The data center backlash is getting spiritual



As I — and numerous others — anticipated years ago, the populist backlash against the dystopian possibilities of super-duper artificial intelligence has begun in earnest, with the rise of data centers as the inciting event.

It is easy to see why. Beyond the standard human response to unasked-for change at scale — isn’t there someone (me!) you forgot to ask? — the populist spirit in America has always run bone-deep.

Americans do not like feeling mogged by their fellow citizens, and we like even less being lectured by the moggers about how we are unentitled to feel that way.

Alexis de Tocqueville understood the democratic dynamics of envy and resentment. Under conditions of social equality, everyone feels precariously interchangeable with everyone else, so another person’s relative advantage can register not merely as inequality but as a wound to pride.

Extend that dynamic to the “global town square,” where we spend more and more of our waking hours watching other people’s breakout advances in real time, and the sensation of being left behind goes nuclear.

Americans do not like feeling mogged by their fellow citizens, and we like even less being lectured by the moggers about how we are unentitled to feel that way. Worse, somewhere beneath the resentment lurks the humiliating suspicion that we have helped put ourselves in the inferior position.

Sensitive young men of ambition today — reminding me of my own “Fight Club”-era preoccupations — are once again stalking some kind of Nietzschean-Christian syncretism that promises, amulet-like, supreme confidence and supreme humility. The reason is that both Nietzsche and Christ condemned resentment.

The gulf between the Übermensch and the God-Man is obviously enormous. Yet both traditions understand that resentment degrades the person who lives by it. And that is why the backlash against data centers has moved so quickly from personal grievance and political interest onto the higher plane of spiritual war.

More Americans across the political spectrum now speak of data centers as if they are not merely ugly, expensive, noisy, or intrusive but evil — evil as “tech” itself has become in their imagination, evil as the “tech lords” who build it are presumed to be.

On the secular left, where human justice perfected becomes an almost religious ideal, tech’s push toward superhuman capability readily appears sinister. On the woo-woo left, where witches warn that they cannot hex Trump, tech’s tilt toward post-humanity manifests as something post-natural and spiritually contaminating.

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On the right, spiritual conservatives with relatively weak institutional confidence often apply a precautionary principle: If it looks menacing, assume it’s evil. Those with stronger church lives have a different reason for suspicion: an acute awareness of man’s fallenness and the old Actonian warning that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Search a man for evil — beginning with yourself! — and evil, no doubt, you shall find. But this being America, where making me feel “less than” can register as a kind of spectral crime, the emotional incentive is to cast the first stone. And in an age when throwing a stick will almost certainly hit somebody culpable and “punchable,” it is remarkable that the techies did not prepare for the boomerang now whacking them upside the head.

But that should be the beginning of our rumination, not the end. Many, many techies are doing “this” because of what they regard as good intentions. Some sincerely believe they are acting, for our own good, out of their very best intentions.

Ignoring that fact will produce a maelstrom of resentment more destructive than the nightmares already filling our wounded and prideful imaginations.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. But the proverb should not tempt us to dismiss good intentions as meaningless. It should force us to take seriously the human yearning for the good, the wonderful, and the pure — especially in people whose projects strike us as dangerous.

Christians, in particular, are meant to remember that all creation cries out for reunion with God and that even badly distorted human desires can point toward something real that has gone wrong in the seeking.

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That does not give the maddest of mad scientists a cosmic hall pass. It does mean that, if we look without fear at the grand plans of our technologists, we may see in them a powerful expression of the universal human longing for purification.

As the structure of our economic life increasingly leaves people feeling condemned by bad debts, bad surpluses, and obligations they cannot spiritually discharge, we desperately seek something powerful and authoritative enough to wipe the ledger clean and leave us new.

Hey, our best-intentioned techies keep shouting. There’s an app for that!

No purification, no salvation; this we have known for ages. But when time feels short, we become vulnerable to shortcuts — to the fantasy of a perfectly engineered “solve” for our human, all-too-human debt.

If we merely demonize one another — losing sight of the Lord’s hidden presence in us all — then the data centers may not be what finally tears us apart. We may do that job ourselves.

The left uses primaries. The right wastes them.



You can’t drain the swamp by refilling it with the same sorts of politicians backed by the same special-interest money driving the status quo. The leftist base learned that lesson for its own dangerous purposes this primary season. The conservative base, meanwhile, has somehow unlearned what it knew during the Tea Party years.

Liberal voters are knocking out very liberal Democrats for candidates even further left. Republican voters are not only keeping their moderates; they are knocking out some of the few members who actually fight for the party’s stated goals. What gives?

The left built a movement. The right built an industry. The results show.

