Energy Secretary Chris Wright met with executives from refining companies on Monday to explore ways the Trump administration could help them boost throughput volumes to help keep America’s gasoline and diesel market fully supplied. The meeting took place in Midland, Texas during an industry conference Wright was attending.

Wright and the White House believe an increase in refined volumes could hold the key to lowering prices for gas and diesel at the pump. The administration’s concerns are not surprising given the fact that gasoline prices have stubbornly remained above $4.00/ gallon nationwide amid the ongoing Iran Conflict, a dollar higher than a year ago. Though still a dollar below the highs reached during the Biden autopen years, the current price paradigm could have a significant impact on November’s midterm elections.

Wright told reporters that the Department of Energy (DOE) would announce steps later this week it can take to help spur higher throughput even though his own Energy Information Administration reported last week that U.S. refineries have been sustaining unusually high activity levels for months now. Some companies have expressed concerns in recent weeks that the current 96.2% capacity level cannot be sustained for much longer as some refineries are already well past their regular periodic maintenance downtime schedules.

It’s hard to see how the feds can spur even higher output levels through this limited refining fleet. Secretary Wright will be looking for short-term measures, like possibly suspending fuel blending requirements under the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) haze reduction program. That move would have made even better sense to take in April when refiners are annually forced to switch over to costly summer blends that always raise gas prices at the pump just as summer driving season ramps up.

The real enduring problem related to America’s refining industry is that there isn’t enough of it: The U.S. industry hasn’t opened a single new major refinery in almost half a century now. The simple fact is that the United States needs more refineries if it is to keep more of its record, world-leading oil production at home for domestic use instead of having to export three million to five million barrels of the light, sweet crude produced from the Permian Basin every day because there isn’t enough domestic refining capacity to handle it.

A single new greenfield refinery is under construction today by America First Refining at the Port of Brownsville, Texas. Scheduled for completion in late 2027, the America First Refinery will have an initial capacity to process up to 168,000 barrels of light, sweet crude per day. As substantial as that is, it puts only a small dent in the overall magnitude of the capacity shortage.

Make no mistake about it, building new refineries is not remotely a short-term solution. In an interview in March, AFR CEO John Calce told me just obtaining the mandatory air quality permit under the Clean Air Act consumed a full seven years for a facility that will take less than 3 years to construct. That’s a regulatory roadblock which has discouraged many other potential refinery projects since 1979.

Wright’s push also comes amid a trend among big shale producers to trim back on drilling budgets in favor of allocating capital to stock buybacks and other returns to investors. That also is not surprising given that it has been the prevailing operational model for shale producers since at least 2019, as Irina Slav points out in a story at Oilprice.com.

No one should doubt Wright’s contention during a Monday interview that the Permian Basin and other shale basins are capable of further increasing production of both oil and natural gas. The main variable in that equation is the willingness of the companies doing most of the drilling to allocate capital to meet that goal.

Most big oil-producing countries source most of their oil through a national oil company like Saudi Arabia’s Aramco that is responsive to government edicts and needs. But in the United States, oil and gas are drilled, produced, and refined by hundreds of privately held companies executing on their own discreet business plans.

Thus, persuasive though Mr. Wright certainly is, persuasion is really the only tool he and the White House possess to wring more throughput out of America’s already stressed refining industry.

Daily Caller News Foundation ^ | August 21, 2026 | David Blackmon

Caffeine acutely raises blood pressure (by 3-15 points systolic), but habitual coffee drinkers develop tolerance, leading to only modest long-term increases of about 2.4 mmHg systolic and 1.2 mmHg diastolic.

* Slow caffeine metabolizers face higher heart attack risks with more coffee, while fast metabolizers clear caffeine efficiently, explaining conflicting study results.

* A review of 13 studies involving 315,000 people found that coffee drinking was not associated with an increased risk of developing hypertension, regardless of gender, amount or caffeine content.

* A Japanese study found that people with severely high blood pressure (160/100 or above) who drank two or more cups daily doubled their cardiovascular mortality risk, though no risk was seen for those with normal or mildly elevated pressure.

* Phytochemicals like melanoidins and quinic acid help regulate blood pressure and improve artery function, suggesting coffee’s overall effect depends on the balance of its compounds, not just caffeine.

=======================================================================

Coffee first entered human lives and veins over 600 years ago, spreading from the highlands of Ethiopia to become the world’s most consumed psychoactive beverage. Today, the average person consumes nearly two kilograms of coffee beans annually, often with precise preferences about origin, roast and preparation methods.

Yet for decades, doctors warned patients with high blood pressure to abandon their coffee habits. The reasoning seemed straightforward: Caffeine is a stimulant, stimulants raise heart rate and a faster heart must mean higher blood pressure. But as with many simple answers to complex biological questions, the truth has proven far more nuanced.

