Politico ‘Reporter’ Perfectly Demonstrates Why Republicans Should Never Talk To Corporate Press
Conservatives become so eager for attention that they continue to engage with corporate media that despise them and their voters.Conservatives become so eager for attention that they continue to engage with corporate media that despise them and their voters.The real power of college has nothing to do with the classroom
In the wake of sexual assault allegations at Cornell University, the victimization of women on college campuses has returned to the public conversation.
Cornell’s 2025 state-mandated sexual misconduct survey reported that 35% of undergraduate women said they had experienced sexual assault since arriving at the university. The undergraduate response rate, however, was only 13%. Cornell’s presidential task force itself warned that the low response rate limits estimates and makes the results difficult to interpret.
People will sacrifice their daughters on the altar of the university for status. Imagine what else they will sacrifice.
If you take the headline number at face value, though, sending your daughter to Cornell sounds insane.
Conservative parents correctly tell a parallel story about the ideological and spiritual dangers of college. They complain that universities teach women to hate men, become atheists, sleep around, embrace progressive politics, and borrow enormous sums for degrees of dubious value. Everyone has seen the meme: a smart, pretty, well-adjusted high school graduate goes off to college and returns tattooed, purple-haired, pierced, and wearing a “down with the patriarchy” T-shirt.
Yet both sides keep sending their daughters.
The left describes campuses as rape factories. The right describes them as camps for progressive indoctrination. Still, liberal and conservative parents drill their daughters for the SAT, pack their schedules with extracurriculars, hire admissions consultants, and sweat over essays for the privilege of attending places like Cornell.
And that privilege is expensive. At 2026-2027 rates, four years of tuition at Cornell’s endowed colleges would approach $296,000 before housing, dining, books, and other expenses. New York residents in Cornell’s state contract colleges get a discount, but four years of tuition still comes to roughly $199,000.
Why would parents fight so hard for access to institutions they routinely describe as dangerous?
The easy answer is that neither side believes its own rhetoric. That is too simple. Conservatives and progressives exaggerate, but many genuinely believe the dangers they describe.
The better answer is status.
For most of American history, college was attended by a small minority. It was a finishing school for elites, a pipeline into the learned professions, and an ivory tower for scholars. Most Americans did not need a bachelor’s degree to enter respectable middle-class work.
The G.I. Bill dramatically expanded access after World War II. Federal aid and student lending expanded it further. As attendance grew, the degree increasingly became more than an education. It became a credential.
The Supreme Court’s 1971 decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. accelerated that logic. Griggs did not ban aptitude tests, as is sometimes claimed. It held that employment practices with discriminatory effects had to be justified by business necessity and job relevance. Broad employment tests became legally riskier, while a college degree became a convenient screening tool.
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That doesn’t mean Griggs single-handedly created credential inflation. It did not. But the larger phenomenon is real. Employers began requiring bachelor’s degrees for jobs that previously did not need them, turning the diploma into a proxy for intelligence, discipline, conformity, and class position.
Eventually the credential became self-reinforcing. A degree was valuable because employers demanded one, and employers demanded one because so many desirable applicants had one.
The result is familiar. Jobs once open to high school graduates now ask for bachelor’s degrees. Jobs once open to bachelor’s graduates increasingly prefer master’s degrees. The education itself may have little relationship to the work, but the credential still sorts applicants.
The economic incentive is only part of it. College has become a rite of passage for the professional class. Parents want the sweatshirt, the move-in photos, the graduation pictures, and the reassuring sense that their children have entered the respectable world. The name on the diploma matters because other people recognize it. The campus experience matters because other high-status people shared it.
A student who attends Cornell does not merely buy classes; she buys membership in a hierarchy that exists long after commencement. This is why attacks on higher education so often fail to change family behavior. Parents can hate the professors, mock the administrators, and denounce the politics while still fearing that opting out will leave their children below the people who stayed in.
College also confers something money alone cannot buy: entry into a social network.
Elite universities connect students with other ambitious, well-connected people. Fraternities, sororities, internships, fellowships, alumni networks, and campus organizations create relationships that can shape careers for decades. Even if every lecture were useless, the network would retain enormous value.
That is why parents who despise universities still want their children admitted to them.
