People write in and ask me: “How can it be liberating to identify your contradictions? It’s painful!”

In all honesty, this is the same as asking: “Why is it better to face reality? I’d rather live outside of reality, because reality can be unpleasant.”

This makes no sense at all. Not if reality is what it is, independent of what you think, assume, want, wish or desire. The way I look at it, reality is going to be what it is no matter what your mind says. Rather than fighting or ignoring the truth, it’s better to face the truth … and then work within that context. That’s what I mean by “liberating.” If you’re constantly fighting reality, then you’re unable to focus on what’s actually possible and feasible. Instead, you’re trying to do the impossible, wasting precious time and energy that could be spent on pursuing the possible instead.

Notice how psychological coping implies a particular metaphysical view of existence. You either accept the philosophical premise that reality is what it is, or you don’t. My psychological recommendations would be very different if I held a different philosophical view. If my philosophical view was that reality can be whatever your consciousness constructs it to be, then I wouldn’t be advising you the way that I am.

None of this is to discourage innovation or creativity, either. But even innovation or creativity has to be rational. I call this “working within the system.” The “system” here refers to any facts you cannot change, at least not at this point in time. You have to separate what you can change from what you cannot, and focus only on what you can change — assuming that interests you, and that it’s connected to some particular goal or purpose you have.

Wishful thinking is a means of escaping reality. This leads to emotional problems commonly known as depression or anxiety. Depression or anxiety are false beliefs, based on faulty premises — one of which is almost always the false belief that wishing can make it so. Trying to control what you cannot control will lead to a sense of futility or “learned helplessness” in some people — the definition of depression. In other people, it will lead to a sense of danger or foreboding — the definition of anxiety. People take pills and pursue therapy for these things, but that will only be a band aid at best until or unless the underlying view is identified and corrected: One’s underlying philosophical view.

Psychology is thought to be theory-neutral, or philosophy-neutral. This isn’t possible. By definition, a therapist is helping a person based upon a certain point-of-view. One therapist will say, “Whatever you feel is right.” Another therapist will say, “I know what’s right — just listen to me.” Still another will say, “Let’s examine the facts. The facts prove that this is the right course of action, the one that will bring you what you want. Do you see any other facts to contradict this?” This last is the method of reason and logic. It’s this method from which so many are trying to escape. A good therapist challenges you, but in a supportive way. “Let’s figure out what the truth is, together.”

When you try to escape from logic and thinking, you’re trying to escape your nature as a rational creature. To say man is a “rational creature” is not to imply that he will inevitably do rational things. It implies that man must reason and think if he’s going to survive, flourish, and be happy. Attempts to escape your nature are attempts to escape your humanity. Most will claim that the essence of humanity are your emotions. But what are emotions? Emotions are the product of thought. And thoughts can be wonderful or downright rotten, logical or completely off base. Hatred, hostility and bitterness are emotions. Do these emotions imply mental health? I don’t think so. It’s the content of your emotions that’s relevant, and the content of your emotions are the thoughts and ideas implied by them. To understand your emotions, you must understand what you think.

Embrace reality, and all the good or bad that goes with it. It’s the only liberation and freedom there is.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

I’ve written before about how aging parents can sometimes become manipulative; appearing to be more “helpless” than they actually are. Interestingly, reader responses were 100% in agreement, but many questioned how to tactfully approach the issue.

Well, sometimes it’s all in how you say it. For example, “Why are you sitting there all day? You can get around! Take a walk and do something for yourself!” As opposed to, “You say you want to be more social. Why not spend a little time at the Cheer Center and meet some new people? It might be fun.” The first one sounds kind of insulting. The second one? Not quite so bad.

When you bluntly tell somebody what to do, you’re implying that they don’t have a mind of their own. This not only applies to adults, but also to kids — especially teenagers. Lecturing or ordering a teenager around isn’t going to work. You have to invoke facts and explain the consequences if he doesn’t do what you ask. If those consequences are important enough to him, you’ll usually get his cooperation.

Interestingly, research from the Department of Psychology at the University of Memphis suggests that lecturing to students in large classroom settings is not the most effective method of instruction. Findings indicate that whenever students are actively engaged in their learning, i.e., experiencing the consequences first-hand, they learn better and faster. This makes sense, because people don’t learn unless they are applying their minds to the facts.

