets, private credit, and private equity has the potential to boost outcomes by 7% to 8%, not just for the "average" DC participant but also across a range of more real financial savings patterns that DC participants too often find themselves in over the course of their working years.

Large institutions, from university endowments to public pension funds, routinely invest in private markets and reap the benefits of diversification and higher returns. We've created two classes of retirement savers: those with access to the full spectrum of capital markets, and those without.

That divide is the difference between participating in today's economy and being stuck in a version of it that no longer exists. Retirement policy should be about equipping workers to build wealth in the modern world.

Right now, my 403(b) originated on a promise that has become so antiquated it might be unattainable. Instead of "taxing the rich", can't we just be allowed to invest like them?

Turner saw the potential of the (then) new technology of cable. Turner used cable to take his UHF station, which he rechristened Turner Broadcasting System (TBS), national, making it the first superstation. Turner once claimed his success was due to professional baseball, professional wrestling, and Andy Griffith reruns. In 1976, Turner put his money where his mouth was and purchased the Atlanta Braves in order to keep the team in Atlanta and their games on TBS. Turner later purchased the Atlanta Hawks basketball team, the MGM film library—which formed the basis of his cable stations Turner Network Television (TNT) and Turner Classic Movies (TCM)—the Hanna-Barbara Studios (producer of Scooby-Doo, The Flintstones and other popular cartoons for his Cartoon Network), movie studios Castle Rock and NewLine Cinemas, and, of course, Jim Crockett Wrestling promotions which became WCW. Turner's acquisitions allowed him to build a vertically integrated media powerhouse. Turner's film libraries, studios, and sports franchises provided his cable stations with a reliable source of content without having to pay high licensing fees to a third party. Instead, the profits were spilt between two parts of the Turner empire.

Turner is best known as the creator of Cable News Network (CNN), the first 24-7 news network. Turner got the idea for CNN from the fact that he was never home to watch the evening news. Turner realized he was not the only person to work past seven and thus miss the six o'clock news. So, Turner created the first 24-hour news channel to allow people to watch the news on their own schedules.

Of course, not every decision Turner made turned out well for him or his company. The biggest mistake of his career was merging his company with Time-Warner in 1996, followed by the Time-Warner merger with America Online (AOL) in 2001. At the time of the Time-Warner-AOL merger, most experts thought the combination of a traditional media giant with what was then one of the leading internet providers would create a company with an unchallengeable monopoly over both traditional and new media. Instead, Time-Warner-AOL fell apart and today is remembered as one of the greatest disasters in modern business history.

One of the blunders that contributed to the wreck of the Time-Warner-AOL merger was stripping Ted Turner of any real say in the management of the media empire he created. The Time-Warner-AOL fiasco is a lesson for policy makers, showing that a company that appears to have unchallengeable dominance can lose market share and fail because of poor management, complacency, or competition from a new firm that better serves consumers. Ironically, actress and political activist Jane Fonda, who is the last of four women Ted Turner married and divorced, has spoken out against Warner Brothers' merger with Paramount.

Following his departure from Time-Warner-AOL, Turner, who was at an age when most business people are getting ready to retire, entered the restaurant business. An avid conservationist, Turner was so committed to bison preservation that he owned 45,000 bison spread around 14 ranches. Turner's passion for bison preservation motivated him to team up with restauranteur George McKerrow to create Ted's Montana Grill. Turner wanted the restaurant to increase interest in bison meat, so bison burgers and steaks were a major feature of the menu. Ted's Montana Grill is an example of doing well by doing good and monetizing your passions.

Among the lessons wannabe entrepreneurs can learn from Turner is the importance of respecting and staying loyal to the consumers responsible for your initial success. Turner's loyalty to baseball and pro-wrestling fans was a big part of his success. Another lesson is to pay attention whenever you think, "I wish there was a…" Remember that there may be other people who have the same desire and who are waiting for someone like you to provide it. Most people had no idea they wanted a 24-hour news network until Ted Turner created it, but once it existed they quickly saw its utility. Take advantage of any opportunity to do well by doing good and monetize your passions.

The last lesson from Turner's career for policy makers comes from the AOL-Time-Warner fiasco. Today's seemingly untouchable monopolies are not immune to losing their positions because of poor management or the rise of competitors offering products that better serve consumer needs.

Great advances in commerce are never an effect of legislation, and they're certainly not a consequence of politicians scanning the marketplace, finding expensively priced goods, and then promising programs to make cheap what was formerly dear. Instead, and as we see with both smartphones and the myriad AIs that we can freely enjoy on smartphones, the best products and services are generally the ones we didn't know we wanted until the entrepreneurial in our midst discovered our wants and needs for us.

Live, opposite thinking minds, not policy, are the path to material abundance. This being true, how unfortunate that politicians on the local, state and national levels can't restrain themselves from efforts to regulate and legislate affordable housing.

The flaw in this broad political conceit starts with the blanket presumption by members of the political class that more housing is the answer to the housing affordability question. Not asked enough is if the latter is true.

It's worth contemplating the supply question through the prism of smartphones and AIs. Popular and pricey as RIM/Blackberry communication devices were, Steve Jobs didn't add to the supply of them with the iPhone. Just the same, OpenAI didn't create another Google-like search engine with the rollout of ChatGPT. With housing it's become an article of faith that more supply of the market good is the obvious answer, but when have politicians and policy experts so distant from the marketplace ever been able to lead consumer needs?

Some reading this will respond that market signals are just that, and rising housing prices are a signal that more supply is needed. It seems so logical, but seemingly never acknowledged is that pundits and legislators well outside the arena are misreading the market's message.

Specifically, what if the true message from expensive, unaffordable housing is that Americans just shouldn't own housing? It's not an unrealistic speculation. Way back in the 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville described Americans as "restless amid abundance." Translated, Americans were constantly on the move in search of the best way to maximize their talents.

Of course, the consumption of housing doesn't enhance our mobility as much as it ties us down to a specific location. It's possible the price signals aren't calling for more supply so that more Americans can own, but for more Americans to pass on home ownership in favor of renting or, yes, something else entirely.

It's no insight to observe that the best politicians can offer us on the matter of housing is more legislation meant to produce more of what already exists. Politicians are constrained by the known, which means at best they can give us stasis.

Yet the question remains: is more access to home ownership really what Americans want? This opinion piece won't presume to answer the question, but it will passionately contend that the political class can't possibly know the housing needs of a 330 million strong market, and better yet, shouldn't presume to know.

All this column will say is that is that time after time, product after product, and frequently failure after failure, intrepid investment matched with live minds has resulted in market outcomes that much more often than not revealed human wants and needs very much at odds with what surely well-meaning politicians thought.

Instead of promising more supply, politicians should admit they don't know. Yes, less policy alongside more capital meant to discover a surely opaque housing future.

Her story, a U.S. native replaced by a foreign-born employee who is willing to work at a significantly lower wage, has become commonplace, particularly in the tech industry. Adding insult to injury, she says, her CEO, who hails from India, told her to train the man he selected to replace her before laying her off.

Despite stints at Google and Cisco and two years of job hunting, Mary can no longer compete in a job market saturated with foreign-born H-1B visa holders. "I had experience. I should have walked right into these corporate jobs, but I didn't. Why? Because Silicon Valley is flooded with people who work for two-thirds of the price, or even half price," said Mary, who asked to be identified only by her first name.

U.S. tech workers like Mary are at the center of a battle brewing in Washington, D.C., over reforming the troubled H-1B visa program, which is designed to fill highly skilled positions when qualified American workers can't be found. The controversy pits tough-on-immigration Republicans and some Democrats against the most formidable of opponents - Big Tech, the primary beneficiary of a program considered by critics to be little more than a pipeline of cheap labor.

In the last few decades, the California dream has gone global as U.S. tech firms have filled their ranks and C-suites with employees born abroad. Intel is no longer the company of its founders, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, but of Malaysian-born Lip-Bu Tan, its CEO since March 2025. Microsoft is led by Satya Nadella; Alphabet Inc. by Sundar Pichai; Adobe by Shantanu Narayen; IBM by Arvind Krishna; YouTube by Neal Mohan; and T-Mobile US by Srinivas Gopalan - all of whom were born in India.

All told, a remarkable two-thirds of the Valley's nearly 400,000 tech jobs are now held by those born abroad, according to a 2025 report from the think tank Joint Venture Silicon Valley. Today, more tech workers were born in India (23%) and China (18%) combined than in the U.S. (34%).

Low-Cost Talent

The influx of low-cost Asian talent has clearly helped fuel profits in one of America's most influential sectors. But there is a downside to this tech boom - the sidelining of U.S. workers thanks to the H-1B visa program that's no longer working as intended. Created in 1990, the federal program has morphed into a vehicle for employers, particularly in the nation's tech centers, to recruit much cheaper foreign labor at the expense of U.S. tech workers, according to Harvard economist George J. Borjas.

While the H-1B program spans multiple industries, it's overwhelmingly concentrated in tech. Last year, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Tata Consultancy, and Google were the biggest visa users, with Amazon alone recording more than 13,000 applications. These companies find the savings from hiring foreign workers hard to resist. The job of software developer, for instance, accounts for 38% of all H-1B visa workers, according to a 2026 paper by Borjas. And these foreign software developers earn about 30% less than their U.S. counterparts, the economist estimates.

Since many of these tech jobs pay six figures, the savings quickly add up. Borjas estimates that companies, on average, save nearly $100,000 per worker over six years by hiring an H-1B worker rather than an American. The arrangement "redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants," Borjas wrote in 2016. That, in turn, helps account for the soaring stock prices of Big Tech since the 2008 financial crash.

False Rationale

The vaguely written H-1B law has been easy for companies to exploit. Hassan Abdullah, an immigration attorney and H-1B advocate, said the supposed congressional basis of the law - to fill highly skilled jobs with foreigners if Americans aren't available - has always been a fiction. "The regulations don't necessarily say that," said Abdullah, who helps companies get the visas. "Throughout all my years, I've never had to even consider that as a factor."

One of the most glaring weaknesses of the law, critics say, is that most companies applying for these visas are not required to demonstrate that they were unable to find qualified American workers. Only companies with more than 15% of their workforce on H-1Bs must make small efforts to recruit U.S. citizens, such as publicly announcing open positions.

Companies are required to pay foreign workers at least the "prevailing wage" for the occupation and region, a provision that should theoretically reduce the incentive to hire employees from Asia. But the process relies on self-reporting and has been easy to manipulate because salaries are calculated using broad regional averages that often fail to reflect real market wages in the technology sector.

As a result, the number of H-1B visa workers has skyrocketed. When an annual cap of 85,000 new visas is combined with renewals, 2025 was a banner year with 406,348 approved visas, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Seventy percent of those visas were issued to Indians. That compares with a total of 275,317 visa approvals in 2015.

Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt, who's part of the MAGA wing of the GOP, reacted to these numbers on X, calling the program "a national security nightmare. Enough. No more flooding the market with 400k+ H-1B visas while our people and our sovereignty gets screwed."

With criticism of the visas dovetailing with broader anti-immigration sentiments, the Trump administration has made the most serious move yet to restrict the program. Six months ago, the USCIS announced a new $100,000 fee that companies must pay per new H-1B worker living outside the U.S. While official figures have not yet been released, some immigration experts estimate that the fee may lead to a 30% to 50% decline in new visa applications.

"This is the first year we have not filed any H-1B visas for people outside the U.S. because tech companies don't want to pay the 100,000[dollar] fee," said immigration attorney Navdeep Meamber, who is based in Silicon Valley.

But companies have found a workaround. Meamber said she has seen an uptick in the number of clients filing for the visas for workers already in the U.S., particularly those such as students who transferred from other visa types to H-1Bs.

"The $100,000 fee is not reducing the numbers because foreign students, especially those who get on the Optional Practical Training program, can move into the H-1B pipeline without paying that fee," said attorney Rosemary Jenks, a campaigner for immigration reform with the Immigration Accountability Project. "So there are still plenty of H-1B visas being issued every year."

American Ingenuity

Silicon Valley wasn't always dominated by foreigners. Some claim the true birthplace of Silicon Valley can be found in a garage at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto. It was there that David Packard, a native of Colorado, and Bill Hewlett of Michigan founded Hewlett-Packard in 1939. Robert Noyce, a native son of Iowa and co-inventor of the integrated circuit, critically made from silicon, gave name to the valley after the substance. With his colleague, Gordon Moore of San Francisco, they founded Intel in 1968.

Throughout the post-war years, America's booming tech industry was largely pioneered by natives. By the 1980s, however, concerns were raised about the dwindling number of young people available to fill STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) jobs in the future. Erich Bloch, director of the National Science Foundation, told the American Council on Education in 1985: "The pool of potential students from U.S. schools will become smaller. Demographic projections, of which you are all aware, show the number of 18-to-24-year-olds declining by about 20% over the next decade."

The 1990 Immigration Act, signed by George H. W. Bush, created the H-1B visa, a temporary work visa lasting a few years aimed at filling the labor shortages Bloch had warned about. Since then, as in many industries, tech firms have sometimes struggled to find employees, particularly specialized engineers, during times of rapid growth. But whether the industry faces a persistent shortage of American workers is a matter of debate among economists and labor analysts.

Major technology companies reject the criticism that the H-1B system is primarily a source of cheap labor. Executives stress that the program allows American firms to recruit engineers and researchers with advanced technical expertise in areas such as artificial intelligence, semiconductor design, and complex software development, where qualified talent can be scarce. They also contend that many H-1B workers are paid high salaries and that access to global talent helps keep American companies competitive against rivals in China and elsewhere.

Critics of the visas point to waves of layoffs, today driven by AI, accompanied by the growth in H-1Bs, as evidence that a labor shortage is nothing more than a fig leaf. Michael Capuano of the Federation for American Immigration Reform wrote in a blog post last year that "Google laid off 951 U.S. employees in 2024, but found room for 1,058 new H-1B workers. Apple laid off 735 people in 2024, but signed on 864 new H-1B employees. Microsoft laid off 3,426 workers from 2022 to 2024 and hired 3,259 new H-1Bs during that same period."

A 2023 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute similarly found that the top 30 H-1B employers hired more than 34,000 new H-1B workers in 2022 while laying off at least 85,000 employees during the same period.

In addition to cheaper talent, critics say H-1B visas also provide a captive workforce. Because employers can sponsor visa holders for permanent residency, many workers become heavily reliant on keeping their jobs in order to remain in the United States. Critics argue this dynamic discourages employees from changing companies or demanding higher wages, with some likening the system to a form of indentured servitude.

Tribalism at Play?

Critics say favoritism has also contributed to foreign dominance of the tech sector. After foreign-born employees take on leadership roles, including CEO, they sometimes attract and hire more foreigners by tapping their own professional and social networks.

Kevin Lynn, executive director of the Institute for Sound Public Policy, argues that "professionalism doesn't exist in these IT departments anymore," adding that "when you look at the hiring, it becomes very tribal; It's really India versus the rest of the world."

Microsoft saw the number of decisions on H-1B applications rise from 2,983 in 2014, when Nadella became CEO, to 6,258 in 2025. Google's numbers jumped from 2,309 in 2015, when Pichai took the top job, to 7,868 in 2025. During these years, these companies also grew, making it hard to know if the percentage of foreign workers increased. At IBM, H-1B decisions have remained consistent since Arvind Krishna was named the leader.

Meamber, the immigration lawyer, disputes the idea that companies run by foreign-born leaders are more likely to rely on labor from their home country. "The CEO doesn't even know who is being hired. These decisions are being made at a lower level by the HR team and by the recruiters," she said.

Stephen Vivien, an engineer, said he witnessed Indian employees help each other get hired by sharing interview questions when he worked at Google. "There were a lot of H-1B workers and they created their own little network," he said. "[When] one Indian guy would be coming up for his interview, the other Indian guys who had [already] gotten hired would call and share the questions."

In April, a New York jury found New Jersey-based Cognizant Technology Solutions liable for $8.4 million after a former executive sued the company, which was founded in India, for discrimination against non-Indian and non-South Asian workers. The executive argued he was passed over for a promotion and was later fired for raising concerns about bias against non-Indian employees.

The decision follows a separate successful lawsuit brought by three other employees against Cognizant in 2017, all similarly claiming discrimination against non-Indian workers, though the company is appealing and denies all allegations. In both lawsuits, juries found in favor of claims that Cognizant had used the H-1B program as a tool to discriminate against American workers. Since 2009, the company has received tens of thousands of H-1B visa approvals.

Reformers vs. Big Tech

While restrictions to the program, including last year's $100,000 fee, have yet to meaningfully slow its growth, some Republicans have called to abolish it. In February, Florida representative Greg Steube introduced the EXILE Act, which would end the H-1B visa program entirely.

A proposed reform that might gain more bipartisan support targets the ineffective prevailing wage requirement that allows firms to underpay foreign workers. One idea floated by Republicans would create a minimum salary requirement for H-1B workers that's much higher than the current pay scale, thus removing the financial incentive to replace U.S.-born workers.

Ro Khanna, the Democratic congressman representing much of Silicon Valley, said on the All-In podcast last year that "there's definitely abuse [that] needs to be corrected" in the H-1B program. Khanna said a new prevailing wage standard would be a reform he could support.

But legislation that would raise labor costs would be opposed by Big Tech, armed with its war chest of money and influence in Washington. Jenks, the lawyer, said H-1B reformers face a tough fight. "The donors on this issue include all of the high-tech companies, whether it's Microsoft, Facebook, all of them," she said. "They put millions and millions of dollars every year into lobbying."

This article was reported in conjunction with GB News documentary, which can be viewed here.

The Michigan State Police used a $10,000 grant from the Department of Transportation on the odd campaign to remind men not to drink and drive. The money would be worth $14,473 today.

That's according to the "Wastebook" reporting published by the late U.S. Senator Dr. Tom Coburn. For years, these reports shined a white-hot spotlight on federal frauds and taxpayer abuses.

Coburn, the legendary U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, earned the nickname "Dr. No" by stopping thousands of pork-barrel projects using the Senate rules. Projects that he couldn't stop, Coburn included in his oversight reports.

Coburn's Wastebook 2012 included 100 examples of outrageous spending worth more than $18 billion, including the pattering potties.

Key facts: Two hundred bars in Michigan each received two Interactive Urinal Communicators with motion sensor technology.

When a urinal was in use, the devices read out in a female voice, "Listen up. That's right! I'm talking to you. Had a few drinks? Maybe a few too many? Then do yourself and everyone else a favor. Call a sober friend or a cab. Oh, and don't forget. Wash your hands."

Black lettering on the devices reminded men to "Call a ride. Get home."

In response to seeing a prototype of the urinal cake, one man told the Associated Press, "Wow! That is disgusting."

Coburn pointed out that it would have been only slightly more expensive for local bars to buy breathalyzers instead of the urinal cakes.

The devices were developed by Wizmark, a Maryland-based company founded by former chiropractor Richard Deutsch. They were first released in 2004 as an advertising tool for Country Music Television and the Canadian brewing company Molson. As Deutsch told the New York Times, they were effective because "there's no place to go. You literally have a captive audience."

The Detroit Pistons basketball team also put them in their bathrooms to yell "Beat L.A." at fans during a championship series against the Los Angeles Lakers.

Open the Books has no record of taxpayer money going to Wizmark after 2012.

Search all federal, state and local salaries and vendor spending with the world's largest government spending database at OpenTheBooks.com.

Summary: Wizmark's devices might best be used as an inescapable reminder for federal officials to reduce wasteful spending on absurd projects like talking toilets.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com

In an effort to restore grading standards, Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences is conducting an email ballot on the administration's proposal to limit solid A grades at 20% of students per course (plus up to four additional A's, if merited).

For decades, higher education reformers have warned that college grade inflation is "real, rampant, and ravaging our universities"—along with workforce competitiveness. And not only at Harvard. In the early 1960s, 15% of all college grades nationwide were A's. Today, A's constitute nearly 50% of all grades. Yet when reformers produced studies demonstrating the problem, defenders of the status quo dismissed the concern as a right-wing myth.

Education commentator Alfie Kohn, in his widely cited 2002 essay "The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation," argued that the entire issue is ideologically driven. "The crusade against it," says Kohn, "is led by conservative individuals and organizations."

This January, a Washington Monthly piece echoed the sentiment, describing grade inflation concerns as "a long-standing conservative grievance" thrust back into headlines by "right-wing media."

But that was then. Now, Harvard itself has stepped forward. Its recent report reveals that A's (including A-minuses) account for more than half—and in many courses, upward of 60%—of all grades awarded at Harvard College!

What was once a rare mark of excellence has become the default. The new proposal would those caps listed above. It would also replace the traditional GPA (grade point average) with an internal percentile-ranking system for honors and awards.

On its face, this is progress worth applauding. Grade inflation is no victimless crime. It erodes the signaling value of a Harvard degree. When nearly every transcript is dominated by A's, employers struggle to distinguish genuine excellence from mere competence.

But most of all, students are cheated. They receive false confidence, graduate with weaker preparation, and enter a competitive world unprepared for honest feedback. Harvard's willingness to risk unpopularity with its undergraduates is, at minimum, intellectually honest and morally courageous—especially at a time when too many universities prioritize student satisfaction over substance.

However, the proposal contains a fatal flaw, one that risks turning reform into cosmetology. Buried in the revisions is an opt-out mechanism: Instructors may designate their entire course as Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory (SAT/UNS) and then award an unlimited number of "SAT+" grades at their discretion. SAT+ recognizes work "well beyond the minimal expectation" for an SAT—essentially an A by another name, free from the numerical cap.

This is no minor detail. It is a built-in escape hatch large enough to drive a school bus through. Professors uncomfortable with the 20%-plus-four limit—concerned about evaluations, enrollment, or the discomfort of denying top marks—can simply switch to SAT/UNS. The A cap then goes poof, and they can hand out as many SAT+ notations as they wish. Since SAT and SAT+ do not factor into GPA or official honors, the university can claim success while inflated evaluation silently continues on a parallel track.

The Harvard subcommittee itself acknowledged this risk in its March revisions, noting it was "wary of reproducing a kind of grade inflation in this alternate grading framework."

Yet it added SAT+ anyway, arguing that flexibility would make the opt-out more palatable to faculty. Yes, but that is precisely the problem. Policy should not be written for the comfort of those most likely to subvert it. By creating an unregulated safety valve, Harvard ensures that the most inflation-prone instructors can ignore the cap entirely.

The result is not restored standards—it is standards hidden behind a different label. Over time, the distinction between capped A's and uncapped SAT+ will blur. Transcripts will still brim with top-tier marks. Public perception of rigor may improve slightly, but the private reality of lax standards will persist.

This looks to me a lot less like reform, and a lot more like rebranding.

Worse, the loophole distracts from deeper failures. Grade inflation arises from a culture that treats students as tuition-paying customers, rewards professors for popularity rather than rigor, and fears any policy that might increase student "stress."

Real reform would confront these pressures—perhaps by mandating median-grade reporting on transcripts (as passed by the Texas House, but not the Senate, in 2025), reducing the weight of student happiness surveys on teaching evaluations, or requiring genuine grade distributions in every course.

Instead, Harvard has chosen the path of least resistance—limiting the most visible symptom while preserving the mechanisms producing it. The proposed percentile-ranking system for honors is savvy, but it too will be undermined if professors simply migrate their "generosity" to SAT+ courses. Students will shop for easy high-pass classes, and faculty will face the same old pressures with an official workaround.

By embedding an uncapped SAT+ option, the faculty has ensured the reform will change paperwork more than practice.

Grade inflation will not be defeated by clever nomenclature. It will only end when professors are required—without easy exit ramps—to assign grades that truly reflect the distribution of talent and effort in their classrooms.

Until then, Harvard's policy strikes me as a cautionary tale: Even well-meaning efforts at elite universities can collapse into performative gestures when the hardest part—saying "no" more often—is quietly made optional. Yes, the faculty should approve the cap. But they should also close the loophole. Anything less is not courage but, rather, camouflage.

In sum, now is the time for our universities—and our lawmakers—to summon the resolve of that child in the emperor's kingdom, strip away the polite fiction of unearned A's, and let transcripts finally tell the unvarnished truth.

Private credit consists of direct loans made by non-banks to medium-sized businesses, providing them tailored financing with greater certainty and flexibility than broadly syndicated markets. These loans fill a vital gap created by over-regulated traditional banks that retreated from lending after Dodd-Frank, Basel III capital requirements, and multiple layers of big-government rules. Private credit provides flexible capital that supports business growth, job creation, and economic innovation without a dime of taxpayer risk. Warren cites the rapid growth of this sector to over $2 trillion as a risk, but what it really indicates is that this is a growth business because it meets a vital economic need.

Warren, the architect of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that would supposedly solve all of our financial ills, launches the same jeremiad against every source of capital. This is the playbook she has used against banks, credit card companies, and consumer lenders. She is openly hostile to all private-sector business and consumer lending - but loves government loan programs.

Her latest letter urging regulation ignores basic facts. Private credit has grown precisely because markets work. It efficiently matches willing lenders with borrowers that regulated banks cannot or will not serve. Redemption gates and liquidity terms are fully disclosed upfront. The negotiated restrictions during market stress that she decried are standard contractual features, not systemic dangers. They exist to ensure capital raised for long-term deployment can continue to fulfill its purpose.

It's true that in the first quarter of 2026, private credit defaults inched up to 2.73 percent, according to Proskauer, but overall lender losses were still minimal. Strong returns overall show that default risks have been well-priced. Private credit last year returned 9.3% according to a tracker from the firm Cliffwater, in line with 20-year annualized returns of 9.6%.

Warren's claim that government intervention is necessary for safety has already been thoroughly debunked. Her argument that financial regulators must conduct a stress test of private credit's interconnectedness to the broader economy is especially bizarre because the Federal Reserve completed precisely that exercise last summer and concluded that even in the event of a severe economic shock, the industry would not impair banks or the wider financial system. The Fed affirmed the finding this month, issuing a report that said risks from private credit are "limited and manageable."

No wonder, then, that the sharpest investors, including the pension funds of teachers and other government workers Warren purports to champion, are increasing their investment in private credit. Public pension funds in recent years have increased their allocation to private credit from 2.9% in 2020 to 4% in 2024, per Preqin.

Yet Warren is pushing to block Americans without access to a pension from adding private credit to their own retirement accounts. That would deny most of us the benefits of higher returns and lower volatility we would get by investing in the most broadly diversified vehicles, which logically includes private equity and private credit along with publicly traded securities. Warren cannot reasonably assert both that these lenders extract too-high returns and that the benefit of those returns should be available only to the privileged few. Blocking access is wealth destruction disguised as consumer protection.

The real threat is not private credit but Washington's insatiable appetite for control over every market innovation that arises to fill the vacuum created by the last round of government intervention. Congress and the administration should reject Warren's latest demands and push in the opposite direction, streamlining regulation to make bank lending more viable, not private credit less so. Markets allocate capital far better than politicians. Let them work.

I served 25 years in the United States Army, much of it as a Green Beret, training, fighting, and leading men in places most Americans will never see. I swore an oath—not once, but repeatedly—to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That oath wasn't a slogan. In basic training, we sang cadence calls about killing "commies" because the Army of my era understood something visceral: communism wasn't just another political flavor. It was the ideological opposite of everything that made this republic worth dying for.

I've been out for a decade now. I'm not young. But I'm not nostalgic, either. What I see today—the slow, steady erosion of the values that turned a ragtag collection of colonies into the world's sole superpower—fills me with the same cold clarity I felt on missions where hesitation meant death. We are watching a soft-power insurgency unfold in our Nation in plain sight. Not tanks in the streets, but classrooms, congressional chambers, city halls, and cultural enclaves where the language of "democratic socialism" masks a deeper drift toward the very system we once fought to contain.

