Persian kings did not build empires by being naive about deception; they practically invented the genre.” —Jesus Enrique Rosas.

Where do the enemies of our country — including the ones inside our country — get the idea that Iran is winning this war? They wish it into existence. The wishing is necessary to put across the talking points that President Trump and his advisors don’t have a plan, don’t know what they are doing, that the USA is persecuting and oppressing Iran for no good reason.

We pounded Iran over the weekend for a very good reason: Iran needs to learn the hard way that there are consequences for breaking agreements. For instance, at around 7:15p.m. local time, Iran fired a projectile at the Cyprus-flagged container ship GFS Galaxy, managed by Dubai-based Global Feeder Shipping, in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran claimed it was “a warning shot,” but it was a direct hit on the ship’s engine room, disabling the vessel. The crew had to abandon ship in lifeboats — and were soon rescued by a combination of other commercial ships and Omani navy vessels. One crew member went missing.

Hours after the attack, Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz closed. And soon after that, President Trump asserted that the Strait was open to commercial traffic, with US forces positioned to ensure freedom of navigation, contradicting Iran’s announcement of closure “until further notice.”

It’s not the President and his advisors who are confused, it’s the situation, and for a good reason: Iran’s leadership is confused. It’s as if Mr. Trump has to stand between Abbott & Costello doing their Who’s on First routine. All the while the IRGC fulminates and fires what remains of its ordnance at ships and other countries in the region, Iran’s putative civilian leadership, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Foreign Minister Seyyed Abbas Araghchi, and Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi, are talking desperately on the phone to mediators in Qatar and Pakistan about how to implement “technical issues” in the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).

All of this indicates that Iran’s leadership is badly split between its civil government and the IRGC (Revolutionary Guard) forces that operate as a competing Mafia-style command structure with an attached military of its own, separate from Iran’s regular army. The major discord between the two entities is that the civil government would apparently like the conflict with America to resolve in a way that will allow their country to salvage its economy and return to normal relations with the rest of the world, while the IRGC remains obdurately bent on jihad, no matter what it means for their country and its people.

The problem with jihad is that it must be waged against all infidels, meaning the people of Western Civ — a major part of the rest of the world — and now even many states around the Persian Gulf region who have joined President Trump’s Board of Peace — Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan — that might qualify as targets of jihad, too. Why? Because Israel was one of the initial signatories, making the Board of Peace a creature of The Great Satan (the USA) and Little Satan (Israel).

Of course, a key precept in jihad is taqiyya, which prescribes lying and deception in the service of jihad, which further suggests that, for the jihadist IRGC, there can be no real understanding in the Memorandum of Understanding that Iran’s civil government signed. Taqiyya requires the IRGC to lie, which it has demonstrated it is determined to do. . . like, firing missiles at commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz after it promised not to. How can such conduct possibly produce mutual understanding?

And so, if you picture the negotiations as a carrot-and-stick type process, you see that Iran’s IRGC is oblivious to carrots. Only the stick might avail, and Mr. Trump is obliging them with it. By the way, rumors circulated the past twenty-four hours that the IRGC’s newest commander, Ahmad Vahidi, was killed in his bunker by an American bomb over the weekend. True? Dunno. We’ll probably learn soon enough. Vahidi became the IRGC Commander in March of this year after his predecessor, Mohammad Pakpour, was successfully blown up. Who’s available to step-up into the job now? I guess we’ll find that out soon enough, too.

Speaking of targets, we also learned that President Trump was targeted for assassination by Iran (surprise surprise) upon leaving last week’s NATO confab in Turkey — Israeli intel informed him — necessitating that switcheroo between the new Air Force One gifted by Qatar, and the good old baby-blue Air Force One just recently retired from service going all the way back to Bush One. The old plane had better defensive weaponry aboard, our officials explained.

If I were president of our country, at this point in the quarrel with Iran, I’d consider just dropping Graham Platner over Tehran. And if that fails to get their minds right, follow-up with Rosie O’Donnell and Ana Navarro.

James Howard Kunstler

Over the past several years, polling agencies and pundits have documented a disturbing trend: Increasingly, many Americans – especially young Americans – are struggling to comprehend the most foundational principles of economics. This growing economic illiteracy could have a potentially devastating effect on not only the country’s economic future, but its political identity and American democracy itself.

In 2022, the Cato Institute found that voters “displayed a depressing lack of understanding of basic economics,” especially when it came to the issue of inflation. This problem was particularly pronounced among young voters. In an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute Samuel J. Abrams wrote that “large shares of young adults [are] unable to define inflation, explain supply constraints, or predict the effects of price controls.”

This decline in economic literacy has coincided with a dramatic rise in support for collectivist ideals – more specifically, socialist and communist policies. Polling by the organization Victims of Communism conducted in 2020 found that around 40 percent of Americans viewed socialism favorably.

Additionally, in 2025, a Cato/YouGov poll found that around 62 percent of people under the age of 30 held a favorable view of socialism with 34 percent having a favorable view of communism – the ideology responsible for roughly 100 million deaths in the 20th century alone. Poll after poll shows that Americans are embracing the false promise of the “warmth of collectivism” at an alarming rate, and that the shift toward socialism is being driven by profound ignorance about basic economic realities and the universal historical record of failure of socialist regimes.

