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I’m not a political pro. I don’t claim to be. I’ve worked races. When Bob Livingston ran for governor of Louisiana in 1987, I was 17 years old and volunteered for him. Before it was over, the campaign had me supervising a crew putting up yard signs all over the New Orleans area. That’s how far back I go. I’ve written speeches, I’ve advised candidates in lots of levels of races. I run a PAC. I have political experience going back a while. But I’m a writer and a pundit by trade, not a political pro. So I don’t claim to know everything. All I can offer is impressions formed from years — if I say decades, that’d make me an old man, and I refuse to make such an admission — of watching the process play out, mostly from the outside but sometimes from the inside. And what I can say with as much certainty as anything I’ll ever put in these pages is that you can’t win elections with only the people who agree with you on everything. It doesn’t work. It never works. When America was a virtually homogenous country in which white-guy property owners were the only ones voting, getting even those people to create a consensus on the major issues of the day was more or less impossible. And it’s certainly not going to work in the America we inhabit now. Winning elections requires building coalitions. Winning elections requires building coalitions. And the Republican establishment, which seems to be hell-bent on recapturing the party now that JD Vance seems to be setting himself up as the leader in waiting in advance of the 2028 presidential cycle, utterly stinks at both. A couple of weeks ago, John Daniel Davidson knocked out a spot-on column at The Federalist identifying the attacks on The Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts over the latter’s defense of Tucker Carlson — this was in the aftermath of Carlson’s more-or-less cordial interview of Nick Fuentes — as an effort to strip away allies of Vance and take him down. (RELATED: The Cold Civil War Is Now on Defrost, and the Right Still Isn’t Ready) Davidson had that perfectly correct, and everything we’ve seen in the Carlson-Fuentes-Ben Shapiro-Roberts free-for-all on the Right ever since has lined up with his theory. Particularly when you discount this kerfuffle according to the obvious context, which is that most of the people involved are podcasters and influencers who are trying to stay ahead of an algorithm that rewards controversy and nastiness, whether that algorithm resides on YouTube, Rumble, X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or whichever other social media platform through which these guys harvest their clicks. This has been blown up into a battle over whether “antisemitism has taken over the Right,” or whether Nick Fuentes is going to be the new Rush Limbaugh, as the conscience of the conservative movement. . @KevinRobertsTX aligns @Heritage with a demagogue who flatters dictators and scorns allies, and he muzzles Heritage fellows from speaking out. He is dismantling not just a think tank’s reputation but a generation’s work of conservative institution building. @TheSpectator pic.twitter.com/kXWSCxP9Hk — Joel Griffith (@joelgriffith) November 14, 2025 Quin Hillyer: In Tucker Carlson controversy, both sides must expel haters https://t.co/8IHW3HI7f4 via @nolanews Kevin Roberts failed. — Quin Hillyer (@QuinHillyer) November 14, 2025 All of this is fake. What isn’t fake, though, is that the Republican establishment residing in Washington is desperate to recover its relevance from the MAGA crowd, which makes up the lion’s share of the GOP’s voters. Most of the MAGA crowd are actually disaffected Bush Republicans. They joined Donald Trump’s coalition for various reasons, but the most prevalent of those is that Bush Republicanism was a fabulous failure. There was an interesting debate at X not long ago over whether Reagan conservatism failed… Did the Conservative movement flop, as many right-oriented populists claim? Just a few policy examples: In 1980, 1 state had a “shall issue” concealed carry law. Today “shall issue” (or no permit) is the rule in all 50 states. In 1980, the top marginal income tax bracket was… — Brad Smith (@CommishSmith) November 11, 2025 Limited government was not preserved, the rule of law wasn’t preserved, individual liberties weren’t preserved, and libertarian market absolutism was used as a shield to defend China methodically destroying our economy. Had “conservatives” made any major inroads in conserving… https://t.co/nZJKc6ZUgV — Wade Miller (@WadeMiller_USMC) November 13, 2025 But there’s a circle to be squared here, and it’s that Reaganism ended in late January of 1989 as the animating philosophy of the Republican Party, and the Bush “New Coke” version of what became known as conservatism took its place. And it took some time, but the Bush crowd gave away basically everything Reagan won. Which is why MAGA ate Bush Republicanism. And MAGA is a coalition of all kinds of people. Among them are young Americans and, particularly, young white male Americans. Lots and lots of them. If you’re Generation X or older and you’re white and male, what you remember about your teens and 20s is that you’d calibrate your politics in order to get dates. It wasn’t so hard to do, of course; you’d mouth a platitude or two about things like equal pay for equal work, and that would get you in the door most of the time. But over two or three or four decades of political, cultural, and