The mass rioting and destruction across France in recent weeks has laid bare the direct connection between multiculturalism and authoritarian political movements across the West, as does the similar chaos in countries such as Albania, Belgium, Italy, and Portugal.

The resemblance to the mass disturbances in the United States in 2020 is obvious, with all these incursions combining ethnic agitation with socialism and Marxism, a red-green alliance financed significantly by outside forces such as foreign billionaire Neville Roy Singham and communist parties around the world.

America is the home of Americans: a people born of liberty who are intent on maintaining the world’s greatest home for freedom and serving as an example to the rest of the world.

This combination shows that the planned destination of multiculturalism is hard socialism or, looking further down the road to perdition, outright communism.

The same struggle over identity and political power is visible in American cities and states where progressive movements seek to make group identity the organizing principle of public life. The Trump administration has begun reversing Biden-era immigration policies, but enforcement alone cannot answer a more fundamental question: What holds Americans together?

A fierce argument over national identity runs through our immigration debate. The 250th anniversary last week of an obscure Virginia bill offers a revealing glimpse of how long that argument has endured.

On October 14, 1776, Thomas Jefferson presented a naturalization bill drafted by Edmund Pendleton to Virginia's General Assembly. He entitled it “Naturalization of Foreign Protestants” and proposed citizenship for foreign Protestants who swore fidelity to the commonwealth and obedience to its laws. The bill also offered newcomers $20 toward passage and 50 acres of unappropriated land. In Pendleton's original conception, the invitation was explicitly religious: Protestants would enlarge a people whose convictions he regarded as central to the commonwealth.

Jefferson revised the bill, removing its Protestant restrictions and replacing “foreign Protestants” with broader language. The editors of Jefferson’s papers say his changes were designed to open citizenship to Jews, Catholics, and other non-Protestants. The Assembly did not enact the bill. Yet the disagreement survives in another form today: Is America a particular people shaped by an inherited way of life, or a proposition to which newcomers can subscribe?

Pendleton emphasized the formation of a people, while Jefferson rejected a religious test for joining it. Both drafts required an oath of fidelity; neither can be reduced neatly to today’s slogans. But they reveal different instincts about what a political community needs in order to endure.

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Americans still debate those instincts. One vision sees the United States as a “shining city on a hill,” a people demonstrating the value of a distinctive inheritance. Another emphasizes its welcome to the “wretched refuse” of other nations, placing faith in the power of American principles to transform those who arrive. The economic claims made for immigration are important, but the fiercest disagreements concern what newcomers must share with the people already here.

Those who describe America chiefly as a proposition often claim the moral high ground, dismissing their opponents as bigots or religious zealots. That tactic has proved effective in a cultural struggle in which collectivists seek to redefine the country in their own image. In my view, progressives, socialists, and communists increasingly subordinate freedom of speech, religion, association, and enterprise to an expansive conception of equality enforced by the state.

The result is a politics that invokes equality while giving ever more authority to government officials. If America is only an abstract proposition, the meaning of that proposition can be rewritten by whoever captures the institutions that teach and enforce it. Equality can then displace liberty as the nation’s defining value.

We have reason to take the ideological change seriously. In a July survey, the Cato Institute found that 38% of Americans under 30 held a favorable view of communism. That is a striking measure of the ground an ideology once broadly rejected has gained among the young.

The answer is not to replace a purely propositional identity with an ethnic test or a mandatory religion. Pendleton’s Protestant requirement was itself a statement of values, however narrowly he understood them. He wanted to establish Protestantism as the premise behind Virginia’s expansion of immigration, considering an obvious connection between Protestantism and the rise of representative government.

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In reality, America’s inheritance is centuries of struggle to build and preserve a constitutional order that protects liberty. Americans are born into that legacy, and newcomers can join it. The common obligation is to sustain it, even when powerful institutions press us to abandon it. Such an identity requires more than a passing declaration of agreement with an abstract creed.

The public may be more receptive to this argument than our political disputes suggest. Cato also found that 71% of Americans surveyed believe the ideals and institutions of the founding are part of their inheritance. That is a foundation on which to build a common national life.

We need to build on that attitude and reinforce the public appreciation of our inheritance as Americans. The flying of other nations’ flags at anti-government rallies is an obvious manifestation of the weakening of our national identity by mass immigration and collectivists’ domination of the nation’s education system and mass culture over the past several decades.

Protection and reinvigoration of respect for the nation’s founding values will require a general agreement on the answer to the question of “What is an American?” I believe that the unifying answer is that America is the home of Americans: a people born of liberty who are intent on maintaining the world’s greatest home for freedom and serving as an example to the rest of the world.

A roomful of young conservatives ... and just one parent

A little more than a week ago, I attended a gathering for “young conservatives” at Lazarus, a bar on East Sixth Street in Austin. The occasion was a book talk about holidays and preserving family traditions. I arrived early, passed the build-your-own nacho station, redeemed my free drink ticket, and found a seat among roughly 30 people, mostly men in their 20s and 30s.

