The GOP can’t ‘wield’ the administrative state without being corrupted by it



Many Americans have watched Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy “The Lord of the Rings.” And many have read J.R.R. Tolkien’s books. Some can quote whole passages and trace Tolkien’s deliberate references to the life of Christ and the horror of modern war.

Maybe House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) live in that camp. If not, they should.

The Republicans’ plan cannot be ‘use federal power while we have it, then trust the next guys.’

A crucial scene comes early in the saga. The council debates what to do with the One Ring, the ultimate source of power. Boromir makes an understandable, dangerous suggestion — a perfect expression of fallen man’s temptation: “Give Gondor the weapon of the enemy. Let us use it against him.”

Aragorn stops him with two sentences rooted in humility and truth: “You cannot wield it. None of us can.”

That is the lesson Republicans must learn now, while they still hold majorities.

Dismantle the machine, don’t borrow it

Many supporters of President Trump want Congress to act boldly. They also want something more important: They want Republicans to roll back the reach and scope of the federal government while they can. If the GOP refuses, Democrats will inherit the same machinery and use it without restraint. Not someday. Soon.

If you think I exaggerate by calling Democrats the enemy or warning that we are doomed, consider a recent message from the second-highest-ranking elected congressional Democrat in the country, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York. Jeffries posted a video of White House adviser Stephen Miller on X.com and wrote: “Donald Trump will leave office long before the five-year statute of limitations expires. You are hereby put on notice.”

Jeffries did not allege a crime. He did not explain what Miller did wrong. He did not argue facts or law. He issued a threat: We will punish you later because we can.

That is what Republicans keep forgetting. The federal government’s power does not idle in neutral. It exists to be used. If it remains in place, someone will use it — and progressives have already shown what they want to do with it.

Which raises the central point: Nobody can safely wield that power. Not congressional Republicans. Not any administration. The correct move is not to grab the weapon and promise better behavior. The correct move is to destroy the weapon.

Fraud stories shine a bright light

Start with something as basic as fraud.

Look at the unraveling of the Somali day-care scandal in Minnesota and the billions of stolen tax dollars. That story grew so large that it helped end Minnesota Democrat Gov. Tim Walz’s re-election ambitions. Yet the government did not uncover it.

Not the Government Accountability Office. Not the Congressional Budget Office. Not the Office of Management and Budget. Not House or Senate oversight committees. Not the IRS. Not the Small Business Administration. Not the armies of full-time staffers inside federal agencies reporting up to inspectors general whose job description exists for this very purpose.

All that government power — and it did nothing.

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The scandal came to light because of the tenacity of a 23-year-old guy with a camera. If the federal machine can miss fraud on that scale, imagine what else it misses.

Fraud saturates the system. Estimates run as high as $500 billion — roughly 7% of the $6.8 trillion federal budget. That budget still reflects COVID-era spending levels. In 2019, Washington spent $4.45 trillion. Why did we never return to pre-COVID levels?

Because money is power. And like Boromir, too many people convince themselves they can wield it.

Ethics are not enough

Energy policy shows the same temptation in real time.

My nonprofit organization, Power the Future, sent another letter to House and Senate oversight committees and to Attorney General Pam Bondi urging investigations into Biden’s energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm. In the final days of the Biden administration, Granholm awarded $100 billion in green-energy grants — more than the previous 15 years combined. Many recipients had previously supported her political campaigns.

Green money poured out of Washington through the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, which allocated $60 billion for “environmental justice” — a phrase so deliberately amorphous that it has no fixed meaning. Team Biden spent $1 trillion “going green,” a statistic Vice President Kamala Harris bragged about during her lone 2024 debate with Donald Trump.

That entire structure still stands.

Nothing prevents the current energy secretary, Chris Wright, from spending billions on his favorite projects except his ethics. I believe Wright has ethics in abundance. We should feel grateful. But one man’s ethics do not qualify as a system of government.

The next secretary could be worse than Granholm. If the power remains, someone will use it.