There are only a few dozen full-spectrum conservatives among the 219 House Republicans who keep the pedal to the metal on immigration, fiscal, and social issues. Contrast that with Democrats, where you’d be hard-pressed to find a member outside a swing district who dissents from party dogma on a major issue. Yet seven Democratic incumbents have already lost primaries this cycle.

In Texas, Rep. Al Green lost to fellow incumbent Christian Menefee, while Julie Johnson lost a rematch with former Rep. Colin Allred. In New York, Dan Goldman lost to Brad Lander, and Adriano Espaillat lost to Darializa Avila Chevalier. Diana DeGette lost to Melat Kiros in Colorado. Shri Thanedar lost to DSA-backed Donavan McKinney in Michigan. John Larson lost to former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin in Connecticut.

These were not moderates. DeGette, for example, was a House manager during Trump’s second impeachment trial in 2021. Yet to the Democratic base, she might as well have been Trump.

Most significantly, not one incumbent on the left lost to someone more moderate. You’d be hard-pressed even to find serious moderate challengers against Democratic incumbents.

Now contrast that with the GOP. Last cycle, the only Republican incumbent to lose was Freedom Caucus Chairman Bob Good. This cycle, Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles, one of the caucus’ most conservative members, was unseated by a Republican backed by a green energy PAC. In Kentucky, Thomas Massie was defeated by a candidate generally to his left, with President Trump’s help. The one clean ideological defeat from the right was Dan Crenshaw, who lost to Texas state Rep. Steve Toth — in a race where Trump thankfully declined to rescue the moderate incumbent.

Cory Mills also lost in Florida, and good riddance, but scandals and corruption drove that race more than a groundswell to move the party toward its base.

Overall, with Freedom Caucus retirements added in, we are backsliding. And that doesn’t begin to capture the lost decade of conservative primaries.

For several cycles, as Trump endorsements refilled the swamp in statewide and federal races, the bright spot was the State Freedom Caucus Network. It gradually won open seats and knocked off incumbents in state legislatures, peaking in 2024 when its members took control of the South Dakota and Wyoming Houses.

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Two years later, the establishment came back with a vengeance. South Dakota’s Freedom Caucus was essentially wiped out, and the Wyoming caucus lost 13 seats and its majority. In Idaho, five conservatives were defeated by Republicans backed by Gov. Brad Little, whom Trump endorsed for a third term. Elsewhere we have gained some and lost some, but the advance of liberty has largely stalled.

During the Tea Party era, we invested in activists. Today we invest in podcasters, TikTokers, and sycophantic grifters who sniff Trump’s rear end all the way to financial success. You reap what you sow. We have endless content, endless influencers, and endless Mar-a-Lago high rollers — but comparatively little money and activism flowing to conservative candidates in primaries.

Meanwhile, the Democratic base is dragging its party closer to the left goal post even in state races. In New York, DSA-backed candidates — many aided by Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s political network — toppled a string of incumbent legislators.

I watch right-leaning propagators online, and they are already obsessed with the next presidential election. What they fail to understand is that even if their dream candidate wins the primary and the White House, he will inherit a generation of Lindsey Graham’s sister acolytes who oppose the reform agenda these same influencers claim to want.

And they will have nobody to blame but themselves for sleeping through the lost decade of primaries.

The left built a movement. The right built an industry. The results show.

Want to squeeze Iran? Trump has one clear move



Iran has been reported to be using negotiations with the United States to buy time, strengthen its position around the Strait of Hormuz, and rebuild military capacity for a wider conflict. The Trump administration needs a new Red Sea strategy. It should begin with Somaliland.

The Houthis recently fired on a ship in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, and Iran has reportedly told the group to be prepared to close the waterway if the United States strikes Iran’s power grid. The Bab el-Mandeb is a global shipping artery and a pressure point on energy markets.

The crises in the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb are warnings. Iran and the Houthis are trying to turn geography into coercion. The United States should turn geography back into deterrence.

The warning is clear. The United States cannot rely indefinitely on distant strikes and vulnerable Gulf bases to protect shipping through the region’s choke points. Washington’s bombing campaign failed to neutralize the Houthi threat, leaving the group able to threaten commercial shipping, Gulf partners, and Israel.

The moment calls for more than another round of airstrikes. The United States should recognize Somaliland.

Somaliland has governed itself for decades, has shown interest in deeper ties with the United States and its allies, and sits beside one of the world’s most important maritime corridors. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has argued that recognition would advance U.S. interests in the Horn of Africa through counterterrorism, anti-piracy operations, and cooperation with partners such as Taiwan and Israel. He is right.

Recognition should be followed by a formal security relationship allowing regular intelligence cooperation, military access, and a forward operating presence along the Gulf of Aden.

Geography is Somaliland’s strongest argument. It sits across from Yemen near the approaches to the Red Sea and the same waters the Houthis have threatened to close.

