Dear incoming GOP governors, don’t listen to the moderates



The morning after you win, the National Governors Association will call. Its leaders will offer a seminar, a binder, and a roster of former governors prepared to explain why you should slow down. Take the meeting if you must — but do not buy their theory.

The midterms may cost Republicans the House and possibly even the Senate. But they will not lose the states. Thirty-six governorships are on the ballot, and the incoming class, with open seats in Ohio, Alabama, Iowa, Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and others, will likely yield the most conservative slate of new governors in a generation.

The bureaucracy has weathered these past governors because they failed to act swiftly.

The federal government will likely be deadlocked in 2027, but the states offer hope for advancing a bold and transformative national agenda.

To carry out such an agenda, incoming governors must reject the advice found in the NGA’s transition manual, which is an apologia for paralysis. On page 39, a former governor offers what the association presents as wisdom: “As a businessman, I spent 90% of my time on process and 10% on policy. As governor, I find I spend 90% of my time on policy and 10% on process.” This advice comes from a man who once controlled his own calendar but learned to let someone else control it.

Unsurprisingly, he did not transform his state during his term in office.

The NGA’s strategic advice is designed to slow you down. In the first six to nine months, “Veteran governors advise that a new governor generally should minimize downtime by not undertaking major reorganizations, large-scale personnel changes beyond normal top-level appointments or other major actions unless absolutely necessary.”

The text then warns against using the honeymoon period to “eliminate some entrenched bureaucrat who has run a particular bureau like a fiefdom for 30 years,” because “experienced governors advise caution at precisely the time when difficult decisions seem easiest.” Page 19 adds a quota: Veteran governors “recommend only tackling three to five large programmatic changes during a term.”

The NGA seeks to lock you into stagnation by “maintaining credibility with the legislature, state bureaucracy, press, and public.” Fail at that, and you become a “caretaker, largely beholden to a bureaucracy that has previously weathered poor governors.”

The bureaucracy has weathered these past governors because they failed to act swiftly. As a new governor, you have a choice: safeguard left-wing institutions or act boldly with the mandate voters gave you.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) declined the seminar’s theory of the job. In his first term, he suspended Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren and won passage of the parental-rights law the education establishment said would never be approved. And when Disney used its private government to punish the state, DeSantis moved to dissolve the Reedy Creek Improvement District.

His second term opened at the same speed. In January 2023, he replaced the board of trustees at New College of Florida, which fired the president at its first meeting and shut down the diversity office within weeks. That summer, DeSantis suspended Orange-Osceola State Attorney Monique Worrell. He filled the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, the replacement for Reedy Creek, with his appointees. None of this waited for month 10, and none of it counted against a “three-to-five” quota.

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Ron DeSantis immediately targeted the offices that decide what the law means, and as a result, he is the most consequential governor of modern times.

President Trump’s second transition is the federal version of the same choice. The work of remaking the government began well before he took the oath of office. Inauguration Day produced a seismic list of executive orders that revoked the prior administration’s directives and froze pending rules.

President Trump moved policy-making career officials into positions where refusal to carry out the elected president’s program became grounds for removal. His speed and decisiveness made it impossible for the bureaucracy to stop him. He understood that since bureaucracy wins through inaction, such qualities are the best counter to its playbook.

The state version of the problem is worse than the NGA manual admits. Agencies are overstaffed relative to the work. A large share of the professional class inside them opposed your election and will oppose any order that threatens a program, a grant, or a headcount.

The NGA’s advice for staffing hundreds of boards and commissions — to staff them defensively, to “avoid embarrassment,” to keep them from consuming the governor’s time, and to wait until the crush of transition has passed — amounts to a 48-month holding pattern. Its goal is to outlast you.

Build the appointment list before election night. Know which boards can be abolished by statute and which must be filled by appointment in the first 60 days. Put your own counsel, budget director, and personnel leads in place before the inaugural balls are over. Carry out the reorganizations the NGA manual says to postpone. Publish the short list of agencies you intend to shrink — and shrink them while the people who run them are still writing memos about how hard that will be.

The bureaucracy is not your partner, and it is not waiting to be persuaded. It is overstaffed, and a meaningful share of its career employees do not want you to succeed. Treat it the way Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are treating it, or spend four years learning why the conservative governor before you left office with a binder full of process and a state that is merely treading water.

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

One atmosphere, 50 courts — what could go wrong?



The Supreme Court opened its new term Monday with one of the most consequential climate cases in years. The justices do not have to decide whether climate change is real or whether carbon dioxide warms the planet. They face a more basic question: Who pays the tab?

In Suncor Energy v. Boulder County, Boulder County and the city of Boulder want ExxonMobil and Suncor to pay under Colorado law for local costs they attribute to global warming, while also alleging deceptive marketing. The Colorado Supreme Court allowed the claims to proceed.

