Today marks the 190th anniversary of the martyrdom of the heroes of the Alamo, who died to delay the dictator Santa Anna’s army long enough so that Texian troops could rally and defend their homes. Singular among those heroes was Colonel and Congressman David S. Crockett, “King of the Wild Frontier.”

Born in 1786 in that part of North Carolina which was then the renegade “State of Franklin” but not yet the State of Tennessee, “Davy” Crockett was a legend even in his own time, and long before the Texas Revolution.

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The son of John Crockett, one of the Overmountain Men unleashed by Joseph Martin to turn the tide of the Revolutionary War at Kings Mountain, the future legend in his teenage years repeatedly traveled on foot from eastern Tennessee to Virginia across the Appalachian mountains, developing skills and achieving feats for which he’d become so well known later.  He served under General Andrew Jackson in the Creek War and in Jackson’s campaign, late in the War of 1812, to drive the British out of Florida. By the age of 32 he’d been appointed a justice of the peace, elected lieutenant colonel of the Tennessee Militia, and started several successful business enterprises.

In the Tennessee legislature and in the U.S. House during Jackson’s Presidency, he fought untiringly against Congress’s overspending and unconstitutional expansion of its powers. He also vociferously opposed Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act, the only member of the Tennessee delegation to do so. For this, the voters of Tennessee sent Crockett home. Undaunted, he ran again two years later and returned to the House, resuming his previous crusades and also collaborating with Kentucky Congressman Thomas Chilton to produce his autobiography, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, Written by Himself.

Crockett embarked upon an extensive book tour which, combined with larger-than-life stage productions such as Lion of the West and mythologized biographies like Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee, cemented in the national mind his legend as a pioneer and frontiersman. Everywhere he went, from New York to Little Rock, adoring fans swarmed him.  More and more, he took the opportunity they afforded him to speak against the military threat and growing tyranny of Mexican dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and the need to support an American-style revolution in Texas.

By the time the voters dumped him again in August 1835, Crockett’s heart was consumed with the Texian cause.  No longer seeing Washington or the pettiness of politics as worthwhile, he famously told his erstwhile constituents, “You all can go to Hell, I’m going to Texas.”  And he went.

He arrived in Nacogdoches with a company of volunteers just five months later in January 1836, swearing an oath to the Provisional Government of Texas.  Barely a month later he and his group were in San Antonio de Bexar, with fellow Texian heroes Jim Bowie, Antonio Menchaca and Don Erasmo Seguin, a Founding Father of the Mexican republic who helped feed and finance the Texas Revolution (Don Erasmo was also the father of Juan Seguin, a defender of the Alamo who survived to become a hero of San Jacinto and a Senator of the Republic of Texas).

Less than a month later, Crockett died defending the Alamo.

Moderns appreciate little of the importance of this.  Some (outside Texas at least) see the Alamo as a minor incident at most. Many today view the Texas Revolution as an Anglo brutalization of a victimized Mexico. They ignore, willfully or otherwise, the multilingual, multi-ethnic nature of the affair, the many prominent Mexican statesmen who, loyal to the principles of their lost republic, took up arms in favor of the Revolution: men such as Erasmo Seguin and his friend Lorenzo de Zavala, the first Vice President of Texas, who was born in Yucatan and had previously served as Mexico’s Minister of Finance.

The revisionists also ignore the widespread opposition throughout Mexico to Santa Anna’s dictatorship and scrapping of the 1824 Constitution. In addition to Texas, both Yucatan and the Mexican states immediately across the Rio Grande from Texas formed republics and seceded from Mexico, albeit unsuccessfully.

But beyond the unquestionable rightness of the Texian cause, the successful Revolution served to answer the burning geopolitical question of that era, namely, would America or Mexico — and would liberty or tyranny — dominate the New World?

Santa Anna had proclaimed himself “the Napoleon of the West”:  his ambitions were vastly greater than just holding a few farms on the Brazos.  Had he imposed his tyranny on the Texians, he would have been liberated to threaten — and possibly conquer — New Orleans, the continent’s single most strategic point.

Had Santa Anna taken New Orleans, he would have reversed Jefferson’s achievement in securing the Louisiana Purchase and accomplished what the British in 1815 could not: the reduction of the United States to a servile position. And with all commerce in the Ohio, Missouri and Mississippi river basins bottled up at Santa Anna’s mercy, not only might America never have generated the capital, industrial strength and military might needed to become a great power, but an authoritarian Mexico might well have supplanted it, expanding throughout the West and the Caribbean Basin as well.

