Monday, July 07, 2025

Hell Freezes Over As Congressional Republicans Don’t Blow It

 

The Democrat crowing about how the Big Beautiful Bill is going to be the doom of the Republicans is about as convincing as Zohran Mamdami’s college app claim that he’s a black guy; in his defense, he is more Indian than Elizabeth Warren, in a manner of speaking. Though their social media doofuses and regime media toe-sucks are hooting about how Hakeem Jeffries set a record for running his fool mouth and how voters will totally be angry with the GOP for killing eleventy million people – the BBB is even deadlier than net neutrality, climate change, and not allowing confused children mutilate themselves to conform to their delusions combined – this is a huge and humiliating loss. It is also a rare exception to the usual GOP MO of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way – this victory capped perhaps the most potent first six months of a presidency ever. Donald Trump came in kicking commie tush, and for the last half-year, he’s been landing score after score while melting every temporary setback his detractors have dealt him. Just a month ago, Iran had a nuclear program. Now, it’s a smoking ruin. Today, no innocent honor student undocumented migrant can walk home from reading to orphans without living in fear that ICE will disappear him into an alligator-guarded gulag. DEI is DOA, the stock market is setting records, and colleges are bending the knee to the hated King. Heck, he has even ended the Rwanda-Congo War and brought peace to Zohran Mamdami’s people. 

But, without the BBB passing, it would have been all for naught. The Democrats knew it, and they went all out to stop it. When the sky doesn’t fall and the Dow soars higher, they get to explain, “Sure, Trump’s brought America a new Golden Age, but his tweets are still really mean!” 

Another winner: J.D. Vance, whose tie-breaking vote got the Senate buy-in. But it was his behind-the-scenes work that helped smooth the way. This guy was deep in the mix, making it happen, and he will get credit for it. Though we have an incredible bench, the nomination is pretty much his in 3.5 years. Right now, the big question is who the Dems will pick to star as McGovern Mondale in the 2028 production of “When In Doubt, Go Left 3: We’re Due for a Win, Right?”

It’s so weird to be saying good things about GOP congressional leaders, but John Thune – he sounds like an MCU villain who fights Iron Man – made it happen without blowing up the filibuster or setting a bad precedent. This was the kind of masterful performance you would expect of Mitch McConnell – yes, I know you curse his name, but until now, he was the unchallenged master of senatorial strategy and minutiae. Totally out from Cocaine Mitch’s shadow, he made the hard calls that cut some of our favorite little tidbits from the bill in order to pass the big stuff. Someone has to be the bad guy. Someone has to make us mad to get things done. Thune did it without being condescending or obnoxious. We now know we have a Senate majority leader who makes it happen. That will serve us well when we build on this win.

Okay, Mike Johnson. Who the hell is this guy? Where did he come from? When he got voted Speaker, most of us thought he was an asterisk on a placeholder. Mitch would have to score him an eight-ball of his cocaine just to get the preternaturally serene southerner up to “mild-mannered.” And yet, he did the impossible, again and again, somehow bringing together utterly incompatible factions to create that nearly invisible area of overlap in the Venn Diagram that was the BBB. He did the impossible. And you know what else they are saying is impossible? Expanding the House GOP majority in 2026.

Another winner…hear me out. The Freedom Caucus. Even the hardest conservatives have gotten frustrated with them when it looked like they were going to kill the deal time and time again. We agree with them on the merits of spending – given the chance, I’d replace food stamps with community gruel pots– but still, they often drive us crazy. But that’s their job. They push things right. This BBB is significantly more right-wing than it would have been without their brinkmanship. Would they have tanked it? Maybe. They have to keep that possibility out there even when it looks suicidal. The Freedom Caucus is basically Cleavon Little in “Blazing Saddles,” and the rest of the House are the people of Rock Ridge wondering if they are just crazy enough to do it

And the losers? I mean, besides the entire Democrat Party? The Lol-bertarian Twins Rand Paul and Thomas Massie believed their own hype of being stalwart, principled iconoclasts standing in the breach. The Freedom Caucus got something by being a pain; these two got zilch and succeeded in doing what many believed impossible – making libertarians even more annoying. There’s no universe where their ideological fantasies pass any House or Senate that might ever exist on Earth.

