NY Uses Tax Dollars to Pay Former Criminals to Mentor Youth. Guess What Happened Next.

 

There isn't a government program that Democrats won't waste money on, no matter how ridiculous. Instead of creating a culture that puts criminals in prison (that would be racist) and teaches children that they will face consequences for bad behavior, Democrats insist on funding social programs that never work, but are sure to make them feel good.

In New York, the Strategic Neighborhood Understanding and Guardian (SNUG) Program pairs former criminals with youth to dissuade them from entering a life of drugs and violent crime. But two men paid by that taxpayer-funded program were just busted for...dealing drugs and carrying weapons.

They were originally busted in earlier this year and were apparently on the clock when they were selling the drugs.

Here's more from the original story.

They were hired to stop crime and now, they’re accused of fueling it.

Two Syracuse men working for a state-funded anti-violence program are now at the center of a drug investigation.

A year-long probe led to the shocking discovery and a 24-count indictment.

Just steps away from the Southwest Community Center in Syracuse where they were paid to steer young people away from violence, prosecutors say Cassieum Pitts and Ahmed Abdi, were selling drugs.

“And they’re accused of doing this on the clock?” NewsChannel 9’s Rachel Polansky asked. 

“Yes,” Senior Assistant District Attorney, Alphonse Williams, said.

Now those two men, Ahmed Abdi and Cassieum Pitts have accepted plea deals in this case. Abdi will be in prison for six years; Pitts will serve nine.

Prosecutors said Abdi and Pitts were wearing orange safety vests and on duty when they sold cocaine and methamphetamine to a confidential informant.

"It's honestly crazy, right?" said Alphonse Williams, the Senior District Attorney in Onondaga County. "You can’t miss those bright orange vests. And you’re like, man, this is actually happening in our city,” Williams also called video of Abdi and Pitts "discomforting" and did damage to the community, especially the kids they were hired to mentor.

"When the youth see that, they’re like, if you’re not taking it seriously, I’m not gonna take it seriously. I’m gonna be like you, and I’m gonna continue to do the things that are plaguing our community at large. It’s the youth that they’re supposed to be serving that gets hurt by this."

Governor Kathy Hochul was a proponent of SNUG. During a March 2022 press conference, she said, "This is an important program because I know that it works. I want to continue investing in what we know has a proven track record of accomplishment." In February, she said the state would spend $20 million on SNUG, with almost $2 million going to the Syracuse site. That announcement came shortly before Abdi and Pitts were arrested.

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In a statement, Lateef Johnson-Kinsey, a spokesperson for the mayor, said, "Every organization has bad apples, no matter what the organization is. It was two individuals, not 20. Two individuals does not stop what we are doing as a community."

Here's a List of What Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick Allegedly Spent Stolen FEMA On

Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (FL-20) is in a boatload of legal trouble. Last week, she was charged with stealing $5 million in FEMA funds after a billing error resulted in an overpayment to a business she's affiliated with for a COVID-related vaccination staffing contract.

Cherfilus-McCormick also faces censure in and possible expulsion from Congress for her involvement. For her part, Cherfilus-McCormick claims she's innocent and played the race card, accusing prosecutors of "attacking minorities."

Now, a report shows exactly what Cherfilus-McCormick allegedly spent that money on, including a six-figure, three-carat yellow diamond ring.

The list of spending is long and expensive. It includes $2.4 million to Cherfilus-McCormick's consulting company, $1.2 million to a bank account managed by relatives of Cherfilus-McCormick, $830K to a different bank account on which Cherfilus-McCormick is an authorized user, $334K to Nadege Leblanc, who is "accused of having coordinated straw-donor contributions to Cherfilus-McCormick," $190K to a bank account tied to Cherfilus-McCormick's brother's consulting company.

The ring, according to a Tiffany & Co. client advisor, appears to be a "Tiffany Fancy Yellow Single Row Celeste, and the Victoria Band ring." Cherfilus-McCormick is wearing the ring in her official portrait.

Yesterday, a Florida judge set a $60,000 bond and placed travel restrictions on Cherfilus-McCormick, who had to surrender her personal passport. She is allowed to travel from Florida to D.C., Maryland, and the Eastern District of Virginia. She is also allowed to keep her Congressional passport to do certain aspects of her job. A spokesperson for Cherfilus-McCormick said she has no intention of resigning from her office.

Warren Tried Criticizing Duffy's Call to Restore Travel Etiquette. Here's How the Secretary Responded.

 

The Democratic Party really has a problem with Americans being told to act civilized while traveling. Last week, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told those heading home for the holidays that the Golden Age of Travel begins with us, and recommended things like being polite and dressing appropriately to go to the airport.

California Governor Gavin Newsom attacked Duffy for it, and complained about the Trump administration canceling fines for airlines that canceled or delayed flights.

Now Elizabeth Warren is doing the same thing:

Of course, we don't expect Democrats to understand that airlines simply passed the costs of those fines onto consumers through higher ticket prices. They truly believe big corporations will eat the costs Democrats impose on them. That's not the case, of course.

On top of that, delays or cancellations of flights are sometimes safety issues. This writer can only speak for herself, but she'd rather wait a bit to make sure the aircraft is in shape to fly than end up dead in a fiery crash.

But Secretary Duffy wasn't going to let Warren's accusations go unaddressed. He pointed out that she voted against a bill that would have spent $12.5 billion to modernize America's air traffic control (ATC) system.

Duffy is correct. President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) had allocations for ATC upgrades and infrastructure. That was described as a "modernization down-payment" for radar and telecom upgrades, as well as new control centers and Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) recapitalization.

One X user asked the question this writer was thinking, "Is her reason to not upgrade the system because she doesn't like people not receiving cancellation money?"

That could be part of it, but as the funding was part of the OBBB, she would have voted against it even if it cured cancer and gave every American a puppy.

That's part of why they object to the civility angle of Duffy's travel pitch. They like the chaos and societal breakdown.

Warren is one of the most feckless Senators, and that's quite the achievement.

Democrats Who Told Military Not to Obey ‘Illegal’ Orders Are ‘Not Being Honest’

 

person1: These six Democrat Congress members, one of the most interesting, odd examples of political performance art. They concocted this video, encouraging, warning, urging members of the military not to follow illegal orders. Wow, Victor, it was just so weird. Your thoughts on it. 

person 2: We have 1.3 million soldiers on active duty, and there are representatives, six of them Congress people and senators, who say on this video, and they all say we have served, we’re veterans, and you don’t have to obey an unlawful order, OK? And it’s in the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The idea is that [President] Donald Trump is issuing unlawful orders. They don’t cite one, not one. So, really, the message then becomes, “Hey, you 1.3 million soldiers, you all are lawyers. So, when your commanding officer says, ‘Get in the helicopter, fly through the fog, and look for the downed pilot,’ you say, ‘That’s an unlawful order. I’m not going to.’” 

That is the message. If the message is, “Wink, nod, Donald Trump has been giving unlawful orders, but we don’t want to specify which ones,” there’s a reason for that. And we’ve heard that it’s unlawful to use military force abroad without a congressional authorization. False. [Former President] Barack Obama killed dozens of people with Predator drones, including a U.S. citizen. He joked about it at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner when he said, “If you want to date my daughter, it’s called Predator, P-R-E-D-A-T-O-R.” OK. 

George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Harry Truman, they’ve all used it. If it’s you can’t send federal troops into a city that’s under siege, [Secretary of State] Colin Powell begged to use 5,000 Marines for the Rodney King [riots], he did. And we’ve had, I think, seven instances where presidents have sent troops in: World War I veterans, Civil War draft, you name it. 

So, they can’t list one thing. And then they say, Uniform Code of Military Justice. OK, Mr. Left-wing Representatives, go look at Article 90 and 92. And it does say you can obey, but then it has lawful and unlawful orders. And you go look at the instances when you can, it’s almost impossible. You have to be absolutely sure that you are being told what … if you read that thing, what an unlawful order is, it’s something like shoot the prisoner, something like that. It’s not what they’re imagining.

And that is highly ironic because in the first term—we have Article 88, since they want to quote the Uniform Code of Military Justice, it says generals, admirals, high-ranking officers shall not disparage, demean, basically smear the commander in chief, the vice president, Cabinet people. And this applies, it says, whether they’re active or retired and subject to recall. We had, I think it was eight or nine four-star admirals who said he was a liar, he was Mussolini, he acted as if he was Hitler, he was a comparable, I think that was General [Michael] Hayden who flashed pictures of Auschwitz, said that Trump was doing the same thing on the border. I could go on. 

So, they’re not being honest. But what’s even worse is—very quickly, and Sami and I talked to some others about it, this insurrectionary idea that Gen. [Mark] Milley, for example, because Trump is so evil, can diagnose him as unstable, then call his Chinese counterpart in the People’s Liberation Army and warn him that he will be contacted if he has any order, Milley, any order, or he can break the chain of command, which he’s not supposed to do, and interfere between theater commanders and the Department of Defense’s secretary, which he did. And he told them all to consult him first.

Or you have Rosa Brooks, 11 days after Donald Trump was inaugurated, saying we’ve got to get rid of this guy. There’s three ways to do it. We either have the 25th Amendment or we impeach him—too slow—or you can have a military coup. Military coup, she said.