Yet there is still hope. The antidote to fallacy, confusion, and collectivist temptation is knowledge and education – specifically about economics, a discipline that was once a major part of American civic life. Anyone can learn the basics of economics, or further his or her understanding.

But before making the case as to why one should study economics, it is important to begin by briefly taking a step back to answer another important question: What is economics? The word “economics” is derived from the Greek word oikonomia, meaning “household management.” To the ancient Greeks, particularly the thinkers Aristotle and Xenophon, the idea of oikonomia was centered on people’s stewardship of resources such that they could flourish and live a good life.

Today, economics has evolved far beyond its ancient roots. It’s also a social science, concerned not with abstract equations or sterile statistics, but with human beings and the choices they make. As the late Austrian economist Percy L. Greaves, Jr. once said, “Economics is not a dry subject. It is not a dismal subject. It is not about statistics.”

As Greaves points out, economics “is about human life. It is about the ideas that motivate human beings. It is about how men act from birth until death. It is about the most important and interesting drama of all — human action.” Economics is concerned with people, their interactions with others, and how those interpersonal relationships affect the ability of a society to produce, deliver, and consume goods and services.

More specifically, economics studies how people interact, cooperate, and respond to incentives. As a field of study, it is concerned with revealing the truth and principles that allow people to find answers to problems through business and commerce.

The study of economics does not teach what the “right” policy decisions are. The “right” tax rate or interest rate is ultimately a subjective judgment. Rather, as Shawn Ritenour, a professor of economics at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, puts it, “The object of economics is to discover economic principles that are true, so that policies developed in light of those principles will be suitable for achieving our goals.”

Learning economics helps us understand ourselves and the world around us. These principles are not academic abstractions. They explain the world as it is. Nobel laureate Gary Becker once said, “[Economics] will be judged on how well it helps us understand the world – and how it helps us improve it.”

The basic principles of economics go a long way toward illuminating why things are the way they are in our world. Take, for example, the famous law of supply and demand, which explains why prices rise and fall. When there is a low supply of a good and demand is high, the price of that good increases. When supply increases, the price falls.

This lesson is probably one that most Americans remember from Econ 101 – although certain members of Congress could probably use a refresher. But most Americans likely don’t know much about the law of scarcity, which outlines concepts like opportunity cost, incentives, and the margin, or the law of marginal utility, which reveals why we’re more satisfied with the first unit of a good we consume than the sixth.

These and various other economic principles can help us understand why certain individual actions and government policies have the effect that they do – and in turn make us more informed citizens and voters.

Increasing our society’s understanding of economics also helps people better detect economic fallacies and understand their damaging impact. As the economist Henry Hazlitt wrote, “Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident.”

Hazlitt hits the mark when looking at today’s situation. Socialist politicians make their case by appealing to economic fallacies – such as the idea that the government can provide anything for “free” – so they can present themselves as self-anointed saviors that can solve all of society’s problems. These fallacies are built on ideas that conflict with reality and are easily recognizable to anyone with a basic understanding of economics.

The study of economics also reveals an important truth: economic freedom and political freedom are inseparable from one another. Milton Friedman saw this when he authored his book Capitalism and Freedom.

“Economic arrangements play a dual role in the promotion of a free society,” Friedman wrote. “On the one hand, freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself. In the second place, economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.”

Free market societies recognize individuals as self-governing in their capacity to make decisions through voluntary cooperation, not through the threat of coercion. Hazlitt made this point when he wrote Man vs The Welfare State. “The solution to our problems is not more paternalism, laws, decrees, and controls,” Hazlitt argued, “but the restoration of liberty and free enterprise.”

From the Soviet Union to Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, the historical record of collectivism is grim indeed. Even China, now the world’s second-largest economy, has only been able to succeed insofar as it has introduced market-oriented reforms to its socialist system. Still, U.S. per capita GDP remains roughly 6.5 times greater than China’s.

Economic freedom isn’t simply a policy preference. As Friedman said, it is a “necessary condition” for a free society, paving the way for human flourishing. A society that is economically literate understands that liberty cannot survive on economic myths. It survives on citizens who understand the principles that make freedom possible.

AMAC Newsline, Hunter Oswald

On one hand, we are winning the war with Iran. On the other hand, the Vice President seems to be at odds with the administration.

Clarice Feldman | July 19, 2026

On one hand, we are winning the war with Iran. This week, bombings greatly accelerated and are not likely to end without real capitulation and surrender. On the other hand, the Vice President seems to be at odds with the administration, unhappy that we are in a (winning) war and casting blame for the failure of his peace effort, which is really only Iran’s fault.

On one hand, the President has declassified documents credibly showing foreign influence and interference with our elections. On the other hand, major news outlets seem determined to keep their viewers from knowing this. If viewers did know how insecure our elections are, they might support remediation measures — like SAVE — to the detriment of the media’s darlings, the Democrats, whose decades-long election cheating is manifest.