And it's being sold by people like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders. They wrap themselves in the warm blanket of "socialism" while pushing policies and rhetoric that echo the opening acts of every failed communist experiment in history. AOC has said flatly that there isn't a billionaire who actually earned their money. Sanders just reintroduced a 5 percent annual wealth tax on America's billionaires—framed as "making them pay their fair share," but amounting to the steady confiscation of private property. They call it fairness. I call it the slow boil toward the abolition of the very incentives that built this nation.

Even at the local level, this ideology has captured real power. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani—a democratic socialist and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member—was elected and sworn in as the 112th mayor on January 1, 2026. In just his first months in office, Mamdani has aggressively pushed rent freezes for nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments through the Rent Guidelines Board, advanced plans for city-owned grocery stores as a "public option" to combat corporate profiteering, secured major expansions of free universal childcare, and proposed new taxes on luxury pied-à-terre properties and millionaires. His administration has launched "Organize NYC" to mobilize mass public testimony and activist pressure on city policy—essentially importing campaign-style organizing into governance. These are not abstract theories; they are concrete steps toward government control of housing, food, childcare, and wealth. Viral videos targeting billionaires and hedge funds have already prompted some businesses to relocate operations out of the city. This is what the shift looks like when socialist values move from congressional rhetoric to executive action in America's largest metropolis.

Just this week, while unveiling yet another municipally run grocery store, Mayor Mamdani took direct aim at Ronald Reagan's iconic warning. Reagan famously said the nine most terrifying words in the English language are "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." Mamdani replied, "It's a good quote, but I disagree. I think nine more terrifying words are actually 'I worked all day and can't feed my family.'" In other words, government is not the problem — it is the solution. This is the soft boil in action.

Let me be clear from the jump: I am not against debate. The First Amendment I swore to defend protects even foolish ideas. You can advocate socialism in the public square. But when those ideas harden into policy that contradicts the Constitution's core protections—private property, individual liberty, limited government, and a Constitutional Republic form of governance—we cross from speech into subversion. And when combined with mass immigration that rejects assimilation, we risk losing the cultural cohesion that made the American experiment work.

America didn't become the envy of the world by accident. It wasn't luck, or geography alone, or some mystical national character. It was a deliberate system rooted in the Enlightenment principles baked into our founding documents.

The Constitution's Fifth Amendment is unambiguous: no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process, and private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation. The Framers understood that secure property rights unleash human ingenuity. When a man knows his labor, his risk, his innovation will not be seized by the state or the mob, he builds, invents, invests. Skeptics sometimes point out that today's billionaires benefit from state-funded infrastructure—roads, courts, schools, and the like. Fair point: government does provide the basic rules of the game, the legal framework, and essential public goods that make commerce possible. But it is the individual who shoulders the personal financial risk, the years of uncertainty, the sleepless nights, and the very real possibility of total failure. Public roads didn't invent the iPhone, scale Amazon, or revolutionize energy. Visionary risk-takers did—betting their own capital, reputation, and future on ideas that voluntary markets then rewarded with profits. That protected incentive is what turns infrastructure into progress. Private property isn't greed—it's the engine of prosperity that lifted billions globally out of poverty through American-led markets.

Assimilation was the other secret sauce. Wave after wave of immigrants—Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, Asians—came here not to recreate the old country but to become Americans. They learned English, adopted our civic culture, intermarried, and bought into the idea that E Pluribus Unum meant one people under one set of rules. The result? A high-trust, high-mobility society capable of projecting power across oceans while innovating at home. That cohesion allowed us to win two world wars, stare down the Soviet Union, and dominate the global economy.

Capitalism—flawed, messy, but unmatched—rewarded merit. It wasn't perfect; monopolies and excesses were checked by antitrust laws and democratic accountability, not central planning. But the system delivered: the U.S. GDP per capita exploded, life expectancy soared, and even our poorest citizens live better than kings of old. This is not ideology; it is history.

Contrast that with the trends swallowing our institutions.

In education, from K-12 through universities, we've replaced civics with grievance. Faculty skew overwhelmingly left—often 6-to-1 or worse. Curricula hammer "equity" over equality, identity over individual merit, and "systemic" critiques of capitalism that sound lifted from Marx's Communist Manifesto. Recent polls paint a bleak picture: among Americans 18-29, 62 percent hold a favorable view of socialism and 34 percent of communism itself. A Heartland-Rasmussen survey found 53 percent of young voters want a socialist president in 2028, with 76 percent supporting nationalization of major industries like health care, energy, and Big Tech.

This isn't abstract. Elements within the Democratic Party openly champion it. The Squad and their allies push Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, rent control, and wealth taxes—framed as "socialism" but requiring exactly the state control of production Marx prescribed in the transitional phase. And now, with Mayor Mamdani in New York implementing the local version—rent freezes, public groceries, tax hikes on the successful—the blueprint is scaling from rhetoric to reality.

This rhetoric isn't new. It mirrors the early stages of every 20th-century communist regime: vilifying the successful promise redistribution, centralize power. Marx and Engels were explicit in The Communist Manifesto: abolish private property, centralize credit and production in the state's hands, use progressive taxation and inheritance abolition as weapons. The "dictatorship of the proletariat" was always the bridge. Democratic socialists insist they reject that path. History disagrees. Every time—Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela—the "soft" phase hardens into tyranny, poverty, and body counts in the tens of millions. As the millions of Venezuelans who fled Maduro's regime can attest, the promises of equity collapse into empty shelves, authoritarian control, and mass exodus.

This ideological drift toward socialism is gaining dangerous traction precisely because America's shared national identity is weakening. When assimilation falters, social cohesion erodes—and societies with low trust become far more susceptible to calls for centralized government control and redistribution. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam's landmark 2007 study, "E Pluribus Unum," found that in ethnically diverse communities, residents of all races tend to "hunker down." Trust plummets—even in people of their own group—while altruism, community cooperation, and friendships decline. This is not an argument against ethnic diversity itself—America has always thrived by welcoming immigrants from every background who embrace our shared values—but against the failure to insist on that assimilation. In such fragmented environments, the natural bonds of mutual reliance break down. People increasingly look not to their neighbors or markets, but to a powerful central state to impose order, fairness, and resource distribution. This creates fertile ground for socialist rhetoric that promises equity through government force rather than through a united citizenry working together.

Compounding the problem is a policy-driven demographic experiment that rejects the melting pot. We've allowed—encouraged, even—large-scale immigration without demanding cultural buy-in. The result: parallel societies that drain resources and erode trust.

Look at Minnesota's Somali community, the largest in the U.S. Recent Center for Immigration Studies data shows 81 percent of Somali-headed households receive some form of welfare, versus 21 percent of native Minnesotan households. Fifty-four percent are on food stamps; 73 percent on Medicaid; 89 percent of households with children get aid. Cash welfare use is 27 percent. Crime data, age-adjusted, shows Somali-born young men incarcerated at roughly twice the rate of native-born Americans. High-profile fraud rings—hundreds of millions in COVID aid and SNAP scams—have involved dozens of Somali defendants. This isn't "racism;" it's the predictable outcome of clan-based refugee inflows into generous welfare systems without assimilation mandates.

Dearborn, Michigan, tells a similar story: concentrated Arab immigrant communities where political discourse often imports Middle Eastern grievances rather than American ones. These aren't isolated anecdotes. Robert Putnam's research showed diversity, without assimilation pressure, reduces social trust across the board. We are balkanizing.

Chain migration, refugee programs, and sanctuary policies exacerbate it. Earlier immigrants faced Ellis Island scrutiny and cultural expectation. Today's system selects for numbers over compatibility, then subsidizes separation. The superpower that assimilated millions now imports low-trust norms and watches trust plummet.

This isn't conspiracy. It's the logical result of choices: open borders without vetting for values, academia captured by ideological uniformity, media that romanticizes "equity" while ignoring Venezuela's collapse or Cuba's prisons. Congressional socialists and now big-city mayors like Mamdani provide the political cover. The First Amendment protects their speech—but the Constitution does not require us to surrender our republic to it.

My oath bound me to defend against domestic enemies too. Cultural Marxism, identity politics, and unassimilated enclaves aren't armed invaders, but they weaken the foundations: property rights, rule of law, shared identity. When youth polls show more favorability for communism than capitalism in some cohorts, and when a democratic socialist runs New York City with rent freezes and public grocery stores, we are one generation from losing the republic by ballot box.

To the AOCs, Sanderses, Mamdani, and DSA activists: I ask you, as a man who buried brothers in the long fight against tyranny and totalitarianism, to look in the mirror. You claim moral superiority—caring for the poor, fighting inequality. But intentions don't rewrite economics or history.

Wealth isn't a fixed pie. Billionaires didn't "steal" from workers; they created value that employed millions and generated tax revenue funding the very safety nets you expand. Confiscate it, and capital flees. Innovation stalls. Shortages follow—bread lines, empty shelves, the universal signature of central planning. Every socialist experiment ends the same: elites in dachas, masses in misery.

You say "democratic" socialism avoids the gulags. Yet your policies—wealth caps, nationalization, rent freezes, speech codes against "hate," and activist governance—require coercion. Property taken without compensation violates the Fifth Amendment. Suppressing dissent to protect the revolution has always followed. Ask the Ukrainians starved by Stalin, the Cambodians killed by Pol Pot, the Venezuelans who fled Maduro's regime.

America's poor live with cars, air conditioning, and smartphones because markets work. Socialism's "fairness" has delivered mass graves. See the light: reform capitalism's excesses through targeted policy—opportunity ladders, school choice, work requirements—not its destruction.

This is not a left-versus-right crusade. I am a constitutionalist, not a partisan. I could vote for a Democrat like Sen. John Fetterman or former Rep. Harold Ford Jr. if they put the Republic and its founding principles first. But when the socialist wing rides their coattails—pushing wealth confiscation, rent freezes, and identity over assimilation—the constitutional guardrails are what matter, not the party label.

To my fellow veterans and constitutionalists: the fight isn't over. With Memorial Day weekend fast approaching, let us honor those who paid the ultimate price by exercising the freedoms they defended with their lives—our right to free speech to call out this soft-power insurgency, and our right to vote in every election, no matter how seemingly small. No contest is inconsequential—local, state, or federal; primary or general. With mid-term elections on the horizon, every single vote will matter. Enforce assimilation—English fluency, civics tests, merit-based immigration. Defund ideological capture in schools. Demand politicians honor the oath we took. The Constitution is amendment-hard for a reason; it protects us from fleeting majorities chasing utopia.

We became a superpower by betting on the individual under law. Abandon that for class warfare, tax-the-rich experiments, and tribal enclaves, and we become just another failed state with better branding.

The darkness is optional. But only if we choose the light of the Founders now—before the boil turns irreversible.

Stephen D. Cook is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel with 25 years of service. A combat veteran decorated for both heroism and valor, he is the author of the field manuals Plan Like a Green Beret and Choose the Heavier Ruck, and the techno-thriller In the Shadows of the Sky. His work explores the intersection of elite military decision-making, intuition, and disruptive leadership. He is based in St. Augustine, Florida.

Welcome to our third Energy Future Forum.

Elections have consequences.

We have a fast-approaching midterm and energy is on the ballot. Energy is always on the ballot.

Our first Future Forum was during what turned out to be the last year for the Biden Administration.

At that time, we were a RealClear voice crying out in the wilderness.

We were calling for an Energy Abundance Mindset to replace the Energy Scarcity Mindset.

Change your mindset on energy, change our shared future for the better.

What a difference an election made.

One notable example: Chris Wright was a speaker at our inaugural Future Forum and was singing from the mindset of our abundance hymnal.

Now he is Secretary of Energy, and he is working to make the Energy Future that is still in its potential stages come to market like the fate of our nation depends on it — because it does.

For the past three years, RealClear has indulged the stable genius that is Mark Mills to see into the Future of Energy, revealing the future that is unfolding in the marketplace — and within reach and scale — if we get out of its way, and then behind it, and defend it.

The Chamber of Commerce has been a party to this indulgence of Mark Mills' and his Abundance Mindset. This is the Chamber's second Future of Energy Forum collaboration.

Not all stages are created equal. It is a Real Clear honor to have this event in partnership with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — the Carnegie Hall of capitalism.

And if all goes well, we'll be back.

What makes Mark Mills worth indulging?

You will see for yourself soon enough, but I will give you a non-spoiler clue.

Like Taylor Sheridan — the creator of the TV show "Landman" — Mark's mind has a secret formula. Sorry buddy, we need more you.

I cracked the code on Mills a long time ago, and it is the reason why we all defer to his wisdom.

Mark is a blended expression of the abundance promise; he is a demonstration project of what a free-science, a free-market, and free-politics can do to alleviate and elevate the human condition.

We are presently witnessing a "drill baby drill," "build baby build" pursuit of energy abundance — and its fruits of affordable, reliable, and clean electrons.

"Drill baby drill" solves the unaffordable prices at the pump.

"Build Baby Build" solves the problem of unaffordable prices at the plug.

Sadly, energy prices at the plug cannot be solved in a matter of months, like they can at the pump.

It takes years — and a moon-shot mindset and warp-speed movement on the ground.

It requires the return of a "can do" America that has long been captured by the forces of "can't do."

I like what I see on the ground. The vital spirits that built the Empire State Building in a year are returning.

Natural gas fracking is getting the "build baby build" favoritism that it ought to have had since it was perfected by Harold Hamm in the early 2000s.

Harold Hamm's drilling methods stand among the greatest American inventions. Walter Isaacson should author his next book about him.

The political problem, which is our problem — and better, our future's problem — is that it takes years to get a natural gas plant online.

And, to make matters more politically and economically tenuous, we have a HUGE demand problem presently that is set on a hockey-stick uptick.

Demand is out-pacing supply because we spent the past decades favoring "Clean" over a policy of Affordable, Reliable, and Clean.

In the interim, we are re-commissioning everything that was decommissioned.

Doing anything else is "Hunger Games" expensive, politically dangerous, and economically suicidal.

America, we got energy inflation at the plug because we had a politically correct measuring stick that favored "clean" over "affordable and reliable" in building new power for the grid.

Sadly, this mindset that necessitates high prices and low growth is a just an election away from making a comeback, and it is still governing all Blue States and too many Red States.

America, please hear this RealClear, common-good truth: "Clean" can no longer be in the driver's seat when it comes time to building back better an affordable and reliable grid and economy.

Don't get me wrong: "Clean" matters. Natural Gas is clean, but also abundant and reliable — which solar and wind are not.

Natural Gas favoritism needs to be a bi-partisan issue.

If we favored natural gas, we would not have an affordability problem.

When Democrats return to power, the high prices of their poor energy stewardship will be their problem.

Natural Gas favoritism ought to be good Blue politics. Senator Fetterman gets it.

A.I. would not pose the energy-pig problem that it does today if we follow T. Boone Pickens' plan that he heralded 20 years ago — and was left in the wilderness.

There's $18 trillion at our water's edge waiting for a grid to plug into. If the grid that these investments require is not built fast — and has hopes of surviving a change of party — it will never materialize. $18 trillion, adjusted for inflation, is 120 Marshall Plan-investments in the American economy.

President Trump, and those listening: domestic energy and electron generation need a strategic doctrine.

Mr. President, folks in this room, I have good news.

There is one at hand: the "Affordable, Reliable, Clean Energy Security Act," but it's sadly captive to a do-nothing Congress — and grim midterm prospects.

President Trump, its word count and mindset are made for an Executive Order.

It's a 700-word prescription to ensure and guide our energy future. In contrast, the prescription that was Obamacare was 906 pages and 400,000 words.

Mr. Trump, ask your energy team to give it a read. It speaks Secretary Wright, Burgum, and Zeldin's policy language. It would clear the way and clarify their paths to energy abundance and security.

President Trump, you grew up with an America that was a powerhouse — and envy of the free world.

You also experienced an America that chose to be less.

After decades of intentional de-industrialization, you want to intentionally re-industrialize an "America First" economy and way of life.

You want to build a 21st Century striver-economy that works for all — bottom, middle, and top.

ARC-ES is the rising tide that can lift all boats and ensure the reality of the legacy you envision and are working towards.

It would create a prosperous, American, and clean way of life.

It's an "Executive Order" away.

Folks in attendance in the room and watching from Midland, Trump is not on the ballot in 2026 and 2028 — but the future of this country's economy and your industry is. It is time to wake up.

Democrats, you are going to be in power again and this high-price-for-electrons problem will be yours. ARC and natural-gas favoritism is your rate-payer, GDP-growth salvation. Take a winning solution to a shared problem and make it your own.

There is a lot to lose with the political return of the Scarcity Mindset.

The future is passing to our hands.

Defending the conditions of energy abundance is our shared, bi-partisan, common-good responsibility.

Thank you.

David DesRosiers is the publisher of RealClearMedia.

The consequences of that refusal are playing out at every gas station in America. Gasoline has risen to $4.52 a gallon from $3.10 before the war. Diesel is at $5.80, up from $3.50. Jet fuel has hit $7.00. Oil producers and refiners are reaping an estimated $254 billion of wartime profits annually.

Every dollar above pre-war fuel prices transfers directly into political pressure accumulating in congressional offices, presidential approval ratings, and midterm election calculations.

Iran does not need to win a single military engagement. It needs only to keep the strait closed long enough for consumers, farmers, truckers, and builders to demand a premature end to the war, one that would leave U.S. strategic and nuclear objectives unfinished and signal weakness to Russia and China.

Tehran is running the clock. The administration understands this. Strategic Petroleum Reserve releases have been deployed and an 18 cent per gallon federal gas tax holiday has been proposed. Unfortunately, neither of these measures will meaningfully move pump prices. The political problem Iran is exploiting requires a significant solution at the pump, not at the margins.

Two additional responses have been proposed. Both are faulty.

Progressives argue that oil producers and refiners are collecting windfall profits they did nothing to earn. Their diagnosis is accurate. Their cure is not. A windfall tax redirects the transfer from the oil industry to the federal treasury. The consumer still pays $4.52 at the pump this morning and receives a modest quarterly rebate months later. Too small, too slow, and too diffuse to reduce the political erosion that Iran's strategy requires.

Free-market conservatives argue that price controls distort markets, destroy production incentives, and produce the gas lines that characterized the 1970s energy crisis. As an energy regulator during those years, I can attest that this principle is sound economics in normal times. But these are not normal times, and the historical analogy does not hold.

The 1970s controls failed because they pushed crude prices below the cost of production, eliminating the incentive to supply the market. That failure was rooted in genuine domestic scarcity. America then was a net importer with no buffer against a supply shock. America today is the world's largest oil producer and a net exporter. The underlying condition that made controls catastrophic then simply does not exist now.

Not a single Permian Basin well costs more to operate than it did in January. Not a single pipeline tariff has increased. Not a single refinery has spent an additional dollar processing domestic crude. The entire $1.40 per gallon increase in gasoline and $2.30 per gallon increase in diesel is traceable to a geopolitical shock, not marketplace costs. What is being removed is not the producer's margin but the foreign-crisis premium that the Brent benchmark is imposing on American consumers for a supply shock they are not experiencing.

There is a straightforward and administratively easy remedy. Regulate the purchase and sale price of oil to and by the nation's approximately 130 domestic refineries, and regulate their export volumes in order to assure that American consumers are supplied first. Producer prices are capped at the pre-war level of $65 a barrel, the marginal cost of WTI oil, the price that has fueled the explosion in oil production and profits, while exports continue at full world prices. No one sells below cost. Pump prices return to $2.80 to $3.25 a gallon. Diesel falls from $5.80 to $3.50. The regulation terminates automatically once the IRGC is defeated and the WTI-Brent spread returns to its pre-war level of roughly $4.00 per barrel.

Iran's calculation is a race against the American political clock. Every week gas stays above $4.50, that clock runs faster. A president who removes the consumer price shock removes Iran's most powerful weapon. An American public paying no more than $3.25 a gallon is far more willing to see this conflict through to its conclusion than one paying $4.52.

Some who support the war most vocally also invoke free-market principles as grounds for government inaction. That combination, however principled in normal times, is handing Tehran exactly the political conditions it needs. Supporting the war while refusing to remove its economic sting is not a strategy. It is a contradiction.

The free-market purists are applying a peacetime principle to a wartime emergency. The windfall taxers are solving the wrong problem for the wrong beneficiary. Both positions serve Iran's strategic interests by leaving pump prices intact and American consumers angry.

Tehran is counting on Washington's paralysis as politicians jockey for political and electoral advantage. Whether it continues is entirely in American hands. Washington must unite to win this war, eliminate the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran controlling 20% of the world's oil supplies, and prove that America is still the greatest military and economic power in the world.

David S. Cohen served as chief attorney and chairman of the New Mexico Public Service Commission. He has over three decades of experience in the oil and gas industry.

In late 1977, Jimmy Carter famously toasted the Shah's Iran as "an island of stability."Within fifteen months, the monarchy had collapsed, and the foreign-policy establishment that had built its assumptions around the Shah was left scrambling to comprehend a revolution it had utterly failed to foresee. The lesson should have been unmistakable: never again mistake repression for permanence, or assume that the political order in Iran is immune to upheaval. But the lesson was never truly learned.

After Ayatollah Khomeini hijacked a broad-based popular revolution and erected a theocratic dictatorship upon its ruins, Washington and many of its allies gradually embraced the same fallacy in a different form. The clerical regime, they concluded, could perhaps be moderated, pressured, negotiated with, or contained—but never fundamentally challenged from within. Diplomacy could be attempted; sanctions could be imposed; tactical pressure could fluctuate. Yet the regime itself came to be treated as an enduring fact of the regional landscape.

That assumption was always wrong.

It was wrong in 1979. And it was catastrophically wrong in 1988, when the regime, in the weeks following the ceasefire in the Iran-Iraq War, carried out the systematic execution of approximately 30,000 political prisoners—overwhelmingly members and supporters of the country's principal democratic opposition, the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK). Regimes do not commit a crime against humanity in a matter of weeks to eliminate a movement they consider irrelevant. The 1988 massacre was, in effect, the regime's own confession, written in mass graves, of which force it truly feared.

I have spent more than two decades studying that regime, have written books about it, briefed members of Congress on its internal dynamics, and met men and women of the Resistance whose courage profoundly humbled me—several of whom, I later learned, were murdered by the regime they opposed. I am, by profession, a scholar. But I am also a father. I do not write what follows from the safety of detached abstraction. I write because, by the spring of 2026, the widening gap between what is now known about Iran and what Western policy is willing to acknowledge, let alone act upon, has become morally and strategically intolerable.

Beginning in late March, the regime executed eight political prisoners—Vahid Bani-Amerian, Abolhassan Montazar, Mohammad Taghavi, Akbar Daneshvarkar, Babak Alipour, Pouya Ghobadi, Hamed Validi, and Mohammad (Nima) Massoum-Shahi—all condemned solely for their alleged membership in the PMOI. Their executions were intended not merely as punishment, but as a message: a warning to a restless society that resistance would be met with the gallows.

Yet the executions did not stop there.

On May 4, three young workers in Mashhad were hanged in connection with the December 2025 uprising. Two days earlier, in Urmia, two more young dissidents were executed following proceedings conducted by video conference—an almost grotesque parody of due process. On April 30, a 21-year-old karate champion from Isfahan was hanged after enduring severe torture in detention. And on May 12, a Baluchi dissident met the same fate.

Meanwhile, the regime's judiciary chief, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje'i, has openly instructed the judiciary to operate in what he called a "combat formation" against protesters and dissidents.

These are not the actions of a government confident in its legitimacy or secure in its hold on power.

They are the actions of a regime governed by fear—fear of its own people, fear of organized resistance, and fear of a society that is steadily losing its fear of the regime itself.

The international press is beginning, at long last, to catch up with realities the Iranian Resistance has articulated for decades. On April 23, 2026, The New York Times reported that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had effectively assumed collective governance of Iran. In May, The Atlantic dismantled the carefully cultivated public-relations façade surrounding the exile figure the regime appears most willing to tolerate: the son of the deposed Shah. Meanwhile, the leading Arabic daily, Asharq Al-Awsat, wrote that Tehran's long-standing policy of brinkmanship had "collapsed and lost its validity." Even the regime's own IRGC-affiliated Fars News Agency acknowledged that organized cells of five to ten individuals are leading protests across the country.

It is within this context that the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) will hold its Freedom March in Paris on June 20, 2026. More than 100,000 participants from sixty countries are expected to attend, joined by parliamentarians, jurists, former heads of state, and prominent international figures. They will gather around a singular and urgent proposition: that the international community must finally recognize the provisional government announced by the NCRI following the death of Ali Khamenei, grounded in Maryam Rajavi's Ten-Point Plan for a democratic republic.

I am familiar with the argument that will inevitably be advanced in response. It is the claim that the regime is simultaneously too weakened to endure and yet too entrenched to be replaced; that while the Islamic Republic is decaying, no organized democratic alternative exists. The first half of that argument offers comfort to those unwilling to act. The second half is demonstrably false.

The PMOI's network of Resistance Units has played a central role in each of the four nationwide uprisings since 2017. Between January and February 2026, that network evolved into a National Liberation Army, which carried out more than 630 documented operations. On February 23, five days before the first airstrikes, 250 PMOI fighters stormed the Pasteur Street complex in Tehran, housing the residence and offices of the Supreme Leader. They engaged a substantially larger defending force in a battle that lasted several hours before 150 of them successfully withdrawing.

We made that mistake once in 1979, and again in 1988: accepting the regime's narrative of its own permanence, inevitability, and invincibility. We mistook repression for stability and terror for durability. We convinced ourselves that no viable democratic alternative existed, and in doing so, we helped prolong one of the most brutal dictatorships of the modern era.

A third repetition would not be an error born of uncertainty or lack of evidence.

It would be a conscious choice.

The Freedom Rally in Paris on June 20, 2026, is many things: a gathering of conscience, a demonstration of solidarity, and a declaration that the Iranian people refuse to surrender their future to either religious fascism or the return of monarchy. But it is also something more consequential. It is a public test of whether the West is finally prepared to recognize reality: that an organized, resilient, democratic alternative to the ruling theocracy does exist, and has existed for decades.

The question before Western governments is no longer whether such an alternative exists.

The question is whether they are prepared to acknowledge it. That answer is long overdue.

And the Pentagon's largest untapped source of those materials is already sitting in its own warehouses.

The Pentagon has a multi-year backlog of classified electronics it can't destroy fast enough. It also has a critical minerals shortage it can't solve fast enough. The copper, gold, palladium, silver, and tin locked inside those warehoused devices are exactly the metals it's spending billions to source elsewhere. That elsewhere, increasingly, can't be China. Beginning January 1, 2027, the Pentagon can no longer enter contracts for materials mined, refined, or separated in China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea.

The Numbers Don't Work

The United States generates roughly eight million metric tons of e-waste every year, and the number is climbing. AI infrastructure is accelerating the cycle. Data centers replace server hardware every three to five years. Each generation of defense electronics contains more critical minerals than the last.

Only about 15 percent of U.S. e-waste gets recycled. And that figure hides a deeper problem. The printed circuit boards inside those devices, the components richest in strategic metals, are almost entirely exported overseas for processing. None of the recovered metals stay here without first leaving.

Washington isn't ignoring it. Project Vault, the administration's $12 billion critical minerals stockpile, is a serious commitment. The Department of Energy just opened a $500 million funding opportunity for domestic critical minerals recycling. There's talk of export restrictions on raw e-waste. But before we build a fence around these materials, we first need something inside it: the domestic capacity to process them onshore.

