A blue wave has long been swelling. Let’s pause a moment to ask why.

Trump did not win in 2024 on Republican votes alone. He reached for people with no natural home in either party: independents squeezed by prices, moderates weary of foreign military adventures, and libertarians, a constituency he courted in person at the Libertarian National Convention, where he pledged to put a libertarian in his cabinet and free Ross Ulbricht. I was among those who were compelled to give him a shot. The reasoning seemed sound. Four years in exile, two impeachments, and a stack of indictments might concentrate a man’s mind. Might.

Kudos where he deserves it—Trump did free Ulbricht, and in his first week. The rest of the agenda has fared worse. The promises were few, popular, and measurable. So let’s measure.

Starting with prices. In August 2024, standing behind a table of groceries, Trump vowed that when he won, he would “immediately bring prices down, starting on day one.” That meant lowering the cost of oil, which trickles through the economy. So he promised to cut energy and electricity prices in half within 18 months at most. On the day he made that pledge, a gallon of regular gasoline cost Americans $3.44 on average. This week the national average stands at $4.33, nearly 90 cents and some 26 percent higher. Most of that increase is no doubt due to the war against Iran.

Which brings us to the second promise. On the night of his victory, Trump told supporters what he had been saying throughout the campaign: “I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars.” And then on January 3, American forces struck Caracas and seized Nicolás Maduro. On February 28, the United States launched strikes on Iran, sparking months of protracted conflict and escalating tensions. Iran answered by closing the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas moves in peacetime. Some 100 ships once passed through each day; since March, traffic has averaged about seven.

How about tariffs, which were sold as a bill foreigners would pay? Turns out (shocker!) that more than 90 percent of tariff costs have been passed on to American consumers. In February, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the emergency statute Trump invoked never authorized them. Within hours, the White House reimposed them under a different law, and when that authority lapsed in July, it replaced them again under yet another. It’s economic whack-a-mole. The average effective tariff rate, 2.3 percent when he took office, now stands at 7.1 percent. Despite the counterarguments, Trump has increased the cost of living by forcing domestic consumers to pay higher prices for foreign goods.

Then there’s DOGE. Here, I was hopeful we’d see some change, particularly because of Elon Musk’s involvement and that of private-sector engineers and entrepreneurs. There was some modest cost-cutting and ferreting out of fraud, to be sure—but federal outlays rose $386 billion in fiscal 2026, to $7.4 trillion. The deficit approached $2 trillion, the highest ever recorded outside a war or recession, and the gross national debt now exceeds $40.3 trillion. The government didn’t shrink its spending, but it definitely shrunk the value of the dollars in your bank account.

Finally, the Department of Education. In March 2025, Trump signed an order to “begin eliminating the federal Department of Education once and for all.” Nineteen months later, the department unsurprisingly endures. It has signed 14 interagency agreements shifting day-to-day management of nearly 150 programs to six other agencies, with most K-12 money now flowing through the Department of Labor. Congress, for its part, increased the department’s funding. The programs, the dollars, and the federal strings all remain intact; various other government agencies simply oversee them. We were promised abolition, and this is not it.

What makes this poor record so remarkable is the opportunity that accompanied it. Republicans have controlled the presidency and both chambers of Congress. The last time before Trump, in 2003, Republicans used their dominant influence to [:::checks notes:::] enact Medicare Part D, a vast new entitlement program. With Trump’s first trifecta in 2017, Republicans failed to repeal Obamacare after seven years of vowing to. Now comes the third squandered opportunity, with Republicans again proving how little they believe in the campaign promises they so generously offer.

Here the two-party system shows its least attractive feature. A disappointed independent has one practical way to register dissent: hand power to the other party, which promises more spending and harbors no special affection for liberty. Few of the voters delivering a blue wave will mistake Democrats for the remedy to Republican stupidity. They will simply be using the only lever the duopoly leaves within reach.

Still, there is something healthy in the exercise. Parties grow careless when they assume their voters have nowhere else to go. The voter who withholds support, who treats a ballot as a sort of contract and enforces its terms, supplies some semblance of the accountability that partisan loyalty never will. Of course, the libertarians and independents who lent Trump their votes in 2024 owe his party nothing in 2026. Their departure is the system working as it should, and the clearest message available to the next candidate who comes courting.

