That last number ought to rattle more than a few consultants. Trump won 55 percent of the state’s Hispanic vote in 2024, a Republican high-water mark built in no small part on anger at inflation. Two years later, the same voters are looking at the border taxes aimed at Mexico and Canada and concluding, reasonably, that they are the ones paying.

The independent split in this data will matter in November. Midterms are influenced by the lightly attached voters: the people who did not vote in a primary, who split tickets, and who bear no strong allegiance to a particular party. A 36-point gap among those voters is a red flag for Republicans.

A tariff is a tax. It is collected at the port, folded into the invoice, and passed on to customers at the point of purchase. The president prefers to describe it as a levy on foreigners. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (and yes, I feel dirty quoting them…) found that nearly 90 percent of the 2025 tariffs’ economic burden fell on American consumers, shocking no one who understands basic economics. The Congressional Budget Office reached the same conclusion: tariffs raise prices and reduce consumers' purchasing power. Foreign exporters do not write the check at the grocery store. We do.

A simple example will help illustrate. Carlos from Mexico sells a bag of tamales to Tom in Texas, for $10. The government imposes a 20% tariff on goods in Mexico, perhaps to “make Mexico pay for the border wall.” Now Carlos sells his bag of tamales for $10 + 20% = $12. The US collects its $2 from Carlos after the sale, who retains his $10. Thus, Tom paid the tariff. The burden rests upon (and the tariff financially punishes) the consumer.

Defenders answer that other countries tariff us first, so a round of tit-for-tat is only fair. British economist Joan Robinson pointed out in 1937 that for a free-trader to argue for this position is as sensible as “drop[ping] rocks into our harbours because other nations have rocky coasts.” A rocky coast is a misfortune. Rocks in your own harbor are a decision.

Texas is the worst possible place to argue otherwise. The state was the country’s largest exporter of goods in 2025, shipping $450 billion abroad, including $299 billion in manufactured products: computers and electronics, chemicals, transportation equipment. Mexico remains the largest customer at $125 billion. The Journal notes the integrated supply chains that run both directions across the river, and the retaliatory duties that follow when Washington starts a fight. Texas does not merely consume imports. It is a trading state. A border tax is a tax on Texas.

Seeing this polling data, I’m reminded of James Carville, who told staff during the 1992 Clinton campaign that, “It’s the economy, stupid.” He was describing how voters actually decide. They feel prices and wages. They notice whether next month looks harder than last month. They do not feel a press conference about reciprocity. They feel the drain on their bank account.

The November midterms will be, in part, a referendum on these tariffs, as the Journal argues, and most public polling already shows Republicans underwater. The Texas Senate race between Republican Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico has been a coin flip all summer in a state Trump carried by fourteen points, with voters naming affordability as their first concern by a wide margin. South Texas House seats Republicans expected to harvest after a favorable map redraw are drifting the other way. The voting coalition assembled in 2024 included a great many people who wanted cheaper groceries and a government that would stop making ordinary life more expensive. Taxing the goods they buy is a peculiar way to cultivate their continued political support.

And while most political strategists focus on the next election, the consequences of this economic intervention won’t be limited to November. A second-term president writes the first chapter of the next nominating contest whether he means to or not. If the signature economic policy of these years is a tax that independents and Hispanic voters reject two to one, the next Republican nominee inherits a sour memory and a smaller inheritance.

There is a better policy, of course. Stop using the tax code as a weapon against consumers. Stop pretending that a managed economy somehow turns “conservative” (whatever that word means…) the moment a Republican is doing the managing. Spend less. Tax broadly, lightly, and visibly. Let people buy what they value from whoever will sell it. If another country insists on impoverishing its own citizens, that is an occasion for pity rather than imitation.

The Overton Insights numbers reveal voters’ opinions on the actual impact of these policies, no matter what talking points were used to justify their enactment. Between now and election day, cash registers and bank accounts will both keep telling Texans what these policies actually cost. Carville had it right, whatever his own party has since forgotten. People vote based on how these policies, and taxes, impact their lives. If the pitch was that someone else would pay, a majority of Texans are rightly rejected it.

The stated purpose? To help students curb the “mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals” and to let them explore hard subjects without fear that an early stumble will follow them for years.

Sure, freshmen arrive anxious to a new environment, and a bad grade right off the bat can feel discouraging. But a policy like this makes a claim about causes, and this one assumes that the pressure of being measured is what ails students. But what if grades do not produce so much of that anxiety as reveal it? What if a growing share of eighteen-year-olds find college overwhelming because they were never prepared for it, and the grade is merely the messenger?

Here’s some evidence to consider. Last November, a faculty committee at the University of California, San Diego, reported a steep collapse in the math readiness of its own admitted students. The share needing remedial math (i.e., high school-level math while in college) climbed from about one in two hundred in 2020 to roughly one in eight by 2025, and the remedial course had to be rewritten to cover material from middle and even elementary school! Shockingly, a quarter of the students placed into the lowest math course had earned a 4.0 in high school math, and nearly all had cleared their state’s requirements. Their transcripts indicated well-schooled students. Their placement exams indicated young people who could not reliably subtract simple fractions.

Michigan’s coddling of its incoming freshmen arrives amid a broader wrestling with grade inflation and remediation. Roughly a third of American college students land in remedial courses that earn no credit toward a degree, costing taxpayers some seven billion dollars a year. Those taxpayers are compelled to pay twice, in effect: once for a high school diploma that was supposed to certify college readiness, and again for colleges to reteach the same material to unprepared students.

These high school students, and their parents, are misled about their preparation largely because grade inflation makes the ‘A’ ordinary and the transcript therefore uninformative. Then in recent years, many universities dropped the SAT and ACT, and several went further and refused to consider scores at all, on the theory that the tests were barriers (duh?). As the data came in, that theory buckled. Dartmouth found that test scores predicted college performance better than high school grades did, and that dropping them had made it harder to spot promising students from struggling schools, the opposite of what was intended. One selective university after another reversed course; nearly every school in the Ivy League has now restored a testing requirement, and hundreds of faculty across the University of California system are in open revolt against their own test-blind policy.

Here’s the point, put simply: a generation is being advanced through a schooling system on paper credentials that increasingly overstate what lies beneath, financed by federal student loans that flow regardless of preparation or progress and that few borrowers fully understand when they sign. Institutions face little penalty for admitting unprepared students, because the money arrives either way.