And then we had two lieutenant colonels, one was very decorated, Lt. Nagl and said, Gen. Milley, you’re gonna have to remove him. He won’t leave. And he has his little green men. And I tell you what, man, when the 82nd Airborne goes and confronts Trump. he’ll back down. So, he’s basically calling for an OK Corral shootout between the Secret Service or somebody in the 82nd. So, what I’m getting at, Jack, is this is not new. 

And when you add this to the 600 sanctuary cities where they’re defying federal law, it’s like Fort Sumter. Or you have [Rep.] Nancy Pelosi saying, we’re going to arrest any ICE officer in our state that we think breaks one of our laws. They don’t know what the Constitution says, that the superiority lies with the federal government when it is enforcing federal law anywhere in the 50 states.

And yet they keep doing it. And they don’t even believe it, what they’re saying. Because when Jan Brewer was the governor of Arizona, and Obama would not, would not, would not do his federal responsibility and close the border, she tried to. And they sued her. And our liberal judges then said, no, Gov. Brewer. That’s state’s rights. You can’t interfere. And she said, well, he’s not doing his job. It doesn’t matter. Immigration is federal. Those same judges are now saying, yes, we can interfere because before the federal government could not be challenged by the state because it didn’t want to enforce the law. It was derelict and that was wonderful. Now, when the federal government is dutiful and wants to enforce the law, yes, you can interfere. 

I don’t know who their heroes are. Jefferson Davis, John Calhoun, George Wallace, Gen. Scott, [played by] Burt Lancaster in “Seven Days in May.” I don’t know. But it’s one of those. They’re insurrectionists. And we’re going to get a situation—mark my words: We’re going to get a situation next year as the midterms and everything heats up when some crazy blue state governor or mayor is going to tell his local police force to stop an ICE officer. Whether the ICE officer is in the process of arresting somebody or chasing somebody through the woods, as we saw in that tape. And you’re going to have a confrontation. And then we’re going to be Bleeding Kansas 1854. 

And I don’t know how it’s going to end, but this is really dangerous. And the Left keeps pushing the insurrection button. And these people who are telling soldiers to disobey commands if they feel and they’re considered opinion that they can is really bizarre, but it has a precedent. If the chairman of the Joint Chief says that as Dr. Mark Milley with my sophisticated background in psychiatry I tele-diagnosed our commander in chief is unstable, then that gives me a right to disobey any order that he gives and beyond that to contact the Communist Party in China and warn them that we might attack them. And I give them advanced warning.

And that theory is the same thing. 

You soldiers can diagnose your commanding officer as crazy, and he gave you a wrong order. So just disobey it. And then they cloak that in patriotism and their service. I’m a veteran. I’m getting really tired of that too. I really like veterans. I grew up in a family of veterans, and I think it’s a wonderful thing to serve. Everybody I met in the military is wonderful. But when these people say that they’re going to hide behind being a veteran. That’d be like me saying you can’t talk about food policy, Mr. Senator. Have you ever been on a 285 Massey for 12 hours? Have you? Have you ever sprayed dimethoate for six hours in a field? You don’t know anything about farming. You have no right to talk about food policy. 

Everybody has a right to talk about military policy, especially when the military veterans set themselves up to be advocating civil disobedience, which is what they’re doing. They really are, or actually military disobedience.

person 1: I’m glad you mentioned “Seven Days in May,” Victor. I saw it recently. It is a terrific movie, even though it’s a liberal movie. No question, it was made from a liberal perspective. But you wait 60 years, and it’s an indictment of the current liberal sense. 

person 2: It is, it is, it is. Everybody, I want to be very clear: The Left is not principled. They don’t have a position on states’ rights or federal superiority in a constitutional sense. They don’t have a position on sanctuary cities. That is just for the moment because it’s conducive to their larger agenda of acquiring and expanding their power. 

And I’ve said this before, but if you’re some guy and you’re a developer, let’s say in Salt Lake City, and you want to build a condo and you see a three-winged blackbird and you say, that blank-blank blackbird nest is right in the way of my bulldozers. And then somebody says, “Well, you know, it’s on the endangered species list.” “I don’t care. The federal government has no jurisdiction here in Utah.” 

Or you’re in Wyoming, you get your cowboy boots stereotype, you go in and they say, “We can’t sell you that .45.” “Well, I don’t follow the federal gun laws. This is the state of Wyoming. It’s a sanctuary gun city.” They would go ballistic, ballistic. “This is insurrection. You have to follow federal law.” They just pick and choose because they have no principle. Everybody needs to know that. When they get up, like Gavin Newsom, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this about sanctuary cities, if you’re here illegally. 

And then you have Karen Bass and Los Angeles officials deliberately creating apps and trying to work with illegal aliens to resist the rule of law as practiced by federal ICE agents. But believe me, sometimes a federal government is good when the protester is conservative, and that very rarely that happens. 

And so that’s what’s really scary about these people. They’re French Revolutionary Jacobins. They’ll do anything and say anything at any time. And I was really angry about that video. I thought, wow. 

You hide behind your service and then you, for cheap political purposes, you get up there and you send this message to over a million soldiers that there’s going to come an occasion where they’re going to get an illegal order, and they’re going to have the constitutional right to resist it when you don’t tell people, “This is how many orders were resisted in the military the last five years per year, and this is what happens to people who resisted that order.” 

Why don’t they give that information out? 

person 1  Resist and you’ll be a hero, but don’t have a vaccine and we’ll can you. It’s amazing.

person 2: 8,500 people.

Insurrection Chic—Democrats’ Dangerous New Fad

 

I’d like to talk about insurrection chic. By that I mean this phenomenon of the Democrats in particular, and maybe the Left in general, it’s talking about ways of undermining the jurisdiction of our own federal government.

I don’t know what their model is. Is it Jefferson Davis, who ordered South Carolina State Troops to fire on the federal fort at Fort Sumter in 1861 that ushered in the Civil War? Or maybe it’s George Wallace, huh? Standing in the doorstep of the University of Alabama, saying, “We’re not going to, here in Alabama, obey state law on segregation and racial discrimination.”

Or maybe, did you ever see the movie “Seven Days in May” (1964) about an officer, General Scott? I think he was played by Burt Lancaster. And he said, basically, we’re going to nullify the presidential directives and not abide by a treaty of the federal government—try to, essentially, overthrow the government.

This is very ironic because the Left lectured us on insurrection, insurrection, insurrection, even though special counsel Jack Smith never charged President Donald Trump with insurrection. But what’s going on now is quite scary. And it’s not new.

In the first term, we had a number of four-star retired admirals and generals who violated Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It said even retired flag officers were subject to the statute that says you shall not disparage the president of the United States. Yet, they called him Mussolini. They said that he was analogous to the people at Auschwitz, he was a liar.

We had one officer who said, the sooner the better, Trump should be removed. We have elections for that. We don’t talk like that. We had two lieutenant colonels that said they bragged that the 101st Airborne would beat the Secret Service and force Donald Trump to get out of the White House. It’s pretty awful.

Now, lately, it’s getting very scary. We’ve had—the mayor of New York says that federal law essentially doesn’t exist in the city of New York. When he takes over, it’s international law. And that he will arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is under diplomatic protection, as a foreign dignitary visiting the U.N. What’s he going to do? Order the NYPD to stop the Secret Service that may be protecting Netanyahu when he arrives as a guest?

We had Mayor Brandon Johnson in Chicago say that he was not going to obey federal law. In fact, he was going to oppose it. That wasn’t just—I don’t know—theoretical because when Immigration and Customs Enforcement was trapped, a convoy of ICE agents were trapped, the Chicago area police force did not come to their aid, by explicit orders not to.

In Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass said that city officials are conspiring, working to tip off illegal aliens against the efforts of the federal government, to stop them.

In California, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who had called the president of the United States the most vile creature in the world, the worst creature in the world, a vile creature, and who tore up the State of the Union address on national TV, she said that state law enforcement might arrest federal officials who were enforcing the immigration statutes. What? Would that be a shoot-out? Or what would that be? It’s getting very, very scary.

And then, most recently, we had a number of Democratic Congress people and senators say in a video that they were addressing soldiers, and they said, you have the right to disobey an order, if it’s unlawful. They never gave one example of any order, of any order, that Donald Trump or any member of the administration or any senior officer had issued anyone that was deemed illegal. What was the point of that? What was the point of telling 1.3 million soldiers that are now on active duty that you have the right to disobey a superior’s order?

Did they quote Article 90 and 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice? No. It outlines specifically the very, very, very, very rare conditions under which a soldier can say, “What you ordered me is unlawful.” And you know what they are. They’re things like using violence in an improper way against another person or desertion. But there’s no example that they can give. None at all.

We have 600 jurisdictions in which blue cities and states say that the federal law no longer applies in their jurisdiction. That’s sort of neo-Confederate nullification that’s prompted the Civil War. And you know, when Jefferson Davis, when he ordered South Carolina troops to fire on Fort Sumter, all he was doing was saying that the federal government is at war with the state. That’s what our mayors are doing in these blue jurisdictions.

Do they believe that that is a principle that they would extend to everybody? No. If a county in Utah said, “We’re conservative, we don’t believe in the”—I don’t know—“the Endangered Species Act. We’re not gonna stop construction for a newt.” Would they say, “That’s fine, you can nullify federal law”? No, they wouldn’t.