A Colorado jury cannot set national climate policy, but a patchwork of state tort verdicts could begin to approximate one.

The U.S. Supreme Court is considering whether federal law precludes them and whether it has jurisdiction to decide that question at this stage. The Trump administration is backing the companies.

This is not simply about two oil companies and one county. Boulder’s alleged injuries trace to greenhouse gases accumulated in a single global atmosphere over generations, from energy used in every state and nearly every country. Yet Colorado tort law would determine liability for selected companies.

Now multiply that. California could have one theory of damages, New York another, Hawaii a third. Nearly 60 state and local governments have brought similar cases. Different juries could impose different costs for alleged harms arising from the same global emissions pool. If every jurisdiction can pursue its own theory, climate tort begins to look less like compensation for a local injury and more like carbon pricing by litigation.

Boulder says it is applying ordinary state tort law, not regulating emissions. But whatever label courts use, large judgments against energy producers will not remain confined to the courthouse.

Then there is China. According to the Global Carbon Project, China accounts for roughly 32% of global fossil carbon dioxide emissions, compared with about 13% for the United States. A Colorado court cannot impose comparable liability on Chinese state-owned producers for emissions in China. That asymmetry is hard to ignore.

New York offers a warning. Its Climate Change Superfund Act sought $75 billion from fossil fuel companies for historical emissions. One federal judge struck it down on August 31; another did the same on September 23. Both relied on the Clean Air Act and the federal government’s authority over foreign affairs. Those cases involved a state statute rather than tort claims, but they show that the federalism problem is not theoretical.

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The lawsuits also leave out the other side of the ledger. Fossil fuels underpin synthetic nitrogen fertilizer that supports food production for roughly half the world, along with medical plastics, sterile packaging, transportation, and dispatchable power. A tort case can price alleged harms without pricing those benefits. Successful climate lawsuits would still raise costs somewhere in the system.

Nor did weather disasters begin with today’s carbon dioxide levels. The 1900 Galveston hurricane killed an estimated 6,000 to 12,000 people. In 1871, after a summer of drought, the Peshtigo fire burned more than a million acres and killed between 1,200 and 2,400 people. The Dust Bowl followed in the 1930s.

None of that settles the science. It shows something narrower: Disaster causation is not binary. A court asked to assign one company a share of a particular drought, fire, or flood must separate baseline risk from any incremental climate effect and then apportion responsibility across global emissions.

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Then comes the question of who pays. Energy demand is relatively inelastic in the short run. To the extent that judgments raise costs for American suppliers, some of those costs will be passed through at the pump, on heating and electricity bills, and in the price of goods. Lower-income households spend a larger share of their budgets on energy, so they feel increases most.

Congress can write national climate law. The EPA can regulate within the authority Congress gives it. Voters can hold both accountable. A Colorado jury cannot set national climate policy, but a patchwork of state tort verdicts could begin to approximate one.

The justices do not have to settle climate science. They have to decide whether state courts, one lawsuit at a time, may impose liability for a global emissions problem.

The answer should be no.

States need to take election security into their own hands



Americans can’t afford to be complacent about our election security. The right to vote is one of the most indispensable civil rights in a constitutional republic, but it is not self-executing. Laws must protect that right, ensure its proper administration, and defend it against error, fraud, and foreign influence.

Citizenship must be verified when voters register. States must maintain accurate voter rolls and give federal authorities the data to which they’re legally entitled. They must also have reliable proof-of-eligibility requirements and prosecute election-law violations.

Americans have fought too long and sacrificed too much to surrender sovereignty to administrative negligence and foreign influence.

This is ultimately not merely an election-administration issue — it is a matter of sovereignty.

The proposition that only American citizens may vote in elections is a cornerstone of our republic. The citizenship requirement preserves self-government and ensures that those who decide our elections are members of the American political community. If these basic rules are treated as mere aspiration rather than an enforceable legal requirement, then American sovereignty is at risk.

The vote — and the machinery that receives, records, verifies, counts, and reports it — is how the American people confer legitimate authority on public officials.

The size of the illegal immigrant population in the country underscores the point. The Department of Homeland Security estimated that roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants — or 3.3% of the U.S. population — resided in the country in January 2022. The Federation for American Immigration Reform’s March 2025 estimate puts this population at approximately 18.6 million at the beginning of 2025.

Whatever the precise number, the practical consequence is the same: A large non-citizen population resides in communities served by state voter-registration systems.

The cost of waiting to verify eligibility until after an election is too high, because even one unlawful vote dilutes a lawful citizen’s vote and undermines confidence in the electoral process.