Some have likened higher-education subsidies to the housing subsidies of the last decade, which coaxed people into homes they were not financially prepared to keep, and the comparison is apt. We are bundling underprepared students into degrees the way lenders once bundled shaky mortgages into securities stamped with high ratings, and calling the rising numbers progress. As we learned in 2008, the institutions involved often get bailed out and held harmless while individuals get the shaft.

None of this makes “pass or no credit” approaches inherently problematic. MIT has hidden first-year grades since 1968, and done so alongside legendary rigor. The question is what problem Michigan believes it is solving. Easing a genuinely hard transition (due to the rigor and expectations involved) is surely a defensible goal. Coddling students in the name of a mental-health emergency, whose deeper source may be unpreparedness itself, is not.

So who, then, is to blame? Simple: the blame rightly rests on the adults who found it easier to pass a young person along than to tell that person the truth. Kindness of that sort compounds into cruelty (the so-called “soft bigotry of low expectations”), saddling unprepared students with significant debt as they struggle along the way. The actually generous act is to prepare people for reality, and reality keeps no covered grades to soften its blow. In the world these students are entering, the project ships or it does not, the client stays or leaves, and no registrar hides the result. Welcome to real life, kids.

Some institutions are already choosing the harder, better road by restoring honest signals, as the return of the SAT shows. Others are being built outside the credential machine altogether. Our Praxis program, for example, spends about eight months turning motivated young people into working professionals through real projects and a paid, guaranteed job at the end, on the conviction that proof of what you can do beats paper that says you once learned something. (Shocking, right?) We assume the young are capable of hard things, and then ask hard things of them, which is how capable adults have always been made.

The goal of a college should be to prepare young people for a demanding world, and that work requires telling them honestly how they are doing. A grade is one of the few honest signals a student gets. Removing it does not solve the problem that so many freshmen are underprepared; it just makes that problem easier to ignore for another semester. The students would be better served by schools that hold the standard and then do the hard work of helping them reach it. Lowering the bar has never once produced a capable adult.

P.S. Praxis’s next cohort begins September 14. If there's a young adult in your life ready to be prepared rather than protected, and to build proof of what they can do instead of paper that says they did, point them here before it fills.

This spring, Kevin O’Leary (“Mr. Wonderful” from Shark Tank) took to television to promote his sprawling “Stratos” data center project in Box Elder County, Utah. He told the country that the local residents fighting it were fronts for a foreign power, claiming that the opposition was connected to the Chinese Communist Party.

He produced no proof. By late June he had conceded he had “no evidence” for the accusation, and the network apologized; last month, the Utahns he had named sued him and Fox for defamation.

Strip away the melodrama and a question remains: why does a fight over a warehouse of servers escalate into accusations of treason and a federal lawsuit? The heat is real, and it is national. By one tally, organized local opposition blocked or stalled at least $156 billion across 48 projects in 2025, with more than 188 opposition groups now active across 40 states. More than 300 data-center bills have been filed in over 30 states this year, and over a hundred local moratoria adopted. In June, New York’s legislature passed the first statewide ban in the country, and the governor soon added a freeze of her own.

It is tempting to file all of this under “techlash,” a nation flinching from the steady march of technological progress (and the infrastructure needed to run it). But I believe the debate turns on two far more basic questions: who pays, and who decides. The passionate arguments against these facilities deserve to be met one at a time, on the merits, rather than waved off as sentiment or smeared as sabotage.

Let’s start with electricity, the loudest complaint. A large data center can draw as much power as a small city, and when a utility builds generation and transmission to serve it, a public commission decides who absorbs the cost. Under the old default, that cost is spread across every ratepayer, including households that see none of the benefit. Some critics (or opportunists) like Elizabeth Warren claim that electric bills near these facilities have risen 267 percent, but that figure refers to wholesale prices, not the amount on anyone’s monthly bill. Still, the alarm is warranted, and the remedy is a matter of design. For example, Virginia is shifting costs onto a data-center rate class so residential customers pay less, and several major companies have pledged to cover the price increases they cause. Make the customer who summons the cost carry it, and much of the grievance dissolves. (This is good practice; those newly entering a community should bear the responsibility of mitigating any negative impact they bring to that community.)

Water follows the same logic. Nationally, data centers consume a sliver of water consumption, on the order of 0.14 percent; locally, a single hyperscale facility can use what a town of tens of thousands uses, which during a drought is precisely the kind of thing neighbors are going to resist. The answer here requires closed-loop, recycled-water cooling; reclaimed sources instead of drinking water; and choosing facility locations away from stressed aquifers. Again, simply requiring data center projects to offset their impact ensures that the local community is held harmless.

Another argument against data centers focuses on their role as the backbone of the new surveillance state. The same infrastructure that today streams video and generates benign AI output for your preferred chatbot can, tomorrow, be used by governments and corporations to operate a Flock-like network of cameras and controls. But privacy concerns are questions of law, of warrants, and of regulatory oversight. Zoning a building out of existence doesn’t strengthen privacy protections or stop the surveillance state. The servers will simply be set up somewhere else, carrying their same functionality today and tomorrow. Our liberty is guarded by the rules that govern the data these centers process and store; blocking the facilities that hold said data doesn’t change those rules at all.

Which brings the argument to its center, and to the one place where the critics have the better of it. The scandal in the data-center boom is the tax code. Across the states, sales-tax exemptions and property abatements for these projects run large, long, and mostly uncapped; by one analysis the breaks can exceed two million dollars for every permanent job created, and Virginia’s annual cost alone climbed from $65 million in 2017 to $750 million by 2023. Yes, exempting business equipment from sales tax is ordinary treatment meant to avoid taxing the same input twice. But the tax policy that really resolves the data center debate is neutrality in both directions: the state should neither punish a data center nor pamper it. Trouble arrives the moment governments set aside the general rule to cut a particular deal, dangling bespoke incentives to land a marquee tenant. (Ahem, Mr. Wonderful.) The tax code then stops describing a level field and starts naming winners, and every neighbor reasonably suspects the game is rigged.

Here the whole controversy resolves into a single, unfashionable idea: a person may build what he wishes on his own land, provided he bears the costs he imposes and enjoys no privilege denied to everyone else. That principle cuts cleanly through the noise. It condemns the blanket moratorium, which forbids a lawful use out of generalized fear. It condemns the sweetheart subsidy just as firmly, since a favor handed to one owner is a burden shoved onto the rest. Both are versions of the same error: the state leaning its thumb on the scale, here to stop building, there to bankroll it.