The author, a working astronaut, began with a question: “How many of you have children?” Just one hand went up. Once the nervous laughter faded, the conversation moved to spacesuits. But the moment captured a problem that is far larger than one room in Austin: Why are so few young people starting families?

A culture devoted to personal possibility can lose sight of the people who come after us.

The numbers are sobering. The United Nations estimates that the global fertility rate fell from 4.8 children per woman in 1970 to 2.2 in 2024. The world's population is still growing, but more countries are having fewer children than would be needed to replace one generation with the next. That shift will affect economies, communities, and how people imagine their futures.

The usual explanations are familiar. Young adults date less, marry later, struggle with housing costs, and find relationships harder to build in a screen-mediated world.

Yet economics and technology do not settle the question. In a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, 57% of adults under 50 who said they were unlikely ever to have children cited a simple reason: They don’t want to. That figure describes a particular group, not all young adults. Still, it invites a cultural question: What has changed about our understanding of a good life?

Fifty years ago, Tom Wolfe offered one answer. His 1976 essay “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening” described Americans absorbed in “remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing” the self. He contrasted that obsession with an older sense that people belonged to a “great biological stream”: They carried forward something inherited from their ancestors and entrusted something to their descendants. Wolfe saw more Americans daring to step outside that stream.

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard later encountered a similar restlessness in America. He saw a country fascinated by speed, reinvention, and the perpetual justification of its own existence. The self was no longer merely something to be cultivated. It was a project that could be endlessly redesigned.

The older warning came from Alexis de Tocqueville. In “Democracy in America,” he described individualism as a “mature and calm feeling” that draws a person away from the wider community into a small circle of family and friends. Tocqueville's individualist still had that circle. What happens when it contracts further, until the individual becomes the central obligation?

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Individualism has given America extraordinary wealth, innovation, and freedom to pursue a life of one's choosing. Those achievements should not be dismissed. But a culture devoted to personal possibility can lose sight of the people who come after us. Children demand time, sacrifice, and commitments that resist being rearranged around our preferences. If freedom becomes simply the absence of such obligations, family formation begins to look less like a natural part of life and more like an obstacle to self-realization.

Governments have tried to make parenthood easier. Singapore subsidizes child care; Hungary offers housing and tax benefits; South Korea supports fertility treatments. These policies can relieve real burdens, especially for people who want children but cannot afford them. Yet they have not produced a reliable formula for reversing low fertility. “No government has discovered a policy that produces sustained bumps in fertility,” Texas A&M historian Trent MacNamara told Business Insider.

Long before today's demographic debate, Theodore Roosevelt worried about what he called “willful sterility.” Writing in 1911, he blamed “selfishness,” the “love of ease,” and a retreat from risk and duty. His language was severe. His underlying challenge remains recognizable: What are we willing to sacrifice for a future we will not live to see?

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Allan Bloom later worried that young people’s “primary preoccupation” was themselves, “understood in the narrowest sense.” Oswald Spengler reached for an even bleaker formulation in “The Decline of the West”: “Children do not happen,” he wrote, when people can no longer find a reason for their existence. Neither writer supplied a birth-rate policy. Both were asking what people believe their lives are for.

No tax credit or dating app can answer that question by itself. Financial help may make it possible to have children, but a society must also regard family life as something worth choosing. It must leave room for obligations that cannot be measured solely by their return to the self.

Back at the bar in Austin, one hand rose when the astronaut asked who had children. The talk moved on. The question should not. A civilization that prizes individual freedom must still decide what, and whom, it hopes will come after it.

Kamala’s voter-roll freakout hits blue states hard

Kamala Harris has made election integrity a big talking point ahead of the midterms. The former vice president’s latest claims of cheating raise an obvious question: Does she object to voter-roll maintenance itself, or can she identify a lawful safeguard she actually supports?

At an appearance in South Korea last week, the former vice president alleged “overt cheating” in American elections, citing voter-roll purges. In September, she accused officials of “cheating by purging voter rolls.” Over the summer, she also criticized the SAVE America Act for requiring documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections.

Harris can keep calling voter-roll purges ‘cheating.’ But California’s unanswered questions and New Jersey’s documented registration failure demand more than talking points.

Harris wants to turn basic election safeguards into the boogeyman of election administration. But isn’t the point to ensure that only American citizens vote in our elections?

Election officials must not improperly remove eligible voters. They also have an obligation to identify ineligible registrations. Harris talks about purges without making that distinction. Americans deserve to know which safeguards she opposes and why.

Start with California, Harris’ home state. On Monday, the Justice Department charged 28 lawful permanent residents with federal election-related offenses, including fraudulent registration and illegal voting. Eleven were arrested. The charges are allegations, not convictions, but the cases warrant serious attention.