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Recent reports only reinforce the need for scrutiny. DHS has found that preliminary reviews identified more than 250,000 potential non-citizens on voter rolls in four states and asked those states to work with the department on election security. Some state officials and election experts have disputed that claim. Fine. Then investigate it thoroughly, transparently, and promptly. The answer to a serious allegation is verification, not indifference.

Though Congress began requiring states to offer voter registration when people apply for or renew driver’s licenses through the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, convenience is not the enemy of integrity. The NVRA did not relieve states of their duty to maintain accurate voter rolls. States must ensure that illegal aliens and other ineligible persons do not vote in elections.

History supplies ample warning on this score. A review of Department of Motor Vehicles records revealed that Philadelphia mistakenly allowed non-citizens to register to vote around 2016. State officials later revised the system, but the episode demonstrates why citizenship verification cannot be left to bureaucratic happenstance.

And the problem isn’t limited to administrative error.

In the Eastern District of North Carolina, federal prosecutors charged 19 foreign nationals with voting in the 2016 election. In the Southern District of Florida, three non-citizens pleaded guilty to illegally voting in federal elections and committing related election offenses.

These numbers may not be large in isolation, but that misses the point. Election crimes are crimes against public trust. They injure every lawful voter whose ballot is entitled to equal weight under law.

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To combat this, states and municipalities should require reliable proof of citizenship and verification before an ineligible registration can result in a ballot being cast. State election officials should coordinate with federal authorities to obtain accurate citizenship and immigration-status information, consistent with law. The Department of Justice should continue to prosecute those who breach the system.

Encouragingly, some states have begun to act. The National Conference of State Legislatures reports that four states enacted documentary-proof-of-citizenship requirements in 2026. Thirteen states now have such laws at some point in the registration process, though litigation and court decisions have prevented some provisions from taking effect.

Other states have adopted bifurcated systems that allow voters who have not provided documentary proof of citizenship to vote in state elections, while still requiring verification for federal elections. These reforms reflect a necessary shift toward verifying citizenship rather than relying solely on a voter’s word.

The reason is obvious. If election safeguards are weak enough to allow non-citizens to register, vote, or otherwise influence elections, public policy could be shaped by individuals who have not assumed the duties of American citizenship or pledged allegiance to the constitutional order. That is a clear breach of the social compact.

The federal government already recognizes the critical nature of citizenship when public trust and national interest are at stake. For example, many national security positions require U.S. citizenship because they involve access to sensitive government information.

Though voting is different from government employment, it is still an exercise of sovereign authority. Through the ballot, citizens choose who will make law, set policy, spend public money, appoint officials, and direct the machinery of government. Sovereignty is preserved not by slogans but by laws faithfully enforced, passed by representatives chosen by American citizens.

State legislators must give election officials the tools to reinforce safeguards, confirm citizenship, maintain accurate voter rolls, and protect citizen self-government. Americans have fought too long and sacrificed too much to surrender sovereignty to administrative negligence and foreign influence.

The rule is simple, just, and essential: American citizens — and only American citizens — must decide American elections.

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

Republicans cannot serve two masters on immigration



Eleven years after Donald Trump’s rise, the Republican Party still has not broken with the business interests that depend on cheap, abundant migrant labor. A handful of conservatives want to shut off the employment spigot and reduce both illegal and legal immigration. But too much of the party remains willing to protect longtime illegal workers in agriculture, expand guest-worker programs, or legalize workers already here when employers insist they cannot operate without them.

That’s the real fault line. Almost every Republican says border chaos is bad. The harder test comes when immigration enforcement raises labor costs for industries dependent upon a large foreign workforce.

When a party’s voters and its governing class want fundamentally different things on a defining issue, eventually the contradiction must break somewhere.

For years, Republicans have talked about focusing deportations on criminal aliens while treating workers in agriculture, hospitality, and other favored industries differently. That approach leaves the cheap labor pipeline largely intact. If employers can continue hiring illegal labor with little consequence, the incentive to come and remain does not disappear.

Republicans simply won’t protect our nation’s sovereignty. Instead, they build up a false dichotomy that points to one solution: amnesty.

Senator Jim Justice (R-W.Va.) made the tension explicit last month. He told Politico that ICE can get “carried away” and questioned “dragging people away that have lived on your street corner for 15 years.” He later issued a statement saying he supports Trump’s immigration strategy “full stop,” while emphasizing the removal of dangerous criminals.

Justice serves one of the most anti-illegal alien states. He did not endorse blanket amnesty outright. He didn’t need to. His comments reveal how quickly the politics change once enforcement reaches local industries and communities that have become addicted to illegal labor.

The same pressure surfaced in southwest Kansas after ICE operations disrupted meatpacking towns. Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) complained that local law enforcement had not received adequate notice and said the operations caused “mass disruptions to local communities and businesses.” Enforcement, he said, should be done “in a responsible and secure manner.” Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) likewise urged coordination with local police and said DHS told him the operation targeted people with criminal warrants.