What high blood pressure actually means

Blood pressure measures the force blood exerts against artery walls during heartbeats. The systolic number, the higher figure, captures pressure when the heart contracts and pushes blood through the body. The diastolic number, the lower figure, measures pressure when the heart relaxes and refills.

Normal blood pressure sits below 120 over 80 millimeters of mercury. Hypertension begins at 140 over 90. Approximately 31% of adults have hypertension, yet half remain unaware of their condition. Among those taking medication, nearly 47% lack adequate control.

This matters because hypertension operates as a silent killer. It produces no symptoms while steadily increasing risks for heart attacks, strokes and worsening kidney and heart disease.

The short-term effect is real but misleading

Caffeine functions as a muscle stimulant that can increase heart rate and potentially contribute to irregular heartbeats. It stimulates the adrenal glands to release adrenaline, causing the heart to beat faster and blood vessels to constrict. This combination raises blood pressure.

Blood caffeine levels peak between 30 minutes and two hours after consumption. The substance’s half-life ranges from three to six hours, meaning half the caffeine clears from the bloodstream during that window. Individual variation depends on age, genetics and habitual consumption patterns.

Research reviews report systolic blood pressure increases of three to 15 points and diastolic increases of four to 13 points after consumption. These numbers sound alarming. However, they represent acute effects, not permanent changes.

The tolerance factor changes everything

Habitual coffee drinkers develop tolerance to caffeine’s pressor effects. Two meta-analyses examining randomized controlled trials lasting more than one week found that coffee consumption increased systolic blood pressure by only 2.4 millimeters of mercury and diastolic by 1.2 millimeters.

These modest increases fall well within normal daily fluctuations. Blood pressure naturally rises and falls throughout the day based on activity, stress, meals and even conversation. A 2.4-point increase from coffee represents a fraction of these normal variations.

Genetics determines risk more than coffee itself

The answer to the coffee-blood pressure puzzle may lie in genetic makeup. Slow caffeine metabolizers face higher heart attack risks, particularly when consuming more coffee. Fast metabolizers clear caffeine efficiently and appear protected from its negative effects.

This genetic variation explains why some people can drink espresso before bed and sleep soundly, while others feel jittery after a single afternoon cup. It also explains contradictory study results. Research populations with different genetic profiles produce different outcomes.

A review of 13 studies involving 315,000 people examined associations between coffee intake and hypertension risk. During follow-up periods, 64,650 participants developed hypertension. Researchers concluded that coffee drinking was not associated with an increased risk of developing the condition.

The exception that proves the rule

A separate Japanese study followed 18,000 adults aged 40 to 79 for nearly 19 years. Among those with severely high blood pressure, defined as systolic of 160 or above or diastolic of 100 or above, drinking two or more cups daily doubled cardiovascular mortality risk compared to non-drinkers.

However, no associations with cardiovascular death emerged for those with normal blood pressure or mild hypertension. This distinction matters. The danger appears concentrated among those whose blood pressure already requires aggressive management.

Coffee contains more than caffeine

Coffee contains hundreds of phytochemicals that influence health beyond caffeine’s effects. Melanoidins help regulate fluid volume and enzymes controlling blood pressure. Quinic acid improves blood vessel lining function, allowing arteries to better accommodate pressure changes.

These compounds may offset caffeine’s pressor effects. Decaffeinated coffee, which retains most phytochemicals while removing the stimulant, shows similar blood pressure benefits in some studies. This suggests coffee’s overall effect depends on the balance between its compounds, not caffeine alone.

What this means for the average drinker

Moderation remains the guiding principle. Most research supports drinking four cups or fewer daily as safe for cardiovascular health. Those with severely high blood pressure, readings of 160 over 100 or above, should consider limiting intake to one cup daily and discussing consumption with their physician.

Patients should know their blood pressure numbers, understand their personal health history and recognize which foods and drinks contain caffeine. They should consider all factors influencing blood pressure, including family history, diet, salt intake and physical activity levels.

Avoiding caffeine before blood pressure measurements will prevent artificially elevated readings. Avoiding afternoon caffeine will protect sleep quality, which independently affects blood pressure regulation.

A historical perspective on today’s conclusions

For centuries, medical advice about coffee reflected prevailing cultural anxieties rather than scientific evidence. Seventeenth-century European physicians blamed coffee for causing impotence, while nineteenth-century doctors claimed it cured asthma. Twentieth-century warnings about hypertension and coffee emerged from small, short-term studies that captured acute effects without accounting for tolerance.

“High blood pressure or hypertension occurs when the muscles in the walls of the arteries constrict, forcing the heart to pump harder,” said BrightU.AI‘s Enoch. “It can also result from arteriosclerosis, where the arteries lose their natural elasticity. A consistent reading higher than 140/90 mmHg indicates this condition.”