But for Houston’s victory at San Jacinto — but for Davy Crockett’s martyr’s death at the Alamo, enabling Houston’s triumph — the American experiment might well have come to nothing.  America might well have been recolonized in that era of global European expansion which saw India and China subjugated (as indeed Mexico was by France for a time, during the 1860s). And with the coming of the 20th Century, freedom might well have perished from the Earth.

History has long honored the greatness of David S. Crockett, and rightly so. He quite literally paid for our lives with his own

Rod Martin

When Donald Trump vowed to tackle excessive federal spending, few expected Elon Musk, the world’s most prominent entrepreneur, to lead the charge. Yet, in a move that reflected Trump’s unconventional style, Musk was appointed head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tasked with dismantling the bloated federal bureaucracy.

DOGE launched ambitiously, aiming to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, eliminate inefficiencies, and overhaul vast parts of the public sector. However, just months into the experiment, the initiative has faltered. DOGE now finds itself politically isolated, legally tangled, and far from fulfilling its promises.

Musk has since become a sharp critic, calling Trump’s budget—the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—a “disgusting abomination” that deepens the deficit. The collapse of DOGE and the backlash to the bill highlight a deeper truth: America’s budget crisis can’t be addressed without tackling deeper structural issues.

DOGE Downfall: Why the Hype Didn’t Match the Reality

DOGE’s biggest failure was its inability to deliver its promised sweeping transformation. From the start, its $2 trillion savings target was unrealistic. Cutting nearly 30% from a $7 trillion budget was never feasible, especially with politically untouchable programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense off the table.

Musk’s claim that eliminating waste alone could close the gap didn’t hold up. While most budget experts support cutting inefficiencies, they agree that waste isn’t the main driver of the fiscal crisis. Even slashing all discretionary spending would save only $1.7 trillion. The real pressure comes from mandatory programs, which account for nearly two-thirds of the budget, leaving only a quarter of spending truly up for debate.

As reality set in, Musk’s savings claims shrank from $2 trillion to just $150 billion. While DOGE cites $170 billion saved, independent estimates suggest closer to $63 billion, less than 1% of federal spending, with many claims either inflated or unverifiable. Some savings were credited to long-canceled contracts. Though headline-grabbing layoffs and cuts were made, they were often botched, forcing agencies to rehire staff or reverse course. Meanwhile, federal spending rose by $166 billion, erasing any gains. Trump’s fiscal agenda worsens the outlook with the first-ever $1 trillion defense budget, sweeping tax cuts, and protected entitlements—all while annual deficits approach $2 trillion.

Yet DOGE’s failures ran deeper than mere fiscal naiveté. What began as Musk’s role as a “special government employee” quickly expanded into an unchecked exercise of executive power, raising constitutional alarms. His team reportedly accessed classified data, redirected funds, and sidelined entire agencies—actions taken without Senate confirmation, potentially in violation of the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. Legal pushback swiftly followed, with fourteen states suing Trump and Musk over the constitutionality of Musk’s White House-granted authority.

Meanwhile, glaring conflicts of interest became impossible to ignore. Musk’s companies—X, SpaceX, and Tesla—hold $38 billion in federal contracts, loans, tax breaks, and subsidies while facing over 30 federal investigations. His push to dismantle regulatory agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)—while X launches the “X Money Account,” a mobile payment service subject to CFPB oversight—only deepened concerns. Musk was legally obligated to separate his business dealings from government decisions. One major result has been the impact on Musk’s reputation. Once hailed as a visionary for his promotion of electric cars, he is now viewed unfavorably by many former fans.

Why Real Fiscal Reform Must Go Through Congress

America’s budget crisis isn’t just about waste—it’s about scale. While headlines fixate on symbolic cuts and political theater, the real drivers of the deficit lie deeper, buried in the structural commitments of federal spending. Musk’s DOGE initiative promised big savings but ran into a hard truth: real spending lies in mandatory programs, not discretionary ones. Cuts to USAID and DEI made headlines but barely moved the needle.

Some now doubt that DOGE was ever a serious reform effort. To many, it now looks less like governance and more like a chaotic, headline-driven power grab, by a youthful team of Musk staffers who were out of their depth. While its goals were admirable, real and lasting fiscal reform can only be achieved through lawful, institutional channels, not executive overreach.

DOGE did strike a chord with a public weary of government overspending and more inclined toward spending restraint than tax increases to address the deficit, but meaningful reform demands that Congress confront the politically difficult structural drivers of the deficit. It will take more than headlines—it needs bipartisan will and a serious commitment to fiscal reality.

