What the Situation on the Ground in Iran Actually Looks Like

 

We’re hearing more and more every day about Iran and [President Donald] Trump as the midterms now are only about 90 days away. 

There’s kind of a narrative that is emerging, left and right, that we are bogged down. I’ve heard the word Vietnam evoked. Donald Trump may have contributed to that because, although in that 150 days, we’ve been operating in the Gulf, we’ve only bombed Iran about 50 or so days, and we’ve been discussing it for 100 days. 

So the narrative has emerged that Donald Trump promises to hit them hard, they back down, and they say they want talks. They do not want talks. They want to delay, delay, delay, delay. Donald Trump then sporadically hits them. They come back to the table. 

We have no idea who we’re dealing with because the Iranian Revolutionary Islamic Guard seems to be playing the bad cop, and the moderate elected—“moderate elected”–officials, seem to put a happy face on things, and they either have no power or authority, or they’re in league with the hardcore to give them time and run out the clock. 

So, what are the relative pressures? Everybody’s getting very angry over this on, off, on, off, on, and we’re concentrating too much on what Donald Trump says. 

We know what each side is doing. Donald Trump has 90 days before the midterms. If he should lose the midterms, his team is convinced, A, that there will be an impeachment circus for the next two years, and B, anybody around him will be hauled before Senate and House committees. 

But mostly in the House because I don’t think the Republicans will lose the Senate. 

And they will be inquired into, they will be researched, they will be berated, and it will cost them a fortune, and that will be a circus. 

And so, Donald Trump doesn’t want that. To avoid that, he has to have gas getting near $3 a gallon, the world price around $65 a barrel, the Strait of Hormuz open, and all that requires him either to have a new Iranian government or a debilitated Iranian government or a negotiated settlement. 

What is Iran trying to do? Iran is trying to talk, hit the Gulf, close the Strait, talk, repeat, wash, rinse, spin, wash, rinse, spin, drag it out, see Donald Trump lose the House, have the House Left and its new Islamicist socialist base cut off funds for [the Iran conflict], and then wait out the clock and get a democratic socialist type of president that would follow the Obama regimen and pretty much appease them and let them do what they want. 

So, what’s going on? What’s the big picture? I think we’re missing what’s actually happening every day. 

There is still an embargo on Iran. No tankers can come in with merchandise, food, material goods, industrial goods, and no Iranian oil is getting out. We have bombed now most of the rail links that go into the former Soviet Union and on into Russia and on into China. 

So, they are not getting imports, and they are not exporting. They may have some airlift capacity in regional airports where China or Russia are sending in material, but it won’t be much. 

But more importantly, they are debanked. Assets are frozen. The economic embargo continues. They are losing in revenue about $500 million per day, and that loss is geometrically increasing, not just arithmetically. 

In other words, as you start to damage their infrastructure, their bridges, and we have, their roads, and you start to inflict enormous damage on the military, and they draw scarce resources from the domestic economy to fix it, the people are getting more anguished and poorer and poorer, and the country is getting worse and worse. 

We don’t see that because of what? We don’t see that because there’s no ground troops. It’s not embedded. We don’t know what’s going on. 

So, while the Left keeps saying to all of us that time is running out for Donald Trump, we’re in a Vietnam quagmire, the war is lost, we need to just look at not what the Left says, not what the right says, not even what Donald Trump says, not what Iran says. 

Just look dispassionately and disinterestedly at two things. What is the actual state of affairs in Iran? 

We have tragically lost 18 soldiers and probably spent $40 billion. But at that cost in blood and treasure, we have debilitated, neutered, deindustrialized, and pretty much destroyed the military, industrial, and nuclear complex industry of the largest state, in terms of economics and population and area, if you combine all those factors together, in the Middle East, and the bully, and the most anti-American. 

And so, while the Left thinks time is running out, the actual data show us that Iran is running out of time. 

And I don’t know who will win this standoff, but Iran has less resources and less wherewithal to withstand this python-like squeezing of it than we do in inflicting it. We can do this forever. 

One final asterisk or footnote. Things have changed somewhat. Donald Trump and the Republicans don’t think the midterms are lost. 

If they thought the midterms were lost, then they would accelerate the bombing probably and say, “We have nothing left to lose. Let’s end the Iranian threat now.” 

But they don’t think it’s lost because of what? 

They have outraised—they, the Republicans—have a $400 million war chest that they will spread very generously throughout these 435 House races and the Senate races. The Democrats only have about a fourth of that. 

Redistricting, whether due to red-state legislatures that are in the majority or from Supreme Court rulings on racial gerrymandering, might give them another five to nine seats they otherwise would not pick up. That’s important. 

More importantly still, we don’t know what Iran is going to be like. If there is some kind of negotiation or if the Strait should remain open or if the price of oil falls, people’s anguish might turn to satisfaction that it’s sort of like the Venezuela or the Panama denouement. They worked, and they will forget the cost and look at the result. 

That could happen even before the midterms. 

But most importantly, finally, this is not a Democratic Party that is running candidates for office. 

There’s two things going on. 

No. 1, a socialist-esque, communist-esque, Islamicist core base movement has captured the Democratic Party. It’s not just Zohran Mamdani. It’s not just Ilhan Omar. It’s not just Rashida Tlaib. It’s not just [Darializa Avila] Chevalier. It’s not just Milat Kiros. I could go on and on. It’s not just Hasan Piker. 

These are the front-line soldiers. But it’s the fear of them that makes milquetoast Democrats go left in fear they’re going to be primaried. 

And the point of all of this is the publicity is not good for the Democrats. They either have to disown these crazy people or keep mum about it and quiet about it or endorse them. 

So, when Gavin Newsom says capitalism doesn’t work either, he’s a mainstream Democrat in the left-wing sense of the Democrat these days. When he says that, that means that almost every single Democrat is terrified of the socialists and will ape and mimic them to survive politically. 

And that is going to filter down to the American people. And they do not want to hear that message, and they will not like that message. 

And so here in the 11th hour of the midterms, when things look the most bleak, the Democratic Party has thrown, given, extended a life raft to Donald Trump. 

And two things then in finishing: Look at what’s happening on the ground in Iran. Who’s getting worse off every day, not what people say. And look at the midterms, not from what people say, but the actual conditions that are in flux right now. 

And we don’t know what’s going to happen, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the Republicans are either going to be stuck in Iran or not, and they will not necessarily be stuck with losing the House.

The Socialist Monster Awakens

 

Who caused unaffordability?

Fear about “affordability” supposedly fueled the new, strident socialism.

Yet annual inflation during former President Joe Biden’s four years averaged almost 5%. It peaked at over 9%, while prices for some key staples rose by 30% over his tenure—all to silence from the Left. (By contrast, annual inflation during Trump’s first term averaged 1.9%. In his second term, it averaged 2.6% in 2025—and may rise to 4.5% in 2026, given the war with Iran.)

The socialists were not just quiet during Biden’s four years; they were themselves responsible for the rampant Biden inflation. They had implemented an inflationary de facto third Obama term, ramming through the most radical and costly agenda in decades under the veneer of that cognitively challenged waxen effigy, good ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton.

So the current Jacobin takeover of the Democratic Party was not sparked by concerns about “affordability”—or at least not if by “affordability” we mean the middle-class struggle to buy a house, a car, or groceries.

Instead, the socialist moment was merely the logical culmination of years of boutique radicalism within the Democrat aristocracy—the ossified leadership of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Hakeem Jeffries, along with the aging Black Caucus, the incoherent Squad, the DEI crowd, the open-border zealots, and the radical greens.

The grandees of the party also normalized the crazy mobs of BLM and Antifa long ago.
Democrats as Dr. Frankenstein

Almost every weaponized scam and national hysteria in the last two decades was amplified and spread by mainstream Democrats: the farcical claim that the Wuhan-lab-hatched COVID-19 virus came from pangolins or bats; the Duke Lacrosse and Covington Kids hoaxes; the Jussie Smollett scam, the “Hands up, don’t shoot” lie; the deification of George Floyd, often portrayed with wings and a halo; Fauxcahontas Liz Warren, touted as the first Native American Harvard law professor (thanks to her grandfather’s high cheekbones); the radical diminution of in-person voting; the canonization of Trayvon Martin and Karmelo Anthony as blameless model children; and the mythology of a 1619 national founding.

Who allowed not just one, two, three, or four million border-jumpers into the country, but over ten million—illegal, unvetted, viewed as an assumed new political constituency, and instantaneously dependent on the welfare state?

Who gave us three, four, five, or even more genders and biological males showering with teenage girls or female prisoners? Who sloganeered about “defund the police” and “no cash bail”?

All this was about as radical as it gets.

The Democrat establishment’s unhinged hatred of Donald Trump mainstreamed radicalism even further and helped birth the socialist-cum-communist Frankensteinian monster that is now devouring its mad-scientist creators.

“By any means necessary” was a Democrat mantra over a decade ago. By 2016, the Democrat leadership and the Clinton campaign were hatching the Steele-dossier farce to warp an election.

In 2020, the Democrat deep state—Antony Blinken, Mike Morell, John Brennan, James Clapper, Leon Panetta, and others—had fabricated the farcical claim that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, a hoax that, this time around, likely did alter an election.

The Democrat establishment, working with its appendages in Silicon Valley, had censored news attesting to the authenticity of Hunter’s embarrassing laptop contents. (For an account of what the establishment was doing in 2020, read Molly Ball’s Time essay describing the “conspiracies” and “cabals” that worked behind the scenes to change voting rules and ensure a Biden victory through mail-in, no-ID balloting.)

Then came four unhinged years of lawfare: special counsel Jack Smith’s seizure of the communications of senators and congressmen, the Mar-a-Lago raid on Trump’s home, the effort to de-ballot Trump, and the five civil and criminal circuses that resulted in half a billion dollars in fines.