The scientific consensus has shifted from blanket prohibition to nuanced moderation. This evolution reflects medicine’s growing appreciation for individual variation in metabolism, genetics and baseline health status.

There is no need to abandon the morning ritual that powers workdays and fuels conversation. The surprising truth is that coffee and blood pressure share a relationship far more complex than simple cause and effect, one where moderation, genetics and individual health status matter far more than caffeine content alone.

Watch and discover the health benefits of coffee.

Retirement Media ^ | August 21, 2026 | Ava Grace, Natural News

Since Franklin Roosevelt, federal and state governments have slowly but surely claimed that property is a privilege, not a right. The wealth tax is the next step.

Allan J. Feifer | August 21, 2026

Americans traditionally understood that what they owned was theirs, not the government’s. Yet, over the last century, that principle has steadily eroded—from gold confiscation to civil asset forfeiture to proposed wealth taxes. The emerging principle is stark: Your property is yours only to the extent that the State allows you to keep it.

Preliminarily, what does it mean to own something? In America, the traditional answer was straightforward: it meant that the property was yours—not the government’s—and that the State had no claim to it unless you forfeited it through a criminal act or the government seized it through eminent domain for the public good.

Private property was understood as an extension of individual liberty, protected by right and law rather than being a privilege that the government granted at its discretion. That principle was deeply embedded in the American tradition and helped distinguish a free citizen from a subject of the State. That relationship changed dramatically in the 20th century.

Perhaps the most well-documented exercise of government power over private property occurred in 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6102, requiring Americans to surrender most of their monetary gold to the government at the then-fixed price of $20.67 per ounce. Those who failed to comply faced criminal penalties.

The following year, the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 placed monetary gold under federal ownership and raised the official price of gold to $35 an ounce—a nearly 70 percent increase from the $20.67 price at which Americans had been required to surrender their gold. Whatever the legal justification, the episode demonstrated something deeply unsettling about the power of the State: It could declare lawful property impermissible to own, compel its sale to the government at a price it dictated, and then change the official value of that property after acquiring it. By any ordinary understanding, that is confiscation backed by the power of the State.

The next expansion came with the institutionalization of modern civil forfeiture. Civil forfeiture originated in an old maritime and customs doctrine and has become a powerful and controversial domestic instrument of government.

Federal forfeiture authority expanded significantly in 1978 and 1984, when Congress broadened the government’s ability to seize the proceeds of alleged drug crimes and property used to facilitate them. The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 also established the Department of Justice’s Assets Forfeiture Fund and authorized the Attorney General to share forfeited property with state and local law-enforcement agencies.

This created a profound change in the incentives driving police and regulatory agencies. Property could be seized and forfeited without the government necessarily obtaining a criminal conviction against its owner, and law-enforcement agencies could benefit from the property they seized, much as pirates did.

Owners who had not been convicted of—or even charged with—a crime could find themselves fighting to recover money, vehicles, homes, and other property in proceedings in which the government was pursuing the property rather than proving the owner’s criminal guilt.

America is a country of precedent. Once the government established the precedent that it could seize private property without first convicting—or even charging—the owner of a crime, and sometimes without even obtaining a warrant, the process felt like an illegal taking. Today, federal forfeiture alone is a multibillion-dollar enterprise. In fiscal 2025, the Justice Department’s Assets Forfeiture Fund received $2.287 billion in forfeiture proceeds, following $2.422 billion in 2024 and $3.339 billion in 2023.

It’s not just the Feds, either. States have developed their own civil asset forfeiture systems, allowing law enforcement agencies to seize property alleged to be connected to criminal activity and, after forfeiture, retain or spend the proceeds effectively placing a lien on property that you own.

And history suggests that the government rarely leaves a newly established power confined to its original boundaries. The justification will always be that the next confiscation is different, that the next group is different, or that the next need is greater.

The government does not have to begin by taking everything. It merely must establish the principle that it can take something that was previously understood to belong entirely to the individual and declare that a portion of it belongs to the State.

Once ownership is deemed conditional, private property ceases to be a protected right. That is the real issue. It is not how much wealth the government takes; it is whether we are willing to accept the proposition that the government has a claim to wealth simply because we possess it. Because once that principle is accepted, the question is no longer whether the government can take your property; it is how much of it the government will allow you to keep.

Did someone say “Communism”?

God Bless America.

If you want to understand the difference between the political left and right, just look at how each side has treated the Supreme Court.

For decades, conservatives grumbled about liberal justices on the court and the judicial activism they engineered in rulings such as Roe v. Wade. Justices, conservatives said, are supposed to interpret the law, not make it. They spent years articulating and defending this principle, and educating and supporting judges who thought likewise.

