I’m old. Really old. Eighty years old. This is not as glamorous as it might sound. My health has been a real problem. Modern American medicine is absolutely lacking in compassion for us old people. My wife and I spend much of our time and money visiting doctors to get help. The main goal of the doctors and the hospitals and the insurance giants seems to be to deny us coverage. But the main lesson of old age — there are others as well — is to follow the advice of Dr. Johnson. He said that the three necessaries of adversity are an “old dog, an old wife, and ready money…” I will talk ad nauseam about the first two. But I, as an expert in finance, urgently caution you not to neglect the third. Many of us, as we arrive at the ultimate adversity, old age, find ourselves short of ready money. I humbly emphasize the “ready” part about money. Many of us have lovely old homes we bought long ago. They have risen dramatically in value. But when we have bills coming in, we need actual cash money. You can sell your real estate. You can probably refinance it. But those are slow processes. The state and the mortgage lenders will NOT be patient. If you want money suddenly, your friends and family will not help, or if they do, they will shame you so much that you would prefer fleeing the jurisdiction or planet earth. YOU MUST ARRANGE YOUR ASSETS SUCH THAT YOU HAVE TONS OF THEM THAT CAN BE LIQUID IMMEDIATELY. Cash, stocks, bonds, all these can save your life from yourself. I did well on investing generally. But I, even now, I crave liquidity beyond anything except my wife’s company. Look to it, old friends. Daily Nightmares Every night, or almost every night, my goddess wife and I watch documentaries about Hitler and the Third Reich. Obviously, a huge part of that horror story of human evil and depravity is about the Holocaust and the cruel murder of millions of Jews because of the worst racism imaginable. In October 2023, there was another horror of a Holocaust on the Israeli border. Israel has been trying to protect itself and its Jews by shutting down the terror, murder group, Hamas. It has been engaged in a war against the well-dug-in murderers of Hamas. Israel has been forced to use heavy weapons when engaged in this struggle. But despite this truth and the truth that Hamas is still using rockets to attack Israelis, and disregarding the “peace” deal that Mr. Trump fought to achieve. But the utter horror of horrors is that “the world” is blaming Israel for seeking to protect itself. Major nation after nation is condemning Israel for seeking a peaceful world around it. Major nations like Canada and the U.K. and France have turned on the tiny nation of Israel. The likely future mayor of New York City has said he will arrest Prime Minister Netanyahu if that brave warrior for peace dares to visit New York to speak to the U.N. A well-known African-American podcaster has flown the Nazi Swastika and flourished a portrait of Hitler to protestors wanting him to tone down his praise of Der Führer. That man is freer to move around the world than is Netanyahu, whose life has been all about freedom and equal rights. God help us. READ MORE from Ben Stein: The Almighty Power Return to Gunskirchen Lager and Col. Denman What Happened to America?

Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty seeks an increase in the property transfer tax, imposed every time a home is sold, to help “unsheltered people” in the California capital. The increase would only apply to homes selling for more than $1 million, and the mayor estimates it would raise $8-9 million. “We think having a fair adjustment is something that we can put before the voters,” McCarty told reporters. As voters and taxpayers might note, the city and state have indulged in lavish spending on the unsheltered. (RELATED: Gavin Newsom Cannot Escape His Embarrassing Legacy on Homelessness) Since 2019-20, California has provided about $37 billion in funding for housing- and homelessness-related programs, according to the state’s nonpartisan legislative analyst. “Sacramento has provided tiny homes, renovated hotels, RV trailers, most of which sit empty,” notes California Globe editor Katy Grimes, a Sacramento resident. The streets of California’s capital still jostle with drug addicts who “don’t want housing or treatment.” That marks a contrast to those who might be called the state’s true homeless population. (RELATED: Will California Go Forward or Backward on Homelessness?) Earlier this year, fires destroyed more than 11,000 homes in the Los Angeles area. As of this week, according to a California government website, Los Angeles County has received 2,306 applications for rebuilding permits, reviewed 1751 applications, and issued  636 permits. The city of Los Angeles received 2002 applications, reviewed 921, and issued 859 building permits. The city of Malibu received 169 applications, with 97 in review and only 7 permits issued. The 45 applications in Pasadena generated 31 reviews, and the city issued 12 permits. If fire victims thought that was too few permits granted, it would be hard to blame them. “LA’s recovery is Governor Newsom’s top priority,” claims the website, which does not quantify homes successfully rebuilt and again occupied by the owners. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, overseas when the fires started, has faced criticism for the city’s poor preparation. Despite the mayor’s claims of decreasing numbers, this year’s homeless count in Los Angeles runs to more than 75,000, with more than six unhoused people dying every day on the streets and in shelters. The mayor has not proposed an increase in the city’s real estate transfer tax, but she does have a history with tax issues as speaker of the California Assembly from 2008-2010. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger set up the Commission on the 21st Century Economy (COTCE), which recommended cutting tax brackets to two and replacing the corporation and state sales tax with a 4 percent tax on business activity. Speaker Bass failed to bring the recommendations to a vote, leaving a volatile system in place and giving no relief to working families. Recurring governor Jerry Brown and current governor Gavin Newsom show little if any interest in tax reform. California’s ruling class regards punitive taxes as the solution to just about everything. Calling a tax hike an “adjustment,” in the style of Mayor McCarty, does not change the reality. The proposal comes in a city that last year, according to the Sacramento Bee, paid city manager Howard Chan $789,000. That is nearly twice as much as the $400,000 salary of the president of the United States, and more than three times Gov. Newsom’s salary of $242,295. So the problem isn’t a lack of money. As Christopher Calton notes, solving homelessness requires more than just housing. Solving homelessness in the Golden State will require transformative solutions. As C.S. Lewis might say, these solutions have not been tried and found wanting. They have been found difficult and left untried. Homeowners, taxpayers, and the unsheltered deserve better. READ MORE from Lloyd Billingsley: Newsom Rewards Reality Dysphoria Frank Meyer, Elsie Meyer and the Quest for School Choice California’s ‘Pillage’ People Lose Equity Theft Battle Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif.

Last September, professors at elite American colleges finally began to admit what has been apparent for the last dozen years: Their students cannot read. No, they are not illiterate. But they cannot read books, at least not the kind of dense and nourishing fare that once constituted the curriculum for entering freshmen. Their response to this discovery has been to stop teaching them. Professor Andrew Delbanco at Columbia removed Moby Dick to accommodate his students’ inability. Professor Victoria Kahn at Berkeley now requires only excerpts from the Iliad rather than the whole thing. Georgetown English Department Chair Professor Daniel Shore finds his students struggle to focus on the entirety of a fourteen-line sonnet. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2025 print magazine. A year later, the situation is worse. Lest one dismiss the problem as perennial griping about the imagined decline of our youth, students themselves now confirm the accuracy of their elders’ descriptions. An intelligent student at Dartmouth recently wrote an essay titled “Yes, College Students Can’t Read Good.” For him, this is not a source of shame but rather pride. Because he thinks his generation simply could not make it through the typical readings for a course in 1990, he knows that earlier generations were simply faking their comprehension in order to maintain the appearance of being serious readers. To admit otherwise would be to admit decline, or worse, intergenerational inequality — with his generation being on the short end of the stick. He concludes instead that “serious reading has never, actually, been a popular activity.” His generation has simply abandoned the concern with false appearances. They are more honest. This makes them better. Faith in progress and their own goodness is preserved. The classical academy movement returns the book to the center of the classroom. An intelligent 18-year-old who comes to hold this view cannot be helped by any college. How did we get here? The internet, phones, social media, declining attention spans, and now dependence on AI all contribute. Worse, the prevailing and crass reductionism of authors to expressions of their race, class, and gender makes all books predictable and boring. Experimental teaching methods leave many unable to read in middle school. This makes assigning difficult books in their entirety impossible in high school. Whatever the cause or causes, students who have no love of reading have no access to our, let alone any, literary, philosophic, or religious traditions that expressed themselves through the written word. They are siloed within themselves. There is no life hack or quick fix to remedy their isolation. But there is a long-term cure. The classical academy movement returns the book to the center of the classroom. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our latest print magazine. Walk into a high school literature course at an established classical charter school, and you will see students debating each other, Shakespeare in one hand, pencil in the other. A teacher stands at the front of the classroom or slightly off to the side, coaxing the discussion along with the occasional question. But it is the students who do most of the talking. Their books are marked up, with important passages underlined and pages dog-eared. These students did the reading last night, and they understood it. They come to class with opinions and questions, and now they have to state those opinions to each other in seminar discussions. They disagree, and the disagreement becomes heated but not uncivil. Quick to state their views, they are also quick to abandon them when disproven. The goal is to understand the text, and the best, most comprehensive interpretation wins the debate. These students are 16 and 17 years old.  They don’t come from money. A classical public charter school is free. Entrance is by lottery, not examination. Their parents are almost certainly not college professors. They are demographically similar to the other students you find in any American public school, except that they know how to read and understand a book. It took a good plan and a lot of time and work to get them where they are. By Bill Wilson for The American Spectator They started learning to read in kindergarten, on the first day of school. Their teacher was trained in the science of reading and used phonics. By the second semester, they could decode any English word. By second grade, they were strong enough readers that they could begin learning new things by reading about them on their own. All throughout, their teachers — and, if they were lucky, their parents — were reading to them good literature well above their grade level. English grammar started in third grade, along with the Greek and Latin roots of English words. They memorized poetry and speeches. By the end of sixth grade, they could recite most of what they had learned, including Lincoln’s Second Inaugural and Tennyson’s Ulysses. In high school, these students take literature, history, mathematics, science, art, music, and physical education. They do not use Google Classroom nor do they have a school-issued iPad. If they own a phone, it can’t be used during school hours. Neither do they want to use it, for the most part. The school they attend shows them that there are a few things that everyone needs to know, no matter what. Technical specialization should come late. They are not training for their future career, but for the whole of their adult lives. In 1990, at the dawn of the charter school movement, it was very difficult to find a classical school, save for some niche private schools and homeschooling co-ops. Today, the classical education movement is booming. According to Arcadia Education, in the 2023–24 school year, an estimated 1,551 classical schools were in operation across the country. These include private evangelical, Catholic, and Jewish schools, as well as secular public charter schools. They serve approximately 356,200 students. Together with the approximately 260,000 students in classical homeschooling co-ops or microschools, there are around 677,000 students following the classical curriculum in America.  This is just a small percentage of the 49.5 million students estimated to be attending regular public schools. But the classical movement is growing. Each year, dozens of new schools are founded, and families tend to flock when the doors open. Arcadia estimates that, by 2035, 1.4 million American students will be enrolled in classical schools.  