From Our Generation

Days before early voting, there is no sign of an October surprise, but plenty of coverage built to steer voters. The hosts argue nearly every major outlet has picked a side. They point to a Texas Democratic Senate candidate who vanished for two weeks while his campaign cited the flu, amid unconfirmed reports of a mental health stay that the campaign denies and the press has not chased. Late claims are hard to disprove before votes are cast, which is exactly why they get made. The closer the election, the less time the truth has to catch up.

Democrats in swing-state Senate races now run on Medicare for All. The hosts note Medicare is not free: they pay about $1,000 a month in premiums for two, plus co-pays, and say the money is not set aside for future costs. Medicare covers roughly 60 million people, about a fifth of the country, so covering everyone would cost about five times as much. They add that insurers negotiate inflated list prices almost nobody pays, so healthcare has no real price system, and that providers and insurers are both fighting the executive order requiring posted cash prices. Changing who pays does not fix a market with no visible prices.

The hosts say the countries that already tried it are the best evidence. Canada's Old Age Security bill is projected to climb from $77.8 billion in 2023 to $136 billion by 2035 and $276 billion by 2060, with long waits for specialists and euthanasia now the third leading cause of death. In France, social charges take 22 to 25 percent of median income on top of a 45 percent top rate starting near $200,000, and the deficit sits at 5.5 percent of GDP against a 2 percent EU limit. French stock markets total $4.6 trillion against roughly $90 trillion for the U.S., and France has 51 billionaires to America's nearly 1,000. Before copying a model, check where it ends up.

Immigration is the corollary. The hosts argue newcomers from countries with heavily socialized politics may vote for the same policies, and that Canada and France show how a changing population weakens old cultural ties. Closer to home, they say low-income arrivals do not come to Tennessee for benefits, but the churn leaves blue states bluer and red states redder. Sorting ourselves by politics deepens the divide.

Microsoft and Adobe, the hosts say, show a pattern of firing American workers and hiring H-1B visa holders at lower pay, a program meant to fill jobs Americans cannot. They ask why a loud critic of billionaires has little to say. Outrage that is selective is just rhetoric.

The U.S. sanctioned the International Criminal Court, which it never joined, with the State Department calling it a rogue court that pursues some actors and ignores others. A body above national courts answers to no one.

Then the tolerance tests. Columbia's satirical paper apologized for a land acknowledgment joke, prompting the question of why the university does not give the land back. An Iowa city council opened with a Satanist invocation, then recited the Pledge, then held 30 seconds of reflection. Tolerance of everything means boundaries for nothing. And the UAW now counts more than 120,000 higher education workers, with more members at the University of California than at General Motors, even as overall membership fell by 23,000. A union can answer to only one core constituency.

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Saudi Arabia has mutual defense pacts with Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan. Iran keeps attacking the Kingdom, and all three partners have stood aside. The real security work gets done by Israel, a country Riyadh won’t formally recognize. Stability in the Middle East rests on alliances nobody will say out loud. Japan’s prime minister asked the UN to strike Japan from its enemy-state language, 80 years after the war, and the UN is dragging its feet. Add the Security Council seat Russia holds, and the point lands: large bureaucracies can’t move on even the simplest request.

China is no ordinary rising power. The distinction that matters is authoritarian versus totalitarian, and Xi has jailed an estimated two million opponents, disappeared dozens of generals, and seen six of the eight members of the top party council lose their posts in a year. A birth rate of 1.2 after decades of the one-child policy leaves an aging population it cannot support. Misread an adversary and you invite the conflict you were trying to avoid. On Iran, the rial trades near 2.7 million to the dollar, Hormuz oil flows are back to pre-war levels without Iranian barrels, and about $18 billion in crude still at sea is the last cash coming in. A regime that can’t pay its proxies is a regime close to cracking.