Federal prosecutors say all 28 appeared on a list of more than 20,000 people the government believes are likely noncitizens registered in California. The Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security sued the state on October 15, seeking to stop ballots attributed to people on that list from being counted until their citizenship is verified.

Governor Gavin Newsom (D) called the lawsuit an attempt to “suppress California voters.” The state should be able to show how it verifies eligibility and corrects its rolls.

It cannot. A separate public records response exposes an accounting problem: California’s statewide voter-registration system “does not contain a voter status reason for cancellation due to non-citizenship.” The state could not provide a count of registrations canceled for that specific reason. Why not?

New Jersey supplies an even clearer example of why verification cannot be an afterthought. In July, Governor Mikie Sherrill (D) acknowledged that a “serious software error” had registered approximately 6,600 people who answered “no” when asked whether they were U.S. citizens during motor vehicle transactions. The “error” occurred between June 2023 and June 2024.

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A subsequent state accounting found that about 340 newly registered people had actually voted. New Jersey claims it has no evidence that those votes changed an election result. That does not excuse a system that registered people after they expressly declined to attest to citizenship.

At a House Judiciary hearing in September, I noted that at least three New Jersey elections in 2025 were decided by a single vote or ended in a tie. When a race is that close, election officials cannot shrug off registration errors.

New Jersey voters understand the stakes. A Rutgers-Eagleton poll released this month found that 82% of state residents support requiring photo ID to vote in person, while 71% favor documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register.

Even Sherrill has expressed support for voter ID. That requirement establishes identity; proof of citizenship establishes eligibility. They serve different purposes, and neither question should be brushed aside with a slogan about voter suppression.

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Minnesota has its own lesson in the need for clear rules. Governor Tim Walz (D) signed a 2023 law that lets residents get standard driver’s licenses without proving lawful immigration status. During an October 2025 legislative hearing, state Rep. Patti Anderson (R) pressed state elections director Paul Linnell on whether those licenses could be used as voter identification. He failed to give a direct yes-or-no answer.

Minnesota does permit a driver’s license as proof of residence for Election Day registration. Citizenship eligibility is a separate requirement. Election officials should be able to explain the distinction simply, especially when lawmakers ask about vulnerabilities.

Accurate voter rolls, citizenship verification, and clear identity rules protect the votes of eligible Americans. Officials should explain how those safeguards work and correct failures when they find them.

Harris can keep calling voter-roll purges “cheating.” But California’s unanswered questions and New Jersey’s documented registration failure demand more than talking points. If she believes these safeguards are improper, she should explain which ones — and what she would do instead.

The GOP can’t blame Biden forever for pain at the pump

A few months in Manhattan have made me part of the city’s bubble. I pay $3 for the subway, worry about rent and groceries, and rarely think about the cost of filling a gas tank. Then I went home to South Jersey and saw the price posted outside a station. I had almost forgotten what the rest of the country pays to get around.

New York City makes that easy. Apartment renters and subway riders experience housing, transportation, and energy policy differently from families who drive to work, take their children to school, and run errands by car. Nine in 10 Americans say they drive at least sometimes. They cannot simply stop paying attention to the price of gasoline.

The election is November 3, and voters won't grade fuel prices on a curve just because the occupant of the White House has changed.

As of October 14, the national average for regular gas stood at $4.33 a gallon. California topped $6, and several other states exceeded $5. New Jersey, where I grew up, averaged about $4.29 a gallon. Even where prices are lower, a family's weekly fill-ups eat into money needed elsewhere.

For years, Republicans hammered President Biden over gas prices. Motorists slapped “I Did That” stickers bearing his face on pumps. Looking at that station in South Jersey, I realized Republicans now face a similar reckoning. The election is November 3, and voters won't grade fuel prices on a curve just because the occupant of the White House has changed.

The administration has moved to ease energy rules. For example, the EPA has repealed vehicle greenhouse gas standards. But regulations alone cannot explain the price at the pump. The conflict around the Strait of Hormuz has disrupted oil markets, and years of delayed infrastructure projects have constrained domestic capacity. A proposed diesel export ban would create its own problems rather than solve the underlying shortage.

Yet the White House has offered little comfort to motorists. Trump called higher gasoline costs a “very inexpensive price” to pay for what the United States had done in Iran. Energy Secretary Chris Wright pointed to the end of the summer driving season and weaker demand as reasons to expect prices to fall. Seasonal demand may ease, but families still need to drive in October. They need relief, not reassurance that summer is over.

Gas prices cannot be waved away until the next news cycle. They present a real political problem for Republican incumbents in November. Democrats bear responsibility for decades of energy restrictions that have hindered pipelines and domestic production, but Republicans now govern in Washington. Voters have every right to demand results from them.

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Democrats have made public transit, walkable cities, and climate policy central to their energy vision. Republicans have sold a different promise: Families should have the freedom and means to live in safe communities, raise children, and drive the pickup truck or minivan that fits their lives. Expensive gasoline makes that promise harder to keep.

