This summer, the WNBA celebrates its thirtieth birthday. The league has never been more popular. Television ratings and attendance have never been higher, merchandise sales have never been hotter, and the sport’s place in our public conversations has never been more prominent.

And yet, for all that, the WNBA is still losing money. It has lost money, in fact, over the course of each of its previous twenty-nine seasons. Someone has been covering the losses and paying the bills. That somebody is the NBA. (The “men’s” basketball league, if you prefer.) And despite being the recipients of all that patience and largesse, many of the players and fans in the WNBA are far from grateful. They’re demanding more – and as we’ve all seen this summer, demanding it happen entirely on their terms.

The WNBA’s loudest voices are convinced that they’ll get that “more.” And that reason is because they’ve spent decades helping to turn the levers of the Political Vise.

Regular readers of this column – and of my book -- know that machine well. The Political Vise, originally designed to ensure that government remained responsive to the people, has long since become a device through which the left manufactures and enforces a consensus. And as far as the WNBA and its most ardent cheerleaders are concerned, the consensus ought to be that misogyny is the sole cause of the league’s enduring financial precariousness. The women who play are woefully underpaid, the consensus says, and the reason is that they play in a country that does not value women.

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Bias in the Balance Sheet?

A’ja Wilson is regularly cited by the league’s media allies as one of the best basketball players alive. Born in 1996, the year the WNBA launched, Wilson (who plays center for the Las Vegas Aces) will earn $1,400,000 this season – matching the highest salary in league history. That compensation is only a small fraction of what Steph Curry makes. Repeat that comparison often enough, in enough sympathetic outlets, and it hardens into irrefutable proof of bigotry and sexism. What the comparison leaves out is that Steph Curry plays in a league that brings in ten billion dollars a year, while Wilson plays in one that brings in a few hundred million -- and consistently loses money all the while.

It should not be controversial to observe that the men are paid more because the men’s game earns more. The NBA’s stars are paid out of real profit, and not someone else’s speculative (or guilt-ridden) generosity. This disparity is less an injustice than it is a balance sheet. But a balance sheet has never moved anyone to indignation. And indignation is the fuel on which the Vise runs.

Setting the Vise aside, there is a real argument to be had about exactly how much WNBA players ought to be paid. Their labor has real value, even if the league for which they play has yet to generate a profit. But the Vise is not interested in the dull details of labor negotiations. It has a grander claim to sell, which is that the gap between what the women earn and what the men earn is undeniable evidence of this country’s enduring contempt for women. Anyone who questions that framing pays a price. Just ask Draymond Green.

Green – an NBA veteran and hardly a stereotypical reactionary – remarked several years ago that the money simply wasn’t there to pay WNBA players what the men were making. He wasn’t making a point about talent or effort; he was making an observation about math. Quite sensibly, Green argued that if you wanted to increase compensation, you needed to increase revenue first. Grow the game, he said, and the money will follow. For his trouble, Green was set upon by the likes of Megan Rapinoe and countless progressive media figures. He wasn’t a truth-teller, but an ill-informed and unappreciative bigot. To his credit, he stuck to his proverbial guns. It takes considerable courage to resist the pressure of the Political Vise, and the most feared enforcer in modern NBA history was just tough enough to do it.

The reality is that very few folks are as adept at standing their ground as Draymond Green. Even if the Vise couldn’t crush my fellow son of Michigan, the episode served to warn anyone else against placing math (and reality) ahead of ideology.

The Second Player They Tried to Break

This summer, another enforcer learned something about placing reality (and biology) ahead of Woke ideology. Sophie Cunningham of the Indiana Fever has become a pop culture sensation thanks to her fearless play on the court and her even-more fearless comments off of it. When Cunningham dared to say that women’s sports should be reserved for biological women, and when she posed for photos with anti-trans activists, she infuriated the very same progressives who went after Draymond Green. Two unquestioned articles of faith on the modern left are that WNBA players are underpaid thanks to misogyny, and that transwomen are women. Though the majority of Americans side with Sophie Cunningham on the trans issue, that hasn’t stopped many in the media from demanding that the Fever star be brought to heel.

Sophie, like Draymond, has held her ground. But the progressive Vise has never depended on winning over the likes of Sophie Cunningham. It depends on everyone else watching what happens to her and deciding that they aren’t quite so brave (and that they might be better served to keep their mouths shut). When the Vise finds it cannot crush a particularly stubborn public figure, it looks for more vulnerable targets. This past Sunday, at an Indiana Fever game played in Atlanta against the hometown Dream, the arena’s own camera crew put a fan wearing a “Protect Trans Kids” shirt up on the Jumbotron for the crowd to cheer. Two other women at that same game wore shirts reading “XX-XY,” the slogan of the movement to keep women’s sports for women. They did not get the Jumbotron. What they got instead was WNBA security, who approached them and asked them to cover the offending message. The approved slogan got a big screen celebration. The other got told to cover up.

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A Blink and a Hedge

The league later said the security intervention should not have happened. They didn’t go so far as to offer a genuine apology, as that would no doubt have infuriated some of their most fervent supporters. That attempt to have it both ways will please no one. It does not bode well for the league going forward.

The WNBA is a wonderful sport, made all the more popular by the likes of Cunningham and her incandescently gifted teammate, Caitlin Clark. From a free market perspective, its stars deserve a chance to market their talents and make good money as a consequence. The question now is not whether women’s basketball is worth supporting. The question is whether those who run and manage the league will let outdated ideological commitments drive that burgeoning support away.

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WATCH

Fifty-three billion dollars is a lot of money. That is roughly what America’s big three automakers (Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis) have now written off on their electric-vehicle ambitions. Put another way, it’s approximately the annual budget for the Commonwealth of Virginia, all wasted in the cause of building cars the American public turned out not to want. In the words of one Detroit insider, this investment constituted “The single biggest capital allocation mistake in the history of the automotive industry.”

Last December, Ford pulled the (proverbial and literal) plug on the electric F-150 Lightning. The F-150 is the best-selling vehicle in American history – and Ford had proudly called the electric version the future of the American automobile. By the time the Lightning was cancelled, Ford’s electric division had already lost around thirteen billion in under three years, more than double what the entire company earned in 2024. GM and Stellantis could tell the same story of billions in losses. What’s striking about this colossal mistake is not that automobile executives misread the market. Rather, it’s that they were lured into that “single biggest capital allocation mistake” by Washington.

Lured may be too weak a word. From the perspective of the Political Vise, the big three got squeezed.

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EVs Aren’t the Problem

I have nothing against electric cars. I have many friends who love their Teslas and Rivians and their Chevy Volts. There are plenty of arguments for driving one (the cost of gas not least among them), and if it makes sense to you to buy one, you should be able to do it. In a free market, electric cars would have no trouble finding customers. The problem was that politicians and the environmental lobby made sure that an actual free market was something neither manufacturers nor car buyers could access.

For years, the environmental lobby has heralded electric vehicles as a solution to the climate crisis. If you believe, as that lobby generally does, that the burning of fossil fuels will lead to disastrous global warming, you’ll advocate for anything to wean countries and consumers off those fuels. Though electric car batteries come with myriad environmental consequences of their own, there’s no denying that EVs reduce emissions. And so, going as far back as 2008, environmentalists and their allies in the media have pressured Washington to speed up the pace of electric vehicle adoption. In response, the federal government put its thumb on the scale for a favored technology, regardless of whether the public wanted it or not.

How Washington Rewired the Market

Back in 2022, President Biden’s (woefully misnamed) Inflation Reduction Act upped the pressure considerably, offering Americans $7,500 to buy an electric vehicle. That’s the kind of money you offer when you want to coax the public to do what they otherwise would not. The Biden Administration also rewrote the rules to push automakers to transition to EVs regardless of customer interest. As an added incentive, the Biden Administration slapped tariffs north of a hundred percent on Chinese EV imports. The EV squeeze had three elements: Bribe the buyers, strong-arm the auto companies, and wall off foreign competition. It doesn’t take a degree in economics to see that not only was this absolutely not a free market, but it was a system guaranteed to collapse the moment those bribes disappeared.