And for decades, conservatives tried to get Republicans elected president in hopes (which were often dashed) that they would restore judicial balance to the court.

That campaign finally paid off when President Donald Trump was able to name three justices in his first term –- one who replaced “centrist” Anthony Kennedy and the other filling the seat vacated by liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The result has been a string of court victories for those who believe the Constitution means what it says, including the lifting of the 50-year plague on the court known as Roe v. Wade, weakening the administrative state, protecting gun rights, ending race-based college admissions, supporting religious liberty, etc.

That doesn’t mean the right is happy with every decision the court has made since. We published a guest commentary in these pages that attacked George W. Bush-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts for siding with liberals on birthright citizenship and election integrity cases this term, saying “Roberts cobbles a majority canoodling with the court’s radical leftists whenever he is scared witless of being ousted from the popular girls’ table of elite opinionmakers.” (There have been other disappointments along the way.)

But while conservatives railed against such rulings, they didn’t stoop so low as to attack the integrity of the court itself.

Now look at how the left has reacted once it lost its decades-long Supreme Court majority.

It embarked on a sustained campaign to attack the court itself and threaten justices who didn’t rule its way.

In 2020, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer stood on the Supreme Court steps when it was deliberating an abortion case and said before a crowd of protesters: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch; I want to tell you, Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

Even the liberal USA Today editorial page was appalled, saying it “warrants a full-throated apology.” (Schumer never issued one.)

While the court was deliberating the Dobbs case, a draft ruling was leaked, protesters camped out in front of conservative justices’ houses, and the threats of assassination were very real.

The left also enlisted the mainstream media to push bogus scandal stories to impeach the integrity of conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito – the latter of whom was targeted after his wife flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag.

When Joe Biden won in 2024, Democrats immediately started pushing to pack the court with liberals. Biden later appointed a presidential commission to study “reforms” and in his last year in office pitched a plan that amounted to court packing by another name. It would, wrote the American Enterprise Institute’s Adam J. White at the time, “strip current justices of their constitutional responsibilities and transfer those powers to successors, one justice at a time, beginning with Justice Clarence Thomas … If anything, the new proposals for disempowering ‘senior’ justices are even more aggressive than the original version of court-packing.”

Biden justified this abomination by saying that “It’s not hyperbole to suggest Trump is literally an existential threat, an existential threat to the very Constitution of democracy we, we say we care about.”

The Democratic Socialists who are quickly taking over the party want to eliminate the Supreme Court altogether.

This week, the Washington Post ran a story headlined, “Angry at the Supreme Court, liberals push a slew of plans for overhauling it.”

It says “The latest wave of proposals to overhaul the Supreme Court have reached something of a fever pitch over the past few months, as Democrats grow increasingly frustrated with the court’s rightward turn,” and that “Democrats’ anger is fueled by a conviction that many of these rulings are more about politics than the law.”

It goes on to talk about Democrats’ “dismay,” their “fresh fury,” the Court’s “appalling record,” the “five-alarm fire,” and the “crisis that we face on the highest court in this country.”

That’s the sort of emotionally loaded language used by the left whenever it loses, and why it should keep losing.

Issues & Insights

The Constitution’s stated goals are in the Preamble: a more perfect Union, justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and the blessings of liberty for living and for posterity.

If those are the ends you actually love, the consistent opposites are what undermine them:

Disunion and factionalism that treat the country as a temporary alliance of tribes rather than a single people under one law.

Injustice—unequal application of law, corruption of courts, or rule by status instead of by rules.

Disorder that the government fails to suppress: endemic crime, riots, or private violence that makes ordinary life insecure.

Weakness or neglect of the common defense, whether through under-preparation or through policies that invite attack.

Capture of government by narrow interests that substitute private gain or ideological projects for the general welfare.

Erosion of liberty—concentrated, unaccountable power, whether from the executive, the administrative state, or majorities that treat rights as optional.

Short-term extraction that loads unsustainable debt, institutional decay, or demographic/fiscal burdens onto the next generations.

Those are not partisan labels. They are the direct negations of the six purposes the document itself names. Loving the goals therefore requires opposing whatever actually produces their opposites, regardless of who is doing it or what slogan they use.

Grok

Vice President Vance said Thursday night that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has a “very discreet plan” to shrink the nation’s debt.

“He [Bessent] has had a very discreet plan, of course, supported by the president of the United States, to get the United States to a point where our economy is growing faster than our debt,” Vance said on Newsmax’s “Carl Higbie Frontline.”

“And if you look, we are on track. So, even though the debt is too high, even though we inherited this debt bomb from the Biden administration, we actually do have a plan to get the economy growing faster than the debt and that’s the most important thing,” the vice president added.

On Thursday, Bessent claimed the U.S. can “grow” its way out of the national debt, which hit $40 trillion on Wednesday.