From my Manhattan apartment, gasoline prices can look remote. For parents in Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Michigan, driving is neither a luxury nor a political statement. They cannot skip the trip to work or the school pickup because the pump reads $5. A city dweller may be able to substitute a subway ride. Most suburban families cannot.

The administration can point to two possible long-term gains. Trump has promoted a long-planned Alaska gas pipeline, although financing and other details remain unresolved. And four senators from both parties have introduced permitting reform intended to speed construction of energy infrastructure. Those are potentially useful moves, not substitutes for lower prices today. Nor should a natural gas project be confused with an immediate fix for gasoline.

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The administration has made progress rolling back regulations and encouraging domestic production. Yet Americans still face the costs of delayed projects, inadequate infrastructure, and international instability. The president cannot control every oil shipment or every price sign. He can explain what the government is doing to expand supply, make projects easier to build, and reduce costs over time.

Republicans have spent years arguing against climate mandates and forced dependence on electric vehicles. Opposition alone will not persuade a family paying more to get to work. The affirmative case is straightforward: Americans should decide how to heat their homes, power their businesses, and travel, while government clears obstacles to producing abundant, affordable energy.

I had to leave Manhattan to remember what a gallon of gas costs. Millions of Americans do not have that luxury. They see the cost every time they pull into a station. Republicans who want their votes in November had better see it, too.

The global meritocracy myth sells Americans’ inheritance cheap

Americans are being told that restricting legal immigration would rig the competition for jobs and college seats. Apparently, allowing citizens to compete with the entire planet is “meritocracy,” while giving them preference in their own country is “discrimination.”

The argument has gained force as scrutiny moves from illegal crossings to work visas and foreign student admissions. Employers use H-1B visas to recruit skilled workers, and public universities often collect higher tuition from students who live outside their states. Critics of tighter visa rules portray any preference for Americans as a kind of affirmative action for the native-born.

A nation is its people, not an economic zone meant for optimization. Even if a global meritocracy were possible, it would be immoral to subject your nation to it.

The claim assumes something remarkable: America exists chiefly to administer a worldwide talent contest. Its citizens have no special claim on the institutions, industries, and opportunities their country built.

Even on its own terms, the global meritocracy argument collapses under scrutiny. It’s a myth.

Merit requires standards, judges, and rules. A perfect score wins in bowling; a low score wins in golf. Hit the pins with a golf ball on a bowling lane and nobody objects. Roll that same ball across a putting green with your hand and you have cheated. What counts as skill depends on the rules of the game. Standards require a recognized authority too.

University admissions present a far harder problem. Americans argue endlessly about standardized tests, grades, extracurricular activities, and what a degree should prove. Colleges that abandoned entrance exams are now restoring them, while others still refuse to consider scores. Even within one country, administrators cannot agree on what qualifies an applicant.

Now expand that disagreement worldwide.

Some countries place extraordinary pressure on students to excel in examinations that determine their educational futures. Others rely more heavily on interviews, recommendations, or years of coursework. Each system rewards different habits. More importantly, credentials are only as reliable as the institutions that issue them and the people who verify their authenticity.

Academic fraud also complicates the picture. Cheating and plagiarism plague American schools, and universities abroad confront their own scandals. Cheating and plagiarism are endemic in China and India. India’s University Grants Commission maintains a public list of institutions that lack authority to award degrees, but diploma mills where credentials are manufactured at scale remain rampant.

An American diploma hardly guarantees competence, either. Universities have diluted requirements, expanded administrative bureaucracies, and sold credentials whose value employers increasingly question. Yet the remedy for weak standards is honest verification, not faith that a global marketplace will somehow discover merit on its own.

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Culture adds another complication. Americans generally expect a posted store price to apply to every customer. In markets where bargaining is customary, skill can mean negotiating the lowest price through patience, personal relationships, and persistence. The same conduct can be admired in one setting and treated as manipulation in another.

Importing large numbers of people also imports habits, expectations, and assumptions about fairness. A country that refuses to acknowledge this invites conflict over the rules by which everyone is expected to live.

We have our own contradictions. Universities and employers spent years elevating diversity goals alongside measures of achievement. Courts and lawmakers have pushed back against some of those practices. On paper, federal law prohibits hiring discrimination based on race, sex, and national origin. Still, anyone who watched institutions defend racial preferences should be skeptical when those same institutions suddenly invoke neutral merit as an unquestionable principle.

The H-1B debate raises a separate problem. Federal rules require employers to pay visa workers at least the applicable prevailing wage or the wage paid to comparable employees, whichever is higher. The program was not written as permission to hire foreign workers at half price. But wage safeguards are only as good as enforcement, and employers can still gain leverage when a worker’s legal status depends heavily on keeping a particular job.

That dependency can hurt both the foreign employee and the American applicant. An employer may prefer the worker who has fewer options. Calling the resulting arrangement a free and fair contest does not make it one.