Others have noticed. Reports indicate that Israel has explored a strategic presence in Somaliland as part of its response to the Houthi threat. The United States has no comparable formal footprint. Access there could support counter-Houthi operations, intelligence collection across the Gulf of Aden, and the fight against Al-Shabaab in Somalia. Israel understands the value of the location. Washington should too.

The United States also needs to reduce its dependence on bases within easy striking distance of Iran. On a recent webinar, retired Gen. Frank McKenzie, the former head of U.S. Central Command, described the problem bluntly: “No one in their right mind would ever put the CENTCOM forward headquarters, you know, 100 miles away from Iran, yet that’s where it is.”

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He elaborated: “It’s good to be close to your potential enemy because it’s a short commute to the fight. It’s bad to be close to your potential enemy, because he has the ability to strike you very quickly.”

I have previously argued that Washington should distribute regional assets across secure, aligned territories rather than concentrate them where host governments can restrict access, basing, or overflight. Somaliland would not replace Al Udeid or every existing Gulf facility. It would give the United States another option when allies limit operations or adversaries threaten choke points.

A U.S. presence in Somaliland would also signal that Washington is willing to reward capable partners instead of remaining trapped by diplomatic habits that no longer serve American security. Recognition would carry costs, including friction with Somalia and other governments committed to Somalia’s territorial integrity. Those costs should be weighed against the strategic value of a reliable partner at the mouth of the Red Sea.

The crises in the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb are warnings. Iran and the Houthis are trying to turn geography into coercion. The United States should turn geography back into deterrence.

Recognizing Somaliland would give the United States a stronger hand in the Red Sea, a better position against terrorist threats, and greater freedom to operate when existing partners hesitate. A proactive strategy begins by securing options before the next crisis closes them off. The time to act is now.

This is what existential politics looks like



The assassination of Charlie Kirk was a devastating blow to conservatives, but almost as shocking was the response from parts of the left. Major figures issued the expected denunciations, yet plenty of ordinary progressives celebrated the violent death of a father and husband or mocked his memory online. Conservatives learned that some of their neighbors were perfectly willing to cheer the murder of a political opponent.

Since then, trade wars, foreign wars, and the usual daily controversies have offered convenient distractions from a much darker realization: Something about American politics has changed. The old assumption that nearly everyone still accepts the same basic rules can no longer be taken for granted.

Conservatives did not choose existential politics by themselves, and they cannot end it simply by wishing for a return to normal.

Denial is a common response when a problem is too large to contemplate. The possibility that a substantial number of Americans now see political violence as acceptable has implications the conservative movement would rather avoid. Yet reminders keep appearing.

Recent videos again showed people mocking Kirk’s death, including a drag performance and comments from streamer and democratic socialist Hasan Piker. It is much easier to argue about tactics, personalities, or the latest outrage than to ask what kind of political order produces people willing to celebrate an assassination.

Piker’s case is especially egregious because he met Kirk and debated him in person. He has built a career around revolutionary rhetoric and violent political fantasies, including lurid comments about landlords and capitalists, and “soak[ing] in the blood” of his capitalist enemies. That he remains a major online personality illustrates the asymmetry conservatives have noticed for years: Rhetoric that would end a career on the right is often treated as edgy entertainment when it comes from the left.

America has received an almost embarrassing number of blessings from God Almighty, which makes it easy to forget that our political experience is historically unusual. The United States occupies a vast, resource-rich territory protected by oceans and has fought remarkably few wars on its own soil. We have not faced sustained internal danger in generations. That security has encouraged an ahistorical view of politics as a permanently orderly process.

Modern Americans expect Mr. Smith to go to Washington, make a speech, win an argument, and then shake hands with the opposition. Every election is called the most important of our lives, but the ritual remains the same because the underlying disputes are assumed to be manageable. If the argument is over marginal tax rates, retirement ages, or entitlement formulas, that expectation makes sense. Those are technocratic disagreements inside a shared political order.

But some disputes are not like that. Consider the fight over the euphemistic “gender affirming care” for minors. One side believes the state must protect children from genital mutilation. The other believes the state has a right to seize children if parents refuse to go along. There is no clever tax-credit compromise that resolves the underlying question. One side’s victory necessarily means the other side’s destruction. That is what existential politics looks like.

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This is why Carl Schmitt has re-entered conversations on the right. Certain conservatives often reduce his friend-enemy distinction to a license for treating anyone who disagrees with you as a mortal foe. That isn’t the useful part of Schmitt. His point is that politics becomes political in the fullest sense when groups understand that a conflict touches the survival of their way of life. His framework is gaining salience because Americans increasingly encounter disputes that feel exactly like that.