Donald J. Trump • O

@realDonaldTrump I know why Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones have all been fighting me for years, especially by the fact that they think it is wonderful for Iran, the Number One State Sponsor of Terror, to have a Nuclear Weapon — Because they have one thing in common, Low IQs. They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too! Look at their past, look at their record. They don’t have what it takes, and they never did!

The president has made clear that he regards what are known as the groypers as stupid and not worth paying attention to:

Yet, this week Vice President Vance, who has yet to distance himself from Tucker Carlson, had a lengthy three-hour interview with Joe Rogan in which he blamed Israel for the war in Iran and, by inference, suggested the President is a tool of Israel.

Vice President JD Vance needs to get his head out of the conspiratorial “rabbit holes” he says he loves to explore and drop the bizarro line he just pitched to Joe Rogan that the Israelis blew up the Iran peace deal because they want “to keep the war going on indefinitely.”

It was Iran that broke the 60-day “comprehensive cease-fire” established by the Memorandum of Understanding by attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz, period: No Jews involved.

Before the ink was dry on the MOU, which guaranteed open passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard asserted Tehran’s control and ownership of the waterway and warned that merchant ships must obtain its OK to transit; then it started firing on vessels that didn’t comply.

It was Iran that broke the 60-day “comprehensive cease-fire” established by the Memorandum of Understanding by attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz, period: No Jews involved.

Before the ink was dry on the MOU, which guaranteed open passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard asserted Tehran’s control and ownership of the waterway and warned that merchant ships must obtain its OK to transit; then it started firing on vessels that didn’t comply.

My own view, for what little it may be worth, is that Trump and Rubio never thought it possible to negotiate peace on our terms with Iran. Vance insisted we could, and Trump allowed him to try it, letting him give it his best shot. The result was a meaningless Memorandum of Understanding which Iran immediately violated. While Vance was negotiating, however, Plan B was further developed — strategies to force Iran to do what we wanted — opening the Strait to shipping and foregoing nuclear capability forever. The Vance negotiations allowed Trump more time to work with Iran’s neighbors to encourage them to join us and offer them protection from anticipated Iranian aggression while setting in play steps to keep oil flowing to prevent a worldwide economic catastrophe. Vance willingly but naively believed in his mission. No one else in the Administration did, although they did nothing to undercut him. If he succeeded, it was good. If he failed — and he certainly did because the task was futile from the outset — he bore the brunt of it. Now, because of his own naivete, he’s exposed as unfit to handle defense matters, which is, after all, the most important role of a chief executive.

To the shame of ABC, NBC and CNN, none of these outlets carried the President’s address this week. Clayton Wood spells out the networks’ failings:

This is not a network declining to air a stump speech or a policy pitch dressed up as news. Obama’s 2014 immigration address was Obama telling the country what he intended to do next. Biden’s 2022 speech was Biden characterizing his political opponents as a threat to the republic. Both of those were arguments. Tonight was a president presenting documents, ordering federal agencies to investigate them, and inviting the public to read the underlying material for themselves at a public website. No network has ever before declined to carry a president’s own documentary disclosure live. They have only ever declined to carry his rhetoric.

Strip away the spin and look at what that decision actually communicated. Three of the six major networks decided, on their own authority, that the American people should not see their own president lay out evidence in his own words, live, unfiltered, and unedited. They decided the public was better served by a curated summary after the fact, written by the same institutions that had already decided what to think about it before a single document was reviewed. That is not neutral journalism protecting the public from misinformation. That is a handful of executives deciding the public cannot be trusted to watch and think for themselves.

If you want the details of the President’s address, they can be found here: The President declassified documents that show China’s alleged election meddling, detail our election infrastructure vulnerabilities, provide evidence of fraud and non-citizen voting, and allege the perfidy of members of the intelligence community in deliberately hiding from the president evidence of Chinese influence and interference in our elections. Among the revelations are these:

China purchased and hacked – mostly illicitly acquired – 220 million voter files, including addresses, Social Security numbers, birth dates, and phone numbers.

 China was alleged to compile intelligence to force resignations or block reelection in order to disrupt the 2019 midterms and the 2020 election.

”Electronic voting and vote counting machines are unreliable and hackable, and… officials knew it, naming Russia, North Korea and China as capable actors…Venezuela’s government used voting machines to digitally manipulate the 2020 count [in their country] in a way immune to audit detection.”

There is substantial evidence of Michigan voter registration fraud. 278,000 non-citizens are registered to vote, and because Democrat-led states are withholding information, the actual count is probably higher.

I am certain more revelations are to come with the seizure of Georgia’s voting records, the ongoing grand juries in Florida, and the likelihood of Maduro and his former aides talking to federal investigators. Maybe our largest news organizations will find it fit to actually report them. If not, the alternate media certainly will.

The New York Stock Exchange opened its doors over 230 years ago. It has been one of the iconic symbols of America’s economic might for more than two centuries.

But for how much longer?

Now the challenge for supremacy isn’t coming from London or Tokyo or Hong Kong or Beijing. It’s coming from Texas.