Hillsdale College’s K-12 Education Office supports one of the largest networks of classical schools in the country. Inquiries from prospective school founders come in a steady stream, and have for years. Often the calls are from parents of 3- and 4-year-olds who have just started visiting kindergartens and are shocked to discover a public school system very different from what they knew. Sometimes they are teachers who are looking to restore common sense to their classrooms. Sometimes they are public school superintendents who are looking to overhaul a curriculum or teacher training system that’s failed to meet the mark. Hillsdale teaches these prospective school founders how to start a classical school. It supports them with curriculum and training for their board, headmasters, and teachers from the start-up days and into the school’s maturity. The most established Hillsdale schools are now a decade old. Scratch the surface of any classical school, and you are likely to find a fed-up mother somewhere in the mix. Hillsdale’s founding groups, for private and public charter schools, are selected through a competitive application process and receive guidance and support from Hillsdale during the two- to three-year process of getting started. Hillsdale provides this help at no cost to the school. Founders fundraise, promote the school, and, in the case of charters, submit an application to the state-appointed authorities. Then the work of building a board begins, and this is followed by identifying a headmaster, finding a location, and recruiting families. It’s a local effort each time, and the work of many years, driven by the people who know the community best.  Enrolling in a classical school requires major adjustments for many families. When one family from Round Rock, Texas, discovered classical education, they put their children on the waiting list and, after a year, all four of them — a first grader, a fourth grader, a seventh grader, and an eighth grader — were in. Before the first day, they remodeled their basement. Out went the video games, the TV, and the foosball table. In went four matching IKEA desks with calendars hung above them. Over the summer, the mother read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with the eighth grader while the father handled The Count of Monte Cristo with the fourth grader. The children protested at first, but soon dinnertime conversation blossomed. The children could tell that they were being asked to read important things. They rose to the challenge. They thrived on the challenge.  Arcadia’s estimate for the future of classical schools is likely low, especially given new legislation that creates school choice programs. Among these programs are education savings accounts, which provide parents with public funds to take directly to their school of choice. The rise of education savings accounts will result in a growth in private classical schools in particular, as tuition has long created a barrier for many families who would otherwise be interested in the curriculum. Without education savings account programs, prospective founders of classical schools faced daunting fundraising challenges. But now, more schools will be able to get off the ground. As of September 2025, thirty-three states and Washington, D.C., offer at least one private school choice program, with twelve providing universal or near-universal access. The academic success of these schools is undeniable. There are long waiting lists, happy students, and devoted parents. In states like Florida and Texas, legislators are reforming curriculum standards to make the environment friendlier to classical schools. Florida’s public university system now accepts the Classic Learning Test as an alternative to the SAT and ACT for college admissions.  The students who graduate from these classical schools go on to college ready and able to study Moby Dick with Professor Delbanco and his colleagues at Columbia without remedial training. Indeed, many will have already read the book. But this also means that many will forgo college altogether and choose instead to enlist or learn a trade. Whatever path they take, they will travel it in possession of what was once — but is no longer — the mark of American college graduates: a love of learning accompanied by the ability to do so. There is no more valuable possession. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2025 print magazine.

New York City stands on the edge of a political and cultural collapse as Zohran Mamdani — an anti-police, pro–free transit candidate with only six years in the country — gains mainstream support. With Hakeem Jeffries’ endorsement and Andrew Cuomo pushed aside, the city’s future reflects a broader national decay: no accountability, rising debt, and government bailouts that shield failure. As New York flirts with socialism and moral surrender, the question looms: What happens when America no longer recognizes its greatest city? (READ MORE: The Democrats Choose the World Over America) On this episode of The Spectacle Podcast, hosts Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay take aim at New York’s leftward spiral, from Mamdani’s radical rise to the city’s economic and moral decay. Can America survive if its greatest city collapses under its own ideology? (RELATED: New Yorkers Will Pay the Price for Mamdani’s Hubris) Tune in to hear their discussion! Listen to The Spectacle with Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay on Spotify. Watch The Spectacle with Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay on Rumble.