“There’s nothing magic about the $40 trillion number, and we can grow our way out of that,” Bessent told “Squawk on the Street” co-host Sara Eisen on CNBC.

“But what we do want to signal is I think there’s been a lot of misinformation in terms of what’s going on with the deficit, what’s going on with the deficit to GDP,” he added.

Bessent said that a temporary aspect of the debt comes from tariff refunds ordered by the Supreme Court in a February ruling against emergency tariffs from President Trump.

The Treasury Department head said U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer is going to implement “the same level of tariffs,” and that he expects the “2026 tariff income is going to be roughly what it was in ’25.”

Lawmakers have recently raised concerns over the national debt, decrying Congress’s inability to sufficiently deal with an issue that has become harder to ignore.

The GOP has commonly cited federal spending and entitlement programs as main causes behind the debt, with Democrats emphasizing the need for increased taxation of wealthy Americans and corporations as well as spending reforms.

The Hill ^ | August 20, 2026 | Tara Suter

U.S. — The United States of America plunged into collective sorrow and mourning yesterday upon learning the devastating news that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle would be moving back to England.

Citizens wept openly in the streets, wondering how America would be able to carry on without the charming couple.

“No! Not Harry and Meghan! Anyone but them!” cried local man Daniel Simpson. “This is like the Great Depression and 9/11 all rolled into one. I have not stopped crying and punching the wall since I heard the news. We are losing the most delightful and beautiful thing about our dear nation. Who will we even be without Harry and Meghan?”

President Trump ordered that today be a national day of mourning in recognition of America’s tremendous loss. “It’s so terrible. Tragic, really,” said Trump in a statement. “We’d never had a prince in America before, and then we got one, and it was so beautiful. Now they’re moving back to England, and no one knows why, because it’s a horrible place these days. You look at the people being arrested for posting memes, very funny memes, and you can’t believe it. Anyway, they’re going back there, so we’re going to lose a prince and a duchess, I believe that’s what she’s called, ‘duchess,’ it’s a very big deal. It’s very sad, I know we’re all very sad about it, me especially, I’m the most sad, probably.”

At publishing time, a grieving America had begged the couple to please record a new Netflix show so we could try to stay in touch with their lives.

Babylon Bee

The Democratic Socialists of America have been growing in power within the Democratic Party, most notably by capturing a number of Democrat nominations in the 2026 primaries, though it’s important to remember that they already hold plenty of seats in public office. They aren’t a new phenomenon in 2026, it’s just that they are now receiving substantial public notice in 2026. A very different thing.

In fact, the Democratic Socialists of America – essentially the borderless movement of global communism – have been making inroads in the Democratic Party for generations, but only recently have they felt comfortable dropping the mask, and saying, point blank, that they are indeed proud marxists.

So many forms of self-identification that people would never have dared to admit, a generation ago, are happily and proudly broadcast today. It’s shocking.

Some Democrat politicians cheer the DSA’s advance – why not, they agree on virtually every issue; the only difference is packaging anyway.

Other Democrat politicians are horrified at their advance, as they believe the DSA’s open advocacy of communism will cause them to blow an opportune midterm cycle this fall.

And Republicans, horrified that communism has been embraced by so many voters, don’t know what to do, other than to remind people that “Communism Doesn’t Work.”

It has become commonplace – for a century now – for non-communists to try to find common ground with socialism-supporters. “Of course we understand,” the argument goes. “It’s a nice idea. Communism sounds good. It just doesn’t work. It has never worked. It never can work. We understand you like it on its face, but every time it’s been tried, it fails. It doesn’t work, because it can’t work.”

There are two problems with this approach.

First, communism really isn’t a nice idea at all, so there’s no reason to grant them that premise. Communism is a thoroughly autocratic, top-down dictatorship with zero respect for the rights of any individual, by definition. We should focus on educating people about this truth, not dismiss it in an effort to seem nice.

But the second problem may be an even more important one:

We must stop saying it doesn’t work, because it does.

Yes. Of course, communism works. People wouldn’t keep pushing for its implementation if it didn’t work. People wouldn’t keep it going – for decade after decade of utter misery, in Cuba and Venezuela and China and North Korea and more – if it didn’t work for somebody.

The challenge here is that we Westerners have a narrow understanding of what it means for a system to “work.”

Our system – the American system – was designed with a commitment to securing the liberty of individual citizens, to providing a level playing field for the business community so that people could have a chance at success, to providing religious freedom so that Catholics and Lutherans and Jews and Presbyterians and Greek Orthodox could get along as neighbors, to ensuring the rule of law so that all decent, law-abiding people would be reasonably safe from attack by criminals, foreign invaders, or an abusive government.