A fairer settlement is not hard to picture, and pieces of it are already arriving. Tax data centers as we tax any other enterprise, no worse and no better. Design electric rates so the load that calls forth new infrastructure pays for it. Require mitigation of water, noise, and grid strain. Remove the favors, and most of the fury departs with them, because the favors are what turned an ordinary land-use question into a scramble for spoils.

O’Leary never needed to cast his neighbors as agents of Beijing. He needed to make his case, carry his own costs, and ask no special treatment. That is the harder path, and the more honorable one. Liberty’s companion is responsibility, and people should be free to build what they desire on their property provided they ensure no one else is harmed in the process. Apply that old rule to the newest industry, and the servers can hum without setting the country against itself.

Then CNN examined where his votes actually came from. Of the fifteen Michigan counties with the lowest share of college degrees, El-Sayed won zero. Of the fifteen counties with the highest share, he won thirteen. Offered a champion, the workers politely declined. The credentialed class, however, accepted him with enthusiasm.

This is a pattern, and it is hardening. When Zohran Mamdani won New York City’s mayoral race last November, exit polling told the same story: 42 percent of voters without college degrees supported him, against 58 percent of college graduates. In Michigan, Bloomberg found El-Sayed took 54 percent of the vote in counties with above-average college attainment and 43 percent everywhere else. Wisconsin may extend the streak this week: the frontrunner for its Democratic nomination for governor is Francesca Hong, a Democratic Socialists of America member whose political home is Madison, the state’s college town par excellence. The engine of American socialism runs on college degrees.

El-Sayed, it should be noted, strategically refuses the socialist label. Pressed in a debate about the socialists filling his rallies, he answered: “I’m not a socialist. I’m just a capitalist who understands how capitalism works.” A man may call himself whatever he likes, but labels are the cheapest item in any campaign. His signature cause is single-payer health care, a government monopoly over every resident’s insurance. He campaigned alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, carries Bernie Sanders’s endorsement, and drew the debate question at all because his rallies are stocked with Democratic Socialists of America members. When the platform, the coalition, and the crowd all point in one direction, a self-description attempting to point in the other reveals less about the man’s economic views than about his brand management. Yes, he’s a socialist.

Why would the most schooled Americans embrace a thoroughly refuted ideology with a historically atrocious track record? The twentieth century ran the experiment over and over, in every climate and culture. Breadlines in Moscow. Famine in Mao’s countryside. Cuba’s slow rot. Venezuela’s blackouts. A hundred million dead is a robust sample size. Either universities have failed to transmit that record, or they transmitted something else in its place.

Anyone acquainted with the ideology’s pedigree will find it unsurprising, because Marxism has been a faculty project from the day it was drafted. It advertised itself as the creed of the proletariat, yet it was authored, financed, and propagated by men who rarely met one. Marx was a lawyer’s son who spent his productive years in the reading room of the British Museum, subsidized by Friedrich Engels, heir to a Manchester cotton mill. Lenin was a lawyer who taught that workers left to themselves would never rise above “trade union consciousness”; revolution required a vanguard of professional intellectuals to do their thinking for them. The worker was cast as the hero of the story and handled as a stage prop. And when actual workers spoke for themselves, the vanguard reached for rifles. The Kronstadt sailors who demanded in 1921 the freedoms they had been promised were shot by the workers’ state. The Polish shipyard electricians of Solidarity were answered with martial law. From the beginning, the masses were the marketing vehicle and little more.

Let’s illustrate the same concept in another situation to help us better observe it. Consider how teachers’ unions invoke children. Every strike and rally is “for the kids,” and these kids are cited as the reason why union members so vociferously oppose anything (school choice at the top of the list) that would threaten union members’ jobs. Whenever the interests of children and the interests of the profession diverge, as they did spectacularly during the prolonged pandemic closures, the children are tossed to the curb by their purported advocates. The child performs the same function for the union that the worker performed for Lenin: a sympathetic face borrowed to sanctify the pursuit of adult power and perks.

Turning back to the university—the petri dish culturing ideological contagion—we might cynically (though accurately) observe that taxpayers are being compelled to subsidize the very institutions that produce voters who demand more taxes. Your hard-earned dollars flow into a schooling system that, judging by its graduates’ ballots, now operates as the most effective socialist recruiting apparatus in American history. Colleges have become a perpetual-motion machine: subsidies in, ideology out, with votes cast for yet more subsidies. The people paying for the machine were never asked whether they wished to fund their own fleecing.

These taxpayer investments are justified on the basis that we need “an educated citizenry.” But schooling (which simply certifies that a person absorbed the consensus of the institutions he passed through) is not education, and graduates are, on the whole, profoundly historically illiterate.

Consider a recent example offered by a young Democratic Socialists of America member who was asked to offer his pitch on socialism. “Community!” he responded. “Are you tired of sitting alone and being by yourself and having no one to talk to? Be a socialist! It’s all about community… to bond over the things that we love and share. That’s what socialism is.”

The pitch, for anyone with two spare brain cells to rub together, clearly conflates socializing with socialism, as though the abolition of private property were a book club. Churches, bowling leagues, and neighborhood barbecues have supplied community for centuries without requiring a single expropriation. A sales pitch that flimsy works only on customers who never learned what arrived after “community” in every socialist experiment on record: the queue, the informant, and the wall. This ideology thrives on the historical ignorance of its recruits—or, even worse, the absolute apathy these individuals show towards history.

What can we make of the fifteen counties whose Democrat majorities didn’t support El-Sayed? They are mostly poor, rural stretches of northern Michigan and the Thumb, places where degrees are scarce and paychecks are stretched thin. And Detroit told him the same thing: his opponent took more than 60 percent of the city’s heavily Black, working-class vote, and led by eight points across counties with sizable Black populations. These are the very people socialism names as its constituency, hourly workers and farmhands and home health aides doing grocery-store math at the end of every month. They know scarcity firsthand rather than as a seminar topic. The voters with the most to gain from the promise of free everything were the least persuaded by it. When the working poor of every race reject socialism while the richly credentialed embrace it, the reasonable conclusion is that one group received an education and the other purchased a counterfeit.

This credentialing machine runs on our money and our children, which means we can stop feeding it. Families can teach sound economics and true history at the kitchen table years before a campus makes its counteroffer; millions of parents raising their kids on the Tuttle Twins books are doing exactly that. Young adults can weigh apprenticeships, trades, and programs like Praxis that trade the credential mill for competence and a paycheck. Legislators can ask hard questions about why taxpayers underwrite institutions openly hostile to the taxpayers’ own interests.