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Empty the arsenal

Just as in Tolkien’s masterpiece, our enemies do not wait quietly. They scheme. They train. They amass armies of lawyers, activists, operatives, and bureaucrats. They build institutional pipelines that outlast elections. They do not go home after losing once. They plan the return.

Republicans need to plan as well — and their plan cannot be “use federal power while we have it, then trust the next guys.”

One party will not hold Washington forever. When conservatives lose power, they should make sure the left inherits a reduced federal government: weaker, narrower, stripped of the patronage systems and enforcement tools that now function as political weapons.

That is why it is incumbent upon congressional Republicans to do everything in their power — everything — to destroy the Ring.

America’s founders envisioned a weak federal government for this reason. In America’s 250th year, Congress should act like it understands the danger of concentrated power. If Republicans keep the machinery intact, they will regret it. If the Ring finds its next master, it will not spare the people who once held it.

How data centers could spark the next populist revolt



Everyone keeps promising that artificial intelligence will deliver wonders beyond imagination — medical breakthroughs, massive productivity gains, boundless prosperity. Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. But one outcome is already clear: If data centers keep driving up Americans’ electricity bills, AI will quickly become a political liability.

Across the country, data center expansion has already helped push electricity prices up 13% over the past year, and voters are starting to push back.

Handled correctly, AI can strengthen America. Handled poorly — by letting data centers overwhelm the grid and drive families toward energy poverty — it will accelerate decline.

In recent months, plans for massive new data centers in Virginia, Maryland, Texas, and Arizona have stalled or collapsed under local backlash. Ordinary Americans have packed town halls and flooded city councils, demanding protection from corporate projects that devour land, drain water supplies, and strain already fragile power grids.

These communities are not rejecting technology. They are rejecting exploitation. As one local official in Chandler, Arizona, told a developer bluntly, “If you can’t show me what’s in it for Chandler, then we’re not having a conversation.”

The problem runs deeper than zoning fights or aesthetics. America’s monopoly utility model shields data centers from the true cost of the strain they impose on the grid. When a facility requires new substations, transmission lines, or transformers — or when its relentless demand drives up electricity prices — utilities spread those costs across every household and small business in the service area.

That arrangement socializes the costs of Big Tech’s growth while privatizing the gains. It also breeds populist anger.

A better approach sits within reach: neighborhood battery programs that put communities first.

Whole-home battery systems continue to gain traction. Rooftop solar panels, small generators, or off-peak grid power can recharge them. Batteries store electricity when it’s cheap and abundant, then release it when demand spikes or outages hit. They protect families from blackouts, lower monthly utility bills, and sometimes allow homeowners to sell power back to the grid.

One policy shift should become non-negotiable: Approval for new data centers should hinge on funding neighborhood battery programs in the communities they impact.

In practice, that requirement would push tech companies to help install home battery systems in nearby neighborhoods, delivering backup power, grid stability, and real relief on electric bills. These distributed batteries would form a flexible, local energy reserve — absorbing peak demand instead of worsening it.

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Most importantly, this model reverses the flow of benefits. Working families would no longer subsidize Big Tech’s expansion while receiving nothing in return. Communities would share directly in the upside.

Access to local land, water, and electricity should come with obligations. Companies that consume enormous public resources should invest in the people who live alongside them — not leave residents stranded when the grid buckles.

Politicians who ignore this gathering backlash risk sleepwalking into a revolt. The choice is straightforward: Build an energy system that serves citizens who keep the country running, or face their fury when they realize they have been sacrificed for someone else’s high-tech gold rush.

Handled correctly, AI can strengthen America. Handled poorly — by letting data centers overwhelm the grid and drive families toward energy poverty — it will accelerate decline.

We still have time to choose. Let’s choose wisely.

Woke Colorado Dems target natural gas: 70% of homes face skyrocketing bills for unreliable electric heat



Colorado is the eighth-largest natural gas-producing state in the U.S., boasting 10 underground natural gas storage fields with approximately 141 billion cubic feet of combined storage capacity. Roughly seven out of 10 Colorado households use natural gas as their primary home heating source.

