The champagne communists who sold Millennials a bill of goods



A generation was promised a simple path to the American dream: Earn a four-year degree, get a good job, buy a house, start a family. For many Millennials, the diploma arrived. The rest of the bargain did not.

Now student loan payments compete with rent, mortgages, and the cost of raising children. Graduates work in jobs that never required the credentials they borrowed money to obtain. Meanwhile, socialism has reached its highest positive rating since Gallup began tracking it in 2010. Who sold Millennials the original promise?

You were lied to by leftist universities that gladly took your money and left you in ruin.

Gallup’s September report found that 43% of Americans viewed socialism positively, up from 39% in 2025. Among adults ages 18 to 34, the figure was 57%. It is an extraordinary development. If government-backed higher education helped saddle a generation with debt, why would more government look like the solution?

The financial burden is real. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported $1.65 trillion in outstanding student loans in the second quarter of 2026. In a separate Federal Reserve survey, 23% of adults with student loans reported recent difficulty making payments. Even a manageable loan bill is money a borrower cannot put toward a down payment or a family.

But why did so many people borrow so much for credentials whose value varies so widely? Because Americans were repeatedly told a four-year degree was the necessary ticket to adulthood.

Parents heard it. Guidance counselors repeated it. Politicians promised greater access. Universities gladly collected the tuition, helped along by a federal lending system that made borrowing easier today and paying the bill a problem for tomorrow.

And some of the professors who taught students to distrust capitalism were only too happy to work within this arrangement. Universities expanded administrative operations while students took on mounting obligations. The people selling degrees should have been the first to explain what those degrees could actually buy.

The gamble persists for younger graduates. Federal Reserve research using 2023 data on graduates ages 22 to 27 found an underemployment rate of 9.7% for nursing majors, compared with 56.5% for liberal arts and 67.2% for criminal justice. Underemployment here means holding a job that typically does not require a college degree. These graduates are working, but many are not using the expensive credential they were told they needed.

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What did the colleges tell their applicants about those odds? If an 18-year-old is asked to borrow tens of thousands of dollars, the institution ought to disclose the likely costs, earnings, and risks. A degree is an investment only if the buyer has a realistic picture of the return. Universities should face the same scrutiny over misleading promises that we expect of any business.

Students also deserved a serious account of the alternatives: trade schools, apprenticeships, community colleges, military service, and employment without a four-year degree. These are legitimate paths to adulthood, not consolation prizes for people supposedly unfit for college.

There is a cultural problem, too. On too many campuses, students are trained to interpret society through oppression, power, and inequality. Let them study those arguments. But also make them confront the best defenses of markets, private property, entrepreneurship, and the limits of government. A university should teach students to examine competing ideas, not recruit them to a fashionable orthodoxy.

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Professors who preach against capitalist exploitation might begin by examining the financial incentives of their own institutions. Some feed students a steady diet of anti-market rhetoric while they borrow heavily for degrees with uncertain returns. That is champagne communism for the faculty and a monthly payment for the graduate.

The irony is hard to miss. A generation taught to question capitalism and burdened by debt from a government-supported lending system may now look to government for relief. But another subsidy does not require universities to tell the truth about what they sell. Nor does it hold anyone accountable for promises that proved empty.

Accountability begins with honest disclosures in university advertising and recruitment. I am working on that problem through the Intellectual Nutrition Label project. If a school makes demonstrably deceptive promises, lawyers and class-action lawsuits may have a role. Institutions that charge families so much should not be exempt from answering for what they represent.

The lesson for Millennials is all too clear. You were lied to by leftist universities that gladly took your money and left you in ruin. It isn’t too late to see the leftist worldview for what it is: the road to serfdom. It’s time to hold the universities that pushed these lies accountable.

​Young men are being left behind



From a young age, we ask kids what they want to be when they grow up. Firefighter, doctor, president, mechanic, astronaut, teacher, actor — the list goes on.

Dreams shift as children discover their gifts, what they enjoy, and where the two overlap. The kid who wanted to be a doctor might change his mind after finding out he can design spaceships and likes math better than anatomy.

What discoveries, studies, and breakthroughs are missing from academia simply because the men who would have made them were unfairly denied the opportunity?

Allowing people to follow their dreams has always been an American aspiration and part of what makes our country exceptional. Yet today, one group of Americans — young men — is at risk of being shut out from their dreams, largely through no fault of their own.

Mountains of evidence show that our education system and economy are increasingly leaving boys and men behind. This is a national crisis our political leaders must urgently acknowledge and address.