All those perversions of the legal system were accompanied by a host of mainstream Democrats, retired generals, politicos, and athletes shouting that Trump was a Nazi, a fascist, a Mussolini, a traitor, or a Putin asset. Meanwhile, a host of loudmouth actors, Democrat activists, and celebrities competed with each other about how best to kill him—whether by shooting, stabbing, poisoning, beheading, burning him alive, or blowing him up.

Trump supporters were libeled over the years by establishment Democrats as irredeemables, deplorables, chumps, dregs, and garbage.

Even an establishment figure like Rosa Brooks, a former Obama-appointed Pentagon lawyer, called for a military coup in Foreign Policy just 10 days after Trump first took office in 2017.

Three would-be assassins got close enough to killing Trump to draw return fire from the Secret Service—near-death encounters that elicited both unapologetic applause for the attempts and lamentations that the shooters had failed from the now truly deranged social-media Left. Murderers themselves were normalized as leftist icons, as seen in the canonization of Luigi Mangione and the glee that followed in many Democrat social media circles after the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Yet did the establishment Democrat apparat calm these waters? Or did it set them boiling?

It was Chuck Schumer who threatened conservative Supreme Court justices, screaming in front of a mob outside the court’s doors, “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Schumer sounded more like a pink-haired anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement street protester than a U.S. senator.

No surprise, then, that two years later a left-wing would-be assassin turned up at Kavanaugh’s home, along with crowds of enthusiastic protestors.

Does anyone recall Maxine Waters urging the public to bird-dog Trump administration officials and harass them whenever they were seen in public? “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out, and you create a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

Does anyone also remember Nancy Pelosi, then-Democrat House Minority leader, greenlighting “uprisings” over ICE deportations? “I just don’t know why there aren’t uprisings all over the country. Maybe there will be.” So spoke the radical owner of two mansions, who entered Congress with little net worth and will leave it worth over $100 million. A Tip O’Neill she wasn’t.

Then there was soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris egging on the George Floyd demonstrations, which, weeks earlier, had already turned violent and indeed deadly (despite what the “fact-checkers” asserted):

“This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop. And everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And that should be—everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up, and they should not, and we should not.”

After four months of rioting in 2020—which left 25 people dead and 1,500 law enforcement officers injured, inflicted $2 billion in damage, and saw a police precinct, a federal courthouse, and an iconic church set ablaze—who gave the perpetrators a pass, with 14,000 arrests followed by few convictions and fewer jailings?

What happened during the violence against ICE in 2025-26? Did the Democrat apparat at least pretend to deplore the violence, or did it instead egg it on?

And who, as sore losers in 2016 and 2024, normalized the idea of dismantling the constitutional order—first by calling for the abolition of the Electoral College and later by planning to pack the court, end the filibuster, and admit two new left-wing states?
The Frankenstein Monster Awakens

So the socialists and communists did not really hijack the party. Rather, these youthful radicals were spawned and nurtured by aged Democrats. They became irate over their impotence and loss of influence—and simply upgraded the methods and message of their elders.

The upper-middle-class Mamdanis, Pikers, and AOCs did not storm the party parapets but were invited in by a party that had already radicalized itself—amid its hatred of Trump, its growing estrangement from the majority of the American people, and its fury at becoming increasingly powerless without the White House, Congress, or the Supreme Court.

Socialists did not lower the bar for extremism; establishment Democrats had already destroyed that standard altogether.

Given all that, the Democratic Socialists of America scarcely had to be invented.

After a decade of establishment Democrats destroying norms and traditions, deliberately dividing us by race, seeking to eliminate life-giving fossil fuels, and trying to implement dangerous crackpot ideas like critical race theory, critical legal theory, no cash bail, and defunding the police, the only change is that the now-electrified socialist monsters have awakened. They have mocked their stagnant creators, reenergized the old messages, and simply sought to replace the messengers.

Gone or going soon were the old white people like Pelosi and Schumer—despite their pathetic efforts to appease the Jacobins. In their place arose a cohort of upper-middle-class, degreed but otherwise poorly educated white urbanites, furious that their empty university certificates, student debt, inflated sense of self, and precious titles and jobs—but low salaries—had not delivered the affluent lifestyles enjoyed by lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers, and other professionals in their urban circles who had real jobs.

The downwardly mobile whites who formed 85% of the official ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America were joined by first- and second-generation immigrants, many from failed socialist states.

These were ingrates who, once safe and prospering in America, learned that boutique radicalism and identity chauvinism won cultural acceptance and conferred DEI leverage in their blue-state urban circles—and so sought to dismantle the very host nation that had saved them.

For both groups, anger was fed by envy of others with more stuff and by furor at a Middle America that plowed ahead, ignoring both their supposed talents and their hyped plight. And the Democratic Party provided the radical model—which, in their youthful ignorance, the new socialists pledged to enhance and exceed.

No longer, they thought, would hardcore leftists have to hide their agendas for fear of losing elections. In their folly, they attributed Harris’s 2024 implosion not to her clumsy efforts to disown and disguise her radical past (including the most left-wing voting record in the Senate), but to her not being left-wing enough.

In other words, a milquetoast socialist had lost in 2024 not because she was too radical for America, but because she was not socialist—or indeed, communist—enough.

The crazed new socialists bragged that they could win by loudly and brazenly broadcasting the old agendas: open borders, mass amnesties, defunding the police, ending fossil fuels, attacking—and now seeking to destroy—the Senate and Supreme Court, and scapegoating whites and white “privilege.” To this old mainstream Democrat farrago, they added one new element: openly embracing anti-Zionism and indeed antisemitism.

America will soon see how this insanity works out.

What Does Francesca Hong Have Against Holidays?

 We already know Francesca Hong supports crazy policies. As a dues-paying, card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Hong supports the group's platform, even if she lies about doing so on Fox News. That means the abolition of the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court, as well as amnesty for all illegal aliens, the abolition of our borders and ICE, and the closure of prisons and the defunding of police. 

But we also have to ask if Hong would cancel holidays, too, because she sure doesn't seem too keen on the major ones. 

In 2020, Hong called to cancel Thanksgiving. Not because of the COVID pandemic, but because the holiday celebrates "colonialism" (among other things). "Cancel Thanksgiving. Should have done this in 1621."


    That's the resurfaced message from Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong as she closes in on the Democratic nomination.

    Another old post also has critics talking after Hong said she was on the verge of… pic.twitter.com/RA92kL5jbM
    — Fox News (@FoxNews) August 1, 2026

"Cancel Thanksgiving," Hong wrote. "Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed indegenous [sic] folx and women so be it."

Here's a link to the archived post.

In December 2019, Hong's work computer needed some help from IT. The tech changed the computer's background to Christmas trees and snow. Hong was triggered by this, too.

    IT bro who was working on "our" computer remotely changed the background theme to snow and Christmas trees. I feel slightly attacked...
    — Francesca Hong For Governor (@FrancescaHongWI) December 17, 2019

"I feel slightly attacked."

    Just so everyone knows where I stand, I won’t cancel Christmas as governor either. https://t.co/uD49Gg4wfU
    — Tom Tiffany (@TomTiffanyWI) August 2, 2026

Thank goodness.

Hong also hates Valentine's Day.

    I miss working in a restaurant every day...except on VDay.
    As if we weren't invisible enough to those who don't recognize the emotional & physical labor of service work, the worst of humanity comes out from folks "celebrating" on another day capitalism tells you how to show love.
    — Francesca Hong For Governor (@FrancescaHongWI) February 14, 2022

"As if we weren't invisible enough to those who don't recognize the emotional & physical labor of service work, the worst of humanity comes out from folks 'celebrating' on another day capitalism tells you how to show love," she wrote on X.

Hong isn't a fan of Halloween, either.

    I don't allow myself to work Halloween weekend or the day of. I would actually ask every single person in costume to leave.
    — Francesca Hong For Governor (@FrancescaHongWI) October 27, 2019

We bet she's a blast at parties.

There are some holidays Hong likes, however. Look how highly she speaks of and celebrates the commie holiday known as "May Day."

    May Day is about worker power, and so is this campaign. Tomorrow, we're showing up alongside the people who are organizing to make better possible. See you out there! 🌹 ⁠ pic.twitter.com/UlK0G1hQl8
    — Francesca Hong For Governor (@FrancescaHongWI) April 30, 2026

Her appearances included a "living wage" rally in Milwaukee, and an illegal immigration rally in both Milwaukee and Madison, followed by a rally in Janesville for "International Workers' Day."

    Scenes from May Day, 2026. 140 years after American workers risked everything for the 8-hour day, the fight for what workers deserve is still ours to carry. And we will. 🌹 pic.twitter.com/y8LwBDNwRq
    — Francesca Hong For Governor (@FrancescaHongWI) May 1, 2026

She cannot win the governor's race. Wisconsin cannot afford to have a governor who hates the holidays that give us time off and bring us together.

But that's what socialists do, of course. By attacking Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine's Day, and Halloween, she's trying to rip apart our cultural fabric so they can dismantle society and rebuild it into a world where we get off on May 1 instead of the last Thursday in November and December 25.

Helicopter Parents Could Learn From Their Trad Moms and Dads

 Helicopter parents are getting worse.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a growing number of Gen Z parents are actively intervening in their children’s job searches, interviews, hiring processes, and even early career issues.

According to the Journal, parents are calling companies about their adult children’s performance reviews, benefits choices, and even calling in sick for them.

According to one survey, 20 percent of Zoomers had a parent attend a job interview with them.

One staffing executive had to fire a 24-year-old twice — once to the employee, who failed to show up for meetings four times, and again to his irate mother who demanded her son be given another chance.

Needed: Trad Parent Wisdom

Ironically, the parents who are hovering over their children now grew up two or three decades ago under trad parents who raised them in an opposite manner.

Not only did our trad parents not obsess over us, they made us go outside to play and not come home until supper, and we knew we had better not be late.

We were free to roam, invent, and discover on our own. We learned how to socialize, make friends, and deal with some of the jerkier kids without a parent anywhere to be found.

True, families were bigger back then and there was always an older sibling around to help us get out of scrapes.