If an export ban went into effect tomorrow, we'd pile up a mountain of e-waste with no way to recover what's inside. That's the capability gap. New mines take a decade to permit. Traditional smelters cost a billion dollars and take seven to ten years to build. Neither delivers the batch-level traceability federal compliance now demands. The 2027 deadline will not wait.

A Faster Path Already Exists

A new generation of hydrometallurgical processing, including biosorption, can recover high-purity metals from end-of-life electronics at commercial scale without the footprint of a smelter. These facilities can be built in about 15 months for roughly $40 million each. They maintain full chain of custody from waste stream to refined metal. And the upstream supply chain already exists: some 900 certified e-waste recyclers operate across the country today. What's missing is the domestic processing capacity to keep those metals here.

This isn't theoretical. My company, Mint Innovation, proved the model last month when HP announced the PC industry's first certified closed-loop recycled copper. Copper recovered from HP's own end-of-life circuit boards, independently certified, placed back into new HP products. The same technology can close the loop for the Department of War. Add mobile destruction units that process classified hardware on site, feeding directly into domestic metal recovery with no offshore processing, and the result is full auditability from destruction to refined metal.

When I testified before Congress on this issue, not a single member pushed back on the diagnosis. This is one of those rare problems that doesn't break along party lines. The FY 2026 NDAA recognized the potential of recycled-material pathways by expanding exceptions within DFARS sourcing restrictions. Congress has opened the door. The Pentagon needs to walk through it.

A Framework Is Already in Place

The United States doesn't have to do this alone. The State Department's Pax Silica initiative and the February 2026 Critical Minerals Ministerial established a framework for allied cooperation with Japan, Australia, the U.K., South Korea, and others. Five Eyes nations are already coordinating to counter Chinese price manipulation and build friendshored supply chains. Domestic e-waste processing fits squarely into that strategy. A modular biosorption facility built in the U.S. today becomes a template Pax Silica partners can replicate tomorrow.

Modular secure destruction facilities co-located on military installations could clear classified hardware backlogs and recover critical minerals simultaneously. A security liability becomes a strategic asset.

The fastest way to build a domestic critical minerals supply chain is to recover the metals already here. The Pentagon is sitting on both the problem and the solution.

Matt Bedingfield is President of Mint Innovation, a recycling technology company that recovers critical minerals from electronic waste using proprietary biosorption and hydrometallurgical processing. Mint partnered with HP earlier this year to produce the PC industry's first certified closed-loop recycled copper.

Universities across the country are facing unprecedented government scrutiny of everything from the rise of antisemitism to the lack of viewpoint diversity in the left-leaning social sciences. Nowhere is the ideological battle over higher education more contentious and consequential than in Florida, home to the second-largest university system in the country.

Florida's crusade against progressivism has been more methodical and aggressive than anywhere else. Beyond setting up a civics program focusing on Western traditions, a trend in many other Republican-dominated states, Florida has launched what critics consider a frontal assault on another tradition - academic freedom - the idea that professors are the experts who determine course content.

Over the last year, state officials, armed with a content ban passed by the legislature, have purged hundreds, if not a thousand, general education courses on topics like gender, women, and race at Florida's 40 public universities and colleges. And they are planning to target the field of history next.

The ban includes a highly unusual post-tenure performance review, putting veteran faculty on notice that they can be sanctioned, and even terminated, for violating the sweeping ban. Last year, for instance, a professor was suspended simply for talking about gender in class.

Florida's move against the discipline of sociology has stirred the most ideological acrimony and dissent, with hot rhetoric flying both ways. A former education commissioner posted on X that sociology has been "hijacked by left-wing activists." Sociologists, who aren't going down without a fight, counter that the state is censoring their core concepts, such as the prevalence of systemic racism, that challenge the rosy view of America that conservatives embrace. "This maneuver to control what is allowed to be said is fascist," University of Florida Sociologist Evan Lauteria told RealClearInvestigations.

What's hard to find in all the discord is any attempt to find common ground, a place where thinkers on the left, right, and center engage each other's viewpoints, and even learn from each other. In principle, academics and state officials would agree that clashing opinions on campus are essential in the search for knowledge - the main purpose of a research university.

But in Florida, nobody's talking about ways to create more viewpoint diversity on its campuses, despite such efforts at schools like Yale. Instead, conservative leaders are replacing one type of politics with their own, while the faculty tries to preserve what it can of their crumbling academic disciplines.

Other Republican states are following Florida's lead, reflecting the deep partisan divisions throughout the nation. In Texas, a new law last year prompted university boards to review thousands of general education classes and cancel those that focused on gender and race. Two years ago, Tennessee banned the teaching of a long list of "divisive concepts," including that the U.S. is racist. Indiana hasn't gone that far in requiring faculty to practice intellectual diversity.

University of Pennsylvania's Melissa Wilde, who is running for president of the American Sociological Association, is one of a growing number of academics trying to find that common ground. Wilde is no fan of the heavy-handed government crackdown in Florida. But she also says her field of sociology, with its well-documented progressive bent, has to change to save itself by returning to its traditional role of open-minded and high-quality research.

"If our job is to explain the social world, we need to engage all potential explanations including those deemed conservative. That's just good social science," Wilde said. "This might be able to happen naturally if the discipline can be less political."

'Positively Dystopian'

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' upheaval of higher education began with the passage of SB 266. It was introduced by Florida state Sen. Erin Grall, one of several conservative Christians involved in the crackdown on academic content they believe is at odds with their religious beliefs. The 2023 law prohibits general education courses from focusing on identity politics and theories that say systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in institutions that aim to maintain inequities.

The law's narrow focus on the general education courses students are required to take was a strategic move to avoid the legal roadblocks that derailed the earlier Stop Woke Act. That act's scope was much broader, banning faculty from endorsing ideas the state deemed "woke" in all classes, including electives, and was rejected by a federal judge as "positively dystopian" and unconstitutional. But Florida believes it has the right to decide the content of general education classes based on state standards, and doing so doesn't infringe on free speech because professors can express their views in elective courses.

A group of Florida faculty challenged that view in a lawsuit, but have been stymied so far by a failure to show they have been harmed by the ban - a problem that a subsequent lawsuit will address, according to Robert Cassanello, president of United Faculty of Florida and a plaintiff in the earlier Stop Woke Act case.

"I teach history and I'm the person who determines the curriculum because I'm the content expert," said Cassanello. "So now the lawmakers say this is how I should teach history even though they are not professional historians. This is absurd."

To refocus general education within conservative lines, DeSantis tapped Scott Yenor at the Claremont Institute, a think tank that seeks to "undermine the Left's hold over America's institutions." Yenor said he assisted officials in scratching hundreds of general education courses on campuses across the state. Students can no longer earn required general education credits by taking courses on Native and African Americans, black women, feminism, the sociology of gender, race, LGBTQ history, and more - classes that raise questions of oppression and justice. Enrollment in them as electives will likely plummet. The remaining general education classes in Western civilization and literature, U.S. history, philosophy, economics, religion, and the Bible provide a more harmonious, if idealized, view of the American experience.

In early 2025, the Florida Board of Governors added more conservative firepower, appointing Jason Jewell, a former humanities chair at a small private religious college and a devout Christian, as its first chief academic officer. Jewell has written that conservatives have mistakenly ceded the humanities to the left, allowing it to "shape society's moral vision."

"We're going to avoid teaching students that everything in society is based on conflict and oppression," Jewell said in an interview. "This critical theory immersed pedagogy is rejected by a super majority of Floridians. I think that will help to alleviate some of the mistrust in our institutions."

Targeting Sociology

The board, with Jewell's help, has taken a particular interest in sociology, perhaps the most politically activist discipline. The state crackdown laid bare sociology's longstanding internal divide between the vocal activist wing and the quieter empirical wing - a few hundred of whom gather at the Heterodox Academy to promote viewpoint diversity and publish criticism of their field in the journal Theory and Society.

The split in sociology goes back a century to Max Weber, a founding father, who warned his peers of the dangers of activism, urging academics to teach from "the lectern, not the pulpit." That admonition has been carried forward by prominent sociologists like Christian Smith. He noted in 2014 that most of his colleagues are too dedicated to ending inequality and oppression to consider critical voices and honest debate over the worthiness of what Smith called their "sacred project."

Today, empiricists are taking aim at sociology's body of research. Oxford Ph.D. student James Manzi used AI to examine 600,000 social science papers and found that 90% "leaned left," with sociology among the most tilted of disciplines and economics the least of all.

An example of that tilt is the near sociological consensus that systemic racism continues to be the prominent cause of racial disparities in society. Evidence gathered over decades suggesting other causal factors of inequality, such as attitudes toward education and single parenthood, is downplayed or dismissed as blaming the victim, wrote Sociologist John Iceland at Penn State.

"Sociologists shy away from engaging in that discussion," Iceland said. "It's so contentious, and when it has been raised in the past, often it's been met with hostility."

Sociologist Jukka Savolainen at Wayne State University in Detroit argues that the "left-wing skew" in his field is connected to a low level of research integrity compared with political science and economics. Sociologists are much less likely to share their data and computer code so other scholars can replicate their findings, and they also fall short in using robust research techniques, such as randomized field experiments, to add credibility to their causal claims, according to Savolainen's paper.

"Sociology has so much potential to improve our understanding of crime, families and society, but the research has been narrowed into grievance advocacy," said Savolainen, who calls himself a lifelong Democrat.

Lauteria at the University of Florida defends the practice of sociology today. If there is a slant in the discipline, he says, it's because objective research findings support a left-leaning agenda. The existence of systemic racism is one such finding, supported by research on the differences in callbacks between white and black job applicants and other studies. Conservatives are attacking sociology, he says, because it undercuts their ideology that everyone is free to choose their own path.

"Sociology feels like a threat to the folks in power in Florida because their myopic, individualistic worldview is quite counter to the belief that a society even exists in the first place," he said.

Some sociologists, like Florida International University's Matthew Marr, get directly involved in advocacy work. Marr, who believes that social forces rather than personal choices are the primary cause of today's homeless crisis, co-founded the advocacy group Miami Coalition to Advance Racial Equity. His recent study, funded by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, concludes with a call for more government spending on subsidized permanent housing rather than temporary shelters - a policy supported by the funder. He based his policy recommendation on interviews with an unrepresentative sample of only 20 homeless people, a non-rigorous approach that Marr defends as valid.

"That policy recommendation is also rooted in decades of research across populations that have found a similar finding, Marr said in an interview. "Nobody can be completely objective but you do try to hold your biases aside and look for counter evidence to your arguments."

Textbook Struggle

Florida's squeeze on sociology gained steam last year when a Board of Governors review determined that all the textbooks used in the state for the introductory course violated the content ban. In an attempt to find common ground, a work group was set up with four state officials and four Florida sociologists to produce a textbook and curriculum framework acceptable to both sides. Never before had a state taken such a direct role in producing teaching materials in higher education.

The sociologists began with an open-source textbook that contained a progressive slant and cut out more than half the pages, including five entire chapters. The edited book needed the stamp of approval of the state officials in the group, including Jewell and Jose Arevalo, also a former academic with a conservative Christian pedigree from Hillsdale College.

"The faculty came up with all the content and we just went over it and said, 'Yeah, we think this might be a problem, this is fine,'" said Jewell.

The radically different treatment of racism in the two textbooks is indicative of the ideological shift in the content covering gender, sex, and other banned topics.

In the original textbook, the word "racism" appears 115 times. Students learn that racism is "prevalent," embedded in institutions such as law enforcement and schools, and is the main driver of inequality. There's no mention of the economic progress of black Americans over the decades. It's a story of unending oppression.

In the edited version, racism in America essentially doesn't exist anymore. The word is mentioned five times in connection with historical wrongs, the elderly, and environmental damage to communities.

Work group sociologist Dawn Carr, who has expressed concern about her field's activist bent, called the attempt to thread the needle between the warring ideological camps "the most unpleasant task I've ever had to take on in my entire career."

The effort at compromise eventually blew up. Faculty protests were loudest at Florida International University, whose president, Jeanette Nunez, a Christian conservative and DeSantis appointee, required sociologists to use the textbook and framework. In January, FIU sociologists voted unanimously to denounce the state-approved materials for omitting core concepts in the field, like systemic racism, and violating academic freedom.

Across the state, however, most faculty have kept quiet, hoping the conflict would blow over rather than risk retaliation by pushing back. But officials said they heard enough dissent to conclude that many sociologists would never comply with the ban. So a few months ago, they eliminated introductory sociology as a general education course across all 12 universities and 28 colleges.

"My position is that they are trying to get rid of the discipline altogether, so why give in to the state," said FIU sociologist Zachary Levenson. "We have no reason to believe that this is the only thing that they want."

This is bad news for sociology, a discipline that's already declining faster - 20% in the last decade - than other social sciences, according to federal data on bachelor's degrees. Without the benefit of receiving general education credits, students will be less likely to take the introductory course, which is the primary way they discover the discipline. "The concern is that we are expecting to see a drop in majors and minors," Lauteria said.

Appetite for Reform?

In an attempt to rescue sociology, the empirical faction is calling for reform, urging their peers to open the field to more conservative voices. Levenson, an award-winning ethnographer who focuses on race and class in postcolonial democracies, says he would like to see more conservatives in the discipline, where the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is 44 to one. There are no conservative sociologists at FIU, Levenson says, because they don't apply for low-paying academic jobs at public universities.

Whether there's a real appetite for reform in sociology will be revealed later this week in the election for president of the American Sociological Association. Wilde of Penn, the reform candidate, has been on a nationwide "listening tour" of sociologists and found many professors who are frustrated with the field's activism, underscored by ASA's long history of issuing political pronouncements. The issue boiled over when the "Sociologists for Palestine" won a vote forcing ASA to issue a statement in 2024 condemning the war in Gaza and the evidence of genocide, contributing to the resignation of 500 members. ASA did reject the group's campaign this year to boycott Israeli academic institutions.

If Wilde wins the presidency, she aims to put an end to ASA's political activism as a first step in revamping the field. "This needs to stop," she said. "We are hurting ourselves. Our job is to gather data to show trends, and if that's useful for certain causes, great. But we are not activists. We are social scientists."

Key facts: The top recommendation is for Medicare to stop paying higher rates based on where a medical procedure is performed. Currently, Medicare pays more for operations in a hospital than the exact same procedure in a doctor's office. Equalizing the rates would save almost $16 billion per year, the GAO estimates.

The GAO also wants Medicare to change how it reimburses hospitals for drugs. Hospitals can make a profit when prescribing medicine to Medicare patients because the government often reimburses the hospital more than the actual cost of the drug. That incentivizes hospitals to prescribe more drugs than necessary. Changing the system would save "tens of billions," according to the GAO.

Waste of the Day 5.20.26

Open the Books

Medicare is projected to be underfunded by $60.4 trillion over the next 75 years.

Much of the report focuses on duplication: instances where the government pays for nearly identical services several times.

The military has "23 cybersecurity service providers who are largely conducting the same activities and functions," according to the report. Different departments of the Internal Revenue Service are buying identical AI software. Several agencies like the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Agriculture are working to expand internet access in low-income and rural areas, but they are not coordinating their efforts.

The report also asks the White House to assemble a comprehensive list of all federal programs, which has been required since 2011 but still does not exist. Even the Federal Register, which is supposed to list active government agencies, included 75 defunct agencies as of January 2025. Hundreds of "zombie programs" also continue to receive funding even though their legal authorization has expired.

The GAO has been releasing its annual report for 16 years. Congress has fully or partially accepted 77% of its recommendations. The GAO estimates that it has saved taxpayers $774.3 billion, including almost $50 billion last year.

Search all federal, state and local salaries and vendor spending with the world's largest government spending database at OpenTheBooks.com.

Summary: The GAO's annual report is one of the government's most valuable tools for reducing wasteful spending, and it's imperative that at least most of its recommendations are adopted.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com

The main reason for the Asia-First strategy has been the cost — after twenty years of GWOT "scheduled wars" in the Middle East and Afghanistan, which failed to achieve their goals and for which the U.S. taxpayer paid some eight trillion dollars, no administration had been willing to increase defense spending to the necessary level until the Trump administration's recent request for a $1.5 trillion defense budget for FY2027.[i] This left the U.S. military dangerously underfunded in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, while the "just-in-time" weapons and munitions production schedules drained the Joint Force of the magazine depth and redundancies needed to fight a peer adversary. In effect, the 'pivot' became a substitute for the resource commitments required to sustain credible deterrence in both key theaters simultaneously. It is ironic that only after depleting munitions during the campaign against Iran, we are finally talking about a defense budget large enough for the task.

Worse still, the Trump administration decided to dismiss European NATO allies as supposedly unable to contribute to America's defense, bluntly criticizing them even as - under pressure from Donald Trump - they finally started allocating significant funds to rearmament. All this was happening while the U.S. bases in Europe supported direct power projection into the Persian Gulf, and access to U.S. stocks in Europe facilitated the operation. Granted, some allies, especially Spain, acted poorly by refusing the U.S. use of their airspace; however, overall, Europe has remained what it has been since 1945: the United States' indispensable strategic platform across the Atlantic.

Alliances have always been U.S. force multipliers—essential advantages over our adversaries. Publicly dismissing and insulting our NATO allies benefits no one and only shows reckless hostility toward Europe among some critics. Similarly, efforts to reset relations with Moscow stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of Russia's geopolitics, its historical strategic culture and longstanding imperial outlook. The idea that the United States can negotiate a sphere-of-influence agreement with Russia in Europe, or even steer Russia away from China, reflects a poor understanding of Russia among those advising the president on strategy and security policy. Strategic policy grounded in personal diplomacy rather than structural realities rarely endures. Pursuing a dismissive strategy towards Europe is a sure way for America to lose its foothold in the Atlantic, which, for 80 years, has enabled it to project power, access the world's resources, defend the homeland, and protect its economic interests.

There is a reason why each administration since 1945 has relied on Europe as the foundation for projecting power globally. Every dollar spent helping Europe defend itself imposes a disproportionate cost on Russia while strengthening America's main alliance system. It also limits China's ability to gain economic influence on the continent. Similarly, supporting Ukraine, reinforcing NATO's Nordic/Baltic Northeast Corridor, and expanding European defense production weaken an adversary at relatively low U.S. risk. In contrast, in the Pacific, deterrence demands substantial forward investments in ships, missiles, bases, and logistics where allied political cohesion and operational integration remain less mature than in NATO. The cost-imposition dynamic in the Pacific has always been less favorable, and the payoffs have always been more long-term.

Despite all the talk about the U.S. shifting focus to Asia, traditional geopolitics still holds true. Europe continues to be the largest center of advanced industrial economies outside North America. It is strategically located along sea lanes and air routes linking the United States to the rest of the world. The Atlantic remains the shortest and most reliable route between the U.S. and its main allies. During both world wars and the Cold War, American strategists understood an important fact: a hostile power controlling Europe would have the industrial capacity, population, and geographic advantage to threaten the United States directly. This strategic logic shaped U.S. involvement in World War I, the "Germany First" strategy during World War II, and the establishment of NATO and forward bases after 1945.

That logic applies once again. A revanchist Russia, supported by China, Iran, and North Korea, is trying to reshape the European security order by force. If Moscow succeeds in coercing or dividing Europe's eastern flank, the consequences will go far beyond Ukraine or the Baltics. They would mark the first successful break-up of the post-1945 security system and send a global warning that American guarantees are no longer reliable, or even meaningful. The Pacific involves a maritime struggle over vast distances, while Europe faces a land-based conflict near Atlantic routes. The latter has more immediate implications for defending the American homeland.

It's time to refocus America's strategic discussion on core geostrategic principles and recognize the importance of the NATO alliance. While Europe's political leaders can often be frustratingly slow and inefficient in decision-making, and prevailing European political orthodoxies may sometimes clash with American sensitivities, the reality is that both sides of the Atlantic rely on each other. The U.S. remains more effective at a lower cost when fully engaged with Europe through NATO, and the same holds true for Europe. It's time to move beyond the "pivot debate." No rhetorical reframing can eliminate the resource requirements necessary to defend U.S. interests globally because adversaries retain agency regardless of American strategic preferences. The Atlantic and the Pacific are not separate theaters; for a naval power like the United States, they are one and the same challenge. It's time for our foreign policy experts and decision-makers in Washington to recognize that.

Andrew A. Michta is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Hamilton School at the University of Florida, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The views expressed here are his own.

Image: U.S. Soldiers assigned to 1st Squadron, 2nd Cavalry Regiment, pose for a picture after the completion of a dry-fire exercise during Saber Strike May 7, 2026, in Bemowo Piskie, Poland. From April 27 to May 31, 2026, U.S. and Allied forces will exercise the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative, demonstrating NATO's ability to fight and win on the modern battlefield. Nearly 15,000 troops from eleven nations will train across the High North, Baltic region, and Poland. They will execute rapid maneuvers, air defense, counter-drone operations, and cyber defense to validate NATO's regional defense plans in real time. This series of linked exercises includes Saber Strike, Immediate Response, and Swift Response. The exercises turn investment into capability. Soldiers integrate unmanned systems such as AI-enabled command and control and live data networks to move, decide, and fight more effectively across all domains. Sword 26 demonstrates how U.S. Army Europe and Africa drives transformation at scale while strengthening deterrence. Together with our allies, we are building a unified, lethal force ready to defend NATO territory and respond to any threat. (U.S. Army Reserve photo by Sgt. Shaun R. Rajasekar)

Note:

[i] $1.5 Trillion Budget Request Prioritizes Service Members, Modernization > U.S. Department of War > Defense Department News | U.S. Department of War

Although much can change before November and a great deal depends on the resolution of the Iran War, as matters now stand, conventional wisdom and early polling have it that Republicans will lose a significant number of seats and their slim House majority in the midterm.

Substantial in-party midterm losses are the rule (averaging 21 seats in recent midterms), but there are exceptions. In three of the 28 post-1912 midterms, the president's party actually gained some seats (fewer than 10) and in another five the losses were minor (also fewer than 10).

The rare seat-gain midterms are Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal realignment midterm of 1934 with a soaring Depression-recovery economy (GDP up 10.8% in 1934), Bill Clinton's post-impeachment midterm in 1998 (with GDP up 4.5%) and George W. Bush's 2002 midterm a year after 9/11. More on the 1934 midterm later.

The five midterms with minor losses for the president's party are Calvin Coolidge's 1926 midterm with big tax cuts and a booming economy (GDP up 5.9%); John F. Kennedy's 1962 midterm in the wake of the October Cuban missile crisis plus a booming economy (GDP up 6.1%); Ronald Reagan's 1986 post-stagflation midterm; George H.W. Bush's foreign affairs-dominated 1990 midterm (the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain); and Joe Biden's weakened "red wave" midterm of 2022.

One thread runs through seven of these eight midterms: The incumbent presidents were very popular. The two earliest (1926 and 1934) took place before presidential approval polling, but each was preceded by and followed by presidential landslides. In the other five exceptional midterms, pre-election presidential ratings were uncommonly high, ranging from 58% for G.H.W. Bush in 1990 to 66% for Clinton in 1998.

The one outlier is 2022. At his 2022 midterm, Biden's approval rating in Gallup stood at only 40%. Despite being nearly 20 points short of presidential standings in all seven previous "good midterms," Democrats with Biden at the helm lost only nine seats in what had been widely anticipated to be a big Republican year. More on this later.

Midterm history's forecast is crystal clear: If 2026 is normal, Democrats will retake the House.

But the "if" raises three central questions:

1. Are there plausible reasons to think the 2026 midterm election might not be normal, that the electorate might be realigning in its partisanship?
2. If the public is indeed primed for a realignment, how might President Trump best campaign to turn the public's inclination into seats?
3. Are there other reasons why 2026 might not be a normal midterm?

Two Studies

These questions brought to mind a pair of studies I made of two of the unusual midterms. The first is from 45 years ago in 1981. Its purpose was to learn what made FDR's approach to his 1934 midterm so successful and what lessons might be drawn from that for President Reagan's 1982 midterm.

The second is my 2023 study of how Democrats fended off the anticipated "red wave" in Biden's 2022 midterm.

Though written 42 years apart about midterms 88 years apart, both provide perspectives President Trump and the Republicans might find useful this year.

The particulars of the who (the seven presidents and the House Speaker) and the when (the five midterms and the three realignments) from the subtitle are identified here.

Study #1: 1934

In the summer of 1981, at the end of my first year as an assistant professor at the University of Georgia, I was approached by the Republican National Committee on behalf of Rep. Newt Gingrich to conduct a study potentially useful to President Reagan and the Republican Party going into the 1982 midterm. Anticipating the nation might be realigning after Reagan's 1980 victory, Gingrich asked me to study how Franklin Roosevelt campaigned in 1934, his first midterm in the iconic New Deal realignment. The reasoning was that what worked for FDR in 1934 might guide how Reagan should campaign in 1982, possibly another realigning period.

There were good reasons in 1981 to suspect conditions were ripe for a Republican realignment. The Democratic Party by the 1970s was in disarray. Political scientists as well as journalists wrote extensively about the de-alignment or decomposition of the New Deal party system. In "The Party's Over," esteemed political analyst David Broder in 1971 observed, "We are in the stage of the political cycle where party realignment is overdue."

A decade later, with a push from Jimmy Carter's failed presidency, many thought a realignment was finally on the horizon.

And it was - only at another decade's distance. Long-held Democratic Party loyalties took time for Republicans to overcome, particularly in the solid South. The staggered, national realignment to partisan parity wasn't completed until Clinton's 1994 midterm when southern Republicans finally broke through (and Gingrich became Speaker of the House).

From 1934 to 1982 to 2026?

Political conditions facing Reagan's Republicans in 1982 had much in common with those of Roosevelt's Democrats in 1934. And both have a good deal in common with conditions facing Trump and the GOP this year - though extreme party polarization accompanied by a deep-seated antipathy toward President Trump (in parts of the public and much of the legacy press) may be impediments of a different sort.

To the basic similarities: Each presidential party confronted an aging party system; a significant number of independents (or new voters) and disgruntled partisans in the opposition party; an unpopular predecessor leaving office with many serious national problems; and a new president with a strong active agenda addressing - though not yet completely solving - those inherited problems.

FDR had Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression. Reagan had Jimmy Carter with the Iranian hostage crisis, an energy crisis, and sky-high inflation and interest rates. Trump has Joe Biden with a long list of crises including high inflation, massive illegal immigration, growth-stifling energy policies, large-scale government waste and fraud, a weaponized bureaucracy, and foreign policy problems ranging from Iran's unchecked nuclear program and its sponsorship of terrorism to the Russia-Ukraine war.

And there are some indications the public may be primed for a populist-conservative realignment. Sociologically, though the college-educated, particularly women, are increasingly aligned with the Democrats, working and middle class voters and an increasing number of minority voters are moving toward the Republicans. This is likely a net gain for Republicans.

In terms of issues, on one 80-20 issue after another - controlling the border, reducing taxes, keeping men out of women's spaces, merit-based non-DEI standards, incarcerating violent criminals, voter ID, rooting out fraud and waste in government programs, and even opposing socialism - Democrats have grabbed the short end of the stick (see here, here, and here).

Ideological voting trends also favor Republicans. Democrats have increasingly become dependent on votes from the left. In the 1990s, they drew about a third of their vote from liberals. That increased by about 10 points since Obama. As a result, the party has moved significantly leftward. The caucus of moderate Democratic senators these days meets when Sen. Fetterman has lunch alone in his office.