That candidate will come, as they always do, bearing promises. The lesson, I believe, is that promises function like a currency. They hold value only when the issuer honors them, and an issuer who prints them freely, without intending to redeem them, debases every one he has issued. On November 3, the voters who once accepted that currency will decide what it’s actually worth.

So why that seat, and why so much?

Massie was a particular kind of irritant. He arrived in Washington in 2012, the year Ron Paul departed (after an awesome mic drop), carrying Paul’s endorsement and much of his creed. He took up Paul’s old cause of auditing the Federal Reserve, reintroducing the bill Congress after Congress. He voted against deficits, no matter which party created them. In March 2020, as leaders of both parties prepared to pass a $2 trillion stimulus package by voice vote in a mostly empty chamber, Massie demanded a recorded vote, saying he refused to let the republic die “by unanimous consent and an empty chamber.” The president called him a “third-rate grandstander.” Massie’s great sin was wanting the public to know who voted for legislation so economically consequential.

Last year he did something rarer still. When House leadership refused to bring the Epstein Files Transparency Act to the floor, Massie gathered 218 signatures on a discharge petition and forced the vote over the objections of the Speaker and the White House. It passed 427 to 1. One member of Congress, armed with nothing but the rules, had compelled the government to open its files.

For this he was marked. The president recruited his challenger (a loyal NPC if ever there was one), rallied for him in the district, and dispatched his lieutenants. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth campaigned in Kentucky against a sitting congressman of his own party. Gallrein’s victory speech offered a fitting summary of his platform: his focus, he said, was advancing “the president’s and the party’s agenda.” Barring a surprise on November 3 (this district hasn’t sent a Democrat to Washington since 1967), the man whose chief credential is a presidential blessing will soon be a congressman, and the man who would not kiss the ring will be a private citizen.

It is tempting to read all this as a story about one rebel and one president. A more interesting question lingers beneath it: what makes a single House seat worth $32 million?

The answer is scarcity. If you concentrate power in a few hands, you raise the value of each hand. Raised value means raised stakes, leading every faction with money and a grievance to pay almost any price to win. The presidency is the extreme case, a quadrennial war over control of the executive branch, whose reach expands with every administration. But the same math now governs ordinary House seats. When one member can force the release of files a president wants buried, that member’s seat becomes a prize worth buying, or a threat worth removing.

The founders saw this coming. The Constitution caps the House at one representative for every 30,000 people; it sets a ceiling and no floor. George Washington, who otherwise sat silent through the Convention’s debates, rose on its final day for his only substantive intervention: to shrink districts from 40,000 people to 30,000—bringing power even closer to the people. Madison later conceded he had “always thought this part of the constitution defective,” meaning it was a problem to specify the maximum size the House could grow into, without setting a minimum as well.

So the very first amendment Congress sent to the states in 1789, listed ahead of the guarantees of rights of speech and bearing arms, was meant to fix it. Article the first would have required the House to grow with the population, eventually guaranteeing at least one representative per 50,000 people. States ratified the proposal, and by the end of 1791, it stood one state short of adoption. Kentucky, newly admitted, ratified it in 1792, but its statehood had raised the overall threshold, and the amendment thus remained one state short. To date, it has never been ratified, and because Congress set no deadline, it technically remains pending.

What’s crazy is imagining the country it would have built. Applied to the 2020 census, the intended version would require a House of at least 6,623 members, and the Constitution would permit as many as 11,036. Instead, we have had 435 since 1911, while the population has more than tripled. The average district now holds roughly 761,000 people, more than the entire state of Wyoming. No human being can represent 761,000 people in any meaningful sense. He can poll them, mail them, and fundraise from the few who can afford access. He cannot know them, and they cannot know him. A growing population means that representation routinely dilutes, until what remains is a broadcast from a distant capital to an audience that long ago stopped expecting a reply.

Let’s return to Massie’s district in Kentucky. Its population would fill fifteen districts of 50,000. A challenger could win one by knocking on doors. No super PAC would spend $32 million on a seat worth one six-thousandth of a chamber. No president could recruit fifteen loyalists and fly the Secretary of War to every county fair. Members could be removed more easily, which means they would listen more closely. And a man like Massie would cease to be a lonely exception, because the conditions that produce independent voices would be everywhere.

Would such a body be unwieldy? The House already does nearly all its real work in committees, and it authorized remote committee work in 2020. Build a larger chamber, or let most members legislate from home, living among the people they serve rather than among the lobbyists who court them. And if a nation of 340 million truly cannot be governed by a legislature large enough to represent it, that too is information worth heeding. Perhaps the problem is the size of the union itself, and peaceful separation into smaller, more governable republics deserves serious thought. Free people have redrawn their political boundaries before, and the republic Americans inherited was itself born of exactly such a separation.

