The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.
With the government shutdown rolling on without an end in sight and the Obamacare subsidies running out, President Donald Trump is sizing up a long-running battle against the failures of the Affordable Care Act.
“OBAMACARE ‘SUCKS,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday morning. “THE WORST HEALTHCARE FOR THE HIGHEST PRICE.”
On Saturday, Trump floated a compromise amid the impasse on the shutdown, urging Republicans to redirect federal money that goes to health insurance companies under the Affordable Care Act and send it directly to individuals.
“PAY THE PEOPLE, NOT THE INSURANCE COMPANIES!” Trump wrote in a message that could resonate with the Democrat base.
That post followed one from Saturday night, targeting the “fat cat” insurance companies for benefiting from a “corrupt system of healthcare” foisted on America by former President Barack Obama’s signature health care legislation.
“NO MORE MONEY, HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, TO THE DEMOCRAT SUPPORTED INSURANCE COMPANIES FOR REALLY BAD OBAMACARE,” Trump wrote on his social media platform.
“THE MONEY MUST NOW GO DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE, TAKING THE ‘FAT CAT’ INSURANCE COMPANIES OUT OF THE CORRUPT SYSTEM OF HEALTHCARE.
“THE PEOPLE CAN BUY THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER POLICY, FOR MUCH LESS MONEY, SAVING, FOR THEMSELVES, AN ABSOLUTE FORTUNE!!! PRESIDENT DJT.”
That post followed one from earlier Saturday, urging Senate Republicans to act on the health care fixes that Trump has talked about since before his first presidential run in 2016.
“I am recommending to Senate Republicans that the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars currently being sent to money sucking Insurance Companies in order to save the bad Healthcare provided by ObamaCare, BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, HEALTHCARE, and have money left over,” Trump wrote.
“In other words, take from the BIG, BAD Insurance Companies, give it to the people, and terminate, per Dollar spent, the worst Healthcare anywhere in the World, ObamaCare. Unrelated, we must still terminate the Filibuster!”
Terminating the filibuster is a call the Senate Republicans are rejecting, fearing Democrats would do the same to push through leftist spending and control-making items like free health care for illegal immigrants and adding four Democratic senators to the Senate by making Democrat-controlled Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico states.
Trump warns that is the eventuality in the future Democrat-controlled Congress and Senate anyway now that former Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz. and Joe Manchin, I-W.Va., are no longer in the Democrats’ way of moving to the nuclear option.
“Republicans Should Terminate the Filibuster (THE DEMS WILL DO IT THE FIRST CHANCE THEY GET!), End the Shutdown, Pass lots of Great ‘Things,’ and Win the Midterms,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday.
“SO EASY TO DO — Be the Smart Party, Not the Stupid Party!”
The issue of Obamacare subsidies is at the forefront of the government shutdown debate because Obama’s signature law set the end of 2025 as the expiration date for the subsidies in order to reevaluate the government-aided health care policy more than a decade after it was put into law.
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
Kirill Dmitriev — Vladmir Putin’s special envoy and head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund — is suddenly ubiquitous.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has been largely quiet since his maximalist negotiating approach with Team Trump failed. Moscow, presumably largely guided by Lavrov, after winning a concession on Tomahawk missiles, opted to continue Putin’s hardline demands for ending the war in Ukraine ahead of the proposed Trump-Putin summit in Budapest. NATO would have to admit that it was the root cause of the war. Kyiv would have to cede all of the Donbas, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine would essentially have to disband.
None of that is going to happen.
When Russia’s Plan A failed, Putin tried Plan B to get Team Trump’s attention. He did so by testing his latest wunderwaffe.
Trump was not amused. He said Putin’s testing of the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile was “not appropriate.” Trump also backed out of the meeting in Budapest after Putin’s nuclear shenanigans.
In response, the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil. Putin’s oil and energy sector, already under attack by long-range Ukrainian deep strikes against refineries and pipelines, is Moscow’s lifeline to keep funding the Russian dictator’s special military operation in Ukraine.
A week later, Putin tried again. This time, he announced the testing of a nuclear-capable underwater drone codenamed Poseidon. Then yesterday, in response to Trump’s threat to resume nuclear testing, Putin ordered Kremlin officials to “submit plans for the possible resumption of [Russian] nuclear testing.”
Putin’s favorite weapon during the Biden administration was nuclear bluffing. Ditto now during Trump’s second term. Yet this nuclear Kabuki theater is not working on Team Trump.
Enter Dmitriev. Putin knows both he and Lavrov overplayed their hand. Dmitriev’s mission is to find a way back in from the cold. The Stanford- and Harvard-educated 50-year-old appears to have calculated that he can do so by reaching out to the U.S. far right. Fearmongering is his weapon. However, undermining U.S. military support and aid for Ukraine is his mission.
In pursuit of this, he recently met with Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), thanking her for supporting Putin’s ridiculous negotiating demands on Ukraine. He also taped a podcast with Lara Logan wherein he falsely claimed that Putin upholds “traditional [conservative] values.”
But intentionally targeting civilians in Ukraine is not conservative or liberal — it’s a war crime. Ditto for kidnapping Ukrainian children.