If somebody in Montana said, “I don’t like federal gun registration, it just hampers the people in our county. It doesn’t apply here,” would the Left say, “Yes. That’s what we do with immigration. Congratulations”? No.

So, what’s going on? Why are they nullifying federal law? Why are they advising protesters in Portland how to avoid arrests by federal authorities?

Why are they telling people in all of these blue jurisdictions that they will appeal to a higher authority, the United Nations? Mayor Johnson says he’ll call in the U.N., the Commission on Human Rights. Is he going to abide by that commission that in the past has had members like, I don’t know, Communist China, North Korea, Iran?

Is that who he thinks have a higher authority than the Constitution? Does he understand the president of the United States was elected by a majority of the population who voted?

So, this is getting very, very scary. And why are they doing it? The Left has no power in the legislative, executive, or judicial branch of government. Their agenda is one that most people do not want. And they want to create as much Teslas. In the past, that has included firebombing Tesla dealerships. That has involved street protests that turned violent against ICE. That has involved social media celebrating assassins and violence.

And now it’s the nullification of federal laws that, in the Constitution, take precedent over local and state laws, when federal officers are trying to protect federal property, as they are now, and enforce federal statutes, as they are now. In other words, the Left is neo-Confederate and insurrectionary. And it should stop before we get into 1861, again.

‘We Did That’: Baby Boomers’ ‘Generational Betrayal’

 

person 1: So, Victor, let’s talk about this generational warfare. I have two things I want to read. Sorry, folks who are listening. This is a post from Benny Johnson, the conservative social media commentator. I used to be his boss once upon a time at National Review for a short while. He posted on X the other day:

“This is generational betrayal. What Boomer will have the backbone and humility to admit this, apologize and spend their final years and energy to right this wrong. I hear nothing. A generation voting and regulating themselves, lavish riches, and closing the door on the way out.”

This has to do with home ownership: the lack of home ownership by young Americans and the increased home ownership by the elders.

Just bear with me, folks, and then I’m going to shut up and Victor will share his wisdom.

So, Michael Brendan Dougherty, my old colleague at National Review, wrote a piece the other day, “Boomers Didn’t Pass on the American Dream.” And it ends like this:

American men are less fit, less likely to be married, less likely to have children, less likely to own a home, and consequently, more likely to be addicted to a drug, more likely to be marred in medical debt or on a disability, and more likely to be politically alienated. To the extent that political conservatism has in any way sanctified these results, telling Boomers that they did it all by their own virtue, or assuring them that posterity failed them, rather than that they failed to pass on their country in a better condition than they inherited it, it must repent. To the extent that conservatism pats itself on the back for victories so long ago in the past that they’re not a living memory for the majority of its citizens, it is losing the fight for the future. Fifty-year mortgages will only compound the idiocy of indenturing the young for the profit of elderly asset holders. The idea that young Americans, blocked out of ownership of real assets, most especially the ornaments of middle class and familial life will seek to conserve the very institutions that dispossess them is a joke only an overfed ideologue could believe.

Pretty powerful claims, charges, and worth your commentary because, Victor, this is spreading in social media.

person 2: Yeah, I think boomers who are listening to this are trying to sort it out. They see the two arguments. The argument that Dougherty made was, kind of, we got ours and we inherited certain values that were inculcated into us. We inherited a 4% gross domestic product per annum growth. We inherited a less regulatory society, a more can-do. We had a house.

I went to University of California, Santa Cruz. I think it was about $900. There was no tuition. There was just $300 a quarter for fees. And then once we got ours and our homes and everything, we regulated, we were going to create Nirvana. We were going to create all these elaborate procedures in health and home buying. And the result was we regulated to death. And then this young group suffered the consequences.

That’s his argument. And it’s both that we changed the structure of America to the detriment of these young generations. And then we created an ethos, or we didn’t pass on the Depression-era, World War II ordeal that our parents did. There’s a lot to say for that. I agree with that. Absolutely.

That being said, a lot of you are gonna say, “Hey, Victor, not so fast.” And what they mean by that is, have you ever asked any of your kids if they’ve had Spam? I don’t think they’ve ever eaten Spam, do you?

person 1: Me? No. They’ve never eaten Spam. I’ve eaten Spam. I have, but yeah.

person 2: Yes, we’ve all eaten Spam. I can remember being 7 years old and eating things that were almost surplus at the cafeteria in a rural school. I can remember it was pretty poor. I can remember that. If you were in the late ’50s or ’60s and you were middle to lower, middle class, and you wanted to drive 200 miles to the Bay Area, it was sort of like sailing on the New World, Santa Maria. I mean, when I was a student, I broke down at least seven or eight times trying to get 200 miles.

Remember carburetors, distributors, cars. And if they were used, and I had a used old Volvo, it was just a wreck. Then, of course, when you’re growing up, you share your bedroom with your sibling or two siblings. I think at one point we had three of us in there when my cousin moved in.

person 1: I had five in my bedroom.

person 2: Well, I never had a single bedroom. I had a twin brother. We always shared it. But my point is that, and then you know, something called “chores.” Do you think that these young people, I don’t know. I don’t think that on weekends they picked walnuts up for eight hours a day and then their parents had to scrub their hands, even though we wore mittens because walnut stain made our hands almost black. But we did all of that stuff, and you know what we were told? We were told correctly, so that this was a joke compared to what our parents went through.

My father said, “I moved into the barn at 12 years old. There was no electricity. I wired a hot wire over to the house. I had one cold water pipe. I had an outhouse. That’s where I lived so that my sister could have one of the two bedrooms: my parents, and she had that.” And I looked at that house, it was about 800, 900 square feet, and that was considered really nice.

What I’m getting at is that generation did not—I think Doughtery was right, that we did not pass on that generational depression, that unique nexus of depression in World War II. And the idea of the ordeal they went through. We were the beneficiaries of that, and yet we didn’t pass on that. It’s sort of like that old classical idea that Athens had the Marathon Men. They created the Periclean class, and then the Periclean destroyed Athens by producing the third generation.

Or as my grandfather always said, he’d point out to a house, and he said, “See that right there? That’s a big fancy house. The guy who built that came from Armenia, and he had nothing, nothing. He lived in a shack. He worked from the dawn up to sunset. He worked seven days a week. And when he died, his whole land was paid for, and he had money in the bank, and his son, who’s a good farmer, and he built a beautiful home. But I worry about that family because they don’t work.” Like I said, “Well maybe the son’s a businessman now, he understands the food market.”

And then the third generation before my grandfather died. “So that boy that’s your age came out to see you the other day. He’s gonna destroy that whole legacy because he doesn’t even know who his grandfather was and how hard he worked.” It’s true. So that this Generation X or Z, or what are they? Zs?

person 1: I lost track.

person 2: I don’t even know what they are anymore, but they’re out. They vote for [Zohran] Mamdani, and they can’t do this, and they can’t do that. But you know what? When you turn 18, I’ve never played a video game in my life. How many hours have you spent on video games? And what if you had not spent that time on video games?

I’m not talking at 12 or 13, I’m talking at 16, 17, 18. Maybe you could have taken an online course in electricity. Maybe you could have taken an online course in roofing. Why not do something like that? And then, when you think that you’re taking three units here and six units there, why do that?

Just get it over. Just take the loan and then take 15 units and get out. But don’t do this, and then kind of do that, and kind of do this. I never lived at home after I was 18, 17. I went to college. I came back and then I came home and farmed, and my parents called up and said, “Your grandmother’s 91 years old and we are not living on the farm, and would you please come home for a summer and take care of her? And she’s all by herself.” And I did. And then my mom would say, “The house is falling apart. Would you stay?” And I said, “I’m leaving. I’m going to get a job back East. Part-time, by the way.” And then I stayed because the house was falling apart. But my point I’m making is, both sides have it. We are culpable for not passing on the values that our parents taught us in many cases.

And we altered the roles of the economy and the way the United States functioned, the school system especially. And yes, because when I went to UC Santa Cruz, I took something called “Introduction to the Western Civilization,” and I had a guy named Jasper Rose who taught art history. And another young [professor], a woman, I’ll remember her name, Mary, and they were fantastic teachers of art history.

I don’t think they have that demanding curriculum. And we did that. Our generation destroyed that curriculum. So, they go to college now and it’s the poetics of masculinity or toxic masculinity, or the racial colonial settler, or development of the Oregon Trail or something like that.

They’ve just polluted everything.

Why the Green Agenda Is Crumbling

 

For most of my life, at least for the last 35 years, we have accepted the climate change orthodoxy. We used to be global warming, and then, when things were not always warming, but they were cooling, they changed the name to climate change to suggest that whatever the temperature extreme was, it was all due to carbon emissions caused by, in general, humans, but in particular, Westerners, who were polluting the planet with heat.

That was the dominant narrative. I didn’t think in my lifetime that I would see an end to that dominance, even though there were inconsistencies.

The planet is 4 billion years old. And man has only been here for 300,000 years. And we only have accurate record-keeping of temperature fluctuations for the last 150 years. And even within that period, we have cyclical changes between decades of abnormal temperatures, whether too hot or too cold. And before the Industrial Revolution, in some cases, by tree rings and ice in the Arctic sampling.