The pressure is especially strong for daughters because women now dominate higher education. Women make up a clear majority of undergraduate enrollment and earn about 59% of bachelor’s degrees. Whatever conservatives may think about the culture of universities, telling a daughter to skip college can mean telling her to surrender access to the credentialed professional world in which many of her peers will compete.
This is the trap.
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Progressives may believe campuses expose women to unacceptable rates of sexual assault. Conservatives may believe universities corrode faith, family, and femininity. Both groups understand that status institutions control access to other status institutions.
That contradiction reveals something deeper than hypocrisy.
Status is the one commodity that is always zero-sum. People are status-seeking creatures, and institutions that confer status therefore acquire enormous political power. If Cornell can make parents compete for the privilege of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars while those same parents describe the campus as dangerous, then Cornell has something more valuable than an educational product.
It has the power to certify who belongs.
Conservatives spend enormous energy winning arguments about college. They complain about ideology, debt, useless majors, campus sex, and administrative bloat. Then they celebrate when their daughter gets into an Ivy.
That should tell them something.
People will sacrifice their daughters on the altar of the university for status. Imagine what else they will sacrifice.
If conservatives truly want to win the political battle, they should spend less time arguing with institutions that confer status and more time building institutions capable of conferring status themselves.
The danger of calling the left stupid
A long list of prominent conservatives have referred to leftists and Democrats as dumb, stupid, incompetent, crazy, and insane. In 2007, Ann Coulter wrote the book “If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans.” Both Rush Limbaugh and President Trump regularly referred to Democrats as “Dumbocrats.” More recently, the leader of the House Freedom Caucus called Democrats “the crazy party,” and JD Vance framed the contrast between the parties as “common sense vs. crazy.”
Matt Margolis titled a piece in PJ Media this year “Democrats Are Too Stupid to Heed This Warning” and posited that somewhere between the 1990s and today, the Democratic Party lost its mind. Some of this stuff gets a chuckle, but conservatives need to be careful with this narrative.
Calling an adversary’s actions crazy or stupid implies that those actions produce an outcome fundamentally different from what their architects intended.
Conservatives need to understand that this tactic can not only contradict the more serious messages they’re trying to convey about leftist policies, it can also remove responsibility from leftists for their malevolence.
Consider a recent interview in which Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) explained that the left’s open-border policy was part of a shrewd, long-term plan to bring in new Democrat constituents, with sanctuary-city policies as another step in that plan. Yet in the same interview, he called the policy “just stupid” and “one of the dumbest policies I’ve ever heard of,” and, in a later interview, adding that “just about every single position today’s left adopts is crazy.”
So we are told that leftists are shrewd, long-term planners who are simultaneously stupid and crazy. Which is it? The distinction may seem trivial, but it’s not.
We need to distinguish between leftist leadership and its dominant agenda on the one hand and its useful idiots on the other.
To be clear, there are certainly some dim bulbs among the left — both in leadership and rank and file. Showcase examples include Vice President Kamala Harris, who frequently struggles to articulate coherent sentences; Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), who worried during a congressional hearing that Guam might “tip over and capsize” if it became too populated; and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who told us that America with defunded police would look just like the wealthy white suburbs.
On a broader scale, consider millions of California voters who knowingly continue to vote for politicians whose policies have devastated the Golden State.
But these examples aside, the overarching leftist agenda — and the people who genuinely understand, subscribe to, and orchestrate it — cannot simply be dismissed as stupid. Doing so is dangerous.
The rise of the New Left
As has often been the case with radical leftist movements in the United States, their stated objective is to dismantle existing American institutions, traditions, and governing structures in favor of a fundamentally different social order. Put simply, they despise America as it currently exists.
Once you understand this premise, their positions look less like harebrained, stupid, illogical, or unworkable ideas, but more like carefully conceived, sometimes ingenious tactics intended to advance that larger objective.
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In this light, things like defunding the police, draconian regulations and carbon taxes, mothballing coal and nuclear plants, wide-open borders, turning a blind eye to Medicaid and NGO fraud, supporting genital mutilation of minors, opposing voter ID, massive expansion of entitlement spending, lowering combat readiness standards in the military in the name of gender equality, and support for adversaries like Hamas can be understood not as disconnected examples of incompetence, but as elements of a broader ideological program.
If it does damage to America and hastens the great realignment, they support it.