The left supports policies many conservatives believe would permanently transform the country: open borders, abortion on demand, racial preferences in hiring and admissions, aggressive secularization, and aggressive state intervention in disputes between parents and children over gender. Some activists openly discuss prosecuting former Trump officials, restructuring the Supreme Court, and changing the composition of the Senate through statehood. Antifa militants have attacked federal facilities and officers. None of this requires believing every Democrat is a revolutionary. It requires noticing that the revolutionary faction has real power.

Progressives understand something conservatives still resist: America increasingly contains rival moral communities sharing the same geographic space.

Mass immigration, ideological sorting, institutional polarization, and the radicalization of political factions have eroded the common assumptions that once made bipartisan compromise possible. Our deepest disagreements are no longer simply about the size of government or the proper tariff. They concern rival definitions of family, justice, citizenship, equality, religion, and even human nature.

This is not without precedent. Shays’ Rebellion was put down by force. The Civil War settled secession through force on a catastrophic scale. Federal troops enforced school integration in Little Rock when state resistance defied constitutional authority. These cases are radically different in scale and moral content, but they share one uncomfortable fact: Political orders eventually enforce some answers and reject others. Two incompatible legal regimes cannot govern the same question in the same place forever.

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We are far closer to Little Rock than to Gettysburg, and conservatives should resist fantasies of civil war. But they should also stop pretending every conflict can be reduced to a policy seminar. About a decade ago, people on the right began asking whether conservatives “know what time it is.” Most still do not. People like Piker serve as reminders that the other side may understand the stakes more clearly.

The left, in its current radical form, cannot be treated as just another coalition with which conservatives alternate power while everything important remains intact. Elections will decide who controls institutions capable of reshaping the country for generations. Someone will win these fights. Someone will lose. The victor will alter the political order.

Conservatives did not choose existential politics by themselves, and they cannot end it simply by wishing for a return to normal. Ignoring that reality only guarantees that their children inherit a country they no longer recognize. Conservatives are not required to become nihilists, but they are required to understand the stakes before deciding how to fight. The hour is already late.

To err is human. To owe $40 trillion is Washington.



Caregiving has taught me to ask a simple question before making a consequential decision: “Is this healthy?” Will this solve today’s problem by consuming what we may need tomorrow? Does it respect the resources entrusted to me?

After 40 years as a caregiver, I have learned that money, time, strength, and even goodwill are finite. Wanting something does not make it wise, and good intentions do not eliminate consequences. A caregiver who confuses desire with capacity can hurt the very person he is trying to help.

We are financing today’s promises with tomorrow’s labor, then congratulating ourselves for our generosity.

Caring describes an intention. Stewardship requires an accounting. By that standard, Washington has failed spectacularly.

The United States has now crossed $40 trillion in national debt. The figure barely communicates anything. Forty trillion sounds like something a third-grader says when trying to name the biggest number in the world.

The national debt is what Washington has accumulated through borrowing. The annual deficit is how much more it spends than it collects each year. The debt is the hole. The deficit is how much deeper we dig it.

The Congressional Budget Office projects a $1.9 trillion federal deficit for fiscal year 2026. Congress has looked into a $40 trillion hole and concluded that what it needs is more digging.

Democrats invoke compassion to justify spending money the government does not have. Republicans campaign on fiscal restraint, win office, and then discover that their preferred spending somehow does not count. One party calls it caring. The other calls it necessary. Both send the bill to our children.

Each party points furiously at the other while passing the national credit card back and forth. Both help start the fire, then pass the collection plate while arguing over who bought the gasoline.

Now we enter election season, when, as Lloyd Christmas might say, the promises flow like the salmon of Capistrano. Candidates will tell us how deeply they care about families, seniors, veterans, national defense, and taxpayers. They will demonstrate their concern for one group by promising it money borrowed from all the others. A politician can always appear compassionate by promising benefits with other people’s money.

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Stewardship asks harder questions: How much will this cost? Who will pay for it? What has the existing program accomplished? What happens if your projections are wrong? If this is worth doing, why must we borrow the money?

Those are not cruel questions. They are the responsible ones.

Government cannot create resources by attaching the word “federal” to them. There is no government money. Government either collects money from today’s citizens or borrows against tomorrow’s taxpayers.

We are financing today’s promises with tomorrow’s labor, then congratulating ourselves for our generosity. There is nothing generous about giving away the money of someone not yet born. That is taxation without representation on a generational scale.

Stewardship does not require government to spend nothing or never incur debt. Families and nations face genuine emergencies. Caregivers understand that. Medical catastrophes rarely consult the household budget before arriving.

But caregivers often do without. Congress seems far more comfortable assigning sacrifice than accepting any. I have also learned that an emergency cannot become a permanent governing philosophy.

At my kitchen table, I cannot promise everything, spend without limit, blame someone else when the bills arrive, and then congratulate myself for caring. Yet Washington does just that.