At home, adult children are cutting off their parents on the advice of therapists, an estrangement community has 4.2 million social followers, and the fifth commandment gets quietly retired. Humanities PhDs that cost universities $700,000 to $1 million each are producing graduates with no jobs. A Boston lesbian bar held a mask mandate until two weeks ago, then offered one mask-optional night to stay open and was met with threats and tears. A woman was fired after screaming insults at a Jewish man in a New York gym. A podcaster called Trump-voting Christians a cancer to be eradicated or jailed. A pop star’s opening act went on an antisemitic rant, a stadium owner pulled the show, and the headliner ended up in tears apologizing to fans. Dehumanizing your opponent is the first step to doing anything to them.

Equal treatment under the law is the test. Every Democrat voted against conditional immunity for an aide to Anthony Fauci who knows what happened to the documents, after demanding total disclosure on Epstein. A Virginia prosecutor is accused of steering DACA recipients charged with drunk driving into lesser charges while citizens take the full hit. Wisconsin judge Hannah Dugan helped an illegal immigrant dodge ICE, was convicted of a felony, and got a $5,000 fine, no prison, and no license suspension. Rights and rules that bend to politics stop being rights or rules.

The power and corruption file is its own category. Bernie Sanders filed a bill for a corporate death penalty and 20 years in prison for AI developers. About 860,000 phantom Obamacare enrollees and 850,000 COVID relief fraud cases point to a $100 billion problem. Some 300 of 400 Civil Rights Division lawyers quit rather than carry out the administration’s priorities, which beats staying and stalling. Biden accepted a Planned Parenthood award while calling himself a proud Catholic. DOJ sued a California city over gun permit fees priced to deter buyers. AI executives asking for regulation want two things, no competition and no lawsuits. Convictions are cheap until they cost something.

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Accurate history is cheap tuition. Learning from other people’s experience costs far less than repeating their mistakes, but only if the record is right. The popular story says FDR ended the Depression. The data says the war did, and that top marginal rates jumping from 25% to 94% helped trigger a second downturn in 1937 and 1938.

Germany’s AfD is now the most popular party in recent regional elections, while Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party keeps sliding. Government spending runs 57% of GDP in France, 50% in Germany, 45% in Britain, and 34% in the United States, about four points above its historical norm. Britain has 410 registered parties, France 30, Germany seven. Centrist parties build coalitions with the left, so more parties means less change, even when voters ask for it.

Candidates who hide their agenda have no mandate to carry it out. Nebraska has no Democrat on the Senate ballot, and independent Dan Osborne is now answering for a recorded private rant. A mandate only covers what you promised.

A poll of fewer than a thousand Democrats asked how they would like Trump to leave office. About 90% favored impeachment, 77% the 25th Amendment, and roughly two thirds a military coup. The pollster was not named on air. The hatred runs far deeper than policy disagreement.

The Vance fraud task force says it is removing 750,000 Obamacare enrollees who never existed, signed up by brokers who collected commissions and insurers who collected subsidies, with no claims ever filed. One California defendant allegedly took $118 million through sham vendors. California added 205,708 social assistance establishments between early 2020 and early 2026. Most coverage describes 750,000 people losing coverage, not 750,000 names that were never real people.

New court filings show AI companies knew what they were doing. A Microsoft document called model training an astounding theft, and OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT called the products an existential threat to publishers. AI answers skip the click, so the sites that did the work get no traffic and no revenue. The same companies warning of doom want regulation that boxes out competitors.

Lawsuit costs end up in prices. States sued the tobacco companies, lawyers took a third, and smokers paid through higher prices. Insurance works the same way, and Obamacare’s 80% payout rule rewards insurers for inflating the base. Big companies absorb the overhead. Small ones can’t.

Trump pulled White House press credentials from CNN, MS Now, and Politico. In 2021, CNN floated the same move against Fox News under Biden. Somebody has to decide who fits in the briefing room, and the risk is handing that power to a president of either party.