When a big bully busted up my hand-built go-kart, my big sister kicked the tar out of him — he was two years older and 70 pounds heavier than she, but I will never forget the image of her sitting on his back, pounding her fists into his sides as he cried like a baby.

Trad parents didn't give us unwarranted praise. Rather, our parents specialized in admonishing us for the millions of things we were doing wrong — not getting to school on time, not getting high enough grades, not keeping our beds made.

In fact, if we were ever accused of any wrongdoing by other adults, our parents sided instantly with the accusers.

“What did you do now, Tommy?”

We had to prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that we were not at fault — though, truth be told, we usually were at fault.

Adults Must Figure Life Out on Their Own

When my parents dropped me off at college, they didn't worry about the life challenges that awaited me. They could barely contain their glee that I wouldn't be eating everything in their refrigerator or racking up auto repairs on our Ford Pinto with Jim Rockford maneuvers (don't ask).

They gave me a big jar of peanut butter and some crackers and advised me there was no point in writing home for money — as there wasn't any.

I admit my blue-collar father did intervene in my studies. Worried I would never find a job as an English major, he insisted I minor in something practical.

Thanks to his meddling, I became the only person to ever graduate from Penn State with a major in English and a minor in air-conditioning and heating.

In any event, our trad parents knew that the process of becoming a well-functioning adult required us to figure most things out on our own.

Looking back, that is the greatest gift they gave us.

End Helicopter Parenting Before It’s Too Late

As I said, it’s ironic that so many of today's parents, who enjoyed a trad-parent upbringing, are suffocating their kids’ development by endlessly meddling in their affairs.

It has gotten so bad, reports the Journal, that employers increasingly view heavy parental involvement as a red flag — a signal that Zoomers with especially meddlesome parents likely lack independence and the ability to make their own decisions.

I sure hope these kids figure out how to function on their own before their turn comes to run the country.

Or one day, during a live White House press conference, the president will be asked a tough question and his mother will grab the microphone.

“I don’t appreciate the tone of these questions!” his mom might say. “And for the record, it’s not his fault he was late to the NATO summit — the traffic was terrible and his alarm didn’t go off!”

VIVIFY’s Hydrogen Generators Can Power Anything

 The distributed energy hydrogen revolution is here — bringing worksite-ready hydrogen-powered electricity without any connection to the electric grid.

VIVIFY Technology founder and CEO Jason Herring says that "Talk is the cheapest thing the energy industry produces. So I did not brag about our systems until they were production ready."

That's why his staff began working quietly in a barn in Griffin, Georgia, over a decade ago, even eschewing email communications, until six months ago, when VIVIFY first unveiled its CAT™, HOG™, and Flying Pig™ clean technology machines to the public. The company's factory in Jupiter, Florida, is already capable of rolling out 100 units a day.

Herring's vision is larger than just profits. "We are," he says, "currently focused on the intersection of energy innovation and national infrastructure. As an America-first leader, I am championing pro-growth energy policies and the development of next-generation hydrogen solutions. Our mission is to ensure American energy remains resilient, independent, and technologically superior."

Herring says that VIVIFY's primary objective is to reduce dependence on centralized energy infrastructure supplied by an aging, often-failing grid. His focus on clean energy inspired the five-stage Clean Air Technology (CAT™) emissions control system, which integrates with coal, natural gas, diesel, and other exhaust systems so that operators can clean emissions without changing core operations.

The CAT™ was designed to help industrial systems move toward near-zero emissions by reducing parasite load, improving plant efficiency, and delivering a more cost-effective path toward cleaner output across both legacy and modern infrastructure environments. Its integrated platform brings together multiple stages of filtration, separation, and incineration technologies to remove virtually all pollutants from exhaust while maintaining strong operational performance.

The five core system elements are hydroponic towers that support particulate separation through water condensation and help prepare the exhaust stream for downstream treatment stages; the Cold CAT™ that applies cryogenic carbon dioxide removal and separation logic to strengthen the platform's overall emissions treatment profile; the clean air turbine that provides multistage pollutant incineration; the AGES™ Separator, which uses artificial-gravity water filtration to improve treatment performance within the process train; and a particle acquisition tower that acts as a final-stage particulate filtration element.

A second market-ready VIVIFY product is the Hydrogen Oxygen Generator (HOG™), which uses water (even dirty water or salt water) as its primary input to provide on-site electricity for facilities seeking alternatives to grid power. The platform can operate as a closed-loop system that is largely emissions-free, self-supporting, and scalable.

The HOG's integrated architecture brings together Pulsar™ for on-demand hydrogen creation and system revitalization, alongside multistage turbines, multi-functioning transformers, an H2O input generator, and combustion chambers for power and heat distribution. The HOG can provide alternative power for cold-storage sites, disaster-response operations, remote worksites, data centers, and any entity facing frequent power disruptions.

The Flying Pig™ is VIVIFY's containerized hydrogen power unit that packages the core architecture of the HOG platform into a deployable module. Each 20-foot by 8-foot Flying Pig is a 1-MW power system that can be delivered by airdrop, assembled in 15 minutes, and paired with multiple other units to power an entire remote industrial facility, mining operation, or mobile military or disaster-relief operation.

The Flying Pig provides hydrogen power from the moment it arrives at a site. It requires no external fuel delivery chain and scales by adding modules as demand grows. The initial 500 gallons of water are sufficient to power the Flying Pig for up to 15 years, making it far more efficient than diesel or natural gas. It can also be operational years before any future nuclear microreactor or small modular reactor.

Herring estimates that the Flying Pig™ has the potential to lower operating costs compared to diesel generation by nearly $9.8 million over a five-year period (based on $4/gal diesel costs). Data centers and other entities on multi-year waiting lists for grid connections can start up right away.

"The underlying idea is simple. Rather than waiting years for new transmission lines, substations, and grid upgrades (or NRC permits), the HOG™ and Flying Pig™ can generate electricity right away wherever it is needed." It is especially beneficial for military operations because it gives no heat signal and can operate in any environmental conditions.

Herring says that VIVIFY's engineering team has 20 major patents, over 200 in all, and an ensemble of products that can be used wherever an activity needs immediate electric power. "My hardest challenge, says Herring, "is keeping the geniuses — led by chief engineer Buddy Hall — in line to get products to market. My job is to focus on product distribution and pushing excellence from my staff."

Herring sees a future in which hydrogen technologies can power just about anything, even totally replacing the aging electric grid. As we generate revenue, says Herring, we will continue to spend on R&D, with one goal: a hydrogen generator the size of an auto battery to power automobiles and households.

Already the city of Jacksonville is looking into powering its new pro football stadium and infrastructure with VIVIFY's products. Longer term, just as Starlink provides internet with no cables, VIVIFY envisions a future in which its hydrogen products can even provide electricity for future outposts on the Moon or even Mars.

Bernie Sanders Is the Democrat Party Now

 The “God” for leftists is Bernie Sanders, the “independent” Senator from Vermont who runs the Democrat Party these days. Sure, there are other people in official jobs who run the party, but Bernie controls the people who call the shots…or will likely shoot you if you don’t obey. Communists have a history of that kind of violence; they just aren’t yet in a position to do anything about it. Thanks to comrade Bernie, they might soon be. If you can’t imagine a world in which that happens, you haven’t been paying attention.

Race-Based Hiring Changed Higher Education

 person 2: I mentioned a couple of episodes ago our friend Bill Jacobson with Legal Insurrection. He has some efforts aimed at ferreting out that stuff. Yeah, it’s not only, let’s just say, racism in schools, which could be in hiring. This could be in scholarships. Here’s a scholarship: blacks only need apply.

Or teachers, you’re going to get this bonus, but only if you’re a minority. So, he has a legal arm there that goes after that. There are efforts to …

person 1: You know, I had a student tell me, “You don’t know what it’s like to be Latino.” And I said, “I do,” because I came of age when this started.

In those days, 4.0 was the top, and I had a 3.99. I had two Bs. I did pretty well for a country boy on the SAT, so I applied to UC Santa Cruz. It was a new campus. It was harder to get in than Stanford. I was on the waiting list at Stanford and UC, so I might not have gone away to college. They let me into both, I think, much later at Stanford, but I got into Santa Cruz from the waiting list.

So, I went there, and there were two students from my high school who were C students, and they were there already. They had been there all summer long. They were Latino. I never said anything, but they could not believe that I had, you know … There were three students who had the top grades.

It’s a long story, but there was a valedictorian. I wasn’t that, but we were all one-tenth of a point apart. I was, I think, the third highest. But the point I’m making is that when I went to graduate school, this was in 1975, Mark Edwards was a great guy. He called us in, and there were four white males. He said, “I want to tell you right now, we’re hearing of lawsuits.”

This was kind of like the [Allan] Bakke era. “None of you are going to get a job. I’ve been to the American Philological Association, and everybody’s told me they’re going to hire women and minorities no matter what. We have to at Stanford.”

We said, “Well, you have three or four women here, and you have an African American.”

I said, “How about all you guys? Why don’t you all resign and then give up your places? You’re all in your 60s.”

When you’re that age, 21 years old, you don’t believe it. So, you think, “Well, I’ll be fine.” I told my adviser. He said, “Well, if you’re good, you’ll make it. I did.”

I said, “Yeah, but you were in a different generation.”

So I finished all my exams in two and a half years. That’s all I did. I studied 20 hours a day and slept about five hours. I wrote my thesis in my third year. I went to the American School of Classical Studies for a whole year. I did all of that.

When I applied to seventeen jobs at age twenty-five, I got one interview at the Naval Academy. They said, “That was a great interview.”

They interviewed me on everything. “Can you tell us who Jomini was?” and things outside classics. Then they said, “But you’re not going to get the job. We have to hire a woman.”

I said, “Well, you guys are kind of old. Why don’t you resign and hire her?” Because they have a civilian system at the Naval Academy, not like West Point.