The Wall Street Journal reported in recent days that the Texas Stock Exchange is now officially open for business, and trading is expected to start soon. Everything is big in Texas, as the saying goes, so New Yorkers should take this rival stock exchange seriously.

In some ways, the idea that Dallas could become the new financial center makes sense. Texas has no income tax. New York City has the highest income tax, capital gains tax and dividend tax. Mayor Zohran Mamdani is threatening even higher “soak the rich” tax increases as part of his goal of making NYC a socialist mecca. Housing will be free, groceries will be free, health care will be free, buses will be free.

This isn’t Democratic socialism. This is unmitigated socialism.

New York was already losing to Texas before any of this happened. Over the past decade, nearly 2 million residents of New York state have fled. Many of them are now in Texas. New York has lost almost $1 trillion of income cumulatively over the past 12 years.

How has Texas surpassed New York so quickly as a business haven? Almost 300 business headquarters have moved into Texas over the past decade.

First, Texas lured businesses out of New York with much lower taxes and business-friendly rules.

Second, it adopted legal structures making Texas a strategic state to incorporate in. It kept the trial lawyers at arm’s length to avoid costly and even crippling lawsuits.

And now comes the TXSE with the aim of dethroning Wall Street as the financial trading capital of the world.

I’ve warned the pols in New York many times that Wall Street can’t survive as the financial capital when Manhattan imposes the most punitive taxes in the nation on capital investment. This would be like Nebraska and Iowa putting hefty taxes on corn production. If you tax something, you get less of it.

Wall Street today pales in comparison to the bustling center of financial trading that it once was. Dallas already has as many financial service jobs as Manhattan. When New Yorkers voted for a socialist to run the city, it was as if they were signing a death sentence for the famous Wall Street bull. It isn’t just rich people who will be hurt if Wall Street continues to hemorrhage jobs. Right now, more than 150,000 New Yorkers’ jobs are tied to the stock exchange and financial trading. Thousands more lower-income service workers are dependent on Wall Street’s success.

The socialists think this is all unfair given the high Wall Street salaries.

So the socialist parasites are now killing the host.

The mystery is why this exodus from Wall Street has taken so long. Why do companies keep paying the New York income tax bills when they and their workers can pay zero income tax deep in the heart of Texas?

Sadly, over two centuries after the birth of the NYSE, Wall Street could become a ghost town. No jumping out of the windows as during the October 1929 crash, but by 2029, there may not be much of a Wall Street left.

Meanwhile, all the Ivy League professors at Columbia University still assure the Mamdanis of the world that taxes don’t matter and socialism is a viable form of economic governance. New Yorkers will learn the hard way just how wrong the socialist intellectuals are.

Stephen Moore, Hotair

A federal appeals court on Friday cleared the way for the U.S. Postal Service to continue developing a Trump-backed rule that could sharply limit mail-in voting, temporarily staying a nationwide block issued weeks earlier by a district judge who found the proposal breached a 2021 settlement with the NAACP.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit granted the Postal Service’s motion to pause a July 1 injunction from U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, a Clinton nominee.

Sullivan had concluded the proposed rule violated the settlement’s requirement that the Postal Service take “extraordinary measures” to deliver election mail through 2028.

The panel found USPS likely to succeed on two grounds, ruling the NAACP’s challenge is “likely neither constitutionally nor prudentially ripe for review” because the rule has not been finalized, and that the proposal likely would not breach the settlement even if adopted.

It also credited the government’s warning that leaving the injunction in place would prevent USPS from issuing a final rule before the November election, Democracy Docket reported.

The proposed rule flows from President Donald Trump’s March 31 executive order, “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.”

It directs the Department of Homeland Security, working with the Social Security Administration, to build state-by-state lists of verified U.S. citizens eligible to vote, and directs USPS to withhold mail-in and absentee ballots from voters not on those lists.

Under the USPS proposal published June 2, state and local officials would upload voter data through a federal portal, and every ballot envelope would carry a unique barcode tied to a specific voter.

Postmaster General David Steiner told a Senate panel last month the agency would refuse to carry ballots for states that decline to share voter rolls.

There are some naked lies so offensive that profanity is valid response.

Such is the case with Minnesota Governor and failed Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz claiming that illegal alien pedophile rapist Tou Lue Vang shouldn’t have been deported because people shouldn’t be judged on their “worst day.”

I’m pretty sure lots of people can remember their worst days: They got in a car wreck, they got fired, they found out their wife has cancer, their dog died.

Raping a ten year old girl doesn’t qualify. “Honey, I got fired, wrecked the car, and, oh yeah, raped a ten year old girl on the way home. This day was the worst!”

Also, it wasn’t one day. Vang repeatedly raped his victim over several years. And it doesn’t seem like Vang thought it was his worst day, or he wouldn’t have kept doing it. Cue the Norm Macdonald…

Then there’s the sheer absurdity of the premise, as criminals are sentenced for a single heinous deed all the time. Should murderer Richard Speck be judged on his worst day, or do eight student nurses stabbed or strangled just count as a little “woopsie”? Charles Joseph Whitman’s Texas tower snipping spree? “Just a bad day, son, we’ll let it slide.” Julio Gonzalez killing 87 people by setting fire to the Happy Land Social Club? “Mistakes were made.”