Despite the Centennial State's bounty of natural gas and the super-majority of Colorado households' reliance on the affordable warmth it provides, officials are pushing for an electrification of heating in the state and putting utilities in a position where they'll soon have to begin removing customers en masse.

'You're increasing the load on electrification without there being any way to fill it.'

State Democrats successfully passed legislation in 2021 aimed at reducing so-called greenhouse gas emissions through regulatory changes affecting gas distribution utilities.

To satisfy this law, the commissioners on the Colorado Public Utilities Commission — all of whom were appointed by Democratic Gov. Jared Polis — have solicited and approved multiple "clean heat" plans.

Earlier this month, the PUC set GHG emission reduction targets impacting three investor-owned gas utilities — Atmos Energy, Black Hills Energy, and Xcel Energy — requiring them to cut the carbon emissions from their systems by 4% this year; by 22% over the next five years; and by 41% over the next 10 years.

While the commissioners declined to set targets beyond 2035, they noted in their formal decision that "because Colorado has a statewide goal of reducing greenhouse gas pollution by 100% by 2050, as compared to a 2005 baseline, we emphasize that clean heat plans submitted by gas utilities must account for that statutorily established future target."

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Colorado Energy Office director Will Toor is among those who have expressed skepticism about the aggressive nature of the switchover from natural gas to the state's already strained electric grid, a system that Xcel Energy indicated will likely face skyrocketing demand in the form of 400,000 electric vehicles and 300,000 new heat pumps by 2029.

"The 41% target, from our perspective, is a pretty challenging target for utilities," Toor told the Colorado Sun. "We certainly hope that utilities get there. I think we thought that 30% was probably more realistic."

The Colorado Energy Office and the state health department's Air Pollution Control Division reportedly asked for a 30% target by 2035.

In order to meet the new targets, the PUC noted that "utilities can propose to meet the clean heat targets using combinations of energy efficiency, electrification, recovered methane, green hydrogen, thermal energy, and pyrolysis of tires."

Alternatively "customers may voluntarily participate in these plans by taking advantage of rebates and incentives to adopt electric heat pumps or complete energy efficiency upgrades in their homes and businesses," said the PUC.

Before incentives, customers looking to satisfy climate alarmists by electrifying their gas appliances and homes are looking at costs in excess of $20,000 per home, Xcel noted in testimony about the state's so-called clean heat plans.

Jake Fogleman, director of policy at the Independence Institute, a Colorado-based think tank, noted that the targets "will necessarily require removing customers from the system."

"Utilities like Xcel, Black Hills, and Atmos may be able to nibble around the edges of the target by relying on recovered methane, improved pipeline leak detection and repair, and other non-demand-destroying strategies, but such approaches will not be enough to comply with state law," wrote Fogleman. "This all but guarantees that gas customers around the state will soon face higher utility bills to subsidize households into switching from gas to electric heating and appliances."

Those who can afford to make the switch will likely still be looking at jacked prices. Fogleman noted that last year, "Electricity was more than four times more expensive on average per unit of energy delivered to Colorado households" than natural gas.

Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute, told the Denver Post, "They're trying to regulate us away from any fossil fuels and taking away our appliances and our heaters. You're increasing the load on electrification without there being any way to fill it."

Republican state Rep. Ty Winter told the Post that when constituents raise concerns about the climate alarmist requirements, he tells them that "the only way to fix this is at the ballot box."

"We’re going to fight this tooth and nail, and we’re going to use every avenue we have," said Winter.

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Why the laws of government physics remain undefeated



In an age when government grows with the regularity of the sunrise and the humility of a bonfire, Dan Mitchell’s “20 Theorems of Government” land not as abstractions but as reminders of truths America’s founders understood almost instinctively. The theorems, devised by the co-founder of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, capture the recurring failures of centralized authority and the virtues of free people operating in free markets.