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Over the next few months, commercials filled with flags, farms, hard hats, classrooms, and concerned expressions will flood the airwaves. Recorded voices will warn that civilization depends upon our response before midnight.

As the onslaught escalates, keep asking one question: Is this candidate a good steward? Not only of public money, but of public trust, constitutional authority, and the extraordinary inheritance of self-government.

To our national shame, we may not be able to answer yes about many of them. That does not excuse us from voting. It makes our responsibility more sobering.

Ronald Reagan popularized “trust, but verify” when dealing with the Soviet Union. Washington has now given us $40 trillion reasons to apply it to our own government. We must choose the better steward and then hold that person accountable.

Campaign season is when politicians sell. Election Day is when we buy. Tax Day reminds us what we paid. Better hang on to the receipt.

After April 15, we begin to learn whether they can manage what they were so eager to sell.

Around my kitchen table, math eventually gets the final vote. At $40 trillion in debt, one wonders whether math even applies in the halls of Congress.

The DSA’s history lesson has one big omission



I walked into my first DSA meeting looking for an answer to a very specific question: How do modern Marxists reckon with communism’s long history of atrocities?

In recent weeks, clips of Democratic Socialists of America leaders praising countries such as Cuba and China have gone viral. Other prominent socialists, including Hasan Piker, openly admire Lenin and Stalin and post pictures of themselves reading “What Is to Be Done?” while wearing Cartier.

Power is not only money or property. It is also the power to decide which history gets remembered and which gets reduced to a footnote.

Communist regimes killed tens of millions of people in the 20th century. So when I sat down for a DSA 101 lecture and was greeted as a comrade, I wanted to hear how the organization taught that history.

The answer was one of the more impressive acts of historical revisionism I have ever heard.

The DSA has built a coalition around oppression. Transgender people, racial minorities, immigrants, women, and people angry about the cost of health insurance are presented as members of classes exploited by a capitalist ruling order. In the room, confidence in the American dream was scarce. Resentment of the capitalist class was not.

That framework extends abroad. As the leader of my DSA 101 session put it, “A socialist approach is built on international solidarity and support. Socialists are internationalists.” Hence the fixation on Cuba, Venezuela, Gaza and the West Bank, and other places cast as victims of American power.

The problem is that several regimes the DSA treats sympathetically were devastated by Marxist rule itself.

Take the Soviet Union. During the Great Terror, roughly 700,000 people were executed. Millions more died through forced resettlement, the gulag, famine, and other state policies. One widely cited estimate puts the Soviet communist death toll at about 20 million.

Yet during the entire two-hour DSA course, the Soviet Union came up only once. The instructor praised it: “Socialists can be proud of our history. Some of the very first, most striking work [for feminist rights] occurred just after the October Revolution in the Soviet Union.”

That was it. The mass killing disappeared. Progressive feminism remained.

China received similar treatment. While discussing planned economies, the instructor praised the Chinese system for combining planning and markets in service of human need. Missing from that account was Mao Zedong’s rule, under which historians have estimated that as many as 70 million people died, many during famines ushered in through Marxist policies.

Cuba got the same reframing. The instructor blamed blockades, embargoes, and sanctions for depriving Cubans of “the chance to live in prosperity and dignity,” while praising the government for resisting America’s “oppressive” economic influence. Castro’s regime, according to historian R.J. Rummel, was responsible for as many as 141,000 deaths.

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The pattern became hard to miss. Marxist countries were not presented as failures so much as unfinished projects. Their progressive achievements were foregrounded; their victims were backgrounded. When socialist systems failed, capitalism, American imperialism, or the political class usually entered the explanation.

“The general attitude of socialism, which goes back to Marx and Lenin,” the instructor said, “is that when we are assigning blame … [it] is with the political class.” He spoke at length about the Pentagon and American power as sources of death and destruction. The deaths caused by Marxist governments? Nothing to see there.

If you let your opponent talk long enough, he will often tell you his strategy. That’s why I went.

The DSA did not exactly deny the horrors of 20th-century communism. It did something more useful: It barely taught them. The history was filtered through a moral framework in which socialists remain the champions of the oppressed and capitalism remains the prime suspect.

“It is the intention of the DSA to take power and wealth away from the capitalist class and put it in the hands of the working class,” the instructor said.

Power is not only money or property. It is also the power to decide which history gets remembered and which gets reduced to a footnote.

If young people learn about communist regimes chiefly through their promised ideals and progressive “wins,” while the bodies disappear from the lesson plan, they are not being taught communism’s history. They are being taught how to forget it.

Why young men are done with Mike Pence ‘conservatism’



A clip of CNN’s Dana Bash interviewing former Vice President Mike Pence is making the rounds. Watch it. It embodies just about everything that failed in the last generation of conservative politics.

First, Pence is in Ukraine. As if he weren’t irrelevant enough already.

Almost anything has to be better than whatever the heck this is.