It’s a sign of how badly social justice has morally deformed Democrats that Walz is willing to go to the mat to defend a pedophile child rapist after his evil, illegal alien rapist ass has already been deported. Bill Clinton would have deported him, then given a high minded speech about it before going off to nail another intern. Jimmy Carter would have deported him. Hell, LBJ might have just had him secretly shot and his body tossed into a ditch. Even Obama would have had him deported as the wrong kind of illegal alien. Biden wouldn’t have deported him, because Biden didn’t make policy decisions, so it would probably depend on which Obama holdover aide controlled the Autopen that day.

But all illegal aliens seem sacred to the modern, Marxist, social justice infected Democrats these days, because they’re convinced they provide a surefire path to the electoral promised land. And just as with communists in the Soviet Union, Democrats regard criminals as much more ideologically reliable allies than law-abiding citizens.

But even among Democrats, few are so tone-deaf and politically maladroit as to draw their line in the sand at deporting illegal alien child rapists. This isn’t an 80-20 issue, this is a 95-5 issue that should be used to hammer Walz and anyone foolish enough to defend his position. Every Democrat candidate in the country should be asked whether they agree with Walz that illegal alien child rapists should be shielded from deportation. ICE should be scouring criminal ranks for illegal alien child rapists to deport (honestly, they should have been doing this already). The likes of Kamala Harris and James Talarico should be asked again and again where they stand on deporting illegal alien child rapists. ICE should go to the California state capital, announce they’re deporting an illegal alien child rapist just to dare Gavin Newsom to pardon him the way Walz did with Vang.

Of all those “national conversation on [___]” Democrats claim they want to have, I’m pretty sure “Should we deport illegal alien child rapists” is the conversation they want to have least…

Mass immigration doesn’t stand alone. Instead, Western governments, including ours, have much grander plans for the end of nations.

Allan J. Feifer | July 19, 2026

One of the greater mysteries of our century may be why governments across much of Europe, North America, and even Australia adopted remarkably similar immigration policies seemingly at the same time. It is difficult to believe this happened by chance. And unlike Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, which explains how complex order can arise without central direction, mass migration appears less like an organic historical development than a remarkably coordinated political calculus.

There are many explanations; some point to economics, others to humanitarianism. Others argue that businesses sought inexpensive labor or that politicians sought new voters. Whatever the explanation, governments across Western civilization not only permitted but actively facilitated mass immigration, even in the face of demonstrably low rates of assimilation by some groups. Government leaders have bent over backward, not only facilitating their entry but also subsidizing their living costs, looked the other way as large numbers of young male migrants, including many with criminal histories, entered and remained, and then protected them from expulsion.

This essay examines the forces that continue to promote this mass immigration despite electoral and mounting fiscal costs, and shows how these new immigrants have consistently failed to assimilate. Why do progressive governments cling to these policies like glue? Why do major media organizations so often minimize migrant crimes while emphasizing stories that reinforce preferred narratives that are harmful to a country’s citizens? Why has a common vocabulary—words such as “welcoming,” “neighbors,” and “safety”—appeared almost simultaneously across governments, advocacy groups, and media outlets?

The central question is not whether large-scale migration has been encouraged; evidence supports that conclusion. The real mystery is how so many institutions, in so many countries, arrived at the same destination nearly simultaneously.

So, how did it occur? To answer this question necessarily requires some inference and speculation.

What we can say is that over several decades, international and domestic organizations and leaders of many Western democracies have shifted away from the central importance of the individual toward a collectivist mentality. Recurring themes promoting transnationalism, nationhood, borders, and identity politics conflict with traditional bedrock constructs such as citizenship and defensible borders.

The people undertaking these discussions and actions are well-funded, disciplined, coordinated, and, if you look at how consistent the messaging and actions are across the Western world, it becomes more difficult to discount coordination by parties, known and unknown, driving us toward a unipolar, undemocratic future. Mass migration is one of the tools of this drive.

So where does this lead? I see three takeaways:

1.    There is a concerted effort to make large-scale immigration seem not only acceptable but desirable.

2.    As during COVID, we can again witness intense pressure to conform to a curated socially correct way of thinking, particularly in blue states and cities.

3.    We are witnessing an intensive effort by progressives to internationalize social, legal, and even historical events, delegitimizing European and American national identities and, especially, America’s constitutional ethos.

Mass immigration is one manifestation of a broader worldview that regards national identity, citizenship, borders, and other inherited institutions as obstacles to be reimagined rather than foundations to be preserved.

If that interpretation is correct, immigration is not the end of the story but the beginning. Once that framework takes hold, it naturally extends into other debates—affordability, antisemitism, international policy, wealth inequality, and countless other issues where traditional American assumptions are increasingly challenged.

Mass immigration is not the only social construct at play; it is simply among the most visible. If this broader project succeeds, what remains is a society progressively reorganized around a different set of political assumptions—what many would instantly recognize as collectivist.