Whatever the mechanism, the principle holds. Concentrated power invites conquest; diffused power invites persuasion. Every office that grows too valuable becomes a battlefield, and factions stop trying to convince their neighbors and start trying to rule them. The remedy is to push power downward and outward, into more hands, closer to home, until no single seat is worth buying. That is the only durable path to freedom.

Massie leaves office in January (maybe he, too, will leave with a memorable mic drop). Gallrein’s backers spent a record sum to win one seat. The founders proposed the solution at the country’s inception (a proposal Kentucky voted for!). We should pass that amendment and radically reduce the concentration of power in Congress.

But consider a different scorecard, set fifty years back. In 1976, the median American family earned $14,960. Gold that year averaged about $125 an ounce, which means the typical family’s annual income could buy roughly 120 ounces. At today’s price, those ounces are worth about $500,000. Last year the median family instead earned $110,500, enough for only about 26 ounces.

The median family should therefore be earning half a million dollars a year. It actually earns about a fifth of that. So where did the rest go?

From 1933 (thanks a lot, FDR) through December 31, 1974, the federal government forbade Americans (in the “land of the free,” mind you…) from possessing gold. During this time, the federal government manually set the price of gold at $35/ounce for foreign banks and governments, suppressing the market-based value of the contraband commodity. That arbitrary price held until August 1971, when Richard Nixon cut the dollar’s last tie to gold because, as the Federal Reserve's own history concedes, Washington had issued more dollars than it had gold to honor them.

By 1976 (50 years ago), both distortions were gone. Gold traded freely, any American could legally buy it, and its price was set by buyers and sellers in an open market rather than by Treasury decree. Thus, we can use this market-based price as a reference point to see how much has been taken from us.

The point becomes clearer when you analyze it in terms of hours of your life. In 1976, the federal minimum wage was $2.30, so an hour of the lowest-paid labor in America bought about one fifty-fourth of an ounce of gold. To buy that same amount today, the minimum wage would need to be about $77 an hour. (It is $7.25, and, tangentially, should be zero). A minimum-wage worker then needed about 54 hours to earn an ounce of gold. Today it takes about 575 hours, over ten times as many.

Go back further. In January 1914, just days after the dollar-devaluing Federal Reserve was formed, Henry Ford announced his famous five-dollar day. A five-dollar gold coin held about a quarter ounce of gold, so a Ford line worker took home, every day, metal worth roughly $1,000 at today’s prices. A month’s work amounted to about five ounces, or nearly $21,000 today. And they kept nearly all of it. Along with the Fed’s creation came ratification of the federal income tax, which exempted the first $3,000 of a single person’s income—about double what a Ford worker earned in a year. (Its top rate, reserved for the richest Americans, was a measly 7 percent.)

Today the median full-time worker earns $1,251 a week. At that rate, one must work four months to earn the same amount of gold a Ford worker earned in one month. That’s over 500 more hours to earn the same value, and that’s before factoring in, for the median household, roughly one quarter of this money taken by federal income taxes, further reducing one’s take-home pay.

Over the past fifty years, the dollar has lost roughly 83 percent of its purchasing power; since the Federal Reserve opened in 1913, about 97 percent.

But not everyone loses value equally. Richard Cantillon observed in the 1700s that new money arrives unevenly, entering first through governments, banks, and asset markets. Those nearest the money spigot spend it before prices adjust; wage earners receive it last, after the prices have already adjusted. Inflation, in other words, is a transfer from savers and workers to borrowers and insiders, executed so quietly that its victims are largely unaware of who or what is actually to blame. (Hint: the government.)

That is why the “record stock market!” deserves a second look. Since January 2020, the S&P 500 has risen about 137 percent in dollars. Priced in gold, though, it has fallen roughly 13 percent. And priced in bitcoin, about 80 percent. Smoothed over four-year averages, as in the video below, stocks have gone essentially nowhere in gold and collapsed 93 percent relative to bitcoin.

The lesson here is rather simple: before celebrating what the market did, pause to consider how those supposed gains are being measured. Nominal increases in how many dollars your assets are worth may create the appearance of growth, but they actually reflect the dollar’s devaluation and your poor financial position.