Their complaint was about tactics and coordination, not ICE’s legal authority to remove illegal aliens. Still, the episode underscores the problem: Enforcement remains popular in the abstract until it collides with an employer’s workforce. Clearly, the problem is worse than we thought.

Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R) of Florida has gone further. In a campaign ad, she told Trump that some enforcement efforts had “gone too far” and said Hispanic voters who backed him in 2024 “feel betrayed.” Salazar explicitly said she was not proposing amnesty. But she has long favored a “legal-status framework” for many illegal immigrants already living and working here. In other words, amnesty.

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The guest-worker side of the equation is even clearer.

House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson (R-Penn.) introduced the Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act with 50 co-sponsors. The bill would allow H-2A labor certifications lasting up to three years, make it easier to transfer guest workers between employers, and let certain illegal farmworkers who were already here and had worked in agriculture apply for H-2A status. That is not citizenship, but it is a legalization mechanism tied directly to agricultural employment.

The administration has moved in the same direction on temporary labor. For fiscal year 2026, DHS and the Labor Department authorized up to 64,716 additional H-2B visas on top of the statutory cap for seasonal non-agricultural workers.

H-2A has no numerical cap. In October 2025, the Labor Department changed the methodology used to set the program’s minimum wage. The department itself estimated the rule would produce $2.46 billion in annualized wage transfers from H-2A workers to employers. A federal judge ruled the methodology unlawful in August but did not vacate the rule, leaving the wage rates in place while the litigation continues.

Whatever one thinks of the legal dispute, the economic direction is obvious: Washington is making foreign farm labor cheaper and easier to use.

In July, Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) led a bipartisan letter — joined by six Republican senators and a number of House Republicans endorsed by Trump — asking the administration to reduce processing delays and structural barriers in the H-2A program. The letter did not ask Congress to raise a visa cap, because H-2A has none. It asked the executive branch to make the existing pipeline work more smoothly.

Sadly, this is not a fringe position inside the GOP. The cheap-labor lobby remains deeply embedded in the party’s agricultural and business wings.

Consider Nebraska. Gov. Jim Pillen (R) has embraced Trump’s immigration-enforcement agenda, yet a New York Times and Flatwater Free Press investigation found that Pillen Family Farms had employed undocumented workers at at least 20 hog farms. Court records showed at least a dozen workers charged with using fake or stolen IDs between 2015 and 2024. Pillen and the company say they never knowingly hired illegal workers and that the business now uses E-Verify. Still, it’s worth noting that Pillen’s farms have never been raided by ICE.

RELATED: The promise was mass deportation. The policy is carve-outs.

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Republicans often treat illegal farm labor as the least objectionable form of illegal immigration. In reality, it may be among the most transformative.

Over the past few decades, large agricultural employers have reshaped rural communities across the Great Plains by relying heavily on immigrant labor. In Schuyler, Nebraska, roughly three-quarters of the population is Hispanic, while 27% of students in the Central Nebraska school district are foreign-born — figures more commonly associated with major metropolitan areas like New York and San Francisco.

The political divide is less about whether mass immigration transforms communities than about where that transformation occurs. Democratic interests tend to favor it in large cities; Republican-aligned agricultural interests have helped bring it to rural America.

When a party’s voters and its governing class want fundamentally different things on a defining issue, eventually the contradiction must break somewhere. The Republican Party itself was born in 1854 when the old party system fractured over the expansion of slavery into the territories.

If Republicans cannot choose between an immigration policy built around American workers and one built around employers’ demand for ever more labor, voters may eventually make the choice for them — and let this party go the way of the Whigs.

When your desperation becomes part of the price



Prices once reflected the product and the market. Increasingly, they can also reflect what a company knows — or thinks it knows — about you.

Surveillance pricing uses personal data, behavioral tracking, and algorithms to estimate what a consumer may be willing to pay. If the system can infer that you are in a hurry, financially stressed, or unlikely to walk away, your vulnerability can become part of the calculation.

Companies watch us. We deserve tools to watch them back and make exploitation costly.

Websites, apps, and data brokers can collect or infer information from searches, purchases, location, browsing history, and even mouse movements. Combined, those signals can build a detailed profile of what you want and how price-sensitive you may be.

The Federal Trade Commission began investigating this market in 2024, issuing orders to eight companies. Its initial findings showed that intermediaries serving at least 250 clients could use granular data to tailor prices, discounts, and product offers. The FTC cautioned that its published examples were “hypothetical.”

Surveillance pricing differs from ordinary dynamic pricing, in which prices move with inventory, time, or demand. Surveillance pricing is personal: the price, discount, financing term, or product placement can vary according to a consumer profile or group. The change may be subtle — a withheld discount, a costlier product ranked first, or a different financing offer.