Americans may never have been as disconnected and, arguably, as confused and at odds as they are today. The divisions are palpable, not unlike the question of slavery was before the Civil War. And it is easy to understand why. The various institutions that people follow, from the political party they support to their religious institutions, schools, and the government that leads us, are catering to polarizing constituencies, sending out mixed and utterly confusing messages that frequently make no sense!

I want to say that our institutions reflect logical, evolving priorities, but I can’t. Our institutions are not just confused concerning their underlying assumptions; no, they’re actively rejecting essential tenets, such as the centrality of our country’s founding and our Constitution. Until recently, that wasn’t up for discussion. However, today, progressives are aligning against our historic principles and, frequently, the will of the people.

Illegal mass immigration is ultimately a symptom of a larger debate over the direction of our nation, accountability, and what has allowed policies that would have been previously rejected out of hand. The confusion, uncertainty, and even anger many feel are palpable. Our country is blessed with a system that has a built-in capacity for self-correction. We don’t know today who, what, or even why America’s future is in play. God willing, we’ll figure it out and self-correct before it is too late.

Regardless, immigration cannot be understood as an isolated policy disagreement. It has become a proxy for a much larger debate over sovereignty, citizenship, democratic accountability, and what our country is to become. Until Americans address that larger argument, we’ll continue debating immigration while missing the philosophy that increasingly drives it.

God Bless America.

Indiana Fever guard Caitlin “Contusion” Clark has locked herself into a grievance spiral, constantly gaslighting her fans, the media, and the general public.

I never expected a black-and-white psychological thriller from 1944 to perfectly describe the current, exhausting state of the WNBA and Caitlin “Contusion” Clark’s antics, but here we are.

In the classic film, Gaslight, Gregory Anton systematically manipulates his wife, Paula, into believing she’s losing her mind. He secretly dims their home’s gas lights without telling her, misplaces items only to blame her for being absent-minded for losing them, isolates her, and flatly denies reality as she doubts her own sanity.

The movie shows a slow, agonizing psychological erasure where the victim is forced to choose between trusting her own eyes and believing a fabricated narrative deliberately meant to manipulate her and break her down. The story is where the oft-repeated term, gaslighting, originates.

Indiana Fever guard Caitlin “Contusion” Clark has locked herself into a parallel spiral, constantly gaslighting her fans, the media, and the general public. During this week’s game between the Golden State Valkyries and the Indiana Fever, Contusion Cait drove to the basket and strong-armed Valkyries’ star Kiah Stokes on her way up for a shot. Their legs grazed. Clark fell to the floor, got up and stumbled, then hobbled down the court before recovering to yell at the officials. Referees had called no foul. After Clark angrily shouted at them, two refs issued her warnings. This was a display that one announcer noted would have earned any other player a technical foul in every state in this country.

After the game, Contusion Cait used the press conference to gaslight the media and the audience about the play. “She hit me right in the quad. That hurts. The ref can’t miss that,” she said, “Then I have to play with a contusion on my leg the rest of the game. It’s ridiculous. You can’t miss calls like that. [The ref] said I initiated the contact. Which is fine, but you can’t knee me in the leg. Knock me over.”

The video footage reveals what really happened. It shows that Stokes did not knee Clark in the leg, nor did she knock her over. It was one of the tamest plays in a physical league that regularly sees far worse collisions send players slamming into the hardwood floor.

By insisting she was violently struck when the tape shows a routine basketball play, Clark demands that the public accept her spin over the visible evidence that directly contradicts her reframing.

Clark is keenly aware that a good portion of her fan base, as well as people who don’t watch basketball, might only be exposed to her quotes. She also knows that press outlets will run the most outlandish parts of her comments as headlines, painting her as a victim.

Clark’s habit of manufacturing victimhood has successfully riled up her fan base and prompted Republican members of Congress to step in on her behalf. The political intervention has led to uneven officiating during games and enabled her to continue to mischaracterize plays, making her Black opponents targets of racial attacks by her fan base. It has also emboldened Clark to challenge referees more forcefully on the court, knowing they are increasingly reluctant to call a technical foul on her.

So far, the league hasn’t shown it has the backbone or desire to appropriately rein in Clark, support its referees, or address the racist backlash Black players experience after Clark accuses them of being too rough on her. The league has not backed away from supporting her, and this week, despite her pattern of on-court disrespect, it doubled down, with NBA commissioner Adam Silver calling Clark an “incredible person.”

Instead, individual organizations and players have stepped up to address what the league has been slow to confront. During a recent game against the Las Vegas Aces, Clark doubled over and crumbled onto the floor after experiencing minimal contact with Aces’ star Chelsea Gray. Following that game, Gray received a racist message from a man calling her the N-word. It fell on Gray and the Aces’ organization to address the abuse in a statement, which the WNBA regurgitated in its own release hours later.

Aces’ head coach Becky Hammon took the step most fans and players have been waiting for the league to take for years. Hammon directly called out the racism, saying, “Any kind of racist, homophobic comments. We don’t need you as fans, don’t want you as fans. Just move on.”

Clark’s manufactured pain at the hands of countless Black women players follows a historic trope whereby white women falsely claim to have been physically or emotionally harmed by Black people.