These government-generated market distortions hid the true cost from purchasers and lessors alike. The Wall Street Journal reported that thanks to Uncle Sam’s generous subsidies, the average monthly payment on a leased EV had dropped to $538 in the summer of 2025, with several models going for less than a hundred bucks a month. A year later, with that Biden-era credit now expired, that average payment has jumped to $707. A lease on a comparable gas car averages $607. Years of electric vehicles sales were subsidized by taxpayer generosity. (And no one even thanked you!)

With the incentives expired, sales (predictably) collapsed. New EV year-over-year sales and leases fell 36% in a single quarter. In California – one-time home of Tesla and the epicenter of the electric dream – the EV share of new car sales slid by a third. As the Journal reported, for the first time in over a decade, Californians bought more hybrids than EVs.

That Wall Street Journal article also profiled several frustrated consumers. In 2024, Mark and Ida Block leased a brand-new Hyundai Ioniq 6 for less than $340 a month. (A deal that only existed because the rest of us were chipping in.) The Blocks liked the car, but when the lease ran out and the subsidy died, they had no desire to get another EV. They drive a hybrid now, while the pricey charger they installed in the garage hangs useless. Judging by the numbers, the Blocks are far from alone.

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The Triumph of Choice

Jim Farley – the CEO of Ford Motor Company and the guy ultimately responsible for cancelling the F-150 Lightning – conceded recently that the end of the $7,500 rebate meant that as a percentage of Ford’s business, EV’s will be “way smaller than we thought.” He added, “We’re following customers to where the market is, not where people thought it was going to be, but to where it is today.” Farley deserves credit for taking responsibility for the decisions made on his watch. And he deserves credit for telling the truth that Ford spent three years and billions of dollars building cars for a market propped up by government pressure rather than organic consumer demand.

Large numbers of car buyers may or may not want to transition to EVs. Ford’s experience proves that either way, very few people want them at the price they actually cost.

The environmental lobby, left-wing media influencers, and their allies in the regulatory agencies could not convince Americans to buy electric cars at market prices. So, they did what they have done for decades, which is turn the levers of the progressive Political Vise instead. Joe Biden’s Washington strong-armed manufacturers, bribed the consumer, and (for several years) sustained a fictional market that wildly distorted supply and demand.

Mark and Ida Block now drive a hybrid of the sort they would have bought all along had the market-wrecking subsidies not been in place. A charger sits useless in their garage, a tangible sign of an investment that did not pay off. The Blocks’ loss is comparatively small. America’s big three automakers and the American taxpayer, on the other hand, are out tens of billions.

Almost none of us asked for this. But all of us paid for it.

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The early-to-mid 1970s was a golden age for American movies. In that era of political upheaval and economic stagnation, Hollywood abandoned stale formulas and created some of the most enduring and acclaimed films of all time. The Godfather series, of course, captured the imagination like nothing else. As a teenager at the time, I didn’t watch Al Pacino and Marlon Brando and decide I wanted to be a gangster. Two other films did shape my aspirations: All the President’s Men and The Paper Chase. One celebrated intrepid reporters bringing down a president during the Watergate scandal; the other made law school seem noble and heroic.

Together, these two movies convinced me to major in journalism and then go to law school. What better way, I thought, to be on the side of the angels – or at least, the good guys? Reporters and lawyers were the heroes America relied on, and I was going to join them.

I may have dated myself by saying I was a teen in the Seventies. Just as dated (to the point of absurdity) is the idea that journalists and lawyers are heroes. The events of recent decades have made it clear that these professions are filled with very few angels and a great many scoundrels. The American public has lost faith in both professions. Justifiably so.

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The First Steep Slide

The reputation of the reporters fell first – and furthest. In the 1970s, when Woodward and Bernstein became legends, 70% of Americans told Gallup they trusted the press to report the news fully and fairly. Fifty years later, that number has fallen below thirty percent. Among Republicans? It’s down to eight.

If you listen to the mainstream media, they’ll claim those numbers fell because of right-wing disinformation. The reality, however, is that for the journalism profession, this is an entirely self-inflicted wound. To offer just one example, consider last week’s Fauci hearings in the United States Senate. Despite having been granted a pardon by President Biden, the great authority of the pandemic era took the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times, refusing to say how the virus began, how the lockdowns were justified, or even what color tie he was wearing. A powerful official, a sworn setting, a hundred unanswered questions? For those of us raised on the heroics of Woodward and Bernstein, this was the moment for a free press to push tenaciously for accountability.

Instead of demanding truth from power, the press framed Fauci’s silence as a heroic necessity. They called the hearings a witch hunt and a waste of time. Within living memory, reporters asked powerful men what they knew and when they knew it. The press that inherited (and squandered) that legacy now turns its fury on those asking the questions. A profession that built its prestige probing the powerful now spends that prestige protecting them – provided, that is, that the powerful are the right sort of progressives. The American people see through the hypocrisy, which explains why so few trust mainstream journalists any longer. I’m glad that the public is not deceived, but I’m not happy to see a profession I once admired debase itself.

There’s a very similar arc to the fall of the legal profession. I still love to watch the idealistic lawyers of The Paper Chase. I grew up believing that passionate attorneys were all that stood between the little guy and the full weight of the state. Those lawyers still exist, but they are increasingly crowded out by another kind. These are the ones who see the courtroom less as a forum for delivering justice for the little guy – and more as a venue in which to wring cash from the taxpayer and the consumer.

Losing On Schedule

One typical and outrageous example: In 2020, at the height of the Woke frenzy occasioned by COVID and George Floyd, the city of Charleston, South Carolina sued a group of energy companies, claiming their gasoline had caused climate change. Court after court rejected the claim over the next five years, but the city – or more accurately, its outside lawyers – refused to give up. Final legal defeat did not come until August 2025 when the case was dismissed on the grounds of federal preemption. The city’s lawyers did not care – after all, they were never actually trying to win. Filing the suit was victory in itself, as it cost the companies millions to defend, kept climate change in the headlines, and inspired activists in other cities to demand their communities do the same.

As I explain in The Political Vise, today’s trial bar works hand in glove with Big Green nonprofits. Activists supply the cause, lawyers file the case and the lawsuit does what neither could do at the ballot box. Nothing gets built. The trial bar just makes things cost more, while the threat of the next suit does as much damage as the suit itself. For the activist, the thrown-out case is not a loss when the lawsuit itself hurts the businesses he hates. For the trial bar, it’s not a loss either. Even in defeat, the lawyer rakes in handsome fees.(An often cited Rand study found that in class action suits, less than twenty cents of every dollar awarded reaches the injured people in whose name the suit was brought.)

Over the course of the last fifty years two noble professions have increasingly indulged self-interest and naked partisanship over public service. I can’t diagnose a motive, but I can diagnose an outcome. So too can the American people, who increasingly regard journalists and attorneys alike with a suspicion bordering on contempt. They have been given good reason.

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Credit That Can’t Be Printed

Please understand, I’m not just indulging in nostalgia for the 1970s. (Terrible fashion, dreadful interest rates, but yes, great films.) My concern is with the loss of something two centuries older than that decade: the basic principle that our republic runs on a kind of trust it can neither print nor legislate into being. Squander that trust, as these two professions have, and the machinery of our republic may not stop, but it will start to run badly.

A people who no longer believe the press will tell them the truth do not stop wanting the truth. They go hunting for it online, struggling to discern the difference between grift and service. They fall prey to odd conspiracies, not because they are gullible but because the profession that once exposed those conspiracies has lost all credibility.

As bleak as things are, I still have hope. Many good reporters – having left or been driven from newsrooms that no longer care about the truth – have landed on Substack or other independent sites like The Free Press, The Federalist, Just the News, and others. Good journalism is still being done, just as we still have good lawyers taking hard cases for the right reasons. The ideals I saw on screen fifty years ago were not lies. They were real and can be real again. But ideals like these cannot be restored by the same people who traded them away.