Nicole Hannah-Jones regrets leaving her daughter in a government-run school but still sides with the unions on choice for everyone else. Twenty-one states, almost all Democrat-run, declined the federal scholarship tax credit, and Indiana is advertising in Illinois to collect the donations instead. Milwaukee’s government-run schools rank fourth worst in the country.

Marx’s labor theory of value misses what capital does. A worker with a $10,000 mower does in ten minutes what took three hours, so he can earn more and the owner can still profit. The Manifesto landed in 1848 because the Industrial Revolution had finally given Marx something to attack. As the old line about his mother goes, she wished Karl had made more capital instead of just writing about it.

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AI companies lobbying for regulation aren’t protecting the public. They’re pulling up the ladder. Anthropic just settled a $1.5 billion copyright lawsuit with publishers and is now cutting deals with teachers’ unions. Facebook paid millions after admitting its algorithms knowingly harmed children. These same authority figures now claim AI is an existential threat, echoing the same credibility gap that produced false vaccine promises and COVID policy whiplash. Nvidia’s CEO offered the simplest framework: builders know when they’re building something harmful, and they should stop doing that. But Bernie Sanders wants prison for AI engineers, positioning himself as champion of the little guy while functionally shielding the very oligarchs he claims to despise.

The deeper current is the rising appeal of socialism, and the question is why it’s gaining traction now when it couldn’t get off the runway in the 1960s. The Port Huron Statement, the Students for a Democratic Society manifesto, went nowhere politically. Today, over 50% of registered Democrats say socialism beats the free market, and Democrat Socialists of America candidates are winning primaries for Congress.

The math tells the story. Real median household income rose from $56,000 to $87,000 since 1967, a $31,000 gain. Health care costs went from $1,200 per family to $27,000 in the same period, swallowing most of that increase. Federal spending exploded from $146 billion to $7.4 trillion. Harvard tuition went from $1,500 to $57,000, triple the inflation-adjusted price. Federal debt ballooned from $286 billion to $40 trillion. Interest payments alone now exceed $1.3 trillion annually, a wet blanket across the entire economy that hits median earners hardest.

People doing everything right still can’t get ahead, and the costs they can’t opt out of (health insurance, car insurance, homeowners insurance) keep climbing. The frustration is real, but the proposed solution is the source of the problem. Bigger government created the squeeze; more of it won’t relieve it.

Meanwhile, a Michigan congressional nominee wants to abolish marriage as a religious construct. Canada’s assisted suicide program is now the third leading cause of death. One-third of House Democrats voted against a bill to prosecute Medicare and Medicaid fraud. The pattern is consistent: institutions that once restrained power are being dismantled by people who assume they’ll be the ones holding it.

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Lying is intentional deception. It includes what you omit, not just what you say. That distinction matters more than ever across politics, media, and academia.

James Tallarico won the Democratic primary in Texas on a platform of eliminating fossil fuels, running a vegan campaign staff, and celebrating trans children. He now eats barbecue on camera, says there are only two genders, and opposes trans athletes competing against girls. He hasn’t recanted one position. He’s reversed six or seven. Abdul El-Sayed is doing the same thing in Michigan. Every reversal is on tape. The Emperor’s New Clothes works only until someone replays the footage.

Trump promised $5,000 to every American if Republicans hold the House and Senate. The reaction was predictable: Democrats called it bribery. These are the same people who run on free childcare, free buses, Medicare for All, and grocery price controls. Trump didn’t propose policy. He held up a mirror.

In Nevada, an independent group is running ads crediting Congresswoman Susie Lee with fighting to eliminate all taxes on tips. She voted against the bill that would have eliminated taxes on the first $25,000 in tips. The media that would catch that discrepancy has no interest in catching it.

A professor at New Mexico State posted a video calling Chairman Mao “perhaps the greatest historical figure of the 20th century” and praising Xi Jinping’s continuation of Mao’s work. The Great Famine killed 30 to 40 million people. The Cultural Revolution imprisoned Mao’s own top advisors. This isn’t ignorance. It’s ideology dressed as scholarship, and it represents the majority view in humanities departments where 90% of faculty vote left and none face accountability when their theories collapse.