So, I came back, and I’d farmed for five years. I was unemployable. When I went to Fresno, Cal State Fresno, they said, “We’re not going to hire you. We’ll have you part-time.”

I said, “I published a book.”

They said, “Well, let me see. You have a Ph.D. from Stanford and you’ve published a book, but we’re going to hire a woman and a minority.”

These were all white guys telling me this.

Finally, I gave a lecture, and a person from the McClatchy Foundation heard me speak. She said, “That was a great talk. Why aren’t you teaching?”

I said, “I only have one class.”

So, she gave a gift for me to teach for one year. I did pretty well, and I doubled the enrollment.

But my point is that there’s a whole generation of people born in the 1950s who came of age during this whole racial preference system, and that’s all they’ve known. So, when people say discrimination, there has been discrimination, but when I saw it institutionally, I’m not talking about what people thought. Institutionally, it was all one way, and people are tired of it.

So, when I got a job and I got tenure, I had a guy from the philosophy department come to me and say, “They’re not going to hire me. I’m a white male. I’ve been a part-time teacher for eleven years, and I make one-third of what a professor does. I drive all over to community colleges. Can you help me?”

So, I went to the chairman, and I did that for about five people. I got all five hired.

But it was very strange how amoral it was. It was just blatant. You know what I mean? Blatant racism. It would have been much better if, when people thought there was inequality, and there was, they had started at K-12.

You could have gone down to the kindergarten level and said, “These are the types of schools in minority districts in the forties, fifties, and sixties that educated people well, and we’re going to restore them. We’re going to make them academies. Anybody can go, but they’ll be located in poorer areas to make sure that when you come out of there … ”

It was holistic, and that’s what I grew up with in a Hispanic district.

So, when I had students, I would always say to them, “You’re going to give a lecture, your class report, and you can have no notes. You’re going to memorize it, and you’re going to talk to me. I don’t want you reading it off a page. And you’re going to have perfect English.”

I corrected their syntax and their grammar. The whole point, I thought, was to make sure that Mexican American, Black, and Southeast Asian students spoke perfect English and were better educated than anybody.

person 2: Right.

person 1: And to do all that work, that’s why I retired.

One day I walked into my office area, and this guy had a big Land Rover. It must have cost $60,000. His office was next to mine, and he had a sign that said, “No blood for oil.”

Then I walked down the hall, and a student came into the office after me. This guy who had been up for tenure was terrible. I was on the tenure committee.

He was telling the student, “Don’t worry about grammar. You don’t need grammar. You’ve grown up in a disadvantaged household. I don’t correct grammar.”

He was an English professor.

I saw that and I thought, “I’m so glad that I don’t have to deal with these people.” I had wonderful colleagues, Bruce Thornton, etc., and I had wonderful students.

Then one of the students I liked a lot, a guy who was really good, came up to me and said, “Well, I’m applying to Ph.D. programs.”

I said, “Yeah, but it’s going to be very competitive because we have two or three people this year with master’s degrees, perfect GRE scores, and they know French and German.”

He said, “Yeah, but they’re not minorities like I am.”

At that point, I said, “I’m done.”

So, I turned around and walked to the California PERS retirement office and said, “I want to retire.”

They said, “Mr. person 1, you’re 51 years old, and you’ve only been here 21 years.”

They showed me the actuarial tables.

“We are notorious for having the best-defined benefits, and you would be getting $110,000 in those future dollars when you complete 35 years.”

I said, “I can’t take it. What would it be right now?”

At that time they said, “$18,000 a year when you’re 65.”

They’ve inflated it a little because of the cost of living, but I said, “I quit.”

The president called me up and said, “You can’t quit.”

I said, “Why?”

He said, “Because you get more hits on your website than the entire school.”

I don’t know what he meant by that.

And I said, “But I’ve had enough.”

person 2: But you also had heavily populated classes, right?

person 1: Yeah, I had 200 students, and I had been there for 21 years. I’d written 16 books. I’d won a National Endowment award. All of those things they count, though I didn’t care much about them. I had been a visiting professor at Stanford and a visiting professor at the Naval Academy.

But I was done. Done.

The Strange Alliance Between Islam and Socialism

 One of the things that is perplexing and often a topic of conversation is this new American-Western European alliance or absorption of Islam and Marxism-socialism-communism. In other words, people who identify as radical Muslims, often in their alliance, include people who are traditional Western Marxists, and it doesn’t seem possible for a variety of ways.

There’s a lot of antitheses. Do we really believe that these upscale people in blue enclaves in the United States who declare themselves socialist and are voting for people like Zohran Mamdani, or Ilhan Omar, or Rashida Tlaib, who are proud, and active, and often fervent Muslims, tolerate gays? Do you really believe if you said, “I am gay, and I’m proud of it, and I want to announce that in Saudi Arabia,” you wouldn’t be in trouble?

Do you really believe that if you went to Iran and said, “I want to repeal all the sodomy laws,” you wouldn’t be in trouble?

Or if you went, let’s say, to Egypt and you said, “I wanna have a trans, sexual support group,” you wouldn’t be in trouble? Do you really believe that upscale, independent women in Western cities, maybe unmarried, professional, doesn’t that bother them a little bit when they ally themselves with radical Muslims who tell them that, as far as men go, their dream is going to an Islamic heaven and having the sexual use as if they’re almost tools of 72 virgins?

Does that go well with a book editor in Manhattan or the head of an NGO in Denver? I don’t think so.

Another thing that’s quite different is Islam believes in Allah, and that’s it. All other people who are non-believers are doomed to hell, and the duty is to spread worship, loyalty, fealty to the Muslim Allah.

But throughout the history of socialism and Marxism and communism, all of them agree on one thing, that religion is really the opiate of the masses. They feel that class struggle is harmed or negated by people who believe in a God. In the Christian sense, they feel that, blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor.

That Sermon on the Mount doesn’t do anything. It basically says there will be social justice in heaven, but not here. If you’re poor, you go to heaven by being morally better than the rich man. Remember, it’s harder for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich man, Jesus says, to go to heaven.

So, the message for believers is that there is social justice in heaven. The message for a socialist, communist, Marxist is it’s right now. There is no heaven. There is no God. We have to get social justice now.

Another thing that’s very different is Marxists believe in the state control of the means of production, and socialists believe that this—there can be private property, but mostly the utilities, the railroads, the steel companies, most all of the muscles of a society are owned also by the state.

But they believe in a commission, a committee, a chairman. They don’t believe that one exercises power through royalty or succession, although most communist and Marxist states, which we see in North Korea and we see in Iran, they’re very similar in some ways. But, in the Arab world, monarchy is pretty much de rigueur, as we see in the Gulf states.

But Marxism says, “No, we don’t believe in kings. We overthrow them.” That was what the revolutions of 1848 were about. That’s what the French Revolution was about. That’s basically what the Bolsheviks were trying to get rid of an imperial dynastic tsar. So, that’s another antithesis.

Another thing is the Arab world is based on tribalism, that your first loyalty goes to people who look like you, speak a dialect of Arabic like you, and have a local or regional affinity, a proximity to you.

That’s always been the challenge of the modern Arab nation or state. How do you include people from seven, 10, 15, 20 different tribes who have fought each other for centuries and only come together when coerced to, for example, under the Ottoman Empire?

But Marxism is very different. Your first allegiance is not to people who look like you.

It’s to the global proletariat, the oppressed, the Comintern. Socialists believe that they have more in common with people in Europe who are fellow socialists than they do with rich people or, or people who are devoutly religious in their own country.

So tribalism is part of Islam’s foundation. Globalism is central to the socialist or the communist or the Marxist.

However, all of that said, someone’s going to say, “Well, Victor, they’re alike. They have a coalition. Zohran Mamdani is a hardcore Marxist, and he’s a hardcore Islamicist, and so is Ilhan Omar, and so are almost all the people in Dearborn, Michigan, it seems like, and so are these new socialist candidates that are popping up like flowers everywhere in blue cities and urban areas.”

So, what’s the similarities? One, they hate Western civilization. They can’t stand the values of Western civilization, free speech, religious opportunity, market capitalism, etc. They both hate that and Islam has been, has been at war with the West since the seventh century, and it’s fought Westerners not just in the Crusades, but all through the history of the Byzantine Empire, all through the history of Europe and North Africa.

And when [Osama] bin Laden said the great tragedy was that Islam lost its hold in Europe, what he was basically talking about was the Battle of Tours and the stopping of the Islamic movement northward into Europe. They, of course, have, in the Quran and its related apocrypha, there’s a lot of hatred of Jews.

They hate Israel with a passion. So do Marxists, socialists. I’m not sure why they do, given the creation of Israel was based on a kibbutz system, which is socialistic in nature, and many of the original generation who settled in Israel even before World War II came there as dissidents from Eastern Europe and Russia, and they believed in a socialist future.

But that’s all ancient history now. As of now, what draws Muslims to the new left-wing hardcore socialist and communist, and what draws them to include rather antithetical Muslims into their movement, they hate Israel with a passion, and they hate Jews.

There’s another, similarity. They hate capitalism.

They do not believe that a person should have freedom of opportunity to start his own business, to make a profit. In the Islamic world, interest is frowned upon officially. Not that the Gulf states are run … The Gulf states are run on hypercapitalism, but officially they find, euphemisms and mechanisms to get around prohibitions in the Quran for hypercapitalism or laissez-faire capitalism.

And of course, capitalism is the main enemy of Zohran Mamdani and others who feel it’s unfair, it doesn’t share the wealth. They believe in the message not of the Americans, “Give me liberty or give me death,” a revolution to ensure political freedom, but a holistic, totalitarian, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree revolution of fraternity egalitarianism.

In other words, we’re not just going to give people freedom to speak. We don’t want them to have freedom to speak. We want to make them equal on the back end by the use of government coercion.

Both of them hate democracy then. They don’t like the people voting because, in the Arab world or the Muslim world, there will be people who object to the role of women, especially in the modern age, or the role that intolerance for sexual minorities or the intolerance shown Christians.