As Steven Moore, a former chief of staff on Capitol Hill and the founder of the Ukrainian Freedom Project told us, given “the collapse of Tucker Carlson, who has always been on message for the Kremlin, the Russians are looking for a new way to pretend that they care about America’s culture wars.”
Dmitriev, at least for now, has apparently been tasked by Putin to do just that. He did it again after Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the much-watched New York City mayoral race Tuesday night, when he posted that George Soros had been a key backer of his winning campaign. Later that same evening, he quote-tweeted the New York Post’s cover that was captioned, “On your Marx, get set, Zo!” while saying, “Good Morning, NYC Comrades!”
Not many people had on their Bingo card a Putin stooge warning Americans about a communist in sheep’s clothing. Yet here is Dmitriev, doing just that. Regardless of where you stand on Mamdani, Dmitriev’s goal was not to warn Americans about the NYC mayor-elect or about modern-day communists. Rather, his sole aim is to undermine U.S. support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
In order to do that, Dmitriev must undermine growing Republican support for military aid to Ukraine. So Dmitriev is trying to do an end-run around Team Trump to court his conservative base. One way to bond with the American right is to warn about communists. Another is to make false claims about Russian conservative and religious values is another.
Especially given the resurgence of Republican support for U.S. economic and military aid to Ukraine.
As Moore noted in a recent Wall Street Journal op ed, Republican voter support had plunged to only 19 percent by March 2025. Now, it has rebounded to 47 percent among Trump voters.
Notably, as a poll Moore commissioned, Christian Republicans who attend church weekly are one of the key drivers accounting for renewed Republican support. They may be more fully appreciating that Ukraine is a deeply religious country and shares many of America’s core values. As Moore emphasized to us, “80 percent of Ukrainians identify as Christians. Baptists are the third largest Christian denomination in Ukraine after Orthodox and Catholics.” Roughly half of Ukrainians attend religious services at least once a month, compared to fewer than 10 percent of Russians, according to various sources.
Putin has hypocritically framed his war as a religious crusade, and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill declared Putin’s invasion of Ukraine a “Holy War” against a West that has “fallen into Satanism.”
Dmitriev is not fooling Team Trump. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly sent him packing after he he claimed new U.S. sanctions would have no effect on Russia’s economy.
Yet Dmitriev keeps trying. He seems to think he and Putin have seats at the table where American culture wars are playing out. Americans of all political stripes should disabuse him of that notion by showing him the door.
Kirill Dmitriev — Vladmir Putin’s special envoy and head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund — is suddenly ubiquitous.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has been largely quiet since his maximalist negotiating approach with Team Trump failed. Moscow, presumably largely guided by Lavrov, after winning a concession on Tomahawk missiles, opted to continue Putin’s hardline demands for ending the war in Ukraine ahead of the proposed Trump-Putin summit in Budapest. NATO would have to admit that it was the root cause of the war. Kyiv would have to cede all of the Donbas, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine would essentially have to disband.
None of that is going to happen.
When Russia’s Plan A failed, Putin tried Plan B to get Team Trump’s attention. He did so by testing his latest wunderwaffe.
Trump was not amused. He said Putin’s testing of the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile was “not appropriate.” Trump also backed out of the meeting in Budapest after Putin’s nuclear shenanigans.
In response, the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil. Putin’s oil and energy sector, already under attack by long-range Ukrainian deep strikes against refineries and pipelines, is Moscow’s lifeline to keep funding the Russian dictator’s special military operation in Ukraine.
A week later, Putin tried again. This time, he announced the testing of a nuclear-capable underwater drone codenamed Poseidon. Then yesterday, in response to Trump’s threat to resume nuclear testing, Putin ordered Kremlin officials to “submit plans for the possible resumption of [Russian] nuclear testing.”
Putin’s favorite weapon during the Biden administration was nuclear bluffing. Ditto now during Trump’s second term. Yet this nuclear Kabuki theater is not working on Team Trump.
Enter Dmitriev. Putin knows both he and Lavrov overplayed their hand. Dmitriev’s mission is to find a way back in from the cold. The Stanford- and Harvard-educated 50-year-old appears to have calculated that he can do so by reaching out to the U.S. far right. Fearmongering is his weapon. However, undermining U.S. military support and aid for Ukraine is his mission.
In pursuit of this, he recently met with Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), thanking her for supporting Putin’s ridiculous negotiating demands on Ukraine. He also taped a podcast with Lara Logan wherein he falsely claimed that Putin upholds “traditional [conservative] values.”
But intentionally targeting civilians in Ukraine is not conservative or liberal — it’s a war crime. Ditto for kidnapping Ukrainian children.
As Steven Moore, a former chief of staff on Capitol Hill and the founder of the Ukrainian Freedom Project told us, given “the collapse of Tucker Carlson, who has always been on message for the Kremlin, the Russians are looking for a new way to pretend that they care about America’s culture wars.”
Dmitriev, at least for now, has apparently been tasked by Putin to do just that. He did it again after Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the much-watched New York City mayoral race Tuesday night, when he posted that George Soros had been a key backer of his winning campaign. Later that same evening, he quote-tweeted the New York Post’s cover that was captioned, “On your Marx, get set, Zo!” while saying, “Good Morning, NYC Comrades!”