Ludwig von Mises understood that the stakes were never merely financial. Sound money, he argued, was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads. A government that can print need never ask permission, and a government that need never ask permission will eventually stop asking about much else.

None of this requires naively waiting for Washington to restore a gold standard. The solution is individual, and it is available today. Every family can decide what it saves in, ounce by ounce or satoshi by satoshi (a fraction of a bitcoin), and can teach its children why, so that the next generation grows up measuring its labor (and storing its output) in something no Federal Reserve or congressional committee can dilute.

You should be earning half a million dollars a year. The money printers decided otherwise, slowly draining the value of your past earnings and your present labor. What you earn from here on can still be kept in money they cannot print. Act accordingly.

P.S. We discuss this topic regularly in our Tuttle Twins children’s books and curricula, as well as the cartoon. Below is one of many cartoon episodes in which we address it (see more here):

Hold that standard in mind, because this year 865 researchers applied it to the social sciences… and the social sciences bombed disastrously.

The effort, called SCORE and funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), spent seven years examining claims from roughly 3,900 papers published between 2009 and 2018 in 62 journals spanning economics, psychology, education, sociology, political science, business, and more. When the results landed in Nature this spring (on April Fools’ Day, hilariously enough), the headline was shocking: only about half of social-science studies could be replicated.

When independent teams reran the studies with new participants and new data, the original findings held up about as often as a coin lands heads. That number is obviously bad. But a quieter companion paper tells an even worse story, one that received a fraction of the above headline’s attention.

Replication asks whether a finding survives a brand-new study (with new data not used in the original). Reproducibility asks something far more modest: if I use your data and your method, will I get the same answer you asserted? No new experiment, no new sample, and no interpretive judgment call. The same numbers go through the same analysis and get checked against the published result. It is the scholarly equivalent of my teacher checking how I arrived at the answer on my math worksheet or, in other words, the lowest bar a quantitative claim can be asked to clear.

The reproducibility study drew a random sample of 600 papers. The first obstacle was simply obtaining the evidence. Authors, it turns out, had made their data available for only about a quarter of them. Three in four published findings, in other words, could not even be checked, because the people who made the claims would not or could not produce the data. In education research, data were available for only 2.9 percent of papers!

Among the papers that could be tested, only about half reproduced precisely (meaning the reanalysis matched what had been published). Economics and political science fared best, at roughly two-thirds. Across the remaining fields, precise reproduction fell to 38 percent. Education (the discipline whose findings shape how tens of millions of American children spend their days) produced the most arresting result. Of the handful of education papers the team could test, half could not be reproduced at all, and the fewest could be reproduced precisely.

I should note that a failed reproduction does not prove a finding false: code gets lost, documentation is thin, and researchers attempting reproduction make mistakes. Yet consider what that concession implies. If a published result cannot be verified from the author’s own materials, then nobody knows whether it is true, often including the author.

Here lies the heart of the matter. Science is (when followed correctly) a method for earning the right to hold a conclusion. Its authority comes from exposure to challenge: I tell you what I did, you do it yourself, and reality adjudicates between us. If you remove the possibility of checking, what remains is authority without accountability. A field that cannot reproduce its own work is not doing science. It’s purveying academic propaganda.

Why do so many credentialed people tolerate such a low standard? The answer is less mysterious than it seems. Academic careers are built on publication, and publication rewards the novel, the striking, and the sympathetic. A bold finding about the latest pedagogical fashion, or about some fresh injustice in need of a government program, earns citations, grants, and press releases. A careful null result earns a desk drawer and barely a media mention. Who wants the latter? Certainly no aspiring academic aiming to climb the ivory tower’s ladder.

Peer review—the process meant to catch errors—is, of course, performed by peers: often drawn from the same small circles, sharing the same assumptions, and rarely asking to see the data. The SCORE team found that as of 2018, just 6.8 percent of journals outside economics and political science required authors to share data, share code, or submit to a reproducibility check. Reviewers were effectively grading others’ homework without ever asking to see the work. Some “peer review,” that.

Then there’s replication. In the studies SCORE reran (i.e., with new data), the typical effect shrank to less than half of what the originals reported. Any policy built on the original estimate was built on a finding inflated more than twofold. This scandal effectively creates a double-hit for taxpayers who had to pay once to fund the shoddy research, and pay again to live under the policies and programs these findings were used to justify.

