From Our Generation

What do you know now that you wish you knew at 30? The question sounds soft until you try to answer it honestly. Health compounds in one direction. The damage done in your 30s and 40s cannot be fully reversed in your 60s. Smoking was the obvious destroyer a generation ago. Today it is high-potency THC, which causes permanent brain damage in teenagers and is being sold by an industry whose tax reve...

The national debt crossed $40 trillion this week. Divided across 340 million Americans, that is roughly $110,000 per person. At a 3% interest rate, each person's share of the debt costs about $3,000 a year in reduced standard of living. For a family of four making $100,000, the burden is 10 to 12%. For a family making a million, it is 1%. The debt is the most regressive tax in America, and no...

Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions about his conduct during COVID. The irony is difficult to overstate. While he had power, he suppressed free speech, shut down churches, banned public assembly, and pressured media to silence dissenting voices. Every right protected by the First Amendment was violated under his direction. When called to account, he used the Fift...

The word visionary gets applied to people who have not earned it. A visionary, in any meaningful sense, is someone whose ideas produce a better future. Someone whose ideas have already been tested and failed is not a visionary. They are repeating a mistake. Every major policy position of the Democratic Socialists of America, abolishing police, eliminating prisons, opening borders, government owner...

Democratic Socialists are winning primaries in deep blue districts and now testing whether their platform can survive swing-state voters. Three bellwether races will answer the question. In Maine, Susan Collins faces a socialist replacement candidate after Graham Platner's exit. Collins is one of the few genuinely moderate politicians in America, reelected three times in a purple state. In Mic...

The Democratic Socialists of America want to "take democracy beyond the ballot box." The phrase sounds like an expansion of fairness. It is the opposite. Democracy has a specific meaning: representation through elected government. Taking it "beyond" that means using state power to equalize outcomes in every domain of life, which requires a government large enough to seize and r...

Graham Platner won the Maine Democratic primary with 72% of the vote. Twelve days later, his own party is pushing him out. The reason has nothing to do with the Nazi tattoo, the abuse allegations, or the sexting claims. All of that was known before the primary. What changed is that he fell behind Susan Collins in the polls. The same party that threw Joe Biden overboard after he won every single de...

Barack Obama opened his Presidential Center with a speech that denigrated the Declaration of Independence and praised the Constitution in the vaguest possible terms. He skipped "endowed by our Creator," as he always does, and framed the Constitution as a document designed to "change with the times," a phrase that sounds reasonable until you realize he means judicial reinterpret...

A CNN poll on July 4th attitudes reveals a divide that did not exist a generation ago. In January 2001, 85% of Democrats said they were extremely or very proud to be American. In 2026, that number is 29%. Republican pride held steady at 90% across the same period. Only 27% of Democrats plan to display the flag on July 4th, down from 65% twenty-five years ago. The question isn't which party is...

Every dollar spent on government is a dollar somebody else had to earn. That math never changes, no matter how large the economy gets. On a ten-person island, adding one government worker forces the remaining nine to work 11% longer to cover the same output. Add a retiree and the burden climbs again. Scale that to a $7 trillion federal budget and the math is the same, just harder to see. Bernie Sa...

Bureaucracies don't die quietly. When Reagan tried to eliminate the EPA, radon suddenly became a national crisis: odorless, tasteless, colorless, and conveniently undetectable without government-approved machines. Cities sitting on limestone, the supposed source, showed no elevated cancer rates. The threat evaporated under scrutiny, but the agency grew. The pattern repeats wherever an institut...

The Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, is the founding document that defines what America is. Clarence Thomas made this distinction in a recent speech at the University of Texas, and the argument holds. George Washington said he fought for sovereignty, not for a governing structure he couldn't yet imagine. The Constitution came later as the operating manual. The Declaration establi...

Trust in institutions is at an all-time low, and the question is whether that's a crisis or a correction. Government, media, Congress: the erosion is measurable. But the people who say they distrust Congress keep reelecting their own representatives. The people who distrust the media keep watching outlets that confirm what they already believe. Distrust without action is just atmosphere. Media acc...

The United States has 11 companies worth more than a trillion dollars. No other country has one. The most valuable company in Europe is worth $600 billion. Japan's is $250 billion. Something about how this country operates produces outcomes no other system has matched, and the question of what that something is runs through every political fight happening right now. The American experiment was...

Redistricting battles across multiple states expose the tension between constitutional process and partisan ambition. Virginia's legislature pushed through a redistricting referendum without following its own constitutional requirements, ignoring the fact that voters were already casting early ballots before the law was finalized. A lower court blocked it within a day. Florida and Texas follow...

The distinction between a subject and a citizen sits at the foundation of American law, and most people have never thought about it. A subject under British common law owes perpetual allegiance to the crown by birth. Blackstone described it as feudal: a debt of gratitude that cannot be forfeited, canceled, or altered. The Declaration of Independence rejected that doctrine outright. Edward Erler&#3...

Pope Leo XIV called military action in Iran absurd and inhumane, said no cause justifies the shedding of innocent blood, and made the statement a day after meeting with David Axelrod. Trump told him to get his act together. The collision raises a real question about moral authority. The same Pope who condemns bombing is protected inside the Vatican by Swiss Guards with automatic weapons, behind wa...

The Iran conflict resists easy labels. A ceasefire brokered through Pakistan unraveled almost immediately when Lebanon attacked Israel and Israel struck back hard. The ceasefire may have served a different purpose entirely: time to rearm, refine strategy, and clear civilians from targets that will be hit next. Trump has laid out four specific conditions to end the bombing: no nuclear weapons, surr...

Executive power finds its limits not in law but in leverage. When a president pays federal workers without congressional appropriation by invoking national security, the legal gray area matters less than the political reality: no one with standing wants to challenge it. That dynamic, where principle yields to practical calculation, runs through the SAVE Act's stalled path in the Senate, filibu...

The development of democracy is not a sudden transformation but a gradual shift in where authority resides. The translation of the Bible into English in the 16th century marked a critical turning point, moving interpretive power from centralized religious institutions to individuals. This change extended beyond religion, elevating personal conscience as a legitimate source of authority and weakeni...

Major political conflicts often reveal more than their immediate stakes. They expose the underlying mechanics of power, incentives, and institutional design. Three simultaneous standoffs (federal funding for homeland security, voter authentication legislation, and a military confrontation with Iran) illustrate how unresolved disputes can shape the direction of policy and governance. Each represent...

Economic prosperity does not emerge from a single policy. It requires a structure of reinforcing conditions: low taxation, limited regulation, sound money, low corruption, and equal treatment under the law. When these principles align, markets function and opportunity expands. When they weaken, prosperity erodes. At the center is a concept called ordered liberty. Freedom without rules produces cha...

Five foundational principles determine whether a society grows stronger or slowly undermines its own prosperity: low taxes, sensible regulation, low corruption, sound money, and laws designed to treat people equally. Like a five-legged table, stability depends on each support holding firm. The central debate examines how these pillars function in practice. States with balanced budget requirements,...

Financial independence is not the same as appearing wealthy. A high income, luxury cars, and an expensive lifestyle can vanish the moment paychecks stop. True independence comes from owning assets that generate income, investments that work even when you don’t. The central contrast is between consumption and ownership. Consumption absorbs income in the present; ownership multiplies it over time. T...

Wealth inequality is often blamed on billionaires, but never on government policy that systematically diverts workers’ income away from private ownership and into non-inheritable entitlement programs. Payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, combined with rising healthcare mandates, remove thousands annually from middle-class families, funds that could otherwise compound into long-term weal...