And we assume that all systems would share these goals, so if a country doesn’t deliver them, we define that country’s system as having “failed.”

But this is wrong. Our goals are not the same as the goals of communist countries, so they don’t judge themselves as having failed.

Communist countries’ publicly stated goals are irrelevant. The reality is that, as dictatorships, their goals are the subjugation of their people, the export of marxist revolution, the complete control of their economy through central planning, and the absolute power of the elitists who run their governments.

Viewed this way – through the lens of reality – it’s a very different picture, isn’t it?

Communism succeeds… for the tiny elite cadre that runs the show.

Soviet Russia enabled Lenin, Stalin, Malenkov, Kruschev, and the rest of them to exert total control over the Russian people. North Korea has enabled the Kim dynasty to exert total control over the North Korean people. Venezuela enabled Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro to exert total control over the Venezuelan people.

China enabled Chairman Mao and his successor Chairman Xi to wipe out tens of millions of their people, by everything from artificial famine to mass killings, from forcing parents to kill their own daughters during the years of the One-Child policy, to forcing apartment building managers to seal up buildings until residents starved to death during the months of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Yes, eventually these leaders die – either of natural causes or of gunshot wounds – but until that day, they have absolute power. As do their aides-de-camp, their lieutenants, their sadistic enforcers, from Berea to Guevara.

Because that’s what communism is really about, at its essence: absolute power.

What words have been championed in our schools, our politics, and our pop culture for generations now? The importance of “empowerment.” Students are told their goal is to “feel empowered” in their jobs, in their communities, in their relationships. They are raised to be “in control” of their situations, their marriages, their destinies.

To the citizen of Western civilization, using these words as positive ones should feel foreign, even shocking. As products of the Scottish Enlightenment, we should value words like freedom and liberty, not power and control. This change in the language, and in the zeitgeist, didn’t happen overnight; it has been building for a century.

This is what we need to teach our children, and our neighbors, and our voters: that the difference, between our system and the many statist foreign systems we broke away from, is what our Founding Fathers expected to be taught to Americans, ever since our nation was born. We should champion liberty, not control. Freedom, not power.

Socialism, communism, marxism, statism – whichever you choose to call it; they are all synonyms – is not “just another option, just another system to give it a chance, and see how it goes.”

Statism is tyranny – the absolute domination of individuals by the entitled, corrupt, ever-more-dictatorial party in power.

The people who support socialism inevitably learn to regret their support, when it’s much too late to undo the damage. As the old saying goes, “you can vote yourself into socialism, but you’ll have to shoot your way out.”

And that’s pretty hard to do when you’ve let them take your guns away.

As long as we allow the naive, uneducated masses to believe that communism is well-intentioned and sweet, their optimism will convince them that even if it went wrong in the past, the good people they trust to implement it here will make sure it goes well this time. We need them to understand that communism itself is indeed evil, that its very goal from the outset is the complete domination of the masses.

And as long as we tell them communism doesn’t work, we are lying to them, as well as to ourselves.

Because it does work.

Just not for them.

Communism works. For the most malicious, the most sadistic, the most vicious of the people, communism is the perfect method of empowerment, the absolute guarantor of control. Communism works for the villains in power.

And we have to be as nice as possible, but also as clear and firm as possible, when we explain to these confused, gullible, utopian children, that communism really does work – better than they can imagine – but only for society’s monsters, not for them.

Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer, speaker, and consultant. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” and his brand new collection of stories about the heroes of the American Founding, “The Founding Generation: The Patriots Who Built America,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon. His trade compliance training practice is available either in person or by webinar.

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The old Republican establishment lost control of the party once. It has no intention of letting Trump choose the political order that comes after him.

When I first entered the public arena, the focus of my work was almost entirely on why the right needed to take power seriously. Conservatives had suffered a devastating string of political and cultural losses because they focused on argument and ideology while paying little attention to the way power actually worked. That criticism drew plenty of hostility from defenders of the status quo who did not appreciate some rookie pointing out why decades of conservative leadership had produced so little.

It turns out I was not alone. Popular voices including Matt Walsh and John Doyle now openly support conservatives taking and wielding power effectively. That disagreement has launched another round of public debate over the pursuit of power, but the argument is only a proxy for a larger battle over JD Vance, foreign policy, and the future of MAGA.

Donald Trump represented a serious threat to the established political order. Initially dismissed as a brash reality television host, he quickly demonstrated that he was tapping into something deeper than celebrity and catchy insults. Trump was not a career politician. He did not enter politics with deep ideological commitments, and he did not know or care about the established rules.

He fused law and order, economic protectionism, foreign policy restraint, immigration enforcement, and culture-war issues in a way no Republican candidate had since Pat Buchanan. Trump saw an untapped political market and, like any good businessman, gave the customers what they wanted.