In a highly polarized electorate historically tilted to conservatives (by 12 points in 2024), a party run by and for a 25% liberal minority is at a disadvantage. According to Gallup, among the "record-high 45% of U.S. adults identified as political independents," about twice as many are conservatively rather than liberally inclined (47% to 24%). Even a large majority of moderate Democrats (62% in Gallup) think their party has gone too far to the left.

Sadly, a wide patriotism gap has also emerged. A decade ago, 90% of Republicans and 80% of Democrats told Gallup they were proud to be Americans. In 2025, that 10-point difference ballooned to 56 points (92% of Republicans to 36% of Democrats) (here and here).

The Democratic Party isn't your parent's big-tent, center-left New Deal coalition anymore, and that should raise the Republican Party's prospects.

But, as 1982 demonstrated, prospects in a midterm are one thing and bringing them to fruition is another. The study of 1934 may provide some clues about making the 2026 potential a reality.

Lessons From 1934

In revisiting my 1981 report to Gingrich and the RNC, three lessons for 2026 suggest themselves.

Lesson 1

Franklin Roosevelt's overarching perspective for 1934 was that the midterm should be about national unity and optimism in the recovery. The focus should be on the New Deal's practical, commonsense actions and its real progress in making the lives of average Americans better, and that continuing support for further progress was vital. Divisiveness and overt partisanship were to be avoided.

FDR was committed to the high ground - making a simple, positive, and vigorous case for the New Deal. Roosevelt instructed his campaign to communicate the administration's dedication to "public and not party service."

His determination to rise above partisan politics went so far as declining invitations to the annual Jefferson Day state party dinners because of any partisan appearance. "Much as we love Thomas Jefferson," FDR wrote to Col. Edward House, "we should not celebrate him in a partisan way."

FDR's two Fireside Chats in 1934 were to the point: "Are You Better Off Than You Were Last Year?" and "We Are Moving Forward to Greater Freedom, to Greater Security for the Average Man." In the first, he stated, "I believe in practical explanations and practical policies. I believe that what we are doing today is a necessary fulfillment of what Americans have always been doing - a fulfillment of old and tested American ideals." The New Deal was presented as guided by traditional American values applied with common sense, not by the divisive ideology of elites.

How might this now guide President Trump and Republicans? Although our extreme polarization, the opposition and legacy media's visceral hostility to the president, and Trump's personal combativeness make this difficult, Republicans should try as much as possible to keep the campaign simple, optimistic, practical and unifying - contrasting the two parties' records in solving the nation's problems.

President Trump's 2026 State of the Union speech, for instance, followed FDR's rule at many points, but the most memorable, simple and important contrast between the parties came when he asked congressional Democrats to stand up for a fundamental American political principle: "The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens."

Democrats remained seated.

To drive home to everyone the inclusiveness of its populist, nationalist conservatism and its contrast to the Democrats' divisive, identity-politics progressivism, the president might think about adding a simple phrase to his motto: Make America Great Again for All Americans.

Lesson 2

Opposition to the New Deal took two different directions in the midterm: the loyal opposition and resistance of the Old Guard. Loyal opposition Republicans - those trying to be moderate and constructive - fared best. The Old Guard resistance was harshly partisan and unconstructive. It fared poorly.

Although well short of the unrelenting hate directed at Trump, the opposition to FDR could also be unhinged. FDR was called "un-American," "a fascist," "a dictator," "fostering revolution under the guise of recovery and reform," and governing based on "the Russian model." The chairman of the Republican National Committee compared FDR to Mussolini and Hitler and likened him to a king (imagine that).

And, as he mentioned in his first fireside chat of 1934, FDR even took heat for "a long-needed renovation and addition to our White House." Turns out critics of Trump's ballroom construction have political ancestors, "prophets of calamity" as FDR called them.

On more weighty matters, FDR was delighted by his opposition's overreach. When he read "a bitter partisan attack" issued by the RNC, he wrote that "in that kind of foolishness lies our strength."

The lesson is simple: a militant opposition makes the contrast for voters sharp and the choice clear. One side is about solving the nation's problems; the other is about partisan obstruction.

As clear as this lesson is, it's also clear it's lost on Democrats. Their bitter anti-Trump reflex is ingrained. From shutting down the government to frequent impeachments to consistently taking the short side of 80-20 issues, Democrats haven't given normal moderate independents any positive reasons to vote for them.

Lesson 3

In looking back at the 1934 study, I was struck by how frequently Thomas Jefferson was referenced with great reverence by FDR and other Democrats. James Farley, for instance, observed "the New Deal is a 20^th century model of Jefferson's principles of government." The New Deal "in its broad outlines," as a young Hubert Humphrey put it in his 1940 master's thesis at LSU, "is essentially Jeffersonian.

Prior to and after 1934, FDR spoke at numerous Jefferson Day dinners held by state Democratic Parties. Not in an off-hand way, he told a 1940 gathering that "Thomas Jefferson is a hero to me." In 1935, FDR established the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis to commemorate the Louisiana Purchase, and he named Florida's Fort Jefferson a National Monument. And throughout his presidency, FDR was deeply involved in the construction of the Jefferson Memorial - from its inception in 1934 to the ground-breaking in 1938 to its dedication in 1943.

No political figure, in thought or by action, was more admired by Democrats than Thomas Jefferson. FDR leads the list of admirers, but the list is long, over many generations and not just among the party's elites at their traditional Jefferson Day unity dinners (later merged into Jefferson-Jackson Day events), but within the American public - honored from Mount Rushmore to the nickel (not coincidentally, first minted in 1938 during FDR's second term).

This veneration ended when Democrats veered into the cancel-culture abyss of the 2010s, ostensibly over the issue of slavery.

One state Democratic Party after another (including Virginia) removed Jefferson's name from its annual dinner. They did so despite the historical context (a majority of pre-Civil War presidents, including George Washington, owned slaves) and despite Jefferson's efforts to abolish slavery, prevent its expansion, and end the international slave trade (see here).

The principal author of our Declaration of Independence, our third president, a man lionized by the Democratic Party's giants from FDR to Harry Truman to JFK to Hubert Humphrey to Bill Clinton was now deemed not virtuous enough to have a dinner named in his honor. Essentially, Democrats orphaned Jefferson.

President Trump and the Republican Party have an opportunity to set things right. Republicans should adopt the orphaned Jefferson. FDR actually anticipated something of this sort when he said "I think of Jefferson as belonging to the rank and file of both major political parties today."

This adoption ought to be declared concretely by naming the new White House ballroom in his honor: The Jefferson Ballroom.

Seven reasons for this come to mind.

1. Most importantly, in celebrating the 250^th year of our nation, it is fitting to honor Jefferson as the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. For this, but in many other ways as well, Jefferson deserves to be honored as an American hero.
2. Following the first lesson, honoring Jefferson would be unifying for reasonable and proud Americans. Jefferson himself called for unity in the nation and between the two major parties (as they were named in his day) in his first inaugural address: "We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists."
3. Following the second lesson, it would put radical Democrats in a self-created awkward position. If they approve, they would be committing the leftist sin of approving President Trump's action. If they disapprove, they highlight their extremism.
4. Jefferson's political principles are fully embraced by today's Republicans - the conservative principle that the best government is the least necessary government, the populist focus that government should serve average Americans, the core value of free speech, and a commitment to strong American nationalism.
5. Like President Trump, President Jefferson used his presidential powers boldly and sometimes unconventionally in the nation's interests (see the Louisiana Purchase, the First Barbary War against pirates in the Mediterranean, and pardoning victims of President Adams' Sedition Act).
6. It would be a wholly appropriate and gracious gesture by President Trump. (See, he doesn't name everything after himself.)
7. Naming the ballroom in Jefferson's honor might make it more difficult for an intemperate successor president to tear the ballroom down.

Study #2: 2022

The second study is of Biden's anomalous 2022 midterm (here). In the run up to that election, all signs - including President Biden's weak approval ratings - pointed to substantial Republican gains, "a red wave." Yet the anticipated red wave hit shore as a weak ripple. Democrats over-performed by quite a bit, losing only nine House seats. This was a mysterious November surprise, a highly unusual midterm.

The study's goal was to solve this mystery. Unlike conventional, poll-centric studies narrowly based on post-election exit polls, my more comprehensive study examined a very broad range of evidence (including polls, expert race-ratings, election laws, campaign spending, turnout, election forecasts, etc.), the state and district distribution of those factors, their changes over the course of the campaign, and comparisons to previous elections, always focused on solving the mystery.

So what happened to the red wave?

First, what didn't happen. Democrats didn't fare better than expected because voters changed their minds about them. There was no epiphany. The election was not decided by the will of the people, either a repudiation of the Republicans or a vindication of the Democrats. Democrats over-performed all indications of the public's verdict, even those on the eve of the election.

November's surprising Republican shortfall was the result of lax absentee mail-in-voting election laws and rules in states with politically competitive races combined with the Democratic Party's well-financed campaigns and vote mobilization organizations in those states. The anomaly of 2022 was a consequence of what amounts to 21^st-century Democratic Party machine politics coupled with the Republican Party's failure to prevent it or counter it.

Two Lessons From the 2022 Midterm

The first lesson is that if Republicans are to prevent another unusual midterm in which Democrats over-perform their standing with the public, they must reform the election system to make it less dependent on campaign spending and vote mobilization organizations. Democratic elections should reflect the will of voting-eligible adult American citizens, not how much the parties spend to round up votes or how they otherwise configure election rules to their benefit.

The SAVE Act requiring proof of citizenship to register and a valid photo ID to vote would be a good start and should help restore greater confidence in elections. Despite protestations, these SAVE Act reforms are not new. Two recommendations of the bipartisan Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform's "Building Confidence in U.S. Elections" report in 2005 were that states "obtain proof of citizenship before registering voters" (recommendation 2.5.2) and "ensure that persons presenting themselves at the polling place are the ones on the registration list" (recommendation 2.5.1). In short, the SAVE Act.

Despite this distinguished bipartisan pedigree, these reforms proposed 21 years ago and widely accepted by other Western democracies are now oddly controversial. They are denounced by Democrats and their allied media (here, here, and here). Sen. Schumer denigrated them as "Jim Crow 2.0."

This long overdue important election integrity legislation, now blocked by the threat of a Senate filibuster, should become law whether by reconciliation, by compromise (perhaps the government could be proactive in securing birth certificates or naturalization papers), or by changing Senate rules to reduce the number of votes needed for cloture, while preserving the filibuster - as the Senate did in 1975.

Beyond the SAVE Act and based on the 2022 study, two additional reforms could make our elections less susceptible to political money and machine politics: shortening the duration of early absentee voting and increasing absentee-ballot and drop-box security. For most of our history, Election Day meant exactly that - a day. Voting was entirely in person, except for requested absentee balloting. Several states now allow voting for over a month before Election Day, and some use entirely mail-in balloting. Such long voting periods with no-excuse absentee balloting unintentionally serve party mischief and weaken confidence in elections more than they intentionally serve voter convenience.

The second lesson of 2022 is that whatever election rules are finally adopted and whatever they permit, Republicans should not be caught flat-footed again. Republicans should be prepared (targeted money and organization) to counteract the use of the rules by the Democrats. If they don't, they run the risk of Democrats again over-performing their standing with the public.

Joining the Two Studies

Elections are won or lost on two fronts: substance and process. Substance refers to the will of the electorate. Process refers to election laws and rules and how effectively the candidates and parties use them. The 1934 study focused on election substance and the 2022 study on the process. Ideally, election outcomes should reflect as purely as possible the will of the people, the substance. But in practice, both matter. If a party wins or loses a seat on either front, it counts the same.

What are the current process and substance outlooks?

On the process front, the Democrats continue to hold the advantage. The "red wave" of public opinion in 2022 was overridden by election rules amplifying the Democrats' big money and organizational advantages. Four years later, not much has changed. Democrats racked up a string of victories in odd-year and special elections - where highly focused process advantages matter most.

The SAVE Act languishes in the Senate, and other important election integrity reforms are not on the table. Unless a well-kept secret, Republicans have not built the infrastructure required to counteract the Democrats' ground game. And, at this point, the net partisan effects of both the mid-decade gerrymandering in red and blue states and of the court's racial districting decision are uncertain, with Republicans currently having an edge (two views here and here).

On the substance front, although President Trump's handling of the military action in Iran is unpopular with swing voters (moderates, independents and others), if peace can be secured soon and the economy reignited with lower energy prices, Republicans would seem to have a good chance of reestablishing their advantage on the merits.

As recounted above, despite a Democrat-inclined legacy media, Republicans hold the more popular positions and records on most major issues - border control, lower taxes, pro-growth policies, a strong national defense, an America-first foreign policy and much more - and all in contrast to the positions and record of the Biden years (here).

Republican practical policies with real results for all Americans as opposed to the Democrats' progressive ideological policies should be especially appealing to average, pragmatic Americans who hold the balance in our hyper-polarized elections.

Republicans also have unusual allies in winning over these average American voters: prominent Democrats. The sharply contrasting party appeals to swing voters can be boiled down to that chilling non-response of congressional Democrats to President Trump's question at the last State of the Union address. Expect to see a great deal of it.

But their assistance goes well beyond that. Many progressive Democrats show surprisingly little interest in appealing beyond their ideological base (here, here, and here). Though unmeasured, the attitude of Democratic leaders toward average Americans seems to range from neglect to elitist disdain. FDR's observation, "in that kind of foolishness lies our strength," remains apt.

From the contrasting appeals of their policies and their records of results as well as their rapport with average Americans, one might expect most potential swing voters to see Republicans as the preferable midterm choice. But even if so, will they turn out to vote?

Turnout is routinely lower outside the ideological bases of the parties, and turnout in midterms is always lower than in presidential years. These turnout questions are Republican problems.

The Campaign Solution

Assuming the above has it about right, Republicans should conduct the 2026 campaign like a high-intensity, high-turnout presidential campaign - not like a typical midterm campaign. As much as is possible, 2026 should be 2024 2.0 - a contrasting retrospective election about the pre- and post-2024 records.

An "on-year" intensity-level campaign could counter the Democrats' advantages on the process front (the rules-money-organization machine politics problem) and inspire greater turnout among potential swing voters, giving Republicans a boost on the substance front.

Although Trump, Biden, and Harris are not literally on the ballots, a full-throttle campaign should make sure their records are in every voter's head.

Without records and proposals with broad appeal to those outside their base, Democrats (and their allied media) will no doubt try to make the midterm a referendum on Trump.

For their part, following FDR's lead, Republicans should make the midterm an election contrasting the records. Which party has been more successful in trying to solve America's problems? Biden and Harris' Democrats who created and left a raft of problems - much like Hoover left FDR and Carter left Reagan? Or Trump's Republicans who are in the midst of trying to clean up the mess they inherited to get America back on the right track?

If voters see it this way, it could make 2026 an unusual midterm - one less like 2022 and more like 1934.

The visits have been far from routine and signify instead Japan's recognition of the threats and its willingness to be a critical security partner alongside the U.S..

Ahead of President Trump's arrival in China, the Trump administration has dispatched Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to Tokyo for a series of economic meetings this week in a move which offers reassurance to Japan ahead of such a pivotal meeting in Beijing.

These acts of diplomacy have been propelled by a major domestic shift in defense policy announced in April which saw Japan overhaul restrictions on defense equipment exports so that it can now sell lethal weapons to allies.

Visiting the Philippines and Indonesia last week, Koizumi looked to take advantage of this new approach to bolster regional security more efficiently, something Washington has amplified the need for. In Australia and Vietnam, Takaichi reaffirmed Japanese economic and military support and its more proactive role in upholding a free and open Indo-Pacific. This is emblematic of a wholesale geopolitical reawakening.

Tokyo is firmly committed to military modernization to deter Chinese adventurism. The Chinese threat is manifest in its escalating activity in growing alliance with Russia and North Korea, heightening tensions over Taiwan and operations around the disputed Senkaku Islands. Last year, Chinese coast guard ships were spotted near the Islands a record 375 days.

Near collisions between Chinese fighter jets flying too close to Japanese intelligence-gathering aircraft have sparked other concerns. Beijing dismissed protests, asserting that the Japanese aircraft were carrying out spying missions. It also warned Japan to avoid interfering in any Chinese military action against Taiwan.

The threat did not cower Tokyo, which doubled down on Japan's support for Taiwan in accordance with national legislation which authorizes the deployment of Japanese forces to address a "survival-threatening situation," which poses an existential danger to Japan or its allies.

Underscoring how seriously Japan views the emerging security environment, Japan has released a Defense of Japan 2025 white paper that labels China and its allies - dubbed the CRINK bloc - the "greatest strategic challenge" to Japan. Although some Japanese are wary of defense build-ups, Takaichi's decisive election victory in February has provided a popular mandate for a stronger stance against China.

In 2026, defense expenditure will hit a record $58 billion. Japan has embraced a notion of the "southern shield," entailing the deployment of weapons platforms to create anti-access, anti-denial layers along the First Island Chain to complicate Chinese operations near Taiwan or in the East China Sea.

The Japan 2022 security strategy was accelerated in a 2023-2027 buildup plan that doubles defense spending, and focuses on long-range missiles, F-35 fighters, and unmanned systems. Critical in this picture is Japan's rapidly developing defense industry that is producing its own warships and missiles, and flexible new rules that allow Japan to export weapons.

It has equipped its destroyers with Tomahawk launch capabilities and signed a contract to build 11 Mogami-class frigates for the Royal Australian Navy. These developments mark strategic opportunity for the Japanese-U.S. partnership, especially if combined with closer alliances with other regional partners.

Japanese concerns around China are compounded by anxieties over the unclear U.S. posture towards allies, which is prompting Tokyo's defense planners to contemplate scenarios in which they fight alone. The shift by the U.S. of defense assets from Asia to support operations against Iran heightens that concern.

Yet Japan's emerging security posture resonates with the U.S., which favors burden-sharing. Its vision for a Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP), first developed over 10 years ago, outlines the importance of collective security and the rule of law in maintaining stability in the Indo-Pacific, values that align closely with Washington's strategic interests.

Japan's FOIP vision represents an opportunity for the U.S., and progress is evident in prudent steps underway in setting up a Joint Force Headquarters and strengthening command and control structures. Exercise Sea Dragon in 2026 with India, Australia, and New Zealand, and Exercise Malabar with South Korea, India, and Australia, focusing on submarine warfare training, represent major commitments to stronger relations among these nations.

For its part, the U.S. has released updated National Security and National Defense documents, and President Trump has called for a 50% increase in defense spending in 2027 to meet what he called "trouble and dangerous times."

Cutting across these considerations, Japan has a highly capable, technologically advanced military that may prove pivotal to deterrence and thus provides a persuasive incentive to other countries to join an alliance. A coalition of partners offers the strongest counter to Chinese expansionism, which should be viewed in the context of China's ambition to establish global economic supremacy that relegates other nations to the role of tributaries.

The U.S. should recognize Japan's key role in forging a coalition that deters Chinese adventurism and that can checkmate its military should conflict erupt. Japan is not merely a strong ally. It is an essential one.

James P. Farwell, the strategic communication expert who has advised the Department of Defense (now War), U.S. Special Operations Command, and U.S. Strategic Command on the Middle East, Africa, and Pakistan.

Nearly 10 years later, the president's state visit in May landed with a much smaller dollar tag, vague commitments on the world stage, and a potential reassessment of U.S. support for Taiwan.

Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping spent two hours in a closed-door discussion on Thursday, during which Trump said they covered "almost everything you could discuss, except for a reduction of tariffs." The White House fact sheet, released on Sunday, said that both sides will promote strategic stability between the two countries.

Taiwan

While the president and Xi landed on the same page in terms of Iran's nuclearization, Trump said he was also trying to avoid a war over Taiwan. Trump told reporters he made no commitment either way to defending Taiwan from China if Xi invades. Trump also indicated that he was reconsidering an historic agreement former President Ronald Reagan struck with Taiwan, called the Six Assurances.

"I'll make a determination over the next very short period," Trump said aboard Air Force One.

Since 1982, the U.S. has committed that it will not consult with China on any arms sales to Taiwan. In December, Trump approved an $11.1 billion arms sale, at the time the largest such sale to Taiwan. But now a $14 billion deal first approved last year could be on the chopping block.

"I'm holding that in abeyance, and it depends on China," Trump told Fox News in an interview on Friday. "It's a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly. It's a lot of weapons."

Within hours, Taiwan President Lai Ching-te criticized the statement and insisted that the arms sale is a vital deterrent to regional conflict.

Although the U.S. maintains a "One China" policy when dealing with Beijing and does not formally recognize Taiwan as its own country, the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act dictates that the government must provide Taiwan with tools to defend itself and to preserve its autonomy. On Thursday, Xi warned there could be "clashes and even conflicts" if Taiwan is not handled properly. When reporters asked Trump if the U.S. would defend Taiwan, he said he refused to talk about it with Xi.

"Trump doesn't care about protocol. It makes sense for him to question these old assurances," Hudson Institute senior fellow Michael Sobolik told RCP. "But it does indicate a concerning shift in our support for Taiwan."

Nevertheless, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said on Sunday that there has been no administration change in policy regarding Taiwan.

"The president's very focused on making sure that nothing happens there," Greer said in an ABC interview, reiterating that Trump did not make Xi any promises about the arms sale. "The president will keep his own counsel on the sales and when and if that happens."

Trade

The only new elements to come out of the two-day trip were the creation of a board of trade and a board of investment. The White House described them as the cornerstone of the U.S.-China agreement. The trade board will oversee tariffs on non-sensitive goods, and the investment board will convene government officials to discuss investments into their respective countries. But neither country confirmed who the members on either board will be.

"It's to be determined how meaningful those are," Sobolik said. "Those mechanisms are only as good as the coordination, follow-through, and the enforcement from both sides."

Sobolik said a trade emphasis has been common for every administration's approach to China. But the Trump administration might be falling into old and failing patterns that downplay security risks. For example, China has become the largest foreign owner of American farmland in the past few years, including land near sensitive military locations. In 2024, Trump promised on the campaign trail to ban Chinese nationals from purchasing U.S. farmland. China's largest bottled water and beverage company is seeking to open a factory in New Hampshire. But these details appear not to have been raised during the trip.

"The crucial problem with the whole summit is that the U.S. is trying to engage China economically while also choosing industries to de-risk," Sobolik said. "That will never work, but they're still trying the same old approach of trade deals to boost relations while also decoupling from China."

The first concrete deal announced was that China will purchase 200 Boeing planes, far fewer than analysts had expected before the trip. Boeing shares fell by 3.8% on Friday and continued to slide all day Monday.

China agreed to buy at least $17 billion of American agricultural products yearly through 2028. This is in addition to a Chinese agreement last year to buy roughly 25 million metric tons of soybeans for three years.

"President Xi and I agree on many things, and we agree very much on trade," Trump said Friday on Air Force One. "We're going to be doing a lot of trading. Our farmers are going to be taking in - I mean, our farmers are going to be very happy."

But there is still some disagreement in the respective readouts. The Chinese version does not mention anything about rare earths, but the White House version claims China will address U.S. concerns about supply chain shortages related to rare earths and critical minerals.

Iran

According to the White House readout, both presidents confirmed a goal to denuclearize North Korea and that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Nevertheless, Trump said he did not discuss the Strait of Hormuz with Xi or request Chinese help with reopening the shipping lanes.

"I'm not asking for any favors. Because when you ask for favors you need to do favors in return," Trump told reporters on Air Force One. "We've wiped out their [Iran's] armed forces, essentially. We may have to do a little cleanup work because we had a little month-long ceasefire, I guess you can call it."

Trump added that he only implemented a ceasefire at the request of other nations. On Monday, he said he rejected a peace deal from Iran and will continue to reject any that does not include a promise not to develop nuclear weapons.

Trump left the summit with promises for more bilateral conversations with Xi, saying on Friday that he expects further talks at the APEC and the G20 summits this year, in November and December, respectively. According to the president, Xi also invited Trump to a November summit in China, which he said he would try to attend. He added that Xi will come to the White House on a state visit in September.

While Americans are fighting for a place to call home, a recent Department of Housing and Urban Development and Department of Homeland Security investigation revealed major eligibility errors in HUD housing programs. HUD found nearly 6,000 confirmed ineligible tenants, and another 200,000 more tenants who have gone through zero eligibility verification. In addition, HUD identified 25,000 deceased tenants still living in taxpayer-funded housing units. These aren't likely empty units. Someone is wrongly receiving this benefit.

Federal law is clear: Section 214 of the Housing and Community Development Act limits HUD housing assistance to U.S. citizens and eligible non-citizens. In addition, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 prohibits public welfare benefits from going to illegal aliens and requires HUD housing programs to verify immigration status at the point of application, now a nearly instantaneous process through the SAVE program. Yet HUD rules have systematically avoided this verification until now.

Instead of using the existing Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, HUD created two workarounds. The first is the "do not contend" provision, under which a tenant declares they do not contend their non-citizen status and receives prorated assistance anyway. This is blatantly illegal. The second workaround is an age exemption HUD fabricated 15 years ago under the Obama administration. Current regulations exempt anyone 62 or older from verification, but this has no basis in federal law.

It turns out, in contrast to federal law, the federal government has been incentivizing illegal immigration by offering taxpayer-subsidized housing along with other welfare programs by not using any verification to ensure benefits are going to only eligible individuals. Hundreds of thousands of tenants, including able-bodied adults, have spent years, even decades, in federally subsidized units still needing eligibility checks. This is exactly what has been prohibited for 30 years, and it's part of what's driving up housing prices today.

The cost of those two failures lands not only on taxpayers whose money is being directed towards illegal aliens, but on lower-income American families, the elderly, and the disabled, who have been waiting for help. HUD's worst-case housing needs remain near record highs. Across the country, the wait for a Housing Choice Voucher is years long, with millions of eligible low-income Americans on waitlists stretching a decade or more. Every unit held by an ineligible tenant crowds out an eligible truly needy person or family. Crowding out elderly and disabled American citizens should be enough to make a taxpayer's blood boil.

President Trump is finally putting an end to this practice. In February, HUD published a proposed rule to implement SAVE eligibility verification by eliminating the "do not contend" option and converting prorated assistance from a permanent status into a temporary one with a defined deadline, as the law intends. It removes the arbitrary age exemption and requires uniform verification for every applicant and tenant. After three decades of noncompliance, the new HUD rule finally follows the law's reporting obligations and extends them to owners and public housing authorities.

Thanks to President Trump and HUD Secretary Scott Turner, every housing authority in the country must finally verify eligibility. This is a strong step towards restoring public trust in HUD housing. For the first time, the system Congress mandated will be employed.

At a moment when Americans are competing for every available unit and homelessness hit a record high of 770,000 under Joe Biden in 2024, this new rule by HUD Secretary Turner finally upholds federal law, frees up units for lawful citizens, and ensures that public housing is there for those it is intended to serve: the disabled, elderly and low-income American families who need help. Americans on the waiting lists, waiting for relief from the inflated rental market, and those looking to buy a home, can be thankful that President Trump is working to ensure more of America's housing stock is going to American citizens.

The United States builds fewer than ten oceangoing commercial vessels per year. U.S.-built merchant ships represent one percent of global commercial tonnage. China builds 75 percent of the world's commercial fleet. The People's Liberation Army Navy has surpassed the United States as the largest navy in the world by hull count. These numbers are not the product of a single administration's neglect, they are the result of three decades of structural policy failures compounding across procurement, workforce development, and institutional governance simultaneously.