Those claims traditionally move public opinion, punishment, and political power against whatever Black person is named, regardless of the evidence provided to defend them. The trope is effective because it elevates white distress over observable reality by drawing on a presumption that white women tell the truth and Black people, especially Black women, are inherently guilty, liars, and always the aggressors.

By validating Clark’s manufactured white grievances, Republican lawmakers and the league are insulating her from the reality of her declining performance and the physical fragility that has exposed her as incapable of meeting the physical baseline expected of any professional athlete playing in a contact sport like basketball.

It’s hard to imagine that Clark and the WNBA can sustain or absorb this volatile and inane trajectory for much longer. The more she spirals, the more her fan base reads that spiral as proof that the league and Black women players drove her to it.

This has set the stage for a very public, final act.

Because she feels as though she’s been given a get-out-of-jail-free card with the refs, it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where Contusion Cait’s exit comes after she shoves an official and is ejected, choosing afterward never to return to the league.

The likelier scenario, though, is that Contusion Cait erupts on the court again, inciting a physical fight, only for the other player(s) to get the better of her in front of a national audience, leading her to announce she’s leaving the league permanently because she doesn’t feel safe.

There’s another version of this ending that doesn’t need a televised incident. An announcement that the physical toll and injuries she’s sustained over the years playing basketball are taking her out of the game permanently.

This ending would give her and the league a somewhat clean exit. It’s a better alternative than having to confront the reality that haunts them: that their manufactured “face of the league” ultimately didn’t have the talent or work ethic to live up to their expectations.

However her exit arrives, the reality at the moment is that what Clark and her fan base want doesn’t fit the rules of professional basketball in any league on this planet. Not to mention, defense without contact isn’t a version of the WNBA even her most loyal fans would find entertaining to watch.

At any point, both sides could fix this. Clark could put in the work her game is missing. The league could step up and protect Black women.

History shows I shouldn’t hold my breath for either option.

So, I have another alternative for Contusion Cait and her fans to consider.

The good news is there is no need to reinvent the wheel or to try to upend the WNBA when the game she seems to want to play already exists.

Ok, ok. Hear me out. Instead of staying unhappy and creating chaos during every WNBA game while underperforming in front of a national TV audience, Clark should steer her fans away from the W and away from racially attacking Black women.

Instead, she should mobilize them and get them to Capitol Hill to ask Congressional Republicans to start a new government-funded league built around a game called HORSE, just for her.

In case you don’t know, and this description is only for ALL the fans she brought into basketball who are still new to the sport itself, HORSE is the driveway staple where one player calls a trick shot, makes it or misses it, and the other player has to match it or take a letter. The first person to spell out HORSE, loses. There are no defenders, no rebounding position, and no bodies anywhere near the shooter. It rewards shot creativity and doesn’t require any tolerance for contact.

I mean, after all, she’d excel and could TOTALLY become the GOAT of a game where the only thing standing between her and a made shot is her own aim. See how we can all win here?

Or, better yet, I think she’s earned a slightly different version of the same game. Maybe, to make it more challenging and on brand for her, let’s change the name from HORSE to DONKEY.

Newsome, Nicki ChildersI

Interesting Graphs at source

That’s because savvy investors on Wall Street now grasp what’s really going on. They fear that the root cause of Netflix’s woes portends the collapse of the dominant business strategy in tech today.

This is hugely important—and not just for investors or technocrats. All of us will be impacted by how this plays out. And I have a strong hunch that what is bad for Netflix might just be good for you and me.

That’s because Netflix’s failed strategy is audience capture. And you and I are part of the audience it wants to keep in captivity.

More on that below—but let’s start by looking at damage done to Netflix’s stock. When I warned about it in June, the price had already dropped 45%….

The Honest Broker

The Collapse at Netflix Signals the End of Audience Capture The most popular strategy in the tech world has stopped working. That’s good news for all of us. Ted Gioia Jul 17, 2026

Today’s culture briefing is free for everyone. Enjoy!

If you value analysis of this sort, consider taking out a premium subscription.

Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month). Type your email… Subscribe A few weeks ago, I warned about problems brewing at Netflix (and other streaming platforms). In just the last few days, these problems have gotten worse, much worse—and the situation has reached crisis proportions.

Even more revealing—the crisis is now spreading through the tech world like a wildfire. It’s no exaggeration to say that Netflix dragged down the entire NASDAQ today, after the release of its disappointing quarterly results.

Source That’s because savvy investors on Wall Street now grasp what’s really going on. They fear that the root cause of Netflix’s woes portends the collapse of the dominant business strategy in tech today.

This is hugely important—and not just for investors or technocrats. All of us will be impacted by how this plays out. And I have a strong hunch that what is bad for Netflix might just be good for you and me.

That’s because Netflix’s failed strategy is audience capture. And you and I are part of the audience it wants to keep in captivity.

More on that below—but let’s start by looking at damage done to Netflix’s stock. When I warned about it in June, the price had already dropped 45%.

But today, shareholders woke up to this.

Source After today’s debacle, Netflix will have wiped out the entire last two years of stock price gains.

This is usually where I take a victory lap, and point out that I warned of the danger three weeks ago. But there’s bigger story here that must be told.