Fifty years ago, I wanted to be one of the good guys. Those good guys are still out there, still doing the work, now almost entirely outside the newsrooms and law firms that used to be their homes. It’s harder work now, done with less money, less prestige, and less cinematic glory. They do it anyway. I believe in time they will redeem their professions. The future of liberty, and of our republic, hinges upon that redemption.

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WATCH

WATCH

Note: As with my previous media dispatch, I apologize for the unclickable thumbnail. Substack still does not play nice with Rumble. Watch the interview here or by clicking the orange button above. Kindest regards.

The most important political arguments ask a simple question: how do we best organize society? There are only two real answers, and every aspiring leader proposes a variation on one or the other. Either we build society through coercion, or we do it through persuasion.

The first is the far older, far bloodier way. The second is a comparatively recent development, one that has led to liberty and prosperity for tens of millions. The better path would seem clear – and yet, the partisans of coercion are louder than ever. The threat they pose is existential.

This past New Year’s Day, as he gave his inaugural speech as mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, told his audience that he intended “to replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” Collectivism is the ancient arrangement under which the individual is dissolved into the group, and the group is directed from above. Its most infamous twentieth-century practitioners – Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot – killed hundreds of millions. These tyrants used the same rhetoric as Gotham’s grinning new mayor. Though the means they use to enforce power may change, coercion operates on the fundamental principle that government should act in what it imagines to be the best interests of the people, crushing dissent in the name of unity. The people, after all, rarely know what is best.

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Customers or Conscripts?

The belief that power should instead be exercised through persuasion is far more recent, dating back only as far as the early Enlightenment. The seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke first explained this idea in full, and the Founders built the American republic on those same principles. The persuasion principle says that the state should be granted narrow (and carefully fenced) authority, exercised only so long as the state continues to enjoy the consent of the governed.

Persuasion is at the heart of our economic system. In private life, endless numbers of entrepreneurs compete to serve people well and win both their trust and their business. They win that business by persuasion rather than force. The grocer does not drag his customers in off the street. Rather, he tries to convince them his bread is good. (He may even blow the scent of fresh baked goods out onto passers-by.) Coca-Cola does not seek to ban Pepsi. It strives instead to make a tastier product.

I’ve spent many years defending liberty – and arguing for persuasion over coercion. There have been times when I’ve felt as if we were close to winning that argument, particularly among young people. This is not one of those times: the American left is in a new ascendancy, led by the likes of Mayor Mamdani. It is troubling enough to see so many fall in love with collectivism, despite its dismal record of poverty and death. What bothers me much more than this naïve infatuation with collectivism? The growing belief that human flourishing is best achieved through coercion.

The Drawbridge Left

When the left is out of power, no one praises open inquiry more loudly. Progressives demand free speech and the chance to march and make demands. They insist on challenging authority, insisting we’re just asking questions! or we only want a debate! Once they are in power, those platitudes about free speech and open competition vanish overnight. For the left, freedom is like a drawbridge. They lower it to get across, then haul it up behind them, ensuring that no one else can follow.

Mayor Mamdani started raising his drawbridge this past Monday. Standing in a Brooklyn grocery store, he announced that New York City would soon open one government-subsidized store per borough, selling meat, milk and produce for thirty percent less than the going market price. The city will own the buildings, forgive the rent, waive the taxes, and cover any losses sustained. At least some of the city’s most vulnerable residents will get a hefty discount on their perishable necessities.

This is straight-up coercion. Yes, the store’s customers will get thirty percent off, but someone else must make up that thirty percent -- along with the rent, the taxes, and whatever the store loses. The “someones” are New York taxpayers, handed a bill for a store they didn’t ask for and may never shop in. They did not consent, and they cannot opt out. Far worse is the coercion of every other grocer save for Mamdani’s chosen few. Most grocers don’t make their living on subsidies. They keep their doors open by persuading the public that their bread is tasty and their produce fresh. Now, these small businesses are compelled to compete against rivals who cannot go broke no matter how poorly they serve the public. Nobody persuaded these small businesses now threatened by Mamdani’s government stores. They will simply be made to comply.

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Faith Knows No Footnotes

Whatever Mamdani is, he’s not uneducated. He must know enough history to understand his experiment will fail. The Soviet Union, East Germany, Cuba, and Venezuela all had government-run grocery stores. They also had empty shelves and bread lines as a result. Every time this has been tried –and I do mean every time – the consequence is deprivation. Zohran Mamdani may know this, but he will do it anyway, not merely to keep a campaign promise but because as a true believer, he cannot do otherwise.

Why?

A few weeks ago, I read a terrific article by Zineb Riboua of the Hudson Institute. She studies how hostile regimes and radical ideologies exploit the persuasion-based Western ideal in order to gain power. Riboua explains that creeds of leftism (like the certainty that the government should run grocery stores) are not ideals you hold because of careful, rational inquiry. They are more articles of faith that transcend evidence. You cannot be reasoned out of leftist beliefs because you didn’t use reason to acquire them. And so, when those of us who believe in persuasion marshal our evidence against leftism, citing Stalin’s gulags and Mao’s famines and failed socialist experiments from Havana to Hanoi, the true believer shrugs it off. In this sense, Riboua seems to say, the belief in coercion as an instrument of government policy is rooted in an intractable delusion about human nature. That intractable delusion was on display in that Brooklyn grocery store this past Monday.

Riboua is right that you cannot easily argue a true believer out of his creed. I’ve tried harder than most, and I’ve had a few successes, but not as many as I’d like. We can wait for New York’s experiment to fail, as it surely will at great cost. But we need to do more than look on in resignation, muttering “Told you so” when the whole government grocery regime collapses. We need to focus on persuading the still persuadable. The true believers enraptured by Democratic Socialism may be lost to us, but their neighbors aren’t – at least not yet. Many voters upset about inflation and very interested in cheap groceries can still be reached, particularly if our message marries sound economic truths with real compassion about the soaring cost of living.

When Mayor Mamdani prattles about the warmth of collectivism, he’s selling the comfort of a full shelf on opening day. That warmth won’t last, so what he’s really selling – inevitably – is coercion and deprivation. His is the kind of false and temporary promise that kings and dictators have made for many centuries. Some will believe in it no matter how bad things get. For the rest of us, the time is now to make the case not just for economic liberty, but for a culture and a society rooted in persuasion itself.

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The left has found itself a new litmus test. It always does. And unless you’re a seasoned political junkie (not that there’s anything wrong with being one!), you may have lost track of how many such tests the left has imposed in just the past twenty years.

In 2008, Barack Obama passed the test of his era. Back then, the American left was united in opposition to the Iraq War. If you were a progressive politician who wasn’t publicly angry about George W. Bush’s foreign policy, you didn’t stand a chance. The junior senator from Illinois deftly tapped into that anti-war sentiment, defeated his more moderate primary opponents, and made it to the White House. A few years into his administration – with Guantanamo Bay still open, and US troops still in Iraq and Afghanistan – progressives conveniently forgot all about that anti-war litmus test.

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Squeezing the Saint

A decade later, there was a new article of faith to which all needed to swear allegiance. By 2018, if you wanted to get ahead in the Democratic Party, you needed to (loudly) demonstrate your commitment to addressing climate change. Barely a month into her freshman House term, media darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Green New Deal. Every progressive candidate with political ambitions signed on. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, having shrewdly taken the temperature of the young activists who occupied her office, shifted left on the environment, signaling other Democrats to fall in line. As the 2020 election drew closer, American progressives even convinced the climate movement’s pubescent saint, Greta Thunberg, to endorse Joe Biden, a man she had previously despised. “I never engage in party politics,” she wrote, before doing exactly that. From a climate perspective, she conceded on Twitter, Biden was “very far from enough.” Then: “But, I mean…you know…damn! Just get organized and get everyone to vote #Biden.”

The progressive Political Vise even works on sullen Swedish teenagers!

A little more than half a decade later, climate has nearly disappeared from the left’s top concerns. Last year, researchers at Yale asked American voters to rank twenty-five issues by how much they mattered to their midterm vote. Global warming came in twenty-fourth. Only 1% of respondents named it as their most important issue. In September 2025, the Searchlight Institute, a think tank aligned with Democratic priorities, advised progressive politicians to stop using the term “climate change” altogether. The weather hasn’t changed, nor has the left succeeded in its aim of getting everyone to turn vegan and ride public transit. What has happened is that the environment has ceased to be what animates those who turn the levers of the Political Vise.