And so, they will object, and they wouldn’t want to express that objection. That’s taboo. And we know from the history of socialism, they say they believe in free speech, but very quickly socialists try to outlaw it, and when they become communists, they kill for it.

That’s another difference. And both of them justify violence.

They believe the violent method is necessary for the, desired end. And so you see people who are committing … Who are the people that commit violence? Who was the person just this week in New York that stabbed somebody? Who was the person in Europe that tried to run over people at a gay party?

Who are the people protesting ICE? Who are the people on the campus protesting violently? They are either radical Islamicist or they’re radical socialist communist Antifa types, or often they’re mixed together in the same demonstration.

Finally, remember that Hitler himself said he was a national socialist.

Yes, he made deals with crony capitalism, but even though he said he despised Bolshevism, he said after he was looking back in his final days that he admired Joseph Stalin’s communism, and he said that if he had defeated the United States and Russia, he would have executed American leaders, but welcomed Stalin in kind of a genteel captivity.

And by the same token, Hitler said that he preferred Islam to Christianity. He had a great deal of admiration for the Grand Mufti. There was an alliance of radical Islam with national socialists. They both hated capitalism, and they hated the same thing as we’ve just reviewed, and they liked many of the same things.

Hitler was not a hypercapitalist. He was a socialist, a national socialist. And in some ways, even though he said he despised Bolsheviks, they had a lot in common.

So, remember, next time you see this bizarre, weird, surreal alliances or people shouting Allah Akbar or, power to the people, spread the word. They’re not as different as you think.

Dating In Your 40s As A Man: Why Apps Feel Broken (And What to Do Instead)

 

If apps feel like a waste of time, you’re not wrong. Dating apps promise convenience. But if you’re dating in your 40s as a man, they often deliver the opposite: frustration, flakiness, and dead-end conversations that go nowhere. This can knock your confidence and leave you feeling rejected. However there is another way 🙂

As a dating coach with over 15 years experience helping men like you, in this blog I’ll share:

Why dating apps feel broken (especially at this stage of life)
Why in-person dating actually works better for men over 40
And how to shift your dating strategy without feeling like you're starting over

🚫 Why Dating Apps Are Failing You (And Men Like You)

    You’re Not Marketing Yourself To Attract The Women You Want

At this point in life, you probably know a lot about who you are; but you may not know how to market yourself to the women you want. You may not have very many photos of yourself full stop (it’s vain and awkward right?) Whilst dating apps demand perfect photos. You may not know how to write prompts that are the right mix of sincere and fun, without sounding like every other guy out there. You might be overlooked for not being flashy, ultra-online, or chasing trends. It’s not a reflection of your value—just the design.
Man in 40s sheltering woman with this jacket
“C’mon quick kiss… no one can see us.”
2. ….And Even If You Do, You’re Facing Stiff Competition

Even if you get great photos, write witty prompts and use AI to craft messages… so has every other guy out there. Dating apps are saturated and often have a user base that’s two-thirds male. They’re the digital equivalent of walking into a bar and there’s 2 men for every woman. Inevitably this means women get overwhelmed, and many men never get a shot. Some studies place the average match rate for men at 0.6% – meaning they have to like (and message) 140 profiles to get a match! Then you have to get from match to a first date, second, third. When you look at the hard stats, the results are shockingly low. The important point for you is not to see this as a reflection on your worth, and attractiveness; as a man over 40 this is just the state of play on dating apps.
3. You Get Filtered Out—Before You’re Even Seen

With age settings on dating apps, many women will filter you out, even if you look and feel great. It’s just human nature: If a woman is given an age range to select between, she’ll often cut off at milestone birthdays for example, if she’s 32 she may select 32-39, and lose all the matches over 40. In reality if you met her in person, and you had a great connection, it’s likely that she wouldn’t care that you’re a couple of years older than she had imagined her ideal partner to be. I’ve coached many men who have seen a drop over in their dating app matches after they’ve gone over 40, and an even sharper decline after 45.
4. The Effort Doesn’t Equal the Return

How many times have you spent 30 minutes writing a message, only to get ghosted? For mature men, this feels inefficient—because it is. Your time and energy are better spent in places where connection happens organically. Not only do dating apps pose lots of problems for men who are 40+ in terms of getting onto a date, even if you get there, the process doesn’t feel that rewarding. Instead, successful dating as a man in his 40s boils down to doing the harder thing (getting out of your house to meet women in real life) to make your life easier (better connections, more dates and a better all round experience.)
✅ Why IRL Dating Works Better for Men Over 40

    Your Strengths Show Up in Person

It’s well known that women aren’t that visual in how they experience attraction and choose partners. The bad news is that dating apps are like window shopping, and they often prompt people to rely on choosing people who look like their type. The good news is, once you cut out the middle man and meet her in person, all of your other strengths that create attraction can register with her. In real life, your tone, humor, eye contact, and presence carry weight. Women pick up on energy, maturity, and warmth—things that just don’t translate through a screen.

Apps hide your strengths. In-person reveals them.
2. You Stand Out from the Crowd

Most men your age aren’t showing up at community events, dance classes, or wine tastings. If you are? You instantly stand out—not just because you’re present, but because you’re engaged. How do I know this? I work with women too! Women in their 30s and 40s often spend a lot of time wondering where you are hiding! The truth is, most men over 40 have let their social circles shrink (it’s just not the same as when you went to college) and their few remaining friends are coupled up. Losing your wingmen means your “social life” might revolve around going to work, hitting the gym, and catching up 1-1 with old friends. You don’t need a dating coach to point out that this isn’t getting you in front of enough women!
Man in 40s riding bike with woman
“I’ll go look for a charging station.”
3. Shared Context Creates Natural Chemistry

When you meet someone at a concert, on a hike, or through mutual friends, you’re already sharing something meaningful. That’s miles better than “So, what do you do?” over an app chat that fizzles out. Most people find it easier, and more natural, to verbally communicate rather than try to portray their personality on a dating app. Also when I ask women how they would ideally like to meet their partner – through friends is the dream. Meet her through your social circles and you get an automatic boost in terms of how seriously she’ll consider your connection. For women, meeting a guy on an app is a boobie prize: Instead she wants her friends to be telling her about a great guy she must meet. This also translates neatly to her effort levels: Anything less than a spark filled first date will get you ruled out on an app, however if you’ve met in person she’ll be more willing to give it a shot.
4. You Avoid the Ghosting/Game Playing Trap

In real life, conversations are humanized. There’s more mutual respect, less game-playing, and fewer people disappearing mid-conversation. Women in their 30s have some experience with dating. This can mean they’re finely tuned to what they want, and don’t want. Dating apps are highly impersonal and don’t create a sense of safety for her when you meet. This means one message that slips up in its tone can lead her to freak out and unmatch or block you. Whilst this is also her responsibility to be less judgemental, people tend to give others more mutual respect and flexibility when you have a real world connection.
What if you don’t have much relationship experience?

Before we look at how to meet women in real life it’s worth addressing, “how does this differ if you’re dating as a man in his 40s with little experience?” As a single guy in his 40s you might:

Have tons of dating experience and be clearer than ever about what you want.
Returning to dating after a divorce, or long term relationship, and feeling like you’ve missed out on a big chunk of dating experience. 
Have reached this life stage without yet having a significant relationship, and are worried this reflects badly on you.

To start with, regardless of your relationship experience, the same rules apply! Dating as a man in his 40s will be easier for you to focus IRL rather than online. Secondly, however you made your journey to being 40 – you’ve got to own it. Even if you don’t have much dating experience, in your 40s you will have greater knowledge of who you are, be more experienced generally, and an attractive choice for women who value maturity and stability in a partner.
💡 What to Do Instead (How to Date IRL Without Making It Awkward)

    Put Yourself Where Connection Can Happen

Go to places where you’re likely to meet women who match your interests and values. Meeting women in person also creates a filter – it takes a lot more effort for her to show up at an event, versus simply putting a profile online. Here’s some of my favourite spots for you to meet women:

Fitness studios (yoga, pilates, group hikes, spin, bouldering, social dance.)
Cooking classes or wine tastings
Singles, networking and speed dating events
Bars that professionals will attend to catch an after work drink.
Volunteering or spiritual groups
Live music, art walks, or talks

Pro tip: You might worry that some of the women you meet will already be in relationships. This is true – about two-thirds of women will already be partnered up, and of the single women only roughly half will be actively looking to meet someone. However, the fact she has the time to show up to an event, means it’s less likely that she already has a partner/ family. The other thing to remember is, even if she’s already coupled up, that you can still have a mutually rewarding, fun, sociable conversation with her… and she may even have a friend she’s keen to introduce you to.
2. Don’t Just Show Up – Say Something!

Even if you’re regularly showing up at tons of well targeted events, simply showing up won’t be enough. Women aren’t that visual (i.e. she’s unlikely to find you super attractive before you’ve spoken to her) and also women won’t be proactive (i.e. she’s unlikely to start a conversation with you.) Now, you may wish she did come over and speak to you, but if you wait on a clear signal – you’ll be leaving a lot of potential dates on the table. Instead, time to get on board with how fun it can be to initiate. Here’s two simple ways to get started with this:

Be direct at singles, or speed dating events. If you’re at an event and you already know you’re both single, then there’s less need to tread carefully – instead strategic boldness will set you apart from the other men in the room. Recently one of my coaching clients went to a singles event, and saw one woman he really wanted to speak to. A perfect moment didn’t arise, so before he left he took his chance by walking right up to her and saying, “I know I’m interrupting your conversation, but I didn’t want to leave this event without coming over and introducing myself…” (Yup, terrifying but also the stuff of romantic movies.) He was in a rush so wrapped up quickly by saying, “I’d like to get to know you better, and talk more another time. My taxi’s waiting, but let me grab your number.”