even economic decline, everything has changed for the worse where this younger generation is concerned. And the millions of young white males who came together to elect Donald Trump in 2024, despite a profound, deep, and well-placed cynicism about politics and practically everything else, come from a very, very different set of experiences than we older folks have. Worse experiences. And at the hands, I’m sorry to say, not just of the Left but of the Bush Republicans. So it shouldn’t be a shock that the kids will vote for Trump, and probably for Vance, but not for Winsome Earle-Sears or Jack Ciaterrelli. And maybe not for your Republican nominee for Congress next year. Because, they ask, what’s the point? The sale hasn’t been closed with those kids, you know. They’d vote for Trump because the alternative, Kamala Harris, is the personification of every negative experience most of them have had in America. She’s the preachy, incompetent female who insists she’s as good as all the men, when she’s relied on men to elevate her at every stage of her career, not on merit but on something else. They didn’t call her Heels Up Harris for nothing, you know. She speaks in the kinds of jargony gibberish they’ve had to endure all through an educational experience that turns out to be wholly inadequate to the professional challenges they face in an environment where Corporate America is actively trying to price them out of the job market with foreign workers of every stripe and status imaginable. Not to exclude openly discriminating against them with woke DEI hiring and HR policies. You’ve got to be considerably more hard-working, smarter, and more technically competent as a white man just to get in the door of corporate America today, and once you’re there, you then have to immediately submit to endless arrays of diversity and sensitivity training, struggle sessions, and countless other digs at your character and identity. Interestingly enough, this has forced many, if not most of them, into the small business world where they then get to experience all the joys of being regulated and jobbed by an economy rigged by the same woke and failing corporations that rejected them in the first place. On Thursday, I had the Clay & Buck Show on the radio in my truck, and a caller — an unemployed engineer recently turned out of a corporate job — told the story of a former co-worker who had come to the Chicago firm where he’d worked fresh off the plane from Mumbai. This co-worker, said the caller, had worked it out based on what an apartment cost back home, and the exchange rates that a one-bedroom apartment in Chicago would cost him about $450 a month, and used that mistaken impression in his salary negotiations. So he was hired at a pittance, and an American lost his job. And the co-worker then found out he couldn’t make ends meet at the minimum wage salary he’d negotiated and unsurprisingly asked for a raise. The answer? Work at the rate you agreed to, or we’ll have you deported. This is what Generation Z is living with. There are 750,000 or so H-1B visa holders here, and in what should be lucrative white-collar jobs, they dominate because they work for almost Third World wages. H1B’s taking 55% to 86% of entry-level tech jobs. That’s not bringing the best and brightest. That’s hawking the first 3 rungs on the ladder. https://t.co/LRaeGesgKD — Peter St Onge, Ph.D. (@profstonge) November 14, 2025 6.1% of new Computer Science grads are unemployed. 16.5% are underemployed…meaning they’re in jobs that don’t even require their degree. Engineering grads? Even worse. 7.5% unemployed 17% underemployed And there is no law requiring companies to hire Americans before issuing… pic.twitter.com/TedRrN3FZz — Hany Girgis (@SanDiegoKnight) September 15, 2025 Palmer Luckey on H-1B visas: “You would not believe what I saw in Silicon Valley. The H-1B abuse is insane. It is obviously a scam to replace US workers with, basically, slave labor that can’t ever escape.” pic.twitter.com/aGBNGPJ1jx — Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) November 12, 2025 This is a generation of young men that faces structural economic challenges that no Americans have seen since the Great Depression. Its experience with academia — run by an educational establishment which is monolithically female and feminist and which has buried masculinity with medication and “zero tolerance” discipline at the lower levels and a plethora of openly cultural Marxist, intersectional curricula at the higher levels, such that young men are increasingly checking out of college altogether — is more negative than any of the preceding generations. And culturally, it’s more disadvantaged than any of its predecessors. Gen Z males were denied a John Wayne, a Chuck Norris, a Sly Stallone, and an Arnold Schwarzenegger. They didn’t even get a Bruce Willis. More of them than any of their predecessors had to grow up without a father figure at all, and had to figure out their masculinity in a mine field. But they’ve got access to all the recorded media since Edison. They aren’t ignorant of history. In fact, they know all about John Wayne and Chuck Norris, and it’s not lost on them that those role models, and the American experience of the 1950s through the 1990s, which produced those icons, have been denied them. Of course they’re angry. And of course they’re resentful. And of course they’re questioning all of these “timeless truths” that the political establishment has insisted