Not many people had on their Bingo card a Putin stooge warning Americans about a communist in sheep’s clothing. Yet here is Dmitriev, doing just that. Regardless of where you stand on Mamdani, Dmitriev’s goal was not to warn Americans about the NYC mayor-elect or about modern-day communists. Rather, his sole aim is to undermine U.S. support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
In order to do that, Dmitriev must undermine growing Republican support for military aid to Ukraine. So Dmitriev is trying to do an end-run around Team Trump to court his conservative base. One way to bond with the American right is to warn about communists. Another is to make false claims about Russian conservative and religious values is another.
Especially given the resurgence of Republican support for U.S. economic and military aid to Ukraine.
As Moore noted in a recent Wall Street Journal op ed, Republican voter support had plunged to only 19 percent by March 2025. Now, it has rebounded to 47 percent among Trump voters.
Notably, as a poll Moore commissioned, Christian Republicans who attend church weekly are one of the key drivers accounting for renewed Republican support. They may be more fully appreciating that Ukraine is a deeply religious country and shares many of America’s core values. As Moore emphasized to us, “80 percent of Ukrainians identify as Christians. Baptists are the third largest Christian denomination in Ukraine after Orthodox and Catholics.” Roughly half of Ukrainians attend religious services at least once a month, compared to fewer than 10 percent of Russians, according to various sources.
Putin has hypocritically framed his war as a religious crusade, and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill declared Putin’s invasion of Ukraine a “Holy War” against a West that has “fallen into Satanism.”
Dmitriev is not fooling Team Trump. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly sent him packing after he he claimed new U.S. sanctions would have no effect on Russia’s economy.
Yet Dmitriev keeps trying. He seems to think he and Putin have seats at the table of where American culture wars are playing out. Americans of all political stripes should disabuse him of that notion by showing him the door.
With the election of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York, much conversation has been made of his appeal to “affordability.”
As I’ve written previously, this is a noble conversation, but one that has been dishonestly framed (by Democrats and media) to date. I will use Mamdani’s comment in his acceptance speech to re-frame the debate.
We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.
Mamdani and the Democrat party have effectively defined a binary choice: Should government or “the market” control affordability? The Democrats are seemingly all in on expanding the size and scope of government, to the point of eventually seizing the means of production.
First let’s look at the role that government has already played and its effect on affordability. What areas in the economy have seen the greatest increase in costs for the consumer? Education, housing, healthcare, and food. Ironically, these are all areas of the economy that the government has interjected itself in the form of subsidies, regulations, government-backed loans, and transfer payments.
In the 1960s, tuition costs were a reasonable expense. The best and brightest pursued advanced degrees and had good-paying high-skilled jobs available upon graduation. Government-backed loans were buffeted by a competitive “private loan” market.
In 2010, Obama eliminated the federal guaranteed loan program, which had let private lenders offer student loans at low interest rates. Now the Department of Education is the only place to go for such loans.
With the election of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York, much conversation has been made of his appeal to “affordability.”
As I’ve written previously, this is a noble conversation, but one that has been dishonestly framed (by Democrats and media) to date. I will use Mamdani’s comment in his acceptance speech to re-frame the debate.
We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.
Mamdani and the Democrat party have effectively defined a binary choice: Should government or “the market” control affordability? The Democrats are seemingly all in on expanding the size and scope of government, to the point of eventually seizing the means of production.
First let’s look at the role that government has already played and its effect on affordability. What areas in the economy have seen the greatest increase in costs for the consumer? Education, housing, healthcare, and food. Ironically, these are all areas of the economy that the government has interjected itself in the form of subsidies, regulations, government-backed loans, and transfer payments.
In the 1960s, tuition costs were a reasonable expense. The best and brightest pursued advanced degrees and had good-paying high-skilled jobs available upon graduation. Government-backed loans were buffeted by a competitive “private loan” market.
In 2010, Obama eliminated the federal guaranteed loan program, which had let private lenders offer student loans at low interest rates. Now the Department of Education is the only place to go for such loans.
Private lenders (prior to 2010) would lend money based on a risk model, where student loans could be obtained with the lender determining their degree of risk associated with repayment. It didn’t serve their interest to make loans to a large swath of students that might likely not repay the loan. Tuition was mostly held in check, as students and lenders evaluated the cost-benefit analysis of higher education. Universities couldn’t raise tuitions beyond what “the perceived market” for return on investment would support.
Eliminating the private lending market placed government as the sole provider of student loans. The government abandoned risk-benefit analysis and effectively provided loans to anyone and everyone who wanted to attend university. This act ballooned the number of people (qualified and unqualified) who obtained government-backed student loans and removed the “market” pressure on tuitions, causing tuition rates to rise exponentially.
Housing unaffordability has three distinct (government-created) problems.
One: Rent control. New York offers us a glimpse at the impact of rent control programs on price and availability. Controlling rents on some subset of housing creates hyperactive demand on the balance of housing in a generalized area. Wherever rent control has been instituted, rents throughout said market rise above and beyond where “the market” might otherwise settle.
Two: Supply and demand (price controls and regulations). Wherever rent controls have been instituted, local governments (i.e., New York, San Francisco) alternately impose strict regulations on the building and upkeep of housing within said market. These regulations, as we see playing out in Pacific Palisades in California, make it near impossible to rebuild and repair, and they discourage private investment.