Second, his “nicer than Jesus” desire for affirmation from Bash and the trans activists is nothing short of a confession: When he was in power and had an opportunity to confront the gender-bending madness poisoning our children, he chose instead to accommodate it with his signature brand of self-important piety.

Third, his thanking Bash because “we’ve been friends for a long time” is like tipping your cap to Tokyo Rose. That’s not a flex. It’s a cry for help.

Fourth, you know who else thinks quoting “do unto others” from Scripture means affirming people in their sin? James Talarico, that’s who.

So if you want to know why young men are reading about Franco fighting the communists in the Spanish Civil War as bedtime stories, it’s because the way of life and cost of living previous generations enjoyed are no longer available to them — because the Mike Pences of the world sold them out with a “conservatism” made for the bedroom eyes of CNN and nowhere else.

Or maybe Pence is working for the Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce now and has some wives and jobs lined up over there for America’s angry young men. What a guy.

Virtually every political primary I’ve gotten involved in — or chosen not to get involved in — over the last 20 years has come down to the same thing: trying to stop another era of what Mike Pence fecklessly represents “in the name of the Lord.” When Jesus offered difficult teachings and people walked away from Him or even picked up stones, He did not stop and plead for “common decency” the way Pence did with Bash.

There is no accommodation to be made with evil. Which is why, in the face of rejection, Jesus simply turned to His disciples and asked whether they were going to leave Him too.

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That is the firm moral foundation that built Western civilization. Pence’s version is how civilizations die. His so-called desire for decency is a suicide pact we are depositing into our children’s cultural 401(k). I mean, what the hell is that guy even doing in Ukraine?

There’s a great scene in “Young Washington” where a British general looks at the future founding father and says, “This isn’t my home.” Washington replies: “See, that’s the difference between you and me. It’s mine.”

Which raises the question: What is Mike Pence’s home? I mean, really? Whom does he serve? What is his bottom line? I fear there are no good answers.

His concern for “common decency” is a con. What, after all, is decent about a Savior beaten and tortured beyond recognition, then paraded through the streets carrying the cross on which He will die for sins not His own? And if that cross — and its defeat in the Resurrection — is the essence of our faith, how can Pence’s perpetual-kindness doctrine be anything but a distraction from true faith at best and a blaspheming of it at worst?

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So is there any point to highlighting the choice of revival or bust, as I often do on my show, if Pence remains the poster child for so much of our Christian leadership — in the church and in politics? Because with him, no such choice actually exists. It’s just bust. Guaranteed. Perhaps intentionally. Too many bright, shiny idols to resist, I guess.

Too harsh? Go watch that Pence video again. He sounded like Dana Bash had given him one of the best days of his life by offering him a forum to affirm obvious sin in the name of being nice above all. That is a very big problem, and I’m not sure where we go from here until that impulse is excommunicated from us as a people.

Let’s start here: Maybe the Boomer and Gen X crowd of men can put down the shovel and start acting under the banner of biblical headship again before younger generations of men declare war on absolutely everything — because almost anything has to be better than whatever the heck this is.

Enes Kanter Freedom said the quiet part out loud



What does it look like when an ideology that has long insulated itself from criticism suddenly has to defend its premises in public? We may be watching that happen in the WNBA.

For years, critics of transgender ideology have often been dismissed as hateful rather than answered. But slogans become harder to maintain when they collide with an institution whose very existence depends on distinguishing women from men.

The deeper problem is the familiar one: Believing something does not make it so. Reality pushes back.

Enter Enes Kanter Freedom.

At Sunday’s Chicago Sky-Indiana Fever game, Freedom cheered after Fever guard Sophie Cunningham hit a three-pointer. A couple of possessions later, Sky guard Natasha Cloud yelled toward him, “She’s not going to sleep with you.” According to Freedom, Cloud then cursed at him. Video showed the two exchanging words before Freedom stepped toward the floor and security escorted him from the arena.

Freedom was wearing a shirt that defined “woman” as “adult human female.” He believes the shirt helped provoke the confrontation. In any case, the incident exposed the contradiction at the center of the debate.

After the game, Cloud posted: “To every trans kid/person, You are apart of MY community & tribe. You belong. You’re loved. You’re seen. You’re perfect as you are. & you will always be protected by me.”

That is a humane sentiment. But protection is not the same thing as agreement, and compassion does not settle the underlying question: What is a woman?

Freedom’s shirt gives the correct biological answer. That answer is not incidental to the WNBA. The “W” exists because female athletes are physically distinct enough from male athletes that women have their own competitive league. Saying so 20 years ago would have been unremarkable.

The modern dispute is not merely about how people dress, live, or describe themselves. It is about whether a person’s stated gender identity can override biological sex in language, law, medicine, and athletics. Critics are frequently told that refusing to affirm such claims causes grave harm. Some activists go further and describe restrictions on transgender policies as “genocidal.”