Trump must crush Massie unmercifully as a cautionary example of those who don’t get on the team. Paul still has a cycle to get his head right, but we’re tired of smug talk. We want wins on the scoreboard, not some dork showboating for sophomoric incel fanboys by failing to accomplish anything except making sure no one else can accomplish anything, either. And if the passage of the BBB helps rid us of them, that’s yet another reason to celebrate.

Imagine – celebrating what the GOP has done. Well, that’s the reality, at least today. Tomorrow, it might be back to monkey business as usual, but we should savor this while we can.

What the First 6 Months of the Trump Admin Have Revealed About Our ‘Experts’

 

The first six months of the Donald Trump administration have not been kind to the experts and the degree-holding classes.

Almost daily during the tariff hysterias of March, we were told by university economists and most of the Ph.Ds. employed in investment and finance that the U.S. was headed toward a downward, if not recessionary, spiral.

Most economists lectured that trade deficits did not really matter. Or they insisted that the cures to reduce them were worse than the $1.1 trillion deficit itself.

They reminded us that free, rather than fair, trade alone ensured prosperity.

So, the result of Trump’s foolhardy tariff talk would be an impending recession. America would soon suffer rising joblessness, inflationor rather a return to stagflation—and likely little, if any, increase in tariff revenue as trade volume declined.

Instead, recent data show increases in tariff revenue. Personal real income and savings were up. Job creation exceeded prognoses. There was no surge in inflation. The supposedly “crashed” stock market reached historic highs.

Common-sense Americans might not have been surprised. The prior stock market frenzy was predicated on what was, in theory, supposed to have happened rather than what was likely to occur. After all, if tariffs were so toxic and surpluses irrelevant, why did our affluent European and Asian trading rivals insist on both surpluses and protective tariffs?

Most Americans recalled that the mere threat of tariffs and Trump’s jawboning had led to several trillion dollars in promised foreign investment and at least some plans to relocate manufacturing and assembly back to the United States. Would that change in direction not lead to business optimism and eventually more jobs? Would countries purposely running up huge surpluses through asymmetrical trade practices not have far more to lose in negotiations than those suffering gargantuan deficits?

Were Trump’s art-of-the-deal threats of prohibitive tariffs not mere starting points in negotiations that would eventually lead to likely agreements more favorable to the U.S. than in the past and moderate rather than punitive tariffs?

Would not the value of the huge American consumer market mean that our trade partners, who were racking up substantial surpluses, would agree they could afford modest tariffs and trim their substantial profit margins rather than suicidally price themselves out of a lucrative market entirely?

Economists and bureaucrats were equally wrong on the border.

We were told for four years that only “comprehensive immigration reform” would stop illegal immigration. In fact, most Americans differed. They knew firsthand that we had more than enough immigration laws, but had elected as President Joe Biden, who deliberately destroyed borders and had no intention of enforcing existing laws.

When Trump promised that he would ensure that, instead of 10,000 foreign nationals entering illegally each day, within a month, no one would, our experts scoffed. But if the border patrol went from ignoring or even aiding illegal immigrants to stopping them right at the border, why would such a prediction be wrong?

Those favoring a reduction in illegal immigration and deportations also argued that crime would fall, and citizen job opportunities would increase, given an estimated 500,000 aliens with criminal records had entered illegally during the Biden administration, while millions of other illegal aliens were working off the books, for cash, and often at reduced wages.

Indeed, once the border was closed tightly, hundreds of thousands were returned to their country, and employers began turning to U.S. citizens. Job opportunities did increase. Crime did go down. Legal-only immigration regained its preferred status over illegal entry.