These theorems are not predictions. They are explanations of what government always does when left unchecked and how society always suffers when the state’s reach exceeds the citizen’s grasp.

The problem is not the quality of the people in government. The problem is the nature of government itself.

Mitchell’s First Theorem, which describes how Washington actually functions, could be carved above every federal agency door. Politics rewards the spending of other people’s money for other people’s benefit. The entire system is designed to avoid accountability and to maximize political reward. Once you accept that incentives drive outcomes, the rest of the theorems follow naturally.

The Second and Third Theorems make this point bluntly. Any new program will grow, metastasize, and waste money. Centralization magnifies inefficiency because bureaucracies face no competition, no profit-and-loss constraint, and no personal consequences for failure. When the private sector gets something wrong, it pays for its mistake. When government gets something wrong, it demands a larger budget.

Theorems Four through Seven widen the gap between political rhetoric and economic reality. Good policy can be good politics, but incentives push politicians toward superficial fixes and short-term gratification. Even strong ideas rot inside bureaucratic execution. And the larger the government becomes, the more incompetent and unresponsive it grows. Bureaucrats answer to political pressure, not consumer choice, and the results are inevitable: waste, rigidity, and indifference.

The Eighth through 10th Theorems confront the moral dimension of government overreach. Politicians who obsess over inequality rarely seek to lift up the poor; they seek justification for more control. Crises — real or imaginary — become tools for expanding that control. And politics almost always overwhelms principle. This is not cynicism. It is observation backed by centuries of evidence.

Theorems 11 through 15 dismantle common misconceptions. Big business is not the same thing as free enterprise. In many cases, it is free enterprise’s most persistent enemy. Corporations often work hand in hand with government to protect themselves from competition. Meanwhile, anyone who opposes entitlement reform is endorsing massive, broad-based tax hikes, because arithmetic leaves no other option. You cannot fund European-style welfare states without European-style taxation. And history shows voters resist paying for the bloated government they claim to want.

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This leads naturally to the 16th and 17th Theorems. Economic progress becomes a race between private innovation and public consumption. When government grows faster than the private sector can produce, stagnation follows. Worse, when dependency becomes a norm, the cultural foundations of liberty erode. A nation that forgets how to rely on itself cannot long remain free.

The final three theorems complete the picture. Climate policy becomes hypocrisy when elites demand sacrifice from others while refusing it themselves. Politicians operate under incentives that reward short-term benefit at long-term cost. And the fiscal results — from rising deficits to ever-multiplying promises — are exactly what those incentives predict.

Taken together, Mitchell’s 20 Theorems point to a conclusion Milton Friedman drew decades ago: The problem is not the quality of the people in government; the problem is the nature of government itself. A government that grows without limit will, eventually and inevitably, burden the citizens it claims to serve.

If Americans wish to preserve both prosperity and freedom, they will have to internalize these theorems as practical truths, not relics of libertarian theory. The path forward is not mysterious. Limit government. Unleash markets. These principles are old — and their urgency has never been greater.

China is winning the energy arms race — using tech we invented



Our economic realities as Americans are tied directly to energy. But those of us working outside the energy industry must be forgiven for not noticing that in 2022, China began construction on an experimental thorium reactor that requires no water, generates substantially less toxic byproduct, purports and appears be vastly safer than all other reactor designs, and all but eliminates the possibility of meltdown. American citizens should be forgiven for not noticing because in 2022, as you recall, we were suffocating in the various tendrils of psychological operations and captured government.

And when China operationalized the reactor and proved the design, firing it up last month, pulling a positive yield of uranium, Americans were again distracted. Our industries are still captured, corrupted, or sidelined. Our government is still dysfunctional, and it appears we are now, in some very official sense, losing the energy arms race.

Clickbait headlines have suggested that China outright stole the reactor design. The truth is probably even worse.

The Chinese reactor works. It delivers cheap, abundant, safe, clean energy. Congress is silent. Portions of our mainstream media only serve corporate (often energy sector-tied) interests, so they aren’t going to sound the alarm.