Many prominent establishment figures declared themselves “NeverTrump” and vowed to resist MAGA’s takeover of the conservative movement. That strategy failed. Trump became a political steamroller. Some NeverTrumpers migrated into the Democratic coalition or created opposition “conservative” outlets such as the Bulwark. Others decided to wait.

MAGA had the populist momentum, but the establishment still controlled institutions, personnel, and much of the donor class. The bet was that it could outlast MAGA and co-opt it, just as the Republican establishment had absorbed the Tea Party.

The next opportunity came with Ron DeSantis. Establishment conservatives hoped Trump’s legal troubles would make him vulnerable to a popular governor with a record of victories. DeSantis was supposed to offer Trumpism without Trump: populist energy packaged in a form more compatible with the old ideological agenda.

It did not work. Trump’s primary and general-election victories removed any illusion that a direct assault on him from inside the party could succeed.

If the establishment could not oust Trump, the remaining option was to derail his movement and prevent anyone from carrying MAGA into future elections. Despite Republican control of the House, Senate, presidency, and Supreme Court, congressional Republicans have repeatedly clashed with the administration. The Senate has stalled key personnel and has not passed the SAVE Act. Republican politicians know they must praise Trump rhetorically, but many continue to resist important parts of his agenda.

Add a deeply unpopular war with no obvious end, and the result is an effective containment mechanism: MAGA divided, distracted, and exhausted.

That is why the fight over JD Vance matters so much. When Trump sent the vice president to negotiate a peace deal, critics who had spent years presenting themselves as Trump’s loyal allies suddenly questioned Vance’s ideology, associations, and viability as a successor. Like Trump, Vance is not wedded to neoconservative foreign policy. His role in the negotiations made clear that he is being prepared as a possible heir to the movement.

At the same time, some critics began presenting Marco Rubio as an alternative while attacking any attempt to withdraw from the conflict.

The fights over power, foreign policy, affordability, and the dangers of the New Right are therefore part of the same proxy war for control of the GOP. It is no accident that many establishment figures who favor expansive military commitments abroad also recoil from using political power aggressively at home.

We can always find money for war, but when the cost of living becomes unbearable, suddenly government action is communism. The overlap is not accidental. It reflects the old conservative settlement: Republicans may fight wars abroad and protect big business at home. They may talk endlessly about social issues, but they are not supposed to spend serious political capital addressing them.

That is why it may seem strange to watch figures such as James Lindsay, Joel Berry, and Ben Shapiro portray Matt Walsh as a socialist or JD Vance as a crypto-Nazi. The rhetoric makes more sense when viewed through coalitional politics. Whatever they think personally of Walsh or Vance, they recognize that both threaten an order that has existed for decades.

The conservative movement became comfortable as beautiful losers: controlled opposition rewarded with money, status, and institutional access while the country moved steadily left. Trump disrupted that arrangement. Vance threatens to continue disrupting it.

If conservatism is ever to become a real political movement, it must escape the ideological shackles that keep it from acting. As Russell Kirk argued in “The Conservative Mind,” conservatism should not be about preserving an abstract ideology but a particular people and their way of life.

MAGA represented that shift. It was willing to pursue policies that improved the lives of Americans even when those policies fell outside neoconservative economic or foreign-policy orthodoxy. Achieving those goals requires the right to think seriously about power and how to wield it. Even reducing the size of government requires acquiring and applying state power.

The NeverTrump project now is to poison the well around Vance, prevent him from inheriting the movement, and return the GOP to establishment politics as usual.

That is the argument underneath the latest round of conservative infighting. The personalities change, the immediate controversy changes, and the slogans change, but the stakes remain constant. Someone will define what MAGA becomes after Trump, and the establishment has no intention of surrendering that decision.

The arguments breaking out across the conservative commentariat are not separate fights. They are proxy battles over the same question: Who gets to rule the Republican Party after Trump?

The Blaze ^ | Auron MacIntyre

You’ve probably heard that Donald Trump assembled a “multiracial coalition” in 2024, inaugurating a historic “realignment” of American politics that will enable the GOP to continue winning elections in our increasingly diverse nation.

It’s a deeply misguided reading of that election. It’s also a dangerous delusion for Republicans.

Racial diversity has made Democratic strongholds out of once-winnable cities like New York and states like California. It threatens to do the same in Texas and Georgia, both of which are now majority nonwhite. Just look at the latest polling for this year’s midterms: White Texans and Georgians strongly prefer the Republican candidate for Senate, yet in each state, the Democrat is projected to win.

The Texas race is admittedly close, but in Georgia, once a deep-red state, the incumbent Democratic senator could win by double digits.

Many conservatives misperceive the unfolding political catastrophe because of the widespread impression that America remains split right down the middle between the two parties. They scoff at the well-worn idea that Democrats are on the verge of securing a permanent majority via demographic transformation.

