On April 11, four astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen had just spent ten days circling the Moon—the first humans to venture beyond Earth orbit in more than half a century. The mission tested life support systems, validated the worthiness of the Orion spacecraft, and (above all else) proved we can still do hard things.

Artemis II was a triumph, but probably not for the reasons you’ve been reading about.

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The Supply Chain That Circled the Moon

The headlines celebrated NASA, and that’s fair enough. America’s government-funded space agency deserves considerable credit for managing a complex mission. But the truth is that NASA didn’t build Artemis II. Twenty-seven hundred different companies, the vast majority of them American, did.

Lockheed Martin designed and built the Orion spacecraft that carried the crew. Boeing constructed the massive core stage of the Space Launch System rocket. Northrop Grumman produced the twin solid rocket boosters and the launch abort system that would have saved the crew if anything went wrong during ascent. Aerojet Rocketdyne provided the engines and thrusters. Airbus built the European Service Module that powered Orion and supplied the crew with air and water.

That’s just the prime contractors. Beneath them sat a supply chain of extraordinary depth. Precision Aerospace chemically milled ultra-thin rocket engine components. Precision Tube Bending manufactured custom tubing for the core stage, while Tecma created precision parts for the engine and ignition systems. More than five hundred companies (and 16,000 workers) in California alone contributed work to the Artemis mission. Businesses in forty-six other states also took part.

Artemis II circled the moon because of government contracting with private enterprise under fixed-price agreements. That’s a technical way of saying these private companies bore the risk and had every incentive to get it right.Under fixed price contracts, if a company finds a way to build more cheaply, they keep the profit. That creates pressure to sharpen the proverbial (and literal)pencil, improve the process, and innovate relentlessly. Cost-plus contracts (NASA’s traditional financing model) was the opposite: the more something cost, the more the contractor made, with taxpayers footing the bill. Fixed price agreements mimic market forces and create price transparency in a market where that transparency has never existed before.

As the Artemis program continues towards the eventual goal of a permanent moon base, subsequent missions will rely even more heavily on private companies. t. Blue Origin is building the Blue Moon lander. Axiom Space is creating the spacesuits that will walk on the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.

The leader in all this is SpaceX. SpaceX is developing the Starship lunar lander under a $2.9 billion contract, but they are more broadly transforming how America explores space. In 2024, SpaceX launched more rockets than any other nation on Earth. NASA proposes, but it is private enterprise that will deliver.

More Than Markets

There’s more at stake here than a defense of the free market system. (Though that system does always deserve a vigorous and enthusiastic defense!) What made the success of Artemis II so thrilling was that the mission tapped into something fundamentally and uniquely human. We are creatures driven to explore and build. We crossed oceans without knowing what lay on the other side. We built cities in deserts. We connected continents with railroads and cables. We reached for the stars because reaching is what humans do. That drive to explore, to build, to push beyond known boundaries is part and parcel of what we are.

That insatiable curiosity may be innate to human beings, but it is not innate to governments. For far too long, the state has told us to think smaller. We can’t afford it. It’s too risky. It expands our carbon footprint. We are told not only to consume less, but to dream less. The message has different melodies but always the same chorus: lower your expectations. Stop reaching.

That tune has been playing for half a century. SpaceX, and now Artemis II, interrupts it at last.

What Happened After Apollo

I was just a boy when I watched Neil Armstrong step onto the Moon in 1969. It was unimaginably thrilling. Given that our space program had accomplished so much so quickly, I assumed that the pace would continue. We’d soon have astronauts on Mars, then Venus, then… who knew? All we knew was the future was limitless.

What followed was five decades of disappointment. After the last Apollo mission in 1972, human spaceflight stalled. The Space Shuttle circled Earth for three decades at an average cost of $1.55 billion per flight.. After the program ended in 2011, America couldn’t launch its own astronauts for nine years. We paid Russia $86 million per seat to ride their rockets. We got a few unmanned spacecraft out into the far reaches of the solar system, but that was no substitute for human achievement.

The disappointment wasn’t a result of irrational expectations. The disappointment is what happens when government monopolizes (and squelches) ambition.

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Here We Go

Artemis was possible because private enterprise reminded us how to reach for the stars again. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launches for $67 million, lands its boosters, and flies again within weeks. That’s a nearly twenty-five-fold cost reduction through competition and innovation. When companies bear the risk, they solve problems creatively. When taxpayers bear the risk, you get decades of stagnation.

The engineers at Lockheed Martin, the machinists at Precision Aerospace, and the technicians at Northrop Grumman who made Artemis possible? They weren’t just collecting government paychecks. They were fulfilling a long-delayed promise. They were making it possible for four astronauts to go further into space than humans had ever gone before. More importantly, they were restoring hope that those alive today will live to see humans go much, much further still. And soon.

For far too long, government held a monopoly on human spaceflight. Republicans cut NASA’s budget, while Democrats wanted the money to be spent on domestic programs. Both parties kept space exploration confined inside a bureaucracy incapable of reaching beyond low earth orbit. .. Most fundamentally, they want to constrain what comes naturally to humans—that insatiable curiosity, that drive to explore and build, that refusal to accept limits. They’ve controlled the commanding heights of American culture for too long, shaping how we think about what’s possible.

But the human hunger to explore cannot be suppressed by even the most sclerotic bureaucracy. Our need to explore and to build will always win out. Artemis II is a welcome (and overdue) reminder of who we are.

The return to the Moon is just beginning. Next year, Artemis III will test landers in Earth orbit, and in 2028 Artemis IV will put boots on lunar soil for the first time since 1972. Beyond that, Mars. Each mission will rely ever more heavily on the entrepreneurial innovation that built this nation. Based on past experience, we know that what we discover along the way will lead to countless additional innovations in engineering, medicine, and computing.

The future I imagined as a boy watching Armstrong was thwarted decades ago. There were times that I didn’t expect to live long enough to see us start again. But at last, we have remembered who we are. We are explorers. And here we go.

When American B-2 bombers flew their strike missions against Iran’s nuclear facilities, they didn’t take the most direct route.

They couldn’t.

France and Spain denied overflight rights, forcing our pilots to fly thousands of additional miles en route to their targets. As former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer noted in an X thread that drew 2.4 million views last week, this from two nations that never miss an opportunity to lecture the world about carbon footprints.

The round trips took 37 hours and each B-2 costs roughly $135,000 per flight hour. This math is simple, and so is the message underlying it: two of America’s oldest European allies decided that when the moment came to support a mission against the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism, they’d rather make American pilots absorb the additional risk and cost of going the (very) long way around.

This isn’t a story about NATO burden-sharing. (That debate has been going on for decades, and frankly, most people are tired of hearing about it.) Instead, it’s a story about a global sorting that the Iran war has made impossible to ignore.

When the shooting started, the world broke into two groups: nations that showed up and nations that issued statements. The composition of those two groups tells you nearly everything you need to know about the direction that geopolitical power is trending.

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A Tale of Two Europes

In his X post, Fleischer drew a sharp line between Western and Eastern Europe, and the data backs him up completely.

Poland now spends 4.5% of its GDP on defense, the highest in NATO and more than double the alliance’s longstanding 2% benchmark. Lithuania is at 4%. Latvia is at 3.73%. Estonia exceeds 3.3%.

These are neither large countries nor are they wealthy. But as former satellites of the Soviet Union, they are countries that remember what happens when you depend on someone else to fight for you.

At the 2025 NATO summit, the alliance agreed to a new 5% spending target by 2035, with 3.5% earmarked for core military capabilities. Poland and the Baltic states are already there, or close to it, a full decade ahead of schedule. Northern European nations like the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries have announced major increases and pledged to meet the target by 2029.

And then there is Spain. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez formally requested and won an exemption from the new spending target, calling it “unreasonable and counterproductive.” Spain has capped its defense budget at 2.1% of GDP. Its spending was essentially flat for over a decade, with 2022 levels matching what the country spent in 2008 in real terms.

This is the same Spain that denied American pilots access to its airspace en route to Iran.

Italy’s trajectory is similar, after a decade of stagnation followed by modest growth that has only recently brought spending back to 2008 levels. France, for all its diplomatic pretensions, hovers around 1% and has been content to let the conversation about increased spending remain theoretical.

The contrast is not subtle. The nations of Eastern Europe, the ones that lived under Soviet domination for half a century, are investing as if their survival depends on it.

Because they believe it does.

They don’t confuse communiqués with security. They have an institutional memory of the danger weakness invites, and they are determined not to repeat the experience.

Western Europe’s legacy powers—France, Spain, Italy—have no such memory. Their political classes grew up in a world where American power guaranteed their safety regardless of how much or how little they contributed.

That guarantee held for more than seventy-five years. It is no longer holding.

Strait Bedfellows

The realignment isn’t confined to Europe. Look at who actually backed the Iran strikes: the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar. These are not NATO members, nor are they liberal democracies. They have not signed the kinds of treaties that fill filing cabinets in Brussels. But just as they have a clear-eyed understanding of the Iranian threat, they also possess both significant military capability, and the willingness to use it.