Congress must reassert its constitutional role in the budget process and restore a measure of fiscal discipline. That means using tools like rescissions and budget reconciliation as originally intended—to reduce deficits, not widen them. Anything less amounts to complicity in a deepening fiscal crisis, one that threatens growth, fuels inflation, and drives up the national debt.

• Mohamed MoutiiMohamed Moutii is a Research Associate at the Arab Center for Research, a Research Fellow at the Institute for Research in Economic and Fiscal Issues (IREF Europe), and a member of the Ibn Khaldun Initiative for Free Thought. He has translated numerous books from English to Arabic, helping to spread free-market literature in the Arabic-speaking world. His work includes articles, analyses, and policy briefs published by various Western and Arab think tanks.

A terrorist in a suit is still a terrorist.” And just because you’re mayor doesn’t mean you’re not a terrorist.

Mamdani is in office to destroy New York City. He’s a Muslim and a terrorist who openly and proudly, in his campaign, posed with terrorists. He of course opposes President Trump’s actions against Iran’s terrorist regime because he, Mamdani, supports that regime. He imposes policies of “democratic socialism” — nothing more than Communism — because doing so lures ignorant young New Yorkers to support him, since they think government seizure of private property, profits and the means of production will make life easier (more “affordable”) for them.

Mamdani understands that if he can manipulate citizens of New York City into destroying this important corner of Western civilization (the legendary Big Apple), he will complete the job started by more obvious terrorists on or even before 9/11. “Death to America” may have been blown apart in Tehran. But in New York City, the murder-suicide of a once spectacular metropolis is well underway.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Most students of history have likely pondered the question: Is it the times that make the man, or is it the man that makes the times? The question, though superficially intriguing, seems to have an easy enough answer: Sometimes it is the times that makes the man, and sometimes it is the man that makes the times. Rarest of all is the man who is both summoned and elevated by the times, on the one hand, and who has the courage and conviction to shape the times in return, on the other hand. It is this lattermost group of men who we might refer to as the truly great men of history.

Donald Trump is, on this metric, a great man of history.

In 2016, Trump was first swept into office, just a few months after the Brexit referendum in the U.K., amidst a broader wave of nationalist backlash to the regnant neoliberal global order. Trump, a lifelong free trade skeptic with New York City outer-borough sensibilities, was the right man to lead at the right moment. He became the first president since Richard Nixon’s fateful trip to visit Chairman Mao in Beijing to begin decoupling the U.S. from its economic bear hug with the Chinese Communist Party. More recently, Trump has overseen a historic securing of America’s porous southern border and an equally historic withdrawal from dozens of transnational institutions.

Trump has met the moment and risen to the occasion in numerous foreign theaters besides China and the broader Indo-Pacific as well. He saw decades of American malaise, managed decline, and overextended empire, and he has promptly reversed course.

Trump and his administration have repeatedly proven willing and unafraid to criticize America’s European allies, nudging our core NATO partners to be better versions of themselves in such areas as military spending and defense self-sufficiency. He has responded to decades of buildup of murderous transnational nonstate cartels and Chinese and Russian entrenchment in our own hemisphere by reasserting the Latin America-centric Monroe Doctrine, as most spectacularly evidenced by January’s Operation Absolute Resolve extraction of fugitive Nicolas Maduro in Caracas.

And now there is the unfolding Operation Epic Fury in Iran.

For 47 years, Iran’s revolutionary Shiite theocracy has been attempting to kill, and indeed has been killing, Americans. From the U.S. Marines Corps barracks in Beirut in 1983 to the Bush-era roadside IEDs in Iraq to the attempted (and indicted) assassination of Trump himself, the mullah regime in Tehran has a long and bloody track record when it comes to American loss of life—more than 1,000 Americans killed in total, according to U.S. Central Command. For decades, presidents kicked the can down the road, appeasing and negotiating with the mullahs as if they were atheistic Soviets and not 72 virgins-aspiring apocalyptic Islamists. The mullahs dissembled and stalled, while racing toward nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles on which to mount them.

And then Trump came along.

Trump campaigned on ending so-called forever wars in the Middle East. His critics, both on the Left and in certain pockets of the impotent Right, have accused Trump of violating that promise with the current campaign. But those critics are wrong. Iran has been at war with us, whether or not we think about it and acknowledge it, since the founding of the revolutionary regime in 1979. The revolutionaries’ very first action was to storm the U.S. embassy in Tehran and commence a 444-day hostage crisis. Tehran’s “death to America” chants since then have been daily, and its anti-American atrocities have been legion.