Here’s the kicker regarding the United States’ second-place status in this energy battle: Americans funded the entirety of the original research for the thorium reactor in the 1960s at Oak Ridge Nuclear Laboratory. This raises major questions about past, present, and future for the energy and tech sectors.

Of the successful test of the thorium reactor in China, the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics stated in a press release, “This marks the first time international experimental data has been obtained after thorium was introduced into a molten salt reactor, making it the only operational molten salt reactor in the world to have successfully incorporated thorium fuel.”

Clickbait headlines have suggested that China outright stole the reactor design. The truth is probably even worse. If you take blood pressure medication, be forewarned: There is malfeasance here, for sure, but the technology wasn’t stolen from either American corporations or Oak Ridge Laboratory. Oak Ridge Laboratory, in concert with the U.S. government, evidently declassified much of the pertinent research, according to researcher Kirk Sorensen.

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Sorensen runs the website https://energyfromthorium.com, where portions of the material, now in the public domain, were published. Meanwhile, private American research into what turns out to be a highly feasible and safe energy source has been, at best, scattered and underfunded. What's more, the stultifying (false?) dialectic between environmentalism and first-world living standards has muddied the waters for decades.

Oak Ridge Labs partnered with the Shanghai Applied Physics Institute back in 2015. American research was just simply handed to the Chinese. Meanwhile, we have considerable energy issues in America: prices jumping 10%-20% per year in many states and services often approaching third-world standards in terms of reliability and transparency. We have the highly unstable and contentious AI industry building data centers at a heady pace and signaling orders of magnitude more energy demand in short order. Lastly, we have a contingent of right-aligned Americans squaring up to take on the potential re-industrialization of the country — automobiles, pharmaceuticals, microprocessors, and steel manufacture at all levels could and probably must be re-shored if we as a nation are ever to right the ship.

None of this happens without abundant, cheap energy.

Since the early 2000s, concerns over dwindling cheap oil have confused the public and stymied good-faith efforts to manage the infrastructure, source, and delivery problems that our grand techno-American plans seem to require. Elon Musk's grandfather, Joshua N. Halderman, was involved with M. King Hubbert in the original Technocracy Inc. endeavor, which signaled early alarms about exponential growth meeting finite oil capacity. Elon is a big fan of solar, but one wonders if perhaps now he’d be better off investigating thorium ... if American industry and government can get out of his way, of course.

Tolkien’s forgotten lesson: Evil wins when good men refuse to rule



Since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Auron MacIntyre, BlazeTV host of “The Auron MacIntyre Show,” has been calling for conservatives to get serious about crushing left-wing violence. Inaction, he’s warned, will only invite escalation. That’s why as a political party, we must insist that the Trump administration dismantle Antifa, impose severe consequences on those inciting or celebrating murders, and wage economic war via regulatory and legal levers against complicit media.

In other words, the Trump administration needs to use its power to obliterate left-wing chaos.

Auron gets quite a bit of pushback for this stance. Many will use J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy to argue against the use of power to quell evil. “The one ring is dangerous. ... You must reject the call of power because ultimately power corrupts and destroys and divides,” they say.

But Auron says this is a “shallow reading” of the father of modern fantasy’s three-volume series. “Ultimately, while yes, there is a message about power in there, there’s also a message about right authority. The last book is, of course, called ‘Return of the King,’ and this is seen as a good thing,” he counters. “So it doesn’t look like Tolkien is ultimately rejecting the use of power, but he does have some very important things to say about the nature of power.”

To discuss this important distinction, Auron speaks with Evan Cooney, the host and creator of “The Middle-earth Mixer” — a popular podcast that dives into J.R.R. Tolkien's lore, themes, and Middle-earth universe.

For starters, Tolkien was adamantly opposed to allegory, meaning that the one ring cannot be said to symbolize power alone. Further, in the books, “There is lawful use of lawful authority, which translates to power, that many characters have and have permissions to do so by the creator god Ilúvatar, and then there are characters who commit unlawful use of unlawful authority, and Sauron creating the one ring would be a perfect example of that,” says Cooney.