There was always debate. But the dominant narrative said, “No, we have to radically change our economy and move away from fossil fuels to renewable,” and that was usually wind and solar.

And then something’s happened lately. King Gustaf XVI, the hereditary monarch of, you know, figurines, as it is, not an actual person in power, in Sweden kind of mused openly the other day—he’s known as a rabid environmentalist. He said, why are you—basically, I’m not quoting him literally. He said, why are we ruining the economy of Europe by having exorbitant power cost, electricity cost, when we only contribute to 6% of global warming worldwide?

Then Bill Gates shocked the world when he said he no longer believes that there is an impending climate change crisis. This was followed by a lot of other people who said, “Let’s take a different look at this.” And of course, the second tenure of President Donald Trump has people in it, in energy, interior, treasury, who were saying, “You know, we’re not gonna subsidize this anymore.”

And this is collated with the disasters that were caused by global climate change worries or Armageddon, such as the high-speed rail program in California that was supposed to replace automobiles—$15 billion, $20 billion. Not one foot of track laid. The solar plant down in the desert of California that is being dismantled. Or the battery storage in Moss Landing, near Monterey, that has caught fire twice. I could go on.

So, there was a lot of skepticism, both by individuals who were influential and by the general public, for good cause.

What is causing this? Well, the first thing is, in reference to Bill Gates, is artificial intelligence. It’s going to require an unprecedented level of electrical generation. It takes huge amounts of electricity. We don’t have it. And we will not get it by subsidizing wind turbines and solar panels.

Sam Altman, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, said, if the United States wants to achieve preeminence in the field—and this seems to be the greatest technological breakthrough since the Industrial Revolution—we’re gonna have to build 100 gigawatt, 1-gigawatt plant, that’s the size of a large nuclear reactor, a thousand megawatts. We’re gonna have to build, he says, a hundred per year or the equivalent of clean coal or natural gas.

So, that influenced Bill Gates. That shook him up. That’s not compatible with his prior green idea that we’re gonna supplant fossil fuels.

Another reason is geostrategic. People are starting to become aware that Russia is a bad actor and Iran is a bad actor. And they depend on oil exports and, therefore, the high price of oil to fuel their military ambitions.

The United States became the largest producer of fossil fuels during the first Trump administration, then President Joe Biden, for all of his green rhetoric, pivoted in his third and fourth year, so he could win the election, and began pumping oil again. Donald Trump took that 12 million to 13 million barrels, has increased it to 14 million. And the price of world oil is going down. And that hurts Iran. And that hurts Russia. And that benefits our allies, like Europe and Japan, that would like more liquified natural gas shipped from the United States. And so, there were geostrategic reasons.

Let’s be frank. Everybody has sort of seen what China’s doing. It’s playing the West. It talks a great game about global warming: “You guys, we all have to reduce our admissions.” And then what does it do? Two things.

It subsidizes cheap export of solar panels and wind turbines, below the cost of production, to bankrupt competing industries in Europe and the United States to get the West hooked on solar and wind, even though it is a very expensive and unreliable source of electricity. Meanwhile, as we get hooked on Chinese exports, they build two to three coal or nuclear plants per month, affordable energy that will give them a competitive edge over the West.

Then there’s the Third World that has been telling us for the last 20 years that we are culpable for global warming, even though the two greatest heat emission areas in the world are China and India.

Nonetheless, governments in Latin America, Africa, and Asia say: You people owe us because you started the Industrial Revolution in the mid-19th century. And you’ve been polluting the planet ever since. And you create all of your industries and your affluent lifestyles by burning fossil fuels. And therefore, you should pay us. Not we pay you, or we don’t have to cut back, we’re late to the game.

And we should say to them, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We burned more fossil fuels in the past because we created the Industrial Revolution. And we do today. We provide you the cars, we provide you the industrial plants, we provide you the plastics. If you want us to stop, we won’t export it to you. And then, maybe we’ll pay reparations. And you can do your own industrialization. Don’t take stuff from us that requires fossil fuels that’s essential to your economies and then tell us that we have to pay an added tax on it because we’re warming up the planet, as if it’s only for our purposes as well as yours.”

Then there’s the, I guess it would be—what would we call it? The hypocrisy. The people who have been the avatars of climate change never suffer the consequences of their own ideology.

Former President Barack Obama said the planet would be inundated pretty soon if we didn’t address global climate change. Why would he buy a seaside estate at Martha’s Vineyard or one on the beach of Hawaii if he really did believe that the oceans would rise and flood his multimillion-dollar investment?

Why would John Kerry fly all over the world on a private plane and then tell the rest of us that we’re flying too much commercial when his carbon imprint was a thousand times more than the individual American?

Why would people on the California coast say, “We have to have wind and solar, and we have to get kilowattage up to 40 cents a kilowatt—the cost—because we want to use less fossil fuels”? And then the temperature from La Jolla to Berkeley is between, what, 65 and 75 year-round, where here in Bakersfield or Fresno or Sacramento it can be 105. And poor people can’t afford to run their air conditioners.

Add it all up: the inconsistency of the global warming narrative, the self-interest in the people who promote it, and the logic that they have not presented, empirically, the evidence that would convince us that we have to radically transform our economies on the wishes of a few elites that do not have the evidence, but do have a lot of hypocrisy in the process.

When Common Sense Is Under Siege: The Erosion of Rational Leadership

 

al overreach. Senator Tim Kaine once remarked that "God-given rights" are dangerous — a statement that defies the very premise of American liberty. Our nation was founded on the belief that rights are inherent, not granted by government. To call that dangerous is to misunderstand the essence of constitutional democracy.

These kinds of statements aren't just intellectually lazy — they're politically reckless. They fuel division, distort public understanding, and distract from real issues. They also raise serious questions about the judgment and fitness of those who make them. In a time when our country faces complex challenges — from economic uncertainty to global conflict — we need leaders who can think clearly, speak honestly, and legislate responsibly.

The consequences of abandoning common sense are already visible. Girls are losing scholarships and competitive opportunities to biologically male athletes. Parents are being silenced when they raise concerns about privacy and safety. And voters are being told that their desire for fairness is tantamount to hate.

We saw this firsthand when Virginia Lt. Governor Winsome Earle-Sears addressed a group of concerned parents about the need to protect their daughters from an adult male who had entered girls' locker rooms and exposed himself. As she spoke, a protester held up a sign that read, "Hey Winsome, If Trans can't share your bathroom, then Blacks can't share my water fountain." The comparison was not only absurd — it was a grotesque distortion of the real horrors of Jim Crow segregation. Equating parental concern for their daughters' safety with racial apartheid is not just intellectually dishonest; it's morally bankrupt.

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This is not progress — it's regression masquerading as inclusion.

To be clear, transgender individuals have constitutional rights like everyone else. But those rights must coexist with the rights of others — not override them. A truly inclusive society finds ways to accommodate diversity without erasing boundaries that serve legitimate purposes. That's the balance we must strive for — not the false equivalence peddled by politicians like Reeves.

It's time for voters to demand better. We need representatives who understand the difference between compassion and capitulation, between inclusion and intrusion. We need leaders who can defend fairness without fear, and who recognize that protecting girls' sports and spaces is not an act of exclusion — it's an act of integrity.

The stakes are too high to tolerate intellectual shortcuts or ideological extremism. When lawmakers compare locker room policies to segregation, or dismiss foundational rights as dangerous, they reveal a worldview that is not just misguided — it's incompatible with the principles of a free and rational society.

Let us be clear: common sense is not hate. Biological reality is not bigotry. And protecting children is not oppression. 

If we want to preserve freedom, fairness, and reason in our public institutions, we must start by holding our leaders accountable — not just for what they do, but for what they say. Because words matter. And when those words betray logic, history, and truth, it's not just a gaffe — it's a warning.

Let's heed that warning. Let's restore common sense to the public square. And let's ensure that the next generation of leaders is guided not by rage or rhetoric — but by reason, responsibility, and respect for the truth

Congress Should Pass a Discontinuing Resolution

 

Unfortunately, the Democrats retained control of the House of Representatives in that election and maintained it throughout Reagan's presidency. Yet Reagan still proposed closing the Department of Education.

In a radio address delivered on March 12, 1983, he explained his education agenda. "I'd like to talk to you today about one of the most important issues that touches our lives and shapes our future: the education of America's children," Reagan said.

"(I)n recent years, our traditions of opportunity and excellence in education have been under siege," he said. "We've witnessed the growth of a huge education bureaucracy. Parents have often been reduced to the role of outsiders. Government-manufactured inflation made private schools and higher education too expensive for too many families. Even God, source of all knowledge, was expelled from classrooms."

"Federal spending on education soared eightfold in the last 20 years, rising much faster than inflation," he said. "But during the same period, scholastic aptitude test scores went down, down and down."

What remedies did Reagan propose?

He called for bringing prayer back to public schools, abolishing the Department of Education and providing parents with tuition tax credits and vouchers to help them send their children to private schools.

"Can we not begin by welcoming God back in our schools and by setting an example for children to abide by His Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule?" said Reagan.

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"But better education doesn't mean a bigger Department of Education," he said. "In fact, the Department of Education should be abolished."

He then offered some proposals aimed at helping "parents reestablish control and to assist them in meeting education costs."