Trump talked of trying voluntary deportation—again to wide ridicule from immigration “experts.” But why would not a million illegal aliens wish to return home “voluntarily”—if they were given free flights, a $1,000 bonus, and, most importantly, a chance later to reapply for legal entry once they arrived home?

Many of our national security experts warned that taking out Iran’s nuclear sites was a fool’s errand. It would supposedly unleash a Middle East tsunami of instability. It would cause a wave of terrorism. It would send oil prices skyrocketing. It would not work, ensuring Iran would soon reply with nuclear weapons.

In fact, oil prices decreased after the American bombing. A 25-minute entrance into Iranian airspace and bombing led to a ceasefire, not a conflagration.

As for a big power standoff, World War III, and 30,000 dead, common sense asked why China would wish the Strait of Hormuz to close, given that it imports half of all Middle Eastern oil produced?

Why would Russia—bogged down in Ukraine and suffering nearly a million casualties—wish to mix it up in Iran, after ignominiously fleeing Syria and the fall of its Assad clients?

Russia usually thinks of Russia, period. It does not lament when tensions elsewhere are expected to spike oil prices. Why would Russia resupply Iran’s destroyed Russian-made anti-aircraft systems, when it was desperate to ward off Ukrainian air attacks on its homeland, and Iran would likely again lose any imported replacements?

As for waves of terror, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis have suffered enormous losses from Israel. Their leadership has been decapitated; their streams of Iranian money have been mostly truncated. Why would they rush to Iran’s side to war with Israel, when Iran did not come to their aid when they were battling and losing to the Israelis?

Has a theater-wide war really ever started when one side entered and left enemy territory in 25 minutes, suffering no casualties and likely killing few of the enemy?

As far as the extent of damage to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, why should we believe our expert pundit class?

Prior to the American and Israeli bombing, many of them warned that Iran was not on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon, and therefore, there was little need for any such preemptive action.

Then, post facto, the same experts flipped. Now they claimed, after the bombing that severely damaged most Iranian nuclear sites, that there was an increased threat, given that some enriched uranium (which they had previously discounted) surely had survived and thus marked a new existential danger of an Iranian nuclear bomb.

Was Trump really going to “blow up”, “destroy” or “cripple” NATO, as our diplomatic experts insisted, when his first-term jawboning led from six to 23 nations meeting their 2% of gross domestic product defense spending promises?

Given two ongoing theater-wide wars, given Trump’s past correct predictions about the dangers of the Nord Stream II pipeline, given the vulnerability of an anemic NATO to Russian expansionism, and given that Russian leader Vladimir Putin did not invade during Trump’s first term, unlike the three presidencies before and after his own, why wouldn’t NATO agree to rearm to 5%, and appreciate Trump’s efforts both to bolster the capability of the alliance and the need to end the Ukraine war?

Why were our “scientific” pollsters so wrong in the last three presidential elections, and so at odds with the clearly discernible electoral shifts in the general electorate? Where were crackpot ideas like defund the police, transgender males competing in women’s sports, and open borders first born and nurtured?

Answer: the university, and higher education in general.

The list of wrongheaded, groupthink, and degreed expertise could be vastly expanded. We remember the “51 intelligence authorities” who swore the Hunter Biden laptop was “likely” cooked up by the Russians. Our best and brightest economists signed letters insisting that Biden’s multitrillion-dollar wasteful spending would not result in inflation spikes. Our global warming professors’ past predictions should have ensured that Americans were now boiling, with tidal waves destroying beachfront communities, including Barack Obama’s two beachfront multimillion-dollar estates.

Our legal eagles, after learning nothing from the bogus Mueller investigation and adolescent Steele dossier, but with impressive Ivy League degrees, pontificated for years that, by now, Trump would be in jail for life, given 91 “walls are closing in” and “bombshell” indictments.