With Epic Fury, Trump isn’t starting a new forever war—he is ending one.

Time and again, Trump has shown that he is willing to take actions that U.S. presidents of both parties long paid lip service to support, but never actually effectuated. The notion that the world’s most zealous Islamist regime cannot acquire the world’s most dangerous weapons had been spoken so many times by so many different politicians over the decades that it had become old hat. No one actually acted on it until Trump tore up Barack Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal in 2018 and bombed key Iranian nuclear facilities during Operation Midnight Hammer in 2025. Now, with Operation Epic Fury, Trump is attempting to finish the job and permanently ensure that Iran no longer threatens American interests.

God bless him for it.

The polling on Operation Epic Fury is mixed—predictably, it’s split largely along partisan lines. But I strongly suspect Trump does not care in the slightest about the polling. Great men of history do not put a finger in the wind before deciding to take a seismic, world-altering action. They don’t read the polls; they read the times and allow the rising tides of zeitgeist to elevate them to their better, most dynamic selves. And they have the corresponding vision and determination to shape the times for the better, in return. The American national interest will be improved by seeing the current mission in Iran through. So too will the broader condition of the Middle East—and, for that matter, the whole world.

The skeptics may shriek loudly. Let them do so. Because for Donald Trump, a drastically improved national—and regional and global—outlook is more than justification enough. Just as it is for all great men of history.

Josh Hammer is Newsweek senior editor-at-large, host of “The Josh Hammer Show,” senior counsel for the Article III Project, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and author of Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West (Radius Book Group). X: @josh_hammer.

With Hezbollah’s Iranian patron on the ropes, Jerusalem gets another shot at completing the job it was forced to pause two years ago.

It took barely 48 hours after the United States and Israel began their joint operation against the Iranian regime for Hezbollah to fire rockets at Israel. As it became clear that regime decapitation was part of the operation’s objectives, the group’s involvement was all but inevitable. Israel retaliated immediately with a wave of targeted strikes and has now begun limited ground operations in south Lebanon, even as its air force maintains an unprecedented tempo of sorties over Iran.

For Israel, Hezbollah is unfinished business. And while the Iranian proxy’s fate ultimately will be affected by that of its patrons in Tehran, the current moment offers Israel an opening to rectify the mistake of two years ago and secure a strategic win independent of the ultimate outcome of the campaign in Iran.

By the end of 2024, Hezbollah was at a low point it had not experienced since its establishment four decades earlier. The blows Israel inflicted on the organization during the war that began in October 2023—culminating in the elimination of nearly its entire top echelon and in the loss of an essential logistical and financial lifeline with the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria in December 2024—left Hezbollah weakened, exposed, and strategically vulnerable. It appeared that relatively little additional pressure would have sufficed to dismantle it as a powerful militia and prominent political actor in Lebanon.

Yet in November 2024, under American pressure and amid a desire to prioritize other arenas, Israel was forced to accept a cease-fire. In doing so, it granted Hezbollah a lifeline—one the organization has used to regroup and rebuild. It looked as though Israel had been denied a rare strategic opportunity. After all, for decades Israel viewed Hezbollah as its most dangerous enemy. The organization’s missile arsenal had cast a constant shadow over life in northern Israel and had contributed to Israeli strategic hesitation regarding action against Iran’s nuclear program.

For a while, it seemed as though an old-new concept, one that was supposed to have collapsed on Oct. 7, had once again begun to take hold in regard to Lebanon: namely, the conceit that Hezbollah had been severely weakened and was now deterred; that time and internal Lebanese pressure would gradually compel it to disarm. This logic, which was encouraged by American envoys and U.S. policy in Lebanon, echoed past strategic assumptions that had proved fatally wrong.

When Hassan Nasrallah decided to join Hamas’ war against Israel, he was convinced it was a win-win situation, based on his experience over three decades as Hezbollah’s secretary general. When Israel’s northern villages cleared out under Hezbollah fire, and when it appeared that Washington had placed limits on Israeli escalation in Lebanon, it looked as though his calculation was sound. However, Nasrallah had made a deadly mistake, as he failed to grasp and internalize the profound shift that had taken place within Israel following Oct. 7. He also underestimated the extent of the intelligence and operational superiority that Israel had gained over the years against his organization.