Scandalous as this is, it doesn’t require a conspiracy. It requires only ordinary human nature operating inside a system that rewards confidence without auditing it. We are social creatures. We defer to credentials, to consensus, to the solemn phrase “peer-reviewed”—and those who traffic in those phrases know it. Propaganda has always worked best when it borrows the vocabulary of truth. John Oliver covered this pretty well a decade ago:

Yet the same research that exposes the rot also points to the remedy, which is almost embarrassingly simple. Papers published in journals that required data sharing were precisely reproduced about 70 percent of the time; papers in journals with no such policy, about 40 percent. (70 percent is no “A,” but hey, it’s an improvement…) And journals are catching on: by mid-2025, roughly 94 percent of economics and political science journals in the sample had adopted at least one transparency policy, along with 43 percent of journals in other fields.

Incentives shaped the problem, and incentives can reshape it. So change them. Any study funded by taxpayers, directly or indirectly, whether in whole or in part, should publish its data and code as a condition of the grant. Any finding cited in legislation or regulation should be reproducible by an independent party before it is used to justify a new policy or program. And any journalist tempted to write “a new study finds…” should note whether the study has been reproduced, let alone replicated, by anyone else.

For the rest of us, there’s a simple question we need to utilize far more frequently: how do you know? Ask it of any expert asserting something as fact. Teach children to ask it, early and often, to dismantle their deference and strengthen their critical thinking capacity. A citizenry that demands evidence is harder to govern by shocking headlines and propaganda press releases.

Eight-year-old Connor had to learn the rule: show your work. It is long past time we held the people who presume to instruct today’s children, and the rest of us, to the same standard.

This sentence is revealing because I think it’s a request. We’re seven months into a war with Iran (that Congress never constitutionally declared, mind you), and here’s the president suggesting Americans should (continue to) sacrifice for the cause.

Americans have rarely flinched from burdens they felt were necessary. The generation that fought World War II accepted ration books, surrendered its spare tires, and crawled along at a “victory speed” of thirty-five miles an hour on a few gallons of gasoline a week. They bought bonds, planted gardens, and shipped their sons overseas. They did so because they mostly understood what the war was for, who had started it, and what its end would look like. Sacrifice follows conviction. When a cause is clear and clearly just, people will be more willing to bear the burdens placed upon them. When it is neither, they will rightly refuse (and no amount of presidential persuasion will move them).

Republican officeholders have spent the year testing this proposition—trying, in other words, to get voters to believe that the US military’s intervention in Iran is just and deserving of their support. Rep. Buddy Carter called the pain at the pump “a small price to pay.” Sen. Ron Johnson argued it’s worth it. “If we can stand the pain of the rising cost of energy, we need to stay the course,” Sen. John Kennedy assured Americans. Sen. Roger Wicker, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, announced that “the public understands the necessity of what we’re doing.”

(Each of those lawmakers, mind you, treated high gasoline prices under Biden as a grave, administration-made burden on ordinary Americans—calling them “astronomical,” saying families “can’t afford it,” and depicting Biden’s energy policy as a “campaign against the American family.”)

The public isn’t buying it. A Fox News poll released last week found that 60 percent of voters call the war the wrong decision, and 71 percent say the administration has no clear strategy for ending it. That second figure includes 83 percent of independents and 43 percent of Republicans. Nearly half of voters now believe the war will leave America less safe, up from 39 percent in April. A New York Times survey taken the same week found more than three-quarters of independents, and nearly a quarter of the president’s own 2024 voters, disapproving of his handling of the conflict. In January, 72 percent of Republicans said the economy was better than it had been a year earlier. Today 29 percent do.

The base is moving as well. In May, Politico found half of self-described MAGA voters willing to continue the war even if it raised costs at home. By July that share had fallen to 37 percent.

Why the refusal? Consider what the public has been asked to believe. The president has declared this war won several times over: in its first hour, again in March, in April as a “total and complete victory,” and in June with a deal he pronounced finished. And yet after each pronouncement, shooting resumed. The objective has been all over the map: ending a nuclear program the administration claimed last year to have obliterated; toppling the regime; destroying missiles; and reopening the Strait of Hormuz (a waterway that was open before the first bomb fell…). According to the Congressional Budget Office, this war of choice has already cost $38 billion (and eighteen American lives), with $3 billion in costs (and more lives?) added each month. A people cannot commit to a cause its own authors are unable to define.