So why are the degreed classes so wrong and yet so arrogantly never learn anything from their past flawed predictions?

One, our experts usually receive degrees from our supposedly marquee universities. But as we are now learning from long overdue autopsies of institutionalized campus racial bias, neo-racial segregation, 50%-plus price-gauging surcharges on federal grants, and rabid antisemitism, higher education in America has become anti-enlightenment. Universities now wage war against free-thinkers, free speech, free expression, and anything that freely questions the deductive groupthink of the diversity/equity/inclusion commissariat, and global warming orthodoxies.

The degreed expert classes emerge from universities whose faculties are 90% to 95% left-wing and whose administrations are overstaffed and terrified of their radical students. The wonder is not that the experts are incompetent and biased, but that there are a brave few who are not.

Two, Trump drove the degreed class insane to the degree it could no longer, even if it were willing and able (and it was not), offer empirical assessments of his policies. From his crude speech to his orange skin to his Queens accent to his MAGA base to his remarkable counterintuitive successes and to his disdain for the bicoastal elite, our embarrassing experts would rather be dead wrong and anti-Trump than correct in their assessments—if they in any small way helped Trump.

Three, universities are not just biased, but increasingly mediocre and ever more isolated from working Americans and their commonsense approaches to problem solving. Ph.D. programs in general are not as rigorous as they were even two decades ago. Grading, assessments, and evaluations in professional schools must increasingly weigh non-meritocratic criteria, given their admissions and hiring protocols are not based on disinterested evaluation of past work and expertise.

The vast endowments of elite campuses, the huge profit-making foreign enrollments, and the assured, steady stream of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal aid created a sense of fiscal unreality, moral smugness, unearned superiority, and ultimately, blindness to just how isolated and disliked the professoriate had become.

But the public has caught on that too many Ivy-League presidents were increasingly a mediocre, if not incompetent, bunch. Most university economists could not run a small business. The military academies did not always turn out the best generals and admirals. The most engaging biographers were not professors. And plumbers and electricians were usually more skilled in their trades than most journalist graduates were in their reporting.

Add it all up, and the reputation of our predictors, prognosticators, and experts has been radically devalued to the point of utter worthlessness.

Elon Musk’s ‘America Party’ Poses Threat to GOP

Elon Musk, as we all know now, has had a rupture. The friendship between himself and President Donald Trump has been ruptured. Now, they’re not just frenemies, but they’re kind of hostiles. And they’re going back and forth against each other.

This is a tragedy because we have the world’s richest and probably most creative man versus one of the most successful politicians of the 20th and 21st centuries, Donald Trump, and wonderful president so far. And they should be working together.

The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now

But now Elon Musk, in his anger, has decided to create a new party called the “[America] Party.” And he outlined the platform. And whether it’s on regulation, taxes, tariffs, free speech, it’s very Republican. It’s not close at all to the Democratic platform. But it’s really—it’s almost identical to the Libertarian Party. And it’s designed, I’m afraid, to lose seats for the Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections and maybe even, if he were to be successful, in the 2028 presidential election.

A word of caution: All of us know the history of third-party movements, and it’s not very good. And I’ll get to that in a second. So it would be logical and probably wise to say that, well, this is crazy. Elon Musk is just nursing a grudge. He’s going to spend a lot of money. And the American party is going to go nowhere.

Remember the name “American party,” it’s kind of reminiscent—I don’t know if that was intended, of course, it wasn’t. But in 1968, George Wallace and Curtis LeMay—one of my heroes—the head of the B-29 program in World War II, ran as a third party on the American Independent Party. They added ”Independent,” but that was an American party, third party—they got about 8% of the vote. A lot of people think that ’68 vote, because he was a Democrat, hurt Hubert Humphrey more than it did Richard Nixon. It might have swung the election.

So it’s kind of an effort to hurt Donald Trump, both in the Congress and his successor in four years. But here’s the question that I have for Elon Musk, and that is, does he really believe that he can pull this off? Apparently, he does.