By the summer of 2024, Jerusalem had made the decision to launch a comprehensive attack against Hezbollah. Within a couple of months, the IDF had succeeded in eliminating the group’s top military command as well as its political leadership, including Nasrallah and his successor, Hashem Safieddine, and had neutralized most of its military capabilities. Facing mounting losses, Hezbollah was relieved by the American push for a cease-fire that took effect on Nov. 27, 2024. Within a month of the cease-fire, the Assad regime collapsed, further compounding Hezbollah’s difficulties.

Eyal Zisser, Tablet Magazine

In 2008, Californians voted on what they were told would be a modern transportation system — a sleek, high-speed rail line connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco in under three hours, financed in part by private investment, delivered at a defined cost, and built within a reasonable timeframe.  Eighteen years later, all that has been delivered is one of the largest eminent domain land grabs in modern history.

No serious person disputes that infrastructure requires land.  But the power of eminent domain is not merely an administrative tool.  It is among the most formidable powers government possesses: the authority to compel the transfer of private property for “public use.”  The Founders allowed it reluctantly, instituting constitutional protections and the requirement of just compensation.  The theory was simple: The public benefit had to be clear, direct, and necessary.

What Californians are witnessing today is a perverse transmogrification of the concept.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority has acquired more than two thousand parcels of land — along its proposed routes, particularly through the Central Valley.  Much of this land was obtained through negotiated purchase, but a substantial portion required formal eminent domain proceedings.  Farms have been bisected.  Family homes have been condemned.  Small businesses have faced displacement.  In many cases, the takings were not entire properties, but strips and easements — yet those “partial” takings often cripple the economic viability of what remains.

The most striking fact is not merely the number of parcels, but the context in which they were taken.

The project that voters approved bore specific representations: a defined route, defined endpoints, cost estimates, and a timeline.  Yet over the years, those routes have shifted, and timelines continue to stretch toward infinity.  The grand statewide vision is little more than a pipe dream.  Meanwhile, land has already been taken — permanently.

Property rights are not abstract philosophical ornaments.  They are the institutional backbone of a free society.  When government exercises eminent domain, it is asserting that the public need outweighs the individual’s right to keep what is his.  That assertion demands that the project be real, viable, and necessary.

When land has been taken for a project that later changes, the property owner does not get his land back.  When construction phases are delayed for years, the displaced family does not rewind time.  When farmland sits idle because funding gaps stall progress, the farmer does not recoup lost continuity of operation.

The defenders of the project often argue that large infrastructure efforts inevitably evolve.  That is  sometimes true.  But evolution in engineering design is not the same as evolution in political promises.  The moral justification for eminent domain depends on the integrity of those promises.

If a private developer misrepresents a project to induce land sales, the law calls that fraud.  When the government makes optimistic projections, downplays risks, and then substantially alters the project after land has been secured, the label may be different, but the practical effect on property owners is the same.

Consider the incentives.  Politicians gain prestige from announcing ambitious projects.  Bureaucracies gain budget and authority as projects expand.  Contractors gain long-term revenue streams.  But the individual property owner stands alone.  His home or farm is not a line item in a budget; it is his capital, his security, and often his legacy.

Compensation, while constitutionally required, does not erase the asymmetry.  “Fair market value” is a theoretical construct.  It rarely captures relocation costs, disruption of community ties, lost business goodwill, or the emotional attachment to land held for generations.  Moreover, the state’s valuation and the owner’s valuation frequently diverge, leading to protracted legal battles in which the government’s resources far exceed the individual’s.

This dynamic is particularly acute in agricultural regions.  In the Central Valley, the rail corridor cuts through productive farmland.  Even when only a strip is taken, irrigation systems must be reconfigured, equipment routes altered, and economies of scale disrupted.  A narrow slice of land can impose broad consequences.

And then there is the uncomfortable question: What if portions of the system are never completed, or not delivered as originally envisioned?

If the high-speed rail network remains a partial system — if funding constraints or political shifts prevent full build-out — then land will have been taken under the banner of a comprehensive project that never materializes.  The constitutional standard is “public use,” but public use implies public functionality.  A right-of-way that sits unused or underused for decades is an egregious violation of individual rights.

We now know that the state’s original ridership projections, cost estimates, and private investment assumptions were totally speculative and overly optimistic.  To proceed with land acquisition on the basis of projections that repeatedly change is to shift risk onto property owners who never volunteered to bear it.

Democratic consent is meaningful only if voters understand what they are authorizing.  When Californians approved billions in bonds, they were not presented with a detailed map of every parcel to be condemned, nor with a candid assessment of how frequently alignments might shift.  They voted for a transportation vision.  They did not vote to empower an open-ended land acquisition program whose scale would become clear only years later.