Be socially smooth if you meet a woman through a hobby or fitness activity. Whilst bold and daring pays off at singles events, smooth and sociable is a better shout when you’re not sure why a woman is there. Approach a woman boldly at the gym and it may seriously backfire! Instead start a chat based on something you see or experience (how busy it is, the instructor, the music playing). If she’s receptive, swap names. If you continue speaking, swap social media. A subtler approach will allow you to feel out opportunities in a socially intelligent and attractive way.
3. Say Yes to More Invitations & Don’t Be Afraid To Ask (Seriously)

Most men over 40 shrink their social circles. Flip that. Say yes to dinner parties, reunions, events. Even if there’s no one you’re interested in—you’re practicing connection. It also will help your social life to gain momentum. Be the guy who not only says “yes” to invites but is a solid value add to social gatherings: Man the BBQ, organise the playlist, help clear the dishes, relay a great anecdote, be a fantastic listener.

This will increase how socially attractive you are, you’ll make new friends, gather more invites, and eventually meet women who are single through your social circles!

Also don’t shy away from asking for introductions. This isn’t cheesy—it’s smart. Tell a few trusted people:

“I’m open to meeting someone great. If someone comes to mind, I’d love the introduction.”

Women trust referrals. And your friends likely know women who are single but done with apps too.
4. Build Confidence in Your Real-Life Skills

If it’s been a while, practice small talk. Learn to show warmth. Smile more. Start a few low-stakes conversations in line at the café or at the gym.

You’re not trying to “pick up” women—you’re showing that you’re approachable and curious. That’s rare and attractive. If you focus too heavily on your goal of meeting a woman, it’s going to be easy to register the initial steps you take as failures, rather than successes. Instead your first goal is to work on your process and give yourself a ton of credit for the work you put in.

Here are some simple initial goals that are achievable and realistic:

Research real life dating venues and events that work for you (don’t be disheartened if a few events you go to are duds, this is part of your refinement process.) 
Checkout chit chat: This means whenever you have the opportunity you start a small social conversation with the people you meet in your everyday life. 
Swap in woman-friendly hobbies: Drop one free weights session for a spin class. It’s okay to change up your schedule slightly to give you more opportunities. 
Work from a co-working space or cafe rather than from your home. 
Focus on paying compliments and making her day. It takes time to learn how to get great at talking to women in real life, to start with focusing on breaking the ice. 
Say “yes” to any social invitations, and if you hear other people discussing a get together be proactive and ask to come along! 
Remember you are a guy who has a lot to offer - so when you talk to a woman you add to her day, and you don’t take away from it.

👊 The Mindset Shift That Changes Everything

Instead of chasing attention on apps, shift your mindset to:

Creating opportunities for connection
Being present and open in your daily life
Enjoying the process, not forcing the outcome

This isn’t about “trying harder.” It’s about showing up in ways that naturally highlight your strengths.

As a man over 40, your calm confidence, values, and experience shine in person. That’s where you build trust. That’s where you connect. That’s where dating gets interesting again.

It takes bravery to build a new routine, and to talk to attractive women in real life; but it’s also far more rewarding and successful. So quit outsourcing your self esteem to dating apps, and start embracing just how attractive you can be as a man over 40 dating in real life.

From Monroe to Clinton, How the American Presidency Changed

person 1: Your presidents today are, as you’ve been speaking of, Bill Clinton and then also [James] Monroe, who followed on [James] Madison’s work and is probably most famous for the Monroe Doctrine.  

person 2: Yes. James Monroe was our fifth president. [George] Washington, [John] Adams, [Thomas] Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and he was … Just think of it. 

He was, after Washington and Jefferson and Madison, he was the fourth president from Virginia, and that was at that time called the Virginia Dynasty. I think there would be four more. I don’t know if I remember them all, but there was [John] Tyler and Benjamin Harrison and Woodrow Wilson. I’m sure Woodrow Wilson was a Virginian. 

He was a Southerner, abject racist, by the way, not that that’s always to be equated with Southerners. It’s not.

But [Monroe’s] known now for a couple of things. Liberia, the capital is Monrovia. Remember that? He was a big advocate of reverse colonization as a solution to the slavery problem, and during his administration, it didn’t work out too well because slaves, African slaves had been there for 200 years. So they were no more African than white people were. 

You know what I mean? So, it didn’t work out too well. But he also had seen this during Madison and his presidency, they had closer ties with …  

After the War of 1812, they kinda shifted, and they normalized their relationship with Britain, number one, and they had seen what the French Revolution had done and Napoleon that followed had done to Europe. 

And they were very skeptical of the Spanish Empire. So, there was a new idea that the United States would follow Washington, would not get involved with foreign powers. But they had established a much better relationship with Britain. They were going back to being pro-British again. And the result of that was they were very skeptical of the Spanish. 

And so, under Monroe, they annexed Florida. And he and Madison were really instrumental in carrying out the, not the spirit of the Louisiana Purchase, but the actual implementation of it.  

So, this was a period where they doubled the size of the United States, and he was … But one of the things he did not want were imperial European powers intervening in the Western Hemisphere. 

That was largely Spain, because the Spanish Empire had a very different attitude about colonization. It was not open to Europeans. It was not open to Protestants. You had to get permission of the Spanish Crown, and you had to get the permission of the Spanish Crown and its Catholic manifestation. 

And he was worried that Spain was playing too great a role and would get too powerful right on our border with Mexico.  

person 1:  I think that was the period, the 1820s, when the Spanish Empire was falling all over Latin America. Like, there were revolutions,  

person 2: It was. It was starting. But the impetus was that he felt that the imperial … 

All the Founders have thought that the imperial tradition of the French in Canada, the Spanish and the British in Canada, the British in America, the Spanish south of the border was nefarious, toxic. So, it was the duty of the United States to get them out. And get them out in the sense to get the French out and buy their land off and get the Spanish out of the United States and buy Florida or settle it. 

And by extension, they did not want Spain to then start dictating to these national liberationist fronts. They really did believe that Bolívar and San Martín, all these people were gonna create United Stateses.

They weren’t. They weren’t gonna last is what I’m saying. They had a very different origin and maturity than we did. 

The Spanish crown was very different than the British crown. They weren’t the same. There was no Spanish enlightenment like there had been a British and Scottish enlightenment.  

He’s known now for the Monroe Doctrine, which in 2013 [John] Kerry said that he had renounced. It was no g- But now it’s sort of been reinvigorated. 

I think most people consider him a very good president, better than average. But he’s also kind of the end of a president either selecting his former opponent as secretary of state or vice president, or there’s not a big difference in the party between the Whigs, and the Federalists party was dying at this time, and the Republican Party, the people for the Republic, I should say, it’s different than the later Republican Party. 

They were gaining ground, but I think they call it the era of good feelings or the era of good relations. 

It was ending. So you’re gonna get a modern antithetical two-party system of really angry, and it’s gonna be characterized by we want a strong federal government and we want internal improvements, and we want taxation and tariffs versus a Jeffersonian, we wanna be left alone and have states’ rights, et cetera. 

So, anyway, the idea of an aristocracy has only got one more president left, John Quincy Adam, and then that’s over with. The idea that you’re gonna come from New England or Tidewater, Virginia, it’s gonna be populism. You know, Zachary Taylor and James Polk and Andrew Jackson.  

As far as Bill Clinton goes, elected in ’92, he never got over 50% of the vote. 

I don’t think he ever did. I think he got 41 or 42% in ’92, and he got 49.6 or something in ’96. That was largely because of Ross Perot. Ross Perot, for what all the Democrats wanna say, he took more votes away from George Bush than he did from Bill Clinton, and he was responsible, and he knew that. He said that he wanted to help the Democrats. 

He said they’d become normal again under Clinton. He was a leftist, and the Republicans, when they ran against him, tried to say that when he was a student at Oxford, you remember that he … I like that new word. He was adjacent to the communist other students, and they said that he was smoking marijuana. That was when smoking marijuana was disqualifying, and he said he did smoke, but he never inhaled. 

And that was the beginning of, “I never had sex with that woman,” because the type of sex he had with the woman he didn’t say qualifies with traditional notions of sex.  

person 1: What was that thing where they kept saying he said, “Well, that depends upon what is is”? 

person 2: Yes, he was being asked by the special prosecutor, and he said it depends on the definition of is, meaning are you, basically, are you having sex? 

Did you have sex? And it was sort of like, “Now? Well, no, I’m not.” You know what I mean? 

person 1: Was the special prosecutor Fitzpatrick? Was that the one?  

person 2: No, he was the one that went after Scooter Libby, as I remember. Oh, that’s right. That’s right. It was Kenneth Starr. Ken Starr. I met him and I knew him a little bit. 

He was a very fine person. He was dean of the Pepperdine Law School, and, and he got a really bad … 
 
You can chalk that up to James Carville. He got on TV and he just character assassinated him. “And there, that special prosecutor, he’s a cigarette lawyer. He’s a cigarette lawyer. That’s what he is. He just is sending cigarettes, cigarettes, cigarettes.” 

That’s what he did. I met James Carville once when I was speaking  on a Hillsdale cruise. He was incidentally on the same boat, and he came up to me, and he tried to tell me that the T-34 was the best tank in World War II. I see you’re talking on World War II. The Sherman was …  

And I said, “That’s just so stereotypical, James. Do you have any idea of maintenance and hours of maintenance to make it, you know … ” The T-34 had no radios in it. It stored its shells verydangerously at the front of the compartment and they could blow up. 

It was a very good tank, but it was basically based on a Christie American chassis. And the Sherman, for all of its defects, it was a medium tank. It was not intended for …  

Oh, I was explaining on, “No, no, the Sherman’s no good. It’s no good.” Very dogmatic guy.  

Not to mention that he didn’t … He and Doug Schoen and Mark Penn made sure that Clinton and Dick Morris got the white working class. And they all staged that Sister Souljah moment where they went to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, and they deliberately said to her, and she said, “Why do we Black people kill each other? 

Why don’t we just go for a change and kill white people in their neighborhoods?”  

And he said, “You should be ashamed of you should be ashamed of yourself.” And that that took a lot of independence. They said, “Wow, he’s not that left-wing after all.” He’s known really for a couple of things. 

