We’re in the heart of the summer. America just had a spectacular 250^th birthday party, the World Cup is drawing towards the climactic final rounds, and much of the nation is trying to stay cool in a heat wave. You’re forgiven if you’re not paying close attention to politics, and to a particular political scandal in Maine. So, if you don’t know the name Graham Platner, let me introduce him as he leaves the stage. As he walks away in defiance and disgrace, Platner is illustrating a fundamental truth about the Political Vise.

Platner is a Democrat, a Marine veteran and an oyster farmer, and a novice politician who launched a populist campaign last year for the United States Senate. His target was Susan Collins, the five-term Republican that Democrats have spent decades determined to dislodge. The Maine seat is one of the few that will decide who controls the Senate next year, which is to say that Graham Platner is not a minor figure. A darling of the far left, Platner railed against corporations and against Israel, reflecting the priorities of the Democratic Socialists of America. His pugnacious style resonated with the party’s increasingly radical base; it was no surprise that last month, Platner easily defeated his more moderate opponents to win the Democratic nomination. The entire party establishment dutifully lined up behind him.

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Tattoo Ü

They lined up behind a lot. Over the course of nearly a year, Platner had survived a steady stream of revelations of the kind that until recently, ended campaigns instantly. There were old Reddit posts, in which he blamed women for their own assaults and suggested they should drink less if they did not want to be raped. There was the Nazi death’s head tattoo on his chest. There were the sexually explicit texts to other women during his marriage. And then, last month, the New York Times published an account from a former girlfriend who said Platner had twisted her arm behind her back until she was, as he put it, “calm.” Through all of it, the Democrats stood by their man. Bernie Sanders – the octogenarian socialist icon – campaigned for Platner. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who had originally endorsed Platner’s opponent, affirmed his support.

On Monday afternoon, a second woman came forward, alleging that Platner had sexually assaulted her in 2021. Within hours, the Democratic establishment turned on their erstwhile darling. Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, the state party, and dozens of other leftist luminaries told Platner it was time to go.

The burning question is, why was this the final straw? Why didn’t the Nazi tattoo, the Reddit vulgarity, the sexts, and the New York Times report doom the Platner campaign?

The answer is the Political Vise. The Vise is a machine, not an argument or a verdict or (as the kids say these days), a “vibe.” The progressive Political Vise is the media, liberal elites, and Democratic politicians, applying pressure from three sides to force an outcome. Graham Platner spent the better part of a year convinced that the machine was working for him. The media that built him up, the party elites who endorsed him, the small-dollar army his populism summoned? It must have made him feel personally invincible and politically inevitable. What Graham did not understand is that he was standing inside the Vise the whole time. The machine that can foist you onto the public can just as easily close around and crush you. All it takes is for the people working the handle to decide you’re more trouble than you’re worth.

Her Word vs. His Party

That New York Times story of the arm twisted behind the back came from Lyndsey Fifield, Platner’s former girlfriend. When the media discovered that Fifield was a conservative – and a Heritage Foundation veteran who had worked briefly for Nikki Haley – they had just what they needed to render her allegations useless. The Platner campaign only needed to repeat that she was a lifelong GOP operative who had dedicated her career to electing Republicans. Democrat elites decided Fifield’s party affiliation was sufficiently discrediting for them to stick by their man. Her accusation never entered the Vise, the handle never turned, and Platner never felt the pressure.

On Monday, though, the handle began to turn. A woman named Jenny Racicot told Politico that Platner sexually assaulted her five years ago. She offered extensive corroboration. She had, in fact, already spoken to the Times for the Fifield story – but the “paper of record” had buried her allegations deep in the text. Racicot is a long-time progressive who supports the Platner agenda. After the Fifield story failed to land, Racicot realized she was one accuser the party machine could not easily dismiss.

I am not sure if Jenny Racicot has read my book, but she understands the mechanism of the Vise better than many politicians. She knew that her account, however well documented, would move nothing on its own, because the party doesn’t weigh a charge on its veracity. It assesses an allegation through the politics of the person making it. A Republican woman’s word is inert; a progressive woman’s word is live. When an accuser who could not be dismissed as a Republican operative stepped forward, Graham Platner finally felt the squeeze.

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A Curtain Call for Conscience

The Vise can squeeze slowly, or it can crush quickly. In Platner’s case, there was little time to waste. Under Maine law, Platner had until Monday, July 13 to step aside and let his party choose a replacement. Miss that deadline, and Democrats would be stuck with him – and Susan Collins would be all but guaranteed an easy reelection victory. When Fifield’s accusation emerged, the party had time to discredit her. That time has slipped away. A party that blithely excused a Nazi tattoo, waved away sexts and ignored an assault on a Republican woman had a convenient and timely rediscovery of its conscience.

By Wednesday afternoon, forty-eight hours after the Racicot story broke, Platner could resist the squeeze no more. The timing of his withdrawal from the race was less because a new revelation had surfaced, and more because party elites had decided he no longer served their interests.

The progressive Political Vise could not care less whether Graham Platner is guilty or innocent. It only cares whether he serves the cause. For a year he served the left well, and the machine ruthlessly protected him through one damning scandal after another. When it turned out he’d laid hands on the wrong woman – and became a liability – the same machine that built Graham Platner crushed him.

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This Saturday, July 4, 2026, America celebrates its 250^th anniversary. The technical terms for this occasion include semiquincentennial, sestercentennial, and even bicenquinquagenary. (I’m not making that up!) Whatever you call it, make sure you call it Independence Day.

A date on the calendar tells you when something happened. Independence Day tells you what happened. I first made this case back in 2013, for what was then America’s 237^th birthday. (I don’t think there’s a fancy Latin term for that occasion.) My argument was simple then, but the events of subsequent years have made it more urgent. To call it the “Fourth of July,” just a date on the calendar, strips this celebration of its meaning. Thirteen years later, I feel even more strongly about what we call this day.

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I Was There in ‘76

I’m old enough to remember America’s 200^th birthday in 1976. That anniversary came in a presidential election year, at a time when the nation was struggling with inflation and the ongoing repercussions of Watergate. Unlike today, we were largely able to set aside division and rancor to commemorate this extraordinary statement of independence. Democrats and Republicans, big cities and small towns, young and old – virtually everyone accepted that this was a unique and special occasion. I know the dangers of false nostalgia, but trust me: I was there. That unity was real. And so too was the understanding of what that holiday meant.

I don’t need to tell you that we don’t have that unity today. For many on the left, Donald Trump is a convenient excuse to refuse to celebrate America’s 250^th birthday. Put simply, because they despise the man throwing the party, they’ve decided the party itself is undeserved. The progressive Political Vise has been busy compelling politicians and performers to stay away from official festivities. Musicians who had pledged to perform at a 250^th celebration concert in Washington found themselves pressured to cancel. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to point out that the left has confused their rage at one man with contempt for the country he leads.

The ‘Reckoning’ Racket

Donald Trump may be the target-in-chief of the left’s anger, but progressive hostility to the American experiment predates his election. Since 2013, when I first wrote in defense of Independence Day, it has become an article of faith on the left that there is little about America that deserves honor. The 1619 Project (originally published in and promoted by the New York Times) argues that we only declared our independence to ensure the survival of our slave-based economy. Alternative histories of the United States declare that America is fundamentally racist to the core. What we need, these voices declare, is a long-overdue reckoning. (Accompanied, of course, by untold billions in reparations.)

This combination of personal hostility to President Trump and growing disdain for the facts of American history has produced a sharp and partisan collapse in patriotism. Don’t take my word for it. Take CNN’s. According to the network’s chief polling analyst, Harry Enten, since 2015 the share of Democrats who say they are extremely or very proud to be American has fallen from 80 percent to 36 percent. Among Gen Z Democrats, that figure is down to 24 percent. Over that same period, the percentage of Republicans admitting their pride in this country rose to 92 percent.

The Pride Recession

“I just never thought I’d see these numbers,” Enten said. He may be surprised, but I’m not. Neither, frankly, should any honest observer of the culture. These are the predictable consequences of a decade spent teaching people that the flag is a symbol of oppression, and that the founders were greedy and racist.