"First, tuition tax credits, which we've already sent to Congress, will soften the double-payment burden for those paying public school taxes and independent or parochial school tuition," he said. "This proposal will help those who need help the most -- low- and middle-income families."

"Second," he said, "we're proposing a voucher system to help parents of disadvantaged children. We want to give states or individual school districts the option of using federal education funds to create vouchers so these parents can choose which school, private or public, they want their children to attend."

"Third," he said, "we're proposing a system of educational savings accounts to help families save for college education."

Reagan was unable to get these ideas through a Democrat-controlled House. But after the Republicans took control of Congress in the 1994 election (when former Democratic President Bill Clinton was in office), they did enact legislation creating 529 plans that allowed families to save money for tuition payments in accounts where the earning were not taxed.

As reported by Americans for Prosperity, 18 states as of this June had enacted "pro-school choice bills."

In March, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the secretary of education to, "to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely."

But the department remains open.

In fiscal 1988, Reagan's last full fiscal year in office, the Department of Education spent $18.246 billion, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement. In fiscal 2024, former President Joe Biden's last full fiscal year in office, it spent $268.353 billion.

Republicans in Congress should work to pass legislation permanently discontinuing this department before Trump completes his last fiscal year in office.

Our Golden Age

 

We media types obsess about America's problems.

But we should acknowledge that today, life in America is better than life has been anywhere, ever.

For most of history, the norm was hunger, disease, illiteracy, slavery, and war.

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There were a few exceptions (from some of those problems) -- so-called golden ages, Ancient Athens, Rome, the Renaissance, etc.

In our new video, historian Johan Norberg, author of the new book "Peak Human," looks at the miracle of the Roman Empire, which at one point extended throughout most of Europe, and parts of Africa and Asia.

Ancient Rome inspired our form of government, a republic with a system of checks and balances.

"There is a reason why we have a Senate and they meet in the Capitol," explains Norberg. "We borrow these ideas from the Romans."

The Romans were ferocious warriors, but so were many at the time. The Romans were able to create an empire because they tried new things:

"They gave people among the subjected the ability to have a second career in Rome," says Norberg. "They made them citizens and allowed them to do business, to have a career in the military. Some of the subjected people could even end up being emperors!"

"The conquered -- some became emperors?" I ask.

"The son of a freed slave eventually ended up on the throne of Rome. That tells you something about the power of meritocracy and of openness. You'll get the best brains if you're open to more people."

Rome thrived because the Romans took ideas and talent from all over the world.

They didn't do it to be kind.

"Tolerance was a weapon, often literally a weapon," Norberg explains. "They got their swords from the Spaniards, ships from Carthage, new business models from other groups. Because Rome was such a huge integrated free trade area, you could source the best material, the best technology from any part of the empire. Therefore, they could become the masters of the world."

Of course, eventually, Rome fell.

There were many reasons. Disease, barbarian invaders, and one reason that modern societies should fear: entitlement spending.

Norberg says Rome collapsed because of:

"Bread and circuses. The emperors wanted to become popular by handing out free stuff to people. Originally, this started small. You just handed the very poor means of subsistence. But it was popular, so the group that lived on the public's expense grew larger all the time. Emperors complained about this. Everyone from Caesar and onwards said, 'We've got to reform this system because it means that we have fewer people working and more people consuming.' But no one succeeded."

It reminds me of the unsustainable promises we see today: Social Security and Medicare in the U.S., absurd retirement promises in other countries -- welfare plans going broke.

"Once you have an ever-expanding system of entitlements that you can't afford," says Norberg, "that's often the beginning of the decline and fall ... Romans could conquer the world, but they couldn't do entitlement reform."

Instead, Roman emperors did what modern governments do: printed more money.

Actually, since they used coins, not paper money, they devalued their currency by putting less gold and silver in each coin.

"Inflation was much worse than barbarian invaders," says Norberg. "The emperor blamed greedy businessmen -- something that we hear today. He imposed price controls on 1,000 goods. But obviously, it all failed. Prices kept rising and undermined the Roman Empire completely."

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Today, America is one of the richest and most inventive countries in the world. Will our "golden age" continue?

"One of the most worrying signs in history is you begin to take wealth and comfort for granted," says Norberg. "You forget what made it possible to begin with. I see a lot of worrying signs right now. We have a backlash against things that keep our society innovative, like trade, migration, unsustainable debts ... But that doesn't mean that we're doomed ... It's not automatic, this decline and fall phase. You can unleash new waves of innovation and progress. There is still time. We can still save this golden age."

Every Tuesday at JohnStossel.com, Stossel posts a new video about the battle between government and freedom. He is the author of "Government Gone Wild: Exposing the Truth Behind the Headlines."

Beware of These Political Land Mines, President Trump

 

I know I do, favor the current administration, what it’s accomplished.

Its miraculous achievements on the border, on energy production, reduction of crime. The “Big, Beautiful Bill” has a lot of good elements in it. Foreign policy has been spectacular. Denuclearizing for the present Iranian theocracy. Having achieved seven or eight ceasefires abroad. Trying to address the war in Ukraine. These are all positive developments. But there are land mines that the Trump administration has to be very careful of.

One of them is that, in his success overseas, President Donald Trump has naturally talked about achieving peace with Ethiopia and Egypt, or Pakistan or India, or what we accomplish by taking out the nuclear facilities in Iran, etc. But the elections are not won on foreign policy, unfortunately, or maybe fortunately. They’re won on economics.

And the Left, in that vacuum, and that lack of praise for the accomplishments of the Trump administration on energy, on gross domestic product, on the stock market, on deregulation, on tax reform, and what will happen in 2026 when, I think, foreign investment and these new technologies will help, in addition, spur the economy and relieve our worries about inflation and affordability—we have to talk about that.

Specifically, he has to talk about the comparison of the Biden administration with both his first term, but more importantly, with what he’s done in the first 10 to 11 months, and what will ensue in 2026 for the things he’s doing now.

Very quickly, a second land mine is, why would we want to increase the Chinese student population from the current near 300,000 to 600,000? That’s contrary to the MAGA agenda of “America First.”

There are 300,000 Americans that would love to come to college that either can’t afford it or can’t get in because of the competition with over 1 million foreign students—1 million foreign students welcomed by the universities because their governments pay the full bill and they can overcharge them by 10% or 15%.

And yet, we know that of the 300,000 students, roughly, here, that 1% or 2% or 3% or 4% engage in active espionage. That’s several thousand—2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000. We know that because when we look at the end result—sophisticated satellites, rocketry, aircraft carriers—they look almost identical to ours. And they are the results of skipping billions of dollars in investment, years of research, and leapfrogging to parity with us by appropriating our technology, in large part, and often, by the presence of so many Chinese nationals.

When we were in a race, an existential race, with the Soviet Union, we did not have Russian students here. That would’ve been seen as insane. So, we should be trying to gradually, without provocation, reduce the size of the Chinese nationalist population, not double it.

And finally, there’s this question, very controversially, of HB-1 visas. These are the visas that are reserved for people with unique skills that, supposedly, Americans don’t have, but they would be integral to our prosperity, security, and national success. Ph.D.s in computer engineering. Master’s degrees in French language, as a professor. A high-stakes athlete or model, even, to enrich our culture.

And nobody objects to that. There’s about 500,000 of these HB-1 visas already. But as part of the negotiations with trade and tariffs and our foreign relations with other countries, we have said that we would like to take in a lot more HB-1 visas.

The problem with that is these countries don’t view it the same way as we do. They would like to send their students with bachelor’s degrees or the students themselves would like to come with no singular skills at all—any different than most Americans who graduate with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, finance.

In other words, we have plenty of Americans that would be able to do the things that foreign nationals would that we would bring in over the current limit of 500,000. And it’s contrary to the MAGA agenda of America First. So, it’s a contradiction in terms and it will hurt the president.

So, I would suggest, very humbly, that we take a second look at doubling the number of Chinese students. We take a second look at doubling the number of HB-1 visas. I would take a second look at the public relations and the communications about the economy. And begin, right now, talking about how it is stronger than perceptions from the Left, especially, and the media. But more importantly, the things that are going on right now by the administration that will improve the economy radically in 2026.

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Biden’s Immigration Invasion Was Nothing Like the Huddled Masses Coming Through Ellis Island

 

Between 1892 and 1954, approximately 12 million immigrants arrived at the now-iconic Ellis Island to enter the U.S.—or nearly 200,000 legal entries per year.

All were registered, documented, and given rudimentary health exams.

They arrived as rich and poor, white and non-white, and, without exception, legally.

With the gradual decline of such great influxes, Ellis Island finally ceased operating roughly 71 years ago.

Yet Ellis Island’s successful tenure offers a sharp contrast to the failures of our recent open-border catastrophes.

Americans will never know how many immigrants swarmed the southern border between 2021 and 2025, when former President Joe Biden and his impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas destroyed federal immigration law as we once knew it.

By design, they allowed between 10 million and 12 million foreign nationals to make a mockery of federal immigration laws by swarming the southern border.

Many crossers grew violent at any sign of even meek efforts by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to enforce the law. Border Patrol officers were often mocked, threatened, and assaulted by arriving illegal aliens.

Officers were unsure as to what was worse: the occasional violence from illegal immigrants or retaliation from the Biden administration if they sought to enforce federal law and block illegal entrants.