Three: Illegal immigration. Unfettered illegal immigration has placed extreme demand for housing above and beyond what the market might otherwise require. Cost supports (transfer payments) to illegal aliens, like government-backed student loans (above), removes some cost pressure against entry for many, causing prices to rise above what the market might otherwise demand, making housing unaffordable in many, primarily urban markets.
Obamacare, or the inaptly named Affordable Care Act, we were told, was necessary to “bend down the healthcare cost curve.” Conservatives, Republicans, health care industry analysts, and economists warned that the opposite would occur, with costs rising and care becoming rationed to curb hospital outlays. This is exactly what occurred, as we see with the debate over Obamacare subsidies as part of the Democrats’ rationale for shutting down the government. Temporary Obamacare subsidies implemented by Democrats in 2021, expiring at the end of 2025, are necessary, say Democrats; otherwise, Americans (and non-Americans) will see a doubling or tripling of their health insurance premiums.
If only someone had warned Democrats that this might occur.
As for health care subsidies to illegal aliens, some untold amount (billions) of federal tax subsidies has been paid out to states as reimbursement for Medicaid outlays. California Medi-Cal (Medicaid) provides full-scope coverage to all children and low income-eligible adults regardless of immigration status, including illegal aliens. Approximately $107.5 billion is reimbursed to California (for Medicaid) with federal funds.
We are informed (again by the shutdown) that 42 million Americans (and non-Americans) receive SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits. This number rose from 38 million in 2019. SNAP is supposed to be a temporary support program and available to U.S. citizens only. The USDA requested SNAP participation information from all 50 states. Twenty-one (Democrat-lead) states have refused to provide these data. It’s believed that this is due to their payouts of SNAP benefits to illegal aliens.
It is no wonder that Americans are concerned with affordability, but they are sadly mistaken if they think “more government” is the answer. Here’s why.
Government subsidies create a third-party payereconomic (pricing) problem.
Prices and products’ and services’ range of quality in a “free market” are arrived at organically, between a buyer (consumer) and a seller (or provider).
Sellers determine the market for their product or service and determine their costs in providing said product of service. They then determine a reasonable profit that justifies the development of a product or the providing (or not) of a particular service.
Buyers are placed in the position of determining the price they’re willing to pay for a particular price or service.
Competition causes other makers or providers to enter a market, if they believe they can make a better or cheaper product. Competition and choice apply downward pressure on costs, helping to ease affordability.
In a third-party payer model (as we see above in education, housing, health care, food, etc.), the buyer has no “direct” incentive to find a better product or service for less money. The money they’re spending is not their money. It’s “other people’s money,” as Margaret Thatcher once opined.
Democrats virtue-signal their care and concern for the American people (and non-American illegal aliens) as they promote the ever-burgeoning expansion of subsidies and transfer payments, because a dependent populace is a loyal (voting) populace. Nothing more. Nothing less.
They’ve systemically advanced Alexander Tytler’s missive in his Cycle of Democracy:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship (or communism).
We thus face a binary choice. Democrats want to expand government, up to including seizing the means of production. Republicans must make the case for reducing government subsidies (and removing illegal aliens) and permitting the market to allow for competition to lower the cost of goods and services.
Democrats and media will clamor that Republicans are dispassionate about “the people.” What’s dispassionate is government-produced unaffordability (documented above), leading to the eventual collapse of our economy and our freedoms.
Communism is the end goal of Progressivism, as Cloward-Piven documented in the 1960s. New York has fallen and will eventually implode. The draw to “free stuff” is real.
Republicans must educate the American people that nothing is free when all are in chains.
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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Acorn squash, Spam and baby food lined the shelves on a recent day at a college food pantry in California’s capital city, a resource that students receiving federal aid to purchase groceries may have to increasingly rely on because that assistance has been in limbo during the government shutdown.
Hundreds of students at California State University, Sacramento, or Sac State, visit the school’s Basic Needs Resource Center every week, where they can select up to a dozen items per trip — ranging from fresh produce and meat to toiletries and secondhand clothes.
“It’s a big blessing,” said Antonette Duff, a junior studying psychology at the university who’s enrolled in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps.
More than 3,600 students at the college of roughly 31,000 receive aid through SNAP, said Emily Tupper, the college’s director of Crisis Assistance and Resource Education Support. More than 200,000 college students in California and 1.1 million nationwide are on SNAP, according to the state’s Department of Social Services and the U.S. Government Accountability Office, respectively.
Many students are facing tuition and housing bills, juggling classes, and often working lower paying part-time jobs that make it difficult to afford groceries, with prices on the rise.
SNAP benefits for roughly 42 million people in the U.S. were cut off at the beginning of November due to the government shutdown. A federal judge last week ordered the Trump administration to fully fund the program, but late Friday the U.S. Supreme Court granted the administration’s emergency appeal temporarily blocking the order. The mixed messaging has left students who rely on SNAP confused and colleges trying to curb hunger on campus by spreading awareness about food pantries and handing out free meals.
“It just puts students in a really horrible position,” said Mike Hannigan, a student at Greenfield Community College in Massachusetts and an advocate against food insecurity on college campuses.
Hannigan receives just under $300 a month from SNAP, but the benefits didn’t come through at the beginning of November due to government delays.