Predictable or not, polls capture a moment in time. They don’t capture enduring truth, nor can they predict what the future will hold. And the truth is that the naysayers and cynics are wrong. They are wrong about American history in general, and they are wrong about this celebration in particular. Two hundred fifty years ago this Saturday, a group of men staked their lives on an idea no government had ever conceded: that the individual is sovereign, and the state exists to serve him. They built the most successful experiment in human freedom the world has seen. That idea was radical when Thomas Jefferson wrote it down, and it remains radical today. An idea that threatens the powerful never stops needing defenders.

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The Idea They Can't Kill

Besides the plea to call this holiday by its rightful name, I made another argument in that 2013 essay, one that I think has only grown more important to remember. We are celebrating more than the day fifty-six men signed a document. We are celebrating the entire process that led to that moment – and all that came as a result. It took years for the founders to move from petitioning with grievance to launching revolution to securing liberty. The lesson I drew in my 2013 piece is the one I’d offer now to anyone disheartened by the polls, or the national rancor, or the empty seats at the celebration in Washington: patriots are stubbornly patient. As I wrote then, “Let us remember that it is the patriots who stay; it is the patriots who fight. It is the patriots whose hearts grow stronger and whose minds work smarter who persuade enough of their neighbors, their co-workers and their family that the fight is worthwhile and winnable.”

It is true that America may seem even more divided than it was in 2013. That doesn’t mean the fight isn’t winnable. We must remain patient and resolved, just as our forefathers were patient and resolved. On the day they signed the Declaration of Independence, the future was very much in doubt. The war still had years to run. Yet we don’t celebrate the day the British surrendered. We don’t mark the end of the conflict. We mark the moment that fifty-six brave men put their lives, their fortunes, their signatures and their sacred honor on the line for a gloriously precious idea: liberty.

Leaders come and leaders go. Patriotism goes in and out of fashion with the elites. Call it our 250^th birthday, call it the semiquincentennial, but this weekend is the right time to remind the world (and ourselves) that we are free and sovereign human beings. Join me in celebrating this Saturday. And join me in calling it Independence Day.

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WATCH

Note: My apologies for the unclickable thumbnail. Substack apparently does not play nice with Rumble. Watch the interview here or by clicking the orange button above. Kindest regards.

The re-election of Donald Trump was a political earthquake. Some eighteen months after he was inaugurated for a second term, the aftershocks are still roiling across the hemisphere. From Central America down to Tierra del Fuego, country after country has moved to the right. In Bolivia, Honduras, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, and Colombia (the last two nations just this month) conservative candidates have swept to unexpected and often decisive victories.

In little more than a year, an entire political landscape shifted decisively away from the left. But why? The media claims that Donald Trump is unpopular at home and abroad. The mainstream press writes (with barely concealed glee) about the rise of “democratic” socialism here in the United States. So why is Latin America refusing to cooperate with the narrative?

The Political Vise has an explanation. The region’s leftward drift of the last twenty years was far from organic. On the contrary, it was deliberately engineered through American funding and carefully orchestrated pressure.

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Comrades in Cartography

On January 20, 2025 – President Trump’s first day back in office – he signed an executive order freezing foreign aid. On March 10, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the Trump administration had concluded its review of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Nearly 85% of USAID assistance to Latin America was eliminated.

The American left howled that thousands (or even millions) of vulnerable children in the developing world would starve to death. Secretary Rubio pointed out that a substantial percentage of USAID spending didn’t go to hungry kids, but to the agency’s “Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance” portfolio. That sounds benign. In practice, it meant American money flowed into a political ecosystem that propped up left-leaning candidates and causes across the hemisphere.

That targeted aid may well have even brought down governments. Michael Benz, a former State Department IT chief, has stated repeatedly that if USAID had not existed, the conservative reformer Jair Bolsonaro would still be president of Brazil. Time and again, Benz and other whistleblowers claimed, American funding had been instrumental in defeating right-wing candidates and propping up left-wing regimes.

Claims like that are hard to verify. But there’s absolutely no mistaking what happened as soon as the funding spigot was turned off. The left’s capacity to exert irresistible pressure seemed to vanish overnight, and what quickly followed was a cascade of right-wing electoral victories. In April 2025, Ecuador’s right-wing Daniel Noboa secured a second term. In October 2025, Bolivia elected center-right Rodrigo Paz Pereira, ending nearly two decades of dominance by the far-left. In Honduras last November, Trump-backed conservative Nasry Asfura narrowly defeated his opponents. In December, Chile’s José Antonio Kast won the presidential runoff with 58.2 percent of the vote against a Communist Party candidate. In February 2026, Costa Rica elected conservative Laura Fernández with 48.6 percent in a first-round victory. Peru elected Keiko Fujimori two weeks ago; just this past Sunday, Colombia elected a firebrand populist (and huge Trump fan) named Abelardo de la Espriella. (His nickname is “The Tiger.”)

The left lost every single one of these elections. That wasn’t just because Latin American voters had lost faith in socialism (though they understandably have). The left lost – and continues to lose – because it can no longer rely on borrowed leverage.

Late Communism: Made in America

Since Barack Obama’s first term, American foreign assistance had turned the levers of the Latin American Political Vise. Voters were told they were making choices free of foreign interference. They had no idea that USAID was secretly funding left-wing candidates and their parties. Conservatives faced a very different landscape. Without access to that same USAID cash -- and without media (influencer) support -- right-wing candidates were squeezed out. The moment the American funding disappeared, the Latin American left lost control of the levers of the Vise. The subsequent results, as they say, speak for themselves.

The clearest evidence for all this comes from a surprising place: Cuba.

Along with North Korea, Cuba is one of the world’s last surviving Communist dictatorships. Like North Korea, Cuba has been ruled by one family since the 1950s. For decades, the Castro regime stubbornly resisted market reforms. Even after the Soviet Union fell, and the Cubans lost their primary sponsor, the party apparatus stayed its rigid course. Until, that is, this month.

Just days ago, Cuba’s National Assembly suddenly adopted nearly 200 free-market reforms. According to Prime Minister Manuel Marrero, these measures are intended to dramatically roll back the state’s role in the economy. Foreign investors will no longer be forced to form joint ventures with the state, and for the first time in nearly seventy years, Cuba will welcome large private enterprises. Soon, both Cuban and foreign investors will be allowed to acquire stakes in state companies.

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Freedom Never Needs a Subsidy

This is, of course, good news. But why now? You already know: because President Trump has systematically dismantled every external support system propping up far-left regimes. When the Trump Administration eliminated USAID funding to Venezuela—funding that had sustained the government of Nicolas Maduro -- Venezuela’s economy collapsed. When the Trump Administration seized an already-indicted Maduro and brought him to the United States to face trial, the dictator’s successors took the unmistakable hint. They cut off oil to Cuba, and without that oil, the regime was suddenly forced to choose between ideology and survival. The Communist Party chose survival.

Most astonishing of all were the remarks of Cuba’s president, Miguel Diaz-Canel. As his regime adopted these new reforms, he conceded the obvious: Cuba had long been held back by their own system’s structural failings, not by American hostility. The Cuban people were suffering because of a bureaucracy that stifled innovation, punished creativity, crushed dissent, and suffocated entrepreneurs.

In other words, the Cuban president finally admitted that communism does not work.

Socialists won elections in Latin America not because their ideas were better, but because they were able to tap misdirected American aid to fund campaigns and squeeze opponents. Thanks to the Trump Administration, that era has come to a welcome and abrupt end. A new age of freedom and flourishing has arrived in Latin America. We should celebrate it.

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What is the American Dream? Is it opportunity? Is it the freedom to speak one’s mind and worship as one pleases? Is it the Detroit Tigers winning the World Series? To be fair, the last of these is mine, and probably not yours. The first two, though, are at the heart of the American promise. They are joined by something else, something increasingly out of reach: buying a home. The dream of owning, and not merely renting, is slipping further away for millions of young Americans. As I see it, that dream is getting crushed by many factors, chief among them the pernicious influence of Big Green.

Sixty-two percent of Americans now believe buying a home is “unrealistic.” A recent Siena/New York Times poll found that for voters under thirty, half say housing affordability is their top concern—more pressing than retirement, healthcare, education, food, or transportation combined. We are watching the primary vehicle by which ordinary Americans build wealth simply evaporate. We are watching a dream die. And it is dying for a reason.