Dirtier Than Blackwater

What’s the latest test? Israel. This year, from Maine to California, primary season has witnessed vicious Democratic infighting over American aid to the Middle East’s only democracy. And to that party’s most dedicated activists, one name has become dirtier than Blackwater or Big Oil: AIPAC.

I am not here to weigh in on foreign policy. The government of Israel may or may not be above reproach. What strikes me here is less Israel itself than the fact that until very recently, other issues commanded far more attention on the American left. Israel, like climate change and the Iraq War before it, has suddenly become the one political issue about which reasonable progressives (perhaps an oxymoron) are not allowed to disagree. And so for the left, this summer’s litmus test is denouncing AIPAC, a venerable organization devoted to drumming up support for our embattled ally.

Take Michigan, where on August 4, Democrats will pick their Senate nominee. Abdul El-Sayed, a fiery leftist backed by Bernie Sanders and AOC, constantly reminds voters that AIPAC has endorsed his more moderate opponent, Congresswoman Haley Stevens. On the stump, El-Sayed rages against a foreign policy that he claims enables genocide. That anger has won him a huge following among the state’s youngest and most radical voters – a constituency increasingly central to Democratic hopes. El-Sayed may be pandering, but he’s also reading the data: a recent Data for Progress poll found that 64% of Michigan Democratic primary voters were less likely to support a candidate who takes AIPAC money.

A slightly different dynamic is playing out in New York’s eighteenth House district, represented by Democrat Pat Ryan. A West Point graduate and decorated Iraq veteran, Ryan has taken more than $790,000 from AIPAC over the last four years. Until a very short time ago, that would not have been a problem. Now, it’s an existential threat to his reelection prospects.

Last week, Ryan voted for an amendment to halt military aid to Israel. He was one of 103 House Democrats to do so. (The amendment was proposed by maverick Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie – the only member of his party to vote aye.) The vote was not enough; the congressman also felt compelled to (again, loudly) explain why he had cast it. “I expect groups like AIPAC will not support me in my future elections and frankly, I don’t want their support,” he declared. Ryan promised he would return all AIPAC contributions. That’s an expensive repudiation of an old friend, but when you’re feeling the pressure that comes from being on the wrong side of the current litmus test, you’ll spend a lot (in this case, almost $800,000) to wriggle free.

Ryan was familiar with the need to wriggle. Back in February of this year, as anti-ICE fervor rose on the left, he’d been forced to give away donations he’d taken from Palantir after activists objected to the company’s immigration contracts. At the same time, a local Hudson Valley progressive outfit called For the Many (you have my permission to roll your eyes at that name) ran a social media campaign, condemning Ryan’s ties to AIPAC. Remember that one of the levers of the progressive Political Vise is turned by influencers, and in the social media age, even just a few media-savvy radicals can generate intense pressure. When Ryan made a great show of severing ties with AIPAC, it was the second time in five months that this heretofore moderate Democrat had coughed up cash to make the squeeze stop.

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The Test

I believe politicians should be responsive to pressure, as that’s how our system was designed. Influencers and media are part of that design, and rightly so. In a healthy republic, they answer to broad swaths of the people, which is what keeps them honest. What has happened on the contemporary left is that a handful of self-appointed influencers have hijacked that apparatus. They answer to no one but themselves, and they force candidates into adopting ever-narrower and increasingly unrepresentative views. As I wrote in my book, anyone who opposes the leftist agenda is either crushed or cowed into compliance.

Twenty years ago, that outrage was over Iraq; five years ago, it was over climate. If policy were the real driver of pressure, the left would never have stopped shrieking about Guantanamo detainees or the Green New Deal. But policy isn’t what the progressive elites care about. They care about exercising raw power, and in the summer of 2026, manufacturing indignation over AIPAC is the latest way they can do just that.

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If it’s not 9-0, apparently the Republic is in peril.

That, as best I can tell, is the new standard by which the left grades the Supreme Court. Last month, in Trump v. Barbara, the Court struck down President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship. Birthright citizenship was affirmed in a sweeping opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, who traced the right back to the Fourteenth Amendment – and to a century of subsequent precedent. The plaintiffs got everything they asked for.

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And yet, they complained – loudly! – anyway. Two attorneys writing for the left-wing Brennan Center took a (very short) moment to celebrate the victory and then launched into a bitter lament that the decision was not unanimous. The Court, they wrote, had faced an obvious and easy choice: “Rewrite the Constitution . . . or just follow the law.” That four justices read the Constitution differently was, they claimed, “an unsettling reminder that we were one vote away from a ruling bringing back Dred Scott.” Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who staked out a middle ground in declaring that birthright citizenship could be ended by legislative action but not an executive order, was accused of drawing “a road map for a right-wing Congress to complete Trump’s failed job.” Utilizing a phrase made famous by Martin Luther King, the Brennan Center authors concluded, in tones both indignant and mournful, that the conservatives on the court “have made it their job to bend the arc of the moral universe toward injustice.”

The Tantrum Tactic

The mainstream media rapidly amplified the outrage. Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern called the 5-to-4 vote on the constitutional question “a scandal,” as though a Supreme Court majority ruling in the left’s favor were a species of corruption. At Vox, Ian Millhiser opined that the Court had come “one vote away from a constitutional catastrophe,” and compared the conservative dissent to Korematsu, the 1944 decision that legitimized the internment of Japanese Americans. Across a broad spectrum of the left-wing press, there were howls of indignation not at defeat, but that the margin of victory was not greater.

It’s easy to make fun of pundits who can’t take “yes” for an answer, or who insist on finding disappointment in a victory. Seen through the lens of the Political Vise, however, this anguish is entirely tactical. Winning an election or a Supreme Court decision is never sufficient for progressives. The real objective is to shrink the range of respectable opinion, and to shift the window of acceptability several steps left. What was once reasonable disagreement gets recast as dangerous bigotry.

Slurs & Subpoenas

So what, you might well wonder. Why care if the left calls you a bigot? Those accusations matter because they are – invariably – weaponized. Shortly after the decision came down, a Tennessee professor of constitutional law declared that the four conservatives on the losing end of the Barbara decision should all be impeached.(His op-ed was widely syndicated and approvingly quoted by the left.) Impeachment is traditionally reserved for high crimes and misdemeanors such as corruption or bribery. In this case, the impeachable offense is reading the Fourteenth Amendment to contain a limit a liberal professor insists isn’t there.

On the left, the impulse to treat legal disagreement as a crime has become a respectable position, argued by respectable people, in the pages that shape respectable opinion. Put another way, cancel culture has come for the high court.

That impeachment-drunk professor is doing a job, intentionally or not. Every time a respectable voice insists that a mainstream legal position is not just mistaken but impeachable, the Vise squeezes a little tighter. Lower court judges read the op-eds, and rethink how far their reasoning can stray. The junior lawyer reads it and considers which arguments might cut short a promising career. The ordinary American reads it, and even if they roll their eyes, they are reminded that some once-acceptable views should now be kept quiet. Most people don’t want to be squeezed, or impeached, or fired. They go along to get along, and the entire culture shifts left.

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Threat Theater

Contrast the left’s outrage at victory with how conservatives coped with defeat. President Trump, who cared deeply about this case, took the loss with almost uncharacteristic calm. Calling the decision “too bad for our country,” he said he would take the fight to Congress. The National Review and other conservative outlets noted that lawful roads to substantive immigration reform were still open. This is, of course, how Americans have traditionally responded to Supreme Court decisions with which they disagree. They express disappointment, vow the fight will continue, and start looking for the next constitutional angle to advance their cause. No one on the right proposed impeaching the five justices who ruled against the President.