Even a perfect ranking of talent would not answer who America's schools and employers ought to serve. An American need not prove superior intelligence or virtue to claim a privileged place in his own country.

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The case against the feasibility of a global meritocracy is sound, but the most important argument against the practice is one of ownership. A nation is its people, not an economic zone meant for optimization. Even if a global meritocracy were possible, it would be immoral to subject your nation to it.

The opportunities inside a country do not emerge from the ether. Americans inherit institutions built through generations of work, investment, and sacrifice. They finance schools, build infrastructure, defend borders, and bear the cost of political failure. The inheritance carries a moral claim, just as children have a claim to their parents’ estate.

Americans may welcome foreign talent when it serves their interests. They can debate which visas advance national purposes and how many to grant. They are not obligated to treat every qualified applicant on earth as equally entitled to the opportunities their country provides. Citizenship must carry a claim that a temporary visa cannot erase.

Calling visa restrictions “DEI for Americans” turns national obligation into an accusation of unfairness. Advocates of limitless competition insist that any preference for Americans violates meritocracy, even while relying on institutions that cannot agree on merit's meaning or enforce its rules. Their supposedly neutral standard disguises a political demand.

A nation that treats its people as interchangeable bidders in a global labor auction has surrendered its purpose. America was not built to supply corporations with cheap labor or universities with tuition-paying students. Americans have every right to prefer their own people, especially in employment and college admissions. Their future should not be sacrificed on the altar of economic ideology.

The DSA's plan for immigration is the worst one yet

President Donald Trump recently renewed his criticism of the left’s immigration agenda, taking aim at mass amnesty. The Democratic Socialists of America are making the point for him, calling to “grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status.”

The White House Council of Economic Advisers released a new report last week estimating that the DSA’s immigration policies could cost Americans a whopping $440 billion to $613 billion over 10 years. And that’s not the worst of it.

'The rule of law cannot co-exist with mass amnesty.'

According to the CEA, allowing mass amnesty could create $36 billion to $47 billion in estimated annual costs for just SNAP, Medicaid, and HUD housing vouchers.

The report argues that these costs would come from “turning the existing population of illegal aliens into legal residents eligible for federal social safety net programs.”

While DSA candidates like Melat Kiros believe “millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States right now should have an immediate pathway to citizenship,” American taxpayers should be asking the more important question: If mass amnesty could leave taxpayers with billions in new costs every year, what exactly does it solve?

It certainly does not solve the underlying problem. It changes the legal status of the people already here while leaving the incentives that attract more illegal immigration intact. We have been down this road before. Not to ruin the ending, but we somehow keep finding ourselves right back to where we started.

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act. The law created legalization programs for millions of illegal aliens while also establishing employer sanctions intended to discourage the hiring of unauthorized workers. About 2.7 million people ultimately received legal status under the law.

However, the bargain did not work. Due to IRCA’s eligibility cutoff, roughly 2 million were excluded from legalization, while an estimated 500,000 were eligible but never received legal status. According to the Migration Policy Institute, those who remained in unlawful status “became the nucleus of today’s large unauthorized population.”

The enforcement side also fell short. Weaknesses in employment verification and document fraud undermined employer sanctions. The problems IRCA was meant to address ultimately grew. The unauthorized population increased from an estimated 3.5 million in 1990 to 12.2 million by 2007.

Legalization changed the status of millions of people, but it did not prevent the country from having to deal with an even larger unauthorized population later. A growing population of illegal aliens brings larger costs for schools, health care, housing, and other public services.

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The DSA platform does not just call for mass amnesty; members also want an end to ICE detention and deportations.

CEA estimates the “net cost to taxpayers of ending deportations and ICE detentions to be between $79 and $139 billion over 10 years.” The report argues that doing so would eliminate fiscal savings associated with current immigration enforcement.

Former Border Patrol agent and Texas Public Policy Foundation senior fellow Ammon Blair puts it plainly: “The rule of law cannot co-exist with mass amnesty.”

If amnesty paired with enforcement did not keep our country from ending up back here, why should taxpayers expect amnesty with less enforcement to work any better?

Mass amnesty is not an immigration solution. And it cannot prevent the next wave of illegal immigration.

American immigration policy sends a message around the world. If the United States repeatedly demonstrates that entering or remaining in the country illegally may eventually end in legal status, policymakers have to consider the incentive that amnesty creates for the next person deciding whether our immigration laws are worth obeying.

That is the problem with DSA’s socialist immigration promises. The slogans are simple, yet the consequences are anything but. Americans would be left paying billions in new costs while the DSA simultaneously calls for less immigration enforcement.

We cannot mistake an old idea for a new solution. History has shown us that mass amnesty is not the answer. Socialism has never been short on promises, but it is taxpayers who are always expected to foot the bill.

Sharia courts are here — and Americans need to wake up

Americans shouldn't wait until Sharia courts become widespread before deciding where they stand — and Brigitte Gabriel is doing everything in her power to help them see the threat before it's too late.