Eminent domain, by its nature, is coercive.  It substitutes state judgment for individual choice.  That substitution can be justified — but only under stringent conditions.  When those conditions are diluted by shifting plans, cost escalations, and uncertain completion, the moral and constitutional foundation weakens.  The citizens pay a heavy price for having trusted the government.

This is not an argument against infrastructure per se.  Roads, bridges, and railways have long required land assembly.  It is an argument for discipline — fiscal, political, and moral — before invoking the state’s most intrusive powers.

A government that can take land on the basis of ambitious or unrealistic projections must also be willing to reassess when those projections deteriorate.  Each additional parcel condemned is an immoral act with permanent consequences.

Californians were promised speed, efficiency, and transformation.  What many property owners have experienced instead is uncertainty, displacement, and the heavy hand of eminent domain exercised for a project with no resemblance to its original design.

In the end, the controversy over high-speed rail is not merely about trains or budgets.  It is about the hierarchy of values in a free society.  Property rights are a cornerstone of individual liberty.  When they can be, in effect, stolen by bait-and-switch politics, citizens are reduced to pawns and dupes.

Jim Cardoza is the author of The Moral Superiority of Liberty and the founder of LibertyPen.com.  Read more of his essays there.

Job 23:10-11 (King James Version) But he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold. My foot hath held his steps, his way have I kept, and not declined.

Listening to the Buggy Whip Press explaining the Iran attacks to the American people is like watching a monkey typing Shakespeare. Trump has such an amazing gift of exposing everyone for exactly who they are and what they are not. Nobody believes them or listens to them since they know the standard reporting will be Trump bad Iran good, so why listen when you already know their conclusion.

They have no curiosity while only axing Gotcha questions when you have the most important jobs in the capitol and are more useless than a Tesla with a dead battery. The President has taken out the biggest instigator of terrorism in the entire world and the mediots want to know what the end game is and how high oil prices can hurt Trump. The end game is sending the biggest mass murderer in the world to meet Satan, game over.

President Trump has also shown how really dumb these people actually are. In their need to overthrow the freely elected President they cannot point out the obvious brilliance of his presidency. This is simply the last step of freeing the world’s vital oil supplies from despots and dictators. It is so obviously obvious only a media moron would not notice it. These are the same mental giants who did not notice Biden could not find the stairs off the stage or would always shake hands with nobody with a look that said nobody home.

Now Trump has the largest reserves of oil accessible to the free world. This would be America, Canada, Venezuela, and Iran with a terror free Middle East. He has neutered the biggest threat to the Strait of Hormuz by putting their ships on the bottom of the ocean and having complete air domination over Iran. This makes the Iran military more useless than the Tesla.

Without air support they cannot terrorize oil shipments let alone their own people. The Kurds have been fighting them for centuries and now have an open season on Iran. If Iraq wants to take part of it there is nothing stopping them since anytime Iran mounts an attack or defense America or Israel will have target practice so they effectively have no military which is the end game for Iran.

This brilliant strategy will free the oil supplies around the world like it has never had before driving prices lower and making manufactured goods lower than ever before. There is now a very real possibility Trump will have secured the lifeblood of business for decades thanks to his partnership with Israel and Venezuela.

The bigger picture is he has cut off China’s main supplies of cheap oil. Since both countries had an embargo on their oil, wink, wink, they were purchasing it at half price or less and both those suppliers are dead and buried. Now China will be buying most of their oil from Trump’s Oil which is the real end game for the Dinosaur Press. Perhaps you Dinosaurs could smile once in a decade or so?

The same doom and gloom from the Pen and Quill press who are still living in Watergate as they predicted runaway inflation from tariffs and an endless war in Venezuela. They have never been right about anything and wrong about everything yet this time Trump is going to fail.

It is obvious God is in control and is using the last man men would choose just like David. He has turned Israel into Iran’s ally and going to free the Iranian people. Whether they can handle freedom is up to them, but the end of the dictatorship is here.

They are now a military state without an effective military. It has no communication, air cover, or a weapons industry. God works in mysterious ways and this may be the most mysterious way of all.

Pray for our Sailors and Airmen

Bray

Ayn Rand wrote, “Socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.”

She nailed it.

Because I am a therapist, people always ask me: “What is self-esteem?”

In part, self-esteem refers to the attitude that you have a right to your OWN life, and to live for your OWN sake.

In line with Rand’s quote, socialism (which is tyranny) is incompatible with self-esteem.