Marx ended his manifesto by summoning the workers of the world to unite. Last Tuesday in Michigan, in their own fashion, they did. All fifteen of the state’s least-credentialed counties, farm and factory towns alike, looked over the newest vanguard sent to liberate them and united behind someone else. The revolution will have to be carried forward, as it always has been, by the people with the taxpayer-subsidized degrees and the borrowed grievances.

Our assignment is simpler: make sure the next generation is educated well enough to see through the credentialed class, however much schooling it receives.

The question was hardly ambush journalism. White’s own guard, Sophie Cunningham, has spent the past two weeks at the center of a national argument after saying she wants to protect young girls from having to compete against biological men. Supporters have rallied outside consecutive Fever road games. Counter-protesters have shown up too. And a Seattle Storm co-owner was suspended by the league over a courtside confrontation with two of Cunningham’s young fans.

Understandably, Coach White expressed frustration that the controversy keeps following her team. But her answer merits a closer look, because it tells us something important about the moment we’re in.

Let’s start with the claim that exclusion is never the answer, offered by a woman whose paycheck is signed by, yes, the Women’s National Basketball Association. Her employer—nay, her career—is predicated upon exclusion. The WNBA keeps men out, for the obvious reason that if men were let in, no women would be left on the court. That category is also why her (consistently unprofitable) league exists at all.

Every category in sport is an exclusion, and deliberately so. Weight classes exclude heavyweights from flyweight bouts. Age brackets exclude eighteen-year-olds from twelve-and-under leagues. The Paralympics exclude Olympians. Roster cuts exclude the insufficiently skilled, which is to say that Coach White administers exclusions herself during every training camp, and is paid well to do it rigorously. Exclusion is the architecture of fair competition. Abolish it, and the obvious result is a single open division in which nearly every woman, every lightweight, and every child is eliminated in the first round.

Coach White confessed scientific ignorance on this topic, as if responding to the question required first taking college-level courses on basic biology. Nonsense. What is readily apparent to any competent person (White included) is that male puberty builds a different machine. Testosterone running roughly fifteen to twenty times higher than in females yields greater lean muscle mass, some thirty percent more upper-body strength, denser bones and longer levers, larger hearts and lungs, higher hemoglobin concentration for carrying oxygen, a greater share of fast-twitch muscle fiber for explosive movement, and thicker tendons to absorb the resulting force. A standard peer-reviewed review of this evidence places the resulting performance gap at ten to fifty percent depending on the sport, widest in events rewarding upper-body power. The coach need not have read the paper. She has watched the phenomenon every day of her professional life.

In 1998, Serena and Venus Williams suggested they could beat any man ranked outside the world’s top 200. Karsten Braasch, a chain-smoking German journeyman ranked 203rd, warmed up with a round of golf and a couple of drinks, and then beat Serena 6–1 and Venus 6–2. Serena, to her credit, later conceded she would never stand a chance against a man inside the top 100.

Two other quick examples. Last year the Switzerland women’s national soccer team played a friendly match against FC Luzern’s under-15 boys. The boys won 7–1. And the women’s world-record time for running the 100-meter sprint—10.49 seconds set clear back in 1988—is slower than what hundreds of high school boys achieve each year.

These examples don’t diminish female athletes, whose excellence within their category is the whole point of having the category. Rather, these examples reveal why the category exists in the first place.

So when an accomplished basketball professional claims she lacks the scientific education to say whether men should play in women’s leagues, we ought to ask what is actually happening. In Orwell’s 1984, the Party’s final and most essential command, he wrote, was “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” Winston Smith’s captors did not merely demand his obedience; they demanded that he sincerely see five fingers when four were held up. The regime understood that a citizen who trusts his own perception (or who feels comfortable saying what those in power do not want said) is a citizen not yet fully governed.

Coach White’s demurral has distinguished company. At her 2022 confirmation hearing, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked to define the word “woman” and answered, “I’m not a biologist.” Here was a Harvard-educated jurist, nominated in part because she is a woman, professing herself unqualified to say what one is. The pattern repeats across our discourse: a demand for credentials no one actually needs, deployed to avoid a statement everyone actually understands. Call it strategic incomprehension. It appears whenever plain observation collides with ideological requirement, and its function is to make conversation impossible. You cannot reason with someone about basic biological differences if they claim, with a straight face, not to grasp observable, self-evident realities.

The broader debate surrounding gender identity contains some tough questions. How adults with gender dysphoria ought to be regarded and treated, to what degree social contagion has pushed this trend onto impressionable youth, and where medicine ends and ideology begins: reasonable people dispute these things, and should. But the sports question sits at the shallow end of that pool. It merely requires eyes, and the willingness to believe them. That is why it has become the issue on which the ideological edifice is cracking first. A New York Times poll found 79 percent of Americans, including 67 percent of Democrats (!!), opposed to biological males competing in female athletics. When a question is this easy, the refusal to answer it stops being a position and becomes a confession.

A confession of what, though? Rarely of sincere belief. White’s answer had the cadence of a prepared statement, as if she had rehearsed it, in anticipation of the topic being brought up, to survive a press scrum without generating a headline. (She failed.) What White’s answer revealed is fear: fear of the activist faction that polices her league, fear of the professional consequences that have befallen plainer speakers. That fear is the deeper indictment of the orthodoxy in question. A movement confident in its claims does not need coaches to feign ignorance of their own sport, or judges of their own sex. Compelled absurdity is the tribute weakness pays to truth.

The response by Portland’s head coach highlights this fear (“I’m completely supportive of everyone!”), showing how people choose to beclown themselves in order to avoid outrage from the mob:

Which brings us back to Sophie Cunningham, who chose the other path. Pressed to soften her remarks, she declined: “I said what I said. I think it’s kind of common sense. I stand on what I said.” For this she has absorbed abuse that would wilt most public figures. But watch what followed. Rallies at each consecutive game. Fellow athletes, and quietly many more, discovering that the obvious thing can be said aloud, and that the sky does not fall when it is.

While Orwell diagnosed the disease, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn prescribed a cure. On the February day in 1974 that Soviet agents came to arrest him, he released an amazing farewell essay to his countrymen titled “Live Not by Lies.” Tyranny ages quickly and grows unsure of itself, he argued, so it enlists falsehood to prop itself up, and falsehood asks something modest of ordinary people: daily submission. Starve it of that and the apparatus cannot stand. Nobody, he insisted, was obliged to march into the town square and shout the truth. It was enough to decline to repeat what one did not think.