The founders expected disagreement and made room for it. They seated multiple justices (and yes, the number nine is not constitutionally fixed) because they understood that debates were vital. The framers of our system understood that both majority opinions and dissents were vital records of important arguments. They knew that one generation’s dissent would become the next’s majority opinion. Major decisions – like Plessy v. Ferguson or Roe v. Wade – have been reversed by later courts. A Supreme Court incapable of anything other than unanimity? We call that a rubber stamp. A rubber stamp seems to be exactly what the left would like.

Whether you agree with the court’s ruling in Barbara or not, we should all be able to agree that the justices did their jobs. They took up a serious question, examined it from a variety of historical and constitutional angles, and ruled on it. Both the opinion and the dissent were detailed and thoughtful. That’s been a familiar story throughout the history of our nation. What is unfamiliar and troubling is that respectable outlets and law professors now suggest we purge the dissenters if we wish to preserve the republic. There is little risk that the four conservative justices will actually be impeached. The danger is that many Americans – and many lower-court judges – will feel the pressure to keep silent.

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We’re in the heart of the summer. America just had a spectacular 250^th birthday party, the World Cup is drawing towards the climactic final rounds, and much of the nation is trying to stay cool in a heat wave. You’re forgiven if you’re not paying close attention to politics, and to a particular political scandal in Maine. So, if you don’t know the name Graham Platner, let me introduce him as he leaves the stage. As he walks away in defiance and disgrace, Platner is illustrating a fundamental truth about the Political Vise.

Platner is a Democrat, a Marine veteran and an oyster farmer, and a novice politician who launched a populist campaign last year for the United States Senate. His target was Susan Collins, the five-term Republican that Democrats have spent decades determined to dislodge. The Maine seat is one of the few that will decide who controls the Senate next year, which is to say that Graham Platner is not a minor figure. A darling of the far left, Platner railed against corporations and against Israel, reflecting the priorities of the Democratic Socialists of America. His pugnacious style resonated with the party’s increasingly radical base; it was no surprise that last month, Platner easily defeated his more moderate opponents to win the Democratic nomination. The entire party establishment dutifully lined up behind him.

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Tattoo Ü

They lined up behind a lot. Over the course of nearly a year, Platner had survived a steady stream of revelations of the kind that until recently, ended campaigns instantly. There were old Reddit posts, in which he blamed women for their own assaults and suggested they should drink less if they did not want to be raped. There was the Nazi death’s head tattoo on his chest. There were the sexually explicit texts to other women during his marriage. And then, last month, the New York Times published an account from a former girlfriend who said Platner had twisted her arm behind her back until she was, as he put it, “calm.” Through all of it, the Democrats stood by their man. Bernie Sanders – the octogenarian socialist icon – campaigned for Platner. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who had originally endorsed Platner’s opponent, affirmed his support.

On Monday afternoon, a second woman came forward, alleging that Platner had sexually assaulted her in 2021. Within hours, the Democratic establishment turned on their erstwhile darling. Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, the state party, and dozens of other leftist luminaries told Platner it was time to go.

The burning question is, why was this the final straw? Why didn’t the Nazi tattoo, the Reddit vulgarity, the sexts, and the New York Times report doom the Platner campaign?

The answer is the Political Vise. The Vise is a machine, not an argument or a verdict or (as the kids say these days), a “vibe.” The progressive Political Vise is the media, liberal elites, and Democratic politicians, applying pressure from three sides to force an outcome. Graham Platner spent the better part of a year convinced that the machine was working for him. The media that built him up, the party elites who endorsed him, the small-dollar army his populism summoned? It must have made him feel personally invincible and politically inevitable. What Graham did not understand is that he was standing inside the Vise the whole time. The machine that can foist you onto the public can just as easily close around and crush you. All it takes is for the people working the handle to decide you’re more trouble than you’re worth.

Her Word vs. His Party

That New York Times story of the arm twisted behind the back came from Lyndsey Fifield, Platner’s former girlfriend. When the media discovered that Fifield was a conservative – and a Heritage Foundation veteran who had worked briefly for Nikki Haley – they had just what they needed to render her allegations useless. The Platner campaign only needed to repeat that she was a lifelong GOP operative who had dedicated her career to electing Republicans. Democrat elites decided Fifield’s party affiliation was sufficiently discrediting for them to stick by their man. Her accusation never entered the Vise, the handle never turned, and Platner never felt the pressure.

On Monday, though, the handle began to turn. A woman named Jenny Racicot told Politico that Platner sexually assaulted her five years ago. She offered extensive corroboration. She had, in fact, already spoken to the Times for the Fifield story – but the “paper of record” had buried her allegations deep in the text. Racicot is a long-time progressive who supports the Platner agenda. After the Fifield story failed to land, Racicot realized she was one accuser the party machine could not easily dismiss.

I am not sure if Jenny Racicot has read my book, but she understands the mechanism of the Vise better than many politicians. She knew that her account, however well documented, would move nothing on its own, because the party doesn’t weigh a charge on its veracity. It assesses an allegation through the politics of the person making it. A Republican woman’s word is inert; a progressive woman’s word is live. When an accuser who could not be dismissed as a Republican operative stepped forward, Graham Platner finally felt the squeeze.

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A Curtain Call for Conscience

The Vise can squeeze slowly, or it can crush quickly. In Platner’s case, there was little time to waste. Under Maine law, Platner had until Monday, July 13 to step aside and let his party choose a replacement. Miss that deadline, and Democrats would be stuck with him – and Susan Collins would be all but guaranteed an easy reelection victory. When Fifield’s accusation emerged, the party had time to discredit her. That time has slipped away. A party that blithely excused a Nazi tattoo, waved away sexts and ignored an assault on a Republican woman had a convenient and timely rediscovery of its conscience.

By Wednesday afternoon, forty-eight hours after the Racicot story broke, Platner could resist the squeeze no more. The timing of his withdrawal from the race was less because a new revelation had surfaced, and more because party elites had decided he no longer served their interests.

The progressive Political Vise could not care less whether Graham Platner is guilty or innocent. It only cares whether he serves the cause. For a year he served the left well, and the machine ruthlessly protected him through one damning scandal after another. When it turned out he’d laid hands on the wrong woman – and became a liability – the same machine that built Graham Platner crushed him.

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This Saturday, July 4, 2026, America celebrates its 250^th anniversary. The technical terms for this occasion include semiquincentennial, sestercentennial, and even bicenquinquagenary. (I’m not making that up!) Whatever you call it, make sure you call it Independence Day.

A date on the calendar tells you when something happened. Independence Day tells you what happened. I first made this case back in 2013, for what was then America’s 237^th birthday. (I don’t think there’s a fancy Latin term for that occasion.) My argument was simple then, but the events of subsequent years have made it more urgent. To call it the “Fourth of July,” just a date on the calendar, strips this celebration of its meaning. Thirteen years later, I feel even more strongly about what we call this day.

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I Was There in ‘76

I’m old enough to remember America’s 200^th birthday in 1976. That anniversary came in a presidential election year, at a time when the nation was struggling with inflation and the ongoing repercussions of Watergate. Unlike today, we were largely able to set aside division and rancor to commemorate this extraordinary statement of independence. Democrats and Republicans, big cities and small towns, young and old – virtually everyone accepted that this was a unique and special occasion. I know the dangers of false nostalgia, but trust me: I was there. That unity was real. And so too was the understanding of what that holiday meant.

I don’t need to tell you that we don’t have that unity today. For many on the left, Donald Trump is a convenient excuse to refuse to celebrate America’s 250^th birthday. Put simply, because they despise the man throwing the party, they’ve decided the party itself is undeserved. The progressive Political Vise has been busy compelling politicians and performers to stay away from official festivities. Musicians who had pledged to perform at a 250^th celebration concert in Washington found themselves pressured to cancel. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to point out that the left has confused their rage at one man with contempt for the country he leads.

The ‘Reckoning’ Racket

Donald Trump may be the target-in-chief of the left’s anger, but progressive hostility to the American experiment predates his election. Since 2013, when I first wrote in defense of Independence Day, it has become an article of faith on the left that there is little about America that deserves honor. The 1619 Project (originally published in and promoted by the New York Times) argues that we only declared our independence to ensure the survival of our slave-based economy. Alternative histories of the United States declare that America is fundamentally racist to the core. What we need, these voices declare, is a long-overdue reckoning. (Accompanied, of course, by untold billions in reparations.)