Thirty-five thousand people have died from heat in Europe this year. Almost none of those countries have widespread air conditioning, largely by government policy. The number barely made the American press.

Bernie Sanders is now calling for prison sentences for engineers who build AI. Not regulation. Prison. The man who rails against oligarchs wants the state to jail people for innovating.

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Ryan Reynolds has built a brand on 1980s nostalgia, calling the decade “brutal” and painting it as some kind of survivalist upbringing. He was born in 1976. He was four when the decade started and fourteen when it ended. The 80s he’s selling never happened to him.

Success Academy, the charter school network serving 22,000 students across 59 locations in New York, is suing the state for suppressing its AP test scores. The network spends roughly $17,000 per student, half of what New York City public schools spend, and educates a population that is 80 to 90 percent Black and Hispanic. Every student takes AP classes, including calculus and physics. The state’s refusal to report those scores isn’t an oversight. It’s a political decision to bury results that embarrass the public school monopoly.

The House held a procedural vote condemning socialism. It split along party lines, except for two Democrats who broke ranks. One, from a Trump-plus-seven district in Maine, quit the party. The other, from Washington’s coast, now faces internal sanctions. The Democratic caucus isn’t debating socialism. It’s enforcing silence about it.

In Massachusetts, Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial has exposed the state’s inverted insanity defense law. Every other state in the country places the burden of proof on the defendant to prove insanity. Massachusetts requires the prosecution to prove the defendant was not insane. The jury split 11 to 1. The legal architecture of that state made the outcome almost inevitable.

Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, has a documented record of statements supporting Sharia law. The primary electorate chose him anyway. Whether voters were informed or indifferent is the more uncomfortable question.

A data center leak in Oklahoma spilled three million gallons of water, and the headlines wrote themselves. What didn’t make the headlines: New York City loses 155 million gallons per day from aging pipes. Texas cities lose 240 million gallons per day. California lets 740 billion gallons of runoff escape annually into the ocean. The outrage over tech’s water use is a rounding error next to decades of public infrastructure neglect.

Jason Arday became Cambridge University’s youngest Black professor at 37, a story celebrated worldwide. It ended in allegations of fabricated research and his suicide. The institutions that elevated him are now scrambling to distance themselves.

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What do you know now that you wish you knew at 30? The question sounds soft until you try to answer it honestly.

Health compounds in one direction. The damage done in your 30s and 40s cannot be fully reversed in your 60s. Smoking was the obvious destroyer a generation ago. Today it is high-potency THC, which causes permanent brain damage in teenagers and is being sold by an industry whose tax revenue has made state governments complicit in the harm. Lower body strength is the single best predictor of longevity in older adults. Bones grow stronger under stress and weaken without it. Weight-bearing exercise is not optional after 55. GLP-1 drugs are transforming lives in the short term, but the long-term side effects are not yet understood. If you can lose weight through diet and exercise, that remains the better path.

Relationships outlast logic. Never use the words "never" and "always" in a dispute. The moment you do, the argument stops being about the incident and becomes an indictment of the person. You cannot take back the spoken word. You can apologize for it, but it lingers. Harry Truman wrote furious letters he never sent. That discipline is harder than it sounds and more valuable than most people realize. Respect is not a feeling. It is a practice. If you do not respect your partner's judgment, remember that you were one of their choices.

Engineers enter the world believing reason solves everything. It does not. Relationships take priority over logic in every organization. Brilliant people need to be managed differently. Elon Musk's ability to solve problems disappears the moment you pull him into something unrelated. Focus and sensitivity are a tradeoff. You cannot be deeply engaged in solving a problem and simultaneously attuned to the people around you. Managing that tension, rather than pretending it does not exist, is what separates good leaders from smart ones who fail.