Auron points to Aragorn, the rightful king of Gondor, as an example. Initially, Aragorn, using the name Strider, runs from his destiny. “And because he's not in that position of the true king, there are others who are less worthy who are ruling in his place,” says Auron. This is seen by characters and readers alike as a bad thing. Aragorn must wear the crown and wield the sword and scepter, as this is what pushes back darkness and brings order to Middle-earth.

Cooney, unpacking Aragorn’s lineage all the way back to Isildur, who initially took the ring of power from Sauron, says, “This shirking of responsibility from everyone involved and [Arvedui’s, the last king of the North] inability to take power created the political disaster that made for why men were so weak by the time you get to the ‘Fellowship of the Ring.”’

“Ultimately, Tolkien recognizes that power will exist, that this void will be filled, and if it's not filled with the appropriate people, the worthy people, those who belong in the line ... you will be ruled by inferior men,” says Auron. “It's not that you won't be ruled; it’s that the stewards are there instead of the kings.”

In the kingdom of Gondor, Denethor — a steward charged with holding the throne in trust until the king returns — is consumed by pride and despair. He refuses to rally with allies, distrusts Aragorn’s claim to the throne, and abandons the city in its darkest hour.

In Rohan, however, King Théoden, who Cooney says is Denethor’s character foil, shows us what it looks like to wield power rightly. With the help of Gandalf, he exiles his corrupt adviser, Gríma Wormtongue — “the quintessential archetype for the sneaky government bureaucrat,” says Cooney — and rides out and meets Sauron’s army in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields.

The exile of Gríma, says Auron, is a lesson for our current government: “The council [of bureaucrats] is paralyzing. It's meant to be paralyzing. It's meant to stop you from taking your rightful authority and taking the honorable action, and you have to remove that influence.”

Once evil advisers have been banished, the next step is to step fully into the role of rightful power. After Gríma is exiled, the first thing Gandalf has Théoden do is pick up his sword. “Your fingers would remember their old strength better, if they grasped your sword,” he tells the old king.

“It’s a very moving symbol,” says Auron.

“What stirs the king back to a noble action is he has to feel the weight of the instrument of his office. The rightful sword he has been entrusted with as the civil magistrate has to be felt in his hand before he can once again truly return to who he is and behave honorably.”

To hear the full conversation, watch the episode above.

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Virtue, not power, is the true aim of politics



The great outbreak of evil in these past days stirred a memory of something I used to tell my freshman students on the first day of their introduction to politics class: Politics is about what is good.

We would read together the first sentence of Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics”— an unrivaled introduction to politics:

Every art and every inquiry, and likewise every action and choice, seems to aim at some good, and hence it has been beautifully said that the good is that at which all things aim.

Aristotle goes on quickly to observe in his usual empirical way that many goods exist along with many arts developed to achieve the different goods. The medical art aims at the good of health. The art of shipbuilding aims at building good ships. The military art aims at victory in war. The art of managing the household, which the Greeks called economics, aims at the good of wealth.

Virtue is the end or aim of political life.

Some arts are subordinated to other arts, because the good at which the art aims is subordinate to a larger good, the way the art of the cavalryman is subordinate to the art of the general.

Aristotle then introduces the subject of politics with a great hypothesis: If there exists some good, some end, that we seek for its own sake, and we seek all the rest for the sake of or on account of this one good — if, in other words, we don’t choose everything for the sake of something else, which would make all of our desires empty and pointless — this would be the good itself, in fact the highest good.

He asks: Would not an awareness of this highest good have great weight in a man’s life? Wouldn’t the art of attaining that good be the sovereign or master art encompassing all the ends or goods of the other arts? And isn’t this what we call the art of politics?