For Exhibit A, simply look at the last 50 years of wage trends. Although earnings for women have steadily increased, nearly doubling in the last half-century, men’s wages have remained largely stagnant. Indeed, while the inflation-adjusted median full-time wage for women has grown by $21,750 since 1976, it has increased for men by only $7,570.

But it gets worse. In August, 98% of U.S. job growth went to women according to government statistics. While female employment has grown by 870,000 since last year, male employment has contracted by 1.5 million. Roughly one-third of men are not participating in the labor force, including over half of young men ages 16-24.

The same trend is happening in college participation. In the mid-1990s, American men and women ages 25-34 were equally likely to have completed college, but the gap has ballooned since then. Today, about 47% of young women have a bachelor’s degree compared to 37% of young men. Women make up about 55% of U.S. undergraduate enrollment, while men account for 40% (with the remaining 5% being unknown or unreported).

Male education and workforce success directly impact family formation. Women are more likely to marry a man with a steady income, and men are more likely to want to work if they have something to work toward. But couples are told to wait until they have financial stability before having kids, a goal that is increasingly difficult to reach, leading them to have fewer children.

And while feminists may cheer the number of women in the 9-to-5 work world, it has not come without a cost. As many observers (including Elizabeth Warren before she entered politics) have pointed out, more mothers entering the workforce has made households increasingly reliant on both parents working to stay afloat, creating a “two-income trap.” It is financially unfeasible for many women to stay home with their children, even when they want to.

Many factors have led us to the current status quo. American industrial and trade policy over the last half-century has shipped many blue-collar jobs overseas while driving down wages for those who remain. Economic policy influenced by feminism has convinced many women to invest in careers rather than family. But we should not overlook another important driver of young men’s present disadvantage: the rapid proliferation of DEI across society.

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Jacob Savage’s essay in Compact magazine last December highlighted the devastating impact of the DEI regime on young men. Fittingly titled “The Lost Generation,” Savage chronicled how Millennial and Gen Z men over the last 10 to 15 years have found themselves chained to the same job, or without one entirely, while less qualified but more “diverse” employees rise in the ranks. This practice has run rampant across numerous industries — entertainment, academia, the medical field — with untold casualties.

What film masterpieces did we miss by passing over a promising writer for a more diverse candidate? What medical breakthroughs did we forgo to reach a quota? What discoveries, studies, and breakthroughs are missing from academia simply because the men who would have made them were unfairly denied the opportunity?

Fortunately, DEI has been in retreat lately, thanks in large part to the Trump administration’s crackdown. DEI has also declined in popularity in the workforce, though it still boasts majority support amid widespread ignorance about its true consequences. Even so, DEI remains a powerful force that could regain greater influence if political conditions become more favorable.

Meanwhile, young men continue to suffer. A recent Institute for Family Studies survey found that about half of men ages 18-29 now see the American dream as out of reach. Many have retreated into destructive pastimes such as pornography and gambling, while suicide rates have risen to record highs. The statistics are grim in every direction.

So where does this leave us?

Our young men are still dreaming as they did when they were little boys, but they are being forced to acknowledge that hard work may not be enough to achieve those dreams. In America especially — the country founded on the ability to get ahead and create something spectacular — this is a reality we should not tolerate.

The situation young men face is an issue lawmakers can no longer afford to ignore. We need an economy where men’s skills and contributions are valued and appropriately compensated. We also need to make it possible for a family to raise children on one income. There is no easy fix for these problems. It will necessarily involve a myriad of approaches, from fully eliminating DEI to bringing back blue-collar work and stabilizing our broken dollar, whose debasement undergirds so much of Americans’ current struggles.

To save the American dream from today’s threats, we must tackle this challenge. We owe it to the next generation of boys who still dare to dream.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the American Mind.

Stallone’s ‘Steps’ looks back on the long, brutal road to ‘Rocky’



Sylvester Stallone is one of America's most recognizable actors. He also stands as a rare representation of sanity in Hollywood, refusing to dance to the industry's carefully choreographed ideological drumbeat.

His new memoir, "The Steps," documents his rather fascinating rise to fame.

Casting agents repeatedly shoved him out of their offices, telling him his voice sounded like a broken garbage disposal and his face looked like a stroke survivor's.

The story starts on July 6, 1946, in a maternity ward in Hell’s Kitchen. The delivery went sideways when a careless doctor dragged him into the world with a pair of forceps, severing a facial nerve and paralyzing the lower left side of his lip, chin, and tongue.

Hangdog sneer

The easily avoidable accident left him with a permanent hangdog sneer and slurred speech, a combination that made childhood an endless gauntlet of brutal teasing. His home life proved equally chaotic, torn between a short-tempered barber father and an oddball mother who dabbled in astrology and DIY medicine.