The idea is older than the AI boom

In 2012, a Wall Street Journal investigation found that Staples.com displayed different prices after estimating customers’ locations. Shoppers near an OfficeMax or Office Depot were more likely to receive discounts; those farther away could see higher prices for the same item.

In 2015, ProPublica found that the Princeton Review offered the same online tutoring package for $6,600 to $8,400 depending on ZIP code. Residents of heavily Asian ZIP codes were 1.8 times as likely to receive the higher price, even in lower-income areas.

The company said the pricing reflected regional business conditions rather than race. Regardless, the outcome shows how supposedly neutral data can produce serious demographic disparities.

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Orbitz also experimented with showing Mac users pricier hotel options first after finding they were more likely to book luxury rooms. It did not charge Mac and PC users different prices for the same room, but the lesson was clear: Even device type can become a signal about what a customer may spend.

More recently, a 2025 Consumer Reports investigation found that Instacart’s AI-enabled pricing experiments offered different prices for identical groceries at the same stores and times. About three-quarters of tested products varied, with some differences reaching 23%. The investigation did not show that personal profiles determined who received which price, and Instacart later ended the program. But the experiment showed just how easy it was to target basic needs.

Your urgency can become valuable data

The troubling question is what happens when individualized pricing meets urgency.

A search for an emergency plumber at 2 a.m., last-minute airfare after a family crisis, or a baby thermometer at midnight may signal that waiting is not an option. Searches for eviction help, payday loans, or emergency medical care can reveal pressure without a company ever seeing a pay stub or medical record.

Economist Benjamin Shiller showed why such information could be valuable. In a 2020 economic model using browsing data to estimate willingness to pay for Netflix, personalized pricing increased simulated profits by 12.99%, versus roughly 0.25% using demographics alone. It was a model, not proof of a retailer secretly charging desperate consumers more, but it showed the commercial value of behavioral data.

Data brokers have long packaged financial vulnerability. A 2013 Senate investigation found categories such as “Rural and Barely Making It,” “Retiring on Empty” and “Credit Crunched.” The report warned that such lists could appeal to sellers of high-cost loans looking for people who need quick cash.

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The balance of power shifts

Two people can see different prices, discounts, products, or financing offers on the same website and each assume everyone else received the same thing. Algorithms do not need a field labeled race, age, sex, or income to make sensitive inferences; ZIP code, device type, location, and shopping behavior can act as proxies.

Targeted pricing is not inherently abusive. It could reward loyal customers or offer discounts to families under pressure. The problem is secrecy: Sellers can know far more about buyers than buyers know about the offer in front of them.

That imbalance can turn personal data into a tool for extracting the highest price a consumer will accept. It also weakens comparison shopping when prices quietly change according to profiles the shopper cannot see.

Transparency is the minimum

Companies should disclose when personal data or AI materially shapes a price or offer and identify the categories of information involved. Regulators have a role, but entrepreneurs can also build independent tools that compare prices across accounts, devices, and locations.

Companies watch us. We need better tools to watch them back.

When a company knows you are desperate, that desperation should never become a hidden advantage it can use against you.

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 last knight of Europe rides again



History can tell you what happened at Lepanto. G.K. Chesterton can make you hear it.

On October 7, 1571, a fleet of the Holy League met the Ottoman navy off western Greece in one of the largest galley battles ever fought. The Christian victory halted Ottoman naval momentum in the Mediterranean and became one of the defining military events of early modern Christendom.

We are not observers of a glorious Christian past.

Four hundred and fifty-five years later, the battle itself is rarely discussed outside history books and Catholic circles. Chesterton’s “Lepanto” helps explain why that is a loss.

The poem does something a chronology cannot. It takes an old battle and makes it present.

That distinction matters because we have largely forgotten how to teach history as inheritance. Too often, the past arrives as a clinical sequence of dates and events — or worse, as a catalog of embarrassments for which the living are expected to apologize. Our ancestors understood that memory had to be cultivated.

I was fortunate enough to grow up partly outside that system. My homeschool education included memorizing and reciting some of the great poems of the Western canon.

Memorization itself was useful. But those poems did more than exercise the mind. They taught me to love and remember the heroes, soldiers, saints, and scholars who built the civilization I inherited.

A textbook can explain the Crimean War. Tennyson makes you hear the cavalry moving: “Half a league, half a league, half a league onward.” A history of Rome can tell you the legend of Horatius at the bridge. Thomas Babington Macaulay puts the choice in the mouth of the man himself:

Then out spake brave Horatius
The Captain of the gate:
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods.”

The same is true closer to home. A paragraph about the British march on Concord can explain what happened. Longfellow’s “Listen, my children, and you shall hear” makes a child want to remember it.