President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are set to speak tomorrow in South Korea, the first time they have met up during Trump’s second term in office. In recent weeks, a matter has emerged as critical for Trump to address during their meetup: the crackdown on Christianity that the Chinese Communist Party has carried out this month. Two weeks ago, authorities in China rounded up 30 Christians who belong to Zion Church, simply for following Christ outside the bounds set by the Chinese Communist Party. Those arrested include the Rev. Ezra Jin Mingri, who founded and leads Zion Church, as well as other pastors and church members. Some of the detained church members have been let go while others remain imprisoned. Chinese authorities also shut down Zion Church’s ability to hold online services and communicate openly over the internet. Zion had shifted to an a “hybrid” model back in 2018, when Chinese authorities demanded the church install CCTV cameras, and upon Jin’s refusal, shut the church down. The “hybrid” model consisted of a daily online devotional program that attracted upwards of 10,000 Chinese Christians, alongside smaller in-person prayer meetings in private homes. The Chinese Communist Party has worked to force all Protestants to belong to the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, and it seeks to inculcate adherence to the party through this state-sanctioned church. Jin objects to putting Christian worship under the domain of the Chinese government. In 2018, when he refused to bow to Chinese authorities’ demands, he said, “To be registered under the state is to surrender the soul of the gospel to Caesar.” The Chinese Communist Party works to force the many underground churches in China to join the Three-Self Patriotic Movement or the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, but many continue to operate, often through house churches like Zion Church. The Chinese Communist Party has a particular animus against Zion Church in part because it tends to attract more educated Christians from professional and intellectual classes and is well-organized. In addition, the church has some connections to Washington, D.C. Jin’s daughter, Grace Jin Drexel, is a Senate staffer, and his son-in-law, Bill Drexel, is a fellow at the Hudson Institute. Sen. Ted Cruz is leading the effort to hold China accountable for its campaign against Zion Church. “The Chinese Communist Party is conducting yet another sweeping crackdown on Christians, and they are again targeting Pastor Jin and the Zion Church. The CCP fears anything it cannot directly control, perhaps most of all, faith,” he told Fox News. “The United States has powerful tools to provide protection and relief to people facing persecution and violence, and we should use those tools unless and until China releases the members of the Zion Church.” Cruz has proposed a resolution in the Senate “expressing condemnation of the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of Christians.” The Chinese government’s crackdown on Zion Church is a particularly aggressive play in the lead-up to Xi’s meetup with Trump, especially as it goes beyond what the party has done toward Christians since 2018. Writing in Tablet, Bob Fu, who leads China Aid, an organization that promotes religious freedom in China, said the crackdown “marks an escalation in the CCP’s war on faith unseen since the days of Mao’s Red Guards.” Police, Fu wrote, had stormed homes across nine provinces the night of Oct. 9 to arrest Christians belonging to Zion Church. Xi is signaling his ironclad grip on China and total opposition to allowing his citizens to hold beliefs and worldviews outside of what is sanctioned by the Communist Party. Trump must use this meeting to demand Xi cease this persecution against Christians. Soon after the arrest of the Zion Church leaders, Secretary of State Marco Rubio released a statement calling for the Christians’ release and for freedom of religion in China. “We call on the CCP to immediately release the detained church leaders and to allow all people of faith, including members of house churches, to engage in religious activities without fear of retribution,” he said. Trump must not let Xi use the freedom of Christians in China, for which so many of his close allies are seeking, as a bargaining chip, but should instead demand their release and religious freedom for all Chinese. Jin’s only communication with the outside world since his arrest has been through a note passed through his lawyer that says “FEAR NOT.”

There are very few things social media is good for. It’s generally a bad thing for the impressionable youth who find themselves spending hours enslaved to algorithms feeding them content that merely serves to destroy their mental health; for those of us who are too old to consider ourselves “impressionable,” it has a tendency to undermine our productivity, our creative individuality, and (in truly destructive cases) our relationships, and, thereby, our lives. But there’s one thing our instantaneous public square is really good at: Exposing the dark underside of the individuals our fellow countrymen have elected to public office. It all started with a relatively mundane post from women’s sports activist and brand-new mom Riley Gaines in response to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent viral appearance at a rally promoting wannabe socialist dictator Zohran Mamdani. “We’re being destroyed from within,” Gaines