How the Industrial Base Collapsed

The decline of American shipbuilding began not with a single policy failure but with a strategic choice made in the years after World War II. Having built the most powerful naval and commercial fleet in history, the United States gradually deprioritized commercial shipbuilding in favor of naval capacity, assuming the commercial sector would sustain itself. It did not. Japan and South Korea built heavily subsidized industries throughout the 1960s and 1970s, steadily undercutting American yards. The Construction Differential Subsidy program had offset up to 50 percent of the cost difference between U.S. and foreign-built vessels. Still, when the Reagan administration terminated it in 1981, the commercial market began to collapse. What followed was four decades of compounding deterioration. Shipyards lost the production scale to maintain modern facilities. Skilled trades workers retired and were not replaced. Apprenticeship pipelines dried up. The limiting factor is not budgetary. It is an industrial capacity that was allowed to erode over generations.

Case Study One: Knowing What's Coming and Doing Nothing About It

Eaglen and Vela call for repairing ships more quickly. That goal runs directly into a structural failure that receives far less attention than new construction: the Navy cannot repair ships quickly because it does not plan for repairs it knows are coming. As Russian and Chinese submarine forces continue to grow, including nuclear-capable platforms that Eaglen and Vela acknowledge will force a worldwide U.S. response, the readiness cost of this planning failure compounds with every vessel that sits unnecessarily in dry dock.

While much of the public debate surrounding U.S. shipbuilding capacity focuses on new construction timelines and fleet expansion targets, depot maintenance inefficiencies may represent an equally significant constraint on naval readiness, and in some ways a more inexcusable one. Eaglen and Vela note that ships break down, and sailors cannibalize parts. What they do not say is that much of this is preventable.

Government-owned shipyards responsible for submarine overhaul and depot maintenance face persistent bottlenecks driven by material shortages and reactive logistics. Submarines entering dry dock frequently experience delays because required components are not procured or refurbished in advance of scheduled overhauls. Although maintenance cycles are largely predictable, and the components most likely to require replacement are known ahead of time, parts are often ordered or repaired only after the vessel has already entered the yard.

The consequence is extended idle time in dry dock. Submarines can remain in dock at an estimated cost of roughly hundreds of thousands of dollars per day while awaiting parts shipment or back-shop repair. In some cases, vessels have remained in overhaul for years beyond scheduled timelines. Such delays represent not merely administrative inefficiency but significant strategic cost, as deployable assets remain unavailable during periods of elevated global demand.

These are not unpredictable failures. Maintenance cycles are known in advance, and the components most likely to require replacement are well understood. They are failures of anticipatory planning, and they are preventable. The solution centers on establishing a rotatable pool of critical components through advance procurement and storage. By purchasing high-turnover parts ahead of scheduled overhauls and maintaining inventory on hand, maintenance could shift from a reactive to an anticipatory model, compressing overhaul timelines and improving fleet readiness without requiring new ship construction or new appropriations.

Case Study Two: Building Before You Know What You're Building

Eaglen and Vela call for building manned and unmanned ships faster and fielding new weapons at scale. That goal runs directly into the second structural failure: the Navy routinely begins construction before it knows what it is building.

The Constellation-class frigate program illustrates what procurement instability costs the taxpayer and the industrial base. Originally selected as a carbon copy of a proven Italian frigate design, the program was intended to accelerate production by leveraging an existing platform. Successive Navy-driven design modifications, hull lengthening, propulsion reconfiguration, generator relocation, acoustic changes, and expanding displacement margins reduced design commonality from an intended 85 percent to approximately 15 percent. Physical construction commenced before key design documents were finalized, introducing rework risk, design churn, and production inefficiencies that compounded over time. The Constellation is projected to exceed its original cost estimate by more than $600 million and faces significant schedule delays relative to comparable European frigate builds completed on time using stable baseline designs.

This pattern reflects a broader acquisition dynamic: an institutional tendency to pursue incremental capability enhancements even when doing so destabilizes production timelines. Requirements creep in, personnel rotate through program offices, and each new stakeholder arrives with improvements to propose. Because profit margins on many defense contracts are regulated as a percentage of total program cost, contractors earn greater absolute revenue from larger and longer programs regardless of efficiency. Policymakers focused narrowly on limiting perceived excess profits inadvertently reward complexity over discipline.

The Same Failure, Twice

Taken together, these two cases demonstrate that the principal barriers to reindustrializing U.S. shipbuilding are structural. Funding levels alone do not explain the performance gap between U.S. and foreign shipbuilders. Procurement instability and institutional fragmentation create a self-reinforcing cycle. Delays generate cost growth; cost growth invites additional oversight and modification; modification induces further delay. Eaglen and Vela are right that the problems aren't insurmountable. But breaking this cycle requires not merely increased appropriations, it requires structural reform that stabilizes demand, matures designs prior to contract award, and clarifies institutional accountability.

What Structural Reform Looks Like

Eaglen and Vela call for hard questions about buying foreign support ships and expanding U.S. shipyards. Before that conversation can be productive, the procurement process that has repeatedly undermined expansion efforts must be fixed. The Department of Defense should implement binding design-maturity thresholds as a precondition for contract award on all major shipbuilding programs. No construction contract should be awarded until critical design review is completed and independently validated. Program offices should maintain documented design freeze agreements, with formal change-control boards empowered to reject modifications that lack offsetting schedule or cost relief. The Constellation program is the cost of not doing this.

Eaglen and Vela rightly call for bringing autonomous and unmanned systems online faster. That goal is also a structural reform opportunity. Large surface combatants require billions in specialized capital investment, limiting participation to a small number of firms and reinforcing a bilateral monopoly in which the Navy has little leverage when costs rise or schedules slip. Deliberately opening competition in smaller vessel classes and unmanned platforms, combined with regulatory streamlining to reduce compliance burdens that currently deter innovative newcomers, could broaden the industrial base and accelerate the autonomous future they envision.

Eaglen and Vela call for a larger technical workforce to raise construction and repair rates. Part of the answer to that workforce gap lies in a region the current debate largely overlooks. The Great Lakes corridor, spanning Cleveland, Detroit, Toledo, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Duluth, retains a deep manufacturing heritage, integrated steel supply chains, and a lower cost of living than the coastal shipbuilding hubs where recruitment and retention are structurally constrained. That untapped industrial workforce is not a long-term aspiration. It is an existing asset waiting to be mobilized toward a strategic purpose.

Finally, and most fundamentally, Congress should establish multi-year block-buy contracts for both naval and commercially relevant vessel categories, frigates, auxiliary vessels, and medium landing ships. When programs are cancelled or stretched, as occurred with the Constellation-class frigate, shipyards reduce workforces, delay capital investments, and grow risk-averse. The cycle becomes self-reinforcing. By guaranteeing production volumes over guaranteed timelines, the federal government provides the planning certainty shipyards need to hire, train, and retain skilled workers at scale. Without stable demand anchored to consistent federal orders, every other reform on this list will falter.

The Commission's Opportunity

Eaglen and Vela have traveled to three combatant commands and heard from stakeholders who see the problems and want fixes. They are right that the challenges weren't made by any one president and require all parties to work together. But the national dialogue they are calling for must confront an uncomfortable truth: the United States cannot build the Navy it needs because it stopped building ships. That capacity is not rebuilt through budget lines alone. It is rebuilt through policy discipline, institutional commitment, and a willingness to treat the maritime industrial base as the strategic asset it has always been.

Christopher Carroll is a graduate of Pepperdine University's Master of Public Policy program and a content creator for the Sagamore Institute.

In the dusty streets of Mosul in the summer of 2003, an Iraqi lawyer pulled me aside on a street corner. The power was still out weeks after we had toppled Saddam Hussein's regime. "If you don't get the electricity back on soon," he told me, his voice low and urgent, "I will pick up a rifle and fight you." He wasn't an insurgent. He was a professional, a father, a man who had welcomed the end of Baathist tyranny. But he was also a realist. Basic services—electricity, water, order—were the difference between gratitude and armed resistance. That conversation has never left me.

A documentary and an oral history collection later confirmed what that lawyer understood instinctively. Molly Bingham and Steve Connors's 2007 documentary Meeting Resistance captured anonymous fighters in Baghdad describing how occupation frustrations turned ordinary Iraqis into insurgents. Mark Kukis's oral-history collection Voices from Iraq: A People's History, 2003-2009 recorded the same sentiment across nearly seventy interviews—with civilians, politicians like former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, former dissidents, and the very militiamen who eventually took up arms. The message was consistent: populations do not wait patiently while outsiders debate policy. They react to the world they actually live in.

I spent twenty-five years in the U.S. Army, beginning as an enlisted soldier in Cold War Germany, earning a commission, serving multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and retiring as a Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel. I have seen policy made in Washington and executed—or mis-executed—on the ground. What I have learned is simple, if unfashionable: America will be engaged in conflict for as long as we remain a global power with global interests. "Forever war" is not a choice we can decline. It is the condition of our era. That condition has persisted regardless of official rhetoric. Despite the Obama administration's decision to drop the term "Global War on Terrorism," America has remained engaged in that war since 9/11 and almost certainly will be for decades to come. The evidence is relentless: in February of this year alone, CENTCOM conducted multiple rounds of strikes against more than 30 ISIS targets in Syria. Just days ago, U.S. and Nigerian forces eliminated Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, ISIS's global second-in-command. These are not isolated incidents; they are proof that the fight against jihadist networks is a persistent, global campaign that transcends any single administration's branding.

That reality demands a different question. The real question is not whether America will face conflict, but how competently we design and execute the full spectrum of operations required to wage it—especially the complex campaigns we shorthand as "regime change."

Pundits treat "forever wars," "regime change," and "nation building" as dirty words, as if uttering them explains failure. They do not. Failure comes from execution that ignores reality on the ground: the expectations of civilian populations, the requirements of stability operations, and the necessity of sustained political will. There are better and worse ways to conduct these operations. Iraq and Afghanistan offer contrasting case studies in how the same strategic goal—removing a hostile regime—can succeed or unravel depending on how seriously we take the "after" phase.

We have never been able to choose when war begins. Iran's war on the United States effectively started with the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. Al-Qaeda declared war with the 1993 World Trade Center attack. We simply declined to acknowledge those acts as the opening salvos they were. The Cold War itself was a forty-year "forever war" fought by other means—containment, proxies, deterrence. When the towers fell in 2001, we responded with the swiftest, most successful light-footprint campaign in modern history: a handful of CIA officers, Special Forces teams, and airpower allied with the Northern Alliance routed the Taliban in weeks. That victory was real and it was decisive.

It was also intoxicating. It convinced senior leaders in the Bush administration that the same model—speed, precision, minimal boots on the ground—could be transplanted to Iraq with equal success. It could not. We ignored the Powell Doctrine lessons forged in the bitter experience of Vietnam and the Gulf War: overwhelming force when necessary, clear political objectives, a realistic post-conflict plan, and the assurance of sustained public support. General Eric Shinseki's pre-war estimate that several hundred thousand troops would be needed for stabilization was publicly dismissed by senior Pentagon civilians. We arrived with enough combat power to win the major fighting in three weeks and not nearly enough civil affairs, military police, engineers, or economic development expertise to govern the peace.

The result was predictable to anyone who had listened to Iraqis. Mass defections of Iraqi army units occurred, but we had no immediate plan to pay or employ those thousands of suddenly unemployed soldiers. Electricity remained sporadic. Police stations stayed shuttered or corrupt. The vacuum was filled by militias, looters, and the early stirrings of what became the insurgency. My conversation with the Mosul lawyer was not exceptional; it was commonplace. The documentary Meeting Resistance and Kukis's oral histories document how quickly ordinary Iraqis crossed from cautious hope to active opposition when the promised stability never materialized. We did not lose ground in Iraq because regime change itself was impossible. We lost ground because we treated the post-regime-change phase as an afterthought rather than the decisive phase.

Afghanistan began differently and ended worse. The initial 2001 operation validated the light-footprint model precisely because the objective was narrow: destroy al-Qaeda's safe haven and remove the Taliban regime that hosted it. Success was rapid and complete. Then, almost imperceptibly, the mission crept. We began building a Western-style central government in a country whose people had never wanted one. Tribal, subsistence-farming societies do not share the urban, somewhat unified civic culture of Iraq. Development projects that looked transformative on PowerPoint slides often arrived in villages that simply wanted security, roads, and the ability to farm without being taxed or conscripted by whichever warlord held the local checkpoint that week. We poured resources into institutions that had no cultural roots and little popular legitimacy.

And then, when the endeavor proved hard—as counterinsurgency always does—we quit. Twenty years of effort, thousands of American lives, hundreds of billions of dollars, and an Afghan government that collapsed in days once we signaled withdrawal. The lesson was not that nation-building is inherently impossible. The lesson was that we lacked the patience and the strategic consistency to see a difficult task through once the domestic political mood shifted.

Both experiences reveal the same truth: regime change is not a binary policy option. It is a spectrum of execution choices. At one end lies the minimalist approach—decapitate the leadership, declare victory, and depart—leaving behind the very power vacuums that breed the next generation of threats. At the other end lies the comprehensive approach: simultaneous major combat, immediate and adequately resourced stability operations, economic restoration, and a realistic understanding of the population's actual culture, desires, and tolerances. The difference is not ideology. It is competence.

This is why the endless debate over whether regime change is good or bad misses the point. It is sometimes necessary. The Islamic Republic of Iran has been at war with the United States, directly or through proxies, for more than four decades. Its pursuit of nuclear weapons, its support for groups that kill Americans and destabilize the region, and its ideological commitment to exporting revolution make continued coexistence on current terms untenable for any serious American strategy.

Regime change may therefore become a necessary course of action — as my previous op-eds in Real Clear Defense have advocated for—but only if we are willing to do it the competent way: with forethought, patience, a fully integrated plan for the day after, and unwavering political support through the inevitable difficult years. I hope that the Secretary of War's stated disdain for regime change and nation building has not caused senior leaders to discard out of hand any CENTCOM-recommended course of action capable of addressing the root cause—the extremist theocratic regime itself. Likewise, I hope the Commander in Chief's sincere love of the military and appreciation for the lives of those who serve has not led to ruling out a fuller Powell Doctrine approach that would involve adequate ground forces where necessary. As a combat veteran, I know my fellow Special Forces brethren understand the true cost of service. They are willing to pay that price with life or limb—but they want the assurance that if they are asked to do so, the mission will be done properly and seen through to the end, unlike what happened in Afghanistan. History offers very few examples of major wars won through air and naval power alone. There are even fewer—if any—in which an extremist theocratic regime has seen its core ideology fundamentally defeated or replaced by such means. I also hope we do not discard this course of action simply because the words "regime change" or "nation building" now carry such heavy, negative connotations. Half-measures and premature exits are not strategies; they are the very errors we have already paid for in blood and treasure.

America does not get to opt out of history. We will be engaged, in one form or another, for the foreseeable future. The slogans that dominate cable news—"forever wars," "no more regime change," "end nation-building"—offer emotional satisfaction without strategic insight. The harder, adult conversation is about execution: how seriously we take the population, how honestly we resource the stabilization phase, and how consistently we maintain the will to finish what we start.

That Iraqi lawyer understood this in 2003. He was not asking us to leave. He was asking us to succeed. Twenty-three years later, that remains the only question that matters. If we refuse to learn it, we will simply repeat the same cycle under new names and in new places. If we finally internalize it, we may yet conduct the difficult work our position in the world demands with the competence it deserves.

Stephen D. Cook is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel with 25 years of service. A combat veteran decorated for both heroism and valor, he is the author of the field manuals Plan Like a Green Beret and Choose the Heavier Ruck, and the techno-thriller In the Shadows of the Sky. His work explores the intersection of elite military decision-making, intuition, and disruptive leadership. He is based in St. Augustine, Florida.

Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, our nation fundamentally shifted the way it viewed Special Operations Forces (SOF). No longer considered a niche capability reserved for limited missions, SOF became central to America's counterterrorism strategy and broader national defense posture. Over the last two decades, these operators have carried an extraordinary burden, serving as the tip of the spear in nearly every major conflict and high-risk operation across the globe.

And yet, the USSOCOM budget has remained relatively flat over the last decade, failing to keep pace with inflation. This stagnant budget has not only created critical modernization gaps but has actually eroded buying power for the Combatant Command, resulting in a 14% reduction in purchasing power since 2019. As of the most recent Fiscal Year 2027 President's Budget Request, USSOCOM now accounts for just above 1% of the total Department of War Budget, while global demand for SOF has surged to meet the evolving landscape of great power competition.

The operational tempo for SOF has, and will continue to, put significant demands on the force. From operations in the Middle East and Africa, to narcoterrorists in our own hemisphere, SOF remains heavily engaged across multiple theaters. At the same time, we are asking our most agile, precise, and strategically valuable forces to do more with less, while simultaneously expecting the same results.

Last month's high-risk rescue operation of two downed airmen deep inside Iran demonstrated the extraordinary reach and capability of American special operators. In a mission described as one of the most complex in U.S. history, hundreds of personnel and dozens of aircraft were mobilized for the recovery under hostile conditions, ultimately bringing both home safely. That operation was not just a tactical success. It reaffirmed a foundational American principle: we leave no man behind.

In another notable success earlier this year, U.S. special operations forces executed a precision mission operation targeting Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. Following months of intelligence preparation, joint-force coordination, and operational rehearsal, that mission showcased the unique ability of SOF to operate in politically sensitive and operationally complex environments where conventional forces are neither designed nor intended to lead.

These missions are not outliers. They are emblematic of what SOF does every day. They keep us safe, often out of public view, and increasingly at the forefront of strategic competition.

As global risks from our foreign adversaries continue to rise, America can no longer afford to remain on peacetime footing.

China is rapidly expanding its irregular warfare capabilities, cyber operations, and advanced technologies specifically designed to counter American military advantages. Iran, Russia, and transnational criminal organizations are becoming more adaptive, networked, and technologically sophisticated. The operating environment is evolving at an unprecedented pace, and SOF units are often the first called upon to respond.

Yet, while the mission set expands, the resources have not kept pace. SOF's culture of discipline, efficiency, and innovation is one of its greatest strengths, BUT there is a difference between being efficient and being under-resourced.

The question before us is not whether SOF can "make do," because history shows that they will. The question is whether or not we are willing to accept unnecessary risks because we failed to invest at a level commensurate with their importance. Within the last year alone, USSOCOM was forced to deny requests for SOF capabilities around 70 times due to the lack of available resources.

Every additional defense dollar must be carefully scrutinized in today's constrained fiscal environment. We will continue to ensure that all Department of War resources serve the end goal of ensuring American military dominance and lethality for generations to come. This is precisely why USSOCOM is a responsible home for Department of War resources, for even a modest increase in funding would generate an outsized return on investment for America's national security.

Restoring balance means investing in next-generation capabilities that allow small teams to operate with greater effectiveness in contested environments. It means ensuring operators have the training, equipment, and support they need to succeed in missions that often carry strategic consequences.

SOF is no longer a niche capability reserved for exceptional circumstances. It is a central pillar of how the United States competes, deters, and, when necessary, prevails in today's security environment. As we approach SOF Week, we should celebrate the extraordinary courage of these men and women and extend them our gratitude by ensuring they receive the tools they need to succeed.

Restoring USSOCOM funding to approximately 2% of the defense budget is a targeted first step that will help ensure America's special operations forces remain ready, resilient, and capable of meeting the challenges ahead.

In an era defined by speed, complexity, and uncertainty, SOF provides the nation with options that are precise, scalable, and effective. It is time our budget reflects the urgency of this necessity.

Peace through strength remains the cornerstone of American deterrence, and ensuring the continued dominance of our Special Operations Forces is essential to maintaining that strength.

Rep. Ronny Jackson (TX-13) is a retired United States Navy Rear Admiral and former Physician to the President of the United States who has served as the U.S. representative for Texas's 13th congressional district since 2021.

Natural gas pipelines are in focus because America's energy needs are growing, quickly.

Electricity needs are climbing, in part because artificial intelligence and data centers require enormous amounts of reliable power. At the same time, liquefied natural gas exports continue to expand, allowing the U.S. to supply allies and trading partners abroad while strengthening domestic production. In its 2026 Annual Energy Outlook, the U.S. Energy Information Administration projects strong long-term growth in natural gas demand from both the power sector and export markets.

Natural gas is the largest source of electricity generation in the U.S. at approximately 41%, providing reliable and affordable power to homes, businesses, manufacturers, hospitals, and schools. As demand for natural gas continues to grow, infrastructure capacity must grow with it so that low-cost, reliable energy can reach the consumers and businesses that depend on it.

The Appalachian Basin, home to the Marcellus and Utica shales, is expected to play a central role in meeting future demand. Production in the East region remains among the lowest-cost in the nation. But abundant supply alone is not enough. Natural gas must be transported to where it is needed, including manufacturing centers, power plants, and export terminals along the Gulf Coast.

Pipelines make that possible.

Pipelines are the essential link between America's energy resources and the consumers who depend on them. They deliver affordable energy to homes, fuel industrial growth, support grid reliability, and enable exports that enhance national security. Without pipelines, natural gas cannot get from the wellhead to power plants, factories, or family homes. Without adequate pipeline capacity, supply bottlenecks emerge, prices become more volatile, and economic opportunities are lost.

The infrastructure required to meet that demand is significant. The INGAA Foundation's recent North American Midstream Infrastructure Report projects that more than $1 trillion in new midstream investment will be required through 2052. That includes roughly 37,000 miles of additional natural gas transmission pipelines and more than 100,000 miles of gathering systems needed to connect production to processing facilities and major transmission networks.

To meet those long-term projections, companies are already investing; many major pipeline projects are moving forward today.

According to Fortune, natural gas pipeline construction in the U.S. is experiencing its largest growth surge in nearly two decades, since the beginning of the shale revolution. More than 150 pipeline projects are planned nationwide, representing roughly 150 billion cubic feet of new capacity, according to analytics firm Arbo. Wood Mackenzie estimates that companies have committed $50 billion to new pipeline investments that would add approximately 8,800 miles of infrastructure across the country.

This builds on the approximately 6.3 billion cubic feet per day of new capacity added to the grid in 2025, with most of that infrastructure directed toward the South-Central region and the rapidly growing LNG corridor along the Gulf Coast. Last year's buildout, coupled with progress being made today are meaningful, much more infrastructure will be needed in the years ahead to keep pace with rising demand

The U.S. has an enormous advantage in its abundant, low-cost natural gas resources. It also has an opportunity to lead in artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, and global energy exports. But those opportunities depend on infrastructure that can move energy from where it is produced to where it is needed.

This Infrastructure Week, policymakers should recognize that pipelines are every bit as vital as highways and bridges. They may run underground and out of sight, but they help power factories, data centers, export terminals, and homes across the country.

Amy Andryszak is the president and chief executive officer of the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, a Washington, D.C. based trade association representing interstate natural gas pipeline companies.

Of course, it's unclear if Fetterman will stand for re-election. He is not raising much money, and he sports higher job approval numbers among Republicans than with his fellow Democrats. Though Fetterman continues to dominate the state's political attention economy, Democrats are increasingly dismayed by his positions, and political observers are now speculating if he'll forego a primary altogether or run again as an Independent. Such a move would vault him into the general election, but running that way is harder than it looks.

Who would take on Fetterman in a Democratic primary? As it stands, here are potential contenders:

5. State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta

Kenyatta's 2018 election victory in the Philadelphia-based 181st House District made him the first openly gay person of color to win a seat in the Legislature. Kenyatta ran for statewide office (and lost) in both 2022 and 2024. In 2024, he lost the race for Auditor General to incumbent Republican Tim DeFoor by a 51-46% margin.

In 2022, he ran for state Senate and finished in third place (of four), with 11% of the vote. He tried unsuccessfully to run to the left of Fetterman, truly a fool's errand that year.

Though Kenyatta lost that year, he did what he really set out to do, which was introducing himself to state Democratic leaders outside Philadelphia. It's clear he's bored in the state House and certainly does not think it can contain him, so who are we to get in his way? He also serves as Vice Chair of the DNC, a largely ceremonial post.

Could he try again to run to the left of Fetterman in 2028? For sure, as that lane is as wide as a super-highway. Perhaps he might run again for Auditor General in 2026, since DeFoor is term-limited there. But for now, we cannot totally discount the possibility of another Senate run.

4. U.S. Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, Democrat from the 6th District (Chester and Berks counties)

Back in 2018, after the Democratic majority on the state Supreme Court took it upon themselves to unilaterally draw new congressional districts, Houlahan won the 6th congressional district, along with Madeleine Dean in the 4th district, Mary Gay Scanlon in the 5th district, and Susan Wild in the 7th district.

Houlahan has proven to be a savvy politico and a tremendous fundraiser, which has catapulted her to the top of many contender lists. She has not had to really sweat any of her re-elections since then, though this year her GOP opponent, Marty Young, has impressive credentials and is a fellow veteran.

Houlahan's district is completely within the Philadelphia media market, the largest in the state, and the most important one in a Democratic primary. Moreover, the the state's has never elected a woman to the U.S. Senate or as governor.

So far, Houlahan has not shown any interest in running for higher office, but her profile, location, and cash on hand numbers will always keep her in these conversations.

3. Former U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb

Lamb served in Congress from a district in western Pennsylvania for two terms before jumping into 2022's open seat primary for the U.S. Senate, where he finished a distant second to Fetterman. He sports strong pro-union bona fides, plus a military background (Marine Corps JAG), and is also the scion of a prominent western Pennsylvania Democratic family. He has been traveling across the state for the past year, essentially campaigning against Fetterman as the Senator's perceived rightward tilt intensified.

Following his loss, Lamb has been working at a well-known law firm, and politicos have mentioned him as an ideal Democratic nominee for Attorney General in 2028, when GOP incumbent Dave Sunday is up for reelection.

Lamb has certainly increased and sharpened his image with Democratic party leaders, especially those who frequent summer picnics and rallies, but is that enough to erase campaign memories of 2022?

That year, he ran to the right of Fetterman, positioning himself as a moderate. Would Lamb do that again in 2028? Would Democratic primary voters value that type of candidate? And would Fetterman view him as an easy opponent to defeat again, and therefore urge him to run?

2. U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio

Keep in mind that Deluzio and Lamb share a common background. In fact, he took Lamb's place in Congress in 2022. He is a western Pennsylvanian, pro union, has a military background (an Annapolis gradudate), and on the moderate side in the House.

They cannot both run at the same time for the same slot, as they are essentially in the same lane. One advantage that Deluzio has over Lamb is that he currently holds office, and therefore has a higher profile and somewhat easier ability to raise campaign funds.

In the House, he serves on the Transportation Committee and on Armed Services, both higher profile slots with good fundraising bona fides.

On the other hand, he is relatively new to the House (in just his second term) and has already watched his predecessor put it all on the line for a statewide run and fall short.

1. U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle

With Dwight Evans in Philadelphia-based third district retiring at the end of this year, Boyle is now Philadelphia's highest profile federal official. He is also ranking member (most senior member of the minority party) on the House Budget Committee, a Notre Dame graduate, and a former civilian advisor to the Defense Department.

Launching a run from Philadelphia, as ranking member on the Budget Committee, and as a member of the Ways and Means Committee, are all top notch, and not to be dismissed.

He has a safe seat in Philadelphia and so the worry would be that his political chops have dulled over the years - and with a young family, does he want to undertake the grueling fundraising and travel schedule needed to run for, and keep, a statewide office?

It's easy to say you'd like to challenge Fetterman when you're lounging backstage in the green room at the MSNOW - but it's quite different to begin traveling the state and putting in the grunt work needed to get such a race off the ground.

A wild card: what role, if any, would a Gov. Shapiro (or a former Gov. Shapiro) play in this race? It's well known that he and Fetterman do not get along, at all, and he's likely to want as much say in a possible replacement for him as other Democrats.