Whatever you can say about him, in 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, he had a balanced budget. He had a surplus. He was paying down the debt. Now, conservatives will tell you it was because Newt Gingrich forced him to cut, cut, cut.  He did, but he also gave in to an increase in the income tax. That was the big grand deal. 

And it worked. And they had a balanced budget. Had we continued on that we would have no national debt now. We would have paid it off. We wouldn’t be thirty-one trillion in debt.  

So you gotta give him credit for that.  

And I went back not too long ago, I wrote about in “The Dying Citizen,” but if you look at the charter of the ’92 Democratic Convention and the ’96 Democratic, and I think that was written by Mark Penn, maybe people listening will correct me, and Doug Schoen, with input from some other people. 

It’s a Republican … I mean, it says, “We want closed borders. We want legal-only immigration. We want juvenile murderers and violent criminals charged as adults. We want everybody to pay their fair share. We want to make sure people are not cheating on their income taxes. And we are for a strong defense.” 

And you know, he bombed—It was kind of a misadventure—but he bombed [Slobodan] Milosevic and got the Serbs out of Kosovo, seventy-seven days, without congressional authority, of course. 
 
Where he was faulted, he had numerous opportunities to stop, al-Qaeda and [Osama] bin Laden, and he passed up on them. 

He could have stopped it. 

The ‘Performance Art Joke’ at the Heart of the Democratic Socialist Movement

 

person 1: Everyone should notice, if you’re watching this on YouTube or Rumble, that over Victor’s right shoulder are the galleys of his forthcoming book “The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement,” which will be out on Sept. 8. You can go to Amazon and preorder it now. 

I always like the preorder. You order it and it’s pre-publication, but—and it’s the movement.  

person 2: [Donald Trump]‘s not a revolutionary. He’s a counterrevolutionary, Jack. He’s trying to upend the progressive project. The progressive revolution.  

person 1: Well, it’s a—  

person 2: He’s a Thermidor trying to stop the Jacobins.  

person 1: We won’t name names here, but to me, this has been the obvious fight, the size, the scope of the Left, the viciousness of it, the murderousness of it. And many on the right have been involved in circular firing squads too often, while the main enemy is, of course, the Left. But not to get off track. 

Go ahead, Victor. 

person 2: No, you’re right. The thesis of this new book is that, for all of the criticisms of his methodology and style, language, tweeting, I can’t think of another Republican president—maybe you can—who walled the border, nor … And he will finish the wall at the current pace, nor took on the Iranian nuclear bomb project, nor took on the trans issue, nor took on DEI, nor took on the, I guess you would call it, sanctuary cities project. 

I mean, it’s a real counterrevolutionary. I just talked today, Jack, with some House staffers about the Smithsonian. They’re going to be calling in the head of the Smithsonian. When I say they, I mean the Republican House leadership. 

person 1: Mm-hmm. 

And, yeah, people want to find out more about that, Victor. 

On the White House website, there is a link to the full, it’s about a 160-page report on the Smithsonian. 

person 2: I looked at part of it, and, I mean, these people want to rewrite American history as if it was completely evil and there was no self-critique, there was no open discussion, there was no back-and-forth, which there always was. 

There were no 700,000 people who died in a war over slavery. There was no women’s movement. There’s no reason they can explain why 12 million people broke through the border to get here from mostly third-world countries if it was so white and so evil. They can’t explain that.  

They can’t explain why the United States is the only really long-lasting democracy, why it lasted so long. 

They can’t explain anything. Why everybody wants to come here. We saw that with the World Cup.  

And then we had Hasan Piker yesterday addressing democratic socialists in a Mao Zedong suit, and he was listing all of the evils of the United States, and you want to say, “Wait, Mr. Piker. You don’t know anything about this country. You may have been born here, but you spend a lot of your time in Turkey in a very anti-American climate. But you’re wearing a suit that is a replica of the greatest mass murderer in not U.S., not European, in all of history.  

“Any historical framework you want to use, he killed 70 million people, and you’re trying to glorify him by emulation?” 

It makes no sense at all. What are you doing? And he had them all captivated, the audience. And then he went down off the podium, Jack, and with his Mao suit, and then he went into his Porsche Targa, you know, and maybe he, I don’t know, maybe he saw Ro Khanna’s wife coming by in her Range Rover. I don’t know. 

But these people are ridiculous. They’re not just evil, but they’re ridiculous. They’re absolutely absurd. These people enjoy every benefit, every fringe, every indulgence, every appetite of capitalism, and then they start this faculty lounge berating America, berating its economy while they emulate and brag about mass murderers. 

[California Gov.] Gavin Newsom was—we said the other day, you know, capitalism doesn’t work. It worked for you, Gavin. You got a $9 million home. 

person 1: Right. Yeah.  

person 2: Why don’t you open it up to the dispossessed who are the victims of capitalism? You can’t. And your businesses, I guess they’re called PlumpJack.  

To whom do they appeal? They appeal to capitalists of the upper class who can afford your fine wines and cheeses and your ambiance. And then you mock it? It’s all performance art. It’s a joke. It really is, these democratic socialists. 

person 1: I think the revolution is more here than we think it is, Victor. Before we get to Iran and Kuwait, which we want to talk about, since you raised it, Daniel Greenfield has this article. 

It’s titled “25 Million Communists in America.” And let me just read a chunk here. “Despite the countless millions dead at the hands of communist regimes, a significant portion of the electorate has a positive view of communism as a political movement. A recent Cato poll shows that more members of Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, have a positive view of communism than those who have a negative view, with around a third splitting each way. 

“Some of this can be attributed to social media propaganda, the educational system, and popular culture, and helps explain the young activists flocking to the DSA. Forty-three percent of students rate communism favorably and only 29 rate it unfavorably, making it clear that the higher education system isn’t just broken, it’s actively recruiting the next generation into extremism, direct domestic terrorism, and totalitarian ideologies, etc.” 

Twenty-five million is not a small number.  

person 2: I will say that the white population in the United States is controversial because of mixed marriages and everything, but it’s estimated to be somewhere between 68% and 70%. The DSA’s membership list shows that 85% of the DSA members are white. 

So, what we’re talking about is not the upper-middle class. What we’re talking about is not a bunch of people in rural Texas or the Ozarks or Appalachia or here near Kings or Tulare County in the Central Valley of California. This is not a bottoms-up revolt of the masses over the inequities of capitalism. 

This is a movement fueled by the educated, the mostly white, and the rest of the 15%, whose public faces are mostly immigrants and mostly from failed states, as we said earlier.  

And it’s a frustration that they cannot have the consumer lifestyle and their appetites cannot be satisfied with the people they rub shoulders with every day in these environments in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Dallas, etc., Austin. 

That’s what it’s about. And we’ll see if they win a statewide election as socialists. I’m not saying they can’t win if they do the waxen effigy Joe Biden, good old Joe Biden from Scranton. And maybe they can get their rogues’ gallery. They can get good old Graham Platner from Maine, the hardworking oysterman. 

They can get Tim Walz from Minnesota, the roly-poly change-my-own-oil-and-I’ll-figure-out-how-to-load-my-shotgun-in-a-year-from-now guy. And maybe James Talarico, the Bible-thumping evangelical, evangelicus from the lower white middle class. 

You can see that effort to find the elusive unicorn white man of the middle, of the working class, shows you that the agenda does not appeal to anybody. 

President Trump Sparked the Counterrevolution to End the Destruction of America

 

I’d like to speak today about revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries. Whether we realize it or not, we’ve been in a progressive revolutionary cycle for about 50 years.

And by that I mean there has been the effort of most of the Democratic Party, and now the radical elements to accelerate that efforts as emblemized by the democratic socialists to take control of government, expand it, redistribute income so that many people in blue states especially are paying over 10% of their income, in addition to 38% of their federal tax or two or three percent in Obamacare tax and other add-ons.

And it’s not very difficult to pay 50% of your income or more for the taxpayer who’s salaried without much write-offs. And the welfare state, which has distributed over twenty trillion dollars since this started under the Great Society, is getting bigger and bigger, at least until Donald Trump.

And this progressive revolution doesn’t believe in borders. It has let in—we have now 53 million people that were not born in the United States, and in California, it’s over a quarter of the population. It’s all-time high percentage-wise, 16% foreign-born.

They don’t have confidence that you, the people, will buy into the progressive project. And so, they want to import a demographic that is poor and needy on the idea that they will be constituents that will trade their votes for subsidies.

And we saw that with the Somali community in Minnesota, and we’ve seen it with other communities here in California.

And so, the progressive project has given us a real revolution. We never imagined that there were going to be more than two genders or sexes. We never imagined that they would try to normalize biological men taking over women’s sports or dressing among young teenage girls. We never imagined that.

We never imagined that prosecutors would let out career felons who had committed violent acts the same day they were arrested. We didn’t know we were gonna empty the prisons because we felt that punishment, penal punishment was too mean.

We never really felt that our only real democratic country and ally in the Middle East, Israel, we would try to disassociate ourselves, and we would try to romanticize terrorists like Hamas.

But what I’m getting at, this was the progressive project. It was anti-American, it was anti-Western, and it glorified other modes of civilization, so to speak: socialism, communism, anarchism. And it was very critical of the very society who had enriched most Americans.

I say most—the middle class of America is the largest middle class in the world and the most affluent, and our poor are better off than most middle class and upper middle class in other places.

It’s important to remember that there has not been a counter-revolution. Ronald Reagan was the first and really last Republican president that had an economic counterrevolution. It was quite successful. He lowered the tax rate. He deregulated the economy, and by 1983-84, he was growing the economy at 7% GDP growth.

And then, of course, that was watered down in subsequent years. But the two Bushes, candidates like John McCain, Bob Dole, Mitt Romney, their agenda was to slow down the revolution, but not to try to overturn it.