This coalition didn’t materialize out of nowhere. It has a deep structural logic that Western foreign policy commentators routinely underestimate or ignore: the Sunni-Shia divide. Iran is the world’s preeminent Shia power, and for decades it has used that sectarian identity to project influence (and terror) across the Middle East. The Gulf Arab states are overwhelmingly Sunni. They don’t oppose Iran because Washington asked them to. They oppose Iran because they have watched Tehran build a network of Shia proxy militias—Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi paramilitaries—designed to destabilize their sovereign governments and threaten their borders.

For the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and Qatar, the American campaign against Iran isn’t someone else’s war. It’s the war they’ve been preparing for, in one form or another, for a generation. For them, it’s existential.

Writing in Foreign Policy, RAND strategic analyst Raphael Cohen offered what Francis Sempa of The American Spectator rightly called a more balanced assessment of the war’s progress than most of Trump’s critics have managed. Cohen noted that the U.S. and Israel have made significant operational progress: degrading Iran’s missiles and missile industry, destroying its navy, weakening its proxy network, and further diminishing its nuclear weapons capability. Diplomatically, the Gulf states have sided decisively with the U.S. and Israel against Iran. That sentence would have been unthinkable fifteen years ago.

Meanwhile, the same Western European nations that denied overflight rights continue to purchase Russian LNG, as Fleischer pointedly observed. France, in particular, remains “good at issuing communiqués and statements,” skilled at “hosting conferences,” and devoted to “pondering deeply.” Yet they continue to buy energy from the country NATO was originally created to deter.

The emerging coalition has no charter and no headquarters. It’s built on something both simpler and more durable than institutional architecture: shared threat perception and demonstrated willingness to actually act. The UAE didn’t show up because of a treaty obligation, just as Poland didn’t surge its defense spending because of a summit declaration. They did it because they understand that in a world where power is being contested, the only credential that matters is capability and the willingness to deploy it.

The nations and institutions that maintained their influence by controlling access to airspace, to diplomatic channels, and to the machinery of international consensus are watching that leverage evaporate. The nations that invested in actual capability are gaining influence with every passing month.

Credentials vs. Capacity

If this dynamic sounds familiar, it should. The same sorting is playing out domestically.

Mark Penn and Andrew Stein made a striking observation in their Wall Street Journal op-ed this week. Only 13% of young Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction, according to Harvard’s most recent youth poll. Meanwhile, in Israel—a nation that has been at continuous war for over two and a half years—a Lazar research poll found that 68% of young people express pride in being Israeli, and 79% report being satisfied with their lives.

This gap cannot be about material conditions. America’s middle class is growing. We lead the world in artificial intelligence, and we just sent astronauts to the moon for the first time in over half a century.

By almost any objective measure, this country is in a stronger position than it has been in years.

The pessimism isn’t a reflection of reality. It’s a product of our elite institutions that have spent years manufacturing the impression that America is failing. These are the domestic equivalents of France and Spain: entities that maintain their influence not through capability or results, but through credentialed authority and institutional inertia. They issue statements and host conferences. They ponder deeply. And when the moment comes to actually deliver—to secure a border, to support an ally—they are nowhere to be found.

The people and institutions that are showing up, here and abroad, don’t look the way the foreign policy establishment or the legacy media expected. But what they have is clarity about the threat, investment in their own capacity, and the nerve to take action.

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The Map After the War

The fragile ceasefire with Iran is a reprieve, not a solution. The Strait of Hormuz remains the central dilemma. The negotiations may succeed or they may fail. But what will not change, regardless of how the ceasefire resolves, is the realignment it exposed.

Western Europe’s legacy powers will not suddenly become serious military partners, Spain will not double its defense budget, and France will not stop buying Russian energy. These nations have made their choices, and those choices reflect a political class that has confused comfort with security and prestige with power. They are, to borrow Fleischer’s formulation, “laggards, trying to get away with it.”

For decades, they did get away with it. That era is ending.

What’s emerging in its place is harder to categorize (and harder to romanticize). It’s not a “coalition of the willing” in the Bush-era sense, and it’s certainly not a new NATO. It’s something less formal but potentially more honest: a network of nations and institutions that have earned their relevance by investing in capability and demonstrating the will to use it: Poland and the Baltics, the Gulf Arab states, Israel, and the private-sector innovators who are building the military logistics of the future. These are the partners who will matter.

You can bet that the old institutions will resist this framing, just as they always do. The foreign policy establishment has enormous institutional incentives to maintain the fiction that the organizations they built and staffed and funded remain indispensable. But the Iran war has laid the reality bare for anyone willing to look at it honestly.

The world is being sorted not by ideology, nor by geography. It’s being sorted by a simpler and more ancient criterion: who is willing to do the hard thing when the hard thing needs to be done.

The countries that answered that question this spring told us everything we need to know about the next chapter of American power.

Last Saturday, millions of Americans participated in some 3,500 “No Kings” protests across the nation. In every state, marchers denounced the administration and its policies. In Minneapolis, Bruce Springsteen sang; in other cities, protesters had to be content with fiery speeches from various Democratic politicians. Though most demonstrators were peaceful, there were periodic outbreaks of violence. In many places, the Communist hammer and sickle, a 20^th century symbol of leftist protest, flew alongside the Palestinian flag, today’s fashionable emblem of radical rebellion.

The scale of No Kings was admittedly impressive. The messaging was clear: Donald Trump embodies authoritarian overreach, and—with apparent spontaneity—ordinary Americans are rising to resist him.

Sarah Parker, an organizer for the Minneapolis event, described the movement to Fox News. “This is organic. This is a people-powered movement,” she said. “We have different local hosts, (all) volunteers who have stepped up.” Unlike traditional organizations, No Kings claims to operate without formal structure, without financial reporting requirements, and without easily identifiable leadership. Just a bunch of concerned citizens, standing up for democracy—or so we’re led to believe.

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Grass Doesn’t Grow from the Top Down

Political operatives have a term for what undergirds the No Kings phenomenon: astroturfing. The word combines “AstroTurf” (synthetic grass, first used in the Houston Astrodome) with “grassroots” to describe organizing that appears organic but is instead carefully manufactured activism. While real grass grows from the soil up, Astroturf gets rolled out from above and fastened to the dirt below.

Genuine grassroots movements grow from local communities responding to local problems, such as parents mobilizing to take back a radical school board, or small business owners coordinating to oppose new regulations. Grassroots organizations develop organically, as volunteers figure out what works through trial and error. In time, and if they have sufficient popular support, these organizations learn to turn the levers of what I call the Political Vise.

Astroturfing is the exact opposite. Astroturfing coordinates from the top down while maintaining the appearance of bottom-up energy.

Professional organizers create the infrastructure first. They develop messaging, design materials, establish communication channels, and recruit local coordinators. They then present what results as a spontaneous popular uprising. The participants may be sincere, and on occasion, their grievances may be real. They are often unaware that they are being cynically and meticulously manipulated.

The ‘Leaderless’ Movement Receives Its Marching Orders

The No Kings movement is textbook astroturfing.

No Kings provides event organizers with a lengthy and detailed toolkit. The document instructs volunteers on how to recruit speakers, delegate roles, register their events, and use No Kings branded media materials. It lays out best practices for logistics and explains how to avoid permitting and insurance requirements. The toolkit includes a “host hotline” with a Maryland area code for organizers who need support.

A map on the No Kings website shows organizational activity in virtually every city in the United States. The materials are professionally designed, the messaging is coordinated, and the branding is consistent from coast to coast. This level of organization doesn’t just require major funding; it requires leaders with the authority to make sweeping decisions about messaging and strategy for the entire country. What looks shambolic requires ruthless discipline.

At the Minneapolis rally, emcee Lizz Winstead—a lifelong activist and founder of the militant Abortion Access Front—said the proverbial “quiet part” out loud. Worth quoting in full, Winstead’s syntax may have been garbled but her message was crystal clear:

I want people to know that if you want to act like Minnesota, or you think Minnesota is a model, what can I do? Well, you can check your ego about what you want to do and listen to the leadership, and when they tell you what they need done, you do that. And you pay enough attention to the amazing organizers who have been on the ground, who actually have the information, who have already done the work, instead of starting your own [group]... you need to be the pack mule.

Listen to the organizers. Do what they tell you. Be the pack mule.

Those are not the words of a leaderless movement. Those are commands from a vanguard to its foot soldiers. The No Kings movement disguises itself as a spontaneous popular uprising, but behind that façade sits the same infrastructure that characterizes every progressive mass mobilization: central coordination, professional materials, directed messaging, and explicit instructions to listen to leadership.

Winstead’s moment of very public candor revealed the machinery. National leadership provides direction, while local organizers execute the plan. Ordinary, well-meaning citizens? They’re the loyal pack mules. The result is 3,500 coordinated events with consistent messaging, professional production values, and to the casual observer, a believable veneer of grassroots authenticity.

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Liberation Through Obedience

Astroturfing claims to empower ordinary Americans while directing them toward predetermined goals. It promises liberation through collective action while demanding submission to leadership. It pays lip service to grassroots organizing while imposing centralized coordination.