Naive realism is the belief that you see the world as it is. You do not. Two people can observe the same event and arrive at opposite conclusions, each certain the other is wrong. The Dunning-Kruger effect compounds this: people who understand the least overestimate what they know the most. A scout mentality, one that actively seeks information that might change your mind, is more effective than a lawyer mentality that defends what you already believe. Warren Buffett's partner Charlie Munger built a career on the willingness to reverse a position when the evidence demanded it.

Strategy is not only what you will do. It is what you will not do. Southwest Airlines succeeded for decades by explicitly refusing to handle baggage transfers, serve meals, or assign seats. Every refusal reduced cost and reinforced focus. Most businesses never articulate what they will not do, and the mission bleeds outward until nothing is executed well.

Government operates on the opposite incentive from every point above. In the private sector, inefficiency kills you. In government, inefficiency grows the budget and the headcount, which increases the manager's compensation and authority. A product that eliminates 90% of the workforce in a government function will be rejected, not because it does not work, but because it works too well. That structural reality is the single most important thing to understand about why government grows and rarely shrinks.

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

The trajectory is accelerating. The country hit $1 trillion in 1980. By 2002, it was $6.4 trillion. In the same span of time since, it has reached $40 trillion. Each 22-year period multiplied the debt by roughly six. Under Reagan, $200 billion annual deficits were treated as a crisis and discussed constantly. The current deficit exceeds $2 trillion a year and draws almost no attention.

The economy is not collapsing. Unemployment is low, job openings are high, and incomes are growing faster than inflation. But the affordability pressure is real and growing. Health care costs continue to rise faster than every other category and are now large enough to affect every family. Energy costs compound the problem because they are embedded in the price of everything else. The debt itself functions as a slow bleed: not crushing yet, but accumulating in a way that narrows the margin for error.

Economic convulsions are not theoretical. The late 1970s saw inflation above 15% and mortgage rates that froze the housing market. The 1980s produced a real estate bubble driven by tax shelter depreciation rules that left cities with years of empty apartments. The dot-com crash wiped out trillions. The 2008 recession was built on millions of no-documentation mortgages issued to people who could never make the payments. Each crisis had a different trigger, but the underlying pattern is the same: debt and distorted incentives compound until a shock forces a correction.

The Democratic Socialists are not the fringe of the party. They are the energy. James Carville, who publicly said he would not be in a party with them, reversed course three days later and endorsed DSA-backed Senate candidates in Michigan and Florida. Only eight House Democrats signed a letter opposing elements of the DSA platform. John Fetterman remains the only Senate Democrat openly refusing to go along. Every Democrat aspiring to the presidency now calls for abolishing the Electoral College. The platform includes packing the Supreme Court with six additional justices, granting citizenship to every undocumented immigrant, and mailing ballots to every household. These are not policy proposals. They are structural changes designed to make reversal impossible.

The Federal Register, the book of all federal regulations, reached 106,000 pages under Biden. Trump has cut it to 60,000, the first time in living memory that the regulatory burden has actually shrunk. He has also reduced the federal workforce by 300,000. That is why the institutional left hates him in a way it never hated Bush or Romney. Those presidents left the machinery intact. Trump is dismantling it.

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Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions about his conduct during COVID. The irony is difficult to overstate. While he had power, he suppressed free speech, shut down churches, banned public assembly, and pressured media to silence dissenting voices. Every right protected by the First Amendment was violated under his direction. When called to account, he used the Fifth Amendment to protect himself. The Constitution that shielded millions of Americans from exactly this kind of government overreach became his personal defense while offering nothing to the people he harmed.

His diary, kept on a government computer for a planned memoir, revealed what he said publicly and what he believed privately were often different things. He acknowledged the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in private while dismissing it in public. He wrote about dining with Jake Tapper and his wife during the same period he told Americans not to gather for Thanksgiving. He noted meeting Kim Kardashian and becoming the most recognized person in the United States. The celebrity mattered more to him than the crisis he was supposed to manage.