His parents eventually “shipped” him off to a boarding home, and he bounced between over a dozen different institutions before finishing high school. Teachers saw him as a lost cause, while his peers treated his cartoon-character name as an open invitation to brawls. He routinely answered the mockery with his fists, accumulating bad grades, behavioral warnings, and a growing reputation as a feral misfit.

By the early 1970s, Stallone was stranded in Manhattan with a few dollars in his pocket, sleeping on wooden benches at the Port Authority Bus Terminal when he couldn’t afford rent. To keep from starving, he took on whatever absurd odd jobs came his way. He cleaned out lion cages at the Central Park Zoo, a gig where he lived in constant fear of urine sprays and sharp claws. He worked at a fish market slicing heads off cod, cut hair in a basement using box cutters with hands that “resembled ten bananas connected by foam rubber,” and worked as an usher at the Baronet and Coronet Theatre. He even sold his beloved bull mastiff, Butkus, outside a 7-11, a moment he describes in "The Steps" as his absolute bottom.

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Rejection as rocket fuel

His early acting credits were equally unglamorous. Desperate for heat during a brutal winter in a tiny room on 46th Street, he agreed to star in an adult movie called "The Party at Kitty and Stud's" for $200. "The whole thing was an embarrassing debacle," he writes in the book, maintaining a dry, self-deprecating tone about his total lack of hope and dignity. Casting agents repeatedly shoved him out of their offices, telling him his voice sounded like a broken garbage disposal and his face looked like a stroke survivor's.

Stallone used the rejection as rocket fuel, sitting down with a notebook to study screenplays and figure out how stories actually worked.

The turning point came in March 1975, when he watched Muhammad Ali fight Chuck Wepner. Wepner was an obscure boxer who lost the fight, yet managed to knock Ali down and survive 15 punishing rounds. Stallone locked himself in a room for three days and hammered out the screenplay for "Rocky." When producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff offered him $350,000 for the script, Stallone refused to sell unless he played the lead role. He had $106 in his bank account, and his wife was pregnant. Still, to his credit, he held firm against every attempt to replace him with an established star like Robert Redford or Ryan O'Neal.

Stubborn to a fault, he got his way and managed to get the film made for under a million dollars. "Rocky" went on to win Best Picture at the 1977 Academy Awards, instantly turning him into a massive movie star.

Stallone eventually bought his dog back for $1,500.

Eye of the tiger

The middle section of "The Steps" tracks his explosive run through the 1980s, but here the narrative loses some of its original momentum. Stallone is most entertaining when he is broke, angry, humiliated, and scheming his way toward the next opportunity. Once the rags become extreme riches, some of that desperate comic energy disappears. There are stretches where a story about an almost pathologically determined outsider turns into the considerably less relatable story of a very famous movie star.

But Stallone taps into his inner Rocky in the final act, reviving the book by confronting his age (80) and mortality with absolute honesty. A churchgoing Catholic, he suggests that although life can be difficult, “you just get stronger the more you fight back and finally realize that God’s greatest gift is your heart and the will to keep going.” It’s a little cliché, but the New Yorker is nothing if not genuine.

He looks back on his career choices with surprising sincerity, admitting when his ego got the best of him during his late 1990s box-office flops. He presents himself not as a genius auteur, but as a relentless, working-class craftsman who understood his own limitations better than his critics did. "The Steps" succeeds because it avoids fawning self-congratulation, standing as an inspiring account of a man who escaped a nightmare to achieve the American dream.

The American dream now comes with upgrade fees



Over the last few decades, many industries discovered they could grow their customer base and profits by selling a cheaper, inferior version of their product while degrading the experience for everyone. Air travel and theme parks are obvious examples. Both learned that the advantages of scale could outweigh the obligation to deliver a high-quality experience.

That philosophy did not remain in the realm of economics. It spread slowly but surely into American public life. The United States government increasingly treats the country the same way: expand the customer base, maximize throughput, then sell people a tiered version of the American experience as the baseline crumbles.

An America designed for everyone eventually becomes an America belonging to no one in particular.

The old theme-park model was simple. You paid one admission price and had roughly the same access to rides and attractions as everyone else. The problem was capacity. If too many people entered, everyone spent the day standing in line.

The solution was brilliant. Sell more tickets, let the lines grow, then charge customers extra to escape the congestion the company created. Premium passes make the park tolerable for people willing to pay, but they do not fix crowded restaurants, bathrooms, sidewalks, or parking lots. The park serves more customers, earns more money, and becomes less pleasant.