That is a standard almost anyone can meet, including a coach at a podium, since withholding assent costs far less than heroism. And every person who withholds it lowers the price of honesty for the next.

Truth already has the evidence on its side; it wants only witnesses. The choice left to the rest of us is the one Cunningham has already made: to either say what we see, or to keep insisting, against the evidence of our own eyes, that we are not educated enough to understand our own biology.

Then, with no transition whatsoever, the subject changes. A flattering profile has run on the front page of The Washington Post. His fame, he writes, has become explosive and unimaginable. It would not be hyperbole, he assures himself, to say that he is now “the most famous and talked about person in the country.” (This, in addition to calling himself “the most credible scientist in the world.” )

He was writing to himself. There was no audience to perform for, no interviewer to charm, no adversary to rebut. Whatever else the diary is, it is the sound of a man alone with his own thoughts, one paragraph below the day’s death count.

Senator Rand Paul, who chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released the journals this weekend, days before Fauci is scheduled to testify under subpoena. Fauci's vanity is going viral on 𝕏 because vanity is easily observable, a little funny, and confirms what half the country already suspected about him. (Don't count on legacy media to notice; they were complicit in elevating him to saintly status in the first place.)

Yet the diary is the least consequential document in the release. The file that matters more came out a day earlier.

Anthony Fauci, the highest-paid official in the federal government, accumulated hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash prizes during the pandemic. NIH’s second-ranking official functioned as his personal awards manager. His taxpayer-funded staff drafted the nominations. The largest purse came from abroad: the Dan David Foundation, headquartered at Tel Aviv University, named him a laureate in February 2021 and wired him $900,000, the balance of a million-dollar prize after the foundation’s customary scholarship set-aside. The citation honored him for “defending science.”

Consider the optics of this. A federal employee’s salaried subordinates prepare his application for a prize. The prize is awarded. The honor then circulates through the press, and through the man’s own account of himself, as “independent” confirmation of his integrity. The laurel that was manufactured in-house comes back as evidence.

In October 2018, Fauci wrote to Barton Haynes of Duke asking Haynes to nominate him for the Shaw Prize; the same day, he floated the Heinz Award as a second target. The Shaw Prize discards self-nominations; the Heinz Awards forbid them outright. What the rules prohibit directly, a friendly phone call arranges indirectly. And why was the phone call so friendly? Because Haynes has won three consecutive grants from Fauci’s institute: $300 million in 2005, up to $139 million in 2012, and $129 million in 2019. More than half a billion taxpayer dollars moving in one direction, and a request for a prize nomination moving back the other. You scratch my back, I scratch yours.

So what, precisely, was the science he was being so richly rewarded for defending?

On January 31, 2020, according to his own diary, leading virologists told Fauci that the new virus carried a genetic feature raising real doubt about a natural origin. Roughly half the scientists on that first call thought the thing looked like it was created in a lab. Yet Fauci spent the following years telling the public the question was settled and treating those who were skeptical as cranks.

The authors of the paper he cited as independent proof were, in their own internal messages, assigning the lab-leak hypothesis odds of thirty percent, twenty percent, or just ten percent, while their published conclusion ruled it out. That same group discussed staying off email and curating their messages with an eye toward future records requests. (Oops.) Fauci had already set the tone. In a February 2020 email, he instructed the director of NIH to “please delete this e-mail after you read it.”

Something clarifying happens as you read through these documents. They stop being a story about one man’s (deficient) character and become a story about a system doing exactly what it was built to do. Institutions produce whatever they pay for, and this one paid for prestige. Prestige requires certainty; certainty cannot survive open questions; therefore open questions had to be reclassified as threats. (Remember what Fauci said in November 2021? “They’re really criticizing science, because I represent science.”)

This is what made “trust the science” so useful to the people who said it. Science is a method of doubting things, but what was on offer in recent years was deference to a handful of officials whose budgets, reputations, and prize money all depended on a single answer being correct. When Elon Musk tweeted in December 2022 about prosecuting Fauci, a former CIA director rushed to call him a national hero who would be “remembered for generations to come for his innate goodness & many contributions to public health.” The speed of that deification (innate goodness, lest you forget!), from a CIA swamp rat whose profession is deception, tells you the dispute was never really about actual evidence.

And notice who is silent about these new documents. The private records of the central figure in the defining event of the 21st century have been publicly released, and the institutions that praised and flattered Fauci have nothing to say. The material does not fit the narrative they so carefully crafted, so a story that was never supposed to become news is quietly ignored as if it were no news at all. Legacy media has cultivated quite the “legacy.”

What was done in service of this manufactured certainty? Schools shuttered for a year and more. Businesses closed, some of which never reopened. Seniors denied access to visiting family and funerals held over video. Neighbors reporting neighbors. A generation whose formative experience of civic life was watching adults obey instructions (that the instructing adults privately doubted!). Whatever the virus actually did on its own, much of the resulting damage was authored by people whose private notes recorded uncertainty while their public platforms admitted none.

Anger is the natural response and the least useful one. Removing one man solves very little, because the incentives that produced him are still in place and recruit new successors. Any institution permitted to fund the research, define the consensus, and police the dissent will eventually generate whichever answer preserves its position. Incentives do not require villains. They only require time.

Richard Feynman, addressing Caltech’s graduating class in 1974 on what he called cargo cult science, gave them a rule: the first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. His point was that science is a discipline of institutionalized self-distrust, engineered to frustrate the human appetite for being right. He closed by wishing them the luck to work somewhere that would never force them to trade integrity for position or funding. These documents describe a discipline running backward: an apparatus organized to protect a conclusion, reward its defenders, and suppress its doubters.

The harder question is, why were most people so ready to be told? A frightened country wanted a face and a settled answer—an expert who could speak confidently about the problem and its solution—and an industry of prizes, profiles, and prime-time bookings obligingly supplied both. Fauci is the byproduct of a broken society unable to think and decide for itself.

Feynman prescribed a temperament, and temperaments are best formed early. A person who has learned to distrust himself (as well as—nay, especially—“the experts”) is not easily governed by manufactured consensus, because his instinct is to check the manufacturing. That habit is taught in the unglamorous work of raising critically thinking children who treat a credential as a claim to be examined rather than a verdict to be obeyed. (Which is precisely the habit a compliance-trained, credential-worshiping school system exists to breed out of a child.)