So the Biden administration pulled off the near impossible. In a mere four years, it had invited in almost as many illegal immigrants as had entered through Ellis Island legally over seven decades.

But unlike past immigrants, we now witness organized violence against ICE officials. We see Orwellian scenes of mobs burning the American flag—the flag of the country they demand to stay in—while waving the flags of the countries they have no desire or intention of returning to.

In sum, three generations ago, a smaller, poorer, but wiser America properly solved its immigration problem at Ellis Island—welcoming in immigrants orderly and legally with health and background screenings.

In contrast, during the Biden years, we, in our arrogance and affluence, engaged in a great experiment—or rather misadventure. Never in our history has the U.S. been home to roughly 53 million foreign-born residents.

Never have immigrants comprised nearly 16% of the population.

Never has California had 27% of its residents not born in the U.S.

Never have we allowed in up to 10,000 aliens a day, with little concern for whether they carried fentanyl, had criminal records, were sick, were unvaccinated, were traffickers, or belonged to violent gangs.

Worse still, the Biden administration made zero effort to acculturate, integrate, and assimilate this massive influx. In fact, they did the very opposite of Ellis Island’s protocols, which fostered pro-American values, melting-pot integration, and respect for American history and culture. Once upon a time, new arrivals were all expected to become Americans—or why else had they come?

Now, the moment an illegal alien has entered the U.S., he likely senses that his ethnicity or race will be essential to his identity. In the minds of the ruling diversity, equity, and inclusion commissariat, claiming a tribal identity offers an easy pathway to generous housing, food, healthcare, legal, and educational entitlements.

So, under Biden’s immigration non-policy, almost all illegal immigrants were immediately categorized as victims in the Marxist binary ledger that now divides America into the oppressed vs. the oppressors.

If one devised a plan to damage America, he could not have done better than further dividing us by tribal chauvinism, overwhelming our fragile social services so essential to struggling Americans, and fueling the already dangerous neo-Confederate state and local nullifications of federal law and the growth of “sanctuary cities.”

Daily, we witness performance-art mayors and governors boasting of how they “resist” federal law enforcement. These modern rebels pose as if they are our own era’s versions of mini-Confederate states. They now brag of states’ rights as they dare the federal government to protect its own property and enforce federal laws within their parochial jurisdictions.

Why did Biden—or whoever was making policy in his place—destroy the border?

What was his utterly mad intent?

To alter the nation’s demography by importing future Democrat constituents dependent on state largesse?

To bow to the demands of his DEI base?

To mindlessly do the opposite of the prior Trump administration, which had closed the border and returned to legal-only immigration?

Virtue signaling while waving illegal aliens across an open border is easy.

But trying to close the border and return millions who entered unlawfully to their homelands is nearly impossible.

It is surreal that those who claimed moral superiority while systemically destroying federal law now condemn as immoral those striving to restore it.

What President Trump Needs to Tell Americans About Prices

 

The supermarket, is still a tough place to conquer, despite inflation reduced and despite some prices, eggs and other things, we hear are down. My wife the other day, who cooks some Italian food, even though she’s Irish, she buys ricotta, says, “I’m looking at this thing. It cost me seven bucks. A few years ago, it cost me four bucks.” These little anecdotes, it’s hard to— 

 Yes. I just got my insurance bill for cars. It’s outrageous. You know what I mean? It’s like the price of a used car. So, [President Donald Trump] needs to say the following: “I left in 2020 with a 1.7 inflation rate. [Former President] Joe Biden borrowed $7 trillion. Economists like Larry Summers said, ‘Don’t do this. Do not borrow money and put it into people who are coming out of the lockdown with pent-up consumer demand, when the supply chains are still endangered, and there’s not enough goods and services to supply the demand that has not expressed itself for two years but now will be flushed with entitlement cash.’ And he did it anyway.” 

And in 2022, we had 9.1% inflation, but he needs to say, “Joe Biden had 5.1 inflation on average every year of his four years. I came in on Jan. 20. I’ve only been in there little over 10 months, and the inflation rate is about where it was when I came in, about 2.8 or something, 2.9, getting close to 3. And so, we are addressing it, but it’s going to take me another two or three or four months to come down.” 

On the tariffs, he’s doing what he always should have. He’s doing “Art of the Deal.” He had very high punitive tariffs. On this program, we said we didn’t understand the logic of tariffing Britain or Israel or Australia, who had, they had deficits, and we had surpluses with them. But I think what we saw with Switzerland when they sent over their grandees to lower the tariffs from, I don’t know, 30 or 40, down to 15, now he’s going to the point where the official policy of the United States will be reciprocal tariffs. And if you think that is not sufficient, you can make up the difference by investing in the United States with companies to lower your tariff costs and to give us an economic stimulus.  

So, I think you’re going to see a lot more reciprocal tariffs rather than punitive tariffs. And that’s going to help too. So, but you’re right, that does temporarily drive up prices, although Forbes and The Wall Street Journal said they didn’t think that it’s resulted with more than a 1% increase that can be attributable to the tariffs so far. But when they come down, it’ll be good. 

How California Progressives Created a Medieval Society

 

Well, let’s turn then to the Palisades Fire in California and the destruction it wrought. Lee Zeldin, our [head of the Environmental Protection Agency], has reported that the federal government has finished their debris removal, but residents are still complaining that it is almost impossible to get permits to get the rebuilding going. And he said that it’s [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom and [Los Angeles Mayor] Karen Bass who have not sped up one thing, despite their promises.

I have mixed feelings about this because, on the one hand, these noble people who tragically lost their homes are being used as pawns because they have a lunatic mayor in Karen Bass, a lunatic City Council in L.A.

All they’re interested in is fighting ICE. There’s a million illegal aliens in Los Angeles County. How it got to that point, I don’t know. But that’s what the agenda of Newsom and Karen Bass are. They care more about illegal aliens not being deported than they do homeowners.

And they have this idea that they’re going to rezone the Palisades and make high-density housing, or at least small little cottages. I don’t know what they are. But they don’t want these people who were affluent to build these majestic Romanesque homes again. I drove through there about two weeks ago, at least along the [Pacific Coast Highway], and there’s nothing happening. It’s just pathetic.

And then when I said I’m conflicted, Prop. 50, which is going to destroy the bipartisan committee and gerrymander California from nine congressional Republican representatives to probably four or five, they voted almost 60%. So, a lot of those people in the Palisades voted for this thing.

And they keep voting for Newsom and they keep voting for the Karen Basses of the world, and they keep voting for these crazy people in the legislature. Then they get surprised when it boomerangs back on them.

The voting of the elite along the coast is, “I want to use other people as lab rats. I want to build massive solar plants. I want to decommission nuclear plants. I don’t want natural gas or oil to be tapped in California. I want to overregulate agriculture. I don’t want any charter schools, prep schools. I want the teacher’s unions to run the state and the government unions. I think homelessness is really great. I don’t want to touch the homeless problem. I want to have reparations,” and then, ding. “I live in Bel Air.” Ding. “I live in Atherton.” Ding. “I live in Napa.” Ding. “I hang out on the shores of Lake Tahoe.” What I just described is the mentality of the Bay Area, the people who got us into this mess in this state.

And I’m talking about you, Jerry Brown, 16 years as governor, Gavin Newsom, maybe 30 years. San Francisco City Council, San Francisco mayor, San Francisco lieutenant governor, San Francisco governor. You got about 30 years right there. And then you had Barbara Boxer. She was responsible. The late Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris.

What do they all have in common? Well, they all wanted to make a progressive, radical state, and they got their wish. We have the highest gas prices, the highest gas taxes, the highest electricity cost, kilowatt. We have 49th, I think, Reason magazine said that our infrastructure and highways were. We’re about 42nd in education.

San Francisco’s per capita property crime rate was the highest in the country. We’ve got the most illegal aliens. We’ve got the most homeless people. One-third of the United States population on entitlements lives here. Half the births are on Medi-Cal. I could go on forever.

That’s the state. And those people gave us this state. And where did they live? Barbara Boxer went down to, I think, Rancho Mirage or somewhere near. Kamala Harris lives in [Brentwood]. Jerry Brown retired to his woodsy Grass Valley estate. Gavin Newsom has a $9 million home, right. Nancy Pelosi made about $200 million somehow as an insider knowledgeable person about stock trades.

A speaker, she has a mansion in San Francisco and an Italian-designed estate in Napa. So, what am I getting at? The people who destroyed the state and made people in the San Joaquin Valley or Inland Empire or Foothills have to pay these exorbitant prices never had to suffer the consequences of their own ideology.

They made out like bandits. And they live in splendor, and people can’t make that connection and they keep voting them in. So, what happens? We’re in a doom … The people that can make the connection, they leave, 300,000 a year, and the people who are left are either the very, very wealthy who are immune from the toxicity of what they plan for others, or they’re the 50% of the state who Medi-Cal pays for all their births or the 40% that pays for their health care.

It’s a medieval society of a few very wealthy on the cone of the period pyramid and everybody else below.