Saturday’s protests demonstrated the success of the fiction, as some eight million Americans earnestly participated in what they believed was organic resistance. Many of those no doubt genuinely oppose Donald Trump, or hold honest grievances about immigration enforcement, the Iran conflict, or affordability. But their protest was neither leaderless nor decentralized. It was not organic. It was a dramatic production staged by seasoned activists who assembled the infrastructure, directed the messaging, and instructed participants to be obedient work horses for the leadership.

In light of this, the name “No Kings” is both ironic and absurd. A leaderless movement would not need detailed toolkits or Maryland hotlines. Organic resistance would not require instructions to listen to leadership. Genuine grassroots organizing would not demand that volunteers be enthusiastic pack mules for a nameless elite who have “already done the work.”

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Winstead’s remarks is her evident exasperation with people who dream of starting their own activist groups. Check your ego, she demanded. Listen to instructions. Do what you’re told.

No kings, they say. Just ongoing pressure from above, and millions trained to submit to it.

Last week, the New York Times published allegations that legendary labor leader Cesar Chavez sexually abused multiple women and girls over decades. Within barely a day, statues were covered up, street signs came down, and governors nationwide cancelled annual Chavez birthday celebrations.

Sixty years of silence turned into forty-eight breathless hours of reckoning.

Why did the reckoning take so long? Cesar Chavez died in 1993. Why didn’t anyone speak up years ago, especially once he was gone? More to the point, how did Cesar Chavez—cultural icon, civil rights hero, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, perhaps the most famous Latino in American history—abuse women and girls for decades without consequence?

Everyone familiar with Chavez had heard the rumors of sexual misconduct. They remained rumors because his victims stayed silent. They did so to protect the United Farm Workers, an institution that had become essential to the progressive political machine.

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The Machine Behind the Man

The United Farm Workers (UFW) that Cesar Chavez founded was much more than just another labor union. It was a government-funded nonprofit network that sat at the heart of the progressive Political Vise, protected by politicians who needed it, media who lionized it, and activists who built their identities around it.

In the Political Vise, government-funded nonprofits sit at the bottom of the system—the most powerful position—pressuring politicians directly while shaping how the media reports and how the public understands events. Some do vital work. Too many exist to extract taxpayer money and convert it into institutional power. The United Farm Workers was the latter.

Jerry Brown, California’s governor in the 1970s, gave Chavez’s nonprofit network nearly unfettered access to federal grants. According to a 1979 Reason magazine report, Brown “waived his right as governor to see and sign federal grants to anyone in the state of California,” giving Chavez “carte blanche approval of anything requested.” The National Farmworker Service Center, created by Chavez and the UFW, received almost two million dollars in federal grants. When the nonprofit’s credit union faced insolvency, it received a taxpayer bailout while gouging the very farmworkers it claimed to serve.

How to Build a Secular Saint

The protection (and the coverup) extended far beyond California. President Obama designated a national monument in Chavez’s honor in 2014 and declared Cesar Chavez Day a federal commemorative holiday. President Biden proudly displayed a bust of Chavez near his Oval Office desk. The media canonized Chavez as a secular saint, a folk hero, a modern-day Gandhi and a successor to Dr. King. Just as those credulous reporters dismissed rumors of his sexual impropriety, they rarely investigated how he ran his union, despite abundant evidence that the UFW regularly engaged in criminal conduct. His chief biographer chronicled Chavez’ penchant for autocratic control, his purges of perceived opponents, his strange alliance in the 1970s with the violent Synanon cult, and his brutal campaigns against undocumented immigrants. Chavez was untouchable.

Schools, streets, parks, libraries, and community centers across the country bore his name.

Dolores Huerta said Chavez raped her twice, resulting in two children whose paternity she hid for decades. She was his partner in building the farmworker movement. She co-founded the union with him. Huerta remains, at ninety-five, a towering figure on the American left. She kept quiet for so long not out of devotion to an abusive man, but to protect an institution that had made each of them into political kingmakers.

The Fastest Funeral in Political History

California leaders declared themselves appalled by the revelations. Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas declared that “the farmworker movement has never been about one man.” Senator Adam Schiff said, “the legacy of UFW promoting equitable and fair treatment for our farm workers is not the province of any one person, including Cesar Chavez.” Governor Gavin Newsom tried to remind everyone to focus on “a movement (the UFW)...that we should all be celebrating.”

These politicians took just hours to toss away a cultural icon. Even as they did so, the Vise remained intact because the Vise was never about Cesar Chavez himself. It was about the machinery of power.

Government-funded nonprofits like the UFW extract wealth from taxpayers through grants and legislation, then use that money to pressure the very politicians who fund them. The cycle is self-perpetuating and nearly impossible to break. Politicians fund nonprofits. Nonprofits help elect politicians. Those politicians vote to fund more nonprofits. The cycle sustains itself at public expense.

Former Illinois Governor Pat Quinn demonstrated this perfectly. In 2010, he announced a fifty-five-million-dollar Neighborhood Recovery Initiative, ostensibly to reduce gang violence in troubled neighborhoods. What really happened was Quinn funneled those nonprofit funds to pay unemployed youth to walk precincts and distribute campaign fliers for himself and his allies. It was a blatant violation of the law, and a clear illustration of how the system actually operates.

The Question Nobody in Washington Wants to Answer

In 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began exposing this machinery on a national scale. In the final weeks of the Biden administration, two billion dollars were transferred from the Environmental Protection Agency to green nonprofits. The TransLatin@ Coalition, like the UFW, a predominantly Hispanic organization, got more than half of its budget from the federal government. The Coalition used that money to advocate for puberty blockers, sex change surgeries for teens, and the dismantling of ICE. For decades, radical non-profits have raked in fortunes in government funds, and then used those funds to pressure politicians, shape media narratives, and build institutional power that makes them accountable to no one. The UFW was one of the earliest and most successful organizations to master the levers of the progressive Vise.

We can’t allow the Chavez scandal to distract us from asking a very pressing question: what other government-funded nonprofit networks are operating right now with the same protection, the same impunity, and the same machinery that the UFW enjoyed until last week? It’s easy to change the name of a street, or a school, or a ship. But until the system that funds, amplifies, and enforces progressive political pressure is dismantled, we will hear stories like this again and again.

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Conservatives are very angry with John Thune, the Senate Majority Leader.

That frustration is hardly unjustified. Thune’s unwillingness to do all he can to force a “talking filibuster” to pass the SAVE Act is a tremendous disappointment not just to the base, but to the nearly 80% of Americans who support election integrity.

This isn’t new. For longtime conservative activists, this disappointment is so familiar it might as well be a law of political physics.

A Law of Political Physics

A brief history lesson about conservative legislative leaders: John Boehner became Speaker of the House in 2011 on the Tea Party wave. Within months, activists were calling him “John Maynard Boehner” (a Keynesian insult) as he cut spending deals with the left. By 2014, the Tea Party Patriots circulated petitions demanding his removal. In 2015, after he negotiated yet another costly budget compromise, the House Freedom Caucus forced Boehner to resign.

Paul Ryan replaced Boehner in October 2015. Barely two months later, Ryan led the effort to pass an omnibus spending bill that funded Planned Parenthood and sanctuary cities. Rush Limbaugh called it “worse than betrayal.” Ted Cruz said it was “a betrayal of the men and women who elected us.” The frustration never relented. Ryan left after one term, a once promising political career all but over.

Kevin McCarthy became Speaker in January 2023 after 15 ballots and lengthy negotiations with the House Freedom Caucus. Nine months later, after McCarthy bypassed conservatives to negotiate a continuing resolution with Democrats, Republicans gave McCarthy the ignominious distinction of being the first House Speaker ever ousted by his own party.

Mike Johnson replaced McCarthy in October 2023. The base gave him a grace period. Johnson had impeccable conservative credentials. Yet soon enough, he too began cutting deals.

The Senate tells the same sad story. John Thune’s predecessor, Mitch McConnell repeatedly disappointed and exasperated the base. He took control of the Senate in 2015 promising to stop Obama’s agenda. Instead, he funded it. He brokered the deal that ended the government shutdown, and raised the debt limit without extracting any meaningful concessions. In 2018, after years of promising to repeal Obamacare, he failed to deliver and instead cut bipartisan deals on gun control and spending. By 2022, McConnell was supporting Biden’s infrastructure bill while conservatives begged him to block it. Donald Trump called him an “absolute Loser” who “folds every time against the Democrats.”

Now John Thune sits in McConnell’s chair, and the frustration has simply transferred. Different leader, same compromises, same anger.

The Wrong Diagnosis

The conclusion from the base is always the same: We keep electing RINOs who betray us once they get to Washington.

The problem isn’t the weakness of the leaders we elect. It’s the system they enter once elected.

In my book The Political Vise, I tell the story of a 2006 dinner with the late Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, as stalwart a politician as I’ve ever met. I asked him the question that had haunted me for years: Why do conservatives move left once in office while progressives only move further left?

Coburn laughed. “Oklahoma is as conservative a state as it gets. And yet . . . as soon as I arrived in Washington, my calendar began to fill up with all the important people from back home. Every last one of them bought into our vision of limited government. But somehow, the conversations were always the same: ‘Dr. Tom,’ they’d say, ‘we sure are proud of you back home. You’re doing a great job holding the line on spending and earmarks. Keep up the good work. Now, there is one little thing I need to talk to you about . . .’”