For decades, I’ve watched the progressive Political Vise operate against American families. I’ve documented how media, influencers, and politicians squeeze ordinary people. But I’ve rarely seen it work with such elegant and comprehensive brutality as it does in the housing crisis.

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Dreams Don’t Die of Natural Causes

According to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), government regulations now add $131,734 to the cost of a newly built home. That’s 26.4 percent of the entire purchase price. These costs have nothing to do with the price of lumber or labor. They are the result of regulation piled on regulation: environmental impact assessments, stormwater permits, pollution control measures, sustainable building codes, energy efficiency standards, permitting delays, and inspection fees. The regulations themselves seem well-intentioned. Clean water and lower energy bills are worthy goals, but the mechanism used to pursue them is destructive.

The left frames environmental regulations as moral imperatives. They immediately reframe as sheer greed any suggestion that we might balance environmental protection with the basic human need for affordable shelter. A homebuilder who argues that stormwater regulations are adding thousands to the cost of a new home isn’t asking for a reasonable conversation. The media will shriek that “Greedy developers are willing to sacrifice public health for profit!”

Homebuilders have no choice but to comply with these burdensome codes or leave the industry altogether. One way or another, the cost gets passed on. Those who can afford a home pay more. Those who can’t remain renters, shut out from the American dream.

Sainthood’s Hidden Sin Tax

In the Political Vise, I devote an entire chapter to “Big Green.” Many Americans still think of environmentalists as earnest do-gooders reminding everyone to recycle. That may describe your aging Berkeley-educated neighbor in the Grateful Dead t-shirt, but the reality is that the nation’s major environmental organizations are master political operators. Non-profits like the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Environmental Working Group don’t build homes. They will never have to comply with the regulations for which they lobby, but they profit handsomely from the regulatory thicket they create. They pressure politicians and homebuilders through lobbying and litigation, raise millions on their ability to stop building projects, and wrangle huge consulting contracts for those projects that do win approval. Stricter environmental regulation is their business model, and it is a highly effective one.

A young family priced out of the housing market doesn’t have a lobbying budget, nor can a couple in their twenties match the organizational resources of the green lobby. Politicians respond to organized power, not to individual stories of disappointment and frustration. Big Green’s well-heeled lobbyists (wearing fancy suits, not tie-dye) show up where young Americans cannot. The result is that wealth-building through homeownership— the traditional path to prosperity – slips further from the grasp of working and middle-class Americans.

Progressivism Protects the Organized (Not the Powerless)

As the founders designed what I call the traditional Political Vise, the people have leverage. You can vote out the politician who ignores you. The media responds to public pressure, and ordinary people have the capacity to organize. The system was designed so that the people, ultimately, turn the levers. In the progressive Vise, the people are squeezed. The levers are turned by politicians responding to influencers responding to media narratives. Homebuyers can’t vote their way out of $131,000 in regulatory costs. They can’t organize faster than the Sierra Club or match the funding of environmental nonprofits with a combined annual budget in the hundreds of millions.

I like to emphasize the distinction between extraction economics and creation economics. Creation is when a builder constructs a home, a family builds equity, a young couple transforms into homeowners, and a community flourishes. Extraction is when regulatory costs transfer wealth from homebuyers to consultants, lawyers, environmental organizations, and subsidy-rich green-tech companies. The NAHB notes that the median home price has risen 28 percent since the pandemic began in 2020—from $317,000 to $405,000. Regulatory costs during the construction phase alone have risen from 13.3 percent to 17 percent of total price in just five years.

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The Rich Ruse

Millennials and Gen Z are angry, the surveys say. They can see that the path to wealth – the one their parents and grandparents took -- is closed to them. The media tries to direct that righteous anger towards the successful, declaring that greedy billionaires are the source of all the suffering. As my Southern friends say, I’m not sure that dog will hunt anymore. Young people are waking up to the reality that environmental regulations, not wealth-creators, are strangling the opportunity to pursue the American Dream.

This is less a debate about the environment versus the economy than it is a simple story about raw power. The housing crisis will end when enough voters understand that it’s not the free market pricing young Americans out of homeownership, but rather regulatory extraction orchestrated by influential environmental elites.

The solution to our housing crisis is in sight. A new generation can claim the American Dream. We need to free home builders from stifling regulations – and we need to pry Big Green’s hands off the Vise.

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LISTEN

This past January, I met with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis about a major capital project that I’ve been working on. My team has Miami, Orlando, Atlanta, Nashville, and Dallas-Fort Worth on our list. I walked him through the details of the proposal. He asked sharp questions, demonstrating that he was (unsurprisingly) both well-briefed and thoroughly engaged.

When I finished, the governor asked one question: “How can we help you bring this to Florida?”

I almost burst out laughing. It wasn’t that what Governor DeSantis asked was funny. It’s that I’ve spent a lifetime in Illinois, and it’s impossible to imagine any elected official back home asking a business executive how the government could help. Whether in Chicago or Springfield, the question Illinois leaders ask is always the exact opposite: What can you do for us?

When you want to build something in the Land of Lincoln, you know you’ll need to pay extra to get permission. Perhaps it’s a special concession, a promise to hire only certain unions, or put in a community benefits agreement that puts cash in the pockets of some favored constituency. This practice has a name: pay to play. That’s a cute term for very real corruption. In 2025, an Illinois court convicted former House Speaker Michael Madigan for running this exact scheme with a utility called ComEd. (Madigan extracted $1.3 million in payments from ComEd, spreading them among his friends. In return, the utility got favorable legislation from Springfield.) As far as state and local officials in Illinois are concerned, business exists to help them, not the other way around. The idea of a governor asking how he could help, no strings attached? Inconceivable.

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The Missed Shot Heard Around the Field

Last week, as you’ve probably heard, the Chicago Bears announced they were moving to Indiana. Well, not quite: the team’s board of directors declared that they’d voted to advance a stadium development project in Hammond, thirty miles southeast of the Windy City. The move came after the Illinois General Assembly failed yet again to pass any financing bill for the team. While I am not a fan of taxpayer funding of private assets, Illinois is the state that pioneered the model for public-private capital projects (including the current Soldier Field, McCormick Place, Navy Pier, and Millennium Park) cannot seem to find a way to keep an iconic NFL franchise that has called Chicago home for more than a century.

Generations of Chicagoans have grown up loving the team they affectionately call “Da Bears.” Through good times (eight NFL championships before the Super Bowl era, plus the 1985 Lombardi Trophy) and bad times (a 3-13 record in 2016), fans have stayed loyal. New York has two NFL teams, as does L.A. Chicago has only the Bears. So even if the team’s name stays the same, and even if some fans will make the regular trip down I-94 to the new stadium in Indiana, the impending departure is a profound cultural loss.

That unnecessary loss has less to do with money than with a fundamentally perverse view of private enterprise that infects both state and local government.

No one – not even the most self-serving politician – denied that the Bears needed a new stadium. Soldier Field is more than thirty years older than any other facility in the league, and further retrofits and enhancements would be inadequate. Yet when the team approached state and local officials for help, they encountered the same logic I’ve watched destroy company after company, job after job during my years fighting in Illinois politics. The state didn’t ask: How do we make this work?

Instead, every layer of government asked a version of the same question: What can we extract?

Notes From the Inside

All of this was frustratingly familiar. In my time leading Illinois Policy, we battled AFSCME, the Chicago Teachers Union, and the SEIU: all public-sector unions that regarded state and local government as a piggy bank from which to extract maximum compensation. We spent years fighting against an entire system that treated businesses as either nuisances or prey. We won some battles but lost too many others.

I watched Ken Griffin -- who had spent more than thirty years doing business in Chicago and who had built Citadel into a multi-billion-dollar company -- conclude that he could no longer stay in the state he’d grown to love. I’ve watched a dozen other businesses reach the same calculation. It wasn’t because they couldn’t handle a Chicago winter. It was because they had grown exhausted with fighting off state and local governments hellbent on extraction. In Illinois, if you create value, it’s the government’s job to figure out just how much of that value they can squeeze out.