If SNAP benefits keep getting delayed, he doesn’t know what he would do to afford groceries, he said. Some students, including those at community colleges who don’t have meal plans, may “have to decide whether or not they are going to attend a class or they’re going to pick up an extra shift to try to make money to be able to feed themselves or their families,” Hannigan said.
Campus food pantries and farmers markets offer some relief
Hannigan and other students recently hosted a free farmers market on campus and gave out thousands of pounds of vegetables from local farms. Nothing was left over.
Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College, a tribal college of about 250 students in North Dakota, hosts ‘Soup Tuesdays’ to feed students on campus for free. Students can also access a food pantry and kits with easy-to-prep meals such as chicken Alfredo or chili, and they’ll soon be able to pick up gift cards from the school to use at local grocery stores.
Many people living on tribal land or in rural areas are in so-called food deserts with limited access to grocery stores, college President Twyla Baker said. The uncertainty over SNAP caused by the political stalemate in Washington adds another layer of difficulty.
“To essentially use the most vulnerable as political pawns is just untenable,” Baker said. “It’s unsustainable, and it’s detrimental to the country as a whole.”
Food insecurity on college campuses has been on the rise in the past decade, and students have had to make tough choices about how to stretch their wallets to cover the necessities, said AJ Scheitler, director of the Data Equity Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, Center for Health Policy Research.
“Students will first make sure that they pay for tuition and books and all that stuff so that they can stay enrolled at school,” she said. “After that, they concern themselves with transportation so that they can get to school, then housing, and then food almost becomes this category that you can go without if you have to if after all of those other categories you don’t have any money.”
Sac State’s food pantries host grocery pop ups on campus twice a month where students can pick up fresh produce for free, said Tupper, the school official. The college may hold the events more often if federal food aid keeps getting delayed.
At the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, which estimates at least 4.5% of students receive SNAP benefits, officials have encouraged people to donate food, funds or their time to the campus food pantry.
Between 100 and 150 students pop into the campus pantry every day, said Lisa Lindquist, director of the LoboRESPECT Advocacy Center. The pantry is free and open to all students. Some fill up baskets with as many as 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms) of food per visit, while others are looking for a snack to hold them over between classes.
Students stressed about food aid uncertainty
On a recent trip to the grocery store, July Star Medina, a senior studying biology at Sac State, was shocked she had to spend about $30 just to buy chicken and a few spices. She’s had to make more frequent trips to the Basic Needs Resource Center in recent months because her SNAP benefits decreased from $290 to $120 a month this year. The assistance was lowered after she started working more hours during the summer, but it hasn’t gone back up now that she’s working less during the fall semester.
“I don’t think it’s enough at all,” Medina said. “After one week of groceries that’ll last me maybe two weeks.”
The prospect of that $120 going away has been stressful, she said.
“And that’s why I’ve been trying to come here to see what I can get,” Medina said outside the center. “Now I need to see where I can pull money aside to just get basic things.”
Scheitler, the UCLA researcher, said the uncertainty “is just so rough” for students.
“And the number of students who may have to drop out of school because they need to eat, their grades are going to fall,” she said. “Their mental health is going to be hurt by the stress of not being able to eat. This is going to have a significant impact if they can’t figure out how to fix this and fix this quickly.”
__
Associated Press Southwest chief correspondent Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico, contributed to this report.
Socialism is making a comeback, according to friend and foe alike. A new NBC poll now suggests that a majority of registered voters don’t like capitalism.
A Gallup poll in September also found that support for capitalism was slipping. A Data for Progress poll around the same time showed that — after asking some decidedly leading questions about democratic socialism — people liked democratic socialism. Still, Politico combined the results to declare: “Capitalism is out … and socialism is in.” And just this week, an NPR podcast dedicated a segment to explaining “How socialism got sexy.”
This has happened before. In 2018, Gallup found for the first time that a majority of Democrats had a more favorable view of “socialism” than of “capitalism.” And we got similar headlines as a result. No doubt such polls partly explain why Democratic presidential primary candidates overwhelmingly ran in the Bernie Sanders lane in 2020. Joe Biden, the candidate who mostly avoided that lane, however, won the nomination.
Like Sanders, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani describes himself as a democratic socialist. His popularity has driven many to claim that democratic socialism is popular too. It may well be, especially in New York City. But what plays in NYC may not have legs far outside the Big Apple. Indeed, Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in neighboring New Jersey, which shares much of the same media market, didn’t run as a democratic socialist and beat primary candidates who more or less did.
But punditry is not my aim here. My problem is with these periodic, poll-driven, “socialism is coming” fads.
For starters, issue polling — even when done well — is not very reliable. Change one word and you’ll get very different results. For decades, if you call a program “welfare,” Americans won’t like it. Call it “assistance to the poor” and Americans like it whole a lot more.
It’s also difficult to keep other issues from influencing issue polling. Capitalism’s popularity dropped — particularly among Democrats — during President Trump’s first term. It has dropped again during his second term. Is it really so hard to imagine people associating capitalism with the avowed party of capitalism? When that party is in power and is unpopular, it shouldn’t be surprising that the thing it claims to stand for is (slightly) less popular too?