What do I mean by slow down? Kind of advise Hollywood that they didn’t have to be so anti-American and have movies that talked about race, class, and gender ad nauseam. Try to tell professional sports not to be weaponized.

Try to tell K-12, calm it down a little bit. We don’t need sex education in the first grade, and there’s nothing wrong with a teacher occasionally giving a prayer that she inadvertently forgot was illegal.

Calm down. You don’t need to send the FBI to school board meetings, that kind of thing. We don’t need to take the knee at sports and ridicule “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

So, this revolution had infiltrated K-12, the corporate boardroom, the universities especially, the media, the foundations, and popular culture. But the Republican and conservative movement had just tried to slow it down.

And then came Donald Trump.

He was not—he’s surely not a revolutionary. We were in the middle of a revolution, but he was not a trimmer either. He was a true counterrevolutionary.

The first term, he was not familiar with Washington. He made appointments with people who did not agree with him—not just they did not agree with his methodology, but they didn’t agree with his counter-revolutionary agenda.

But it was still in places working. And what was the result? The result was COVID-19 and the COVID-19 lockdown, and it was aborted.

The second time he came around, he tried to finish the counterrevolution. So he pretty much demolished the subsidies for green energy and re-emphasized oil and gas production, and we became the greatest producer of oil and gas in the history of civilization.

He sort of said, “We’re not going to regulate AI and robotics, cryptocurrency, genetic engineering, drone. We’re not gonna legislate them out of business. We’re not gonna have antitrust and complete investigations of all these people. We’re gonna promote it. We’re going to promote these new innovations and new technologies.”

And lo and behold, we’re ahead of the Chinese in almost all of them now.

He didn’t just say, “I am worried about the military. It may be that DEI has discouraged a particular demographic that over generation after generation has provided the largest percentage of our combat units, namely white males.”

He did away with DEI. And what was the result? All of a sudden, we have met all of our recruitment figures.

He didn’t just say, “Well, the border’s been open. I know that we’ve let in 10 million people a year over four years. I know that 10,000 were coming a day under Biden. I understand that, so maybe I’ll say no more catch and release. Or maybe you have to apply for refugee status in, say, Mexico.”

No, no.

He said, “I’m going to finish the wall. I’m not gonna let anybody stop me. This time there’s going to be a wall, and we are going to deport people. We’re gonna deport a million people in my first year, and we’re gonna make sure a million others self-deport, and we’re gonna go after 500,000 with criminal records.”

He didn’t just say, “I am very worried about Latin America.

“Under [Barack] Obama and under [Joe] Biden, we saw a wave of left-wing governments, and the Panama Canal is in danger. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves really in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world, and they are exporting convicts and drugs to the United States.”

He didn’t just say that.

He went down there and basically threatened Panama that we would take over the canal unless they honored our Panama Canal treaty and expelled the Chinese from trying to control the entry and exits of the canal.

He said to [Nicolas] Maduro, “You better stop because you’re exporting terror and communism and bullying your neighbors.”

He didn’t, and he extradited him and ended that threat.

And now as we look at Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, I could go on, they’re mostly center right.

So, he staged a strong counterrevolution by reinforcing the Monroe Doctrine that had been rejected by the Left, and he made South America and Central America now a free market and, for the most part, a society that’s pro-American, with some notable exceptions.

For example, in Nicaragua, a beleaguered Daniel Ortega and a beleaguered Castroite government in Cuba that are both now for the first time in years isolated.

In addition to that, he made our allies stronger. He used unorthodox methods. He was the proverbial gunslinger who came in to help the townspeople who were ossified and couldn’t deal with the robber barons or the cattle barons or the outlaws, and then he cleaned up the town, and then they got tired of him because of his methodology and rhetoric.

But nonetheless, he said to our allies, “We’re not gonna be in NATO unless you’re real NATO members. You’re not NATO members. You’re not arming yourself. You’re not abiding by your commitments.”

Same held true to Canada. And lo and behold, now we have much stronger allies, and the alliance is stronger than ever.

What am I getting at? Donald Trump is not a revolutionary. He’s a counterrevolutionary.

And what is he trying to do? He’s trying to undo the entire half-century progressive project within four years. That’s an impossible task. And yet he’s trying to do it.

He’s the first authentic counterrevolutionary since Andrew Jackson.

Democratic Socialists Think America Is Somehow Worse Than Mass Murderer Mao Zedong

 

We’re hearing more and more from the Democratic Socialists of America about all of the sins of America and very little of the good things we’ve done to ourselves and to the world at large on our 250th birthday. 

What is it, the nature of this DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, and the diversity, equity, inclusion criticism that we were racist, sexist, nativist, cruel, ruthless, etc., etc.  

But my question is, compared to what? 

Mao Zedong? He killed 70 million people. He was the greatest mass murderer in history, and that government is still communist in an unbroken chain from [Chinese leader] Xi [Jinping] all the way back to Mao. Do we ever talk about that or the million people who are in concentration camps in China? 

Compared to historically to the Aztecs? We’re told the Aztecs were great people. They had an empire, but they crushed over a million people to create their empire. Some years, they sacrificed up to 10,000, maybe 15,000 a year of conquered tribes of fellow Indigenous people. 

Do we remember Shaka Zulu, the 19th-century creator of the Zulu nation? He was responsible for a genocide in crushing his enemies that probably cost over a million lives. 

Do we really think that the Native Americans were living in paradise until Europeans came? The story of Native Americans was conquest, enslavement, butchery of rival tribes. 

So, what is going on? 

We have a tradition in the West of self-criticism. That’s what makes us different. Rationalism, self-criticism, improvement. But when that goes to an extreme, it ventures from self-criticism and self-reflection to nihilism, and it’s quite destructive. 

So, let’s just take a look at where the United States is compared to the rest. 

Look at immigration. Why do a million people, or 2 million people, 10,000 a day under Joe Biden, from very poor countries, most of them from what we would call the former Third World that were victims of socialism, why do they risk their lives coming here every year? 

Why do all these critics of the United States … [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], why did her parents want to come here? Why did [Rep.] Ilhan Omar’s father want to come here? Why did [Rep.] Rashida Tlaib’s father want to come here? Why did [New York City Mayor] Zohran Mamdani’s parents want to come? Was it so bad? 

Can’t they ever acknowledge that they came here because they had greater security, they had greater freedom, they had greater economic opportunity? And if they had criticisms, it was never enough that they wanted to go back to the places that they praised, but only from a distance and in the abstract. 

The truth is that the poor in the United States are better off than most of the middle classes in every other country. We saw that in the World Cup when middle- and upper-middle-class Europeans came over, and unlike … to watch the games, and unlike most tourists, they didn’t just stick on the coasts. They went to places in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, the South, and the Midwest. 

And they found two things. One, Americans were amazingly friendly and open, upbeat, not downers and drab, and everything’s terrible, which they expected from their experiences in Europe. 

And more importantly, they were affluent. They had big homes. They had air conditioning. the poor had appurtenances. Everybody has a cell phone. Nobody worries about the cost, apparently. 

There’s also then the hypocrisy of a lot of our critics. And let me just give you an example of a few of them. 

Hasan Piker is a child of very, very wealthy Turkish immigrants that became U.S. citizens. He grew up for much of his life in Turkey. He gave a talk the other day in a Mao suit to Democratic Socialists of America. Think about that. He put on the uniform, so to speak, of the greatest mass murderer in history, and then he denounced capitalism. 

But he didn’t denounce capitalism in his own life because his parents are multimillionaires. He is a multimillionaire, and he drives a, what? $120,000 Porsche. Isn’t that a luxury of the bourgeoisie? 

And then there’s Zohran Mamdani, of course. His family, as I pointed out numerous times, was the elite of the elite of the elite in Uganda, a community of expatriates, Indians, from India that control 60% of the wealth, and they’re only 1% of the population. 

And he grew up in privilege here. He had a very nice home. He has a family estate on Lake Victoria, of all places. 

Ro Khanna, the congressman from California, he always is pointing out the evils of Republicans, and as he looks at the drift of the Democratic Party, he puts his finger in the wind, and he says socialism is the answer. Ro Khanna does. 

But he’s a multimillionaire. His father-in-law is one of the wealthiest members of the Indian American community, probably worth $500 or $600 million. His own children have been deeded golf courses. His wife drives a $190,000 Range Rover, and he’s lecturing us about our shortfalls? 

And then, of course, we come to [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom. He wants to get in on the socialist craze, so he said the other day, as is his wont, moving his arms around and being very slick and glib, that capitalism fails. It didn’t work. 

It worked for you, Gavin. You have a $9 million home. You are the, basically, the quote-unquote, “protégé” of the Gordon Getty oil for- fortune, who backed all of your business opportunities. 

Graham Platner, the now-disgraced madman who thought he was going to be senator with a Nazi tattoo. He criticized capitalism. He said that, you know, he was drifting towards socialism, very critical of America. 

But he really wasn’t a small-business person. He was a construct. His mother and father, who were very wealthy, one owned an upscale restaurant, the other was a well-known, often corporate real estate lawyer. They set him up in business, and they were his only client, and they allowed him to have land to use. 

So, what I’m getting at is most of this criticism of America is not coming from the so-called poor. It’s not coming from the lower middle classes. It’s coming from elites in urban enclaves who have done very well with capitalism, and they feel that by mouthing these socialist and communist platitudes, it’s a way to get power within the Democratic Party first, and then within the United States second. 

And remember one thing, this is not new. Most of the violent socialist communist movements in history, whether we look at the anarchist of the late 19th century, or whether we look at the Bolsheviks of 1905 all the way up to the Russian Revolution of 1917, or we look at the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, especially the Reign of Terror, 1792 and 1793, when a bunch of very wealthy, this should sound familiar, socialists hijacked the French Revolution and turned it into a Stalinist-like murder spree. 

They all had one thing in common. They were very, very wealthy, and they hated the very system that had enriched them, and they wanted to try out a whole series of nihilist projects on whom? On the middle class and the poor, with the proviso that none of their ideology would ever apply to themselves.