The good that the art of politics aims at, he says, is “the human good.” What name do people give to the human good that encompasses all others and lacks nothing? The Greek word, Aristotle says, is eudaimonia, which we usually translate as “happiness” in English. The art of politics is the art of happiness. But it gets even better.

The art of politics is a practical art. It aims not just at knowing what happiness is but at being happy. Thinking happiness through, Aristotle finds that it does not have primarily to do with the body. It is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue — in fact, in accordance with complete virtue. You can’t be a happy man without being a good or virtuous man. And in this sense, virtue is the end or aim of political life.

Aristotle goes on to distinguish between virtues of character and virtues of intellect, or what we usually call moral and intellectual virtues. He argues that the specific virtue or excellence of the statesman — the political man par excellence — is the intellectual virtue of practical wisdom, what he would call “phronesis.” Phronesis is the only intellectual virtue that is inseparable from moral virtue. According to Aristotle, a man cannot possess phronesis without possessing all the moral virtues actively and in their fullness. He is a man in full.

I would tell students that to make progress in their study of politics — this practical art — they would have to make progress in virtue; they would have to make progress toward the human good; they would have to make progress toward happiness. This is what our semester would be about.

Happiness and politics go together?

If I were lucky, at least one hesitatingly confident realist among the students — they were still too young to be cynics — would be brave enough on this first day of class to raise a hand and say deferentially and politely something like: “What! Have you read a newspaper lately?” (They had newspapers back then.) “Every page is filled with violence, crime, corruption, and somebody grasping for power! To call someone a politician is an insult.”

And so the semester would be off and running.

I would admit that though Aristotle in his “Politics” defines man as a “political animal” because man is a “rational animal” — an animal possessing logos, or reason — he makes an empirical observation at the end of his “Ethics” that will be familiar to anyone who has read a newspaper: Rational creatures though they are, men sometimes do not listen to reason and are carried away by their passions.

Aristotle would agree with Alexander Hamilton, or rather Hamilton agreed with Aristotle, when he wrote in Federalist 15:

"Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.” And with James Madison’s even more famous saying, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary."

In addition, working on our non-angelic human fallibility and culpability, bad education causes us to make mistakes about what is good. For these reasons, Aristotle argues that both education and coercion are central to the art of politics and, alas, that practicing the art of politics is not a leisurely activity. It is the burdensome art of inducing others to do what they ought to do for their own good and happiness, even when they don’t want to.

These days, our children learn in school and online that it is good to shoplift or try to change themselves from a boy to a girl or from a girl to a boy. A shockingly large percentage of them have learned that it is good to kill those who disagree with you.

From his first day in office in 2021, Joe Biden — our then-educator in chief — made it the central point of American politics that being trans was being good and questioning the goodness of being trans was evil. He thrust this bad education into the face of his country — marching trans heroes before the cameras to model the “goodness” that all Americans should admire and publicly praise if they wanted to avoid ostracism, public shaming and canceling, expulsion from school, losing their jobs, being put in jail, or being murdered in cold blood.

Politics requires goodness

Knowing what is good is not easy. A man in ancient Athens with the greatest reputation for wisdom knew only that he did not know what was good. To have what was good, to be good, was so crucial to Socrates — the one thing needful — that it made no sense to do anything else with his life than to try to find out what it was.

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Photo by Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images

But we do not need to be philosophers to know that boys cannot become girls, that biological males should not be competing against biological females in sports or sharing their bathrooms, and that killing those who disagree with us is evil. Glenn Ellmers, Salvatori Research Fellow at the Claremont Institute and an old friend, published a short essay on the urgent need, in this increasingly deranged world, to hold on to our common sense.

Machiavelli — the infamous teacher of “realist” politics — seeing unflinchingly what we all could read in the newspaper, taught that in a world where so many are so bad, it is merely common sense that it is necessary for those who would succeed in the art of politics to enter into evil. I would suggest an alternative lesson to students, one that I think is in the spirit of Aristotle: In a world where so many are so bad, it is merely common sense that it is necessary for the good to be great.