That rhetorical trick does real work. If disagreement is violence, then argument itself becomes suspect. The critic no longer has to be answered; he can simply be condemned.

But the WNBA makes that escape difficult. A women’s basketball league cannot avoid asking what qualifies someone to play in the women’s league.

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That’s why Freedom and former NBA player Royce White have been able to make their point through satire. If self-identification alone determines sex for purposes of women’s athletics, why could a male player not simply declare himself a woman and demand eligibility? The predictable answer is that he would not be sincere. But sincerity is not a biological category, and the objection quietly concedes that some external standard remains essential.

The deeper problem is the familiar one: Believing something does not make it so. Reality pushes back.

If I walk into a bank and announce that I identify as a billionaire, the teller will still check my account balance. My conviction may be sincere. It does not create a billion dollars.

Of course, sex and wealth are not identical categories. The analogy has a narrower purpose: Subjective conviction cannot, by itself, determine every fact about the world.

The cultural argument over sex became combustible because it moved beyond the old libertarian bargain — adults may live as they choose — and began demanding public affirmation, institutional accommodation, and changes to categories built around biological sex.

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For Christians, there is an even deeper dispute about what a human being is and whether the body is something received or something the will may redefine. I have argued elsewhere that the conflict ultimately reaches Christian anthropology.

But one need not settle that theological question to see the WNBA’s problem. A league created for women must know what a woman is.

The controversy surrounding Freedom is no mere spectacle. The issue is no longer confined to university seminars or activist language. It has arrived courtside, where a definition printed on a T-shirt can become more controversial than a player shouting at a fan.

Ideologies protected from criticism often appear strongest just before ordinary people begin noticing the absurdities and contradictions. Once the questions can be asked publicly, slogans are no longer enough.

The WNBA is discovering that in real time.

Republicans keep losing because they won’t take hostages



By now, most Americans have figured out that the push for the SAVE America Act is performative — perhaps even more than the usual Washington standards.

Republicans have a closing window of unified control of the House, Senate, and White House. Yet the structural advantages Democrats spent decades building remain largely untouched outside temporary executive action. The SAVE America Act is one way to answer that problem with basic election rules such as voter ID and limits on mail-in voting.

John Thune understands leverage perfectly well. It is time for Republicans who say they want this bill to pass to prove they do, too.

Elections remain vulnerable to the same disputes over identification, mail voting, and administration that Republicans have spent years denouncing, while other institutional fights — immigration enforcement and reform of the FBI among them — remain unfinished. If Republicans lose unified control without locking in durable changes, a future Democrat administration can reverse much of what has been done by executive order.

Despite what the D.C. consultant class says, Republican success in the midterms will hinge on base motivation. Voters need something to vote for. Democrats are already portraying Republicans as the party of their own DEI: data centers, the Epstein class, and the Iran war.

Fair or not, those are political anchors. Without a positive agenda, the charge will stick.

The consultant class responds with the usual sermon about unity, which in practice means: Get in line and do what leadership says. But voters do not want WWE. They want UFC.

The Republican Party is already in an internal fight over what it will become after Trump, and only one side seems willing to use leverage. Some will call that destructive infighting. But the fight is already happening, and it will shape the party for decades. The question is not whether Republicans should have an internal struggle. It’s whether conservatives intend to participate in it as effectively as the senators and institutions working against them.

Recent Senate fights make the point. Republicans have held up ICE funding to block an Anti-Weaponization Fund and delayed Attorney General Todd Blanche's confirmation. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) used leverage to extract millions for Alaska nonprofits.

Politics is, at bottom, the acquisition and use of leverage. The Senate's left-wing Republicans understand that. The right too often makes threats it will not carry out — and loses.

The real show is not on the Senate floor. It is in the bank accounts.

The money controlled by Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, led by Tim Scott (R-S.C.), explains more than another ideological taxonomy ever could. Hundreds of millions of dollars flow through leadership-aligned committees and outside groups from interests that want something from Washington. That money becomes both carrot and stick: protect friendly incumbents, discipline troublesome ones, and keep conservative senators talking rather than acting.

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That’s how Thune and Scott can go on television praising the SAVE America Act while the leadership machine supports senators who stand in its way. My friends and I call this the head pat: Give conservatives a little rhetorical affection while making sure nothing they want actually happens. And it works. All the time.

The same network is lining up behind Senator Darline Graham Nordone (R-S.C.), rather than original SAVE America Act co-sponsor Ralph Norman. The scale is enormous. As of June 30, the Thune-aligned Senate Leadership Fund reported $238 million cash on hand, while its allied network, including One Nation, said it had raised more than half a billion dollars for the midterms. Those are obscene sums for a party that increasingly presents itself as the vehicle of working-class voters.