I would like to say, as I said, that it’s impossible that he can do it. But I would also have said 10 years ago it’s impossible that anybody can break into the big three auto companies. We had American Motors dropped out. Remember the DeLorean automobile, and I think that was the ’70s. That didn’t make it. He did. Tesla still has the highest stock value of the big three.

I would’ve thought no one could ever challenge NASA—that government monopoly. He did. I thought, wow, he paid so much for Twitter. How could he—you can’t just rebrand it ”X” and after paying three times its market value, be a force. Would it work? He did it. I don’t need to get into Starlink. So everything he’s done is successful. So people should be very careful about writing a third-party movement off.

But that being said, let’s just look at similar cases in history. In 1980, John Anderson, a moderate Republican, didn’t get along with Ronald Reagan. He said he was going to run as a third party. Remember that Reagan, until about the last three weeks of the campaign, was running behind Jimmy Carter. And everybody said John Anderson, if he takes 6% or 7%—which he did—of the vote, Reagan will lose. Reagan won. And remember, “There you go again, Jimmy Carter,” in that one very dramatic debate.

I mentioned the 1968 George Wallace campaign. I think that may have hurt Humphrey. And then, some of you were going to say, “Well, wait a minute, Victor. George Wallace, politically, was closer to Richard Nixon than he was Hubert Humphrey. So that’s a wash.”

If you look at the two third-party runs by Ross Perot—remember 1992? He really had a grudge against the Bushes. He ran and he got almost 19% of the vote. And if you look at the margin that Bill Clinton won by, about eight or nine points, that did hurt George H.W. Bush. I do think that most people felt that Ross Perot was more conservative than liberal and closer to the Bush position than he was the Clinton. And that third-party effort in ’92 spoiled the reelection bit of George H.W. Bush in large part.

He did it again in 1996. Everybody writes that second attempt off. He pulled out. He was all over the map. He still won almost 9% of the vote.

And if you add up all of Bob Dole’s votes, popular votes, and Ross Perot’s—and I think he was much closer to Bob Dole than he was to Bill Clinton, who was running for reelection—it’s almost equal to the Clinton vote, may or may not had a role.

Strom Thurmond, he won four states as a Dixiecrat in the 1948 election. And boy, everybody said that Harry Truman was running behind, well behind Thomas Dewey, and if Strom Thurmond bolted the party, they were done for. He took four states, won those electoral votes. Harry Truman still, in a comeback surprise, won by over four points. It had no effect.

There’s two times I think we could finish by saying third parties did really matter. And one was in 1912. Teddy Roosevelt, he had taken over after the assassination of William McKinley. He’d finished out a first full term. It was his second term. He wanted to run again. And his appointed successor—I mean, the person that he endorsed—William Howard Taft, he felt was not progressive enough. So he ran against him. And he had a third party—not the American party, but the Bull Moose Party.

And what happened? He won 27% of the vote. William Howard Taft only, I think he got six electoral—he only won six states. And he only won 23%. But here’s the kicker. If you had put Teddy Roosevelt’s votes with William Howard Taft, they would’ve creamed Woodrow Wilson, who was a hard-left progressive. So that was a spoiler election.

The other one was a famous one in 1860, when Stephen Douglas, who had those famous debates in the senatorial race in Illinois against Abraham Lincoln, was the Democratic nominee against Abraham Lincoln.

John Breckinridge broke off from the Democratic Party and had a Southern Democratic Party. And he took enough votes away from Stephen Douglas that got Abraham Lincoln elected president with—thank God—only 40% of the vote.

What I am getting at is there is no record ever that a third-party candidate can win the presidency or will make a fundamental change in the makeup of the Senate or the House.

I don’t think in the next midterm election there’s going to be [America] Party senators or representatives. However, they do, in some cases, affect elections. And for the most part, it’s unpredictable.