Gabriel tells BlazeTV host Nick Freitas that she was shocked to relive her upbringing in Lebanon — where her home was attacked by Islamic extremists — on 9/11, when her daughter sat watching the towers fall on the news and asked her, “Mommy, why did they do this to us?”

“And I found myself, Nick,” she explains, “looking into my daughter’s eyes and repeating to her the exact same words my father said to me when I was a 10-year-old little girl, laying wounded in a hospital in Lebanon, hooked up to IVs on both arms, one blood bag in one arm, one IV in another, asking my father, ‘Why did they do this to us?’”

“And my father told me, ‘They hate us because they consider us infidels, and they want to kill us.’ Here we were two generations apart, two continents apart. I had to look into my daughter’s eyes and repeat to her the same words my father said to me,” she continues.

“That day I was reborn as an activist,” she adds, noting that this is why she started the Act for America foundation in 2002.

This foundation serves to “organize people in chapters nationwide to teach them how they can impact policy at their local level.”

Not only does the foundation now have over 5 million members nationwide, but it has successfully passed 300 bills at the federal and state level.

And the latest bill it is putting through Congress is the Preserving Our Constitution Act of 2026.

“It says no Sharia courts are allowed to operate in the United States. We are building the firewall to make sure that this does not happen,” Gabriel explains.

Freitas warns that this could easily become a problem for the U.S., as in the U.K. right now, there are 84 Sharia courts.

“Please understand that when Brigitte here is talking about Sharia courts in the United States, it is an inevitability unless you’re proactive,” Freitas says. “Because the moment they start going, and you haven’t prepared yourself for this, now all of a sudden, they win a couple of cases in court, and nobody wants to challenge them, and they start setting them up everywhere.”

However, Gabriel has some bad news.

“The Sharia courts are already operating in the United States,” she says. “The first Sharia court was established in Richardson, Texas, in 1991. Since then, we have documented 150 cases judged under Sharia law in the United States in 23 states.”

This is why in 2009, Gabriel got to work on the American Laws for American Courts bill, which says that “no law that is not compatible with the U.S. Constitution would be allowed to be practiced in an American courtroom.”

“We were able to pass that law in 13 states,” she explains.

“We’ve been fighting this battle for a long time,” she adds.

“Making the Argument with Nick Freitas” is available on BlazeTV+, YouTube, and major podcast platforms.

Start watching Nick Freitas NOW at blazetv.com and use the promo code NICK for $20 off your BlazeTV+ subscription.

It’s a big deal that the landmark new AI agreement is shockingly uneventful

Trump’s recent assembly of many of the very top people in AI must be counted among the most momentous political occasions in U.S. history — and perhaps human history. It comes at a time of extreme instability, uncertainty, and acceleration.

Even — or especially — those at the summit of tech and politics are unclear on what is going to happen and why. But they do know one thing: The nature of ultimate power on Earth is changing, and they are positioned to receive more of that power than almost anyone else.

Laws will not save us. Algorithms will not save us. Mere adherence to the letter of any code, however intelligently written, will not save us.

Power does not arrive alone. Rapidly acquiring unprecedented power brings anxiety, pressure, exhaustion, confusion, and the temptation to mistake possession for mastery.

The important thing about this is precisely that it is an experience. To deal with the consequences of a profound infusion of power is to plunge into the mysterious depths of being — the realm philosophers call ontology — in stark contrast to epistemology, the realm of knowing.

Power reminds us that knowledge arises from being, not the other way around.

For anyone operating at the highest levels of tech and politics, that reminder is crucial. Decades of bad modern philosophy and overzealous nerdery have encouraged the opposite idea: that being arises from knowledge.

That fake news is bad news. It feeds the fear that we have poured so much knowledge into machines that they are about to spring to life as an altogether new form of being — uncreated by God, no less — that will instantly dwarf and dominate us.

Yet one prominent techno-utopian belief treats the same prospect as good news, almost literally a new gospel. In this telling, the machine is not merely a rival life form. It becomes the vehicle for a new man. Rather than dwarfing and dominating us, the alien intelligence will fuse with us, becoming in effect a new god and a new soul, transforming us into Adam 2.0.

People who recoil from that prospect, and fear it could become real, are scrambling to fight or slow it through new law. The impulse is understandable. But it carries the seeds of its own failure.

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Christians know there are sharp limits to what lawgiving can accomplish. St. Paul wrote that, having died to what bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit rather than the old way of the written code (Romans 7:6). He also wrote that God “has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant — not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6).

Paul’s point is spiritual, but it bears directly on our technological confusion. Treat lawgiving as the highest activity of man and God, and you begin to imagine that being arises from knowledge. If being arises from knowledge, then creating knowledge can create being — as if the Golem of Prague or Frankenstein’s monster could be brought to life by sufficient information.

That is not life. It is a parody of life: death pretending to be life and producing more death.