Whether one agrees with that interpretation of any particular policy is a separate question. The important point is that conservatives shouldn’t automatically assume destructive policies are the product of stupidity.
In “America’s Cultural Revolution,” Christopher Rufo explains how the radical left’s approach evolved from traditional Marxist class conflict toward an emphasis on race, gender, and identity. Traditional Marxism defined the conflict largely in socioeconomic terms, pitting the working class against the wealthy. In the United States, however, the middle class proved too large, mobile, and invested in the existing system for a conventional class-based revolution to take hold.
Influenced by thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse, the New Left increasingly emphasized “the war of position,” “the long march through the institutions,” and racial and cultural identity as alternatives to direct political conflict. Barack Obama became a highly consequential figure in this transformation.
During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama told an audience in Columbia, Missouri, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” In the years that followed, he did precisely that.
The media proactively escalated the new narrative, increasing use of the terms racist, racists, and racism by roughly 700% between 2011 and 2019. The phrase “white supremacy” rarely appeared in the media until 2015, but by 2019, the Times and the Post were using it 17 to 18 times more often than in 2014, with similar jumps for “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” “unconscious bias,” and “whiteness.”
Gallup found that the share of respondents who believed black-white relations were “very good” or “somewhat good” plummeted from about 70% to 47% by 2015.
From the perspective of those who designed it, this was a deliberate and consequential political strategy. Arthur Brooks put it well, pointing out that the president ran on optimism and unity but governed on pessimism and division. In 2011, Obama’s Executive Order 13583 cemented DEI language, metrics, and policies across federal agencies. The resulting fallout has been well documented.
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Stupid or strategic?
To call leftist leaders or their policies stupid is therefore more than an unfortunate choice of words. It can mislead conservatives regarding what they are confronting.
We don’t tend to think of stupid people as evil. Perceived stupidity neutralizes perceived intent and, to some degree, perceived blame. “Stupid” is not the word that comes to mind for figures like Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, and it would have done us no favors to describe the Axis powers in World War II as merely stupid or crazy.
Calling an adversary’s actions crazy or stupid implies that those actions produce an outcome fundamentally different from what their architects intended. But what if the opposite is true? What if the policies are producing precisely the disruption their architects sought?
Once upon a time, Democrats and Republicans were two parties with broadly similar hopes for America but sharply different views on how to get there. That time has passed.
Conservatives should not lose sight of what they believe to be the left’s overarching mission. They need to describe political actions, and the consequences those actions produce, not simply as the unfortunate results of incompetent or stupid people, but as those of an underlying ideological agenda.
That doesn’t mean every Democrat is a radical leftist, every leftist is an intellectual strategist, or every controversial policy reflects a coordinated conspiracy. Nor does it mean conservatives should stop pointing out genuinely foolish statements or incompetent decisions. It means something simpler: Stop confusing foolishness with strategy.
Some political actors may indeed be foolish. Others may be highly intelligent and deeply committed to an ideological vision conservatives regard as destructive. Those two categories shouldn’t be confused.
If conservatives want to understand and effectively challenge the modern left, they should focus less on calling its leaders stupid and more on understanding what they’re trying to accomplish. That leadership may be insidious, duplicitous, destructive, morally wrong, and in some cases evil. But dismissing them as stupid or crazy risks missing the point entirely.
Let’s start calling them out on what they actually intend to do.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.
Want fewer RINOs? Give GOP conventions more power
Deep-red states keep electing Republicans who govern against their voters. Democrats campaign on anti-corruption and inflation in swing states while delivering nothing but leftism in their bluest states. Republican voters should expect their reddest states to govern just as aggressively on the right. Instead, Republicans-in-name-only dominate.
Whenever I demand action against red-state RINOs, the GOP’s obedient chorus lectures conservatives about “unity.” Unless we overhaul these state parties — changing how they select nominees or running on third-party ballot lines — we will keep suffering Democratic governance under the Republican banner. Democrats will also keep gaining ground in states they once couldn’t penetrate.
Conservatives cannot keep treating nominations as a procedural detail and then wonder why Republican victories fail to produce conservative government.
South Dakota shows both the problem and a remedy. The state chooses some statewide nominees at party conventions rather than direct primaries. This summer, state Rep. Heather Baxter defeated Secretary of State Monae Johnson by 18 points at the GOP convention. Activists concluded that Johnson had obstructed the election integrity agenda on which she originally campaigned.