RELATED: Remember the Battle of Lepanto

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These works are literary masterpieces, but that is not the whole of their value. They are meant to stir the imagination. They give history rhythm, voice, courage, tragedy, and glory.

Chesterton’s “Lepanto” belongs in that company.

He wrote it in 1911, before World War I and more than a decade before he formally entered the Catholic Church. Yet the poem’s religious imagination is already unmistakable. Chesterton does not treat Lepanto merely as a naval engagement. He presents it as civilizational and spiritual combat, with Don Juan of Austria riding into a struggle that reaches backward through Christian history.

The poem’s movement is part of its power: drums, gongs, guns, trumpets, waves, banners, and cannon fire. Chesterton does not ask the reader to stand at a safe academic distance. He drags him onto the deck.

At one point, the Ottoman side hears something older than the fleet approaching it:

But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not "Kismet"; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!

Chesterton uses “Kismet” to dramatize what he saw as a contrast between fatalism and the Christian refusal to surrender to supposedly inevitable defeat. Richard the Lionheart, Raymond of Saint-Gilles, and Godfrey of Bouillon appear not as museum pieces but as members of the same inheritance. Godfrey, leader of the First Crusade, became ruler of Jerusalem under the title Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre.

The poetry lets the reader place himself in that line. Christian history ceases to be a collection of remote episodes and becomes a living inheritance — something received, loved, defended, and handed on.

That spirit has become difficult for the modern West to summon.

One line from the poem has always stayed with me. Describing a Europe divided by religious conflict while the Ottoman threat advanced, Chesterton writes: “And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise.”

He was writing about a particular historical moment, but the line captures something recognizable now: spiritual exhaustion disguised as sophistication. We have seen so much, mocked so much, qualified so much, that conviction itself begins to look embarrassing.

Chesterton’s Europe is divided, distracted, and half-convinced that resistance is pointless. The pope calls for “swords about the Cross,” while other rulers hesitate or look elsewhere. Even the Christian captives below the Ottoman decks have nearly stopped expecting deliverance.

Then comes Don Juan.

Dim drums throbbing in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe taketh weapons from the wall.

That is the great appeal of the poem. Don Juan does not enter because victory is guaranteed. He enters because something must be defended.

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Chesterton reminds the reader that courage often arrives from an unexpected quarter. Don Juan, the illegitimate son of Charles V, was hardly born into the tidy life of a storybook hero. Yet he became the man who took command when command was needed.

That is what the old poems can still teach us. We are not merely observers of a glorious Christian past, reading about better men in safer times. We inherit what they defended, and inheritance creates an obligation.

We owe a debt to the saints and heroes who came before us. Honoring it does not require pretending we are Don Juan of Austria. It requires the willingness to take responsibility for what has been handed to us — and the courage to defend what is true when resignation would be easier.

History can tell us that Lepanto happened.

Chesterton reminds us why anyone should care.

In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.

Democrats have a political violence problem



They say politics can be murder. Recent polling suggests a disturbing share of Democratic and left-of-center voters are becoming far too comfortable with the idea.

A new survey from Liberal Currents and the Center for Strategic Politics asked 683 Democratic voters how they would feel about five hypothetical ways President Donald Trump might leave office before his term ends.

Apparently protecting democracy now includes the occasional military junta.

The lawful options drew predictably lopsided reactions: 86% said they would feel positively if Trump were impeached and convicted, and 84% said the same about removal under the 25th Amendment.

Then the poll got darker.

Fifty-nine percent said they would react positively to a headline announcing that military leaders had removed Trump and assumed control of the government to “safeguard the Constitution.” Another 56% said they would react positively if Trump simply died in his sleep.

The only scenario in which negative reactions outnumbered positive ones was assassination. Even there, 31% said they would feel very or somewhat positive if Trump were killed while speaking at a rally; 26% were neutral, and 43% reacted negatively.

The survey measured emotional reaction, not willingness to carry out or personally endorse violence. Still, a positive reaction to an assassination or a military takeover is an ugly result for a party that presents itself as the guardian of democracy.

Apparently protecting democracy now includes the occasional military junta.

Those findings do not stand alone. In April 2025, the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers Social Perception Lab surveyed 1,264 U.S. adults and found that 55.2% of respondents who identified as left of center considered the murder of Trump at least somewhat justified. Nearly 50% said the same about Elon Musk. The researchers described an emerging “assassination culture” among segments of the political left.

Five months later, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking at Utah Valley University. Prosecutors allege that the accused killer targeted Kirk because of his political and religious beliefs.

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Owen Anderson

The online reaction exposed something broader than one alleged killer’s motive. Social media filled with people celebrating Kirk’s death, mocking his widow, and arguing that he had deserved to die because of his politics.