Even Tom Coburn—from one of America’s most conservative states—found difficulty resisting the sum total of all the requests for just “one little thing.”

The problem isn’t that we keep electing the wrong people. The problem is that every person we elect walks into the same machinery: the progressive Political Vise.

In the traditional Political Vise, three sides apply pressure to politicians in the middle: the media, the people, and elite influencers (lobbyists, donors, institutional power brokers). Policy gets squeezed out the top based on how much pressure comes from which direction.

In today’s Washington, the Vise has been inverted. The progressive version of the Vise doesn’t squeeze politicians—it squeezes the American people. Politicians, media, and influencers work together to pressure citizens to conform. But for conservative leaders in DC, something even more insidious happens: they find themselves operating inside a progressive Vise without any coordinated counter-pressure.

What the New Leader Actually Walks Into

Think about what a newly elected conservative Speaker or Majority Leader faces.

The DC media will attack them as extreme, radical, dangerous. The lobbyists and institutional powers will threaten funding, access, and support if they don’t compromise.

But the most irresistible pressure comes from institutional norms. Senate tradition demands deference to the minority. Committee assignments reward those who “play well with others.” The “regular order” requires negotiation before confrontation. The unwritten rules (don’t embarrass colleagues, preserve options for future deals, revere the institution above any cause) all push toward accommodation. A leader who defies these norms doesn’t just face resistance. He faces isolation. The machinery of the Senate itself is designed to outlast disruption, and the machinery always seems to win.

The Missing Machine

All that would be bad enough. Here’s the biggest problem: the conservative infrastructure that’s supposed to provide counter-pressure doesn’t operate as a coordinated Vise. Conservative think tanks work independently. Conservative media personalities have different takes (think, for example, of Tucker Carlson vs. Mark Levin on Iran). Donors give to individual causes, not coordinated campaigns. Activists mobilize separately, not strategically.

The base gets angry. The base demands the leader fight harder. But base anger alone isn’t institutional pressure. It’s just noise unless it’s channeled through coordinated machinery that can protect leaders who fight—and squeeze leaders who don’t.

It doesn’t have to be this way. During COVID, Governor Ron DeSantis successfully resisted the entire progressive Vise. How did he pull it off?

DeSantis had the Florida legislature backing him. He had a conservative media ecosystem supporting him, an alternative donor base sustaining him, and state-level institutional power protecting him. When the progressive Vise squeezed—when every national media outlet called him a murderer, when the public health establishment declared him reckless, when corporate interests threatened boycotts—DeSantis could rely on synchronized institutional counter-pressure.

GOP leaders in Washington cannot always rely on that support. Too often, they walk into the DC Vise alone. At times, the base does rally to provide the necessary counter-pressure. (As I recount in my book, the successful confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh is an outstanding example of the right deploying the Vise to great effect) That rallying, though, is more episodic than it is consistent. And when the counter-pressure doesn’t appear—and conservative leaders compromise under thanks to the progressive squeeze—we call them RINOs and demand their replacement.

So, we fire Boehner and get Ryan. We fire Ryan and get McCarthy. We fire McCarthy and get Johnson. We retire McConnell and get Thune. And the cycle continues because we keep replacing the victim of the Vise rather than getting our hands on the levers.

What is the solution? Conservatives must make legislators fear their voters more than they fear their own leaders—and all the special interests operating the Vise. We have to make them fear backlash and the tarnishing of their reputations more than they fear those applying the pressure to vote like RINOs. Until conservatives sufficiently build out the machinery to reclaim the Vise on battles such as Voter ID, we’ll keep firing leaders—and keep getting the same disappointing results.

Nine days after the first strikes on Iran, oil crossed $100 per barrel—and the progressive pressure apparatus moved immediately into action.

This was the progressive Political Vise operating in real time. Media, activists, and elite institutions coordinate pressure to squeeze politicians into compliance. Economic consequences become leverage. Political retreat becomes the goal.

Democrats—always eager to score points on the president—pounced. Chuck Schumer blamed Trump’s “reckless war of choice” in Iran. The DNC chair warned that “working families are being crushed.” Representative Tom Suozzi, who supported the initial strikes, now called it a “sugar high” that wasn’t “well thought out.”

The New York Times described how Democrats had “seized” on the oil spike. Note the language: not “responded to” or “raised concerns about.” Seized. For once, the paper of record (presumably inadvertently) described the mechanism of the Vise honestly.

President Trump’s response?

"Prices will drop rapidly when the destruction of the Iran nuclear threat is over. ONLY FOOLS would not see the surging oil costs as a small price to pay for global security."

The progressive Vise failed.

When it comes to Donald Trump, the left can’t generate the unified pressure that normally squeezes presidents into submission. Trump, unlike his predecessors, can fight this action without the concerted sabotage that helped turn Iraq into a quagmire.

The Danger of Relying on One Man

But there’s a cost here. Trump’s boldness and unconventionality—the very qualities that let him stand up to the pressure of the progressive Vise—may be teaching conservatives to forget how the mechanism itself works. And if we don’t learn to operate it ourselves, we’re just watching the left fail without building the organized power conservatives need to produce good outcomes.

In my book The Political Vise, I describe how this mechanism functions. Three sides squeeze the politicians:

1. Media

2. The People

3. Elites (in our institutions).

Good policy decisions get forced out the top. The Vise was designed by our Founders to be the most powerful force in American politics.

From a partisan perspective, the Vise is a neutral mechanism. For decades, progressives mastered it. They seized the commanding heights of American culture and turned them into synchronized pressure points. They squeezed to force withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, to pass Obamacare, and to mandate lockdowns.

Then the pattern began to break. DEI mandates became unpopular liabilities; the Russia collusion narrative fell apart with the Durham findings; and the Twitter Files proved that federal agencies coordinated with tech platforms to suppress speech. The Supreme Court struck down affirmative action. Companies like Meta and Amazon ended their DEI programs. Trump won in 2024 and promptly ended a vast array of federal diversity programs.

So, by the time oil briefly hit $100 and the left began to roll out its Iran messaging, the Vise had lost enough credibility that this attempt at coordinated pressure became visible political theater.

(A word of caution: We shouldn’t be overconfident—the left is a master at manufacturing simulacra of credibility. The progressive Vise is not gone forever.)

Where Is the Conservative Vise?

But watch what’s missing on the conservative side. Many prominent figures on the right openly oppose the conflict in Iran. Others strongly support it. That debate is legitimate. Reasonable conservatives can and do disagree on foreign policy.

Whether conservatives support Trump’s Iran strategy isn’t the point. The real question is both simpler and more profound: Where are conservatives using the Vise on anything?

Look at the issues where conservatives actually agree:

• We want the border secured.

• We want the regulatory state dismantled.

• We want parental control of education restored.

These aren’t controversial among conservatives.

But despite that consensus, there’s little institutional machinery applying sustained pressure to force these outcomes. Heritage releases a report. The America First Policy Institute publishes detailed analysis. Individual governors act. Fox covers it. Conservative podcasters talk about it. While all of this is good and important work, it is too rarely coordinated. (One example of the Vise working for our side? School choice. Aided by the reality of pandemic-era school shutdowns, activists among the American people, many organizations,and solid conservative media support have all coalesced in recent years to exercise the Vise’s pressure and deliver more choice in education.)

The American right hasn’t yet built the machinery.

With satisfaction, we watch the left’s break, but we don’t yet build our own. Progressives spent decades capturing institutions and wielding them as leverage points that could dictate political outcomes, and we’re celebrating the collapse of that system without asking whether we should be learning how it worked in the first place.

Trump’s unconventionality is his strength, as it lets him ignore the progressive Vise where previous presidents always capitulated to the squeeze. That success is easy to misinterpret. Too many on the right think the key to victory is just defying the left’s pressure rather than learning to generate our own.

Building Our Machine

What would it look like if we did?

• Think tanks would coordinate research priorities.

• Conservative media would amplify the same framework across platforms.

• Governors would apply pressure from the states.

• Legal organizations would file simultaneous challenges in multiple circuits.

• Activists would mobilize at key moments, not randomly but strategically.

Not on every issue—conservatives will still sometimes disagree on tone, tactics, and policy. But on core consensus topics like border security and regulatory reform? Synchronized institutional pressure would make opposing us a career-ending political mistake.

The goal isn’t to silence debate or demand uniformity, but rather to turn conservative consensus into durable policy wins. On the question of whether to pursue regime change in Iran, reasonable people can and will disagree. But the lesson from this moment transcends any single policy decision.

Right now, Donald Trump wins through sheer power of his personality and his willingness to wield executive authority. When he’s gone, what happens? Without institutional pressure sustaining his victories, hard-won progress will vanish the moment progressives rebuild their control. One man defying the Vise isn’t the same as conservatives reclaiming it.

My goal in writing The Political Vise was simple: explain how this mechanism functions so conservatives can reclaim it in service of our nation and our cause. The question isn’t whether Trump’s Iran policy is right. The question is whether conservatives will learn to use the Vise before progressives rebuild their control of it.

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On February 28, Axios declared “Trump says he ‘ended DEI.’ Courts disagree.” The story explains how Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs have been blocked and stalled in federal courts. Conservatives are worried, we’re told, while the left is celebrating.