This combination of personal hostility to President Trump and growing disdain for the facts of American history has produced a sharp and partisan collapse in patriotism. Don’t take my word for it. Take CNN’s. According to the network’s chief polling analyst, Harry Enten, since 2015 the share of Democrats who say they are extremely or very proud to be American has fallen from 80 percent to 36 percent. Among Gen Z Democrats, that figure is down to 24 percent. Over that same period, the percentage of Republicans admitting their pride in this country rose to 92 percent.

The Pride Recession

“I just never thought I’d see these numbers,” Enten said. He may be surprised, but I’m not. Neither, frankly, should any honest observer of the culture. These are the predictable consequences of a decade spent teaching people that the flag is a symbol of oppression, and that the founders were greedy and racist.

Predictable or not, polls capture a moment in time. They don’t capture enduring truth, nor can they predict what the future will hold. And the truth is that the naysayers and cynics are wrong. They are wrong about American history in general, and they are wrong about this celebration in particular. Two hundred fifty years ago this Saturday, a group of men staked their lives on an idea no government had ever conceded: that the individual is sovereign, and the state exists to serve him. They built the most successful experiment in human freedom the world has seen. That idea was radical when Thomas Jefferson wrote it down, and it remains radical today. An idea that threatens the powerful never stops needing defenders.

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The Idea They Can't Kill

Besides the plea to call this holiday by its rightful name, I made another argument in that 2013 essay, one that I think has only grown more important to remember. We are celebrating more than the day fifty-six men signed a document. We are celebrating the entire process that led to that moment – and all that came as a result. It took years for the founders to move from petitioning with grievance to launching revolution to securing liberty. The lesson I drew in my 2013 piece is the one I’d offer now to anyone disheartened by the polls, or the national rancor, or the empty seats at the celebration in Washington: patriots are stubbornly patient. As I wrote then, “Let us remember that it is the patriots who stay; it is the patriots who fight. It is the patriots whose hearts grow stronger and whose minds work smarter who persuade enough of their neighbors, their co-workers and their family that the fight is worthwhile and winnable.”

It is true that America may seem even more divided than it was in 2013. That doesn’t mean the fight isn’t winnable. We must remain patient and resolved, just as our forefathers were patient and resolved. On the day they signed the Declaration of Independence, the future was very much in doubt. The war still had years to run. Yet we don’t celebrate the day the British surrendered. We don’t mark the end of the conflict. We mark the moment that fifty-six brave men put their lives, their fortunes, their signatures and their sacred honor on the line for a gloriously precious idea: liberty.

Leaders come and leaders go. Patriotism goes in and out of fashion with the elites. Call it our 250^th birthday, call it the semiquincentennial, but this weekend is the right time to remind the world (and ourselves) that we are free and sovereign human beings. Join me in celebrating this Saturday. And join me in calling it Independence Day.

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WATCH

Note: My apologies for the unclickable thumbnail. Substack apparently does not play nice with Rumble. Watch the interview here or by clicking the orange button above. Kindest regards.

The re-election of Donald Trump was a political earthquake. Some eighteen months after he was inaugurated for a second term, the aftershocks are still roiling across the hemisphere. From Central America down to Tierra del Fuego, country after country has moved to the right. In Bolivia, Honduras, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, and Colombia (the last two nations just this month) conservative candidates have swept to unexpected and often decisive victories.

In little more than a year, an entire political landscape shifted decisively away from the left. But why? The media claims that Donald Trump is unpopular at home and abroad. The mainstream press writes (with barely concealed glee) about the rise of “democratic” socialism here in the United States. So why is Latin America refusing to cooperate with the narrative?

The Political Vise has an explanation. The region’s leftward drift of the last twenty years was far from organic. On the contrary, it was deliberately engineered through American funding and carefully orchestrated pressure.

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Comrades in Cartography

On January 20, 2025 – President Trump’s first day back in office – he signed an executive order freezing foreign aid. On March 10, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the Trump administration had concluded its review of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Nearly 85% of USAID assistance to Latin America was eliminated.

The American left howled that thousands (or even millions) of vulnerable children in the developing world would starve to death. Secretary Rubio pointed out that a substantial percentage of USAID spending didn’t go to hungry kids, but to the agency’s “Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance” portfolio. That sounds benign. In practice, it meant American money flowed into a political ecosystem that propped up left-leaning candidates and causes across the hemisphere.

That targeted aid may well have even brought down governments. Michael Benz, a former State Department IT chief, has stated repeatedly that if USAID had not existed, the conservative reformer Jair Bolsonaro would still be president of Brazil. Time and again, Benz and other whistleblowers claimed, American funding had been instrumental in defeating right-wing candidates and propping up left-wing regimes.

Claims like that are hard to verify. But there’s absolutely no mistaking what happened as soon as the funding spigot was turned off. The left’s capacity to exert irresistible pressure seemed to vanish overnight, and what quickly followed was a cascade of right-wing electoral victories. In April 2025, Ecuador’s right-wing Daniel Noboa secured a second term. In October 2025, Bolivia elected center-right Rodrigo Paz Pereira, ending nearly two decades of dominance by the far-left. In Honduras last November, Trump-backed conservative Nasry Asfura narrowly defeated his opponents. In December, Chile’s José Antonio Kast won the presidential runoff with 58.2 percent of the vote against a Communist Party candidate. In February 2026, Costa Rica elected conservative Laura Fernández with 48.6 percent in a first-round victory. Peru elected Keiko Fujimori two weeks ago; just this past Sunday, Colombia elected a firebrand populist (and huge Trump fan) named Abelardo de la Espriella. (His nickname is “The Tiger.”)

The left lost every single one of these elections. That wasn’t just because Latin American voters had lost faith in socialism (though they understandably have). The left lost – and continues to lose – because it can no longer rely on borrowed leverage.

Late Communism: Made in America

Since Barack Obama’s first term, American foreign assistance had turned the levers of the Latin American Political Vise. Voters were told they were making choices free of foreign interference. They had no idea that USAID was secretly funding left-wing candidates and their parties. Conservatives faced a very different landscape. Without access to that same USAID cash -- and without media (influencer) support -- right-wing candidates were squeezed out. The moment the American funding disappeared, the Latin American left lost control of the levers of the Vise. The subsequent results, as they say, speak for themselves.

The clearest evidence for all this comes from a surprising place: Cuba.

Along with North Korea, Cuba is one of the world’s last surviving Communist dictatorships. Like North Korea, Cuba has been ruled by one family since the 1950s. For decades, the Castro regime stubbornly resisted market reforms. Even after the Soviet Union fell, and the Cubans lost their primary sponsor, the party apparatus stayed its rigid course. Until, that is, this month.

Just days ago, Cuba’s National Assembly suddenly adopted nearly 200 free-market reforms. According to Prime Minister Manuel Marrero, these measures are intended to dramatically roll back the state’s role in the economy. Foreign investors will no longer be forced to form joint ventures with the state, and for the first time in nearly seventy years, Cuba will welcome large private enterprises. Soon, both Cuban and foreign investors will be allowed to acquire stakes in state companies.

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Freedom Never Needs a Subsidy

This is, of course, good news. But why now? You already know: because President Trump has systematically dismantled every external support system propping up far-left regimes. When the Trump Administration eliminated USAID funding to Venezuela—funding that had sustained the government of Nicolas Maduro -- Venezuela’s economy collapsed. When the Trump Administration seized an already-indicted Maduro and brought him to the United States to face trial, the dictator’s successors took the unmistakable hint. They cut off oil to Cuba, and without that oil, the regime was suddenly forced to choose between ideology and survival. The Communist Party chose survival.

Most astonishing of all were the remarks of Cuba’s president, Miguel Diaz-Canel. As his regime adopted these new reforms, he conceded the obvious: Cuba had long been held back by their own system’s structural failings, not by American hostility. The Cuban people were suffering because of a bureaucracy that stifled innovation, punished creativity, crushed dissent, and suffocated entrepreneurs.