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

Mass immigration means dependence, and dependence means control



Power always seeks to expand. It never halts for principles or words on paper, but only for rival powers strong enough to resist it. Those rivals must have deep roots, independent resilience, and the ability to demand loyalty. They must project sovereignty in ways the state cannot easily replicate, establishing spheres of influence that can resist government overreach without ever firing a shot.

Historically, strong communities provided this check. Their religions and folkways became the rhythms of life, passed down through generations. These beliefs drew authority from transcendent sources no earthly power could reproduce. Families built churches, schools, libraries, civic organizations, unions, and fraternities to preserve culture, transmit values, and care for members.

Communities with shared traditions can limit state commands. But diversity dissolves those limits.

Such communities formed spheres of sovereignty. They made competing demands on their members and provided services the state could not: spiritual grounding, mutual aid, a sense of identity. Membership required specific behaviors to remain in good standing, norms the state could not easily reshape. Because traditions were deeply ingrained, the state had to respect them or risk serious resistance.

Over time, these communities often accumulated wealth. Virtue and stability generated surplus capital, which supported robust institutions and provided safety nets. Their members no longer relied on government in times of need. They relied on each other. These were the kulaks — the middle class — people whose independence created natural barriers to state expansion. Not atomized “self-reliance,” but communal reliance: stability rooted in culture and habit. That is precisely why governments sought to break them.

High and low vs. the middle

The political theorist Bertrand de Jouvenel, in "On Power," described the classic formula: high and low versus the middle. The ruling class always wants more power, but the middle class resists. The poor, being dependent and disorganized, cannot mount opposition. Only the middle class, with property, institutions, and traditions, can stand in the way. To expand power, rulers must dissolve these spheres of sovereignty.

Their method is alliance with the dependent lower classes. Sometimes this means the domestic underclass. But that group still shares culture and traditions with the middle, making it less reliable as a tool. Importing a foreign underclass works better. Immigrants lack roots in the land or its traditions. They can be counted on to side with rulers against the entrenched middle.

Mass immigration delivers cheap labor to the wealthy while creating a new political client base. The upper class benefits from gardeners and nannies. Politicians gain millions of new voters to whom they can promise state benefits.

Dependence as a weapon

Immigrant groups rarely possess cohesive culture or resilient institutions. They lack roots, leisure, or unity to resist. They depend on the ruling class for entry, employment, rights, and welfare. Many don’t speak the language. They need the state to survive — and they reward the state with loyalty. This isn’t passive dependence. To succeed, they actively require the state to expand.

To serve this new underclass, rulers pillage the middle. Kulaks are blamed for inequality. They are guilted, taxed, or coerced into surrendering what they built. That wealth is transferred to immigrants, cementing the state’s power over both. The middle grows poorer, loses property, closes institutions, and becomes more unstable. Families that once resisted government control now depend on it.

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Mass immigration also erodes culture, another obstacle to power. Communities with shared traditions can limit state commands. But diversity dissolves those limits. Forced to mingle with newcomers, the shared identity frays. Cultural separation becomes taboo. Institutions that once passed on values and provided aid collapse. Charities are drained. Public spaces decay. And those who maintained them see no reason to sacrifice for strangers.

The state ensures that escape is impossible. First taboo, then law, forbids communities to separate and reform. Those who try are smeared as bigots, then prosecuted. The middle is barred from reconstituting its way of life. Virtue fades. The spheres of sovereignty are gone. Everyone becomes a rootless dependent, giving the state a blank check to expand its power.

Why immigration became policy

This is why mass immigration became a priority across Western liberal democracies. It doesn’t just dismantle barriers to state power; it builds a machine to demand more of it. Rulers gain cheap labor, grateful voters, and excuses to raid the middle. The cost is cultural dissolution, but to elites that is a feature, not a bug.

If we want an elite that serves its people rather than undermines them, we must choke off this supply of outside populations. Stop importing clients. Stop dissolving communities. Restore the middle class and the spheres of sovereignty that protect liberty. Only then can the leviathan be caged.

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