Statewide incumbents almost never lose direct primaries. The convention gave activists a chance to hold Johnson accountable for her record.
Critics might dismiss those delegates as too extreme or uncompromising. Johnson answered that objection herself: After losing their support, she endorsed the Democrat in the general election — in South Dakota.
“South Dakota deserves a Secretary of State who will strengthen confidence through performance rather than provocation; who will support election officials rather than burden them for political effect; who will protect voter access and election security without pretending those goals are enemies; and who will treat the office’s employees, voters, candidates, and business owners with dignity,” Johnson wrote in her statement endorsing Democrat Terrence Davis last Saturday.
Her language about “voter access,” followed by her endorsement, confirmed that delegates were right to give her the boot.
Johnson had already turned against pro-lifers fighting a ballot initiative to enshrine abortion on demand in South Dakota’s Constitution. House Speaker Jon Hansen (R) founded the Life Defense Fund, which contacted petition signers to verify that they had consented to having their names on the petitions. Johnson accused the group of running a “scam.”
Petition organizers’ claims of public support deserve verification. A signature should reflect a voter’s consent, and election officials should welcome efforts to establish whether that consent was real. Suspected petition fraud warranted scrutiny. In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration investigated alleged fraud in a similar abortion petition drive in 2024. “The circulators appeared to have forged the voters’ signatures and inserted the voters’ personal identifiable information into the petitions without consent,” Secretary of State Cord Byrd wrote in a letter that year.
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Johnson accused Hansen’s group of “impersonating” her staff and “trying to pressure voters into asking that their name be removed” from the petitions. She sought a criminal investigation, but Attorney General Marty Jackley found no evidence of lawbreaking.
“By labeling our lawful activity as a scam, Secretary of State Johnson has done significant and irreversible damage to the pro-life movement in South Dakota,” Hansen said in May 2024.
Voters rejected the abortion amendment, but it garnered 41% of the vote — an alarming share in such a red state. Conservatives had better be prepared to scrutinize petition drives for future abortion, marijuana, and ranked-choice voting initiatives.
Johnson won convention support in 2022 by campaigning on election integrity. Once in office, she obstructed conservatives seeking to investigate or confront election fraud. With her support of the Democrat, we now know she was never really on our side.
This contest offers two lessons.
First, conservatives must stop letting threats of party disunity protect liberal Republicans. If a defeated RINO will support a Democrat, that strengthens the case for removing that Republican even sooner. Given the Democrats’ radical agenda, anyone willing to endorse them would remain a subversive force under the GOP banner.
Red states teem with these politicians. In Alaska, liberal Republicans shared power with Democrats, gradually creating a uniparty. Ranked-choice voting further blurred the distinctions. Despite reliably backing Republican presidential nominees, Alaska is essentially a province of the Democratic Party. Democrats are favored to win the legislature and flip a U.S. Senate seat, while their candidate for governor leads by double digits in a recent poll.
When Republicans in the reddest states share power with Democrats, conservatives cannot settle for “at least we have a Republican.” Keep rewarding that conduct, and even the Republican label will eventually disappear.
Kansas offers another warning. Republicans’ refusal to unite behind a conservative agenda has helped Democrats hold the governorship for eight years. Unpopular incumbent Republicans have now made Kansas competitive at the federal level. Former Republican Gov. Bill Graves even endorsed Democrat Adam Hamilton against Republican Sen. Roger Marshall.
We have allowed liberals to weaken the party from within for years. The demand for unity always seems to bind conservatives, while liberal Republicans remain free to support the other party. That arrangement rewards the politicians responsible for the division and silences the voters trying to fix it.
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The second lesson: State conventions give conservatives a better chance to reclaim their party than direct primaries do because they draw informed activists. Johnson’s endorsement is unlikely to elect a Democrat in South Dakota. The point is the convention allowed conservatives to expose and remove her. Try doing that in a direct primary while special interests spend heavily to mislead low-information voters who barely follow these races.
As conservatives rejected Johnson at the convention, liberal Republicans won key direct primaries. Hansen would have easily won the gubernatorial nomination had convention delegates decided that race. Instead, Gov. Larry Rhoden won the primary. He has opposed initiative petition reform, which conservatives need to confront the process helping turn red states blue.