The fast-pass system is especially revealing because the premium product is not really a new attraction. It is relief from the congestion created by admitting more customers. The company first degrades the common experience and then monetizes the escape hatch. That is the genius of the model. The wealthy do not merely buy more; they buy protection from the consequences of scale. Everyone else gets longer lines and is told that broader access represents progress.

Air travel followed a similar path. Flying was once expensive enough that many Americans rarely did it, but the experience was more comfortable and predictable. Low-cost carriers expanded the market by packing more seats into cabins and turning ordinary features into add-ons. Legacy airlines copied the model. More people could fly, but the customer experience became a maze of fees, cramped cabins, crowded airports, security lines, and delays.

This democratization was celebrated as progress, and in one obvious sense it was. Schoolteachers and retail workers could travel more cheaply and more often. But scale always has costs. When capacity expands faster than the infrastructure supporting it, abundance in one measure can produce scarcity in another.

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The United States has applied the same logic to immigration. For decades, political and business leaders treated population growth as an economic good in itself. Illegal immigration and expansive legal immigration increased the supply of workers and consumers. Employers gained labor, investors gained demand, and headline economic measures such as GDP benefited from a larger economy. But a larger economy is not automatically a better country for the people already living in it.

Housing, roads, hospitals, schools, water systems, and power grids do not expand automatically with population. In places where growth outruns capacity, prices rise and service deteriorates.

Housing is the clearest example. The National Association of Realtors reported the median first-time buyer reached age 40 in 2025, though other estimates put the figure lower. Whatever the exact number, Americans are buying homes later, delaying marriage and children, and paying more for less space.

Labor markets create another conflict. Immigration can lower costs for employers and raise overall output while imposing concentrated costs on particular workers. Those effects are especially visible in lower-wage industries but also appear in sectors such as technology, where companies have long used and abused visa programs to expand the labor pool.

The costs are not purely economic. Large and rapid immigration can slow assimilation, especially when newcomers settle in concentrated communities large enough to reproduce the language, institutions, and customs of the countries they left. The result is not always conflict, but it can weaken the expectation that immigrants adapt to a common national culture.

The same sorting mechanism appears geographically. Families with enough money move away from crowded schools, failing services, and disorder, while people without that option absorb the consequences. Political leaders can then point to aggregate growth while the public realm fractures into radically different experiences depending on zip code and income.

The national statistics improve even as ordinary life becomes more expensive, more crowded, and less coherent. The public system remains available to everyone, but equality of access increasingly conceals inequality in the actual experience. That leaves Americans with a familiar arrangement: The baseline experience declines, while affluent people purchase private substitutes.

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Want a quiet neighborhood? Buy into a gated community. Want orderly schools? Pay private-school tuition. Want safety? Hire private security. Want enough space to raise a family? Move farther from the economic centers where you work. The things that once arrived as part of ordinary middle-class American life increasingly become premium upgrades.

The university completes the joke. It teaches students the moral case for ever-greater replacement migration while providing the credentials needed to earn enough money to avoid many of its consequences.

Other countries already show where this can lead. Brazil has wealthy neighborhoods, excellent private schools, luxury shopping, and first-world amenities alongside dangerous and dirty favelas. People with money can buy back pieces of civilization through walls, guards, private education, and exclusive enclaves.

That is not the American dream.

The American ideal was never perfect equality, but it did promise a broadly shared public world: safe streets, functional schools, attainable homes, reliable infrastructure, and a national culture recognizable to the people who inherited it. A nation cannot maximize scale forever without asking what, exactly, it is scaling. GDP is not a civilization. A labor market is not a people. A proper country cannot be reduced to an economic zone whose success is measured by how many workers and consumers it can process.

An America designed for everyone eventually becomes an America belonging to no one in particular. If we want the country to remain a nation rather than a marketplace, we will have to value continuity, capacity, assimilation, and the welfare of existing citizens more than endless growth.

Washington must not forget the grassroots



Football is back. The first harbinger of fall is just around the corner, bringing game-day tailgates, late-night bonfires, and hope that this just might be your team’s year to win it all.

Fueling this hope is a fresh round of hype videos getting folks excited for the season. For NFL and college football fans alike, these edits of last season’s highlights are just the thing to paper over last year’s disappointment and turn over a new leaf for the season ahead.

The real strength of the conservative movement is not in the ivory tower or stone colonnade.

One hype video broke out of the college football echo chamber with over 4.5 million views online. What about this video is so resonant? The message — and conservatives should take notice.

The video opens in the Auburn Tigers' locker room, where coach Hugh Freeze is giving a pep talk. “Life is more about others than it is yourself,” he begins. “What buys long-lasting purpose is you understanding selflessness and it being about something bigger than yourself.”