At the intersection of unprecedented technological and political power, we have to remember that epistemology is downstream, not upstream, of ontology.

That is why the new “White House Accord on Super Intelligence,” signed by Trump and six of the industry’s most powerful executives, is so momentously uneventful. The companies say they “should implement” four basic layers of controls and audits: robust internal safety controls; an empowered internal team to make sure those controls work; an independent external auditor or evaluator; and an independent board committee to oversee the whole structure and make sure problems are fixed.

That’s it.

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The accord adds that the companies will meet regularly to establish standards and best practices. “Over time,” it concludes, “it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations.” But for now, no. Basically, it is a plan to get better organized about not screwing up the whole AI thing.

That may sound a little scary, considering how fast things are moving and how deep the trust gap has become between many Americans and the tech titans.

But it would be scarier if the companies threw themselves at the feet of lawgiving and tried to fob off responsibility onto a new written code. Because if they did that, they would in effect force the rest of us to do the same.

That kind of thinking is what got us into this mess in the first place.

Laws will not save us. Algorithms will not save us. Mere adherence to the letter of any code, however intelligently written, will not save us. Christianity’s warning against pharisaical faith in the letter is not an invitation to lawlessness; it is a warning against confusing compliance with righteousness.

It is good that the accord is simple and unsensational. Strip away all the words, codes, boards, controls, and audits, and there are still people underneath — people who can run from responsibility but can never finally hide from it.

All told, the accord is being-first — human-being-first. That is exactly what it needs to be if we are to avoid the false faith that our identity is merely the slave of information.

The diesel panic cure could make the disease worse

Diesel prices are at all-time highs, and panic has set in. Several Republican senators from Midwest farm states in competitive midterm races are calling on the administration to ban diesel exports. Even President Trump expressed support for the proposal. Lawmakers desperately want to curb the pain felt at the pump and throughout the agricultural industry. It’s understandable. But the knee-jerk reaction to “do something” by banning diesel exports is ill advised and would quickly backfire.

Logic might dictate that preventing all diesel from leaving our borders will allow it to fulfill our needs first. It just doesn’t work that way. Petroleum is a global market.

The only way to curtail a diesel surplus would be to cut back on crude altogether, a move that would be economically devastating.

The U.S. fuel network is not set up to distribute gas throughout our country. Nearly 55% of the nation’s refining occurs along the Gulf Coast, producing more than enough diesel for the region. But much of the surplus must be exported, as there are very few avenues to ship it to other domestic markets, like the East and West Coasts, where it is needed. Both those areas rely on imports to satisfy their diesel and other gasoline demands.

The U.S. has too few pipelines and cargo capabilities to transport energy to these locations. And storage is not an option; there is only so much space.

Refineries cannot flip a switch to produce only the diesel needed at a given time. Processing a barrel of crude oil produces certain proportions of gasoline and other distillates (like diesel and jet fuel); refiners are limited in their ability to adjust those proportions.

The only way to curtail a diesel surplus would be to cut back on crude altogether, a move that would be economically devastating.

At a time when we are already experiencing significant gasoline shortages and steep prices, constricting our supply further would only continue to inflate prices. Voters still rate the economy and affordability as their top concern; higher conventional gas prices would increase financial strain on household budgets.

U.S. diesel exports represent roughly 20% of global supply, which means they put downward pressure on global prices. Removing that portion would push those prices up, and the regions that depend on diesel imports — like the East and West Coasts — will face higher prices.

A ban on diesel and other refined products has been proposed before and soundly rejected. The Biden administration broached the topic in late 2021 but ultimately decided against it. Several analyses concluded that the action would adversely impact the country.

Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

A 2022 American Council for Capital Formation study predicted that such a ban would shut down roughly 1.3 million barrels a day of refining capacity. More than two-thirds of U.S. consumers would see price increases of roughly $0.15/gallon for gas and $0.45/gallon for diesel, and GDP would drop by $44 billion the following year.

McKinsey & Company similarly calculated bad news for U.S. consumers. A ban may initially provide relief for Gulf Coast and Midwest customers, but it wouldn’t last. Import-reliant regions, such as our coasts, would experience diesel price spikes due to global prices inflating by at least $0.60 per gallon.

Unfortunately, until there is a durable resolution to the geopolitical conflicts and disruptions abroad that would restore a steadier flow of resources, there is not a quick remedy that can bring energy costs down. Since energy markets and refinery operations are globally interconnected, a rash course of action has ripple effects felt across supply chain networks, some of which touch parts of our own country.

Lawmakers should focus on long-lasting solutions at home that will provide better insulation and protection from outside forces beyond our control.

Make federal land leasing more predictable and feasible for petroleum exploration and development.
Streamline permitting to facilitate and hasten building energy infrastructure like refineries for processing fuel and pipelines to transport it across the country.
Create a regulatory environment that fosters investment in the essential energy sources that run our economy.