Meanwhile, about 16 liberal former legislators and challengers defeated conservative freshmen in legislative primaries, aided by an infusion of Big Tech cash. Baxter herself lost her legislative primary before defeating Johnson at the convention in the same election cycle.
Conservatives cannot keep treating nominations as a procedural detail and then wonder why Republican victories fail to produce conservative government. The selection process determines who we send into office and whose demands they heed.
Conservatives who want different results must change how their parties choose candidates. Keep the same primary system, and the uniparty will keep collecting the nominations.
‘Victory is a state of existence’: John Doyle rejects conservative ‘black-pillers’
Many people on the right seem determined to convince everyone that defeat is inevitable, and BlazeTV host John Doyle isn’t having it.
The worldview, which he calls “black-pilled,” is deeply pessimistic, nihilistic, and ultimately destructive. It also is a play on the red-pill/blue-pill dilemma from the film "The Matrix," where the main character, Neo, was offered a red pill or a blue pill.
In the film, if you take the red pill you are awakened to the truth no matter how terrible it is. If you take the blue pill, you “go back to your normie life” and accept the lie.
While Neo takes the red pill and carries out a heroic battle to fight those enslaving humanity, Doyle points out that in real life, those who have taken the red pill simply end up “being pretty miserable.”
“You find out how bad things are. You think it’s always going to be bad. That kind of sucks,” he says.
“And so then it kind of creates this self-fulfilling prophecy where you’re upset about being alone. You go online, you find out some, I don’t know, interesting facts about say women’s behavior in aggregate. So maybe you start to hate all women,” he continues.
“You avoid them, women avoid you. The problem never gets solved, and then you actually do end up alone forever,” he adds.
Now some on the right who have taken the red pill have adopted the term “black-pilled,” which is essentially the end result of taking the red pill, seeing the truth, and having no hope for the future.
“I encourage all of you to recognize this behavior when you see it and respond the right way. You don’t have to play games with these people,” Doyle says. “In fact, you shouldn’t play games with these people because you wouldn’t tolerate this behavior in literally any other part of your life or in any other environment.”
“You would recognize it as stupid. You would recognize it as counterproductive and therefore harmful to your goals,” he continues.
“So there’s absolutely no reason to tolerate it then in the sphere that is upstream from your life and from your goals and those of your family and friends because our success here is going to affect all of our lives and all of our goals forever. That’s the point,” he adds.
And the conservative movement, Doyle explains, is “going to matter for the rest of our lives.”
“Our destiny is tied to this. If this succeeds, we have a shot at succeeding,” he says.
“If this fails ... it’s not going to look good for patriots, but we won’t black-pill, but we’ll be in a little bit of a patriot predicament,” he continues, “So in the meantime, every small win is going to buy us some time, buy us some hope, you know, improvements, here and there. That’s very good."
“If we keep that up for long enough, it’s going to start to look and feel like victory. Victory is not an event, it’s not a Marvel movie ... victory is a state of existence,” he adds.
Want more from John Doyle?
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The future belongs to people who believe in one
The future will be different from today.
The cars will be different. The clothes will probably look worse. Our phones might still be little black bricks with touch screens, but there will be new applications and new platforms for the dissemination of information. Some cities will grow, some will shrink, new suburbs will be built, and already dying small towns will finally collapse.
There aren’t many logical reasons to have children in 2026. We don’t need them to work the farm or provide free labor at the shop.
We have a tendency to imagine the future as essentially the present but a little farther away, with some higher numbers at the end of the date.
But nothing stays the same forever.
People grow old and die. New people are born. And the people who inhabit the future won't simply have different names from the people alive today. In some important ways, they will be different kinds of people, because they will disproportionately be the descendants of the people who chose to have children now.
The end of the something
We are, in some way, at the end of something, even though we can't clearly see it yet.
The fertility collapse is too big, includes too much of the developed world, and is happening over too long a period of time for us to perceive the whole thing at once. The world's population is still growing, but fertility has fallen below replacement level across much of the world, and dozens of countries have already reached their peak populations.
People aren't having kids like they used to. Or, more precisely, certain people aren't having kids like they used to.