And yet people’s opinions are rarely reflected in the votes cast by their purported representatives. Last Tuesday the House voted 220 to 204 to direct the president to end hostilities. Seven Republicans joined the majority. Seven. Over two hundred of their colleagues voted to continue the conflict. (The Senate, which has buried every such measure, stands ready to bury this one, too.) The Pentagon, meanwhile, has asked for another $88 billion. (You know, because they manage their budget so well…)

In short, on this issue there’s a large chasm between the sentiment of economically struggling voters and the politicians dismissing their concerns with platitudes of sacrifice and staying the course. And within that chasm live, comfortably, the interests that prosper from permanent war.

Republicans were warned. In a South Carolina debate hall in May 2007, Ron Paul spoke a simple truth: that the September 11 attacks were “blowback,” the CIA’s own word for the unintended consequences of intervention. Rudy Giuliani famously demanded a retraction, clutching his pearls. Dr. Paul refused, and delivered one of the rare teaching moments a debate stage has produced. He pointed to the CIA’s 1953 overthrow of Iran'‘ government and summarized the matter in eight words: “They attack us because we’ve been over there.”

The attendees cheered Giuliani in the moment (full of militaristic fervor and post-9/11 fury). But the country, slowly, sided with Dr. Paul. He out-raised every Republican rival in the final quarter of 2007, and the young people he drew into politics began returning the right to its older, non-interventionist roots. That shifting of the Overton window allowed Donald Trump, nine years later, to tell Jeb Bush on a debate stage that his brother’s administration had lied the nation into Iraq, and to win South Carolina’s primary a week later.

The promise of no new wars helped assemble Trump’s victorious 2024 coalition, libertarians (and me) included. The coalition now lies in rubble. We were promised prosperity and peace. We received tariffs and Tehran.

There is, perhaps, a hopeful reading of the polling numbers: many voters have learned what their representatives have yet to. The instinct Ron Paul awakened in 2007 now outranks any single politician, the president included. It runs strongest among the young, who have never (!!) known a year in which their country was at peace in the Middle East.

But that instinct has few friends among Republican officeholders. There are seven in the House. In six weeks, the voters will have something to say about the rest, and Republicans who wish to survive November might begin by believing their own constituents, who are telling pollsters that the war’s cause is unclear, the cost is real, and their patience is spent.

The president calls four-dollar gasoline a very inexpensive price. Americans have willingly paid far dearer ones for causes that deserved them. Their objection to paying this one is a judgment on the war itself, one whose purpose is neither clear nor clearly just. Wise leaders (who are sadly in short supply in our era) would accept the verdict and extricate the US from this war of choice.

That quick agreement should give us pause, at least to consider what’s going on. Three men who have spent years suing, poaching, and publicly sniping at one another, whose AI companies are valued in the hundreds of billions, arrived at a consensus that the race in which they lead should be slowed for everyone.

When was the last time the leaders of an industry volunteered, in unison, to make less progress? The answer usually turns out to be: whenever slowing down costs the leaders less than it costs the people behind them.

Let’s rewind a few days. Five days earlier, a 27-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon announced his resignation from Anthropic on X, warning that his employer and OpenAI were “gambling with our lives.” He had only a handful of followers and no posts on his account. That same day, the Wall Street Journal ran an exclusive interview. By week’s end it had drawn over 170 million views.

The same day, a Labour MP tabled a bill in the House of Commons to criminalize the development of superintelligence, and within days more than seventy MPs and peers had written the prime minister urging him to back it and to lead an international movement. Democrats in Washington, Bernie Sanders chief among them, spent the week demanding a federal agency.

On Thursday, the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute spent two hours with Tucker Carlson explaining why the machines will kill us all. On Saturday came the essay, which proposes embedded outside evaluators inside every AI lab, common standards across governments, and eventually a global agreement with authoritarian ones.

And yesterday morning, on CBS, Amodei went further: it has “always been very strange,” he said, that this technology is built by a private company, and he is uncomfortable with it. Asked whether he would hand it to the government, he proposed “some kind of joint governance” by several governments together.

What a week.

At the outset, let me say that Coxon’s mega-viral post (and the immediate Journal exclusive, ready to go), followed soon thereafter by Amodei’s viral essay, was quite coordinated. For example, consider the response by David Sacks, the former White House AI czar. He has 1.7 million followers on 𝕏 and a podcast audience in the millions, but a newcomer (Coxon) with no audience outdrew one of the most followed voices in technology policy fifty to one.