More important, the money is not politically neutral. It is a mechanism for deciding which senators get protected, which challengers get starved, and which legislative priorities receive serious attention.

Some of that war chest will protect senators most resistant to the SAVE America Act. Leadership gives them money and political lifelines while they deny the bill a vote. Those dollars do not come with strings attached for Republican voters. They come from donors and industries that need things from the Senate.

That is the leverage SAVE America Act supporters have ignored. If leadership can use money and floor time to reward compliance, conservatives can make leadership pay a price for blocking their priorities. Until they do, they have not begun to fight.

The absence of pressure is itself revealing. If leadership truly regarded passage of the SAVE America Act as a must-have priority, it would be using every institutional tool at its disposal to find votes and impose costs on holdouts. It is not.

The Senate made the problem obvious on August 8. Instead of forcing a vote on the full SAVE America Act, it took up a narrower photo-ID bill from Senator Jon Husted (R-Ohio). It failed 52-46. Then, that same morning, Thune filed cloture on the CLARITY Act crypto bill — a leadership priority that could consume much of the Senate's limited September floor time before the midterm campaign takes over.

Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), one of four Republicans who refuses to back the SAVE America Act, said the quiet part out loud: Unless its supporters find 60 votes, “they know it’s dead, and so all this is theater.” Thune says the Senate is “bound by arithmetic.” But arithmetic is not an alibi. Leadership chooses where to spend its money, floor time, and pressure.

So stop asking nicely.

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Senate leadership routinely holds unrelated priorities hostage to get what it wants. Republicans who actually want the SAVE America Act should do the same. When the Senate returns in September, it will face a college sports bill, Thune's CLARITY Act, and the National Defense Authorization Act. Those are leverage points.

A team sport works only if everyone is playing the same sport, wearing the same jersey, on the same field. Senate leadership is not behaving like it is on your team. Treating it as though it is only guarantees another round of speeches, cable hits, and failure.

The base needs to see a cage fight. Give the people what they want.

Refuse to hand leadership what it wants until the SAVE America Act gets an up-or-down vote at a 51-vote threshold. That is the same kind of hostage-taking the Senate’s left flank uses successfully. Thune understands leverage perfectly well. It is time for Republicans who say they want this bill to pass to prove they do, too.

Trump’s next tax cut should make Americans owners



America may be entering a period of extraordinary economic opportunity. Artificial intelligence could drive a wave of investment, construction, productivity, and growth. The question is whether ordinary Americans will own enough of that growth to benefit from it.

That makes tax policy about more than rates and revenue. If Washington wants Americans to build wealth, it should make it easier to own appreciating assets — stocks, funds, homes, and businesses — and keep more of the gains they earn over time.

Building wealth requires more than rising wages. Americans need the ability to acquire assets, hold them, and benefit from compounding over decades.

President Donald Trump is reportedly looking for new policy wins ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, including capital gains reform. The White House and congressional allies are considering indexing capital gains for inflation and creating a new exemption for certain home sales, reportedly including homes worth $2 million or less.

Both ideas move in the right direction. They would let Americans keep more of the returns on investments they have held for years and reduce tax penalties that can discourage people from selling appreciated assets.

The usual objection is that capital gains reform is a giveaway to the rich. But IRS data cited by Americans for Tax Reform show that 74% of tax returns reporting capital gains come from households with incomes below $200,000. Millions of Americans own stocks through brokerage accounts, mutual funds, and retirement plans. The tax code should not treat long-term wealth building as something reserved for the affluent.

Inflation makes the problem worse. A taxpayer can owe capital gains tax even when part of the apparent gain simply reflects a dollar that has lost purchasing power. Indexing gains for inflation would make the tax apply more closely to real economic profit rather than paper gains created by rising prices.

Housing presents a second opportunity. Expanding or exempting capital gains treatment for certain home sales could encourage more owners to put appreciated properties on the market. Many older Americans remain in homes that no longer fit their needs, in part because selling can result in a sizable tax bill.

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Reducing that penalty could make downsizing more attractive and free larger homes for younger families. It wouldn’t solve the housing shortage — America still needs to build more homes — but it could help the existing housing stock move to people who need it.

The broader principle is more important than either proposal. Building wealth requires more than rising wages. Americans need the ability to acquire assets, hold them, and benefit from compounding over decades. Ownership is how economic growth becomes personal.

The White House should therefore think bigger than a handful of tax tweaks. The next phase of Trump’s economic agenda should aim to turn more Americans into owners.

A serious capital gains overhaul could encourage people to invest, save, start businesses, sell homes when it makes sense, and accumulate wealth over time. If the coming AI boom creates enormous new fortunes, ordinary Americans should have a better chance to own a piece of it — not merely watch Sam Altman get richer.