The disappointing revenue report yesterday is just the tip of the iceberg. The company’s reluctance to provide viewership numbers is an even more revealing sign of how bad things really are.

Netflix once bragged regularly about its growing user base. But yesterday they refused to share updated viewership numbers until 2027!

Source Yet even without those metrics, I’ve seen evidence of a coming corporate collapse—but only if you dug into the numbers.

Last week, for example, we learned that Netflix’s audience is skipping the second season of the platform’s hottest offerings.

Source: Flowing Data That’s scary stuff for Netflix. But it gets worse. The audience is also losing interest in the platform’s brand new series.

Source The situation is so dire that even Netflix’s biggest new series of the second quarter failed to get renewed. But if the platform can’t count on its new hits, will anything save it?

Source Netflix doesn’t want to tell us about users canceling their subscriptions. But just go over to Reddit and other platforms where people say what they really think about the company. You will get an earful.

This is typical:

Funny I was talking to my wife about how Netflix has practically nothing left we want to watch and maybe it was time to move on. If this price increase goes through that would be the final straw. I suspect a lot of others are getting close to that limit….

Another frustrated customer didn’t even make a comment—just shared some numbers. But the numbers paint a dismal picture.

Source Netflix got into this mess by pursuing a simple strategy: (1) Reduce the number of new scripted series (which peaked in 2022), but (2) Raise subscription prices.

That is the “audience capture” strategy mentioned above. The idea is that the audience got captured years ago with cheap subscription prices, and now the platform can squeeze them mercilessly—offering less and charging more. Netflix has been pursuing this agenda for several years now.

Ah, but Netflix isn’t the only company building its future on audience capture. It’s getting used at almost every streaming platform. And even companies outside of the media space are practicing variants of it. You see it at Google, Meta, X, Apple, etc.

It’s shocking how many companies have learned this technique. The entire printer and toner business is now built on audience capture. The same is true of the software industry—don’t even get me started on my Microsoft Office subscription fiasco. And, of course, all those customer loyalty programs (variants on the frequent flyer gimmicks that started this craze years ago) are examples of the same stale strategy.

Even the AI world is turning into an audience capture business—both for itself and its customers. This is one of the key reasons for my frequent criticisms of AI slop. It feeds into step one of the strategy outlined above. The companies use AI to reduce the cost of content, thus boosting margins while reducing their dependence on human creators.

Audience capture has always existed, but never to this extent. When I consulted at BCG we called it a milking strategy, where you raised prices and reduced capital investment in a business—which was now your cash cow. You squeeze all the money you can from it, for as long as you can.

But back then we realized that milking only worked in the short term. Eventually you killed the cow. And the risk is the same today with “audience capture”—which is just a new name for that poor old bovine.

Sooner or later, the audience refuses to be held captive. And that’s happening now at Netflix—hence the stock sell-off.

But it’s happening elsewhere too, although few are paying attention. Look at the share price at Spotify or Disney for ther examples.

Did you know that Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire has stopped growing? In the first quarter, Meta saw a decline in users for the first time in the company’s history.

Source: Social Media Today This is not just a coincidence. Meta is the king of audience capture, and when it starts losing that audience, other tech companies ought to pay attention.

You should expect to see more problems of this sort at audience capture corporations. And that’s bad news for the technocracy, because this manipulative strategy is everywhere. If it stops producing results, they will need to take drastic steps.

But their nightmare is our blessing. That’s because the end of audience capture means tech companies will need to return to serving customers, not holding them in bondage.

They aren’t ready to take that step—not now, at least. Pleasing customers is hard work. Milking cows is a simpler business. But they won’t have a choice. The cattle are finally resisting. They might even stampede!

Moo, moo, moo!

Sometimes even cattle fights back (Source: Paul J. Everett) I give the leading audience capture companies 12-18 months at most before the worst consequences of their overreach hit their financial statements. And it may happen even faster.

If they were wise, they would start acting now. But whether they fix the root cause of their audience capture mess now or later, the end result will be the same. That captive audience will find itself liberated.

If I’m right, this may represent the biggest shift in the consumer economy of our time. So check back here for updates—because this will be a bumpy rodeo ride for all parties.

The Honest Broker

Karl Marx’s economics, and it concedes valuable ideological ground to the left every time it’s repeated. It’s a line some conservatives still reach for, almost reflexively. It’s time that changed, because even the claim that communism works in theory is plainly false.

In a speech Thursday announcing a global crackdown on left-wing terrorism, Secretary of State Marco Rubio made exactly that argument: communism does not even work in theory. Socialism and communism, by their very nature, require the centralization of power, the destruction of the individual, and the abolition of private property, the very institution that has been instrumental to the development of the West and the greatest nations on Earth. Even as an abstraction, communism is the antithesis of nearly everything Americans have historically believed in.

“One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism, for example, is that it sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice. That’s actually not true,” the secretary of state said. “Communism does not sound good in theory. The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, grey, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul. The world it envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity or ambition, a world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive towards, a world without miracles, without myths, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things. And the world communism envisions is a world without God.”