they bow to. So when an Andrew Tate or Nick Fuentes comes along and offers a transgressive challenge to that orthodoxy and is promptly shouted down and — I use this term advisedly, as I’m simply adopting the argument for conversational purposes — persecuted for the transgression, to many of these kids that’s a signal that the establishment which they blame for destroying the America their grandparents once had fears the transgressors. And they find that sexy. Because of course they do. Our generation used to thrive on rebels, not fear them. Some 40 percent of American women under 45 surveyed by Gallup say they’d leave America if they could. That’s the dating pool these guys live in. They’ve dealt with that kind of rejection all their lives, and it’s why they don’t approach women anymore. Tell them they should try, because the worst that can happen is she’ll say no, and they will give you a reasoned argument why you’re wrong. They can show you the countless TikTok videos of women screeching about the unattractive young man who hit on them and gave them the ick factor, and the social media destruction unlucky young guys lacking in game have endured. She can make it a lot worse than just saying no. And if you’ve been given few cultural tools and even worse signals, the chances of it being a lot worse are not zero. Throw in the dating apps and the horrific swipe left/swipe right binary dating culture is reduced to, plus the outrageous materialism of modern feminism which reduces men to payers of bills (and how the Zoomer guys priced from the workforce by foreign labor when not hunted out of existence in corporate America going to build the kind of equity which gets them on the right side of that equation?) and our Gen Z males are starting to run across the same experience their counterparts in China face, but for different reasons. China’s one-child policy resulted in the mass abortions of a huge portion of the female children in the past two generations, so the math doesn’t work out for its younger men. In America, it’s the culture and economics that increasingly don’t work out. Is it a lost generation? Miraculously, no. But it’s a generation of seekers. They want a way forward, and they’re committed to nothing. Why should they be? And to save America, we’re going to have to lock them into our coalition. By whatever means necessary. This column isn’t intended to defend Carlson against Shapiro. If that’s what you’re taking from the above, shame on you. Read it again. Nor is it intended to excuse poor attitudes or underperformance. But right now, we cannot afford to dismiss anyone as a loser. We need a very big tent. Our opponents in the civil war, which is defrosting in our national microwave, have made it very clear how this all ends if they win. (RELATED: The Four Rings of Terror — How Violence Targets Conservative America) It ends in a ditch. With a bullet. We’re the ones fighting to keep that all-too-common reality from happening. We sent Charlie Kirk — it’s much fairer to say he sent himself, but our side staked and supported him — to college campuses just to talk to people and win converts. They shot him dead for it, and now they offer wisecracks about “kirkholes” on social media as not-so-idle threats in an effort to shut us up. (RELATED: Demons and Demonization) This is a fight to save, and maybe restore, some semblance of the America these kids have been denied. And we’ve got to enlist them in this fight when our only real currency with which to do so is that their grievances against the Left are greater than those they harbor for the Bush Republicans. By a little bit. Talk to Kevin Roberts, and he understands this. But they’re trying to get rid of him, just like they’re trying to cancel these other people. Rather than engaging and converting — and then turning out in all the election cycles — the people our coalition can’t win without. And if we can moderate some of the excesses of our new friends, it’ll make us morally superior to the modern Left to boot. We don’t have to listen to the Bush Republicans anymore, and we shouldn’t. There is far too much at stake. READ MORE from Scott McKay: The Dog That Didn’t Bark and the Bombshell That Didn’t Explode Trump and the GOP Won the Shutdown. Let’s Make Sure Trophies Are Taken. Five Quick Things: The Mamdani Matriarchy Sets Up Shop In NYC

Talk of a Christian revival has been hard to miss lately. Even the secular press has noticed the religious undercurrent moving through America. Yet as this supposed revival ripples outward, pews remain eerily empty. The nation speaks of rediscovering faith, but few seem willing to show up for it. The statistics are grim. Fewer Americans attend church today than at any other time in the country’s history. The revival, if it’s real, is happening online — disembodied, individual, and dangerously detached. (RELATED: The Digital Crucifixion of Christianity) Rebecca McLaughlin’s How Church Could (Literally) Save Your Life, a book I recently read, offers a timely reminder that faith without fellowship isn’t faith at all. It’s a health supplement taken without the meal, a gym membership left unused, a diet of devotion without the daily bread. McLaughlin’s argument is beautifully simple: if you care about your soul — and your sanity — get to church. (RELATED: Young Church Attendance: An Interview With Pastor Jesse Johnson) Each year, the average American spends roughly $6,000 chasing wellness. They’ll buy seaweed capsules, weighted