Not so fast.

The Pattern of Retreat

While the media focuses on court battles in Washington, look at New York City. Democratic socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani just appointed Cea Weaver to run the Office to Protect Tenants. Weaver has publicly called homeownership “a weapon of white supremacy.” When these statements went viral, Mamdani stood by her—but his Chief Equity Officer, Afua Atta-Mensah, deleted all her social media before her own appointment was announced.

Trump’s orders are blocked. Mamdani is hiring more equity officers. On the surface, DEI is winning. But look closer. Atta-Mensah deleted her social media before the announcement. Weaver’s “white supremacy” quote spread everywhere within hours. In 2020, those views would have launched speaking tours and keynote invitations. By 2026, even New York’s radical mayor watches his appointees scramble to hide what they believe. The ideology is in retreat, desperately shoring up its last defensible position.

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How We Got Here

In the summer of 2020, the American people were subjected to an unprecedented campaign of orchestrated pressure following George Floyd’s death. Within weeks, virtually every major organization issued statements denouncing systemic racism and pledging support for Black Lives Matter. Companies committed billions to DEI initiatives. Universities created administrative empires overnight. The goal: hire administrators to mandate and implement DEI in every American workplace and school.

In my book The Political Vise, I describe how the progressive left operates: crisis creates pressure, pressure forces compliance, compliance becomes institutionalization. By the time Donald Trump took office in January 2025, DEI wasn’t just a set of aspirational slogans. It was embedded in the personnel, budgets, and organizational charts of virtually every major institution in America. Thousands of people had built lucrative new careers around DEI ideology, and billions had already been spent creating an entire professional class whose livelihood required the ideology not just to survive but to expand.

The Quiet Scrubbing Begins

When Donald Trump signed executive orders targeting DEI programs across federal agencies and contractors, he created direct counter-pressure against an ideology that had operated with complete impunity for five years. Federal courts blocked parts of his orders. But despite the Axios framing, that’s not the real story. The real story is what happened at the nation’s most prestigious institutions, the ones that occupy the commanding heights of American culture. They started scrubbing DEI language from websites. Even in liberal Los Angeles, the University of Southern California shut down its inclusion office website entirely. Institutions began self-censoring to avoid federal scrutiny.

In 2020, institutions competed to prove their commitment to racial equity. Six years later, New York’s Chief Equity Officer deleted her social media before the announcement. When you’re hiding, you’ve already lost.

New York City is a “blue” stronghold where federal courts can rarely limit a mayor’s choices. If DEI still commanded unshakeable consensus, Weaver’s “white supremacy” quote would have been cheered. Instead, it exploded as a scandal within hours. As even liberal New Yorkers balked, President Trump’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights announced the DOJ was “paying very close attention.”

Ask yourself: could the Trump Administration have publicly challenged a major city’s equity programs in 2020 and been taken seriously? Of course not. For years, merely to question DEI meant revealing yourself as a white supremacist, subject to swift cancellation. The Vise worked to crush dissent because elite consensus was complete, with media, corporations, and universities all in lockstep.

That consensus is broken now. The Office of Civil Rights can investigate the Mamdani Administration on civil rights grounds. The courts are split on President Trump’s orders. The same major corporations that got squeezed by the Vise in 2020 (the NFL, Target, Disney, and dozens of others) are quietly retreating in 2026. Some eliminate DEI positions outright, others rebrand—but fewer and fewer defend what they created not so long ago. The unified pressure that forced compliance no longer exists. Jennifer Sey was fired from Levi’s in 2022 for opposing pandemic-era school closures; she now runs XX-XY Athletics and calls out corporate DEI programs on national media. Fortune 100 companies are following her lead. Sey was once a casualty of the DEI regime. She survived the crush of the progressive Vise and now leads the resistance.

Why Axios Sounds Defensive

The left understands this, which is why the Axios piece is more defensive than triumphant. They know the moral authority that made DEI mandatory in 2020 is gone. What they have now is institutional inertia, embedded personnel, and (in some jurisdictions), friendly activist judges. That can sustain programs in blue cities for years. But it can’t create the sweeping national transformation the left achieved in 2020.

The clearest sign of retreat is how extreme DEI programs have become in the left’s last redoubts. When Mamdani appoints someone who calls private property white supremacy, he isn’t expanding. He’s holding deep blue New York and pushing as hard as he can because DEI is retreating everywhere else. The progressive Vise still functions there because local elites remain complicit or cowed. But even in its stronghold, Weaver’s views became a scandal. Even there, the Justice Department is watching.

Even as DEI remains entrenched in blue cities, the moral authority that made DEI mandatory everywhere is cracking. And without that authority, the Vise can’t squeeze.

Cea Weaver still has her job. But everyone knows what she said about homeownership now. Afua Atta-Mensah runs New York’s Office of Equity. But she had to delete her social media first. In 2020, calling homeownership “white supremacy” would have been applauded at corporate conferences. In 2026, it’s a scandal—even in New York City.

The shift is the win. There are more wins to come.

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Last Friday afternoon, the Supreme Court struck down most of President Trump’s tariffs. Markets surged. Trump attacked two justices he’d appointed. Importers started calculating potential refunds running into the hundreds of billions.

And Congress? Silent. Watching from the sidelines. Having created the whole mess in the first place.

The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) says the president can “regulate … importation” during national emergencies. Does that include tariffs? Congress never said. For nearly fifty years, no president thought it did. Then Trump tried it. The Supreme Court had to decide.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote: “Based on two words separated by 16 others in … IEEPA—’regulate’ and ‘importation’—the President asserts the independent power to impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time. Those words cannot bear such weight.”

Congress passed IEEPA in 1977. The law was vague. Nobody knew what it meant. Then someone tried to use it. Courts had to sort it out. Billions of dollars and international trade hung in the balance—all because Congress couldn’t be bothered to say clearly what it meant.

This isn’t an accident. This is how Congress learned to escape accountability.

Their Favorite Trick

Here’s how the system is supposed to work. Politicians sit in what I call the Political Vise—under constant pressure from three sides: the media, the people, and elite institutions. That pressure forces them to make clear decisions. Policy comes out the top. The people evaluate the results. They vote accordingly. That’s accountability.

But Congress discovered a loophole. Write vague laws, and you stay in the Vise without owning what comes out. You feel the pressure. You pass legislation. But bureaucrats and judges make the actual decisions—and voters can’t hold them accountable.

That’s bad enough. But the left has weaponized this loophole to create something worse: the Progressive Vise.

The traditional Vise—the one the Founders designed—keeps politicians accountable to the people. It’s supposed to work that way. But the Progressive Vise flips it upside down. Instead of politicians getting squeezed by the people, the people get squeezed by politicians, media, and unelected elites working together. Vague laws are what make this inversion possible. When bureaucrats -- not Congress—get to decide what the law actually means, you can’t vote them out. You’re stuck with their interpretation. By the time you cast a ballot, unelected officials have already decided what’s legal and what isn’t.

Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) saw it immediately: “Congress carries a lot of blame for enacting obscenely vague laws—IEEPA being one of many examples—and then leaving it up to the other two branches to ‘iron out the details.’ That’s not their job.”

He’s right.

The executive enforces laws. Courts resolve disputes. Congress writes laws. But when Congress writes laws so vague that nobody can tell what they actually permit or prohibit, someone else has to decide. That someone is never accountable to voters.

Lee continued: “Congress has grown addicted to the practice of adopting impossibly vague statutory language, effectively delegating its lawmaking power to the other two branches. This subjects the American people to enormous uncertainty and confusion.”

Addicted is the right word.

Think about it from a legislator’s perspective. Write a clear law that says “the president may impose tariffs up to X percent for Y days under Z circumstances,” and you own the results. Tariffs work out? You get credit. Tariffs cause chaos? You’re on the hook.

But write a law that says the president can “regulate … importation”? You can claim credit when things go well and dodge responsibility when they don’t. Tell constituents who support tariffs: “I voted for that authority!” Tell constituents who oppose tariffs: “I never intended it to be used that way!” When courts decide what the law means, you can criticize the decision regardless of which way it goes.

It’s politically brilliant. It’s also utterly constitutionally corrupt.

Three Ways You Lose

When Congress writes impossibly vague statutes, three things happen:

First, unelected bureaucrats fill in the details. They interpret “regulate … importation” or “significant risk to public health” or any of a thousand phrases Congress refuses to define. These bureaucrats aren’t on any ballot. You can’t vote them out. Career civil servants outlast presidents. Agency cultures persist across administrations.

Second, courts become policymakers. Was IEEPA intended to authorize tariffs? Six justices said no, three said yes. This wasn’t a legal question with a clear answer. This was nine people deciding what the law should be. That’s a legislative function performed by an unelected judiciary.

Third, the people lose twice. They can’t hold Congress accountable because Congress never took a clear position. They can’t hold bureaucrats accountable because bureaucrats aren’t elected. They can’t hold judges accountable because judges have lifetime appointments.

This is the Progressive Vise at full strength. By the time you vote, the interpretations are already in place. Elections change personnel without altering the system.