A YouGov poll conducted after Kirk’s killing found that 16% of liberals said it was usually or always acceptable to be happy about the death of a public figure they opposed. Among the “very liberal,” the number rose to 24%.

Conservatives registered at just 4%.

Cheering a death is not the same thing as committing violence. But political violence becomes easier to rationalize when the target has first been reduced to someone whose death is funny, deserved, or morally cleansing.

I have watched that permission structure develop in my native Portland, Oregon

During the summer of 2020, rioters repeatedly attacked the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse with fireworks, incendiary devices, rocks, bottles, and other attempts to set fires. Federal prosecutors charged one man after an incendiary object exploded at the courthouse entrance.

The pattern did not disappear. Beginning in 2025, the Portland ICE facility became another center of unrest. Court records describe protesters throwing rocks and bricks at officers, damaging security equipment, trying to breach the building, and using an upended stop sign as a makeshift battering ram. One participant who struck a federal officer in the head with a rock was later sentenced to 30 months in federal prison.

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There is a difference between peaceful protest and political violence. Democrats should be able to draw it without hesitation.

It’s why then-Senator Kamala Harris took flak during the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots when she urged followers to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund “to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.” In the middle of widespread disorder, a future Democratic vice president used her platform to promote bail assistance for protesters rather than draw a sharper distinction between lawful protest and criminal violence.

Political violence thrives on permission — explicit or subtle. That permission can come from celebrating an assassination, describing violence as justified, excusing riots because the cause is righteous, or treating the rule of law as optional when the target is sufficiently hated.

Democrats have spent the better part of a decade warning that American democracy is endangered by Trump and the right. They cannot demand that the country take political violence seriously while refusing to confront the appetite for it inside their own coalition.

You cannot save democracy by cheering when your political opponents are removed from it.

That is, in fact, how democracies die.

Our enemies burn Israel’s flag. Our friends plant it.



Sometimes a symbol becomes more than a symbol.

A flag is a simple piece of fabric. But what it represents — a country, a people, a history — can inspire us deeply. And when that flag is planted by someone who has chosen to stand beside you in your darkest hour, it becomes something more: a message that you are not alone.

A flag planted by someone who has chosen to stand beside you in your darkest hour becomes a message: You are not alone.

That is what I think about when I see an Israeli flag planted by a church in America.

In 2024, we began Flags of Fellowship with a simple idea. Christians across America would plant Israeli flags at their churches and in their communities in memory of the innocent lives taken on October 7, 2023.

We could not have known how far that simple act of friendship would travel.

This year, more than 4,375 churches, synagogues, universities, and organizations around the world are participating in Flags of Fellowship. Together, they will plant more than 5.2 million Israeli flags. The movement now reaches 12 countries, with more than 1,775 participating churches and organizations outside the United States and Canada.

Every one of those flags tells a story.

It tells an Israeli family that we remember. It tells the Jewish community that someone sees what happened to us. And it tells the world that October 7 did not destroy the friendship between Christians and Jews. If anything, that friendship has grown stronger.

Last month, we gathered in Israel at Banias Church in Nazareth for the first Flags of Fellowship event of this year. Church volunteers and community members planted 1,200 Israeli flags before Christian and Jewish leaders spoke and prayed together. The Armenian Christian Association’s children’s and youth choir sang the Lord’s Prayer.

Israel is home to Christians, Jews, Muslims, and people from many countries and backgrounds. We do not always agree. We do not always see the world in the same way. But there is profound beauty when people who are different choose to stand together.

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When a church plants an Israeli flag, it is not making a political statement. It is making a spiritual one: a declaration of friendship, remembrance, and faithfulness to those who are hurting.

That is what I hope people see when they look at Flags of Fellowship: not simply flags, but friendship; not simply remembrance, but solidarity.

The world has changed since October 7. So much attention is given to division, hatred, and the people who tear things down. But another story is being written.

It is being written in churches across America and around the world. It is being written by pastors who stand before their congregations and say that Israel is a friend. It is being written by families who plant an Israeli flag outside their homes, by Christians who pray for Israel, and by Jews who are discovering, sometimes for the first time, how deeply many Christians care about them.

It is written one flag at a time.

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I have had the privilege of watching this friendship grow for years. I have sat with Christian leaders who opened their churches to Israeli flags. I have heard from pastors whose congregations embraced this initiative with extraordinary enthusiasm. And I have spoken with Israelis who are deeply moved to learn that, thousands of miles away, people they have never met are standing with them.

As we mark another anniversary of October 7, I am reminded that remembrance is not only about looking backward. It is also about deciding what kind of future we want to build.

Choosing courage over fear. Friendship over division. Love over hatred.

There is a phrase we often use at the Fellowship: Our enemies burn the flag; our friends plant it.