blankets, and apps that remind them to breathe. They’ll pay for anything that promises to slow their decay. Yet most ignore the one habit proven to extend life by seven years: attending church. Harvard researcher Tyler VanderWeele isn’t in the business of sermons, yet his findings sound almost evangelical. He found that weekly churchgoers are significantly happier, less likely to suffer depression, and far less likely to die young. That’s not divine marketing, just hard data. (RELATED: How to Write About Christianity While Knowing Nothing About It) We talk about Jesus as though He were an influencer, someone whose content we enjoy but whose community we ignore. A Sunday service has a stronger link to longevity than a strict diet or an exercise routine. Yet millions of Christians skip it for brunch. They’ll post a verse on Instagram, sip oat milk lattes, and call it worship. Church, they argue, is a state of mind. But a state of mind doesn’t lay hands on you when you’re sick, bring casseroles when your mother dies, or sing beside you when you’ve forgotten the words. McLaughlin’s book lands like a polite but firm slap. The modern believer treats God like a therapist on retainer — available when needed, avoided when not. We talk about Jesus as though He were an influencer, someone whose content we enjoy but whose community we ignore. Meanwhile, the body of Christ grows weak from neglect. The “great dechurching,” as scholars call it, has produced predictable results: higher suicide rates, deeper loneliness, shorter lives. The soul, it seems, finds little spiritual sustenance in podcasts. Joe Rogan might make you think, but he can’t make you whole. (RELATED: Is Suicide Selfish?) This isn’t to say church attendance works like a charm. You can’t slip into a pew and expect salvation by osmosis. But refusing to gather is like claiming to be an athlete while never breaking a sweat. It’s like saying you love your family but never visiting home. Faith was never meant to be private hygiene — it’s communal health. The comparison to physical fitness isn’t trivial. A Christian who prays but never worships corporately is like someone who eats kale but never moves. Conversely, a person who volunteers and socializes but neglects prayer is the gym rat who never eats. One nourishes, the other strengthens. Both are required for health. Church is where spiritual muscle meets renewal, where our individual devotion joins something greater and more enduring than our own emotions. Of course, many have reasons for staying away: bad sermons, hypocritical pastors, or memories of churches that wounded more than healed. These wounds are real. But if every hospital visit reminded you of death, would you stop seeing doctors altogether? The Church is full of sinners because it’s where sinners go. To expect perfection from it is to miss its point. Church isn’t entertainment. It isn’t meant to be a stand-up show or a moral spa day. It’s meant to remind you that you’re not the center of the universe. That you need forgiveness, community, and correction. In an age of hyper-customized everything — from playlists to pronouns — the Church remains one of the last institutions that tells you no. And that “no” might be the most loving sound in the modern world. There’s a dark humor in watching America chase immortality through intermittent fasting and cold plunges while ignoring the very thing that might keep it alive. We track our steps, calories, and REM cycles, but not our Sunday attendance. We’d rather stare at a smartwatch than a stained-glass window. The irony is divine: people desperate for meaning overlook the one place built entirely for it. Real revival doesn’t happen in comment sections, but it does happen in sanctuaries, where broken people sit side by side and remember who they are. Faith, at its healthiest, breathes through shared worship. You cannot livestream belonging. You cannot download communion. Real revival doesn’t happen in comment sections, but it does happen in sanctuaries, where broken people sit side by side and remember who they are. The Church, for all its flaws, remains humanity’s oldest recovery group. It’s where addicts confess, doubters find faith, and cynics find peace. In its best moments, it is heaven rehearsed — ordinary people practicing eternity. If the current talk of revival means anything, it should start not with hashtags or cheap theatrics but with full churches. A nation that longs for resurrection must first show up at the tomb. As McLaughlin reminds us, church attendance is a literal lifeline. Skipping it, week after week, is a slow act of self-harm. So go. Sit in the back if you need to. Exchange a word or two, but keep your voice low. Fidget, daydream, glance at your phone (repent later). Just go. READ MORE from John Mac Ghlionn: How Scott Galloway Dumbed Down Jordan Peterson — and Cashed In How the BBC Tried to Burn Trump — and Barbecued Itself Instead Twenty Million Dead: The Generation Abortion Stole from America