This all has the signature of a rollout, and rollouts have authors. The play is basically this: engineer a crisis, manufacture consent for the response, then convert public fear into institutional power that protects incumbents against competition. That sequence has run many times before, and it never ends with individuals being freer than they began.

Sacks’s response was, on its face, generous. Go ahead and “pace,” he told the AI labs (Anthropic and OpenAI); you are the frontier, and nobody is stopping you. The catch, he noted, is that demanding a preferred regulatory framework as the price of restraint would look like a bid for regulatory capture, or, in his phrase, “an election-season psyop.”

And sure enough, within hours of the essay, Anthropic’s policy chief called for “a national law requiring testing of frontier models,” with power to block those deemed unsafe. Safety was the manufactured headline, but government licensing was the ask. It’s a tale as old as time.

If it’s not politics driving this, it’s money. The frontier labs’ advantage comes mainly from being a few months ahead of everyone else, including the open-weight models anyone can download; keeping subscribers paying monthly requires constantly edging out the competition and offering the latest and greatest features. If they slow down and the open-source AI teams do not, those months evaporate, and with them the revenue growth that justifies massive valuations (with both Anthropic and OpenAI wanting to go public but delaying that decision, likely due to how much money they are losing). So before they slow down, in their minds, the government must slow down whatever is behind them. A speed limit enforced only on the cars in your rear-view mirror is a lead, protected by law. Who can resist? (Not Amodei.)

Another benefit of seeking regulation is that when an AI model misbehaves, as some already apparently have, a federal stamp of approval converts the builder’s liability into the regulator’s. The public absorbs the downside; the labs keep the upside. Again, who can resist? (Big Pharma couldn’t. Big Tech can’t, either.)

None of this is novel. Trailblazers spend fortunes educating a market, then watch competitors arrive with better information and lower costs. Imagine Pets.com, in 1999, solemnly warning that the internet was moving too fast and that Congress should license anyone else wishing to build an online store. The pioneers of the web were right that they would be overtaken; they were only wrong that it was the public’s job to prevent it. Protecting one’s downside is a natural impulse but a very poor argument for pausing human progress.

And the pause has always been the wrong call. The Luddites smashed the looms that would soon clothe the world cheaply. Physicians warned that rail travel would damage the body. Paul Ehrlich promised mass starvation by the 1980s; the decades that followed produced the greatest reduction in hunger in recorded history. Every generation has credentialed prophets of catastrophe, and every generation of markets and adaptive humans has dramatically embarrassed them.

Peter Thiel has made a more unsettling version of the point. Drawing on Paul’s warning in 1 Thessalonians 5:3 that destruction arrives under the banner of “peace and safety,” he argues that fear of technological apocalypse is the lever by which a consolidating world authority gets built: treaties, harmonized regimes, and global coordination, all justified by Armageddon. One need not share his religious interpretation to notice that “joint governance” by a combination of governments is exactly that architecture and, if history is any sort of guide, will lead to all kinds of authoritarian tyranny by placing significant power over the many into the hands of the corrupt few.

But maybe it’s neither politics nor money that is behind this coordinated effort to slow things down. Maybe it’s just marketing. It’s been the model these companies have used for years, after all; when the (now-archaic) GPT-2 came out in 2019, OpenAI (and now-CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei, who at the time was VP of Research at OpenAI) declined to release the full version, warning that it could be abused for fake news, impersonation, phishing, and more. As one commenter noted, “The decision was unusual not only because of the model itself, but because the withholding became part of the product story. The staged release strategy transformed a technical milestone into a policy event.” This marketing strategy has been recycled again and again, most recently with the Mythos model.

In a rapidly changing world exacerbated by AI development, taking a breather may sound nice on the surface. But “pausing” costs more than it seems. These systems are compressing the timeline of drug discovery, vaccine design, and treatments for rare genetic disorders, Alzheimer’s, and cancer. Every month of deliberate slowness is measured in the lives of people who ran out of time, a cost typically absent from analysis (“that which is not seen”). This same fear-based approach in other areas has caused real harm, such as hobbling cheap, abundant nuclear energy:

Those with eyes to see can recognize the pattern. “The climate is changing, so we need more government.” Or, “COVID-19 will kill us, so let’s grow the government.” Or, “AI is getting out of hand, so let’s have the government control it.” Beware anyone proposing state intervention as a supposed solution; government is, as Robert LeFevre said, a disease masquerading as its own cure. “Pacing the frontier” or AI development is therefore the technological equivalent of “two weeks to flatten the curve.” Like Fauci before him, Amodei has an ulterior motive with what he’s proposing.