What role does the state Democratic Party play in this? It has been silent as other party members have increasingly criticized Fetterman publicly in the past six months. Does Fetterman care? Aren't his people asking the state party for air cover and backup?

And who wasn't mentioned here? Pennsylvania's invisible man, Lt. Gov. Austin Davis.

Of course, if Fetterman opts against running for reelection, or decides to take the Independent route, then the Senate primary would completely change. Would aspiring Democrats flock to the high-profile race, or would they shy away, concerned that they, rather than the GOP nominee, would be more likely to lose votes to Fetterman?

As always, Pennsylvania politics continues to prove fascinating.

Pennsylvania should be blamed for initiating today's chaos.

Well, to be more correct, blame Obama's former Attorney General, Eric Holder, for using Pennsylvania as a test case for his new mission: a permanent Democratic majority in the U.S. House. In 2018, the organization that he chairs, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, played a role in advocating for Pennsylvania's Supreme Court tear up of the state's congressional map mid-decade. Compounding it, the partisan (Democrat majority, elected) state Supreme Court itself drew the new boundaries: shifting Pennsylvania's delegation from 13-5 (GOP) to a 9-9 split, thus achieving "justice" in the eyes of Democratic power brokers.

Over a dozen states are acting or are threatening to take action to re-draw their congressional lines. Each side is accusing the other of "starting" it or raising the stakes. But in reality, it started in Pennsylvania in 2017.

Today, Democrats have attacked judges and justices, throwing countless jabs at the U.S. Supreme Court - threatening to expand and pack it with Democrats - and at the Virginia Supreme Court by threatening to remove the entire Court for not bowing to the will of Democratic activists thirsting for power. The irony is that most of the Virginia Supreme Court members are Democrats.

There's always been partisan politics in redistricting - how each state draws boundaries for its congressional districts. Some states try to have "impartial" citizen panels or "experts" draw the lines; others, like Pennsylvania, use state legislators to draw congressional lines.

How did we get to the chaos of 2026?

Under the Constitution, every 10 years, there's a census. Thereafter, the 435 members of the U.S. House are assigned to the states based on average population. Yet, in practical terms, if the census suggests that every House member represent 750,000 people, even states with a lower population get one member. Thereafter, the remainder are divided among the remaining states. This is known as re-apportionment.

Then, each state begins the second part: re-districting, having been assigned X number of seats, how will those seats be distributed across the state? What will the boundaries be? By custom and tradition, those newly adopted boundaries are used in the next election - the "2's" (2002, 2012, 2022) - and stay in place until the next decade.

But, as we are learning, custom and tradition mean nothing to Democrats with an agenda.

In Pennsylvania, congressional boundaries are put in place through legislation. A bill is introduced; hearings take place; amendments are offered; debates are held; a vote is taken. Pennsylvania did that in 2011, with bipartisan support in both Chambers, and with the support of the Philadelphia Democratic Party chairman, himself a member of Congress. The bill was signed into law.

Elections took place in 2012, 2014, 2016. Then, as 2018 approached, Holder and his army of lawyers, activists, and commentators jumped in and sued before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The legal argument was that "too many" Republicans represented Pennsylvania in Congress, despite the fact that the lines were drawn through legislation and had bipartisan support.

Throwing aside custom, tradition, and the precedent of deferring to the legislature, the Court's Democratic Party majority ruled that the boundaries were illegal and, ultimately, they themselves drew the lines.

This not only had the effect of causing chaos in Pennsylvania, changing the lines weeks before candidate filing for the 2018 election (where some candidates found themselves living in other districts). It opened the door to disrupt the nationwide tradition of only creating lines after each new census.

With part one of the Democrats' House takeover plan in place - ending the custom of only restricting after a census - team Holder moved to part two: using the legislative process in states where they hold the "trifecta" to redraw lines whenever they need seats, e.g., California, New York and now, Virginia, despite the new governor pledging not to redistrict if she was elected.

Let's not forget re-apportionment of seats among the states was built upon a Biden policy - a purposeful decision to actively seek out and count anyone residing in a state, including illegal immigrants. This had the effect of disproportionately helping Democratic trifecta states, e.g., California, Minnesota, and New York. As a result, those states have several extra members of Congress - extra Democrats, since illegal immigrants were purposely added in.

If Democrats get their way, they may not only take over the House this fall. They will have created a new custom: elections never end. Power brokers will politicize the census, courts, and agencies to continuously design and redesign congressional seats to win and hold on to power.

The old ways were imperfect, but better. The parties fought. Then elections were held - and we all tried to keep the courts as removed from party fights as possible.

But the chaos and food fights of today started in 2017 when Pennsylvania was used as the test case - throwing away tradition and further tearing us apart.

Pennsylvania performs materially worse than the national average, where an astonishing 65% of households are priced out. These figures should force Pennsylvania policymakers to rethink what exactly the Commonwealth is selling to the next generation.

Pennsylvania's economic identity rests on a simple promise: ordinary people could still afford an ordinary life here. A teacher in Altoona, a nurse in Scranton, a mechanic outside Pittsburgh, a warehouse supervisor in the Lehigh Valley. The expectation was not luxury. It was stability: a house with a yard, a decent school district, a mortgage payment that did not consume half a paycheck.

That was Pennsylvania's competitive advantage, but today, it has clearly eroded.

The analysis in the study compares median household incomes against the income required to afford a newly built median-priced home in each state using standard mortgage underwriting assumptions, including prevailing mortgage rates, property taxes, insurance costs, and a traditional debt-to-income threshold of 28%.

The least affordable states in America are largely predictable. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York have spent decades layering high land costs, restrictive zoning, elevated taxes, and byzantine regulatory systems onto already constrained housing markets.

Except for New York, new housing in Pennsylvania is comparatively much more expensive than every neighboring state.

The problem is not simply that new homes are expensive in Pennsylvania. The problem is that wages are no longer keeping pace with the total cost of ownership.

Nationally, the median American home now costs roughly $417,000 while median household income sits near $83,000. In the mid-1980s, homes generally cost about 3.5 times household income. Today, nationally, the ratio is closer to five times income.

In Pennsylvania, the median new home price is $528,370. The household income needed to comfortably afford the median new home is $160,900.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania's median household income is $77,971. It's woefully short.

Pennsylvania increasingly finds itself stuck in an uncomfortable middle ground: wages closer to the industrial Midwest paired with housing pressures increasingly resembling the Northeast Corridor.

That is a dangerous combination. States can survive being expensive if wages scale with costs. They can survive lower wages if living costs remain manageable. The politically destabilizing scenario is when residents experience Northeast-style costs without Northeast-style incomes.

Compare Pennsylvania to more affordable states. Iowa remains among the country's most attainable housing markets, with median listing prices near $295,000 and one of the nation's lowest price-to-income ratios. Oklahoma's cost of living remains roughly 15% below the national average, driven heavily by inexpensive housing.

Meanwhile, states that saw explosive pandemic-era migration, including Idaho and Montana, experienced affordability collapses as demand overwhelmed supply.

Pennsylvania is not yet Idaho. But it is no longer clearly Iowa either.

That distinction matters politically.

Homeownership was the mechanism that turned paychecks into wealth for millions of middle-class families after World War II. It created neighborhood stability, local tax bases, civic engagement, and generational upward mobility simultaneously.

People think differently when they believe they are building equity instead of merely surviving monthly payments. When ownership disappears, frustration rises quickly.

That frustration is increasingly visible across the country. Surveys now show large numbers of younger Americans believing they may never own homes at all.

Their parents often bought homes on one income. Their children increasingly struggle on two.

Pennsylvania should view that trend as a warning. The Commonwealth was never supposed to compete with Silicon Valley salaries or Manhattan wealth.

It competed by offering something more durable: affordability, stability, and upward mobility for ordinary families.

Once that formula breaks, Pennsylvania risks becoming trapped between two worlds: not dynamic enough to command coastal incomes, yet no longer affordable enough to compensate for them.

States rarely decline all at once. More often, they simply become incrementally less attainable until the next generation decides to build their future somewhere else.

It all began with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). Back in October 2019, then-Gov. Tom Wolf issued an executive order to force Pennsylvania into RGGI, the multistate compact that imposes a carbon tax on all its members.

For six years, the state was stuck in limbo while the issue played out in court. In 2023, the Commonwealth Court ruled that Wolf's order unconstitutional, invalidating Pennsylvania's RGGI membership. But Shapiro appealed that decision, prolonging the unnecessary litigation. Then, during budget negotiations in November 2025, state lawmakers finally agreed to permanently exit RGGI. In the end, Pennsylvania taxpayers paid more than $4 million in legal fees to litigate this whole mess.

But by then, the damage was already done.

A new study by the Commonwealth Foundation demonstrates how six years of RGGI uncertainty scared away more than $5 billion in investment in new electricity generation. Proposals to develop new generation dropped by 38% during the six-year window compared to the prior period. Natural gas proposals, the lifeblood of Pennsylvania's bread-and-butter industry, collapsed by 65%.

And even if developers submitted proposals, very few came to fruition. Before RGGI, about three-fourths of proposals reached operation. During RGGI, that number plummeted to 9%.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania's westward neighbor, Ohio, tells a different story.

On paper, Pennsylvania and Ohio have a lot in common. Both are part of the PJM grid. Both have access to the Marcellus and Utica Shale formations, which produce nearly one-third of total U.S. natural gas.

But there is one critical difference: Ohio never joined RGGI.

And whatever Pennsylvania lost, Ohio gained. When Pennsylvania's energy pipeline shrank during its six-year flirtation with RGGI, Ohio's energy project pipeline grew by 33%. Also, the state's natural gas conversion rate — the rate at which proposals develop fully into operation — rose from 61% to 78% during the same period.

Bechtel, the multinational construction firm, provides an illustrative anecdote. The company originally planned to build a $1 billion natural gas-fired power plant in Clinton County, Pennsylvania. But after years of regulatory uncertainty (compounded by legal warfare by radical environmentalists), Bechtel canceled the project in Pennsylvania, packed up, and moved about 200 miles west, building a $1.3 billion power plant in Columbiana County, Ohio.

To put it in Shapiro's words, Pennsylvania is "losing to friggin' Ohio."

But this is more than just some petty rivalry between neighboring states. By a conservative estimate, Pennsylvania forfeited nearly 4,000 megawatts of generation capacity during the RGGI years. That's enough electricity to power nearly 2 million homes.

RGGI's ruinous spirit lives on in Shapiro's Lightning Plan, which will be even more destructive than RGGI. Shapiro's proposal includes two programs: the Pennsylvania Climate Emissions Reduction Act (PACER) and the Pennsylvania Reliable Energy Sustainability Standard (PRESS).

PACER is a cap-and-trade carbon tax scheme like RGGI. But rather than a regional model spread out over several states, PACER would concentrate its destructive forces solely within the confines of the commonwealth.

PRESS would more than triple Pennsylvania's alternative energy mandate. To comply with the mandate, Pennsylvania would need to grow its wind capacity thirtyfold and solar capacity a hundredfold by 2035.

Combined, PRESS and PACER would wreak havoc on Pennsylvania's already-high energy costs. Independent analysis estimates the combined cost to be more than $150 billion in new energy costs over ten years, more than doubling residential electricity bills.

Shapiro claims his plan will reduce bills, but his projections deserve scrutiny. The governor used the same modeling that his predecessor used to justify RGGI. But Wolf's spitballing was off — way off. The modeled RGGI prices predicted a clearing price $4.01 per allowance in 2025, but the actual clearing prices was $26.73 in 2025 — sixfold higher than originally estimated.

Despite the plethora of bad policies, Pennsylvania remains well-positioned for an energy boom. The commonwealth is the number-one exporter of electricity and second only to Texas in natural gas production. A wave of new investment — roughly about $34 billion in power plant upgrades, conversions, and construction — emerged as data center demand surged and RGGI's defeat became certain.

The lesson of the RGGI years is straightforward: Just the threat of the carbon tax scheme drove investment away right at the very moment Pennsylvania needed it the most. This production drought raised electricity prices and reduced grid reliability. Shapiro's Lightning Plan will only exacerbate these issues and erase Pennsylvania's competitive advantage as an energy-producing state.

The future of Pennsylvania energy looks bright, but only if we learn from our mistakes and avoid repeating them with just another rebranded boondoggle.

That program is the Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC), which marks its 25th anniversary. From its inception, EITC's design was simple yet revolutionary: Allow businesses to invest in scholarships and empower families to choose educational environments that are best for their kids.

Twenty-five years later, EITC is still delivering on that promise.

In fact, the program achieved a new milestone. For the first time in its history, EITC—in conjunction with its partner, Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC) — awarded more than 101,000 scholarships in the 2023-24 school year—an almost 20% increase over the previous year. Since their inception, both programs have offered more than 1 million scholarships to children across our great commonwealth.

These scholarships are going to the households that need them the most. The average household income of families receiving EITC scholarships in the Philadelphia area was about $76,000 per year — well below the statewide median of $100,557 for Pennsylvania families.

But these scholarships don't just go to kids in Philly. EITC and OSTC scholarships went to students in all 67 Pennsylvania counties, meaning all families — rural, urban, and suburban — benefit from these programs.

While these recent numbers highlight remarkable achievements, they also reveal areas for improvement. In 2023-24, more than 68,000 applicants didn't receive a scholarship. That means 40% of applicants walked away disappointed and empty-handed. Today, these children remain on a wait list, hoping for an education that will give them the opportunity for a brighter future.

This issue is even more acute with OSTC. Out of about 61,000 applications, only about 15,000 kids received an OSTC scholarship. That's OSTC denying a staggering 75% of applicants.

And it wasn't because these students didn't qualify. Instead, this is a simple case of supply not keeping pace with demand. Arbitrary program caps have limited the number of scholarships available each year.

Fortunately, we know exactly how to fix this issue. Automatic indexing — a legislative mechanism that would expand the program by 25% annually when the commonwealth has allocated 90% of credits — would allow EITC and OSTC to grow with its demand.

But that isn't the only legislative solution. EITC created a template and a model for success that other innovative programs could emulate.

In 2023, Pennsylvania nearly adopted the Lifeline Scholarship Program. The program would have awarded $100 million in educational savings accounts to eligible students attending Pennsylvania's lowest-achieving schools based on statewide testing. Unfortunately, Gov. Josh Shapiro vetoed Lifeline Scholarships, breaking his campaign promise to deliver a high-quality education to "every child of God."

There's also the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit (FSTC). Signed into law last July, the FSTC grants dollar-for-dollar tax-deductible donations up to $1,700 to scholarship-granting organizations (SGOs). Thanks to EITC and OSTC, Pennsylvania is home to more than 100 SGOs, primed and ready to award millions of scholarships to families in need. And this federal tax credit does not take any money away from our public schools.

Again, Shapiro holds the keys. Before students can benefit from the FSTC, the governor must opt in. Failing to do so would leave, by one estimate, about $500 million in lost scholarship funding. Leaving money on the table would be an unspeakable insult to families in dire need of better educational options for their kids.

Plus, polling shows that there's overwhelming support for this. Seven out of ten Pennsylvanians support opting into the FSTC, and nearly 80% want to expand tax-credit scholarships in Pennsylvania.

And it's understandable why Pennsylvanians are hungry for change. The majority of Pennsylvania students score below proficient in math and reading in statewide testing.

Families want it. Businesses support it. Students are far better for it. The only thing standing between kids and these scholarships is the political courage to grow a time-tested program that has already earned its credibility a hundred thousand times over.

And while we should celebrate these decades of achievement, we still have our work cut out for us. With more than 200,000 kids trapped in Pennsylvania's failing schools, we cannot rest until each and every one has the opportunity and resources to break free.

So, happy birthday, EITC. Here's to many more because we are just getting started.

Though Donald Trump moderated his language in the run-up to his summit last week with Xi Jinping and in his public comments about the summit, the FBI under both the Biden and Trump administrations has warned that "The counterintelligence and economic espionage efforts emanating from the government of China and the Chinese Communist Party are a grave threat to the economic well-being and democratic values of the United States. Confronting this threat is the FBI's top counterintelligence priority."

Then-CIA Director William Burns said in 2023 that "China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and increasingly the … power to do so." According to the Harvard Kennedy School, China has taken the lead in some of the foundational technologies of the 21^st century and, on current trajectories, will overtake the U.S. within the next decade on others.

China is the dominant exporter of clean technology, accounting for 80% of the world's solar power modules and batteries, 70% of electric vehicles (EVs), and the largest shares of heating, cooling, and wind power equipment, as well as numerous categories of computer chips. It holds one-third of the globe's rare-earth elements (REEs), used in batteries, computer screens, high-tech weapons, EVs, and other advanced technologies. It has over half of the world's REE mining capacity and 90% of its refining capabilities. When China suspended and then restricted REE exports starting last year, it disrupted Western defense and industrial supply chains. No progress restoring REE shipments was announced following the Trump-Xi summit.

By contrast, the United States has substantial natural advantages in traditional energy. China's goal is to eliminate that advantage, turn the U.S. into a vassal state for China's clean energy resources, and utilize a chokehold on American energy to embed spyware and dictate terms. Thanks to compliant progressives, China is making substantial progress in achieving its goals, even as it contrarily increases its domestic use of coal and fossil fuels.

"Behind the Climate Curtain," an extensively sourced report issued today by the National Association of Scholars, observes that "Energy is the prerequisite to economic power. … A great power targeting an opponent's energy access and controlling how energy is used is one way to emulate Sun Tzu's adage to subdue an enemy without fighting." The NAS report unveils China's extensive influence operation to neutralize America's natural advantage in energy, particularly by changing U.S. policy.

Its path is through California's pliable progressive Democratic Party leadership. Because of the state's technology sector leadership, powerful economy, and large population, California's standards often become de facto national standards.

In September 2013, then-California Gov. Jerry Brown met with the head of China's Development and Reform Commission to sign a memorandum of understanding for California and China to jointly reduce carbon emissions and energy usage, bolster carbon and methane standards, implement carbon emissions trading systems, expand adoption of EVs, support green energy markets and technology development, and, notably, collaborate in "policy design and rule-making."

In 2017, Brown met with Xi to expand the collaboration. He signed agreements to bypass the first Trump administration's decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord. California agreed to partner with China to promote climate change policy, energy storage and grid modernization technologies, new-energy and zero-emission vehicles, low-carbon urban development, and emissions trading systems; to create a California-China Clean Technology Partnership Fund; and to develop information technologies.

By 2018, California's public employee retirement system (CalPERS) invested more than $2 billion in 172 Chinese companies, including firms with ties to the Chinese military and with records of environmental and human rights abuses. Within two years, CalPERS had to divest many of these investments because of U.S. sanctions.

In 2019, the University of California and China's Tsinghua University agreed to collaborate on climate change policy. Tsinghua is an odd source for advice on policy. It has been tied to cyberattacks against American companies and government institutions in the United States, Kenya, Brazil, and Mongolia. It has developed technology used by China in human rights violations, and it houses multiple laboratories focused on defense technologies.

Brown's diplomacy with China culminated in 2021 when California enacted legislation to authorize the California China Climate Institute, transitioning a partnership between universities into a de facto "treaty" between California and China centered on the development of policies that support the Chinese clean tech sector.

In October 2023, Brown's successor, Gavin Newsom, visited China to meet with Xi. Newsom highlighted California's close ties with China, observing that: "The only way we can solve the climate crisis is to continue our long-standing cooperation with China." During the trip, California and China entered into yet another MOU to advance joint research, development, and innovation of clean energy, including joint policy announcements. Newsom committed California to work with China's central planners to decarbonize the power sector by transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy, increase the use of EVs, strengthen cooperation on clean energy, accelerate the deployment of wind technology, and share information on clean energy technologies.

Energy Foundation China is a U.S. nonprofit led by a Chinese national with strong ties to China's Ministry for State Security who also works at Tsinghua University, where he is required to "firmly serve the party, government and people's political orientation." EFC donates heavily to American universities and organizations for research that promotes alternative energies, including policies that increase sales for Chinese manufacturers and energy costs for American consumers and reduce American energy independence.

In 2021, EFC gave Rocky Mountain Institute $820,000 to support education and analysis to phase out coal. One year later, RMI reported that gas stoves were linked to childhood asthma and were similar to secondhand smoking. The Biden administration cited that research when it proposed to ban gas stoves.

The Natural Resources Defense Council is one of the main beneficiaries of EFC funding. Founded in 1970, the NRDC is a leader in climate litigation and policy. Its relationship with China began in 1991. In 2005, it opened a fully staffed Beijing office, where it focuses on "climate, clean energy, environmental protection and urban solutions." NRDC's former CEO, Gina McCarthy, served in the Biden administration as the first-ever National Climate Adviser. Among numerous actions advancing Chinese interests, the NRDC used litigation and diplomacy to foster agreements that advance purchases by California utilities of alternative energy technologies and equipment from Chinese suppliers.

UCLA School of Law's Emmett Institute on Climate Change & the Environment is affiliated with EFC and other Chinese-funded groups. Its co-director, Alex Wang, was previously an NRDC attorney. The Emmett Institute has sought to reshape California's environmental policy. In September 2019, Wang led a two-week tour introducing Chinese and U.S. regulators. In 2020, with funding from EFC, Wang and the NRDC co-authored a report that recommended quotas for EV adoption, disincentives for gas-powered vehicles, zero-emission building standards, and an economy-wide carbon cap-and-trade system. Two years later, on behalf of the NRDC, the Emmett Institute urged Los Angeles to phase out the largest urban oil field in the U.S.

In 2025, advised by state agencies, the Port of Long Beach entered into an MOU with Shanghai and Chinese businesses to build a "green shipping corridor." Chaired by a state-owned Chinese firm that the Pentagon has identified as a commercial asset for Chinese intelligence and military purposes, the project will deliver substantial commercial contracts to Chinese companies.

The NAS report describes how California uses regulation and mandates to create demand for products that are predominantly developed and controlled by China. The report also identifies numerous graduates of Tsinghua and programs funded by China hired for policy-making positions in California agencies that regulate energy, transportation, and the environment. In those positions, they bolster China's efforts to depress traditional energy production in favor of alternative energy.

Newsom has closed down most California drilling, refineries, and pipelines. As a result, the state now imports most of its fuel, imperiling supplies, and its energy costs have skyrocketed at a rate well above the national average. Concurrently, California's use of batteries - most of which are manufactured in China - has increased by 1,944%.

NAS believes that some of California's agreements with China may violate constitutional prohibitions in Art. I, §10 on states entering into foreign treaties. They certainly violate principles of transparency and sound policy. NAS recommends federal investigations, and that regulators must be U.S. citizens. More broadly, Americans have to recognize that Chinese influence operations are for China's benefit. Giving away America's comparative advantages while enriching China and advancing its technology prowess is folly, betrayal - or both.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

As Justice Samuel Alito explained in his majority opinion, the prevailing interpretation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as requiring states to create congressional districts along racial lines actually undermined the constitutional rights of other citizens by colliding with the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Unfortunately, the legal language of Alito's opinion is difficult for the average reader to penetrate, so it is worth stepping back and looking at the actual language of the Voting Rights Act itself. The part of the law at issue is Section 2.

As originally passed in 1965, Section 2 simply said:

No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.

This was a just and appropriate guarantee that no state could use devices such as literacy tests or other discriminatory practices to prevent citizens of a particular race from voting.

And in 1965, those concerns were tragically real.

On March 7 of that year, the infamous Bloody Sunday attack occurred on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where state troopers and local police attacked civil rights demonstrators with billy clubs, tear gas, mounted horse charges, and whips. Similar efforts to intimidate black voters existed throughout much of the South.

Thus when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law later that year, it was widely understood as a landmark effort to guarantee minorities access to the ballot box as equal participants in the democratic process.

What it was not understood to require was racial engineering of congressional districts.

There was no suggestion in the original text that states would someday be expected to create congressional districts designed primarily around race in order to increase minority representation in Congress.

That interpretation arose largely after Congress amended Section 2 in 1982 under President Ronald Reagan. Although subsection (a) continued the language of the original 1965 act, subsection (b) added new language that stated that minority voters must have equal opportunity "to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice."

For more than 40 years, courts interpreted that language in ways that encouraged or required states to create majority-minority districts.

But let us look carefully at the actual text of the revised Section 2 to see whether the law itself truly mandates racial districting.

Subsection (b) states:

A violation of subsection (a) is established if, based on the totality of circumstances, it is shown that the political processes leading to nomination or election in the State or political subdivision are not equally open to participation by members of a class of citizens protected by subsection (a) in that its members have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.

The statute then adds an important limitation:

Nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.

That limitation matters enormously.

The plain language of the section is not itself racist, but the interpretation of the courts gradually became race-centered. Whereas every voter has a chance to elect representatives of their choice from among the candidates on the ballot, courts increasingly interpreted minority voters' ability to "elect representatives of their choice" to require districts in which minority-supported candidates had a realistic opportunity to win.

The distinction is crucial.

The revised Voting Rights Act never explicitly required states to create majority-minority congressional districts. Nor did it establish a right to proportional representation. Yet over time, courts developed a doctrine that pushed states toward drawing districts heavily influenced by race.

The theory was that if minority voters consistently supported certain candidates, and majority voters consistently defeated those candidates through bloc voting, then the political process was not "equally open" to minority participation.

But that interpretation transformed a law intended to guarantee equal access to voting into a system increasingly focused on electoral outcomes.

To be fair, courts did not openly declare that minority voters are entitled to representatives of the same race. The legal test instead focused on "minority-preferred candidates." But in practice, race became central to the analysis because courts relied heavily on evidence of racially polarized voting patterns.

And that is precisely the constitutional problem Justice Alito addressed.

The Equal Protection Clause does not permit states to sort citizens primarily by race absent an extraordinarily compelling justification. However well-intentioned the goals of the Voting Rights Act may have been, courts gradually interpreted the law in ways that encouraged states to divide voters into racial categories and design congressional maps accordingly.

The absurdity of the doctrine becomes especially obvious when compared to Senate elections.

Every state elects its senators statewide. In almost every state, minority voters routinely vote in elections where most candidates are white. Yet courts have never suggested that Senate elections violate the Voting Rights Act simply because minority voters do not always elect their preferred candidates.

Defenders of the current doctrine argue that House districts can be manipulated in ways statewide Senate elections cannot. That is true. But it still does not explain why equal participation in the political process should require government officials to sort citizens by race when drawing congressional boundaries.

At some point, a law intended to eliminate racial discrimination became a justification for government-mandated racial line-drawing.

That is why the Supreme Court's recent ruling matters.

Contrary to the claims of critics, the court did not take away anyone's right to vote. Nor did it repeal the Voting Rights Act. What it did was recognize that the Constitution places limits on how far government may go in using race as a political tool - even for ostensibly benevolent purposes.

For decades, courts attempted to reconcile two competing principles: the Voting Rights Act's guarantee of equal political opportunity and the Constitution's guarantee of equal treatment under the law. Increasingly, those principles came into conflict.

Justice Alito's opinion did not erase that conflict. But it did move the law back toward a simpler and more constitutionally sound principle: Citizens should be treated as individuals, not sorted into political categories based primarily on race.

Stewart also approved an annual $39,000 pension for herself despite only working in New Britain for 14 years, not the required 20 years.

Stewart is currently campaigning for governor. As of May 12, she is the favorite to win the Republican nomination.

Key facts: Stewart racked up $207,000 on her city credit card from 2016 to 2025. The Hartford Courant first reported the story, and it was later verified by several other news outlets.