The ‘Alt-Alt-Right’s’ Numerous Misconceptions About Israel

 

So, I know that you wanted to talk about Israel, that’s sort of tag teaming with the [Nick] Fuentes discussion, who is, you know, clearly an antisemite, and the whole issue of Israel and antisemitism in the United States. So, it’ll be interesting to hear the truth about these wars and some of the misunderstandings about—

Almost everything that we hear from the alt, alt—alt-right is a word that it’s kind of ironic because in German the word “old” is “alt.” And we use the same term for the Buchanan paleo old, that’s a Greek word. But so, everybody thinks it’s alt-right, the old right, old-fashioned. No. Alt means alternative, right? I would call what’s going on now the alt-alt-right, the alternative to the alternative. Because these are different even than the Buchanan Right.

Almost everything that Nick Fuentes and that group says about Israel is untrue. So, they say that neoconservatives and Jewish interests got us into the Middle East wars, Gulf War I and II. OK. Who are they? Well, they usually mention Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, David Frum, Max Boot, Bill Kristol, right? Yes, they were in the Project for New American [Century]. They wanted to go, but they didn’t make the decisions.

Who made the decision, say, “I won’t go in the first Gulf War,” but who said they wanted to go into Iraq? I mean, not who wrote about it or who said they should or shouldn’t, but who actually made the decision? George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet—no one is Jewish.

The Israeli government was asked, “Do you think we should go into Iraq?” “No. Please don’t. Our existential enemy is Iran, and for all the evil of Saddam Hussein, he’s a check on it.”

They didn’t want us to go in. So, why did we go in? We went in because after the first Gulf War, we let Saddam survive. He broke all the rules, still we were gonna let him be. And then 9/11 came. And for better or for worse, we said, that team said, “We’re not going to allow Islamic radicalism anywhere.” They felt that he had harbored terrorists and he was going to try to go into the oil fields, like he didn’t before.

And remember, in the first Gulf War, we didn’t go into Kuwait because Israel said so. Israel was an—I mean, they were sending Scud missiles at Israel. Israel didn’t attack them. And we were saying, “Don’t attack them, don’t reply. We’ll reply. You can’t defend yourself. We will defend, but not you. We’re gonna attack Saddam.”

And remember, people ask James Baker, the secretary of state, about, he said, “F the Jews, they didn’t vote for us.” So, there was that, that’s crazy.

So, then why do we support Israel? Well, Tucker Carlson said that he hated Christian Zionists more than anybody, and I don’t know what he meant by that.

I don’t, when I hear that term, I don’t come—Karl Rove and John Bolton? I don’t think so. I mean, they’re, they’re more secular politicos, you know. But he mentioned former Gov. [Mike] Huckabee, who’s now the ambassador.

I am a person of Christian faith, but I don’t support Israel because that’s the birthplace of the Judeo-Christian. I mean, that’s something to consider, and I know a lot of people do. But I don’t come from it as the alt-alt-right accuses people. “Well, there are either a bunch of Jews or they’re kind of crazy Christian Zionists and they get us into this war and they want us”—no, I do it from U.S. self-interest, U.S.

So, No. 1 is, Israel is a constitutional parliamentary republic. They have elections. There’s no elections in Ukraine right now. We tell Ukraine—and I’m for all helping Ukraine not start World War III, but defending itself. But they have canceled elections. They have canceled political parties. They have censored the media. We have told them, “No ceasefires,” basically, until [President Donald] Trump came in.

We tell Israel, “Ceasefire. No collateral damage. You have to have elections.”

The second thing is, so, it is a parliamentary democracy surrounded by 500 million Arab Muslims, not one democracy or parliamentary republic among them. And then you ask yourself, “Well, we give them all this money, Victor, $3.5 billion a year.” Yes, we do, in military aid for 10,200,000 people. That’s a lot. However, it’s a return on our money because we contact, we get a lot of high-quality intelligence from their intelligence services.

No. 1, when we give them F-35s, they don’t call us up and say, “It’s broken,” like most countries, or “How do we do this?” They improve it and then they call us up and say, “You know, if you do this to the F-35, it works even better.”

When we were working on the Patriot system, they said, “Listen, we have done Iron Dome, now we’re working on Iron Beam. We have Arrow. This is valuable. It’s in your interest and our interest.” So, they share technology with us.

And more importantly, as I said before, radical Islamists killed 3,000 people. On 9/11, they killed over 300 at the embassy and the Marine barracks—Hezbollah did. The Houthis disrupted international shipping on the Red Sea. Hamas and Iran have killed Americans. Iran’s killed probably over 2,000 Americans in Iraq by sending shaped charges to Islamists that were fighting our troops. And Hamas, Palestinian terrorists have hijacked planes. They killed an ambassador, we know that, to the Sudan.

So, their enemies happen to be in this part of the world, our enemies. And they’re doing a lot of the things we wouldn’t have been able to—Tucker said, “You know, World War III, why are we taking out the nuclear facilities?” We’re taking out the nuclear facilities so they don’t get a missile with a nuclear tip and tell Europe, “You’re not going to do this and you’re not gonna do this ’cause we want to go to paradise and we will destroy you.” And we didn’t want to have a nuclear exchange in the Middle East between Israel and Iran.

So, we wouldn’t have been able to do that unless Israel had wiped out Iranian air defenses. So, we did.

I heard from the alt-alt-right that it’s a theocratic state, it’s a Jewish—no, it’s not. Seventy percent of the population of little 10,200,000 people are Jewish. That’s it. The other 21% are Arabs—Arabs, Muslims.

Do you think that there’s a population of 20% Jews in any of these Arab neighbors? I can tell you there might have been 5% or 6% in Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Saudi. There were at one time. And you know what happened? They were all ethnically cleansed, 1 million of them after the ’47, ’56, ’67, ’73 wars.

There’s no Jews to speak of in any of those countries. But there’s not just 20%, 21% Arabs. There’s 180,000 Christians. So when the alt-right says, “Well, in Bethlehem, the Jews ethnically cleansed all the Christians and they drove ’em out. And it used to be 80″—no, no, that was the Arabs that did that.

And where did they go? They went to the U.S., Europe, and Israel. That’s why there’s 180,000 Christians in Israel and there’s only 20% of the population of Bethlehem on the West Bank. It was just a complete distortion. And then, when you look at the Druze, there’s another 10% of the population that are Druze and other religions, and they’re all living in Israel.

And when you look at the 2 million Arabs—so, ask yourself, would you whether be a Jew living in any of these 20-something Arab countries or an Arab living in Israel? Well, we have the answer for it. There are no Jews in these places, and they were driven out. There’s 2 million Arabs. And you know what? They have one of the largest, I think they’re the second country in the Arab world as far as lifespan longevity. They have longer lives, and they’re the freest Arabs in the world.

You know that propaganda movie “Jenin, Jenin” about how the horrible Israelis destroyed Jenin? And all that was produced in Israel by Arabs. They have Arab studies programs in Israel. Nobody, you know, nobody thinks of that. Then you think, “Well, the country’s dependent.” No, it’s not.

Its gross domestic product now, I think—I just looked it up. This year it’s $60,000 per capita GDP. It’s higher than France, it’s higher than Germany—the standard of living. You go there today and Haifa looks like San Francisco around, I don’t know, the time they made “Vertigo” in the 1950s. It looks—the streets are clean, it’s sparkling. Everybody’s happy. It’s amazing.

And so, when we get this image, well, we prop it up because we give them, I guess we give them, I have it written down, $3.8 billion in military. That’s a lot. And I just explained, that’s a good investment. But the Congress just voted six bills. You know how much we’re going to give or have given or will give for the—we’re gonna give $175 billion to Ukraine, and we are giving to the dictatorships that surround Israel $1.2 billion. To Jordan, $700 [million], half a billion to Egypt, half a billion to Yemen. I could go on.

But all of these Arab countries that we are so afraid of that they will inculcate terrorism, we are giving them money, basically, to say, “Stop the radical Islamism.” So, I don’t know how, why there’s this hatred. So, then people are saying, “Well, there’s a, there’s this Jewish clique and they run at”— 35% of Jews in Israel are not marrying Jews. They’re going all over the world and marrying non-Jews, or they’re marrying Israelis who are no longer observant.

In the United States, the Jewish community is disappearing because people are intermarrying and intermarrying outside their—I wanna ask the Groypers. Can I ask you a question? If you are an Arab Muslim immigrant, are you more likely to marry someone who’s Arab and Muslim? Or if you’re a Jewish American, are you more likely to marry a non-Jew? Do you know the answer to that? It’s not even close.

So, your idea of a small clique of these medieval Jews that are doing all these weird—they’re running Hollywood. You know, they ran Hollywood in the 1940s and ’50s, and maybe they’re overrepresented. But I don’t hear you talk about, as I said earlier, about the NFL being run by black players, or I don’t hear you—[former President] Joe Biden talking about the donut shops of America.

I go to every 7-Eleven when I’m driving back and forth, I have never seen somebody—I’m telling you the truth—that was not from Palestine or from India running a 7-Eleven or a quick stop. Do I think that’s some kind of organized cabal? No, I think that’s very industrious people, and they feel they’ve mastered this skill and they’re going to go ahead and do it.

So, I don’t understand why we fixate on this group when there’s this historic hatred of them. And I know why we’re doing it. As I said earlier, we’re doing it because this new generation of young males has been treated terribly, and they have been the generation that suffered the most from reverse discrimination and hiring in admissions to college.