The Pattern Repeats Everywhere

IEEPA isn’t unique. The Clean Air Act tells EPA to regulate pollutants that “endanger public health or welfare.” What counts as endangering? Congress won’t say. The Affordable Care Act said subsidies would be available “through an Exchange established by the State.” What happens when states don’t establish exchanges? Congress won’t clarify. Dodd-Frank gave regulators authority over institutions that pose “systemic risk.” What’s systemic risk? Who knows -- because Congress won’t define it.

Each time, the pattern is the same. Congress writes vague language. Bureaucrats interpret. Courts review. The people can’t vote anyone out because nobody will say who actually decided.

Within hours of Friday’s decision, Trump announced he was using Section 122 of the Trade Act to impose a ten percent global tariff. That authority expires in 150 days unless Congress extends it.

Will they extend it? Will they clarify IEEPA? Will Congress finally write clear laws?

Don’t hold your breath.

The tariff case isn’t about whether tariffs are good policy or bad policy. It’s about whether Congress will do its job or keep hiding behind vague language while unelected officials decide for them.

In The Political Vise, out March 3 wherever books are sold, I explain why winning elections alone can’t fix this—and what it would actually take to reclaim institutional control from the left.

The Founders wanted the most accountable branch making the most important decisions. What we have now is the least accountable actors making the most consequential choices.

Senator Lee called it a wake-up call. The question is whether anyone’s listening.

Six years ago next month, the entire country shut down in a matter of days. Schools closed. Businesses shuttered. Millions lost their jobs. The decision wasn’t made by Congress. It wasn’t put to a vote. A handful of unelected public health officials—people whose names you’d never heard—issued recommendations, and within seventy-two hours, the world’s largest economy ground to a screeching halt.

I am sure you remember the confusion. I know I’ll never forget it. One week, everything was normal. The next, you couldn’t get a haircut. Your kids were home indefinitely, attempting to learn through a screen. The authorities told you this was temporary—two weeks to stop the spread. Two weeks became two months. In states governed by the left, it became two years.

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COVID was when I realized most Americans don’t understand how power actually works in this country. I don’t blame them; it took me a long time to understand it myself. I spent twenty years inside the policy machinery before I saw it clearly. I watched as decisions that shaped millions of lives got made in rooms where no voter had a say. I saw good people—people who genuinely believed in limited government—get crushed by forces they couldn’t name. The few who resisted paid a brutal price. Almost without exception, they left public service in frustration and disgust.

What Is The Political Vise?

What I discovered was this: American politics operates through a mechanism I call the Political Vise. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. I’ve written a book on the concept: The Political Vise: How the Radical Left Controls America and the Path to Regaining Our Liberty comes out on March 3. In it, I explain how we got here, how the mechanism works, and what it would take to reclaim the Vise for liberty.

Start by thinking of a three-sided vise, the kind machinists often use when a two-sided vise can’t hold a particular shape. In a three-sided vise, pressure comes from three directions at once, squeezing whatever sits in the middle. In American politics, those three sides are the media, the people, and the influencers—the elite institutions that shape what we think and what we’re permitted to say. Politicians sit in the middle, responding to demands from all three sides. What gets pushed out the top? Policy, regulations, and the actual decisions that govern our lives.

When the Vise Worked

The Vise is not a bad thing. Far from it: it is exactly what the Founders designed. They wanted politicians under constant pressure from a sovereign people. The Founders built the Vise to be an enduring mechanism by which free citizens could hold their government accountable.

For most of American history, that’s how it worked. When the Vise functioned properly, politicians felt genuine pressure from their constituents. That doesn’t mean every piece of legislation enacted or every policy produced was ideal. It did mean that government officials—whether elected or appointed—found it very difficult to thwart the will of the American people for long.

Then something changed.

The Progressive Vise

Over the past several decades, the left has systematically taken control of the Vise. They didn’t do this through elections. They did it by capturing two of the three sides: the media and the influencers. Universities that train elites, media organizations that shape the narrative, credentialing bodies that set rules for who gets to participate in public life, and a vast network of wealthy and unaccountable nonprofits.

By the time you step into the voting booth, the defaults are already set. The bureaucracies are entrenched. The acceptable range of debate has been established. Your elected representative – no matter how smart and idealistic—walks into an environment where every institutional force pushes left.

This is why conservatives keep losing even when they win. The pressure is relentless, and it works.

There’s an even more dangerous problem: the left hasn’t just captured the traditional Political Vise that the Founders designed. They’ve inverted it.

In the traditional Vise, politicians feel pressure from ordinary constituents. Once in office, elected officials remain keenly aware that they can and will be removed if they fail to deliver on the agenda of a sovereign people.

In the Progressive Vise, the people themselves are squeezed. Politicians, media, and elite influencers work together to force ordinary citizens into compliance. Challenge prevailing left-wing orthodoxy on climate, gender, race, or COVID, and watch what happens. You’ll be mocked in the press, fired from your job, and ostracized by former friends who fear being cancelled if they remain loyal to you.

Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection, as significant as it was, did not shut down the Progressive Vise. It remains a powerful and dangerous force in American life. What’s more, the left is determined to ensure that the president’s reforms do not endure long. They speak openly of the trials and tribunals and cancellations to come—just as soon as they have retooled and strengthened the Progressive Vise. The danger to ordinary conservatives, and to our republic, is existential.

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How to Reclaim the Vise

The real work is unglamorous. It’s building alternative institutions. It’s showing up to school board meetings. (And running for school board!) It’s creating media that can compete. It’s understanding that power belongs to those who control the systems in which everyone else must operate.

The left figured this out decades ago. They didn’t just win elections. They captured the commanding heights of culture. They built the machinery that now governs American life—and they did it all while conservatives were still arguing about the next election cycle.

The Political Vise explains how the left executed their strategy—and what we must do to beat them at their own game. My book maps the institutional terrain, identifies the leverage points, and provides the strategic roadmap for rebuilding durable centers of power. You’ll learn how to recognize when you’re being squeezed, how to apply counter-pressure, and how to build the kind of institutional capacity that outlasts any single election. It’s drawn from decades of wins and losses in the policy trenches, from state capitols to the Supreme Court—and it will show you how we can reclaim the Vise.

In their genius, the Founders designed this system to be controlled by the American people. Somewhere along the way, we handed that control to unelected elites who despise our values and resent our interference.

It’s time to take it back.

Something has shifted in Silicon Valley, and once again, the mainstream media doesn’t understand it. Over the past two years, many leading industry figures who once treated national politics as background noise have begun paying closer attention—not because they’ve undergone ideological conversions, but because they’ve grown uneasy about where power is actually exercised.

This shift is less about candidates or parties than it is about governance. It reflects a recognition that decisions shaping innovation, speech, and professional survival now occur far upstream from elections, inside systems that do not change hands when votes are counted.

Despite what the mainstream media says, this is not chiefly a story about Silicon Valley moving right or left. It is a story about understanding leverage—and about who has it.

As I argued last week, in modern politics, power does not operate where we are told to look. It does not operate primarily at the ballot box or in campaign slogans. It operates in the rules, constraints, and defaults that determine what is permitted long before any vote is cast. By defaults (a term I’m borrowing from software and platform design), I mean the rules, standards, and enforcement practices that determine what is allowed, what is risky, and what carries consequences. Those who control these parameters shape outcomes. Those who enforce them ensure those outcomes endure.

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The Hidden Operating System

Defaults are rarely debated openly. Regulators embed them in rulemaking, and credentialing bodies enforce them through standards. Professional norms do the rest. Together, they decide which actions are routine, which require special approval, and which will (swiftly) end a promising career. Institutions preserve these defaults because their authority depends on them; professionals enforce them because their livelihoods do.

By the time an election occurs, these defaults are already in place. They define what elected officials can realistically change—and what lies beyond reach.

As I see it, what looks superficially like a partisan shift in Silicon Valley is better understood as a response to overregulation, enforcement, and institutional control. The contest is not over elections, but over who sets the terms under which innovation, speech, and professional survival are permitted.

The changing politics of Silicon Valley are rooted in a growing recognition of this fact: the most consequential decisions shaping American life now occur inside systems that operate upstream from elections. Bureaucratic agencies issue binding rules with limited accountability. Courts reinterpret statutes beyond their plain meaning. Credentialing boards and professional associations define acceptable belief and conduct, attaching real penalties to noncompliance. Universities train future elites according to doctrines never submitted for public approval. Media organizations shape perception long before public debate begins.

Governance by Demonstration

DEI makes this concrete. It operates as a default-setting regime—defining acceptable speech, professional risk, and advancement, and enforcing those boundaries regardless of who holds office. Those who challenge these defaults incur brutal and enduring consequences. The rest learn quickly not to risk it.

Let me illustrate how this works. In 2017, a Google engineer named James Damore circulated an internal memo questioning aspects of the company’s diversity programs. Damore cited peer-reviewed research, suggested alternative approaches to achieving diversity, and explicitly endorsed diversity as a worthwhile goal. He wrote carefully. He engaged in good faith. He sought genuine discussion.

Less than three days later, James Damore was fired.

Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, issued a statement declaring that “portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.” The company did not specify which portions violated which rules, nor did it engage with any of Damore’s actual arguments. There was no internal debate. There was no weighing of evidence. There was only swift, certain, and very public enforcement.