In other words, the Cuban president finally admitted that communism does not work.

Socialists won elections in Latin America not because their ideas were better, but because they were able to tap misdirected American aid to fund campaigns and squeeze opponents. Thanks to the Trump Administration, that era has come to a welcome and abrupt end. A new age of freedom and flourishing has arrived in Latin America. We should celebrate it.

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LISTEN

What is the American Dream? Is it opportunity? Is it the freedom to speak one’s mind and worship as one pleases? Is it the Detroit Tigers winning the World Series? To be fair, the last of these is mine, and probably not yours. The first two, though, are at the heart of the American promise. They are joined by something else, something increasingly out of reach: buying a home. The dream of owning, and not merely renting, is slipping further away for millions of young Americans. As I see it, that dream is getting crushed by many factors, chief among them the pernicious influence of Big Green.

Sixty-two percent of Americans now believe buying a home is “unrealistic.” A recent Siena/New York Times poll found that for voters under thirty, half say housing affordability is their top concern—more pressing than retirement, healthcare, education, food, or transportation combined. We are watching the primary vehicle by which ordinary Americans build wealth simply evaporate. We are watching a dream die. And it is dying for a reason.

For decades, I’ve watched the progressive Political Vise operate against American families. I’ve documented how media, influencers, and politicians squeeze ordinary people. But I’ve rarely seen it work with such elegant and comprehensive brutality as it does in the housing crisis.

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Dreams Don’t Die of Natural Causes

According to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), government regulations now add $131,734 to the cost of a newly built home. That’s 26.4 percent of the entire purchase price. These costs have nothing to do with the price of lumber or labor. They are the result of regulation piled on regulation: environmental impact assessments, stormwater permits, pollution control measures, sustainable building codes, energy efficiency standards, permitting delays, and inspection fees. The regulations themselves seem well-intentioned. Clean water and lower energy bills are worthy goals, but the mechanism used to pursue them is destructive.

The left frames environmental regulations as moral imperatives. They immediately reframe as sheer greed any suggestion that we might balance environmental protection with the basic human need for affordable shelter. A homebuilder who argues that stormwater regulations are adding thousands to the cost of a new home isn’t asking for a reasonable conversation. The media will shriek that “Greedy developers are willing to sacrifice public health for profit!”

Homebuilders have no choice but to comply with these burdensome codes or leave the industry altogether. One way or another, the cost gets passed on. Those who can afford a home pay more. Those who can’t remain renters, shut out from the American dream.

Sainthood’s Hidden Sin Tax

In the Political Vise, I devote an entire chapter to “Big Green.” Many Americans still think of environmentalists as earnest do-gooders reminding everyone to recycle. That may describe your aging Berkeley-educated neighbor in the Grateful Dead t-shirt, but the reality is that the nation’s major environmental organizations are master political operators. Non-profits like the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Environmental Working Group don’t build homes. They will never have to comply with the regulations for which they lobby, but they profit handsomely from the regulatory thicket they create. They pressure politicians and homebuilders through lobbying and litigation, raise millions on their ability to stop building projects, and wrangle huge consulting contracts for those projects that do win approval. Stricter environmental regulation is their business model, and it is a highly effective one.

A young family priced out of the housing market doesn’t have a lobbying budget, nor can a couple in their twenties match the organizational resources of the green lobby. Politicians respond to organized power, not to individual stories of disappointment and frustration. Big Green’s well-heeled lobbyists (wearing fancy suits, not tie-dye) show up where young Americans cannot. The result is that wealth-building through homeownership— the traditional path to prosperity – slips further from the grasp of working and middle-class Americans.

Progressivism Protects the Organized (Not the Powerless)

As the founders designed what I call the traditional Political Vise, the people have leverage. You can vote out the politician who ignores you. The media responds to public pressure, and ordinary people have the capacity to organize. The system was designed so that the people, ultimately, turn the levers. In the progressive Vise, the people are squeezed. The levers are turned by politicians responding to influencers responding to media narratives. Homebuyers can’t vote their way out of $131,000 in regulatory costs. They can’t organize faster than the Sierra Club or match the funding of environmental nonprofits with a combined annual budget in the hundreds of millions.

I like to emphasize the distinction between extraction economics and creation economics. Creation is when a builder constructs a home, a family builds equity, a young couple transforms into homeowners, and a community flourishes. Extraction is when regulatory costs transfer wealth from homebuyers to consultants, lawyers, environmental organizations, and subsidy-rich green-tech companies. The NAHB notes that the median home price has risen 28 percent since the pandemic began in 2020—from $317,000 to $405,000. Regulatory costs during the construction phase alone have risen from 13.3 percent to 17 percent of total price in just five years.

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The Rich Ruse

Millennials and Gen Z are angry, the surveys say. They can see that the path to wealth – the one their parents and grandparents took -- is closed to them. The media tries to direct that righteous anger towards the successful, declaring that greedy billionaires are the source of all the suffering. As my Southern friends say, I’m not sure that dog will hunt anymore. Young people are waking up to the reality that environmental regulations, not wealth-creators, are strangling the opportunity to pursue the American Dream.

This is less a debate about the environment versus the economy than it is a simple story about raw power. The housing crisis will end when enough voters understand that it’s not the free market pricing young Americans out of homeownership, but rather regulatory extraction orchestrated by influential environmental elites.

The solution to our housing crisis is in sight. A new generation can claim the American Dream. We need to free home builders from stifling regulations – and we need to pry Big Green’s hands off the Vise.

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LISTEN

This past January, I met with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis about a major capital project that I’ve been working on. My team has Miami, Orlando, Atlanta, Nashville, and Dallas-Fort Worth on our list. I walked him through the details of the proposal. He asked sharp questions, demonstrating that he was (unsurprisingly) both well-briefed and thoroughly engaged.

When I finished, the governor asked one question: “How can we help you bring this to Florida?”

I almost burst out laughing. It wasn’t that what Governor DeSantis asked was funny. It’s that I’ve spent a lifetime in Illinois, and it’s impossible to imagine any elected official back home asking a business executive how the government could help. Whether in Chicago or Springfield, the question Illinois leaders ask is always the exact opposite: What can you do for us?

When you want to build something in the Land of Lincoln, you know you’ll need to pay extra to get permission. Perhaps it’s a special concession, a promise to hire only certain unions, or put in a community benefits agreement that puts cash in the pockets of some favored constituency. This practice has a name: pay to play. That’s a cute term for very real corruption. In 2025, an Illinois court convicted former House Speaker Michael Madigan for running this exact scheme with a utility called ComEd. (Madigan extracted $1.3 million in payments from ComEd, spreading them among his friends. In return, the utility got favorable legislation from Springfield.) As far as state and local officials in Illinois are concerned, business exists to help them, not the other way around. The idea of a governor asking how he could help, no strings attached? Inconceivable.

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The Missed Shot Heard Around the Field

Last week, as you’ve probably heard, the Chicago Bears announced they were moving to Indiana. Well, not quite: the team’s board of directors declared that they’d voted to advance a stadium development project in Hammond, thirty miles southeast of the Windy City. The move came after the Illinois General Assembly failed yet again to pass any financing bill for the team. While I am not a fan of taxpayer funding of private assets, Illinois is the state that pioneered the model for public-private capital projects (including the current Soldier Field, McCormick Place, Navy Pier, and Millennium Park) cannot seem to find a way to keep an iconic NFL franchise that has called Chicago home for more than a century.

Generations of Chicagoans have grown up loving the team they affectionately call “Da Bears.” Through good times (eight NFL championships before the Super Bowl era, plus the 1985 Lombardi Trophy) and bad times (a 3-13 record in 2016), fans have stayed loyal. New York has two NFL teams, as does L.A. Chicago has only the Bears. So even if the team’s name stays the same, and even if some fans will make the regular trip down I-94 to the new stadium in Indiana, the impending departure is a profound cultural loss.

That unnecessary loss has less to do with money than with a fundamentally perverse view of private enterprise that infects both state and local government.