Anthropic and OpenAI are free to slow down, and could do so immediately. What they must not do is enlist the state to slow everyone else down, while dressing the request in the borrowed robes of public safety. It’s laughably absurd to call for a swarm of physical agents (the government) out of concern for a possible future swarm of digital agents.

Amodei and his ilk can pace their own frontiers. They do not get to pace humanity’s. As Marc Andreessen wrote three years ago (and it remains as true today): It’s time to build.

That gap is a good reason to ask what, exactly, today is celebrating. Most Americans will take the day off of work. Fewer can say, with any confidence, why this holiday exists. Labor Day has become the civic cousin of the Fourth of July barbecue: a long weekend, maybe a mediocre parade, and a foggy sense of the historical events that produced the annual recognition.

Before gaining government recognition, labor activists and select states organized Labor Day, with Oregon the first to pass a law recognizing it in 1887. By 1894, 23 more states had adopted it, and Congress made the first Monday in September a federal holiday that June. A century on, the day mostly means a generic salute to “work” and an extra day away from it.

First things first: yes, labor matters. Human effort turns resources into meals, houses, software, and surgeries. A society that despises work will not stay free or fed for long. But these points are distinct from the holiday’s preferred myth: that organized labor (i.e., unions), backed by government, is the main reason American workers live better than their great-grandparents did.

Living better results from rising wages (mo’ money, fewer problems), and wages rise when workers produce more. So what raises production per hour? Productivity rises when people apply better tools, better organization, and more savings to the same hours. That is capital. A ditch dug with a spoon is labor. A ditch dug with a machine is labor multiplied. For most of human history, sheer effort barely moved the food supply. The plow, the horse collar, later the truck and the silicon chip, changed what effort could buy.

Workers without capital look like subsistence: plenty of hands, few multipliers. Machines without operators are scrap. The two depend on each other (until Tesla Optimus robots start producing and maintaining themselves, anyway). But only one of them got a federal holiday. Celebrating labor while ignoring (or in many cases, criticizing) capital is like enjoying the shade and indicting the man who planted and nurtured the tree.

Unions still step into that shade and claim the credit. Labor Day gives them a bigger bully pulpit from which to argue that they speak for workers as a whole. But that claim does not survive scrutiny.

A union can raise pay for the people inside it, typically through exclusion. If you can keep other workers from competing for the same jobs, the remaining seats become more valuable (showing that even socialist pro-union folk implicitly understand basic supply-and-demand economics). That helps the members who kept their jobs. It does not help the applicant turned away, or the worker pushed into inferior employment alternatives.

The right of free association means people are free to join a union or walk off the job together. What they should not get, and do not deserve, is government help locking other workers out, then a holiday speech calling that the “voice of labor.” In the private sector, 94.1% of wage and salary workers are not part of a union! So, treating “union” and “worker” as synonymous is flat-out incorrect.

Here is the encouraging part from the Gallup poll. Eighty-one percent of Americans view free enterprise positively (against 54 percent for capitalism). Asked what's wrong with each, 23 percent name inequality as capitalism’s defect; only 9 percent say it of free enterprise. Americans have not rejected the thing. They have rejected a label, which means the case for capital is losing on superficial branding rather than on substantive merit. That is a far better problem to have, and a fixable one.

So what would a better Labor Day sound like?

We would thank people who show up and do hard work: the grocer, the trucker, the warehouse worker, and the engineer. Then it would go further. It would recognize and thank the capital allocators who saved and paid for the machines, the people who invented them, and the customers who choose to buy them. It would be a Labor+Capital Day, or perhaps better put, Market Day.

Prosperity rises as labor and capital combine. Contrary to the fantasy that Marxists have long concocted, the two are not at odds; they are codependent halves of the market miracle, creating a virtuous cycle whereby capital investment leads to more productive and prosperous labor, which unlocks more capital to invest in yet more opportunities to benefit all of us, workers and otherwise.

Workers matter, of course. So do the tools in their hands and the savings that paid for those tools. What made their hours able to feed and house a country was work joined to capital, under free exchange.

Drop the story that unions and government built American living standards by beating up on capital. And let’s remember what paid for the shade: work, yes, and the tools and savings that made that work worth far more than hands alone could produce.

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.