The content of Damore’s memo matters less than what happened to him—and what every other Google employee learned from his unhappy example. The lesson was unmistakable: certain questions, no matter how carefully researched or respectfully framed, are not permissible. Challenge the framework, and you will face immediate professional consequences. The defaults don’t announce themselves in an employee handbook. They reveal themselves through enforcement. And once revealed, they require no further explanation. Everyone gets the message.

This is how defaults operate. They don’t need constant defense or repeated justification. They govern through demonstration. One high-profile termination teaches a thousand employees what they dare not say. The architecture does the rest of the work.

Anyone who has built or worked inside large technical platforms will recognize the pattern. Defaults endure because most people never change them. Architecture outlasts leadership. Governance happens where rules are enforced, not where intentions are announced.

Why Architecture Always Outlasts Leadership

Silicon Valley is not merely observing this dynamic. It has lived inside it—and, at times, helped construct it. The recent political realignment within tech reflects less a change in values than a clearer understanding of leverage, and a growing unease about defaults that now constrain the very people who once benefited from them. The central question is not just who will govern next, but who will control the systems that determine what governance can do once in office.

Elections still matter. They create openings. They buy time. They can slow institutional drift and, in rare moments, reverse it. But elections cannot substitute for the long, unglamorous work of institutional control—of reclaiming authority over the defaults that shape daily life. Silicon Valley’s experience is instructive. Even an industry accustomed to shaping the future has learned that power ultimately belongs to those who design and enforce the systems everyone else must operate within.

This is the task I focus on in The Political Vise: not trembling before each election as if it were an existential threat but patiently reclaiming the commanding heights where rules are written, credentials are granted, and authority is exercised over time.

Defaults, once established, resist reversal. Time favors those who control them.Until they are reclaimed, even the most decisive election will change personnel without changing how power is exercised—or altering the direction of our national life.

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Nine months out from the November midterms, anxiety on the Right is rising. Donors worry about turnout. Activists worry about enthusiasm. Strategists worry about margins in a handful of swing districts that will determine control of Congress. Disappointing special election results raise alarm. These concerns are understandable. Elections matter, and losing one can carry real costs.

But by 2026, conservatives should be honest with themselves about what these recurring cycles of worry reveal.

Electoral outcomes change officeholders; rarely does either victory or defeat alter the institutions that govern everyday life. The anxiety surrounding the next midterm is therefore not misplaced—but it is misdirected.

Here’s the simple truth: political power is more about systems than it is about elections.

Over the past several decades, conservatives have captured governorships, state legislatures, Congress, and the presidency—sometimes all at once. Yet culture, education, media, corporate governance, and large portions of public policy have continued their steady march away from self-government and toward centralized moral and administrative control. The pattern is now familiar: electoral victories produce momentary relief, even excitement—followed by deeper institutional losses that persist regardless of who holds office.

This is not a failure of messaging, candidate quality, or voter enthusiasm. Those explanations flatter us by implying that the system still works as advertised—that if conservatives just campaign harder or communicate more effectively, liberty will prevail.

That assumption no longer holds.

The most consequential decisions shaping American life are not being made on Election Day. They are being made inside institutions that remain stubbornly entrenched no matter how the vote totals shift. Worrying about the midterms without confronting this reality is like arguing over who controls the steering wheel while someone else controls the gas pedal and the brakes.

Elections and the Institutional Vise

America’s constitutional order was designed around a simple premise: raw political power would be restrained by durable institutions that did not rise or fall with elections. At the same time, elections mattered because elected officials exercised real control over the institutions governing public life.

That founding premise has steadily eroded.

Today, vast areas of American governance function outside democratic control. Unaccountable bureaucracies write binding rules. Courts reinterpret statutes beyond their plain meaning. Professional guilds and credentialing bodies impose ideological conformity through DEI mandates that bypass both voters and legislatures. Universities train future elites in doctrines never submitted for public approval, while media organizations filter reality long before citizens ever fill out a ballot.

Together, these forces form an institutional vise—one that tightens regardless of electoral outcomes.

A conservative Congress can slow this machinery. A conservative president can disrupt it temporarily. But when political power shifts, as it always does, the vise remains intact, ready to resume pressure. This is why conservatives can win election after election -- all while steadily losing influence over the nation’s central cultural, financial, and educational institutions.

Why Midterm Panic Misses the Point

The recurring panic before every major election cycle reflects a deeper confusion about where power actually resides. Conservatives behave as though losing one election is catastrophic, and winning one is decisive. In reality, both are marginal events unless accompanied by institutional control.

Liberty is not primarily defeated by bad laws passed in moments of electoral defeat. It is eroded over time by organizations that reward ideological conformity, dependency, and grievance while punishing competence, independence, and dissent. Speech is chilled through professional sanctions rather than formal censorship. Parental authority is weakened through bureaucratic “guidance” rather than legislation. Markets are reshaped and constrained through regulatory pressure rather than socialist nationalization.

None of this requires electoral majorities. It requires command of the institutions that translate abstract authority into daily life.

This is why conservative victories feel hollow. We celebrate winning Congress while the deeper architecture of power continues to operate against us. We fixate on the next election while ignoring whether we have our hands on the levers of the vise itself.

Reclaiming the Levers

Faced with this reality, conservatives tend to reach for one of two responses. One is nostalgia: the belief that if we could return to an earlier era, elections would once again be enough. The other is imitation: using political power the way the Left does, without regard for institutional legitimacy or restraint. One looks backward. The other overreaches. Neither endures.

What is needed instead is a shift in focus. Not away from elections, but away from the illusion that elections are decisive on their own. Power today is exercised over time, through institutions that set norms, shape incentives, and determine what is permitted long after campaigns end. If conservatives want results that last, they must learn to work where power actually lives.

This does not mean seizing institutions or bending them to partisan ends. It means taking responsibility for how they operate. It means restoring standards, insisting on competence, and ending ideological mandates that operate without public consent. It means identifying the commanding heights—the places where rules are written, credentials are granted, and careers are shaped—and treating them as responsibilities to be assumed rather than burdens to be avoided.

That is how the political vise tightens, and how it can be loosened. Pressure is applied through control of institutions that sit upstream from daily life. The Left understood this long ago and invested patiently. Conservatives do not need to adopt the Left’s methods to reassert institutional authority. They need to take hold of the levers of the vise and turn them back toward self-government, one institution at a time.

The next midterm matters—but it is not decisive. Elections can create opportunity. They can slow decline. They can buy time. What they cannot do is substitute for the steady and almost always unglamorous work of exercising institutional control.

The task before conservatives is not to wager everything on the next cycle, but to regain command of the institutional terrain that makes self-government possible. When the commanding heights are held by people who still believe in limits, responsibility, and restraint, elections regain their proper weight. And for the first time in a very long while, victory begins to feel not just possible, but enduring.

Federal agents are moving through Minnesota with force. What began as an ordinary bureaucratic scandal—buried in hearings, audits, and denials—has spilled into the open.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have surged into Minneapolis, and the resulting violence has attracted international headlines. What is lost in the breathless coverage is that all this enforcement action began in direct response to revelations of staggering, but all too commonplace, corruption.

Minnesota’s child-nutrition scandal should have forced a reckoning long ago. Over the course of a decade, fraud networks, drawn disproportionally from Minnesota’s Somali community, stole at least $250 million from the Education Department and Medicaid.

That is likely a significant underestimate; some put the total stolen at well over $1 billion.

Reviewing what became known as the Feeding Our Future case, state and federal investigators concluded that fraud was not incidental to the operation—it was the business model.

Not an unintended consequence. Not a breakdown at the margins. Fraud was how the system functioned.

Minnesota’s own elected officials kept the scandal quiet, treating it as an embarrassment to manage rather than a diagnosis to confront.

When the Trump Administration drew national attention to the scale of the scandal, the state’s political establishment simply tried to change the subject. The media is eager to cover the confrontations in the streets between federal agents and left-wing rioters yet they have adopted a curious silence about what prompted those operations in the first place: a fraud of breathtaking scope, and depressing familiarity.

That reaction is perhaps more revealing than the scandal itself.

In Minnesota, the warning signs were not subtle. Dozens of nonprofits claimed to be feeding tens of thousands of children a day, often out of empty storefronts or small offices with no visible capacity. Meal counts spiked overnight. Paperwork was duplicated, altered, or missing altogether. Regulators flagged irregularities repeatedly. Yet taxpayer funds, by the hundreds of millions, continued to flow to fake charities.

How did this go on so long? Because stopping the fraud would have required confrontation. It would have meant questioning organizations publicly framed as serving immigrant communities. It would have required state officials to accept accusations of bias, insensitivity, or worse.

Faced with that choice, officials hesitated. The easier option was to ignore the doubts. The easier option was to approve the applications and make the payments. The easier option was to defer oversight—or stop performing it altogether. In the face of enormous pressure to serve vulnerable immigrant communities, ordinary regulatory diligence became coded as institutional racism.

When caution is treated as cruelty, corruption becomes policy.