Hopefully every coach and every political movement understands teamwork relies on humility to achieve a larger goal.

He continues, “Tonight, I submit to you that there’s some family that drove from I don’t know where, parked five miles away from this stadium, and they saved all ... year long, just to buy a ticket, to climb to the top of that stadium and watch your tail play!”

As the music builds to a crescendo, Freeze screams the most potent line of the video: “YOU OWE THEM SOMETHING!”

In sports, as in politics, conservatives must recommit to playing for the fans in the cheap seats.

This does not mean rallying around the lowest common denominator or dumbing down conservative messaging. It means remembering why so many conservative advocates got into the trenches to begin with.

How many of those players in the Auburn locker room started as kids in the cheap seats?

How many conservative politicos began as local activists knocking doors, eating cold pizza, and making calls for something they really believed in? Conservatives need to recapture some of that grassroots energy and turn it into tangible victories for the people who put them in office.

We owe them something.

For those working in the professional conservative movement in D.C., that means less time on niche debates and more time delivering for average Americans who share conservative values and need a voice in the nation’s capital.

In 2024, voters elected President Trump and a Republican Congress on clear promises to improve the country. They expect results, just like the family saving all year for one game expects the team to leave it all on the field.

With the announcement that the House is canceling the final two weeks of session this month, it’s now or never. The House will have four days left to crystallize the case they’ll take home ahead of the November elections.

There is no shortage of opportunities to create contrast.

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The Chloe Cole Act from Rep. Bob Onder (R-Mo.) or the Title IX Clarification Act from Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) would undermine the gender industrial complex in medicine and women’s sports.

The southern border is secure in part because of President Trump’s executive orders; Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy’s Permanent Trump Secure Border Act would codify the administrative changes necessary to preserve national sovereignty if another open-borders Democrat came into office.

House Republicans could take a major step forward toward a longtime conservative priority to close the Department of Education by passing the Less Bureaucracy, Better Education Package, codifying transfers of authority of duplicative education programs.

Passing any of these measures would be a good step to demonstrate that conservatives in Washington are moving the ball down the field for those cheering fans.

No one wants to cheer for a team calling it quits while there is still time on the clock.

Those in D.C. tend to bristle at giving credit beyond their elite circles, but it is time to acknowledge the real strength of the conservative movement is not in the ivory tower or stone colonnade.

It lies in every hardworking American chasing the American dream who still believes in the principles that have made America exceptional and votes to keep it that way.

We owe them our best. Let’s give them a reason to show up.

Now presenting 'misogynoir' — the Democrats' latest reason it’s never their fault



Democrats have never run out of ways to cast themselves as victims — and according to BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales, it's only getting worse.

“Democrats and liberals, they’re just always victims. They are just always the victims in life. Nothing is ever good enough. They always have to complain that they’re oppressed. Someone is oppressing them,” she says.

“And I’d like to introduce you at this point to Representative Maxwell Frost, a Democrat from Florida,” she adds, playing a clip of Frost from a Jubilee debate.

“I don’t have a ton of money in a bank account when I decided to run for office, so I had to hustle and make ends meet, which is the thing that you are all telling Gen Z,” Frost said, arguing that the American dream is out of reach.


“That’s the American dream,” his opponent, wearing a patriotic headband, interjected.

“You lived it,” he added, before clapping along with the rest of the Jubilee debaters.

Frost then denied that it was the “American dream.”

“The American dream isn’t driving Uber to barely make ends meet. The American dream is upward mobility and being able to have success,” he argued.

“You went from driving an Uber to being a politician,” his opponent said, dumbfounded. “Is that upward?”

“That sounds pretty upward to me. A lot of upward mobility in the change from driving Uber to a representative in Congress. But then again, I’m not a Democrat,” Gonzales comments.

But it gets worse, as the next clip Gonzales plays features MS NOW’s Eugene Daniels, who used a new leftist term to describe the racism and sexism Jasmine Crockett supposedly faced in her run, and loss, for the Texas Senate.

“I think what was really interesting about this primary in particular in Texas was that the nastiness online bled into the nastiness on the ground,” he began.

“Usually it’s like, you know, the internet is not real life, which I believe typically when it comes to politics, like a lot of people yelling about everything, but somehow in Texas it became a part of the actual campaign on the ground,” he continued.

“And so there was some racism online, a lot of racism, a lot of sexism, a lot of misogynoir, which is a connection of both of those things against her,” he added.

“What? ‘Misogynoir'? What are you? You just made that up, sir. That is not a term,” Gonzales says.

“That’s how bad it’s gotten. That is how bad the Democrat Party has gotten. There is no floor,” she adds.

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