Which brings us back to Fauci, logging the day’s dead in one paragraph and his own fame in the next. That juxtaposition is the whole lesson in miniature: he had fooled himself first, and a country too credulous and too out of practice at doubt was in no condition to catch him.

A free people cannot keep the powerful from fooling themselves. It can, and must, decline to be fooled alongside them.

In 2024, due in large part to Fauci’s deceptions, I felt compelled to write Mind Wars: Avoiding Deception in an Age of Manipulation. After reviewing examples of how the masses have been manipulated by those in power, I share ways we can fortify our minds against those who aim to deceive.

Asked about the city’s plan to spend $30 million building a government-run grocery store, and whether it might crush the bodegas nearby, Gustavo Gordillo replied: “If one publicly owned grocery store that brings prices down is enough to put someone out of business, then maybe they shouldn’t have been in that business in the first place.”

A municipal government commanding the tax revenue of 8.5 million people, including the taxes paid by the bodega owner himself, will open a store across the street from him, undercut his prices with his own money, and if he goes under, well, he had it coming.

More astonishingly, this is offered as a philosophy of fairness by a movement that claims to champion the little guy. The bodega owner is the little guy. And he is being told that his life’s work was a mistake that the state is now correcting.

So who is Gustavo Gordillo? Here the story turns from absurd to tragic. His family emigrated from Peru when he was a child, and he grew up outside Miami before making his way, apparently, to Yale and then to New York’s art world. Consider what his parents fled. Peru at the close of the 1980s was Alan García’s socialist catastrophe: populist spending, nationalizations, price controls, shortages in the shops, and an inflation so violent that prices could double in weeks. Stalking the countryside was the Shining Path, Maoist guerrillas who massacred peasants in the name of the people. The market reforms that later stabilized Peru, the austerity and privatization known as the Fujishock, had barely begun when families like the Gordillos boarded planes. They fled a left-wing collapse in its purest form.

His parents crossed hemispheres, took whatever jobs they could find, and lifted their son into the American middle class. And when MacCallum asked him why his family came here, he explained that Peru’s misery was caused by “the imposition of capitalism and American imperialism.”

Pause. Process that. He said his parents fled to America (and its still-somewhat-capitalist system) because of… America and its capitalism? “That doesn’t make much sense,” his host rightly pointed out.

It makes no sense as history. But it makes perfect sense as strategy.

Gordillo is an intelligent man, and intelligent men can see where power pools in our culture. There is little cultural power today in gratitude, in thanking the country that sheltered your family, in telling the unfashionable truth that socialism wrecked your homeland. There is, by contrast, enormous power in grievance. The mantle of the oppressed confers moral authority, media attention, and now, in New York, actual political office. He has made his choice, and he is counting on the rest of us to respond the way comfortable majorities usually do: with a shrug.

The shrug would be a mistake, because Gordillo is a symptom rather than an aberration. A 2025 poll found that 62 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 hold a favorable view of socialism. A third of them view communism favorably. These are the voters who powered Zohran Mamdani into City Hall on promises that include the aforementioned grocery stores and a freeze on rents for a million apartments.

More pointedly, as I wrote in Reason the day after the election, it was those with college degrees who supported Mamdani the most. Young Americans are seduced by socialism, and more so those who spent years on a college campus swarming with its adherents and activists.

Lest anyone conclude that these delusions live only on the left, consider what happens when government hands subsidies, bailouts, and sweetheart contracts to favored corporations: the same sin Gordillo proposes, with better-dressed beneficiaries. The TARP bank bailouts. Subsidies for farmers and film crews alike. Tax incentives lavished on sports stadiums and data centers. The Export–Import Bank, quietly guaranteeing loans for politically connected exporters. Each is socialism in a different flavor, the state picking winners and losers with other people's money. Conservatives can be outraged all they want at a radical DSA member like Gordillo, but their preferred party is guilty, in differing degrees, of the same anti-competitive market interference that Mamdani is advocating with his grocery store idea.

Young people who watched banks get rescued while their parents lost homes drew the reasonable conclusion that the game was rigged. So did the teenagers who watched governors order the family diner closed as "nonessential" while the big-box stores, blessed with lobbyists, stayed open and posted record profits. So do the twenty-somethings who follow accounts tracking congressional stock portfolios, wondering how lawmakers so reliably beat the market they regulate.

They are right about the rigging and wrong about the remedy. All of this is capitalism corrupted, wealth flowing to the politically connected rather than to those who earn it by creating value for customers. The answer to government favoritism toward the rich or well-connected cannot be government favoritism run by different people. It is government favoritism toward no one.

Why, then, is socialism so seductive to the young among us? It is, I believe, a symptom of historical illiteracy, and that illiteracy is manufactured, however unintentionally, by the institution that raises most American children: the government school.

We should not be surprised. Government schools are themselves socialist enterprises, funded by compulsory taxation, insulated from competition, assigned their customers by street address. Everything Gordillo proposes for groceries, voters (including conservatives who profess to reject socialism) long ago accepted for education: a "free" government provider, bankrolled by taxes on the very families it lures away from private alternatives, driving those alternatives out of business in neighborhood after neighborhood.

If a tax-funded grocery store putting the bodega under is tyranny, what shall we call a tax-funded school that did the same to independent schooling generations ago? Conservatives who recoil from Mamdani's supermarkets have spent a century defending Mamdani's model in the classroom, then wonder aloud why the classroom keeps producing Mamdani voters.

That wonder is misplaced. An institution built on the socialist model has no incentive to teach the case against itself, and this shapes what passes for history in its classrooms. Students learn that the Great Depression happened; they don’t learn how FDR’s meddling deepened and prolonged it. They learn that the Soviet Union fell; they don’t learn about the engineered famines, the queues for bread, the informants in every apartment block, or why an economy without prices cannot feed itself. The syllabus will not linger on García's Peru, or Mao's tens of millions starved, or the Venezuelan grocery lines, because every one of those stories is an argument for limiting the very power that signs the teacher's checks.

History arrives, instead, pre-filtered: capitalism's sins itemized, socialism's catastrophes reduced to a paragraph about good intentions gone awry. (Gee golly, surely socialism will work next time!) The predictable result is a generation that can recite the perceived sins of markets but cannot name a single country ruined by the state meddling in them. So the curriculum drifts toward the collective and away from the individual, and children marinate for 13,000 hours in an environment that treats the state's provision of life's necessities (including education and even groceries) as the natural order of things. They graduate fluent in grievance and ignorant of economics, and then we act astonished when 62 percent of them like the sound of socialism.