The City That Tested the Theory

This contempt for business and wealth creation is not limited to Illinois. We see it in almost every “blue” state and city. Think of Oakland, which not so long ago was the home of not one, not two, but three championship-winning professional teams. Since 2019, this Northern California community of 440,000 people has lost the NFL’s Raiders, the NBA’s Warriors, and the MLB’s Athletics to other cities. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to lose one franchise might be misfortune, to lose two might be carelessness, but to lose three? That’s a colossal failure of public policy and common sense that can only happen where the left is in charge.

Each departure meant the loss of jobs, tax revenue, economic vitality and civic pride. Each departure could have been avoided if far-left city officials had focused on wealth creation rather than extraction.

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Business Goes Where It’s Treated Well

The Chicago Bears are moving to Indiana because the Hoosier State knows what Illinois leaders refuse to accept: when you make it easy for private enterprise to succeed, everyone benefits. Capital can always pick up and move – just ask Ken Griffin or the Las Vegas Raiders. Successful businesses go where they’re welcome, and they go where elected officials ask not what they can get, but what they can do to help.

Indiana has only about half of Illinois’ population, but it may soon have two professional football teams while Illinois will have none. Indiana will enjoy that advantage because their elected officials know that prosperity is a function of attraction rather than extraction. Indiana’s leaders – like Ron DeSantis in Florida -- asked, over and over again, how they could help, and so “Da Bears” are headed where they are welcome and wanted. Countless other entrepreneurs, small business owners, and major corporations alike will continue to do the same.

I’d like to think the imminent loss of such a beloved cultural institution will cause the far-left politicians in Illinois to rethink. Recent history, alas, suggests they won’t.

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I gave a speech last month about Genghis Khan. Now, I’m not a professional historian. But I am curious about the past. As someone who has spent years studying and practicing politics, I’m especially interested in how leaders in the past acquired and used power. And what I’ve found is that American exceptionalism is the reason we’re not completely at the mercy of brutal warlords like Genghis Khan.

A little over eight hundred years ago, Genghis Khan emerged from Mongolia and headed west. His genius, his will, and his strategic mind all found expression through conquest. He took what he wanted because he had the power to do so. By the time his own extraordinary life came to an end, Khan had killed nearly 10% of the world’s population – a figure that no modern dictator, not even Mao or Stalin – has been able to match. Genghis Khan is the preeminent symbol of how the world worked for thousands of years. If you were willful and talented and driven, you became a warlord. Ambition found its fullest expression in conquest.

As I noted in my speech, the contemporary American left considers our greatest wealth creators to be no different than these blood-soaked warlords. They look at the likes of Elon Musk, and they see another Genghis Khan. Both are tremendously wealthy, enormously powerful, tenaciously ambitious. As far as the left is concerned, Musk is a softer, subtler version of the ruthless conquerors of the past. Our greatest living entrepreneur is just another brutal man using his power to exploit the weak and vulnerable.

As usual, the American left is profoundly wrong.

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Why We Unlearned Conquest

Of course, Elon Musk is nothing like Genghis Khan. And the reason he isn’t is because of the very thing the left despises: American exceptionalism. Two hundred and fifty years ago, our founders created something new – not just a new form of government, but a system that channeled human ambition in an entirely new direction. The founders had no desire to make human beings less willful or driven. What they did seek to do was create a system that took those fundamental human impulses to discover and to dominate -- and direct them towards productive ends.

There is something I’m not sure the left will ever understand about this system, something that goes deeper than economics or politics. Jesus taught that the greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. The Apostle Paul made clear that love is not a feeling but a verb—it means actively doing what you can to create conditions where your neighbor can thrive. And if we are called to love our neighbor, that love needs to happen at work and in business at least as much as anywhere else.

Christ and the Other Adam

The genius of the American system is that it was the first to align with this theological principle. You cannot build wealth in a capitalist system without serving others. Genghis Khan operated in a world of extraction economics, a world of finite wealth where my gain means your loss. In that world, conquest is the only rational strategy. But capitalism is creation economics. You cannot prosper by extracting. You prosper by creating value that didn’t exist before. That’s why an ambitious person in Khan’s world became a warlord, and an ambitious person in the United States of America becomes an entrepreneur who builds rockets.

As Adam Smith first explained in Wealth of Nations (published just months before the founders gathered to sign the Declaration of Independence), an entrepreneur’s path to abundance is paved with serving customers, employing workers, and improving lives. Capitalism and free enterprise teach that serving others is the path to success and lasting fulfillment. Jesus taught the same thing.

If Elon Musk had been born in Mongolia in 1162, I suspect that he too would have built an empire through conquest. I have no doubt he would have rivaled Genghis Khan in ambition and success. Instead, because he came from South Africa to America to prosper, Musk builds the most advanced electric cars on earth. He connects the world through Starlink. He is literally rewiring damaged brain neurons through Neuralink, restoring possibility and autonomy to ordinary people’s lives. Elon has become the world’s richest man not through extraction, but through imagination, ambition, and service.

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The Ghosts of Giants

Elon Musk’s mixture of talent, drive, and genius is exceptional. But it is not unique. The American system has produced countless entrepreneurs across centuries: from the likes of Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers to Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie, to Madam CJ Walker (the first African American millionaire) and many others who have improved and transformed our lives. What these entrepreneurs – I call them giants – share isn’t just wealth, or power. What they all share is how they got to where they did: by serving others well. As different as they were, they each channeled their energies and ambitions into giving people what they wanted – or didn’t even dare to imagine wanting.

For Genghis Khan, his drive to succeed required him to become a warlord. Conquest, subjugation, and battle were the only available outlets for his tremendous drive. Just like Elon Musk, the likes of Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie might well have become chieftains or tyrants had they lived a few centuries earlier, or in a different part of the world. Yet when I think of other contemporary entrepreneurial giants – for example, Sarah Blakely, the founder of Spanx -- I see the same fundamental drives as Khan. Sarah’s imagination, work ethic, drive and genius found expression not through conquest, but through creation. She succeeded not by subjugating millions, but by serving them.

The left gets away with describing bold entrepreneurs as greedy warlords because we have stopped explaining to young people that entrepreneurship is noble. As I noted in my speech last month, we have almost entirely abandoned the work of teaching that building something is profoundly virtuous. Because of that neglect, the left has been able to fill the void with the lie that entrepreneurs exploit rather than create. They preach the false narrative of the zero-sum game, convincing young people that success only comes from stealing.

Our nation’s founders created a system where human ambition could serve humanity instead of destroying it. That system has brought prosperity and flourishing to hundreds of millions. But that system will only survive if we actively defend it against its detractors. We must continue to tell the story of American exceptionalism and American possibility. If we fail, we risk returning to Khan’s world.

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WATCH

The Democratic Party has proved that it is willing to do anything—anything!—to appeal to men, except appeal to men.

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The media, the Deep State, the government itself. They’ve all been weaponized against one man for the better part of the last decade.

Last week, the Libertarian Party held its national convention in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Yes, there were the usual speeches about gun rights and sovereign citizenship. There were the usual hopeful declarations that America was – at last – ready for the Libertarian message. But what got the most news coverage was a bitter, fierce fight over dress codes.

Ben Weir, a libertarian candidate for county sheriff in New Hampshire, proposed that convention attendees adhere to business casual attire. No weird costumes, no see-through clothing, no using boots as headwear. And—this sparked the fiercest backlash—Weir suggested that biological males should not wear dresses or skirts.

For a movement that has long confused freedom of expression with ordered liberty, the response was predictable. “You hate freedom of speech, my dude,” one indignant official wrote. Another called Weir’s simple suggestions “anathema to libertarianism.” The measure failed after the party’s governing board deadlocked 5-5 on passage.

Defiance was the order of the day on the Grand Rapids convention floor, where someone showed up in a one-piece swimsuit while another delegate wore a thong (and not much else). In refusing to pass the Weir proposal, libertarians defended their right to dress however they pleased. They have been defending that right, and others like it, since 1971. And in all that time, they have never elected a single party member to federal office. The Libertarian candidate for president managed to get only 0.42% of the national vote in 2024. (His name was Chase Oliver. And yes, I had to look that up.)