Waste of the Day 5.18.26

Open the Books

In June 2018, Stewart used city money to pay $1,374 to a company that prints invitations for wedding showers and hired a makeup artist for $93, The Hartford Courant reported. She was married later that year.

A few days before her husband turned 40 in 2022, Stewart made purchases that appear to be for his birthday party. She bought an arch made of balloons, 40th birthday candles and cocktail napkins, and a gag card of Donald Trump saying "Let's make 40 great again." They were listed as office expenses, according to The Hartford Courant.

On May 4, 2023 — Stewart's birthday — she paid $531 for dinner at the Capital Grille in Hartford, the newspaper reported.

Stewart also used city funds to pay more than $18,000 for a membership at The Hartford Club, an elite social and dining club. Other purchases included a yoga mat, diapers, pool toys, a salad spinner, a vanity mirror and more, according to the newspaper. More than half of the items did not have receipts.

Separately, the Connecticut Mirror reported in April that Stewart approved a "prorated pension" for herself before her time as mayor ended in 2025. Prorated pensions do not exist in New Britain's legal code. Employees either earn a full pension if they retire with 20 years of service, or they do not earn one at all.

But Stewart is currently set to earn a $39,366 annual pension starting in 2042. Eleven days before she left office, she sent the following email to her human resources director: "Based on my 14 years of service, I calculate my eligibility for a deferred partial pension benefit of approximately 35% of my annual salary, payable upon reaching the eligible age of 55."

The city's benefits administrator, Wilbert Vazquez, approved the request three days later. There is no record of anyone questioning its legality, according to the Connecticut Mirror.

Search all federal, state and local salaries and vendor spending with the world's largest government spending database at OpenTheBooks.com.

Supporting quote: "There is a reason you have receipts and you have all that proof because there was nothing to hide," Stewart told the Hartford Courier about her credit card spending. "There were receipts that were submitted and annually budgeted and don't forget independently audited too. And for 12 years there was never a question or a doubt raised until now, until I decided to step away and run for higher office."

When asked about her pension, Stewart told the Connecticut Mirror, "I think that it would be foolish for me, after 14 years of service, to not make the inquiry and see that if I was entitled to the benefit … I think that after so many years of service to not make the ask, I would be doing myself a disservice."

Summary: Hopefully this year, New Britain can increase its oversight of credit card spending and taxpayers can fund their own birthday parties with the savings.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com

It is now the middle of college graduation season, and we will not be making any commencement addresses.

One of us is a former president of several major universities who will mark the first time in 45 years not presiding over graduation festivities. The other heads an academic association composed of faculty at schools across the country. But if we were speaking to students, their families, and our fellow academics, we would present a sharp contrast to the controversial commencement remarks made earlier this month at the University of Michigan and other campuses, where assorted accusations were leveled at the US, and our ally, Israel. Instead, here is the urgent message we would deliver: it is time to make our colleges and universities fiercely American again.

This is not intended as a slogan. It is an invitation to re-examine the very purpose of higher education. With a recent survey finding that national trust in academia as an institution has eroded to 35 percent, we need to ask ourselves what our core mission is - especially in the AI age when the value of a diploma is being scrutinized like never before.

And the answer, if you look at the history of American education, is simple: American universities exist, and have always existed, primarily to raise generation after generation of excellent, dedicated, curious, innovative, and deeply committed citizens.

While we firmly believe that opening the gates of our universities to students and faculty from all over the world has helped turn America's higher education institutions into the global powerhouses they are today, it has also helped our friends across the world adapt our educational values to their respective local cultures. However, the most noble and desirable thing you can do with the diplomas you are about to receive, and the skills and knowledge you have earned these past four years, is to put them all in the service of this great nation that we love so much.

How, then, should we begin to restore faith in academia? Here is a bold idea: by first looking to reimagine Middle East studies. Some would say it is a niche, if not volatile, place to start, but this, graduates, is vital for you to remember as you embark on your life journeys. Solving for what is hard will yield the highest returns.

We are not merely choosing this path because America's war on Iran has been going on for months. Nor are we writing to jump into the fray and discuss the heated atmosphere on too many American campuses since Hamas's murderous attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the ensuing and heart-wrenching suffering and death of innocent civilians across the Mideast.

Instead, and what is getting lost in the public discourse, is the connection between Middle East studies and our national security. As the current war shows all too clearly, the region remains of the utmost importance to America's vital interests. Fluctuations in its oil prices and movements have a very deep impact on our economic well-being. Changes in its political or military alliances impact the tender geopolitical balance between America and global rivals, especially China and Russia. And radical religious ideologies continue to inflame the minds of young men, causing them to target Americans around the world. For these reasons and so many more, having Middle East scholars that supply us with sharp, accurate, insightful, and dispassionate analysis of the region is key. It certainly does not mean turning a blind eye to America's shortcomings, but neither should it give license to knee-jerk contempt.

Unfortunately, look to almost every Middle East studies department anywhere in the country and you will find just that. Open and respectful debate, based on empirical data and scholarship, has given way to intolerance and groupthink. As Middle Eastern studies serve as a feeder to vital government and military roles, failures and prejudices continue to fester. Language instruction declined, and cultural explanations for American culpability expanded. Given the disturbing enthusiasm for Hamas currently displayed in academia, including large swaths of support now emerging for the Islamic Republic of Iran, self-examination seems unlikely. If anything, academia shows signs of digging into its "resistance" to President Trump confronting a regime that has been calling for America's death since 1979.

If we are to rebuild the public's trust in higher education and ensure our academic institutions continue being major engines of American growth, reforming Middle East studies programs provides a potential case study for other academic areas in need of reform. Where to start?

1. Open the Books: Universities should be required to publish detailed explanations of their administrative structures, including the rules and organization for faculty hiring, firing, promotion, internal funding, and academic governance. Any institution that receives federal funding must be completely transparent about how it spends those funds and how it operates - along with divulging foreign financial support.

2. Eradicate Departmental Divisions: Transcend turf wars between departments and attract a new generation of multi-disciplinary Mideast scholars, with a grounding in US civics and able to connect the dots between geology and history, Farsi and large language models.

3. Stop Diverting Student Activities Fees: Student governments, a key node in funding Hamas supporters on campus, should be cut off from university-collected funds if the use is blatantly divisive. Student activity fees are too often diverted to fund political activism used to "cancel" other students and professors.

4. Phase Out Tenure: Tenure should be gradually ended and replaced with fixed-duration contracts that are renewable. Right-size the ratio of faculty to students through retirements and buyouts. Return faculty to their primary teaching and research roles and end the indentured servitude of graduate students and adjunct professors.

Like America itself, our institutions of higher education contain multitudes. For each affected professor and student making headlines with odious comments, we know a dozen or more who are toiling not only to repair what has been rendered broken but to dream of a brighter future.

So, congratulations, and you deserve nothing less.

For years, I helped Hollywood chase the world … And now I regret it.

I sat in many rooms where movie deals were struck to open China's market and others around the world, attract international audiences, and globalize production efficiencies. We believed we were building a more efficient entertainment industry without borders, powered by billions of consumers, cheap labor, and foreign incentives.

In many ways, we succeeded - especially by short-term financial measures. But for America's longer-term interests, we failed miserably.

We told ourselves global commerce would lead to convergence, better monetization, and shared values. Instead, we created a slow-moving trainwreck of imbalance. Markets like China protected their domestic film industries with quotas, censorship, and restricted revenue shares, while Hollywood recklessly adapted for access. Scripts were adjusted. Pro-American themes, even in their most subtle forms, were nullified. Storylines softened. Creative decisions bent to the realities of mandates from the Middle Kingdom to the Middle East. This creative-stifling behavior complemented Hollywood's fervent drive to keep production costs low by finding cheaper labor and grander incentives than America provided. Capitalism trumped patriotism, but at the time it simply felt like smart business.

Looking back, however, the cost is now painfully clear.

Los Angeles alone has lost more than 40,000 film and television jobs in recent years - roughly a quarter of its entertainment workforce. Production employment is down nearly 30% since 2022. On-location filming has dropped more than 20% in the last year alone and nearly 40% over the past decade. Atlanta - once the crown jewel of "Hollywood South" - saw production spending collapse from $4.4 billion in 2022 to roughly $2.3 billion today, a nearly 50% drop.

Hollywood offshores more than 60% of its production annually now. As a result, America has lost a major economic engine along with significant global cultural influence. Hollywood didn't slowly decline. It hollowed out - as did the industry's appetite to project pro-American idealism globally.

This isn't a temporary slowdown. It's deeply structural. Like many other industries, Hollywood chased efficiency and global scale for decades. Productions moved wherever incentives were strongest and labor was cheapest. Financing followed international capital. And foreign governments offered subsidies aggressively, pulling jobs, expertise, and infrastructure out of the United States - often while using ruthless protectionist policies to nurture their own domestic players.

The result was predictable. Reckless globalization didn't just change where and how Hollywood's films are made - it changed who makes them and stars in them too. Today, a disproportionate share of top-tier, box-office-leading English-speaking actors come from the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. American-born stars account for less than half of the industry's biggest global draws, despite the United States representing roughly three-quarters of the English-speaking world. Studios increasingly cast British and Australian actors as Americans, not just for talent but for global market appeal.

Hollywood didn't just export its films - it imported its priorities and American interests, favoring global optimization over domestic industry investment.

We assumed American dominance in entertainment was permanent. It isn't. Even worse, many are OK with that.

If we want Hollywood to remain the global leader in storytelling, we must reinvest in the ecosystem that made it great: our workers, creatives, stories, and production infrastructure.

That's exactly what I, along with a 1,000-plus fellow Americans, just did.

After years of writing and speaking on these issues, I produced "Bad Counselors," a fish-out-of-water comedy starring Chris Klein, Matt Cornett, and Ramon Reed, directed by Chris Dowling. The collective vision and the resulting film proved what should have been obvious: What matters most isn't just what's on screen. It's how it was made.

All 1,175 people who worked on "Bad Counselors" are American. Every creative - writers, director, producers, cast - is American. We shot entirely in the United States: North Carolina, Tennessee, and California. All pre- and post-production was completed in Texas, Tennessee, California, and North Carolina. The music is entirely American - from "Night Ranger" to "Lifehouse" to "Forrest Frank." The film was financed by an American studio, Loam Entertainment, and produced by American companies Loam, Zero Gravity, and Narrow Gate.

None of this was accidental. It was intentional. It wasn't the cheapest way to make a movie. It wasn't the easiest either. But it was the right one. Because at some point, belief must turn into action.

For years we've talked about supporting American workers and rebuilding domestic industries. Yet Hollywood often failed to apply those principles to itself, optimizing for cost over community, incentives over infrastructure, and short-term gain over long-term strength.

When production leaves, jobs don't just disappear - they take entire ecosystems with them. Equipment houses close. Post-production shrinks. Young talent loses the chance to learn the craft. Capability leaves with it.

That's the real danger. Hollywood's strength has never been just its intellectual property or global reach. It's the depth of our talent, the maturity of our process, the mastery of our craft, the world-class infrastructure, and the great nation of the United States of America that supports it all. When we abandon the birthplace of moviemaking, we erode the highest-profile cultural and economic pillar of the United States.

Though modest in scale, "Bad Counselors" will release on 1,000-plus screens nationwide on July 23. The model behind it proves it's still possible to make a great film entirely within the American creative economy, directly employing over a thousand Americans and boosting local economies across the United States.

At a time when more than 60% of major productions are made abroad, choosing to make a film entirely in America isn't nostalgia - it's a deliberate economic decision. And, most importantly, it's a decision to make quality the priority.

Which raises a simple question: If we know what works, why aren't we doing more of it?

This isn't about shutting the world out. I've spent my career building bridges across markets and still believe in global collaboration. But only when it's balanced. When one side protects its own domestic industry and the other doesn't, the result isn't partnership - it's displacement.

I don't regret the work I did helping Hollywood expand globally. It was done in good faith. But experience brings clarity, and clarity demands adjustment. "Bad Counselors" is part of that important journey.

It's a fun, feel-good family comedy, the kind Hollywood used to make routinely. If audiences want more films like it - entertaining, broadly appealing, emotionally fulfilling, inspirational, and 100% built by American crews and creators - the path forward is simple: Show up and support them.

Because in the end, this isn't just about how films are made. It's about whether we choose to invest in the people who make them.

Hollywood doesn't need to retreat from the world. But it does need to remember where its horsepower comes from - American actors, writers, stories, crews, musicians, innovators, locations, infrastructure, and communities. That's the engine that drives the greatest creative community in the world. Like any engine, it requires maintenance. For years we assumed it would take care of itself. Now we know it won't.

If we want to sustain American leadership in entertainment, we must be deliberate about where we invest, where we produce, what stories we tell, and whom we employ. That's exactly what we set out to do with "Bad Counselors."

We bet the house on America, and America delivered a world-class film. On July 23, go see it at a theater near you. Remind Hollywood that American-made movies are truly the best in the world.

"The pivot from figures of universal inspiration," NYU students complained, "to an individual who has been accused of making homophobic remarks in a class and public misconceptions about transgender identity, and has promoted disturbing rhetoric around antiracism, social justice, and diversity, equity and inclusion, claiming that the abolition of DEI may be the only way out of the Leftist ideological capture of American campuses, is deeply unsettling and clearly undermines the University's stated values."

Those accusations are deeply mistaken and profoundly misleading. The one accurate claim is that he did acknowledge that the abolition of DEI might be the only way for academia to correct course. So Haidt is clearly not an inspiring choice for students who are attached to that destructive paradigm.

But Haidt is nothing if not a figure of inspiration for parents, writers, and budding social scientists. He has produced four bestsellers, of which three, including The Coddling of the American Mind, are global blockbusters. His latest, The Anxious Generation, has spent over a year on international bestseller lists, leading to not only parental and community efforts, but real policy changes to protect the mental health of children and adolescents.

This includes an initiative at NYU called "IRL" (In Real Life). As a result of Haidt's work, designated spaces on campus are device-free to encourage face-to-face interaction and time away from the distractions of social media. The student statement, however, unironically asks whether the choice of Haidt was "yet another effort to push the IRL narrative." At elite universities, where everything is "narrative," even efforts to encourage friendships and immersive real life experiences can only be interpreted as an effort to push a narrative.

"Many students have reported feelings of disappointment, disgust, unenthusiasm, defeat, and embarrassment" as well as "being misunderstood," the statement reads. Awkward phrasing aside, at least these students didn't insist that Haidt's selection was "harmful." When I worked with Greg Lukianoff and Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind, attempts to disinvite and deplatform speakers were often framed as efforts to protect vulnerable students from the "harm" of speakers' words — or even the speaker's mere presence.

Psychologists at UCLA, Harvard, and Ohio State have found that believing words can harm is associated with worse mental health: more anxiety and depression, less resilience, and worse emotion regulation. And when students see words as violence, they can become willing to endorse actual violence in response to speech — or even to prevent it.

According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Gen Z is roughly 10 times more accepting of using violence to prevent speech than Baby Boomers, and more than 25 times more than the Silent Generation. Roughly 43% of Gen Z survey participants refused to endorse the view that violence against speakers is never acceptable.

As of May 7, campus deplatforming attempts had surpassed 100 for the year, according to FIRE's publicly accessible Campus Deplatforming Database. In the first quarter of 2026, reports FIRE's Chief Research Advisor, Sean Stevens, 65 of 70 attempts succeeded.

While failed deplatforming attempts are bad enough, at least they "show that institutional safeguards are holding," Stevens says. "A successful attempt signals that those safeguards are eroding. If nearly all deplatforming efforts are now succeeding, then the problem is not simply that controversial events are being challenged. The problem is that universities appear increasingly willing to fold under pressure."

Protesting commencement speakers is hardly new. When I graduated from Barnard College in 1990, students at Wellesley College were "outraged" by the choice of their commencement speaker, Barbara Bush, because she wasn't a career woman.

But when students of past generations tried to school their elders, their elders schooled them right back. Psychiatrist and author Jean Baker Miller called those students' objections "simplistic." Wellesley alumnae quipped that the class of 1990 had apparently not learned the school's Latin motto: "non ministrari, sed ministrare," not to be served, but to serve.

And the pushback wasn't partisan. Feminist Pat Schroeder offered, "I have nothing but respect for Barbara Bush.... Being a wife and mother is not a protestable offense. After all, if it weren't for mothers, there would be no students at Wellesley." Mrs. Bush, always the soul of discretion, said simply, "They're 21 years old and they're looking at life from that perspective."

Gen Z has been less fortunate. Instead of university administrators and other leaders asserting their authority, they have increasingly appeased and indulged students' emotional instability, arrogance, and even rule-breaking — including with respect to disruptions, harassment, threats, mobbings reminiscent of Maoist struggle-sessions, and even violence. This is not beneficial for anyone, including those students who violate the boundaries of protected free expression.

Both Jonathan Haidt and Barbara Bush delivered their keynote addresses. Mrs. Bush's is now included in NPR's list of best commencement speeches of all time:

"As important as your obligations as a doctor, lawyer or business leader will be," she said, "you are a human being first. And those human connections—with spouses, with children, with friends—are the most important investments you will ever make."

That advice has never been more true or more necessary. And it's not so different from the message NYU graduates heard from Haidt on Thursday. "Call someone you love just to say hi," he told them, "Invite someone to dinner. Say yes when someone invites you. Be the one who makes things happen in the real world." Hopefully, the graduating class learned something from him.

But Europe and the United States are ignoring a critical question: What exactly are Turkey's military ambitions?

The answer increasingly points to a country pursuing strategic autonomy through offensive missile capabilities designed not simply for defense but for coercion, regional intimidation, and worldwide leverage. As evidenced by the showcasing of its new Inter Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) - the Yildirimhan, Turkey's accelerating development of ballistic, cruise, and potentially hypersonic missiles should force Washington and Brussels to reconsider whether Ankara is evolving into a stabilizing NATO partner—or a revisionist power armed with increasingly sophisticated strike capabilities.

A recent report documents the extraordinary pace of Turkey's missile modernization program. What began in the 1990s as a limited effort to build retaliatory missile capabilities has transformed into one of the most ambitious missile-development programs among NATO members.

Turkey is now developing a layered arsenal that includes the Bora, Tayfun, and Cenk ballistic missile families alongside long-range cruise missile systems such as the Gezgin and SOM. According to the report, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan personally ordered the acceleration of missiles with ranges exceeding 800 kilometers and directed the development of systems able of ranges beyond 2,000 kilometers.

This is not the posture of a state focused solely on territorial defense.

The strategic geography of these missile systems matters. As reporting demonstrates, a 2,000-kilometer-range Turkish missile places vast portions of Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, Israel, North Africa, and the Gulf within reach. Turkey's Tayfun system reportedly already exceeds Mach 5, while the Cenk missile appears to be designed with maneuverable reentry-vehicle technology associated with advanced medium-range ballistic missile systems. It is worth noting at this point that the reported capabilities of Turkey's new ballistic missile technology have not been independently verified.

At the same time, Ankara is attempting to position itself as Europe's future defense partner. Turkish officials increasingly argue that Europe cannot construct a credible post-American security architecture without Turkey's defense-industrial capacity. Recent cooperation with Spain on the Hürjet trainer aircraft and Ankara's broader push for involvement in European defense projects reflect this effort. Ankara is simultaneously pushing narratives of its value to European security to reinvigorate its accession to the EU.

European leaders appear increasingly receptive. The logic is understandable: Turkey possesses manufacturing capacity, an expanding defense sector, and a large standing military. Yet Europe risks making a major strategic error by treating Turkish military growth as politically neutral.

Turkey's missile development program cannot be separated from Erdogan's wider ideological and international agenda.

Over the past decade, Ankara has repeatedly threatened fellow NATO member Greece, challenged Cyprus's sovereignty, militarized disputes in the Eastern Mediterranean, and escalated anti-Israel rhetoric to unprecedented levels. Erdogan himself has repeatedly warned that Turkey could "come suddenly one night" against its adversaries—a phrase now embedded in Turkish strategic signaling. Turkish officials have openly threatened Greece over maritime disputes while simultaneously expanding ballistic missile ranges capable of striking Athens and beyond.

Israel faces an even more alarming trajectory. Since the October 7 attacks, Erdogan's rhetoric toward Israel has grown steadily more confrontational. Senior Turkish officials routinely compare Israeli leaders to Nazis while Ankara continues hosting Hamas-linked figures and preserving ties with Islamist networks across the region. Turkish missile development must therefore be understood not in isolation, but in the context of a government increasingly comfortable with coercive regional posturing.

This is precisely why Ankara's growing missile arsenal should concern Europe and the United States. For decades, NATO's shared defense architecture depended upon interoperability, strategic trust, and political alignment. Turkey's existing trajectory undermines all three.

The problem is not simply that Turkey is building missiles. Many NATO allies possess sophisticated strike capabilities. The problem is that Ankara increasingly behaves like a power pursuing strategic independence from the West while simultaneously benefiting from NATO's protections and Europe's economic integration. It does so simultaneously, while entering in defense procurement agreements with Russia. In 2019, Turkey purchased and still maintains the S-400 missile defense system, resulting in Ankara's ouster from the F-35 program, in addition to being subjected to limited sanctions by Washington.

Indeed, the IISS report shows that Turkey's missile-development ecosystem emerged partly because Ankara grew frustrated with dependence on NATO systems and Western export controls. Turkey's pursuit of indigenous propulsion systems, vertical launch systems, and long-range cruise missiles demonstrates a deliberate strategy to decouple itself from Western constraints.

This has serious consequences for transatlantic security.

First, Turkey's missile advances risk triggering a regional arms race in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Greece will almost certainly deepen missile-defense cooperation with Israel and France. Israel, already wary of Turkey's growing hostility, will increasingly treat Ankara as a long-term strategic threat rather than a difficult regional actor. Gulf states may similarly accelerate missile procurement programs.

Second, Turkey's growing defense-industrial independence weakens Western leverage. The more self-sufficient Ankara becomes in propulsion systems, guidance technologies, and missile production, the less vulnerable it becomes to American or European sanctions pressure. This is particularly important given Turkey's continued balancing between NATO and revisionist powers such as Russia and China.

Third, there is a growing risk that Europe's desperation for defense-industrial capacity will lead decision-makers to ignore the political character of Erdogan's government altogether. Already, some European officials claim that geopolitical realities require "pragmatism" toward Turkey regardless of democratic backsliding or regional aggression. That logic may produce short-term defense cooperation, but it additionally risks empowering a government whose strategic objectives increasingly diverge from those of the transatlantic alliance.

Turkey's missile program ultimately reveals a deeper ambition: Ankara no longer sees itself merely as NATO's southeastern flank. It increasingly sees itself as an autonomous Eurasian military power capable of coercing rivals, shaping regional conflicts, and bargaining with both East and West simultaneously.

Europe and the United States must recognize that reality before Turkey's expanding missile arsenal significantly changes the regional balance of power. The question is no longer whether Turkey can develop advanced missile capabilities. It clearly can. The real question is whether the West fully understands what Erdogan intends to do with them.

Sinan Ciddi is a senior fellow and director of the Turkey program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).

The Times this week played host to one of the most astonishing examples of journalistic malpractice in recent memory. It was perpetrated by Nicholas Kristof - a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist turned progressive columnist and aspiring Democratic politician. Hiding under the cloak of the Times' opinion section, Kristof ran a report alleging shocking and lurid claims of widespread, systemic sexual assault by Israeli prison guards against Palestinians.

This would be horrifying if true, except we have little reason to believe it is. To justify his claims, Kristof relies on Hamas-linked organizations, anti-Israel activists, and anonymous accounts that lack any semblance of independent verification. He also regurgitates a monstrous claim - that Israel trains dogs to rape prisoners - that is widely believed to be impossible, let alone unsubstantiated.

Let's start with Kristof's marquee source: the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. He calls it "a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel," which is like calling the DNC "a Washington-based political group often critical of Republicans." Euro-Med exists to oppose Israel. Many of its leaders, including its founder and chairman, are linked to Hamas. The group has a track record of promoting unverified or false anti-Israel claims, including the exact "dogs trained to rape prisoners" story Kristof repeated.

As for that preposterous claim, it is a well-documented libel against Israel.

And then there is the rampant use of anonymous sourcing, which makes up most of the first-person accounts in Kristof's piece. Assuming these sources are real Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, they have an obvious incentive to paint Israelis in the worst possible light. Basic journalistic due diligence would have treated the claims with skepticism, especially when they offer no medical reports, photos, videos, or forensic evidence for the most extreme claims.

When Kristof does quote sources on the record, their identities are revealing.

The most prominent is Sami al-Sai, a Palestinian "freelance journalist" who says he was raped by Israeli prison guards. But al-Sai is neither an impartial nor a reliable witness. He publicly praised the October 7 Hamas attacks, eulogized West Bank terror cell leaders as "martyrs," and has given shifting accounts of the supposed rape. He appears to have added crucial and graphic new details when talking to Kristof that don't appear in earlier accounts.

This is also true of Issa Amro, whom Kristof glowingly refers to as "the Palestinian Gandhi." In an earlier Washington Post interview, Amro said he was threatened with sexual assault on a particular day. In Kristof's column, he alleges an actual assault. So, which is it?

Kristof also quoted former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as saying he "definitely" believes that assaults have occurred. But after the story was published, Olmert said his quote was flagrantly misrepresented. It's easy to see how it could have happened. Isolated instances of assault in Israeli prisons are entirely possible considering the scope of this conflict. Yet Kristof does not present them as occasional acts of violence, but as a systematic Israeli practice. Olmert strongly objects to that claim.

Kristof himself offers a telling hedge in his column. He writes that "it's impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are" - which is an interesting disclaimer in a piece that also calls the assaults "systematic," "widely practiced," and "frequent."

Adding to all of this, the timing of the piece is highly suspect: published the day before the release of a major Israeli report on Hamas sexual violence during the October 7 attack, which, unlike Kristof's piece, is deeply sourced with documentary evidence. It's difficult to view Kristof's column as anything other than an attempt to shift focus and paint a false moral equivalency.

Ultimately, this is not just another case of Hamas propaganda being laundered for the Western masses. It is a striking example of the disintegration in journalistic standards that is eroding trust in the press. I know many who have published opinion pieces in the New York Times, usually representing moderate viewpoints, and they describe a strenuous fact checking process - but it appears to be selectively enforced.

The Times should have applied particular scrutiny to Kristof given his recent ambitions. He is no longer a mere opinion columnist, but rather an aspiring progressive politician whose 2022 attempt to run for governor of Oregon was struck down in the courts over residency requirements.

Viewed that way, the op-ed begins to look much like the rest of the discourse from aspiring candidates in America - where facts take a backseat to agendas, and claims are measured more by whether they hurt the opposition than whether they capture the truth.

The difference is, this claim appeared in the New York Times, bringing us back to the question: How can the American people know what to believe?

As Ars Technica described: "There is also growing resistance from communities all across the US to data centers." I live in Virginia, one of the biggest data center states in the Union, where public opinion is turning "sharply against new data center development." Loudoun County is opening up a fight from public officials, while local citizens closer to me are fighting to stop another center's proposed construction.

When you get to be as big as Google or OpenAI, it's easy to lose sight of the "little" picture. But I've seen big corporations lose billion-dollar projects this way. From 2010 to 2018, small-town activists in New Hampshire (my own sister was one of them) organized to scuttle the ambitious, expensive Northern Pass electrical transmission line. In Virginia last year, the then-governor's agreement with the billionaire owner of the Washington Capitals and Wizards to move the stadium a few miles south was blocked by local resistance from the governor's own party.