Nobody knows what the situation will be in 2028. But Elon Musk must know that it won’t be a constructive role, that he is more akin to Donald Trump and the conservative movement than he is the people who have persecuted him and tried to put him out of business.

So let’s hope that he looks at history, comes to his senses, and says, “For all my disagreements with Donald Trump, they pale in comparison to what has become of the Democratic Party.”

 

A Reminder of What the 4th of July Means

 

Today is the 4th of July, and I’d like to remind everybody what the 4th of July is.

It’s the formal date when the Second Continental Congress—about a year and four months after the shots heard around the world, the first shots of the Revolutionary War at Lexington and Concord, were fired—the Second Continental Congress decided to formally disband the 13 colonies from Great Britain.

Now, two days earlier, Richard Henry Lee of the famous Lee family—he was the first cousin of Light Horse Harry Lee, the father of Robert E. Lee—had introduced an amendment called the Lee Resolution that formally was approved and said we are divorcing ourselves from Great Britain. But two days later, John Adams and mostly Thomas Jefferson decided they needed a more holistic document that would list 23 grievances, why it was necessary. So that version of Jefferson, and to a lesser extent, Adams, became the formal Declaration of Independence. And it was ratified on July 4th.

And we all know it from our high school days, or we should. The first famous line, “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to disband …” And then, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” the first line of the second paragraph. So, it’s a foundational document.

And it doesn’t mean that men are God. When Jefferson wrote “that all men are created equal,” it doesn’t mean that they were equal at that time. But it gave an aspirational goal that, if you think about it, would put the Founders out of business, so to speak. Because if all men are created equal and you create this wonderful place, and you don’t have a blood and soil argument that only the people who were here and related to the Founders by race and ethnicity are Americans, but all men are equal, people will flock to the United States. And they might not look like the original Founders. But they would represent the original Founders. They would be the same type of people by ideas and values.

And so the idea of America was really established with the 4th of July. And we’re going to have the 250th anniversary a year from now that will celebrate the 250 years of the United States of America. Today, it’s the 249th anniversary of the 4th of July. This is not the Constitution that will be ratified in 1787 and will formally establish the government. Fourth of July declares that the 13 colonies who have been at war with Great Britain for about 14 or 15 months, and are operating on what we will call the Articles of Confederation, will then free themselves at the Battle of Yorktown. And then they will have a new type of government, which we now call the U.S. Constitution.

There’s a couple of other things to remember on the 4th of July. The British have a very different idea than we do when they look at the 23 grievances. They said, “Wow, you guys have it pretty easy. We’ve been as nice to you, or better, than the people in Canada. And we have all these Commonwealths and they’re not revolting.” And if you want to look at an interesting document, read “The Great Historian.” A good friend of mine, Andrew Roberts, has addressed all 23 grievances from the British point of view and said, “Ah, that was nothing. Oh, they were crybabies. You shouldn’t have done it.”

It was an interesting argument. But it has a phenomenal effect on history because if you look at Canada, if you look at New Zealand, if you look at the former South Africa, if you look at any of the British commonwealths, or for that matter, any country in Europe, they follow a parliamentary system. But the Founders who created the United States—and through this Revolutionary War learned about what was wrong with the British and what were the alternatives for consensual government, came up with this tripartite based on Montesquieu and the separation of powers. It goes back to the Spartan and Cretan constitution, antiquity. They came up with a unique government of checks and balances—Supreme Court, Congress, president. Executive, legislative, judicial. All equal branches. All checking each other and balancing each other, based on a system of federalism, that each state would have the right to be autonomous and free, as long as it did not contradict or conflict with the laws of the union itself. And they solve that problem of the Articles of Confederation.

And this system, 249 years ago, whether it persevered—I don’t know how it persevered in the Revolutionary War. The Americans didn’t have a lot of assets. The French helped a great deal. But then we had the War of 1812. The War of 1848. And of course, the American Civil War, where 700,000 Americans died trying to abolish slavery, and some trying to perpetuate it. And then, of course, we had the Spanish-American War. And then World War I, where 117,000 Americans died. Two million of them went across the Atlantic Ocean to save France and Britain from German precisionism or German autocracy.