When his proposal failed, Weir warned that “We cannot expect to get over 0.5% of the vote for our candidates if we don’t get better on our messaging to normies.” He’s right, of course. But the Libertarians aren’t listening. They’re too busy finding hills on which to die.

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The Most Principled Man in the House

This same dynamic just played out earlier this month in Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District. Thomas Massie—for years, one of the most principled conservatives in the House—lost his Republican primary by nine points. In my book The Political Vise, I describe Massie as one of a very small number of “brilliant Congressmen” who “can transform the political landscape.” I meant it. During the COVID panic of 2020, Massie stood nearly alone in demanding that Congress hold an in-person debate on the $2 trillion CARES Act instead of passing it by voice vote. For his trouble, he got death threats and scorn. As I wrote afterwards, “Like Luke Skywalker in the Death Star’s trash compactor, Tom Massie got to feel just how intense and nasty the Vise’s pressure can be.”

Thomas Massie isn’t an official member of the Libertarian Party, but more than any other member of Congress, he represented small “l” libertarian principles. He was often alone, or nearly so – but for most on the right, his was a respected voice. Fiscal conservatives across the country donated to his campaigns, hopeful that others would take up his call for smaller government. For Republicans, fights over spending discipline are nothing new – and for years, Massie helped build a coalition for common sense.

In the last year, however, Tom Massie started acting less like a principled conservative and more like those iconoclastic Libertarians in Grand Rapids. In 2026, Massie made virulent opposition to Israel into his signature issue. He didn’t just vote against every spending bill that included Israeli military assistance, he condemned President Trump’s decisions on Iran. Massie then went further, publicly accusing the president of launching military strikes against the Iranian regime for the sole purpose of distracting the nation from the Epstein files.

What had begun as conduct consistent with a libertarian worldview—oppose all foreign aid, oppose all military intervention, demand transparency – turned into an angry one-man crusade. He had made a foolish calculation, assuming that his consistent principles would protect him even as he burned bridges with his own party and its president.

Massie lost his primary because he operated like a capital “L” libertarian—ideologically consistent, politically isolated, and ultimately powerless. He alienated almost everyone who would stand with him when the pressure came. When Trump and pro-Israel groups mobilized against him, he garnered endorsements from the likes of Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, two former House members who had also loudly and ineffectively bucked the Republican Party and President Trump. Having considered their options, a clear majority of Republican voters in Kentucky’s 4th gave their votes to Ed Gallrein, a soft-spoken former Navy Seal who promised to support the party’s agenda.

I watched the last days of the primary unfold from Berlin, Germany in the company of a good friend who is a Massie supporter. Her husband, also a great friend, was on the ground in Kentucky working on Tom Massie’s behalf. My friends clearly did not see the Congressman’s shifts over the past year the way the district’s primary voters saw those changes. I admire and respect my friends. However, I understand that Massie lost for the same reason so many on the right lose (or never gain the power as they should): He didn’t fully embrace his actual role as a politician.

A politician’s job is to acquire political power for the purpose of advancing his philosophy. Thomas Massie had, and largely still has, a libertarian philosophy that most conservatives support. But he lost because he made what I consider tertiary and transitory issues a greater priority than the larger, generational battles for which he was long such a good warrior. In the end, he lost because he forgot the first rule of being a politician - stay electable so you can advance your agenda.

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Coalitions Beat Consistency

Thomas Massie forgot that the Political Vise rewards coalition-building, not ideological purity. Yes, you can (and should!) be principled. Yes, you can have positions that others disagree with. But you must do both while maintaining relationships with allies who will defend you when the pressure intensifies. Massie had built those relationships on spending discipline. But when he turned on his party’s president – and when his rhetoric slipped dangerously close to outright anti-Semitism – he destroyed the coalition that had protected him.

The left understands this. They don’t ask whether every member of their coalition agrees on everything. Brooklyn hipsters and Chicago ward bosses probably have different views on transgender issues, for example. But the left ruthlessly maintains coalitions because they understand that political power requires unity of purpose, even amid disagreement on details. They pick their internal battles rarely and strategically, and they don’t blow up their coalitions over pet issues.

Thomas Massie can believe what he likes about why the war with Iran began. A Libertarian delegate can still wear a boot on his head on the convention floor. Both believe they hold principled positions. But principles that alienate your allies doom you to failure and defeat. Massie learned that lesson the hard way. The Libertarians, standing proudly in their swimsuits and thongs in Grand Rapids, may never learn it.

Spencer Pratt is running for mayor of Los Angeles. I hope he wins.

I am pulling for Spencer even though he has zero political experience, zero governing experience, and zero relevant credentials beyond justifiable indignation. I hope he wins because Los Angeles doesn’t need credentials. It needs someone from outside a failed system with the courage and independence to blow up a crumbling, broken, and failed bureaucracy.

I don’t live in California. But I care about the outcome of next month’s mayoral election in L.A. because I know full well that what happens in our largest cities impacts the rest of the nation. Zohran Mamdani’s election last year as mayor of New York City heartened radical leftists across the country. Mamdani’s policies are already driving business out of America’s biggest city – but that hasn’t stopped his socialist imitators from running for office. (Several of his admirers are on the L.A. ballot.) If Spencer Pratt can win in Los Angeles, the consequences will reverberate.

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Degrees and Debris

Los Angeles is America’s second-largest city, with a $13 billion annual budget and over 50,000 full-time (mostly unionized) employees. And yet, when devastating wildfires swept through the city’s chic Palisades neighborhood in January 2025, that bloated civic budget offered no protection. Instead, fire hydrants ran dry, and a critical reservoir sat empty. Individual first responders were heroic, but they did not have what they needed to prevail in the fight. Several lives were lost, and thousands of multimillion-dollar homes burned to the ground.

Spencer Pratt was one of those Palisades homeowners who lost everything. Like so many in L.A., Pratt had built his career in the entertainment industry. When he was done starring on The Hills, he went to USC and earned a degree in political science. Still, he had no plans to run for office. Not, that is, until the fires came.

As he came to grips with what he had lost – and why – Pratt realized that his neighbors had voted for tax increase after tax increase, regulation after regulation, always assuming that they were paying for good government. They never got it. They got ashes instead. And what Pratt saw was that the scale of the devastation was directly tied to L.A.’s ongoing decline. The utterly inadequate response to the firestorm was not the only proof of that decline. For decades, the city has spent billions to address homelessness – while the number of “unhoused” Angelenos continued to swell. The taxpayers subsidized countless agencies and programs that promised to solve the problem. The streets only got dirtier and more dangerous.

Karen Bass Cannot Be Reformed

To be fair, socialist policies didn’t literally start the Palisades fire. The untreated mental illness and addiction that lead to homelessness happen everywhere. The problem in Los Angeles is that a swollen, sclerotic bureaucracy is more committed to left-wing ideology than good governance. And no one embodies that misplaced commitment more than L.A.’s incumbent mayor, Karen Bass. A former Congressional Black Caucus chair, Bass was so radical that she traveled to Cuba to support Fidel Castro when she was barely out of her teens. When she gave up her House seat to run for mayor, she was endorsed by every progressive organization in California. They were confident that Bass would prove a dutiful, dependable ally.

Karen Bass can’t fix the homeless problem because the homeless nonprofits fund her campaigns. She can’t reform the fire department because the unions elect her. She can’t streamline permitting for new housing because the environmental groups would destroy her politically. She’s not just in the Progressive Political Vise—she has her hands on the lever.

In The Political Vise, I explain how progressive institutions create control through elite pressure from above and organized mobilization from below. In Los Angeles, as in many large cities, the Vise captures you on your way up. You need union money to run, and you need left-wing nonprofit support for ground game. By the time you’re viable enough to govern, you’re far too captured by the system to reform anything.

Credentials Are the Disease

In 2022, Rick Caruso spent $100 million of his own money trying to beat Bass. He lost to her by seven points. Caruso was a developer, so environmental groups opposed him. He was a billionaire, so progressive activists targeted him. He tried to position himself as the reasonable businessman who could fix things. A competent, courteous self-made man, Caruso thought money, detailed plans, and impeccable business credentials could overcome the progressive stranglehold on the City of Angels. He was wrong.