And then there’s the messy fact that Trump’s brand of capitalism isn’t exactly the uncut free market stuff (that I like). It’s not socialism, but it’s definitely close to “state capitalism” — a system involving massive government interventions in the economy, usually on behalf of favored industries. Most serious libertarians would rather eat glass than call Trump’s program of massive tariffs, cronyism, industrial planning and partial government ownership of industries “capitalism.”
There’s a famous — and widely attributed — line that the problem with socialism is socialism, but the problem with capitalism is capitalists. When the administration is run from the top by private-jet-flying billionaires seemingly getting richer with insider deals and literally cosplaying “The Great Gatsby” at a time when SNAP benefits are running out for 40 million Americans, you’d think capitalism would be in even worse odor.
But take Trump out of it. When the status quo is unpopular, if you call the status quo “capitalism” they’ll have problems with it. Call the economic status quo “capitalism” and a lot of people will choose option number two, whether you call it “socialism” or not.
It’s not like the new “socialists” have cracked the books in their free time and suddenly have a newfound respect for Karl Marx, Sidney Webb, Michael Harrington or some other socialist thinker.
Socialist intellectuals have a hard enough time agreeing on what socialism is. The best definition the very well-read editors of the socialist journal Dissent could come up with in 1954 was “socialism is the name of our desire.” The idea that millions of Americans have a fully formed and coherent understanding of the concept, never mind know how to implement socialism, is preposterous. Asking people if they like socialism or capitalism is a “vibes” question and little more.
Of course, socialists are entitled to be happy about improving vibes. But the best way to make Americans sour on socialism is to put socialists in charge — which is why I’m not too worried about America becoming a socialist country.
New York City has just elected Zohran Mamdani – a self-described democratic socialist and the first Muslim mayor in the city’s history. Let that sink in. The cultural capital of America, once a beacon of enterprise, grit, and Judeo-Christian values, is now under the leadership of a man whose worldview is rooted in Marxist economics and secular progressivism. For those of us who still believe in God, country, and constitutional liberty, this is not just a political shift – it’s a spiritual alarm bell.
Mamdani’s platform reads like a socialist wish list: rent freezes, free public transit, city-run grocery stores, and a government that inserts itself into every corner of daily life. This isn’t compassion – it’s control. And it’s being sold to a generation that’s been taught to distrust freedom, worship entitlement, and redefine morality to suit their feelings.
Let’s be clear: Mamdani’s rise is not an isolated event. It’s the latest chapter in a coordinated effort to dismantle the foundations of Western civilization. His refusal to affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is a slap in the face to every Christian who understands the biblical significance of Israel. His embrace of gender ideology and radical identity politics mocks the very notion of objective truth. And his economic vision – where government replaces God as provider – is a direct assault on the biblical principle of stewardship and personal responsibility.
This is the fruit of decades of cultural decay. We’ve allowed our schools to become indoctrination centers. We’ve let Hollywood normalize rebellion against God. We’ve watched churches trade conviction for popularity. And now, the consequences are sitting in the mayor’s office of America’s largest city.
But here’s the deeper danger: New York sets trends. What happens there doesn’t stay there. Mamdani’s victory will embolden radicals in other cities. It will push the Democratic Party further left. It will normalize policies that punish hard work, reward dependency, and erase the moral compass that once guided this nation.
The church has got to stop apologizing. The body of Christ must stop compromising. We’ve got to stop pretending that neutrality is noble. This is a war of worldviews, and it’s time to fight like it. Stand up. Stand out. Speak up. Speak out. Fight with truth. With bold preaching. With courageous parenting. With political engagement that refuses to bow to the gods of wokeness.
Mamdani may have won New York, but he hasn’t won America. Not yet. The soul of this nation still belongs to those who fear God more than government. Who believe that freedom is worth defending. Who know that socialism is not charity – it’s theft dressed in virtue.
Let New York be a warning. Let Mamdani’s victory be the wake-up call. Because if we don’t stand now, we may soon find ourselves living in a country we no longer recognize.
In the 77 years since the formation of the Jewish state, and for the 2,000 years since the destruction of the Second Temple, the West has understood peace in the Middle East—peace between Arabs and Jews—as impossible.
Semantically, the “Peace Process” was the continuing enjoyment of a process which could be ended only by peace. What, then, have the West, the world and the United Nations been doing in regard to the Mideast since 1948?
The terrorist Yasser Arafat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994; the U.N., funded by the U.S., has dedicated time, treasure and prestige to the demonization of the Jewish state; Presidents Obama and Biden funded Iranian terrorism; presidents prior to Donald Trump vowed to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and broke their word; successive Democratic administrations promoted energy restrictions ensuring we’d have to buy oil from those enemies who paid for terrorism.
Through all the mishigas, the antisemites held that the Jewish state must be destroyed. The more philosemitic disagreed, suggesting instead accommodations that could only possibly end in Israel’s obliteration. Historically, this diplomacy was mistaken for and awarded as achievement.
There is an analog in my experience. It is the home game. This is a poker game made of a longtime, limited set of players—friends and neighbors, but acquaintances at least—given to “friendly” play. The game is “friendly,” as supposedly no one will lose greatly over the long run. Why? If they did, the game would dissolve from lack of players. The money, then, is largely just pushed around.