Sixty percent of the student body are female women. They have this weird, bizarre, provocative Victorian moral code, our society does, where we encourage people to sexualize themselves. And then when you have intercourse, all of a sudden, you revert to Victorian protocols of, you looked at me the wrong way at the office, or after we had sexual intercourse, you didn’t call me, therefore, you harassed me.

It’s bizarre. And I understand all that. And AI is hitting this generation. But it was not the Jews that did this, and Israel is not being supported by the United States because of a Jewish cabal, and it’s not being supported by the United States by Christian Zionists that Tucker said he hated more than anybody in the world, more than the Nazis, more than, I don’t know, al-Qaeda. And it’s not being supported by any dark group of people in the shadows.

It’s being supported because it’s in our interest.

The Sad, Conflicted State of Young American Men

 

Person 1: [Virginia Attorney General-elect] Jay Jones said he wanted his opponent, who was the speaker of the Virginia Legislature, he wanted a bullet to kill him. And then they said, “You don’t really mean that.” And he said: Yes, I do. I’d like to see his kids dead and dead in the hands of his wife. That will not disqualify. Again, if he had tweeted, “I’ve been thinking about it. For me, for all of us in Virginia, we live next to Washington, we’re going have to find a way to work with [President Donald] Trump for the next [four years],” he would’ve lost that election if they exposed that.

person 2: Yeah. Yeah. [Pennsylvania Sen.] John Fetterman has become a right-winger in the shifting dynamics here. Victor, we’re gonna take a little break and come back with a final topic, and that’s about the mental health of young men, and we will do that right after these final important messages.

We are back with “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.” We are recording on Sunday, Nov. 9, and this episode will be up on Thursday, Nov. 13, two weeks out from the great day of Thanksgiving. So, Victor, the day before Election Day, there was a conference on young American men that The Lafayette Company put on in D.C., and my dear friend Ellen Carmichael’s the person who put it on, and it was a very worthwhile undertaking. What’s going on with young men in America was the focus.

So anyway, there was a poll done and I just think there’s some interesting findings in these polls of young American men. Few bullet points:

• On mental health, 57% of the respondents said their mental health is just fair, poor, or very poor.
• On friendships, 48% of Gen Z males have two or fewer friends.
• 11% have no friends at all.
• 36% of young men say they’re less socially engaged compared to prior to COVID and 41% say their mental health has worsened because of COVID.

Just three more things.

• 40% of young men say they do not have a male mentor.
• Under guidance, 17% of respondents don’t look to anyone in their life for guidance about how to be a man in society. So, they figure things out on their own.
• And finally, on affiliation, 35% of males age 16 to 28 are not affiliated with any organized group, religious congregation, intramural sports team, online community, political volunteer association, or educational association.

That’s a lot of loneliness and dysfunction out there, Victor.

person 1: Yeah, in the old days, they would’ve been in the Elks Club, the Lions Club, the Rotary Clubs, the Knights of Columbus, the Masonic Lodge, the Downtown Club, the bowling league, now they’re playing video games in their bedroom or garage or something. Part of it is technological, that you can connect with the world in a solitary fashion.

And the more you do that, the fewer skills you have socially. So, these young men are doing video games in their own domiciles, and then they feel they’re awkward because they haven’t been out and met and greeted people. That’s one thing.

The second thing that’s going on is, let’s face it, from K-12, they’re told by the education establishment in the form of teachers that are mostly female that they suffer from inordinate masculinity, toxic masculinity. Their sports are too rough. They should feminize, and the whole idea of being a male and being responsible is not inculcated.

We have a high 45% divorce rate. So, in many cases, they either don’t have a father, or they have a stepfather or a boyfriend of their mother. That’s very problematic. When they get to college, they’re told that they are prone to be Harvey Weinsteins. And they’re gonna get two separate messages.

They’re gonna see young women who, in today’s fashion, in the age of the Kardashians, are going to have short skirts, very provocatively dressed, and they’re going to have a Victorian code printed on that. So, when they go out for a date, they’re in the post-’60s age, where premarital intercourse and sexual congress is very common, very fine. But they’re gonna have a twist to it, unlike the ‘60s, that if that matchup or that agreement does not—I’m not saying there’s not forcible [asymmetrical relationships]. There are.

But if any grounds whatsoever, the female partner objects post facto, if the male objects and says, “I had sexual congress with this woman, and I feel like she came onto me, and I was drunk,” nobody believes that, partly for good reasons, biology and all that, but the point I’m making, there is no due process if somebody accuses you of something, if you’re a male.

And then, in graduate school, if you go on, about 55% of the degrees in the humanities, art history, English are from females. And superimposed on that is affirmative action. So, the male, especially the white male, goes to college—if he gets in—and I say, where I work, Stanford University, white males consist of about 34 to 36% of the population. But they took 9% who identified as white male at Stanford the last four years. So, when they go to that school, they’re going to be in a distinct minority, but they’re gonna be told that they are racist, homophobic, sexist, predators. Even though they’re underrepresented, they’re gonna be told, “White males take over the world. White, white, white, white, white.”

I just reviewed a book by this Danielle Padilla, and the word “whiteness” I think was on 75 pages, always in a negative context. And then on top of that, I think I’m on reason No. 8, we have the whole sexual revolution of the feminist movement in the ‘60s that said women define their own sexuality on their own terms, and they can be as boorish and permissive and predatory as men. And that’s the definition of a proud, self-assured woman.

What that means is the old idea that the male had certain responsibilities imposed on him by society and his family—to be a gentleman, to open the door for a woman, to pay for the dinner and on the first, second or third date, kiss her on the cheek or something, respect her privacy, and make sure that she was treated with respect and dignity—that’s out. If a male does that, he is a square.

Then you have the reaction toward women who say, “Well, he didn’t pay for it,” or, “He is tight!” You broke the rules long ago, and he’s just now taking advantage of it.

So, if you’re a male, in the old days, if you’re in your basement playing video games and you’re 29, a woman will say, “Well, get it together, bro. I mean, it’s time for you to move out of mom’s house and dad’s and I want you to get a job. I don’t care. Two jobs. I want you to tell me when you’re gonna buy a house, and then maybe we’ll see if we’re gonna date and have sexual relations.”

Not now. The male says, “Well, you know, there’s nothing I have to do to date. I don’t even have to take her out to a movie. We just meet, we hook up that night, maybe. It’s all easy and nobody puts any demands on me to be a responsible date or father or partner, or husband.”

I don’t wanna be too specific, but I think I have one, two, three, four, six nephews …

person 2: Yeah.

person 1: … in their late 30s and 40s. One is married, one owns a house.

person 2: Wow.

person 1: And that is a problem because they can’t … they all owe student loans. They are all working, but our society makes it very difficult.

I’ve given the pathologies on the problems with young males, but there’s also the society at large. When I wrote “The Dying Citizen,” if you look at the ages when people get married, when they’ve had their first child, and when they buy their first home, it’s advanced by about four years. It’s got 23 to 27, 27 to 33, 33 to 40. So, we have this prolonged adolescence and that’s economic.

The best thing that Trump could do is really get the interest rates back down to a mortgage of 4% or 5% and have a nationwide tax incentive program for people to build homes, and then to socially, culturally, inculcate a new, “It’s wonderful to get married in your early 20s. It’s wonderful to have children and family. And we’re going to really honor men who marry, buy homes, and are good providers.” And that would help.

And then, “Video games are not really the way to spend your 20s and 30s.”

person 2: No.

person 1: I can honestly say I’ve never played a video game, so I shouldn’t talk about something I don’t know.

person 2: Oh, really?

person 1: Not once in my entire life.

person 2: Oh,, let’s play Donkey Kong sometime or Mario Brothers.

person 1: I don’t even know the names of them. The reason I confess that is because I don’t want to talk about … I think they’re probably fascinating. I’ve seen them on the internet and stuff.

But it’s something wrong with somebody 36 years old playing paintball with his buddies or …  

person 2: Yeah.

person 1: Yeah. I don’t know what—

person 2: Societal responsibilities take a generation or two generations to bleed out what colleges have done to the young.

person 1: That’s a lot of it. There’s no reason in the world that 50% of young people need to be in college, except if it was A, affordable, and B, educated you and gave you a general education of the world around you, your history, your culture, your ethos, art, music. It doesn’t. It doesn’t. It just gives you propaganda for the most part, unless you’re pure science.

And then you’re going to pay all this money over the rate of inflation each year that tuition rises. You’re gonna be broke. And then you’re going to get embittered because your psychology or sociology degree from, I don’t know, UC Irvine, that you pinned $150,000 in the hole for. You’re gonna go out and be in an apartment, and the drain’s gonna get stopped up, and the plumber’s gonna come in and the guy is 23 and you’re 29. He doesn’t owe any money, and he is making 50 bucks an hour.

person 1: Right, right. “It’s unfair! It’s unfair!”

person 2: I’ve been reading the interviews with [Zohran] Mamdani’s voters. That’s what they say in New York. They’ve been replaced by AI or they couldn’t get a job because of AI, or they have too much student debt.

And then the people they call to fix things make more money than they do.

person 1: And it’s, yeah, resentment. Real resentment.

person 2: And they’re frustrated. It’s kind of like Samson. They want to pull the house down on everybody. But not for good reasons, for bad. And he’s gonna help him do it. He’s a nihilist.