Fraud does not flourish at that scale because no one knows about it. It does so because accountability carries greater risk than indulgence. In modern governance, spending is treated as virtue, speed as productivity, and oversight as condescension. Ask too many questions, and you are not praised for diligence; you are accused of bigoted motives.

Minnesota is only surprising if we pretend it stands alone. But the mechanics are familiar.

California’s homelessness programs follow the same pattern at greater cost. Announcements are made, billions are spent, metrics are obscured, and results are ignored. Failure is absorbed and normalized. At the federal level, pandemic relief produced the largest fraud wave in American history—hundreds of billions lost, little recovered, few held accountable. Different programs. Same logic.

State and federal aid programs, like much of modern governance, operate inside a political vise. The vise applies pressure from multiple directions. In the case of the Feeding our Future scandal, the media framed scrutiny as racism, activist networks mobilized outrage, and institutional elites signaled which questions are permitted and which were forbidden. Politicians feel this pressure constantly and respond accordingly. Regulators and controllers whose job it is to ensure accountability? They realize quickly that if they do what they are theoretically supposed to do, they will soon be out of work.

The product of all that pressure is obvious. All that remains is to count just how much exactly the taxpayers lost.

This dynamic does not always require conspiracy or malice. Yes, many of the Somali fraudsters in Minnesota knew exactly what they were doing. But their crimes were aided and abetted by a system that had been pressured to acquiesce to fraud. The perpetrators of this massive theft understood that those charged with oversight were too cowed to hold anyone accountable. The moment that any regulator dared ask questions, they’d be branded a racist, eager to steal food from needy kids. In Minnesota, as in so many other places where this sort of fraud has flourished, the criminals knew exactly how the vise worked in their favor.

The costs are real: meals that never reach hungry children, homelessness that spreads despite billions funneled to homelessness nonprofits, and so on.

If there is good news, it is that people see this more clearly than ever before. They know the system is optimized for messaging, not outcomes; for virtue signaling, not actual governance.

What drives the call for reform is not just frustration at inefficiency but justifiable anger at political deceit and societal decay. And lasting reform requires that we understand exactly how the system works to reward silence, discourage resistance, and reframe scrutiny as a threat.

A government that claims to serve the vulnerable faces a simple test: can it tolerate scrutiny without collapsing into moral panic? Human beings have always been greedy. That is not a revelation. The purpose of institutions is not to deny that reality, but to constrain it. Systems that treat accountability as hostility and prudence as malice do the opposite. They do not check human nature; they pervert it.

Fraud became the business model not because greed suddenly appeared in Minnesota, but because transparency and accountability were stigmatized and de facto prohibited. Over time, pressure shaped institutions so that asking questions carried consequences—professional, social, and political—while happily looking away carried none. Reversing that lesson is not a matter of better intentions, but of reclaiming the system itself—restoring structures that protect scrutiny, reward restraint, and make integrity in public life possible again.

Money meant for the vulnerable should reach them. If it does not, the failure is not accidental—it is institutional. And institutions designed to suppress accountability must be redesigned to restore it.

There is a familiar ritual that often follows episodes of political violence in America. We saw it last September, with the assassination of Charlie Kirk. We saw it last week after that fatal confrontation in Minneapolis, when a federal immigration officer shot Renee Nicole Good during an ICE operation. I could name two dozen other instances.

Each time, long before facts are established or motives understood, the press and pundits deployed their favorite and familiar causal explanation:

Rhetoric.

If only our language were softer.

If only disagreements were less sharp.

If only words were chosen with greater sensitivity.

The theory sounds sensible and straightforward. Political violence, the logic goes, is merely a problem of temperature. Lower the heat, and the risk recedes.

After Charlie Kirk’s murder, political commentary converged—within hours—around the idea that his death was the predictable byproduct of “extreme political rhetoric.” Polling from that period showed large majorities, across parties, accepting this explanation. Last week, following Good’s death, we saw the same reflex: institutions rushed past uncomfortable questions and embraced their comforting moral script.

It is an intuitive diagnosis. And it is utterly wrong.

The Myth of Rhetorical Causation

Our leaders embrace the rhetoric narrative because it demands nothing of them. It is cheap. It is easy.

If political violence is caused by “tone,” then the solution is endlessly transferable. Everyone must “do better.” Everyone must “lower the temperature.” Responsibility is evenly distributed and therefore settles nowhere in particular.

This framing performs a novel trick. It transforms a power problem into a vocabulary problem, recasting institutional malpractice as simply a failure of manners.

“Both sides need to calm down.”

“Extremes on both sides are equally dangerous.”

But America’s collapse of civic trust is not symmetrical—and neither is its dehumanization problem.

One side of America’s political divide controls the commanding heights of cultural life: the media, the universities, professional credentialing bodies, major nonprofits, philanthropic foundations, and much of the administrative state.

These institutions do not simply reflect opinion; they decide who is dangerous, who is virtuous, and who may be treated as expendable.

They pretend to offer mere commentary; in reality, they are defining moral legitimacy from their commanding heights.

Violence does not begin with heated speech. It begins when institutions teach the public which lives are worthy of empathy—and which are not. What matters most is not any single outburst or policy decision, but how media, political leaders, and elite institutions work together to decide what beliefs and behaviors are permitted—and which are punished—long before violence occurs.

Dehumanization: The Real Fuel of Political Violence

Here is an uncomfortable truth: Political violence is rarely spontaneous. It is the downstream effect of systems that decide, long before any act occurs, whose actions are excusable and whose are unforgivable.

Political violence becomes inevitable when an elite class declares that those who hold certain views are no longer fully human. That threshold has been crossed.

Since 2020, if not before, our most respected institutions have normalized the idea that certain viewpoints, particularly conservative ones, are not merely wrong but immoral. Those who hold these views are declared “threats to democracy,” obstacles to progress, or agents of active harm.

This moral sorting is not an abstraction. It has life and death consequences.

From the ivory tower and Manhattan newsrooms, Charlie Kirk was caricatured, mocked, and reduced to a symbol of abstract illegitimacy and amorality. When he was murdered, the response was consistent with how the elites had framed Charlie – and his supporters. There was perfunctory, grudging sympathy – quickly followed by lectures about tone.

The Minneapolis case reveals the same moral asymmetry, only from the opposite direction.

In the aftermath of the ICE shooting, networks of activist nonprofits and progressive advocacy groups were treated not as contributors to escalation, but as victims of it. The federal officer was declared guilty long before the facts could be assessed from the full video at multiple angles. Democratic political leaders spoke not of restraint, but of “resistance.” The existence of federal law enforcement itself was framed as ugly provocation, while the violent resistance to that law enforcement was declared alternately innocuous or heroic. In both the Kirk and Minneapolis cases, the common thread is not rhetoric. It is permission.

When institutions repeatedly tell people that certain authorities are inherently illegitimate, that certain laws are inherently immoral, and that their law-enforcing fellow citizens are enemies of justice, they render political violence inevitable.

When they excuse hostility toward one group while moralizing relentlessly about another, they create a hierarchy of dignity.

And when dignity is rationed, violence always follows.

The Role of Institutional Permission

This is where the rhetoric explanation becomes not just wrong, but dangerous.

It directs public scrutiny downward, toward private citizens and their speech, while shielding the institutions that shape moral reality itself.

If rhetoric is the culprit, then citizens must self-censor. But if dehumanization is the cause, then institutions must be confronted – and then, dismantled and rebuilt.

Consider what the Minneapolis episode exposed: a dense web of activist organizations that train citizens to confront law enforcement operations; political leaders who cynically blur the line between civil disobedience and outright obstruction; and a cultural environment in which resistance to the law is treated as inherently virtuous if aimed in the right direction.

None of this requires shouting, and none of it depends on inflammatory epithets.

It depends on moral authorization.

The same dynamic was present in the climate that surrounded Charlie Kirk. Different targets, same mechanism.

What a Healthy Civic Culture Actually Requires

If America wants to reduce political violence, it must abandon the lazy self-indulgence of speech-policing and confront harder truths.

A healthy civic culture requires:

1) Institutional neutrality: Disagreement must be treated as a civic constant, not a cultural threat.

2) Equal moral concern for all citizens: A murdered conservative activist, a left-wing activist killed under tragic circumstances, and a law enforcement officer acting under lawful authority are each deserving of empathy.

3) Consequences for institutional dehumanization: Not legal consequences, but moral and reputational ones. Institutions that strip dignity from those they disfavor must be confronted, not echoed, by their cultural peers.

4)Courageous cultural leadership: The kind that resists fashionable narratives and tells the truth even when it contradicts elite consensus.

The Vise Tightens Only When We Let It

The political vise tightening around our culture is not powered by angry words alone.

It is powered by institutions that distribute compassion to the few and contempt to the many, teaching Americans whom to fear, whom to excuse, and whom to despise.

Charlie Kirk’s death and the surging violence surrounding immigration enforcement are not isolated tragedies. They are not warnings of what may come, but of what is already here.

The more we accept superficial explanations, the tighter the vise becomes.

But the pattern can be broken, not by policing the language of our neighbors, but by demanding moral integrity from the institutions that shape our common life, and by building alternatives when they refuse.

The future does not belong to those who moralize about tone, but to those willing to confront the real causes of our division—and restore a culture that treats every American as fully human.