Should a player lose beyond his ability to pay, the others may allow him time to pay off his loss—usually, time until the next game—and he may offer up an IOU. If the players acknowledge the worth of the IOU and its holder bets it as if it were cash, it must be accepted at face value by the pot’s winner.
If the IOU isn’t redeemed in good time, the players have a problem. They will then understand the chit as worthless, which must mean the exclusion of the debtor from the game. In a small pool of players, that might mean the game’s end.
The point of the home game is its continuation. The home game, then, is essentially the opposite of any rational understanding of poker—the aim of which is to win the most money.
As the chits of losers proliferate, the members, seeking new cash, may admit outside players. These newcomers, however, have no stake in the comradely game’s continuation, and are in fact dedicated to its obliteration: They want to take the game’s money away.
Their success must reveal the home game’s essential fatuity. Should the newcomer win, he will first be offered the IOUs as payment—as the longtime members see this as a happy way to realize the worthless debt. The newcomer, however, would be foolish to accept the paper. He’d come prepared to pay his losses, with the understanding that he will be paid should he win.
The members must contrive to pay the new guy off, which means redeeming the deadbeat’s paper. Which means they can no longer allow their friend, the loser, to play. The nature of the home game is thus revealed. The players have been funding an evening of camaraderie and calling it poker. They are now out of pocket, short on players and, perhaps, abashed at their complicity. The game can no longer continue.
Far from being the impediment to the Peace Process, Hamas was its one essential element. If Hamas, like the insolvent card player, were eliminated, the “process” would be revealed as a sham. The marginalization of Hamas allowed those not interested in “process” to pursue actual resolution of the conflict. The “outsider” in this home game was, of course, Mr. Trump.
Before his appointment to the bench, Louis Brandeis referred to himself as “Counsel for the Situation.” This is a warm and pleasing understanding of the law, but for counsel to represent “the situation” rather than his client is actually a dereliction of his sworn duty.
The U.N., the various peace commissions, the Camp David Accords, the Oslo Accords, and so on, were the work of Attorneys for the Situation. “A situation” is a persistent state of affairs.
Mr. Trump recognized, and then busted out, the home game.
Mr. Mamet is a playwright, film director and screenwriter.
At over 7 percent, the unemployment rate in Canada is the highest it has been in a decade. For those under 25, it surpasses 14 percent. This is a real challenge for young people at the beginning of their working lives. The usual rules for getting started on a promising career no longer seem to apply.
The university degree does not open doors the way it used to. There are many more university graduates than there are openings that require this qualification, and this does not even consider the mismatch that exists between the fields of the vacant positions and those of the graduates.
The government has reacted to this sad situation by severely curtailing the number of temporary foreign workers (TFWs) allowed into Canada, presumably to save jobs for unemployed Canadians. It may not work. TFWs have been brought into Canada to fill jobs that, even in times of high unemployment, Canadians would not fill.
Agricultural workers are an example. Youth (and older workers) are reluctant to take seasonal jobs that require long hours of demanding physical labour outdoors for the rates of pay that our food-producing sector can afford.
TFWs also play a big role in entry-level service jobs, another area that is hard to fill with Canadians, especially if they have a university degree. Finding Canadians for these jobs is particularly acute in smaller centres and more remote locations.
Not only are the jobs left unfilled by reducing TFWs unattractive to most Canadians, but many of the more attractive jobs are now, or soon will be, replaced by AI. Older workers will recall how swathes of lower-level white-collar jobs, such as secretaries and clerks, were eliminated by the introduction of computers.
Now the work of higher-level positions can be done by AI. This includes junior executives, many mid-level management positions, and any position that has the word agent or broker in the title—areas where many aspiring leaders got their start. Now it is even harder to find any openings.
There are still good jobs in desirable locations that pay well, where vacancies tend to exceed job seekers and which will be difficult or impossible for AI to replace. Most Canadians do not even consider these opportunities or are barely aware of them.
The people needed now and into the future are trades workers, technicians, and technologists. Also needed are people who can provide a level of human contact that machines cannot offer in medicine and other areas.
Use the phrase “hands-on” to determine which occupations are safe from an AI takeover. AI cannot fix a leaky pipe or wire a new building. It cannot deliver a baby.
Nor can AI create and maintain the physical underpinnings of our 21st-century world. For this, technicians and technologists are required. Right now, there are openings for technicians and technologists in engineering at all levels and also in design, maintenance, inspection, project management, and other fields.
Such in-demand occupations are regulated in B.C. by the Association of Technicians and Technologists of B.C. Current job openings are listed here. Institutes of technology and many universities and colleges offer the training that would lead to positions like these. Most courses take two years, less than a university degree. Many technician and technology positions offer upward mobility into areas like management or professional engineering.
For those who prefer to deal with people, we will still need doctors, nurses, and other health professionals even as AI takes over the more tedious administrative aspects of that work. Counsellors and advisors will still be needed, but they will need to have both excellent people skills and detailed expertise in fields like financial planning, employment, and others. The more routine support and advice can and will be provided by AI.
Even in hands-on occupations, practitioners will still have to keep up to date with AI and other developing systems. These current and future developments will be like the telephone—useful and necessary in whatever we do. But they will also free us from the tedious administrative requirements that until now were part of just about every job.