In America, liberals are having fewer children than conservatives. A 2026 study using decades of General Social Survey data found a widening fertility divide by political orientation, with the difference becoming especially pronounced among more recent generations.
Another recent survey found conservatives reporting 1.40 children on average compared with 1.09 for liberals. That sounds like a small gap until you realize it amounts to nearly 30% more children — and demographic differences compound with every generation.
Running on empty
The average secular, centrist Democrat Boomer might have had two kids in 1982 because that's just what you did. Today, his kids might have dogs.
We don’t yet see the impacts of the asymmetrical population collapse because we are still at the very tail end of secular liberals reproducing. But eventually the tail will disappear, the gas will run out, the engine will slow, and we will see a future of different people.
Sometimes I meet with older people who never had children or older secular centrist Democrats who had two kids but whose children haven’t decided to do the same. I wonder if they are able to see the self-eliminating tendencies of their general worldview or if they give any thought to why exactly their children haven’t chosen to become parents as they did and if, perhaps, in hindsight they might reflect that there were flaws in raising them the way they did.
Sometimes I find myself someplace where the average age is 64, and I wonder if the people realize what that means. It’s not that they should be lying awake at night sweating bullets because they aren’t replacing themselves. We can only do so much in this world, and some problems are bigger than us. But I do wonder if they realize that the future will be different in part due to their choices regarding procreation and child-rearing.
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Why bother?
There aren’t many logical reasons to have children in 2026. We don’t need them to work the farm or provide free labor at the shop. So we who have children today have them for deeper reasons. Sometimes they are outwardly religious ones, like the imperative to be fruitful and multiply. Sometimes they are less religious ones based loosely on culture or love of family. And sometimes it’s just hundreds of little signals that add up gradually to form a general attitude toward family life.
“We’d love to have more.”
If you are in the conservative world in any way, this is a phrase you are well acquainted with. You have heard it said too many times to count, and you have probably said it quite a few times yourself. It’s just what you say after a conversation about a baby, a new car to accommodate another kid, or any other funny story about family life.
It’s a short little sentence, but it being a sort of default thing to respond with very acutely illuminates the difference between the liberal world and the conservative one in 2026.
In the liberal world, this is not a phrase that is uttered naturally. There is no presumption that (of course!) you want more children. At best, children are viewed neutrally, and at worst, they are considered kind of a buzzkill for what could be a life of “freedom” and higher earning potential. On that side of the political world, it is simply not a cultural assumption that children are a blessing and the more the better.
Betting on the future
But that attitude is dying, literally. It doesn’t seem like it yet, I know. It’s slow. We are still over-saturated with young people born to the types that wouldn’t have kids today. We are still in the middle of that very long population bottleneck, and the ship is still coasting though the gas has just about run out.
But over time — a very long period of time — the attitudes of those who don’t care for a world of children will slowly dissipate and become less potent. They are self-eliminating, after all. That’s not opinion; it’s a cold fact of reality that we all see clearly now. The only people who will exist in the future will be people born to those who believed children are good, that the more life there is, the better, and the future should be one that is full of humans.
I’m optimistic.
Free money wins elections — and that’s why America’s debt will keep growing
As Republicans head toward what looks like a perilous midterm election, affordability is on everyone’s lips. The Biden administration never convinced voters that it had brought food and housing costs under control. Some Republicans have tried to pretend the problem does not exist; others have acknowledged it without making meaningful progress.
Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump made choices that worsened the pressure, from expanding federal spending to deepening costly foreign commitments. Neither party has a durable solution. The Congressional Budget Office projects a $1.9 trillion deficit for fiscal year 2026, and debt held by the public now tops 101% of GDP. Spending and inflation are not accidents at the edge of mass democracy. They follow from its incentives, and nothing will change until the incentives do.
In a democracy, giving voters something is the winning strategy, and Trump likes winning.
The affordability crisis has several causes, but much of the immediate pain comes from the cumulative rise in prices. Wages may rise and bank balances may grow, yet each dollar buys less. Inflation is a pernicious tax precisely because it is hidden. Normal taxes must be enacted and collected openly. No one votes directly for inflation, which instead erodes the value of money people have already earned and saved. It punishes careful savers while rewarding borrowers and speculators.