¹In short: Freedom (economic and otherwise) is the mental oxygen you breathe. Your self-esteem will choke under socialism. And if you possess any self-esteem at all, you could never support socialism.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The only difference between a socialist and a Democrat is that the Democrat says, “Your earnings don’t belong to you. Your earnings belong to the government. Now hand over half of your earnings.”

A socialist (aka communist) says, “Your earnings don’t belong to you. Your earnings belong to the government. Now hand over ALL of your earnings.”

Morally, there’s no distinction.

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Today’s Democrat has turned into a socialist. Why? Because the thief who feels entitled to half your income feels entitled to all of it. It’s only a matter of time.

A conventional Republican, by the way, claims: “Your earnings are yours. But please hand over half of them anyway. And if the communists take over — well, we’ll meet them halfway.”

You cannot meet a thief, a brute, a predator, or a totalitarian halfway. Once you concede anything to a totalitarian, you have lost it all.

Most of the world, outside of America, now understands this. Americans will be the last to learn it — the hard way.

Uninformed people say they support socialists because they’re struggling with expenses. “I care about affordability.”

So, imagine this solution: Hire someone to rob other people and give you a portion of the loot. Now you’ll be able to afford more, right? “Well, no, that would be theft. I can’t do that. It’s not right.”

So instead, they vote for a candidate who says he will make robbery LEGAL when he does it — that he’ll give you a portion of the loot, and then all will be well.

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“Now you’re talking. That’s not only morally acceptable. It’s morally virtuous.” Being uninformed will come with consequences.

And then there’s the economics of it. Let’s pretend for a moment that there are no moral issues with voting for someone who promises to legalize robbery.

You can pretend there are no unintended practical consequences of this action — but there are.

For one thing, there’s the law of supply and demand. Now that you’ll have all this free loot, the prices for those goods and services will go up.

Why? Because as demand goes up with supply staying the same, prices go up.

And supply, in fact, will go down. Why? Because with a communist now in charge of everything, the most productive and profitable companies and businesses will flee — to places with no socialism, or less socialism. Or they’ll just stop producing.

Put simply: When you outlaw profit as socialism does, you outlaw production.

So economically, socialism’s legalized theft can be expected to lead to smaller supply and greater demand: a recipe for high prices.

This will create an even greater “affordability” crisis. Case in point: the empty grocery shelves in Soviet Russia, Cuba, or Venezuela.

At that point, communists will do what communists always do: Take everything over.

“Prices are out of control, thanks to greedy capitalists; no job is too big for the government, so let the government handle everything.”

In New York City, victorious socialists have already promised to take over grocery stores and control the distribution of food. This sets the stage for taking over everything, which will seem rational when socialist policies make prices go through the roof.

Remember: This is what the Democrat Party has in store for all of America. We are no longer dealing with JFK’s Democrat Party. Nor even Lyndon Johnson’s, Jimmy Carter’s, or Bill Clinton’s Democrat Party.

The Democrats have gone all the way, both in theory and practice.

The previously unthinkable result of all this? AOC is their front-runner for the 2028 nomination for president.

A growing number of younger voters, as they age, say they want socialism. What will America look like in 10 years under socialism? What will NYC look like in 10 months?

The only hope for “affordability” is capitalism. Capitalism meets demand by producing the goods.

The quest for profit ultimately leads to more goods and that, in turn, reduces prices.

Conversely, socialism creates NOTHING. It disrupts innovation, prevents production, and leads to stagnation and shortages.

Note that socialist supporters always live in capitalist countries. They take for granted that goods will continue to be present and plentiful. 

The U.S. economy expanded at a surprisingly strong 4.3% annual rate in the third quarter as consumer spending, exports, and government spending all grew. Interesting.

All I hear people saying is how bad the economy is. “AI is destroying the economy!”

How? It’s never explained.

“Trump is destroying the economy.” By doing what? “Why, it’s Trump!”

No other explanation needed. “Well, OK; he’s racist.”

Inflation is killing us. Yes, it is. But governments create inflation. The Democrats’ unlimited government equals even more inflation.

Affordability? We cannot afford socialism. And we cannot afford to abandon capitalism.

America, at least the part governed by socialists, stands on the precipice of economic ruin.

Tragically, had we been paying attention, none of it ever had to happen.

Michael J. Hurd, Ph.D. is a psychotherapist with a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Psychology. He’s the author of “Grow Up America” and “Bad Therapy, Good Therapy,” (see: www.DrHurd.com). Dr. Hurd has been quoted in and/or appeared on over 30 radio shows/podcasts (including Rush Limbaugh and Larry Elder) and on Newsmax TV. He also authors two self-help columns weekly. Dr. Hurd resides in Charleston, South Carolina. Read More Dr. Hurd’s Reports — More Here.