And yet, less than 22 years later, the United States would be in another world war, and we would lose about 420,000. And then the Korean War, 1950 to 1953—35,000. Fifty-six thousand in Vietnam. 

So, it’s very valuable on this date, to realize that from time to time, from generation to generation, thousands of Americans have fought to protect the ideas of the American Revolution and the United States itself.

And on this July 4th, we need to give them a due. And remember what they did, who they were, and why they did it.

Thursday, July 03, 2025

The End of Patriotism?

 

America has a major problem: nearly half of Americans -- 42% -- don't believe in America. According to Gallup, just 58% of adults say they are either "extremely" or "somewhat" proud to be American. That number has been in steep decline for a decade: In 2004, that number was 91%, and was still 81% as of 2016. Then it began to tumble, and it hasn't recovered.

The trend isn't equivalent across the political spectrum. Republicans have always been far prouder of their country: their pride number has never dropped below 84% in 2022, and currently stands at 92%. The serious decline is located among independents, who have dropped from 76% in 2013 to 53% today, and Democrats, who plummeted from 80% to 36% during that same period. Furthermore, Americans' age correlates highly with levels of American pride: 83% of the Silent Generation venerates the country, as do 75% of Baby Boomers and 71% of Generation Xers -- but just 58% of Millennials and 41% of Generation Z do.

So, what precisely happened?

The answer is simple: Republicans started winning, and Democrats spiraled off. President Donald Trump's victory in 2016 sent Democrats spiraling into an anti-American black hole, with their pride in America dropping off a cliff during the first Trump term, recovering only moderately during Joe Biden's term (62% in 2021), and then plummeting again this year. Democrats embraced a new and extreme anti-American point of view, reflected most obviously in the elevation of figures like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; and now New York Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani.

These figures, emblems of a new wave in the Democratic Party, are disaffected with America in general. If the promise of Barack Obama is that the vessel of the Democratic Party could be used to bottle the fire and fervor of the revolutionary left, these radicals believe that all bottles must be shattered -- that the institutions of the United States must be exploded entirely. They see the reelection of Donald Trump as indicative of a deep rot at the heart of the American experiment, and wish to eviscerate the fundamental ideas of that experiment. They champion the supposed virtue of the Third World and the supposed evil of the United States; the supposed beauties of socialism and evils of capitalism; the supposed virtue of transgressive social values and the supposed evils of traditionalism. They believe that America's unique Constitution is a framework for oppression; they believe that rights are mere guises for despotic power, and that duties are cynically placed fetters upon their true selves. They are, as I describe in my upcoming book, "Lions and Scavengers," scavengers: They are all about tearing down, not about building something new.

They have taken over the Democratic Party -- and they are making extraordinary inroads among younger Americans. Ironically, that's due to the failure of the very institutions the political left hijacked and misused for decades: Democrats heavily regulated and taxed the free market and then blamed the free market for recession or inflation; Democrats hijacked our educational institutions to pay off their union cronies and indoctrinate young people in their mindset and then blamed capitalists for failing to pay off young people's debts; Democrats abused our scientific and governmental institutions and then suggested that Republican resistance was actually Biblical fundamentalism rearing its ugly head.

Meanwhile, political independents grow increasingly discouraged by our politics. They see Republicans shifting the deck chairs atop the Titanic of state as Democrats eagerly drill more holes in the hull -- and they are increasingly depressed. They are not wrong to be. But they are wrong to believe that they can or should chart a middle course between those who love America and her founding principles and those who despise them. We should all be proud of America, the greatest country in the history of the world, with all of its faults and flaws. And we should work to correct those faults and flaws rather than seeking its overthrow, or despairing and throwing up our hands.