Deficit spending can fuel inflation when government expands demand faster than the economy can supply goods and services. Creating money makes it easier to distribute benefits today, but it can reduce the currency’s purchasing power tomorrow. Inflation also lightens the real burden of government debt by reducing the value of what was borrowed. The average person, however, rarely has early access to new money or the sophisticated financial instruments wealthy investors use to hedge against rising prices. He feels the loss at the grocery store.
The oldest move in politics is to offer people a material reward for their support. Every system does it, but democracy makes the exchange especially powerful because elections confer legitimacy. A politician rarely calls the arrangement a “bribe.” He routes the benefit through a program aimed at groups likely to reward him at the polls. The legal form gives the transaction respectability, but voters still understand the bargain.
Donald Trump recently dispensed with even that pretense. At the Republican midterm convention last week, he promised $5,000 to every adult citizen if Republicans retain the House and Senate. An independent estimate put the cost at more than $1.2 trillion, and Congress would have to approve it. Whether the payments ever materialize is not the point. The offer mocks the fiscal restraint conservatives claim to espouse. Conservative commentators objected, but Trump brushed them aside. He understands the incentives. He promised not to cut Social Security and Medicare because benefits win votes. In a democracy, giving voters something is the winning strategy, and Trump likes winning.
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Warnings about democracy long predate modern America. Plato and Aristotle distrusted rule by the demos, and the American founders built a constitutional republic with layers of insulation against popular majorities. Their fear was simple: Once voters discover they can use the state to transfer other people’s money to themselves, restraint collapses. A republic may survive only if institutions impose limits that elections alone will not.
Is the $5,000 check good fiscal policy? Of course not. It’s a disaster. A transfer approaching $1.2 trillion would widen the deficit and almost certainly worsen inflation, especially in an economy already near capacity. Pandemic-era fiscal stimulus did not single-handedly cause the 2021-2022 inflation surge; supply shocks and monetary policy mattered too. But New York Federal Reserve research found that fiscal support contributed materially.
Is the check good politics? Yes. In a democracy, vote-buying is an optimal strategy, and anyone who refuses it risks losing to someone who will. Democrats have principles that let them hand out money and receive praise — and votes. Republicans profess principles that should forbid it. Sound economics grants no electoral advantage.
Reckless spending is terrible policy, but it can win elections. Conservatives may campaign on austerity, but austerity rarely inspires voters. If progressives alone use the winning strategy, conservative fiscal theory becomes irrelevant. Losers do not write budgets or exercise executive power. Both parties therefore spend when they hold office, though they direct the money toward different constituencies. The democratic incentive is to distribute everything you can while you can, because the other side may take power tomorrow and spend it instead.
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The philosopher Nick Land captured the logic in “The Dark Enlightenment”:
As the democratic virus burns through society, painstakingly accumulated habits and attitudes of forward-thinking, prudential, human and industrial investment are replaced by a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a “reality television” political circus. Tomorrow might belong to the other team, so it’s best to eat it all now.
None of this is hopeful. Conservatives have made preserving mass democracy a principle even as the system rewards policies they oppose. A constitutional republic needs constraints on majoritarian appetite, but there is little political will even for modest spending cuts, much less fundamental limits on the franchise. The brutal truth is that both parties will keep spending recklessly while blaming each other for rising debt and prices.
As long as mass democracy reigns, buying votes with public money will remain one of the surest ways to gain and hold power. Every politician wants power.
Campus free speech is alive — barely
America’s universities have forgotten what education is for. And they are increasingly willing to treat the God-given right of free speech as something administrators may grant or withdraw.
American higher education received its annual free-speech report card this week. The good news is that the patient has a pulse. The bad news is that we have apparently lowered our expectations to the point where this counts as good news.
Maybe students are beginning to rediscover something their institutions forgot: Hearing an argument does not constitute an injury.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression released its 2027 College Free Speech Rankings, based on the experiences of nearly 63,000 students at 261 American colleges and universities. The average university continues to perform badly at one of the activities universities were ostensibly invented to encourage: thinking out loud.
This is an unusual institutional achievement. A hospital that made patients afraid to discuss their symptoms would attract attention. A law school where students feared making arguments would be considered defective. But a university where students learn to keep controversial thoughts to themselves can still issue press releases celebrating its commitment to dialogue.
It is all the art of illusion. Universities tell the public, “We are inclusive,” while students know they may have to self-censor or risk angering professors who control their grades.