Those groundswells weren't partisan, and the data center protests aren't, either. They're a combination of environmental concerns on the left, "leave me alone" on the right, and "big business shafting us" from everyone. That kind of united front is rare in 2026 - and a potential death sentence for data center ascendancy.

Of course, AI companies need support from lawmakers and regulators up the chain. President Donald J. Trump, the Department of Interior, and Congress play huge roles in AI regulation. Companies must excel at getting their projects past thousands of other bills on Capitol Hill, securing cosponsors, and then getting majorities in multiple hearings and multiple floor votes. Finally, there's a presidential signature. For less high-profile objectives, you have to be on first-name terms with the lobbyist who can finagle a few lines into a "must pass" omnibus bill, or have the in-depth knowledge of "the system" to ensure regulators have your back.

But to paraphrase Jason Aldean, don't "try that in a small town." These officials' concern is looking at how only 30% of voters vote in local elections, and how a few key business owners and community leaders seem to be on their side. The loudest people aren't going to move them from office - and the 25 families whose companies rely on the data center's construction for the next three years can stand up in front of those who aren't sure what to think

Avoiding the data center meltdown goes beyond manipulating the political system. It's better long-term to take residents' concerns seriously long before you propose anything. Don't go in only once your proposal is being presented. Instead, take 18 months to get to know the community, build relationships with the local press, and understand challenges and needs on the ground. Host some town halls. Go to the local coffee shops and breweries. Have the CEO, local leaders, and everyday people make your case.

That way, there's no trusting luck by introducing a proposal that everyone might love - or, more likely, will hate because they've only heard about the heavy water usage and power needs of data centers. They'll understand your point of view in a deeper way, which means that instead of being seen as carpetbaggers taking advantage of the yokels, data center executives could then be viewed as partners in the community.

I go back to Northern Pass. The company promised lots of temporary jobs and a few permanent ones, but failed spectacularly to account for how Granite Staters would see things: "Give up your beloved scenic views so we can ship electricity to wealthy southern New Englanders hundreds of miles away." They never really made their case until opposition was under way - and then it took almost a decade and untold corporate dollars for the project to die.

If you understand the locals' pain and have a realistic, sensitive way to relieve it, you'll get that 40% approval. And trust me (and the data centers!): You can't go without it.

In a regulatory environment that's so global that the president weighs in on county zoning decisions, most politics is still local. Google, Oracle, and OpenAI are not too big to embarrass themselves on Main Street. As for the rest of us, let's remember the little guy, who never goes out of style. If we forget that, he'll remind us, in the picket line and at the ballot box.

Few industries are more important to our national security than healthcare. More than 131 million people—nearly two-thirds of all U.S. adults—use prescription medications. Yet the United States has allowed its pharmaceutical supply chains to become dangerously dependent on foreign rivals—particularly China.

That vulnerability became strikingly clear during the pandemic, when U.S. leaders scrambled to secure masks, gloves, and other protective equipment from overseas. But our overreliance on China runs far deeper than just rubber and fabric.

Today, China produces an outsized portion of the world's Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs). These are the chemical backbone of most medicines, from insulin to antibiotics to asthma treatments. In a crisis—whether military confrontation, sanctions escalation, or a broader trade disagreement—Beijing would have us by the pills.

It's not theoretical. China has already demonstrated its willingness to weaponize supply chains. During recent trade disputes, Beijing leveraged its control over rare earth minerals—critical inputs for everything from aerospace systems to consumer electronics—to strengthen its negotiating position against the United States.

This kind of market dominance is by design. Every five years, leaders from across China congregate to decide a new national development plan. Because of the country's highly-centralized structure, the government systematically targets strategic industries.

In 2020, that five-year plan focused on electric vehicles and semiconductors. Now, Beijing is expanding its ambitions into biotechnology and "frontier science." China is positioning itself not just as a pharmaceutical inputs supplier, but as a potential gatekeeper of future medical breakthroughs.

Washington cannot let that happen. Fortunately, the U.S. has a powerful tool that our chief competitor across the Pacific doesn't. Free market capitalism—as opposed to a top down, state-directed economy—is America's competitive edge against China. Congress just needs to provide the right incentives so we can maximize on that advantage.

Recent tax reforms that allow manufacturers to immediately expense some of the costs associated with research and development are a strong start. These legislative changes are providing businesses with greater certainty to invest in domestic production and expand "Made in America" pharmaceutical capacity.

President Trump is adding fuel to that momentum through his pro-business agenda. A 2025 order that streamlines approvals for companies looking to onshore drug production is a prime example. But executive action is fragile. America's next leader could reverse that progress with the stroke of a pen. As the Trump administration continues to hack away at layers of red tape, lawmakers should codify these reforms.

America already has a strong foundation to build from. Indiana, North Carolina, and the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, among other areas, anchor a significant share of existing American pharmaceutical production. By encouraging more innovation in our own backyard, these hubs can be strengthened to secure supply chains and reduce our dependence on China.

Recent investments—including $300 million committed to Puerto Rico to expand domestic drug manufacturing capacity—are proof of concept.

U.S. Congressman Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) recently said it best when he warned "America's medicine cabinet runs through Beijing." As China tightens its grip, securing America's healthcare supply chains against foreign disruption is not just sound economic policy—it is a national security imperative.

Will Coggin is the managing director of the American Security Institute.

The accurate portrayal of the "fog of war" was gifted to us by Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. Clausewitz warned that what a commander thinks they know on the battlefield is often wrong, partially wrong, or unknowable in real time due to an accumulation of myriad small errors. The resulting friction is characterized by extreme uncertainty, confusion, and lack of situational awareness experienced during combat.

On March 1, three F-15E Strike Eagles were shot down by a coalition aircraft in the same airspace while seven Army reservists were killed by Iranian drones at an operations center in Kuwait. Eleven days later, two KC-135 Stratotankers collided mid-air over Iraq, killing six crew members. On March 27, an E-3 Sentry was destroyed and multiple KC-135s damaged by Iranian drones at Prince Sultan Air Base. On April 5, two MC-130J Commando II aircraft were deliberately destroyed by U.S. forces after becoming stuck at a makeshift airstrip near Isfahan — an equipment loss rooted in insufficient geospatial planning data. Five incidents. Thirteen lives. None caused by adversary superiority. Each caused in part by gaps in integrated battlespace awareness.

The instinct to attribute these losses to familiar combat realities — poor coordination, high ops tempo, the fog and friction of war — leaps past one fundamental question: could affordable, modern technology have prevented these outcomes?

What was missing was not data — it was the integration required to complete Boyd's OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, faster than the adversary. In theater, operators could observe individual data feeds but could not orient — they lacked a fused awareness of the full threat, airspace, and movement. Intelligence, planning, and operational data existed across siloed systems that could have precluded each tragedy. What was missing was not the data — it was the ability to act on it.

Controllers should have waved off merging assets. Soldiers should have known about incoming fire. Planners should have known the targeting threat or soil conditions. Without accurate orientation, decisions and actions were fatally delayed. A digitally twinned battlespace can integrate relevant information, remove errors, and compress the time between observe and orient phases, delivering real time situational awareness that lets warfighters focus on deciding and acting with Artificial Intelligence (AI) by their side.

Technologies exist today to deploy AI-enabled digital twins — closing planning gaps while enhancing situational awareness in real time. A digital twin can be deployed in days or weeks at the cost of one Tomahawk missile, integrating authoritative sources selected by the warfighter, not some contractor back in the States, and tailored for each mission.

A digital twin is not a dashboard or a common operating picture. It is a continuously updated virtual model of the operational environment — reflecting not just asset locations, but the relationships between them, the constraints they operate under, and the conflicts that would arise in certain courses of action. It integrates live Air Tasking Order execution, IFF status, coalition partner activity, electronic warfare conditions, logistics states, and airspace restrictions — all fused in real time. What has been missing is the institutional commitment to deploy it.

The Department of War has recognized the problem. CJADC2 reached a minimum viable capability milestone in early 2024. But incidents continue — because the gap between an experimental result and a fully integrated picture at the tactical edge remains wide. Even as the Department articulates a vendor-agnostic vision, billion-dollar contracts flow to large incumbents for integration work that smaller, more specialized companies already deliver faster and at lower cost. Even worse, incumbents are not incentivized to offer small-company innovation — that would reduce their fees. The Department must implement a deliberate assessment of how fast CJADC2 integration investments result in tangible effects on the battlefield.

Our military fields more sensors and collection systems than any force in history. The problem is what happens after collection. Intelligence, planning, operations, and logistics live in separate systems — reconciled by human analysts under time pressure, if at all. The GAO's 2025 CJADC2 assessment described a "swivel chair model": data manually transferred between disconnected systems to approximate a picture none provides alone. In a peer conflict at the speed of relevance, this model succumbs to the fog and friction of war.

The solution is loose coupling: linking data sources when needed for mission requirements, not vendor preference. Innovative platforms can establish digital twins with federated authoritative sources on demand — drawing from the trusted databases and terrain models simultaneously, on the warfighter's terms.

While AI cannot compensate for broken data architectures, a digital twin foundation with trained AI surfaces issues before they become incidents — including across sensor systems operators might not think to consult. Without a digital twin, AI's value for warfighters is dramatically diminished.

These tragic circumstances have happened before. The same conditions will continue to recur —consider an Indo-Pacific scenario with denser airspace, more capable adversaries, and more severe electronic warfare. It is not just combat: tragic mid-air collisions and ground near-misses at commercial airports persist because we have not twinned the national airspace or trained AI to aid controllers.

The United States does not lack the innovation or human talent to maintain information superiority. We are challenged because we are not deploying the technologies now that integrate what we already know— to allow the hardest fog and friction of war to lift. Until we commit to digitally twinning a battlespace for the warfighter that is dynamically assessed, continuously updated, and operationally trusted, we will continue to suffer tragic, preventable losses.

The HON Lucian Niemeyer is a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, former White House official, a former staff member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, and retired Air Force military engineer.

Timothy Faulkner is a former Senior Defense Executive, former Senior Special Operations civilian in the Department of the Navy, and a retired senior U.S. Army officer.

A dairy farmer opens it to find new requirements from their milk processing plant. Herd data, energy usage, emissions figures. The letter calls it voluntary but if you don't comply, the plant can't take your milk. And if the plant can't take your milk, you're out of business.

That's Pathways to Dairy Net Zero in practice.

Pathways to Dairy Net Zero (P2DNZ) is presented as a voluntary, science-based initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from dairy producers. In practice, however, it functions as yet another sector-specific implementation of global ESG and net-zero governance.

In the case of P2DNZ, this governance model is applied to large-scale milk producers. The result is the downward transfer of climate-compliance costs and onerous ESG restrictions on farmers. Especially mid-sized and small farms, while offering no plausible pathway to detectable global emissions reductions. In short, this is the latest attack on American farmers from globalist board rooms seeking to control what you consume.

P2DNZ may be presented as a voluntary, science-based initiative but in reality, it's the same ESG playbook we've seen used to squeeze entire industries into net-zero compliance without a single vote being cast. The pressure doesn't come from government. It comes from the giant food corporations at the top of the supply chain. It comes from the boardrooms of companies like Nestlé and Danone and filters down through processors until it lands on the farmer who has no real choice but to comply.

What begins as "guidance" quickly becomes obligation.

For dairy farmers, especially the ones that make up the lifeblood of the American Heartland, that obligation carries a heavy cost. P2DNZ effectively embeds climate compliance into the financial and commercial conduits of the industry. It deeply impacts how farmers access credit, who processes their milk, who buys their milk, and under what conditions they can continue operating. The burden doesn't fall on distant institutions or multinational coalitions. It falls squarely on the people milking cows before sunrise, managing tight margins, and trying to pass their family farms on to the next generation.

And for what measurable gain?

Even under the most aggressive assumptions, eliminating all emissions from U.S. dairy production would have no detectable impact on global climate trends. That's not a political statement; it's a matter of scale. Yet the economic consequences are anything but theoretical. Farmers face rising compliance costs. Consumers face higher prices at the grocery store. And the industry itself faces increasing consolidation, as smaller producers struggle to keep up with mandates they had zero role in shaping.

This is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of P2DNZ: it is less about environmental outcomes and more about control. It's about shifting decision-making power away from independent producers and toward a network of globalist financial and corporate actors.

The attacks on American agriculture have taken on many forms. From discriminating against the use of diesel- and gasoline-powered farming equipment in the lending market, to corporate shareholder resolutions calling on food companies to "reduce greenhouse gas emissions" by cutting beef production, to utter demands to adopt plant-based alternatives to actual meat, and even outright litigation designed to bankrupt American businesses and farmers. Regardless of the tactic, they share a common objective. To create a world in which every single human is under the thumb of a global set of rules that would ensure more pain and misery than anyone should entertain.

The good news is that the current federal administration seems to be sticking up for small- and mid-sized American farms and dairy producers. Yesterday, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, shared a post on X highlighting the Pathways to Dairy Net Zero Problem. "Dairy farmers are vital in rural America, but now face radical ESG mandates disguised as "sustainability." As (@Heartland Impact) notes, Pathways to Dairy Net Zero will burden small farms with costly compliance."

P2DNZ is not an isolated initiative. It is the agricultural, and diary centered, expression of a broader ESG governance model that substitutes accounting targets for physical outcomes and private coordination for public accountability.

Hopefully, in the months and years to follow, more Americans and policymakers will become aware of the harms associated with incorporating ESG metrics into farming. American famers feed the nation, and they deserve better.

The same coercion architecture underpins the labor that sustains Chinese crystalline silicon solar manufacturers, which continue to seek access to the U.S. market.

Five years after the United States moved to specifically ban Uyghur forced labor, it remains the largest system of state-imposed forced labor in the world - and it is larger than ever. Our research found that China recorded more than 3 million labor transfers of Uyghurs and other ethnic groups in 2025. This was the highest figure on record and a year-on-year increase, despite the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), which was meant to curb the practice. China's silicon solar industry, which has lobbied for years to preserve its access to the U.S. market, remains an active participant in it.

At the center of China's solar supply chain sits Hoshine Silicon Industry, the world's largest producer of metallurgical-grade silicon. In 2021, the United States blocked Hoshine's products at the border after extensive evidence of forced labor at its Xinjiang operations. Yet, despite the ban by one of the largest solar markets in the world, Hoshine's sales volume has grown from 530,000 metric tons in 2021 to more than 1.2 million tons in 2024, with roughly 90% still originating in Xinjiang.

That surge reflects both the difficulty of enforcing UFLPA and the Chinese crystalline silicon industry's success in circumventing U.S. laws. In December 2023, two years after UFLPA was enacted, a Chinese county government signed a formal employment cooperation agreement with a Hoshine facility and dispatched 65 workers in a state-organized send-off ceremony, describing the arrangement as a "long-term labor export and strategic partnership."

A 2024 government video - posted the same year Hoshine sued the U.S. government to maintain access to the American market - reveals what these placements entail. Workers sign a three-party agreement with the local government and a state-owned human resources company. The contract requires them to adopt a "correct employment ideology" and remain employed for at least one year. Officials later sent cadres to the facility to monitor workers, reporting a 91.2% retention rate as a government performance metric.

No genuine labor market requires ideological compliance - in this case, to communist ideology - as a condition of employment. The model has been deliberately redesigned to withstand international scrutiny by removing the camp-style features that drew global attention in 2017 and 2018.

After the UFLPA passed, Chinese manufacturers signed pledges and bifurcated their supply chains: U.S.-bound modules are documented as using non-Xinjiang polysilicon, even as the same companies remain deeply tied to Xinjiang production. This created enforcement challenges compounded by the nature of the product itself - no laboratory test can determine whether polysilicon originates in Xinjiang. And Chinese manufacturers have a long history of shifting manufacturing stages to third countries and claiming non-Chinese origin for what remains, in effect, a Chinese-made product to circumvent U.S. laws.

Even as American manufacturers built large amounts of domestic capacity free of exposure to Chinese crystalline silicon supply chains, the U.S. has detained solar products under UFLPA from India, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Ethiopia.

In 2025, nearly half the companies whose shipments were denied U.S. entry simply redirected them elsewhere. Direct exports from Xinjiang to Canada, Britain, and the European Union rose 465% between 2021 and 2025, and Xinjiang's total exports have more than tripled since the UFLPA took effect. The result is a global enforcement gap.

The U.S. Trade Representative's ongoing Section 301 investigation into 60 of America's trading partners is the clearest opportunity since UFLPA's passage to close this gap. It should require partners to adopt equivalent import bans within a defined timeline, with a presumption against goods from regions where state-imposed forced labor has been documented. It should mandate information sharing between U.S. Customs and Border Protection and trade partners, so that goods rejected at the U.S. border cannot simply be diverted. Tariff consequences should apply to transshipment hubs. And UFLPA liability should extend to module manufacturers sourcing polysilicon from designated entities to prevent sanctioned material from entering the U.S. either as polysilicon or embedded in derivatives such as ingots, wafers, cells, and finished panels.

The system the police officer described in Xinjiang is not contained. It is the largest of its kind, it is expanding, and it has been redesigned to look like ordinary employment - with China's solar manufacturing juggernaut among its most active beneficiaries.

Laws are only as effective as their enforcement. Congress took the right step with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. China's crystalline silicon industry has proved nimble, and each round of U.S. enforcement has produced a new workaround.

Let us be precise about what inaction means: U.S. companies continue purchasing goods produced through the forced labor of ethnic groups that have been systematically detained, surveilled, and conscripted by a state - not because there is no alternative, but because no one has compelled them to use one. American-made solar panels exist, and there is no trade-off to be made. Nor is there a neutral position.

Continuing to look away is a choice, and the people living inside this system will bear the consequences long after the next procurement cycle closes.

"This is what happens when you take the lead in polls," remarked the former Biden Health and Human Services secretary after several heated attacks from his rivals.

Becerra's recent surge to the top of the pack and his record spanning more than three decades in office made him a top target, continuing a theme from the last few debates over the last month.

An Emerson College poll released Wednesday showed Becerra as the top choice of just 19% of voters, compared to 17% each for Republican Steve Hilton and Democrat Tom Steyer - a razor-thin margin that underscores just how volatile and wide open this race remains with just a few weeks of voting left in the primary. Another 12.1% of respondents still remain undecided.

The debate, co-hosted by the San Francisco Examiner and CBS News California, focused largely on affordability as poll after poll shows Californians sounding the alarm and voting with their feet. UC Berkeley researchers recently found that California lost a net 150,000 residents in 2025, concluding that the state's affordability crisis is likely responsible for the exodus.

Fraud Scandal Clouds Campaign

The debate came on the same day Becerra's former political adviser, Dana Williamson, pleaded guilty to three felonies tied to a scheme to steal $225,000 from one of his campaign accounts. The connection runs deep in California Democratic circles - Williamson most recently served as Gov. Gavin Newsom's chief of staff. Two other Becerra associates - former chief of staff Sean McCluskie and Sacramento lobbyist Greg Campbell - pleaded guilty last year.

Republican candidate Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host, did not mince words, pointing to reports that new evidence shows McCluskie informed Williamson that he had told Becerra about the scheme to use funds from a dormant campaign account to pay for his wife's employment.

"You shouldn't be in this race; you should be preparing your criminal defense," Hilton told Becerra as the audience erupted in gasps.

Becerra took issue with Hilton's assertion that the talk show host lacks a law degree - at which point Rep. Katie Porter interjected that she is a lawyer and backs her GOP rival's legal analysis. Just because Becerra isn't implicated in the charging document doesn't mean he won't be in the future, she argued.

"You know that does not preclude an indictment from being issued against you," Porter said. "We do not know what Dana Williamson said about your involvement."

Steyer also posted on X.com Thursday that Becerra "likely broke state law, and now he's at the center of an ongoing criminal investigation."

Becerra pushed back, insisting he "did nothing wrong" while repeatedly citing a U.S. Department of Justice spokesperson who stated that "no candidate running for governor has been implicated" in the scheme.

Becerra's Single-Payer Flip-Flop

Becerra, who served as California attorney general after Kamala Harris, also found himself on the defensive over allegations that he privately told California's largest medical lobbying group that he opposed single-payer healthcare - directly contradicting his public position.

Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer confronted Becerra on stage, noting that the California Medical Association's president claimed Becerra told doctors in a private meeting he was "very clearly" not supportive of the policy. The group subsequently endorsed Becerra and donated the maximum allowable amount to his campaign.

"So, are they lying?" Steyer pressed, repeatedly questioning whether Becerra was willing to tell one thing to powerful interest groups behind closed doors while publicly endorsing the opposite position.

Housing Crisis Takes Center Stage

California's housing emergency was a top focus during Thursday's debate. The state needs roughly 2.5 million more homes to meet current demand, according to a 2025 state housing assessment, while the median home price has topped $800,000 - double the national median - and asking rents are approaching a $2,900 average statewide, the highest in the nation.

The candidates offered sharply different prescriptions. Becerra has campaigned on an insurance rate freeze and said he would declare a state of emergency to cut through the red tape strangling new construction, while Villaraigosa pledged to streamline the permitting and ordinance bottlenecks that have made building in California so costly and slow.

Porter focused on the mental health dimension of the homelessness crisis, calling for stronger care courts to get people off the streets and into treatment. Bianco defended his office's practice of arresting homeless individuals, arguing that Riverside County pairs enforcement with meaningful mental health services.

And Mahan - whose work on housing and homelessness in San José has been cited by several of his rivals as a model - took the opportunity to turn the tables on Becerra, noting pointedly that the frontrunner still cannot explain how he would actually pay for his housing plan.

Gas Prices and Energy Policy

With California's average gas price surpassing $6 a gallon Thursday, Hilton made the case for expanding domestic oil production off the state's coast - a proposal long supported by the Trump administration but rejected by all the California Democrats in the race.

"The price is the highest in the country because instead of getting oil and gas from our own oil production here in California, we are shipping it 7,500 miles in giant supertankers, spewing out carbon emissions," Hilton said. "In the name of climate, we are increasing carbon emissions. We need some common sense here."

The candidates were sharply divided on energy policy, with the fault lines falling largely along partisan and ideological lines. Becerra noted that he has sued oil and gas companies in the past as state attorney general. Steyer, meanwhile, focused on accelerating the shift away from fossil fuels and criticized oil companies' pricing practices, arguing that energy companies are "overcharging us dramatically" and that California should restructure the market and expand alternative fuel sources, including importing refined fuel if necessary.

When asked whether they support reopening California to offshore drilling, all the Democrats said no, while Hilton and Bianco said yes.

Abortion Extradition Becomes Flashpoint

One of the debate's sharpest exchanges centered on whether a California governor should hand over a state doctor to Louisiana to face criminal prosecution for prescribing abortion medication across state lines.

Extradition would require Newsom's approval - something he said he won't do. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul rejected a similar Louisiana extradition request last year, setting up an ongoing interstate clash over abortion enforcement.

Both Hilton and Bianco said they would - a position that puts them squarely at odds with California's current leadership and its sweeping reproductive health shield laws.

"This is not about abortion rights," Hilton argued. "This is about one trying to undermine another state's laws. We have a federal system."

Becerra Denies Fraud - Despite $267 Million Scheme Exposed Last Month

Perhaps the most jarring moment of the night came when Becerra was asked how he would combat Medicare fraud as governor. Rather than offering a substantive plan, Becerra appeared to deny that fraud in California has been proven - a stunning claim given that just last month, Attorney General Rob Bonta announced charges against 21 suspects and the dismantling of a major hospice fraud scheme that defrauded the state of $267 million.

Becerra's remarks seemed more focused on deflecting blame onto the Trump administration than addressing the very real fraud happening on California's watch.

"Trump is now trying to deprive California of another billion dollars in health care for Medi-Cal," he said. "He doesn't have the right to do that. You still have to prove the fraud - he's taking money, even though he hasn't proven in court what's been done."

The Frontrunner Newsom and Others Won't Endorse

Perhaps more telling than anything said during the debate is what prominent Democrats are refusing to say outside of it. Gov. Gavin Newsom, former DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and Rep. Pete Aguilar all awkwardly declined to endorse Becerra this week despite his frontrunner status - and, given that Williamson served as Newsom's chief of staff, the governor's silence carries particular weight.

The reluctance of high-profile Democrats to throw their weight behind their own party's leading candidate suggests either a lack of confidence in Becerra's ability to close the deal - or, more cynically, a calculated decision to keep their distance until the full scope of the scandal becomes clear.

Becerra Repeats Pledge To Fight Trump

If you closed your eyes Thursday night, you might have thought Donald Trump was on the ballot for California governor. Becerra invoked Trump's name more than any other candidate on stage - cramming references to Trump into a single 60-second answer six times.

The Trump fixation produced some of the night's more eyebrow-raising moments. While defending his tenure as HHS secretary, Becerra turned to Hilton and boasted that he had worked to expand healthcare coverage to 300 million Americans - "far beyond what Donald Trump, your daddy, gave us." Hilton, however, declined to take the bait, coolly noting he had no interest in "silly name-calling."

When asked whom he would support if he failed to make the November ballot, Becerra - like most of his Democratic rivals - said he would back any Democrat on stage. But he quickly added that he could never support any Trump-endorsed candidate, taking a direct shot at Hilton.

"Because we would have a Donald Trump look-alike in the governor's office," he said, "and we can't afford to do that."

In California, tarring Republicans with the Trump label is a well-worn and successful path to victory. But Becerra's over-reliance on it during the debate renewed questions about his ability to think on his feet and whether he has the energy and vision to carry a grueling general election campaign. He came across as notably flat throughout much of the evening, repeatedly falling back on the talking point that he sued the Trump administration more than a hundred times during his tenure as California's attorney general.

While those lawsuits produced some court victories, repeatedly falling back on them doesn't suggest someone looking to provide bold and innovative solutions to California's crises.

It has been a punishing week for Becerra - a gaffe with a reporter that went viral, a guilty plea from a former aide in the campaign money scandal, and now a debate performance that failed to seal the deal. Whether voters ultimately care about any of these individual stumbles remains to be seen, but taken together, they paint a picture of a frontrunner who is treading water rather than pulling away.

Big Promises, Thin Plans

The debate's sharpest back-and-forth on policy substance may have come when candidates turned their fire on what they characterized as Becerra's chronically vague economic platform. At one point, Porter held up her notebook on stage and pointedly demanded that Becerra explain how he would actually generate the revenue to pay for his proposals - a theatrical move reminiscent of the whiteboard moments that went viral during her time in Congress.

As previously stated, Mahan piled on, noting that Becerra had not even released a comprehensive housing plan until just one week ago.

Becerra's response was telling. Rather than laying out a concrete revenue strategy, he pointed to Newsom's revised May budget, released Thursday, as a model for how he would handle fiscal matters. He then pivoted, as he has done repeatedly throughout the campaign, to his legal battles with the Trump administration.

"We fought, and we won," he said. "We're going to do the same thing again."

It's a line that plays well with the Democratic base but does nothing to answer the fundamental question Porter was asking: How, specifically, does Becerra plan to pay for anything?

Steyer had a mixed night of his own, making some forceful, clear points and positioning himself as the field's leading progressive change agent, particularly on energy policy and moving California away from fossil fuels.

But he also delivered several convoluted answers that failed to land, leaving undecided voters with little new to work with. His debate performance, like Becerra's, was unlikely to dramatically reshape the race - though with just two points separating them in the latest polling, even a slight shift in momentum could prove decisive.

The debate's most memorable moment may have come during a discussion of California's struggling public education system. Steyer, perhaps unknowingly, handed Hilton the perfect setup when he invoked a familiar adage: "There's an old saying: If you keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome, that's insanity."

Hilton didn't hesitate. "Then don't vote Democrat."