To be sure, several important factors have kept conservatives in the game up to now:

Countermajoritarian institutions—gerrymandering in the House, malapportionment in the Senate, the electoral college—have overwhelmingly benefited Republicans. The Democratic Party’s brand is in the toilet, and the GOP has managed to woo working-class whites in recent decades, offsetting increases in the nonwhite population over the same period.

Hispanics occasionally flirt with the GOP, as do Asians, to a lesser extent. Among age cohorts, only the under-25 crowd is majority nonwhite, and most of them can’t yet vote. Nor can the millions of illegals who streamed across the southern border under Joe Biden.

But you can’t get away from two basic facts: 1) Most nonwhite voters favor the Democrats, and 2) the country will be mostly nonwhite in a couple decades. A few years after that, America’s electorate will be mostly nonwhite. And since whites are politically more divided than nonwhites—with white liberals voting Democratic—doomsday will come even sooner for the Republicans.

In my view, it’s already here. Just consider presidential elections from the past few decades to appreciate the seismic changes underfoot and the political earthquakes that both the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election could bring.

The current political alignment began around the time of the Civil Rights movement, when the Republican Party adopted the “southern strategy” to gain support among white voters.

The GOP has been the white party ever since, and Republican presidential candidates, at first, dominated in this racial dispensation. Richard Nixon won a landslide victory in 1972, as did Ronald Reagan in 1984. The electoral maps for those elections are stark, with both Nixon and Reagan taking 49 out of 50 states.

By contrast, Trump’s winning maps from 2016 and 2024 show a mix of reds and blues. Like Nixon and Reagan, Trump won white voters but lost nonwhite voters, yet his margin in the electoral college was much slimmer, and in neither election did he crack 50 percent of the popular vote, despite running against deeply flawed candidates in races featuring no significant third-party spoilers.

The most important underlying variable accounting for these wildly different outcomes: The electorate had become less white.

But didn’t Trump make inroads with minority voters, proving that the GOP can thrive in a majority nonwhite America? Not really. Around 84 percent of Trump’s voters were white in 2024, only modestly more diverse than Mitt Romney’s 88 percent in 2012, despite the pool of eligible voters becoming less white in between. Yet Romney was panned for appealing only to white voters, whereas Trump was praised for “broadening the Republican coalition.”

People see what they want to see, I guess. Republicans were exuberant, and no one seemed receptive to my warning that Trump’s multiracial coalition was a mirage and the GOP was in big trouble. Republican donors, advisors, journalists, and think-tankers all told me different versions of the same thing: Trump won Hispanic men, we’ll get those minority voters—many are “natural Republicans,” after all!

Well, anything is possible. But no Republican presidential candidate since Herbert Hoover has won a majority of any nonwhite racial group. And remember those mitigating factors that I mentioned earlier, the factors that have kept Republicans in the game up to now? Many are eroding.

Nonwhite Americans too young to vote are only getting older. Trump has bled support among Hispanics, Asians, and even working-class whites. And while the millions of illegal aliens in our country can’t vote, their children, if born on American soil, will be able to.

In the upcoming midterms, gerrymandering may prevent a massive blue-shift in the House of Representatives, and this year’s Senate map happens to be a fairly tough one for Democrats.

But if you want to see the political future toward which America is hurtling, don’t turn to the wishcasting fantasies of myopic Republican strategists. Just look at New York City, which was 90 percent white in 1950 and is just 30 percent white today.

As the Big Apple has turned brown, its politics have turned blue. The last Republican mayor was Michael Bloomberg, a lifelong Democrat who, in 2001, switched parties to open a less obstructed path to Gracie Mansion. (In the “Republican” primary that year, Bloomberg defeated a former Democratic congressman.)

Following the Bloomberg era, the Republican candidates in Gotham’s mayoral elections have mostly served as something even more pitiful than Democrats in red ties: comic relief.

In the 21st century, the actual choice facing New Yorkers is between the progressive and establishment wings of the Democratic Party. So last year, after Zohran Mamdani—a democratic socialist born in Uganda—secured the Democratic primary, he easily won the general election, though white voters preferred the independent candidate Andrew Cuomo (another lifelong Democrat).

Across New York City, Mamdani enjoys high approval ratings in the nonwhite parts of the city and poor ratings in white areas.

That’s what’s in store for the country, and soon. Recent polling shows that 58 percent of Democrats see socialism in a positive light, 26 points higher than the number for capitalism, so a progressive lefty certainly could win the Dems’ presidential primary in 2028.

And unless I’m missing something about the racial character of American politics, the Republican candidate will discover that compelling arguments and slick campaign ads no longer counteract demographic headwinds. The permanent Democratic majority has arrived.

Andrew Bay, American Conservative