None of this would matter if parents had kept the duty of formation for themselves, but most surrendered it decades ago, assuming the state’s schools would transmit ideas and values it is incentivized to ignore. A civilization that assumes its children will absorb its values by osmosis has written its own obituary. Liberty is an inheritance, and inheritances must be deliberately transmitted, or else they are lost in a single generation. That transmission is now (and always was!) a family responsibility because nearly every other societal institution has grown indifferent or adversarial to the values of individual freedom. Michael Novak understood this, in a line I once turned into a book-length treatment:

Between the omnipotent State and the naked individual looms the first line of defense against totalitarianism: the economically and politically independent family, protecting the space within which free and independent individuals may receive the necessary years of nurture.

This conviction is why I have spent years writing the Tuttle Twins books, which have put the ideas of free markets and individual rights into the hands of millions of children whose schools will never mention them. But no book series, mine included, is sufficient to the scale of the emergency. Ideas compete for the young the way merchants compete for customers, and for decades, the socialists have been showing up to the market. They are selling envy dressed as justice, and to a generation that was never told the price, it looks free. Parents need to realize the red-level crisis that this actually is.

Gordillo’s parents understood something their son has unlearned: that the difference between Lima in 1990 and Miami in 1995 was liberty, and that the difference was worth crossing the world for. Somewhere between their sacrifice and his socialist seminar rooms, the story broke down. No one handed it down, so ideology rushed into the vacuum. A young Gordillo heard the socialist siren song from Bernie Sanders, and now he, Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others are assimilating young people, Borg-like, each convert wired to recruit the next.

Every American family now faces a humbler version of the choice Gordillo's parents faced. They crossed the world to give their son liberty; we need only cross the living room to explain it. Hand down the story, deliberately and early, or watch someone else hand down a different one. The bodega owner already knows which future he is living in. The question is whether the rest of us will notice before our children inform us, with perfect sincerity, that we “shouldn’t have been in business in the first place.”

For this, Langley has called DeFlock a “terroristic organization” whose “primary motivation is chaos.”

Sit with that inversion for a moment. A billion-dollar enterprise photographs most cars in America (regardless of whether their drivers are suspected of a crime), logs each vehicle’s movements into a searchable national database, and grants access to thousands of police agencies, no warrant required. A private citizen responds by noting, on a map, where the cameras sit in plain view atop public poles. And in the CEO’s telling, the man with the map is the menace.

Consider how strange this standard is. Tens of millions of Americans open Waze every day, an app that lets drivers flag police cars and DWI checkpoints in real time. When the NYPD demanded Google shut the feature down, the company refused, noting that informed drivers make safer decisions, and nobody seriously calls Waze a terrorist network. Freeman's map does less than Waze.

The ACLU (rightly) called Langley’s assertion “simplistic, juvenile, and ultimately authoritarian.” But even that seems charitable. When merely watching the watchers gets branded as terrorism, something foundational has flipped in the relationship between citizen and state.

Fairness demands we grant Flock its strongest case. A shop owner who points a camera at his own parking lot is exercising his property rights, and sensibly so. Many police departments credit these systems with helping them investigate cases. Flock claims to have “supported more than 1 million investigations, assisted in solving 20% of cleared cases, helped locate more than 10,000 missing persons, and contributed significantly to stolen vehicle recoveries across the country.”

Langley himself puts it plainly: “Everyone wants to live in a crimeless society.” He is right about the desire. Nobody roots for the carjacker. The longing to be safe is among the most human of impulses, and any honest critic must concede that these cameras have, in particular cases, done genuine good.

But honesty cuts both ways, and the devices are no longer only what their marketing suggests. “License plate reader” undersells the machine considerably. Flock’s cameras record a vehicle’s make, model, color, dents, bumper stickers, and roof racks, creating a fingerprint that can be tracked even when the plate is not visible. And their cameras can also record the people inside their cars.

The company’s next product, Nova, promises to knit police records together with Social Security numbers, credit histories, and property data into one AI-searchable whole. And the cameras have migrated from highways to the places we go to escape being watched: parks, trails, playgrounds, libraries. Local governments plug into the network, share their feeds across state lines, and very rarely ask their residents first.

What happens when this much power sits in this many hands with this little oversight? We no longer have to speculate. Consider a brief inventory of the record so far:

• At least 18 police officers, including multiple chiefs, have been caught using Flock to stalk ex-girlfriends, spouses, and romantic rivals, sometimes running a single plate hundreds of times.

• A Texas sheriff’s office searched 83,000 cameras across the nation hunting a woman who had taken abortion pills; the stated reason in the log read “had an abortion, search for female.” Officials claimed a welfare check, but court records later showed police had weighed criminal charges.

• In Dunwoody, Georgia, records revealed Flock’s own employees accessed the city’s cameras regularly (reportedly over 1,000 times), including a camera inside a children’s gymnastics room, while the company’s FAQ had promised that “nobody from Flock Safety is accessing or monitoring your footage.”

• Federal immigration agents tapped the network in states whose laws forbade it, prompting Illinois to audit and expel dozens of agencies from its data.

Each incident was predictably dismissed as an aberration. But together they form a pattern, and the pattern is the point: infrastructure this powerful will be abused because it is operated by fallible human beings and checked by almost nothing.

Where does the road lead if we keep driving? Look at London, the CCTV capital of the Western world. Nearly a million cameras watch nine million residents, roughly one for every ten people; the average Londoner is recorded about seventy times a day. Yet researchers find little correlation between camera density and crime rates. The cameras did what cameras do. They watched everyone, and criminals adapted, and the dragnet stayed.

Nor is this some distant foreign cautionary tale. Flock’s own hometown of Atlanta is now the most surveilled city in America, with 124 cameras per 1,000 residents; worldwide, only cities in China watch their people more closely. The panopticon has a zip code, and it is domestic.

Langley believes that “Safety is a fundamental right.” He simply wants a world where people are kept safe, and I take him at his word. But that is precisely what should trouble us, because the urge to be kept safe is the campaign fodder for every tyrant in history. No regime ever announced itself as an oppressor; each arrived promising protection from crime, from chaos, and from enemies within. The Stasi kept East Germans very “safe” from one another. The question a free people must ask is never whether surveillance can prevent some harm. Of course it can. The question is what kind of people we become once we accept being tracked, logged, and cataloged as the price of admission to public life. A society where every trip to a church, a gun store, a clinic, a protest, or a political meeting enters a database is a society where dissent grows quietly expensive. Anyone with a modicum of historical knowledge knows how that story ends, and it does not end with safety.