Spencer Pratt, as I noted above, has no governing experience. He’s completely unqualified by traditional standards – and it is that very quality that makes him ideal for this job. He can dismiss the homeless nonprofits getting millions in city contracts to NOT solve homelessness. He can gut the permitting bureaucracy that prevents housing construction. He can override the environmental regulations that made water management impossible during the fires. And he can direct the police to start enforcing the law and make the streets safe again.

Every other candidate in the mayoral race is invested in the broken system. After four years in office, Bass says she needs more time to make the system work better. Two other candidates (running even further to Bass’ left!) want to invest even more in failed policies – and to defund the police even further. Like Bass, these hopefuls are in the progressive Vise, feeling the squeeze from the elites and the unions and the non-profits. Only Spencer Pratt – a (justifiably) angry reality TV star – isn’t captive to that corrupt and corrosive agenda. His is the only plan that has a real shot to work.

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Every Failing Blue City Is Watching

If Pratt wins, he becomes the anti-Mamdani. New York City swung to the hard left by electing a charismatic, radical socialist—but Mamdani is still a creature of the Democratic Socialists of America, a professional politician playing at revolution. If Los Angeles voters are fed up enough to elect an uncredentialed disruptor, then other failing cities (including my own long-suffering Chicago) would have a new model to consider.

The progressive establishment insists that only those captured by the system can govern. Spencer Pratt has a chance to prove otherwise. I’m pulling for him. You should be too.

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Weeks ago, the new mayor of New York City picked a fight with the founder of Citadel, and lost it in public.

Zohran Mamdani, four months into running the largest city in the country, posted a video attacking Ken Griffin personally. The pretext was Mamdani’s proposed $500 million tax on pied-à-terre apartments, the kind of policy proposal that plays well on Bluesky but collapses upon contact with basic arithmetic.

Nevertheless, Mamdani was – visibly – gleeful that he had found an easy villain to slay for an audience of admirers perennially bound to the political identity assigned to them during undergrad.

Griffin responded with neither anger nor bluster. The billionaire did not humor the socialist mayor with a thundering moral or philosophical defense of capitalism and free markets, nor did he wax historical about the public necessity of private wealth generation.

Instead, feet firmly on the ground, Griffin simply pointed at his construction site in Miami (a tower he is building, with his own capital, in a city that wants him there) and suggested:

This is the way.

Then he said something else that every big blue-city mayor in America heard (and that the smart ones quietly absorbed). What is happening in New York, Griffin said, is “triggering the trauma I went through in Chicago.”

The exchange went viral. Most people commenting on social media thought it was about New York, its novice mayor, a mobile billionaire, and a contested tax proposal and a building.

Alas, it wasn’t. It was about a reconfiguration of the American left that has been underway for a decade, that almost no one is naming correctly, and that has produced a new political type we do not yet have a vocabulary for.

We need a term here. Allow me to give you one.

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The Rise of the Non-Working Class

Mamdani is not a have-not.

He is a Bowdoin graduate, his father a tenured professor at Columbia, and his mother an internationally celebrated filmmaker. He was raised inside the credentialed-creative pipeline that, four years ago, he leveraged into winning a New York State Assembly seat at age 29 and that has now propelled him into Gracie Mansion at age 34.

The man who proposes to extract $500 million from the owners of second homes is the son of not one, but two members of the glittering cultural elite.

This is a description, not a criticism.

Mamdani’s base is not the working class. His base is the college-educated children of affluence who did not inherit what they thought was their birthright. This is a demographic cohort that was promised a particular kind of life by their degrees and is now furious that it never arrived. This fury informs their politics. They did everything the elite credentialing factory told them to do and discovered the credential was not, in fact, a key to the status and success to which they believed themselves entitled.

Their anger is real, and they have made a decision about whom to be angry at. This decision – a catastrophically wrong one – is the entire story.

They are not angry at the universities that took their money or the professors who baited their righteous indignation with seductive fictions about the world and this country, or the credentialing economy that cranked out aspiring elites several orders of magnitude above the economy’s actual demand for them. In their frustration, they have decided that the people standing between them and the life they were promised are not the institutions that failed them but a hedge fund manager in Miami.

This is Privilege Populism.

Privilege Populism entails the aesthetics of class struggle, performed by people whose parents or grandparents already triumphed in that fight. This new generation appropriates the symbols of the fight and deploys them against those whose success has been greater and more enduring.

It is, as some have observed, war between the haves and the have-mores.

The have-nots are absent from this class war because they lack both access to it and interest in it. Radicalized haves instead agitate to advance their own interests while wearing the interests of the have-nots as a costume. The Privilege Populists are invariably blind to this, which is one reason they are unable to connect the policies they champion to the societal failures that emerge around them as a result.

Dialectics and Dunces

Why does the resentment get pointed at the hedge fund manager and not at the people who actually broke the promise?

The answer is not that the credentialed downwardly mobile are stupid. They are not. Many of them are, by the metrics the credentialing system uses, exceptionally bright. The answer is that the misdirection is built into the worldview the credentialing system installed in them.

Consider what would have to be true for the anger to land where it actually belongs.

A graduate who borrowed $180,000 to attend a private liberal arts college, who emerged with a degree in a field the labor market does not particularly want, and who is now 31, sharing a Brooklyn apartment with one or more roommates, would have to conclude that the institution they attended sold them something fantastical. They would have to conclude that the professors and mentors who awakened their political consciousness profit from the system to which they inflame “resistance.” They would have to conclude that the entire framework they were taught for understanding power (class, race, capital, oppression, etc.) is the framework that bolsters them.

All this seems unthinkable, and the credentialing system has evolved over the past half-century to make such conclusions seem unthinkable.

So, filled with all this thwarted entitlement, the anger gets redirected. Outward, upward, sideways, almost anywhere except at the institutions that charged them a premium for it.

The hedge fund manager is a convenient target. He is visible, wealthy, unsympathetic, and crucially, ideologically far estranged from what’s found in student group manifestos. He exists beyond the walls of the credentialing economy. He probably hasn’t read Foucault or Fanon. And worse, he succeeded despite his shortcomings. The grave injustice of his success becomes the problem to oppose.

This logic is also why Privilege Populism cannot connect its policies to the outcomes those policies produce. If you cannot see your own institutions as a plausible cause of your misfortunes, you also cannot see them as a possible cause of anyone else’s. When the rent goes up, it is the landlord’s fault, not the zoning regime designed by the credentialed class you trust. When the productive class leaves, it is their selfishness, not Privilege Populism’s malevolence.

This is why Griffin did not get into a war of words with Mamdani. He simply pointed at a building in a city that wanted him there, and let that towering physical reality do the rest of the work.

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The Real Race to the Bottom

I have watched this play out before.

For twenty years, I worked in the public policy space in Illinois. I saw Chicago’s productive class quietly relocate while its progressive political class directed increasingly hysterical acts of grievance towards those who stayed. I saw the tax base hollow out one Citadel, one Caterpillar, one Boeing headquarters at a time. I saw many of the people who stayed look at the resulting decline around them and conclude, somehow, that the answer was to vote even further to the left. We must have more socialism, they declared. The alternative, as ever, was unthinkable.

Ken Griffin left Chicago in 2022. He took Citadel with him. He was understandably unwilling to be the whipping boy of elites who never built anything, never would, took him for granted, and resented him for it.

What is happening in New York is the same, but with younger actors and more social media clout. The productive class is already running the numbers. Some have already moved, while others will wait it out a little bit, hoping the city corrects. It will not correct soon, because the people who run it cannot grasp the connection between cause and effect.

They may never grasp that connection.

The audience for the politics of Privilege Populism is large, well-credentialed, loud, and engaged. The audience for the building is much smaller, quieter, and busier. They’re also more mobile.

Privilege Populism keeps winning the room, but it loses the city.

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When it comes to the American left, I sometimes play something I call the “opposite game.” The rules are straightforward. Whatever a far-left politician or pundit declares bad is almost good, and vice-versa. There are times that game proves too simplistic, but not as often as you’d think. My favorite current example comes from Georgia Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, who declared that last week’s Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais“is nothing less than a massive and devastating blow, not only to our democracy, but particularly to people of color in the South.”