Every Democrat on the committee used their time to praise his 50 years of public service. Not one asked a question about the evidence. The pattern is consistent: as long as a bureaucrat expands government power, the party of government will protect them regardless of the damage done.

The Federal Register, the book containing all federal regulations, was under a thousand pages in 1974. Under Obama it exceeded 100,000. Trump brought it to 70,000 in his first term. Biden pushed it back over 106,000. Trump has it under 70,000 again. The growth of bureaucratic power is measurable, and its reduction is the reason Trump is despised by the institutional left in a way no other Republican has been.

Government grocery stores are coming to New York. Mamdani announced city-owned stores will sell staple items at 30% below market price. A well-run grocery store makes 3% profit. Selling at 30% below market means losing 27% on every transaction before accounting for the operational incompetence that government enterprises reliably deliver. Chicago already ran this experiment. Walmart closed five stores on the south and west sides after the city refused to address shoplifting. The replacement, Save A Lot, received $26 million in subsidies, burned through half of it in two years, and closed all seven locations on the same weekend. Each store lost roughly a million dollars a year just trying to operate at market prices. Mamdani is taking that failed model and adding a 30% discount.

The midterm bellwethers remain Maine, Michigan, and Wisconsin. If swing states elect DSA-aligned candidates over moderates and well-known Republicans, that is not a polling fluctuation. It is a structural shift in what American voters are willing to accept.

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The word visionary gets applied to people who have not earned it. A visionary, in any meaningful sense, is someone whose ideas produce a better future. Someone whose ideas have already been tested and failed is not a visionary. They are repeating a mistake. Every major policy position of the Democratic Socialists of America, abolishing police, eliminating prisons, opening borders, government ownership of major corporations, has been tried in other countries. The outcomes are not ambiguous. They produced poverty, authoritarianism, and collapse. Calling those ideas visionary is not generosity. It is illiteracy.

The bellwether races are narrowing. Maine's Senate race pits Susan Collins, one of the few genuinely moderate politicians in America, against a socialist replacement candidate. Michigan's Senate primary features a DSA-backed candidate endorsed by Bernie Sanders and AOC who openly calls for dismantling the system. Wisconsin's governor primary produced a suspicious result in Milwaukee: the hard-left candidate lost under circumstances that suggest party intervention to install a more electable moderate. If she is later appointed to a high-level administrative position, the evidence of a managed outcome becomes difficult to dismiss.

Texas now matters as an indicator. If Talarico, a far-left state rep running for Cornyn's vacated Senate seat, wins against Ken Paxton in a state that is not considered a swing state, that result would signal a shift deeper than anything in Maine or Michigan.

The constitutional architecture is under direct threat. If Democrats win the presidency, House, and Senate with sufficient margin, the sequence is predictable: eliminate the filibuster, pack the Supreme Court, add Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico as states, then pass a statute eliminating the Electoral College. A packed court operating under a "living Constitution" doctrine could affirm that statute without requiring an amendment. Twenty years ago, both parties accepted that the Constitution could only be changed through the amendment process. That consensus no longer exists.

The phrase "our democracy" is doing specific work. The United States is not a democracy. It is a constitutional republic. The founders were deeply suspicious of pure democracy because it concentrates power in the majority and destroys individual rights. Every structural feature of the government they designed exists to prevent that outcome. When politicians invoke "our democracy" to justify changing constitutional rules by statute, they are using a term that sounds inclusive to mean something that eliminates the constraints the founders built to protect the individual.

AOC claims no one can earn a billion dollars without harming others. The claim rests entirely on Marx's labor theory of value. Sam Walton started with one store and built a company that lowered prices for tens of millions of Americans in communities that previously had no access to affordable goods. His children inherited over $150 billion. No one has asked AOC how she would have stopped Walton from opening more stores, or what happens to innovation when the reward for success is capped at 100% taxation above an arbitrary threshold.

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