There is resistance. Langley’s reaction to calling DeFlock a “terroristic organization” stemmed in part, no doubt, from how some individuals are using its information to disable these surveillance systems. (I should point out that while Langley and others see this behavior as itself criminal, our very country, whose anniversary we just celebrated, was founded by patriots engaged in similar activities in the name of liberty.)

On the more peaceable front, more than fifty cities have canceled, deactivated, or rejected Flock contracts after residents mounted pressure. City councils respond to rooms full of neighbors in ways no federal agency ever will. Concerned citizens should (at a minimum) demand legal reforms that:

1. require a warrant to use data from these devices;

2. impose short retention windows after which the data must be purged; and

3. require publicly available audits of how the systems are used and for which types of investigations.

I should note that for years, our team at Libertas Institute has been passing and promoting legislation in states across the country to protect privacy. Flock’s rapid expansion of surveillance systems catches many communities off guard. Private companies develop (and law enforcement agencies begin using) new tools and technologies far faster than committees and councils and citizens can typically keep up. More work is needed, and Libertas will be engaged on this topic.

The Fourth Amendment was written on the premise that a free people are entitled to be left alone absent particular (read: individualized) suspicion. Which returns us to the man with the map. Telling your neighbors where the cameras are is among the oldest of American instincts: the refusal to be governed in the dark. (And what some choose to do with that information, including destroying them, is borne—much to the chagrin of Langley and law enforcement—of a related American instinct.)

Perfect safety has never been on the menu of human life, and the societies that chased it hardest made themselves miserable without ever catching it. What is on the menu is a choice older than the republic: whether we will live as free people who accept the risks freedom carries, or as monitored people who traded their birthright for a promise neither Flock nor their friends in law enforcement can keep.

Our ancestors made that choice under far graver dangers than ours, and they left us a clear answer, one best articulated by Franklin: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” The least we can do is decline to auction off our liberty, one pole-mounted camera at a time.

You see, there is a grim regularity to the lifespan of great powers. Sir John Glubb, a British officer who spent his retirement surveying the wreckage of empires from Assyria to his own, concluded that the average dominant power endures about 250 years, roughly ten generations.

Samuel Arbesman, examining 41 empires across three millennia, landed on a similar number. Chart their rises and falls and you get a horizon of overlapping arcs, each cresting and collapsing with almost embarrassing consistency (see below). Nations ascend, plateau, then decline, gradually and then all at once. Note America at the end (of the chart, heh…).

Many of the founders would not have been surprised. They were morbidly fluent in the failure of republics. They studied Athens and Rome as cautionary tales rather than curiosities, and they built accordingly. What they feared was never foreign conquest so much as domestic complacency: a people grown too comfortable, and too incurious, to know why liberty was worth the trouble and what’s required to preserve it.

Franklin’s famous warning, “a republic, if you can keep it,” carried no rhetorical flourish. It was a job description of sorts, handed to every generation that would follow.

So how is the present generation performing? Consider an awkward birthday statistic.

A new Cato Institute survey, released on Friday, found that 46 percent of Americans cannot even say what the 250th anniversary actually commemorates. Among Gen Z, that figure rises to 61 percent. Fewer than four in ten young Americans can identify the adoption of the Declaration of Independence as the occasion we are celebrating with parades and pyrotechnics.

(This is why, I’ll briefly note, our America’s History Tuttle Twins series is so critical, helping the rising generation learn history through storytelling—a strong antidote to dry textbooks. Volume 3 just launched last week and there’s a sale right now.)

Young people are seven times likelier than their grandparents to believe the founders acted chiefly to pad their own fortunes. Barely half of Gen Z counts the ideals of 1776 as part of their own inheritance, against 88 percent of seniors. And in the cohort that will superintend America at its 300th birthday, socialism now polls better than capitalism.

Here’s my thesis, in short: A civilization that cannot even explain itself to its children has already begun to end.

Civilizations do not fall because the barbarians grow stronger. They fall because the heirs grow indifferent. Education degrades from the formation of character into the accumulation of credentials (if even that). History becomes a dusty file cabinet of antiquated anecdotes, easily archived in favor of the seductive now. The common story dissolves into competing tribal ones, and a people who no longer share a past discover they cannot agree on a future.

And here is the consolation the arc of empires conceals: the pattern is descriptive, not prophetic. It records what has happened, never what must. Decline is a choice, assembled from a thousand small surrenders. And if decline is a choice, so is renewal.

That renewal, I believe, must happen upstream of where most people focus. Politics captures our attention, money, and care. But this constant squabbling is downstream of the cultural forces that influence it, which themselves are downstream of the family. This is where the battle for America’s preservation truly lies.

I see this as a tragedy: We pour fortunes into short-term political fights and nearly nothing into forming the next generation. We fight over the harvest and neglect the planting. This isn’t me just opining; it’s what the data shows. Here’s where the money currently flows in right-of-center organizations focused on freedom (taken from a slide deck I’ve shared with a few of Libertas Network’s donors):

The most consequential efforts of the next 250 years will not occur in any capitol, courtroom, or classroom. It will occur at kitchen tables and in curricula, in the ordinary handing down of ideas from those who hold them to those who do not yet. Asked in that same survey what they most want children to learn from this anniversary, Americans’ top answer was this: that freedom is rare and must be protected. They know what is needed. The question is whether we will build the means to deliver it.

As we celebrate America’s 250th, I think of what it will take to perpetuate classically liberal values—free speech, property rights, free enterprise, and more—for another 50, 100, or 250 years. Can America beat the trend? Can it survive longer than the average civilization?

Answering that requires us to confront this simple truth: No free society has outlived its own ignorance of the values that gave it life.

The founders built the first 250 years. They did it deliberately, against long odds, with clear eyes about how fragile the whole experiment was. The next 250 are our assignment. The hour is late, but it is not too late, and a birthday is as good a moment as any to begin.

Franklin's job description has come due again, and the question, as it has always been, is whether we will keep it.

P.S. This topic is the theme of a new, single-issue magazine we’ve mailed out to a few donors and friends. Here’s the PDF.

If you’ve read this far, I’m excited to share that there’s more to come. This is the first of a new weekly newsletter I’ll be sharing commenting on current events, providing behind the scenes updates of our work, and breaking down complex ideas into simple, self-evident truths that you can communicate to your children.