The Senator has it, of course, exactly backwards. Callais is indeed a massive and devastating blow, but it was delivered against the very structures that have marginalized and disempowered black Americans. Callais, as I understand it, restores the nearly forgotten commitment to not just equal opportunity under the law, but equal treatment as well. The future for Americans of all races and ethnic backgrounds is brighter as a result.

That’s quite a claim about a 6-3 high court decision that invalidated legislative districts specifically crafted based on race. Leaving aside the opposite game, Democrats like Senator Warnock are right to be worried that certain safe House seats (traditionally gerrymandered to ensure black majorities) will now be up for grabs in the upcoming midterms. To entrenched incumbents who take black voters for granted, Callais is terrifying. For everyone else—very much including those black voters—the consequences are much more promising.

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The Containment Strategy

Under the race-based districting regime, reliably conservative Southern states would carve out one or two “black majority” districts. Black voters got concentrated into those districts. The remaining majority-white districts then had very few black constituents. Politicians in those white districts had no incentive to address black concerns. Meanwhile, black voters found themselves in a political ghetto. They had one or two elected representatives, but no real power.

When you segregate a group of people into an enclave, rigid ideological conformity takes hold. Peer pressure, coercion, shame, and shunning enforce that conformity. Inside a racially gerrymandered district, one party dominates. Power is often passed down within families or social networks. A few benefit at the expense of the many.

In my book The Political Vise, I explain how progressive institutions extract power by creating permanent dependency. They build and maintain what I call grievance coalitions. These function in perpetuity because grievances (as we have all seen from social media) can be manufactured and sustained. Over time, those grievances become the glue binding people to a political party. Resentment is a feeling, not an economic state. No matter how prosperous you become, you can be made to believe you’ve been held back by your skin color.

The perversion is that race-based districts were sold as protecting black voting power. They accomplished the opposite. They isolated black voters politically, allowed white-majority districts to ignore black concerns, and created exactly the political dependency (sustained by grievance) that the left relies upon.

The Math Has Now Flipped

Callais changes the incentives. In apportioned districts without racial gerrymandering, black Americans will often be a minority. That’s a simple demographic reality. But as a minority, they can swing an election. Politicians in fairly designed districts will need to address black voters’ concerns. A candidate who ignores those concerns will risk losing their seat.

In heavily Republican districts in the South, the outcome of competitive primary races between multiple conservative candidates may hinge on successful appeal to black voters. In ruby red states where racial gerrymandering was entrenched, Callais will expand (rather than diminish) black influence. Thomas Sowell, the hugely influential black economic historian, has long implored his fellow African Americans to leave what he calls the “Democrat plantation.” Callais presents an opportunity for millions to do just that.

We’ve already seen monolithic Democrat voting among black Americans declining under Donald Trump. In 2020, Trump received 8% of the black vote according to AP VoteCast. In 2024, he received 15% according to Pew Research—nearly doubling his support. More dramatically, exit polls showed Trump winning 20% of the black vote overall and 24% among black men specifically. CNN polling analyst Harry Enten reports that in 2026, Trump’s approval rating among black voters stands at 16%—up from 12% during his first term. These numbers may seem small, but Enten describes them as “generational gains.” When districts are no longer gerrymandered to produce Democrat black grievance candidates, that trend will accelerate.

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Old Patterns and Modern Politics

The Democrat Party has pursued power through racial division since its inception. Democrats defended slavery before the Civil War, imposed Jim Crow after it, and fought integration for a century. When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, he reportedly told an aide “I’ll have those n-----s voting Democratic for 200 years.” The strategy shifted from physical segregation to political segregation, from controlling black Americans through law to controlling them through dependency.

Race-based Congressional districts served that strategy, functioning as political enclaves where black voters were told their only path to power ran through Democrat politicians fighting for government programs. Republicans, safe in majority-white districts, had no incentive to compete for black votes. Black voters remained captured, dependent, and reliably Democrat.

The Progressive Political Vise depends on racial division. It requires black Americans to believe their interests are fundamentally opposed to white Americans’ interests. When black and white voters share the same representative, attend the same town halls, and voice the same concerns about schools and taxes and public safety, that narrative collapses.

For sixty years, the left has maintained political segregation through grievance, dependency and racial gerrymandering. Callais upends a regime, and it breaks a cherished lever of the Progressive Vise. Last week’s Supreme Court decision is indeed “a massive and devastating blow” to those who have run that regime. For everyone else—especially black Americans—Callais marks the start of a new and long-overdue era of opportunity.

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Hate is a good business model.

On April 21st, the Department of Justice indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on eleven counts of wire fraud, false statements to banks, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The indictment alleges that between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid over $3 million in donor funds to leaders and members of the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and other white supremacist groups.

The organization that gained renown for labeling conservatives as dangerous extremists? They spent at least a decade bankrolling actual extremists.

According to the indictment, the SPLC ran a covert network of paid informants—internally called “field sources” or “the Fs.” One informant in the neo-Nazi National Alliance received over $1 million. Another was paid $270,000 while serving in the leadership group that organized the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. That was the infamous event that left one woman dead—and inspired Joe Biden to run for president.

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The Long Con Started in Montgomery

“In that moment, (Charlottesville) I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime,” Biden told supporters when he announced his candidacy in 2019.

We know now that much of that threat was expensively and carefully manufactured.

The SPLC was founded in 1971 in Montgomery, Alabama. They made their bones suing the Ku Klux Klan in state courts, sometimes recouping significant monetary damages. The sympathetic liberal media decided that anyone with the courage to sue the Klan in Alabama must have tremendous moral legitimacy. The SPLC and its leadership were soon venerated as heroes. The organization rapidly accrued not just legitimacy but significant cultural and political power.

That power grew exponentially after 1990, when the Center started publishing its annual census of “hate groups” in the United States. A fawning media cited those designations as authoritative, and before long, major corporations consulted the list before making donations or forming partnerships. By the time the age of social media arrived, the “hate map” functioned as a tool to ostracize, deplatform, and bankrupt conservatives. Anyone who suggested that these designations were unfair was accused of possessing Nazi sympathies. Long before anyone had coined the term “cancel culture,” the SPLC had become masters at destroying the careers of their critics.

Every Watchdog Needs a Wolf

In my book The Political Vise, I explain how progressive institutions extract wealth and power by creating permanent dependency on their services. Solving the problem eliminates the need for the institution, which would threaten both the money and the influence. All the incentives run towards ensuring a perpetual need, or warning of an ever-present danger.

The SPLC took this logic to its natural conclusion. One informant received a million dollars over nine years. As far as I am concerned, that’s a salary! The informant’s job wasn’t just to keep SPLC leadership apprised of what various “hate groups” might be planning, it was to ensure that the threat those groups posed seemed far greater than it really was. The SPLC could then fundraise off that embellished threat. It was a very lucrative business model.

The money spent on informant “salaries” proved an excellent investment. Between 2015 and 2024, the SPLC raised approximately $1.2 billion in donations. After the 2017 Charlottesville rally (organized by one of those paid informants), revenue nearly tripled from $51.8 million before Charlottesville to $133.4 million after. Apple CEO Tim Cook personally pledged $1 million. JPMorgan Chase gave $500,000. George Clooney’s foundation donated $1 million. The SPLC helped create an alarming (and deadly) spectacle, and corporate America responded.

Charlie Kirk Was on the List

The incentives are clear. The SPLC wields influence (and turns the levers of the progressive Political Vise) thanks to their self-proclaimed role as the indispensable watchdogs of extremism. That influence hinges on tens of millions of dollars in annual donations, donations that will quickly dry up if it is revealed that the “hate groups” SPLC monitors pose no real danger. If donors realize what the Klan truly is—a pathetic collection of aging and aggrieved men with no real power—the SPLC’s model collapses.

Put simply, the SPLC needs ongoing extremism the way a fire department needs ongoing fires. Except fire departments don’t bankroll arsonists.

What makes the SPLC’s grift so dangerous is that even while it bankrolled otherwise inconsequential extremists, it also spent years labeling mainstream conservative organizations as hate groups. Christian groups that advocated for traditional marriage, or against abortion? On par with literal Nazis.