A durable fix requires resisting the temptation of quick, politically satisfying moves and instead doubling down on policies that expand supply, modernize infrastructure, and strengthen the resilience of our energy system.

Banning diesel exports would raise prices for most Americans, destabilize global markets, and weaken the very regions already under strain. Rather than constricting flows in a tightly interconnected network, lawmakers should pursue reforms that unlock investment, improve distribution, and ensure that the U.S. can reliably meet its own needs.

The path to lower prices runs through growth and modernization — not restriction.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.

What’s really behind the opposition to data centers

Increasing numbers of Americans are deeply opposed to building more data centers. Over the summer, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) imposed the strictest data center rules in the country, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) ordered a statewide moratorium on hyperscale construction, and Gov. Greg Abbott (R) paused new approvals in Texas pending a grid audit.

At the local level, dozens of county and municipal fights have followed no reliable partisan pattern. Polling from Heatmap and Embold, collected by anonymous Substack writer Cremieux, shows data center popularity plummeting over the last year.

Any actions seen as forcing data centers on voters who do not want them will only make matters worse.

Though Cremieux argues the opposition is fundamentally driven by NIMBYism (not in my back yard), I am unconvinced. The polling seems to follow the pattern you would expect if NIMBYism were the primary driver, but posing the problem as a generic national issue produces substantially less opposition.

The arguments most central to the anti-data-center cause, namely complaints about the effect on utility costs, seem to generate an outsized amount of discourse relative to their actual effect. For example, in Virginia — the world’s data center capital and the state where I live — the State Corporation Commission estimated that shifting capacity and distribution costs from households to the large-load rate class would lower a typical residential bill by about 3.4%, or roughly $5.52 a month.

In other words, the effect is something on the order of a Subway sandwich in 2008.

I want to be scrupulous, because the complaints about data centers are often not literally false. Households are indeed suffering from a pecuniary externality created by increased demand. But it is hard to reconcile the mostly muted effects with the surging level of emotional response.

Americans’ growing dislike of data centers stems not from animus toward any single company or product but from a cumulative reaction to the momentous technological changes of the past couple of decades.

Because AI is the latest harbinger of those changes — and offers revolutionary potential — it has inherited our culture’s immune response. This means these problems cannot be adjudicated simply by changing utility regulations or even bribing local communities.

Michael Siluk/UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Three further factors have combined with the populist anti-tech feeling to make AI and, by extension, data centers unusually unpopular.

First, AI faces a particularly unfavorable coalition of constituencies. Its association with California and the tech industry has deeply soured much of conservative America toward it, and its association with billionaires and big business has soured many progressives. Even many techies feel personally threatened by the technology.

Second, those most aggressively advocating for data centers are not building them in their own back yards. Palo Alto, where I lived while attending grad school, has spent years fighting small-cell installations. One of the most prestigious retirement homes in the U.S., Channing House, recently fought to have wireless equipment removed from its roof.

In January, the city of Palo Alto wrote to the FCC opposing a rule that would speed up wireless approvals, while at the same time supporting the infrastructure needed to run AI-enabled services, so long as it retains the power to veto unwanted projects.

When the group that appears to benefit most from a technology is also most averse to its consequences, it is natural for the public to wonder what the tech world might be hiding. The anonymous author Polimath, writing in Marginally Compelling, gets closer to the underlying problem by viewing it as another front in the culture war, an outworking of long-simmering discontent with tech culture.

Third, much of the tech world itself seems increasingly concerned about the existential risk AI might pose to humanity. For example, earlier this month, Jacob Coxon, a researcher who spent three years doing pretraining work at OpenAI and then Anthropic, publicly resigned, writing that both companies were racing toward self-improving superintelligence and “gambling with our lives.”

Jason Henry/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Evan Hubinger, an alignment lead at Anthropic, replied that he agreed and put the odds of AI killing everyone within the decade above 10%. From talking to my friends at these labs, the modal person really does seem to think they are summoning the machine god. That prospect naturally feeds public opposition to AI.

Taken together, these factors help explain the public’s anger. The lines of the current debate have already hardened, and the grievances far predate the specific events of the day. Any actions seen as forcing data centers on voters who do not want them will only make matters worse.

But the centers will be built regardless. Demand is so enormous, and suitable locations are sufficiently plentiful, that only a small number of permissive communities, such as Loudoun County, are needed. If localities want to opt out, I see little reason to stop them.

However, the industry could take an important step if it wants to win broad American support.

Specifically, Big Tech should make a visible effort to build data centers near the communities where its executives and employees live. This would give them a way to begin convincing Americans that data centers are an asset worth having, not a liability worth dodging.

Concerns about water and electricity are simply not what most people are worried about, and addressing them will do nothing to solve the larger problem. Since these reasons are selected ex post to justify pre-existing opposition, defeating any single point will merely invite a hundred more.

If you are opposed to data centers, my guess is that saving $5 on your monthly utility bill wouldn’t be enough to change your opinion.

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

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