asserted on X on Sunday. (READ MORE by Aubrey Harris: This Is Why Sliwa Can’t Save NY By Not Showing Up to the Fight) Hyperbolic? That’s debatable. Mamdani’s policies, if implemented, seem capable of putting the final nail in New York City’s coffin. A run-of-the-mill political comment? Absolutely. But AOC picked up the gauntlet. “Maybe if you channeled all this anger into swimming faster you wouldn’t have come in fifth,” the politician responded the following morning. Yikes. Where exactly, one wonders, was her social media team? Charity can be replaced by a modicum of political sense in concluding that the comment was ill-advised for someone eyeing a potential presidential campaign. At this point, of course, social media hordes noticed that they were in for a rare treat. They didn’t have long to wait. Gaines, by now a veteran of these kinds of spats, delivered exactly the kind of response we all wanted: “It’s always hilarious when they think they’ve landed a “gotcha” by pointing out I was the 5th-fastest woman *in the nation* yet they conveniently forget the mediocre man who ranked 462nd in the men’s division,” she remarked. “Misogynistic dunce.” At this point, it was time to take the sparring off social media. The rules of warfare and TV ratings demanded that the two women take their debate to the airwaves. So, Gaines got on Fox to challenge AOC to an in-person debate. “She can defend socialism; I will defend capitalism. She can defend removing God; I will defend embracing a biblical worldview,” Gaines told Laura Ingram. “She can defend child sacrifice; I will defend the sanctity of life.” (READ MORE: Xi Cracks Down on Christians Ahead of Meetup With Trump) Much to the disappointment of salivating television CEOs watching from the C-suites they can’t afford, Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t interested. “I would like to challenge this person to get a real job,” she said on X, despite (as Gaines pointed out in the comments) being technically jobless herself given the ongoing government shutdown for which her party bears the responsibility. Gaines, of course, didn’t leave it there. “I have a real job. I’m a mom. It’s the most important & rewarding job in the world,” she fired back in a repost. “I think if you had a baby girl like I do, you’d understand my positions a little better.” As a general rule, social media squabbles are not the place to look for political and cultural insight: Their participants are usually heated, and their audiences are usually a radical subset of the population. That said, this week’s altercation may very well have been the exception to the rule. Over the course of the last year, Democrats have published a whole host of articles trying to discern the reasons for their abysmal performance in the 2024 presidential election. Perhaps, they muse, Americans are just too misogynistic and racist to vote for the party that gave a black woman a shot at the Oval Office. Maybe, the fix is to turn to young socialists concerned about “queer liberation” — never mind that polling suggests, as Semafor recently pointed out, that “Democrats have badly weakened their party with left-leaning ideas and rhetoric.” In fact, it turns out that an astronomically high 70 percent of voters consider the Democrat Party “out of touch.” Americans are a whole lot more normal than Democrats give them credit for. Most of them still find being the fifth-fastest female swimmer in the country more impressive than being a politician from New York. Eighty percent of Americans aren’t all that interested in watching men beat women in women’s sports. The vast majority still believe that mothering children is a very real and very beautiful job. All of this is why Ocasio-Cortez’s fiery social media posts this week were, to put it mildly, ill-advised. They were profoundly out of touch with public opinion. Maybe they’ll play well to a crowd of childless New York millennials who’ve spent their 20s severing familial connections, but those young adults still number in the minority. The problem Ocasio-Cortez is unwittingly unveiling is that the Democrat Party has, by and large, turned into a massive self-referential bubble drifting further and further away from reality as experienced by the mostly normal humans who occupy this country. The good news for the rest of us is that the inevitable finally happened: Americans noticed the bubble. READ MORE by Aubrey Harris: We’re Winning the Marriage Fight in Spite of Ourselves

Roger Stone breaks the latest on the explosive Arctic Frost documents & the DOJ’S investigation into Biden’s autopen use!

They are targeting your children. And you are letting them. https://t.co/walAEQ4BTi — Lara Logan (@laralogan) October 29, 2025

by Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., Childrens Health Defense: A 12-year-old girl took her own life just three weeks after starting Prozac, following years of social media addiction that contributed to her depression. Her mother, Charay Gadd, has joined a lawsuit accusing TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube of targeting vulnerable children with harmful content. After four years of […]

by Rhoda Wilson, Expose News: On Monday, Elon Musk launched a challenge to Wikipedia.  Called Grokipedia, it is an AI-powered online encyclopaedia developed by xAI.  It has so far, around 900,000 AI-generated pages. Only a few days into its launch, we take a look at how it compares to other online encyclopaedias by comparing entries […]