No one – not even the most self-serving politician – denied that the Bears needed a new stadium. Soldier Field is more than thirty years older than any other facility in the league, and further retrofits and enhancements would be inadequate. Yet when the team approached state and local officials for help, they encountered the same logic I’ve watched destroy company after company, job after job during my years fighting in Illinois politics. The state didn’t ask: How do we make this work?

Instead, every layer of government asked a version of the same question: What can we extract?

Notes From the Inside

All of this was frustratingly familiar. In my time leading Illinois Policy, we battled AFSCME, the Chicago Teachers Union, and the SEIU: all public-sector unions that regarded state and local government as a piggy bank from which to extract maximum compensation. We spent years fighting against an entire system that treated businesses as either nuisances or prey. We won some battles but lost too many others.

I watched Ken Griffin -- who had spent more than thirty years doing business in Chicago and who had built Citadel into a multi-billion-dollar company -- conclude that he could no longer stay in the state he’d grown to love. I’ve watched a dozen other businesses reach the same calculation. It wasn’t because they couldn’t handle a Chicago winter. It was because they had grown exhausted with fighting off state and local governments hellbent on extraction. In Illinois, if you create value, it’s the government’s job to figure out just how much of that value they can squeeze out.

The City That Tested the Theory

This contempt for business and wealth creation is not limited to Illinois. We see it in almost every “blue” state and city. Think of Oakland, which not so long ago was the home of not one, not two, but three championship-winning professional teams. Since 2019, this Northern California community of 440,000 people has lost the NFL’s Raiders, the NBA’s Warriors, and the MLB’s Athletics to other cities. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to lose one franchise might be misfortune, to lose two might be carelessness, but to lose three? That’s a colossal failure of public policy and common sense that can only happen where the left is in charge.

Each departure meant the loss of jobs, tax revenue, economic vitality and civic pride. Each departure could have been avoided if far-left city officials had focused on wealth creation rather than extraction.

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Business Goes Where It’s Treated Well

The Chicago Bears are moving to Indiana because the Hoosier State knows what Illinois leaders refuse to accept: when you make it easy for private enterprise to succeed, everyone benefits. Capital can always pick up and move – just ask Ken Griffin or the Las Vegas Raiders. Successful businesses go where they’re welcome, and they go where elected officials ask not what they can get, but what they can do to help.

Indiana has only about half of Illinois’ population, but it may soon have two professional football teams while Illinois will have none. Indiana will enjoy that advantage because their elected officials know that prosperity is a function of attraction rather than extraction. Indiana’s leaders – like Ron DeSantis in Florida -- asked, over and over again, how they could help, and so “Da Bears” are headed where they are welcome and wanted. Countless other entrepreneurs, small business owners, and major corporations alike will continue to do the same.

I’d like to think the imminent loss of such a beloved cultural institution will cause the far-left politicians in Illinois to rethink. Recent history, alas, suggests they won’t.

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I gave a speech last month about Genghis Khan. Now, I’m not a professional historian. But I am curious about the past. As someone who has spent years studying and practicing politics, I’m especially interested in how leaders in the past acquired and used power. And what I’ve found is that American exceptionalism is the reason we’re not completely at the mercy of brutal warlords like Genghis Khan.

A little over eight hundred years ago, Genghis Khan emerged from Mongolia and headed west. His genius, his will, and his strategic mind all found expression through conquest. He took what he wanted because he had the power to do so. By the time his own extraordinary life came to an end, Khan had killed nearly 10% of the world’s population – a figure that no modern dictator, not even Mao or Stalin – has been able to match. Genghis Khan is the preeminent symbol of how the world worked for thousands of years. If you were willful and talented and driven, you became a warlord. Ambition found its fullest expression in conquest.

As I noted in my speech, the contemporary American left considers our greatest wealth creators to be no different than these blood-soaked warlords. They look at the likes of Elon Musk, and they see another Genghis Khan. Both are tremendously wealthy, enormously powerful, tenaciously ambitious. As far as the left is concerned, Musk is a softer, subtler version of the ruthless conquerors of the past. Our greatest living entrepreneur is just another brutal man using his power to exploit the weak and vulnerable.

As usual, the American left is profoundly wrong.

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Why We Unlearned Conquest

Of course, Elon Musk is nothing like Genghis Khan. And the reason he isn’t is because of the very thing the left despises: American exceptionalism. Two hundred and fifty years ago, our founders created something new – not just a new form of government, but a system that channeled human ambition in an entirely new direction. The founders had no desire to make human beings less willful or driven. What they did seek to do was create a system that took those fundamental human impulses to discover and to dominate -- and direct them towards productive ends.

There is something I’m not sure the left will ever understand about this system, something that goes deeper than economics or politics. Jesus taught that the greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. The Apostle Paul made clear that love is not a feeling but a verb—it means actively doing what you can to create conditions where your neighbor can thrive. And if we are called to love our neighbor, that love needs to happen at work and in business at least as much as anywhere else.

Christ and the Other Adam

The genius of the American system is that it was the first to align with this theological principle. You cannot build wealth in a capitalist system without serving others. Genghis Khan operated in a world of extraction economics, a world of finite wealth where my gain means your loss. In that world, conquest is the only rational strategy. But capitalism is creation economics. You cannot prosper by extracting. You prosper by creating value that didn’t exist before. That’s why an ambitious person in Khan’s world became a warlord, and an ambitious person in the United States of America becomes an entrepreneur who builds rockets.

As Adam Smith first explained in Wealth of Nations (published just months before the founders gathered to sign the Declaration of Independence), an entrepreneur’s path to abundance is paved with serving customers, employing workers, and improving lives. Capitalism and free enterprise teach that serving others is the path to success and lasting fulfillment. Jesus taught the same thing.

If Elon Musk had been born in Mongolia in 1162, I suspect that he too would have built an empire through conquest. I have no doubt he would have rivaled Genghis Khan in ambition and success. Instead, because he came from South Africa to America to prosper, Musk builds the most advanced electric cars on earth. He connects the world through Starlink. He is literally rewiring damaged brain neurons through Neuralink, restoring possibility and autonomy to ordinary people’s lives. Elon has become the world’s richest man not through extraction, but through imagination, ambition, and service.

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The Ghosts of Giants

Elon Musk’s mixture of talent, drive, and genius is exceptional. But it is not unique. The American system has produced countless entrepreneurs across centuries: from the likes of Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers to Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie, to Madam CJ Walker (the first African American millionaire) and many others who have improved and transformed our lives. What these entrepreneurs – I call them giants – share isn’t just wealth, or power. What they all share is how they got to where they did: by serving others well. As different as they were, they each channeled their energies and ambitions into giving people what they wanted – or didn’t even dare to imagine wanting.

For Genghis Khan, his drive to succeed required him to become a warlord. Conquest, subjugation, and battle were the only available outlets for his tremendous drive. Just like Elon Musk, the likes of Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie might well have become chieftains or tyrants had they lived a few centuries earlier, or in a different part of the world. Yet when I think of other contemporary entrepreneurial giants – for example, Sarah Blakely, the founder of Spanx -- I see the same fundamental drives as Khan. Sarah’s imagination, work ethic, drive and genius found expression not through conquest, but through creation. She succeeded not by subjugating millions, but by serving them.

The left gets away with describing bold entrepreneurs as greedy warlords because we have stopped explaining to young people that entrepreneurship is noble. As I noted in my speech last month, we have almost entirely abandoned the work of teaching that building something is profoundly virtuous. Because of that neglect, the left has been able to fill the void with the lie that entrepreneurs exploit rather than create. They preach the false narrative of the zero-sum game, convincing young people that success only comes from stealing.

Our nation’s founders created a system where human ambition could serve humanity instead of destroying it. That system has brought prosperity and flourishing to hundreds of millions. But that system will only survive if we actively defend it against its detractors. We must continue to tell the story of American exceptionalism and American possibility. If we fail, we risk returning to Khan’s world.

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WATCH

The Democratic Party has proved that it is willing to do anything—anything!—to appeal to men, except appeal to men.

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The media, the Deep State, the government itself. They’ve all been weaponized against one man for the better part of the last decade.