In September 2025, conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the charismatic founder of Turning Point USA, was assassinated on a college campus in Utah. A year before his murder, the SPLC had labeled Charlie’s organization as extremist in their “Year in Hate and Extremism 2024” report. What was so hateful about Turning Point? It supported border enforcement and opposed the medical transitioning of American children. Common sense conservative values were, as far as the SPLC was concerned, no different than the noxious doctrines of the Klan.

This is the progressive Political Vise at work. The SPLC operated as what I call an “influencer” in the Vise framework: an institution that shapes the boundaries of acceptable discourse and applies pressure to politicians, corporations, and other institutions. When the SPLC designated someone or some group as extremist, the media amplified that designation, and the squeeze followed. And while the SPLC is not directly responsible for Charlie Kirk’s murder, their insistence that he led a “hate group” contributed to the culture that fed the paranoia and rage of Charlie’s assassin.

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The Smear Machine’s Mileage Problem

The Justice Department’s case against the Center is not a slam dunk. Legal experts point out that the SPLC’s mission to infiltrate and dismantle extremist groups was never secret. Donors may have accepted that fighting these groups might require paying informants. Prosecutors will need to prove that donors felt deceived and that the money funded criminal activity rather than intelligence gathering. But though indictments may not lead to convictions, the revelations have already led to change. FBI Director Kash Patel severed the bureau’s relationship with the SPLC, calling it a “partisan smear machine.” Chick-fil-A, one of the South’s most beloved and respected family-held brands, told the New York Post that despite past donations, the SPLC was no longer “an organization that Chick-fil-A is involved with or supports in any capacity.”

The likelihood is that the SPLC will survive this indictment. Organizations with $850 million endowments rarely disappear. They’ll claim political persecution, point to their decades of civil rights work, and argue that infiltrating hate groups was necessary, brave and noble. Other progressive organizations will rally to their side. The SPLC is far too valuable an ally for the left to abandon.

But whether the SPLC survives or not, the truth is out in the open. We now know that the same organization that called Charlie Kirk a hateful extremist was putting millions into the pockets of actual neo-Nazis. We now know that the SPLC manufactured white supremacist spectacles like Charlottesville to drive donations. And perhaps most importantly of all, the public now knows that in funding the enemy it claimed to fight, the SPLC embodied the business model of the contemporary American left.

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Two weeks ago, Pope Leo XIV met privately with David Axelrod at the Vatican.

If that name doesn’t sound familiar, let me remind you. David Axelrod was Barack Obama’s campaign architect. He is a man who is not Catholic, who has never met a pope before, and whose entire career has been engineering political narratives for the American left.

The Vatican provided no details about what was discussed. Three days later three senior American churchmen appeared together on 60 Minutes. Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington, and Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark gave their first-ever joint interview. They criticized President Trump’s Iran policy, condemned his immigration enforcement, and accused the administration of “gamifying” war.

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Bad Faith

It was difficult to regard the timing of the broadcast and the Axelrod meeting as coincidental. It smacked of all-too-familiar progressive coordination.

Within hours of the broadcast, President Trump responded on Truth Social calling Pope Leo “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.” The subsequent headlines wrote themselves: “Unhinged President Attacks Holy Father.” The media, licking their chops, declared that conservative American Catholics would be forced to choose between their political convictions and their faith.

It is true that President Trump is sometimes jocular to the point of vulgarity. Even his supporters concede he does not always think before he posts on social media. Nonetheless, the focus on Trump’s rhetoric misses the point. The goal wasn’t to drive the president to make an impolitic post on Truth Social. The carefully calculated goal was to put American Catholics under intense pressure.

Some brief backstory: In January, Pentagon official Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States. According to reports, Colby told Pierre that the US military “has the power to do whatever it wants” and that the Church “better take its side.” Someone in the room reportedly said something about Avignon, a reference to a city in which a series of medieval popes were held as virtual prisoners by the French crown. That sounded like a very unsubtle threat.

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The Avingon Threat

There’s real doubt whether Colby or any of his aides made the Avignon reference. As ever, what mattered wasn’t what actually happened, but how the media reported it. The Vatican was apparently alarmed enough to reject the White House’s invitation to host the Pope for America’s 250^th birthday in July. Instead, Leo will spend July 4th on Lampedusa, a tiny Mediterranean island where waves of African migrants arrive every day.

As war began with Iran in late February, the Vatican escalated its criticism of American foreign policy. Then came the strange Axelrod meeting, the 60 Minutes episode, and President Trump’s exasperated response on Truth Social. The left are masters of synchronized political pressure. What makes it different this time is that progressives have deployed the Roman Catholic Church as an instrument of that pressure. There is perhaps no human being on earth with more perceived moral authority than the pope. In recent weeks, the left has succeeded in weaponizing that powerful authority for its own political ends.

Christ as Political Instrument

Pope Leo XIV is the first American pope. Born Robert Prevost, the future pontiff grew up just south of the Chicago city limits. As almost everyone knows, he’s a lifelong White Sox fan. And while I do not hold that error in judgment against him, I do know that anyone who grew up in Chicago has an innate understanding of how politics works. Though he has lived abroad for many years, Pope Leo is said to still consume American media voraciously. So, when the first American Pope meets privately with one of the Democratic Party’s shrewdest political operatives -- and when that meeting is followed days later by three progressive Cardinals attacking a sitting Republican president on the nation’s premier primetime news program -- we are absolutely witnessing coordinated mischief.

The progressive left has spent decades mastering the particular skill of reducing Jesus to a political instrument. They’ve stripped away the inconvenient parts and ignored the passages from the Bible that don’t fit the narrative. They regularly present Jesus as an immensely compassionate liberal, someone who would freely give money to every poor person regardless of work ethic, never enforce immigration laws, never limit the rights of any minority group, and serve as the great defender of every progressive cause.

The left cherry-picks Bible verses to support their politics while ignoring everything that contradicts their predetermined conclusions. They quote “blessed are the peacemakers” while ignoring centuries of Just War theory. They cite “judge not” while ignoring that Jesus called sin exactly what it was. They stand up for the vulnerable, unless those vulnerable include the unborn.

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The Church Will Be Fine

This isn’t just something the secular left imposes on a resistant church. Too often, progressive Catholic bishops and Cardinals speak of Jesus as if His primary concern was validating the Democratic Party platform. This is less the Church speaking moral truth to political power than it is about Church allowing itself to be captured by one side of our political divide.

This is what the celebrated scholar George Weigel meant when he wrote about “the utter incoherence of 21st-century liberal Catholicism.” By incoherence, he meant a version of Catholicism that has become so accommodating to progressive politics that it has lost the ability to articulate what makes Catholic teaching distinctly Catholic. It cherry-picks Church doctrine the same way it cherry-picks Scripture—elevating the parts that align with progressive politics while downplaying or ignoring everything else.

The progressive left has long controlled the commanding heights of American culture. To their hegemony over universities, newsrooms, entertainment, and much of corporate America, you can now – perhaps – add the Vatican. The left understands that cultural authority matters far more than legislative victories. Laws can be overturned and elections can be reversed, but if you control the institutions that shape how people think about what’s morally acceptable, you control the culture.

I’m not here to litigate Catholic doctrine, as I am not a Catholic.I defer to theologians (like George Weigel) on spiritual matters. What I am here to do is call out transparent political manipulation when I see it.

David Axelrod, a legendary political operator, didn’t request an audience with Pope Leo to discuss his own religious journey. Axelrod went to see his fellow Chicagoan because each man is immensely skilled at managing public perception and building narratives. (Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a piece correctly calling Leo “a methodical political operator.”) I don’t know what David Axelrod and Pope Leo discussed two Thursdays ago. Neither does anyone else outside that room. But what we do know is that three days later, three Cardinals delivered a nationally televised attack on the President’s policies. Coincidences don’t run on 72-hour timelines.

Catholic voters can make their own decisions about Trump’s Iran policy or immigration enforcement. What they shouldn’t have to navigate is their spiritual leader taking strategy sessions with Democratic operatives. The Church will be fine. It’s survived worse than David Axelrod. But respectfully, Pope Leo needs to reconsider allowing the Vatican to serve as a mouthpiece for progressive talking points.

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.