Last week, William Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, raised the prospect of a 50-year mortgage with President Trump, who endorsed it with a post on Truth Social. Evidently, the idea was not sufficiently reviewed by administration officials, and a firestorm ensued, after which Trump moderated his enthusiasm. A 50-year mortgage sounds like a creative way to increase home ownership, widely viewed as a means to a stable society, with homeowners committed to maintaining the integrity of their neighborhoods. Of late, the unaffordability of housing has become a strategic domestic issue, contributing to the ascent of Zohran Mamdani, recently elected mayor of New York, with the help of phalanxes of young people who cannot afford the city. A 50-year mortgage would stimulate the demand for housing and help the construction industry. (RELATED: 50-Year Home Loan the Worst Idea Since New Coke) The Wall Street Journal’s lead editorial last Wednesday advised that due to inflation and high mortgage rates, the average monthly payment has increased by about 80 percent over the past five years. Not only that, the Journal reports that the median age of initial home buyers has hit 40, versus the late 20s about 40 years ago. The only trouble is that a 50-year mortgage is a financial narcotic that will encourage irresponsible behavior and increase system risk. The only trouble is that a 50-year mortgage is a financial narcotic that will encourage irresponsible behavior and increase system risk. With total household debt at a record $18.6 trillion according to the Federal Reserve, and U.S. national debt at $38 trillion, or almost 120 percent of GDP, which is at the high end of the G7, the last thing the U.S. needs is another means to encourage indebtedness. Besides increasing system risk, there are various other negatives associated with a 50-year mortgage. (RELATED: The Forces Fueling America’s 45-Year Debt Addiction) First, it certainly appeals to a “get something more for less” mentality and can encourage people to commit to a larger housing acquisition in view of lower monthly payments. Assuming a $500,000 purchase price, 75 percent loan to value, and a 6.25 percent interest rate, the monthly payment is $2,309 for a 30-year mortgage, versus $2,044 for a 50-year one. The difference in total payments of principal and interest is almost $400,000. Given the term of 50 years, a borrower would be in debt for most or all of their adult life in a current or future home — like an indentured laborer. Second, the risk of default is greater over 50 years than 30, and this would increase long-term mortgage rates, which are already prohibitively high for many people at over 6 percent.  Further, a 50-year term generally exceeds the depreciation schedule of a residential property, which the IRS allows to be 27.5 years. (One cannot depreciate a personal residence). With a 50-year mortgage, a borrower would increase equity at a much lower rate than with a 30-year mortgage. Should a recession occur, which is inevitable, home equity loans would not raise as much “rescue” financing against that equity. Third, should the threat of insolvency arise, a borrower would have less incentive to maintain the loan as current, and it would be easier to “walk” and let a bank take it into its real estate owned (REO) portfolio. This phenomenon occurred during the mortgage meltdown of 2008, encouraged by nonrecourse laws in states such as California, Minnesota, Texas, and Connecticut. Fourth, a lower monthly payment can cause weaker borrowers to qualify, driving up home prices. Origination of subprime mortgage credits that were securitized, highly rated by credit agencies, and sold as elaborate derivatives to investors all over the world contributed to the 2008 financial crisis that imperiled Wall Street and Main Street. Fifth, frequently, mortgages are bundled and transformed into mortgage-backed securities, guaranteed by Freddie Mac or Fanny Mae, government-sponsored enterprises, and sold to investors wanting long-term assets yielding more than treasuries. Securities prices and interest rates are inversely proportional, and duration is a measurement of sensitivity to interest rates. Fifty-year mortgage-backed securities, therefore, constitute a high degree of interest rate risk. Market acceptability and liquidity should not be assumed, and since they are backed by Freddie and Fanny, they increase the liabilities of the federal government. Proposals such as this should be well vetted by the Treasury Department, Congressional committees, and regulators before making it to the Oval Office. It was Karl Marx who gave us the expression, “the opium of the people.” Today, he would likely include a 50-year mortgage. It’s not just a bad idea — it’s a lousy idea. READ MORE from Frank Schell: The GENIUS Act: Is It Greed or Is It Good? Trump and Modi Need The Art of the Deal The Next James Bond Will Defy Traditions Frank Schell is a business strategy consultant and former senior vice president of the First National Bank of Chicago. He was a Lecturer at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, and is a contributor of opinion pieces to various journals.

by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project: The EPA approved cyclobutrifluram, the first “forever chemical” pesticide allowed under the Trump administration, for use on golf courses, lawns and crops. The decision came during a historic government shutdown, even as scientists warned that the pesticide could cause lasting water contamination and global environmental harm. (Center for […]

by Daisy Luther, The Organic Prepper: How do people become homeless? It’s a question that a lot more people are asking this year. The number of foreclosures in America has climbed for eight months straight as of October, and evictions also appear to be on the rise, though this number is harder to track. It’s not […]

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