I know something about this from the inside. I have taught at Arizona State University for more than two decades. Our motto is “inclusive excellence.” Yet I run a Substack where I document how ASU professors stifle free speech and push DEI and LGBTQ ideology onto their students.
ASU is slipping in the FIRE rankings. This year it ranks 29th out of 261 schools, down from 23rd last year. Its numerical score increased from about 70 to 72, but its grade remains a C-.
Apparently, even grade inflation has limits.
A C- is awful, and ASU administrators should make correcting course a top priority. Instead, they host events like “Queer Animacies.”
The more interesting numbers are buried beneath the overall ranking.
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FIRE reports that ASU remains in the bottom 50 nationally for “openness,” its measure of whether students believe they can discuss controversial subjects freely. Even more striking, ASU’s ranking for “administrative support” fell 107 places in a single year.
Think about that combination. Students attend a university to learn how to think, yet many perceive controversial subjects as effectively off-limits, while their confidence that administrators will defend free speech has substantially deteriorated.
This points to a deeper problem than free speech.
We have forgotten what a university is for.
Socrates did not walk around Athens distributing approved answers. He asked questions. Irritating questions, as the Athenians eventually discovered.
He questioned politicians, poets, and craftsmen who believed themselves wise and discovered that possessing expertise in one subject has a curious tendency to persuade people that they possess expertise in everything.
Twenty-five centuries later, we have perfected the type.
The university is supposed to cultivate intellectual maturity by forcing students to distinguish what they know from what they merely assume. That requires disagreement. It requires professors willing to have their own beliefs questioned. And it requires students who can make an argument without first consulting the ideological weather report.
When I was recently interviewed by KJZZ in Phoenix about my Arizona Supreme Court case, leftists — including ASU professors — took to the Facebook comments to dish out personal attacks because I dared to question the university’s DEI curriculum. My case concerns a training program I argue violated Arizona law; ASU has disputed my claims, and the Arizona Supreme Court is now being asked to decide whether I may proceed with the suit.
Such professors teach students the one skill required for university success: identifying the professor’s approved conclusion.
This is not education. Not even close. It’s training students to lie for approval and to accept censorship.
The problem becomes particularly obvious when universities congratulate themselves on “critical thinking.”
Critical thinking is one of those phrases that appears in university mission statements with approximately the frequency of “excellence,” “inclusion,” and “innovation.” Everyone favors it because nobody bothers to define it.
But critical thinking cannot mean criticizing only the ideas your professors have already designated as problematic.
If students are encouraged to “interrogate” Christianity but not transgender ideology, colonialism but not Marxism, capitalism but not DEI, they have not been taught critical thinking.
They have been given a list of suspects.
Real critical thinking is considerably more dangerous because it applies the same standards to everyone.
Can you define your terms?
What is your evidence?
Does your conclusion follow from your premises?
Are your premises true?
What would prove you wrong?
Those questions are wonderfully indifferent to race, sex, political party, academic rank, ideology, or preferred pronouns.
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Logic has always suffered from an embarrassing lack of sensitivity.
This is why free speech is not merely one university value among many. It is inseparable from the purpose of the institution. And it is a God-given right, not a gift to be handed out and taken back by radical professors or university administrators.
A university exists because human beings are not born knowing the truth. We must learn.
Learning requires discovering that some things we believe are false. Discovering that requires allowing someone to tell us we are wrong.
Remove that possibility and the university ceases to be a university in anything but name.
There is at least one encouraging finding in the new national data. Student tolerance for shouting down speakers, blocking access to events, and using violence against speakers declined slightly from last year’s record highs. Maybe students are beginning to rediscover something their institutions forgot: Hearing an argument does not constitute an injury.
That’s progress.
But universities should not congratulate themselves because students have become slightly less enthusiastic about silencing one another. The standard is considerably higher.
The university should be the place in American life where the unpopular question is most welcome.
Where the student can challenge the professor.
Where the professor can challenge the administration.
Where Christians, atheists, conservatives, progressives, Marxists, and their increasingly rare opponents can all be asked the same unforgiving question: How do you know?
Until universities recover that purpose, Americans will need to be honest about their value.
And we will cultivate our God-given freedom to think elsewhere.
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.
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