We now find ourselves in an uncertain economy with high and rising unemployment. What used to be good ways to find a job or establish a career are no longer working, and AI-related elimination looms over many positions. But there are still many hands-on occupations that AI cannot fill and that offer good jobs now and excellent career prospects to those willing to consider them.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.
Many people are wringing their hands over the election of self-identified democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor. Unfortunately, they have reason to be worried, because his election reflects a trend that can be called conservatively, concerning, and liberally, alarming. To understand this assessment better, it helps to understand the nature of democratic socialism.
What is the history of the movement in this country?
Although he wasn’t an admitted socialist, Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced sweeping socialism to America:
While Roosevelt was not a socialist, his administration enacted a series of sweeping government programs that had long been championed by the Socialist Party.
Policies such as Social Security, unemployment insurance, federal jobs programs like the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and laws protecting workers’ rights to organize were all core tenets of the socialist platform that had been dismissed as radical just years earlier.
The Great Depression thus serves as the clearest example of how a systemic crisis can rapidly move socialist-inspired ideas from the political fringe to the center of American public policy.
Many of these programs have now become integral to the operations of the federal government, in spite of the early criticism of them. There is a good reason for calling them “entitlement programs.” Most of the country has come to depend on them.
Shortly before he co-founded Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in 1982, academic and leftist activist Michael Harrington attended a conference of the Socialist International in Paris. There he befriended many of the world’s leading socialists, including Israeli Knesset opposition leader Shimon Peres. Peres was among the coterie of leftist leaders with whom Harrington could sit down ‘over a beer and exchange stories,’ as Harrington’s biographer Maurice Isserman put it.
Interestingly enough, Jews and Israel were originally supported by the DSA:
Harrington would build support for Israel into the amalgamation of American socialist groups that formed DSA. Embracing Israel as the fulfillment of the Jewish right of self-determination, he wrote that Zionism is ‘the national liberation movement of a Jewish people.’
In spite of its founding principles, DSA made an about-face when it came to the Jews and Israel. It’s hard to know precisely when this shift occurred, but October 7 solidified this change:
On October 7, 2023, in response to Hamas’s horrific attack, DSA issued a statement ‘unequivocally’ condemning the killing of all civilians but also calling Hamas’s actions ‘not unprovoked’ and ‘a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime.’ The following spring, members of its youth branch, Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), played a leading role in pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel campus demonstrations. In at least one instance, Jewish protesters were told to ‘go back to Poland.’ Other demonstrators used imagery and slogans equating Zionism with Nazism. The slogan “
‘From the River to the Sea,’ often interpreted as a call for eliminating Israel, has sounded at DSA meetings. And at its 2025 national convention, DSA approved a resolution citing support of Israel’s right to defend itself or equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism as ‘expellable offenses.’
As it turned out, the DSA was behind many of the campus protests and riots that consumed American campuses after October 7. In April of 2024, the DSA posted a statement to the website, which included this passage:
We support the righteous message of protesters at the encampments. We call on our comrades to support efforts nationwide to force universities to divest from the Zionist occupation and call on the United States government to cease all aid to Israel. Where protests appear, we’ll appear in numbers. Where repression looms, we’ll show up and protect the whole. Where support is needed, we’ll be a support.
Now, if you’re thinking that the participation of the DSA in political affairs is fringe or harmless, look at the inroads that the DSA has made:
A new report by the Heartland Institute, a national free-market think tank, reveals that nearly every candidate endorsed by prominent socialist organizations in the United States emerged victorious during the 2024 election.
Overall, these organizations endorsed a total of 51 socialist candidates, of which 48 (94 percent) won their races for federal, statewide, or local office with an average margin of victory of approximately 49 percent. Nine of these candidates ran in uncontested races. Taking out those nine candidates, the 39 remaining socialist candidates won their races by an average margin of approximately 37 percent. Only three socialist candidates lost their races, with a 13 percent average margin of defeat.
Among the candidates endorsed by these three socialist groups, 27 ran for the U.S. House of Representatives, two ran for U.S. Senate, 12 ran for statewide offices, and 10 ran for local offices. These races occurred in 22 states and the District of Columbia. California was the leading state for socialist candidates in the 2024 election, with 10 in total.
The DSA also publicly condemned one of their own, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, after she led a panel discussion in July 2024 against antisemitism:
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) dropped its endorsement of New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after she hosted a panel discussion on antisemitism.
The DSA said in a Tuesday statement that it was rescinding its conditional endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez’s reelection campaign after she ‘conflated anti-Zionism with antisemitism and condemned boycotting Zionist institutions’ during the discussion she sponsored last month.
‘This sponsorship is a deep betrayal to all those who’ve risked their welfare to fight Israeli apartheid and genocide through political and direct action,’ the statement said.
Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, condemned antisemitism in the public discussion with two Jewish activists — Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), and Stacy Burdett, a former senior official at the Anti-Defamation League and US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Democrats in the party continue to radicalize. The position of the socialists in supporting Marxist ideology increases its hold. People who feel they can draw on government programs are becoming more dependent on the “free” services that are offered. The movement to extend entitlement grows.
Are we truly prepared to accept people running for office who are democratic socialists? What if they are antisemitic? Are the freebies too tempting to too many people? Even if they fail to be elected—increasingly unlikely—how much damage will be done?
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 