That is the choice behind Flags of Fellowship. Millions of flags, planted by thousands of congregations and organizations, say the same thing to the Jewish people: You are not alone.

I am deeply grateful for every one of them.

The ‘Cornell 7’ case should terrify every father of boys



As the civil lawsuit and renewed criminal investigation into what allegedly happened inside Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity house move forward, the public argument over blame has become largely binary: her or them.

“Consent” has become the watercooler word. Was she responsible for putting herself in that situation, or were the men responsible for what happened afterward?

Brotherhood isn’t helping your brothers get away with bad things. It’s demanding that your brothers be better men.

But I want to bring two more parties into the conversation: dads and the “manosphere.”

I keep asking myself a question I don’t see asked nearly enough: Where were the other young men?

Not the seven fraternity members accused in Jane Doe’s lawsuit. I mean the other brothers who may have been in the house or who saw the fraternity Snapchat thread during the night.

According to the civil complaint and reporting on the messages, a photo of Doe appeared in a group chat, and messages invited other fraternity members to come upstairs. The public record does not establish what every recipient knew or whether each was physically present. But the question remains: What had those young men been taught a man should do if he realizes something terrible may be happening down the hall?

More frightening is the thought of what my sons would have done if they were in that house.

That’s where dads — and the competing vision of masculinity being sold to young men online — belong in this conversation.

I have two boys under 10, and I’ve noticed the standard most dads emphasize: Don’t be the bad guy. Don’t bully other kids. Don’t take advantage of your friends.

Fine. But that’s the floor.

Your goal as a father isn’t merely to raise boys who won’t commit evil. It’s to raise boys who will confront it.

Too often, we obsess over raising boys who aren’t predators. We don’t spend nearly enough time raising protectors. Strength isn’t demonstrated by what you can take from somebody weaker. It’s demonstrated by what you’re willing to risk on that person’s behalf.

I’m not raising my sons to walk away from the Cornell fraternity house room. I’m raising them to open the door and stop what’s happening. Sometimes avoidance is the right answer, and avoidance takes judgment. Other times intervention is the right answer, and intervention takes courage.

The manosphere teaches young men that masculinity is something you prove through acquisition: women, sex, money, muscles, followers, status, dominance. Men advertise their “body count” as if the number of women they have slept with were a masculine achievement. Women become objects, not obligations. That’s rotten.

Most critics focus on how the manosphere distorts the way young men see women. They spend less time on how it distorts the way young men see other men. The entire system is a hierarchy: Who’s the alpha? Who’s weak? Who’s afraid? Who’s willing to go the farthest?

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Now imagine being the 19-year-old fraternity brother who realizes something is badly wrong upstairs. Stopping it may mean risking exactly what this worldview tells him matters most: the approval of other men.

The popular phrase goes, “Character is what you do when no one’s watching.” Good. But I’m also teaching my boys that character is doing the right thing when everyone is watching — and when doing it makes you unpopular.

Applied to the Cornell allegations, the manosphere tells a young man not to be the buzzkill. Actual masculinity tells him to be willing to become the least popular man in the house. Open the door. Stop what’s happening. Find her clothes. Get her somewhere safe. Call the police if necessary. Accept the social consequences tomorrow.

That’s courage.

The stakes rise when the wrongdoer is your friend: your frat bro, your teammate, your lifelong best friend. We teach boys that loyalty is a masculine virtue. It is. But we have confused loyalty with complicity.

We take our friends’ keys when they shouldn’t drive. Likewise, dragging your friend out of a room when he is about to do something horrific isn’t betraying him. It may be the most brotherly thing you can do for him.

Brotherhood isn’t helping your brothers get away with bad things. It’s demanding that your brothers be better men.

The manosphere didn’t arrive in a vacuum. Boys have been begging for someone to tell them what a man is, what strength looks like, and what we owe other people. If fathers don’t answer those questions, someone on TikTok happily will.

RELATED: America needs heroes who do not apologize for being heroes

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The answer to the manosphere isn’t telling boys that masculinity is toxic. It’s giving them a better version of it.

My biggest fear as a father concerns the moments when I won’t be there. Fatherhood has an expiration date on enforcement. Eventually my sons will face a situation without me standing beside them.

Then it won’t be who’s beside them. It will be what’s inside them.

If I’m successful, their standard won’t be “don’t get arrested” or even “don’t participate.” It will be this: When everyone else loses his head, keep yours. And when somebody vulnerable needs help, help.

The courts will determine legal culpability in the Cornell case. New York Attorney General Letitia James is now overseeing the renewed criminal investigation, while the civil lawsuit proceeds separately.

Fathers don’t need to wait for either process to ask what would have happened if their own son had been there.

We shouldn’t settle for hoping he wouldn’t have participated. We should raise the son who would have stopped it.