Next month the most important political book of the year, or perhaps the decade, will be published. It is called The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control. The author is Jacob Siegel, a journalist for the Tablet.

To summarize: shocked by the arrival of Donald Trump in 2016, American government officials, the media, and the technology giants created a system of censoring the public, spying on other opponents, and planting false stories. The media was complicit and will never fully recover.

Trump’s rise, Siegel writes, “meant that politics had become war, as it is in many parts of the world, and tens of millions of Americans were the enemy.” He goes on: “One of the most disorienting aspects of the conspiratorial mania that overtook America’s elites in response to the rise of Donald Trump was the sheer scale of expert consensus behind views that were, on their merits, utterly deranged. What an ordinary person saw in 2016 was the country’s most venerated institutions all promoting the same claims about a Russian takeover of the American political system. Any given charge about Trump’s ties to the Kremlin might fall apart under scrutiny, but there were so many, coming from seemingly authoritative sources, that their totality seemed to outweigh their individual merits. The alternative—that it might all be so much propaganda—was difficult to face.”

To face the truth means to face the fact that “legions of Harvard professors, senators, senior national security officials, and respected journalists touting Trump’s sinister connections to Vladimir Putin had allowed themselves to become credulous bullhorns for a cynical and destructive information operation. If that was true it suggested that institutions and individuals with hundreds of years of built-up trust behind them were not only capable of getting big questions wrong but could, at any moment, decide to join hands and break out in song while they led the entire country off a cliff.”

One of the things that is going to make The Information State so powerful is that it will challenge the media’s greatest power – the power to ignore. Siegel, a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan wars, is not MAGA, even if he is not liberal. He will be interviewed at the CUNY Graduate Center on March 16. His book will get reviewed – unlike others that the media chooses to ignore.

Siegel explores how reporters became more pliant and stupid, even as the digital revolution exploded with access and new voices. A key moment came in 2015 when White House aide Ben Rhodes tried to sell Obama’s deal with Iran. Rhodes observed, “Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington.” Siegel: “Without reporters on the ground, journalists simply retailed the narratives fed to them by their political contacts….Rhodes seemed to enjoy boasting about his power over people he considered beneath him. That did not make his assessment of the media landscape wrong. ‘The average reporter we talk to is twenty-seven years old,’ he noted. ‘Their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.’ The depth of reporting and institutional experience built into the twentieth-century print model was dead. Something else that was easier to manipulate had taken its place.”

When asked about the “onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal,” Rhodes explained how the White House had manufactured a consensus: “We created an echo chamber.” The legions of experts were apparatchiks. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say,” Rhodes acknowledged. The echo chamber effect relied on the twin revolutions in social media and the smartphone. It worked because great masses of people had already been herded into the vast, unbroken wholeness of the digital networks, where a message could reverberate from one end to the other without hitting any structural walls. Twitter, the social media platform favored by journalists and DC insiders, played a crucial role by synchronizing the various narrative purveyors in the echo chamber.”

On December 23, 2016, Obama signed the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act. The Act directed the State Department to expand the mission of the recently formed Global Engagement Center, run out of the Department of Homeland Security, and whose job was to counter the effects of foreign propaganda and disinformation. Siegel notes that “by creating a mechanism to enforce a party line on matters related to fighting disinformation and defending ‘US interests,’ the agency effectively created an official government office for coordinating the resistance to Trump.”

Then came Russiagate. Terrible people like John Brennan of the CIA, James Comey of the FBI, and President Barack Obama created a false story and sold it to the American people. Government officials were practicing the new art of “hybrid warfare,” which involved manipulating information itself. “Hybrid warfare,” Siegel writes, “provided the framework for reclassifying populist parties as security threats and shoving them outside the protection of the law.”

Obama also forced people like Mark Zuckerberg and platforms like Twitter to go along. Zuckerberg at first resisted, but quickly caved when Obama demanded that they combat “disinformation.” The new Leviathan, observes Siegel, was huge. The “whole-of-society apparatus” intent on “fighting disinformation” was in reality a group that “fused the political goals of the Obama-led ruling party with the institutional agenda of the intelligence agencies, funding from the financial elite, the narrative power and activist fervor of the media and NGOs, and the tech companies’ technological control of the public arena. The fact that the populist challenge was both legal and highly democratic did not affect their view that it was illegitimate. If democracy allowed such a threat to arise, then the rules of democracy would have to be changed.