Lecturing has its place for a motivated audience, but it’s not the way to approach personal or business relationships. Of course there are exceptions: When you hire an expert to fix your car, build your house, or perform surgery, you want someone who’s in charge and knows what he/she is doing. But even then, it’s valuable to have things explained to you. In fact, one of the biggest complaints that I hear about some doctors is that they don’t take the time to explain what they’re doing. Even an expert should have a method of reasoning that a non-expert can understand. No matter how accomplished they may be, no one is above showing respect and consideration.

There will always be those who have a need to tell others what to do. These authoritarian personalities have an inflated sense of their own importance and the role they play in the lives of others. Sadly, more than a few of these types end up in positions of power, but many more show up in the personal lives of everyday individuals. The authoritarian is more than just a “control freak.” Control freaks are driven by an anxiety to get things done “right” – for better or worse. The authoritarian, however, believes that people are incompetent, and that he or she must take over for them. When a compulsive authoritarian and a depressed, dependent person find one other, the resulting combination can be sicker than either of the two alone.

None of us knows everything, but we’re all able to think. Needing to be told what to do stems from a mistrust in your ability to think things out. When you’re confident in that ability, you recognize your capacity to investigate and form responsible conclusions on your own. You can then make your own decisions based on your best judgment. All the talk of self-esteem really boils down to this: A belief in your ability to figure out what’s going on around you and to take responsibility for making judgments about it.

Healthy people look around the world and form conclusions carefully and objectively. As a result, they have no desire to tell others what to do. They know that it just doesn’t work.

Michael J. Hurd, Life’s a Beach

They say anxiety is a disorder.

Yet we’re simultaneously told that we must care what others think.

“Which others? And why?” Those questions are not permitted, nor considered.

Young people come of age in a society with their psyches firmly fixed in these contradictions. “Don’t be afraid of being who you are. But be sure not to upset anyone. Be all you can be. But make sure you fit in.”

Fit — into what, and why? That question is never considered, nor permitted.

And we wonder why anxiety paralyzes millions, tempting them into addiction, possible depression, even suicide. We have done this to ourselves, and to each other. Because of the way we think.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

If tolerance means the end of Western civilization, then we cannot be tolerant.” (Elon Musk)

If you tolerate people who seek to annihilate you, then you’re self-destructive — if not suicidal.

The first principle of life for an individual — or a culture — is survival.

Today’s self-anointed intellectual, political and cultural “influencers” are openly committed to anything or anyone who seeks to destroy Western civilization and the original American Constitution generated by that civilization.

It’s as simple as that.

If you tolerate your destroyers, then you’re destroying yourself.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Socialism is more fashionable today than at any time since the Soviet Union collapsed. It’s back, and its major rival isn’t an ideology of unfettered free markets but right-wing populism. Theodore Roosevelt is a greater inspiration than Ronald Reagan to today’s young Republicans. The man most likely to be the next GOP presidential nominee, J.D. Vance, is more enthusiastic about Huey Long than Milton Friedman. Even the alternative “NeverVance” candidate insiders in Washington prefer – Secretary of State Marco Rubio – has made a point of saying capitalism must be “common-good capitalism.”

Libertarians have disappeared, just as the national debt has blown past $40 trillion. Arguably the most libertarian member of the US House of Representatives, Thomas Massie, lost his primary in May after investing all his political capital in anti-Zionism and the Epstein files. The most libertarian senator, Rand Paul, has not succumbed to the same obsessions but finds himself marginalized in Donald Trump’s second term. He and Rubio were first elected to the Senate the same year; their divergent fortunes tell a tale.

Bold thinking rather than ballot-box popularity had always been libertarianism’s strength – but today the ideas seem exhausted, and there’s no libertarian who provokes or inspires to anything like the degree Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek or Murray Rothbard once did.

Libertarian think tanks and magazines are running on fumes; they’re richly endowed but irrelevant. One need not agree or even sympathize with libertarian philosophy to find all this surprising. Free markets had triumphed by the end of the 20th century, with even Democrats such as Bill Clinton and British Labour party leaders such as Tony Blair adopting pro-market attitudes, if not policies that satisfied libertarians. What had long been radical libertarian views on gay rights, recreational drug use, pornography and vices such as gambling have now become law throughout the western world. Free trade was a bipartisan orthodoxy for decades, and for more than 30 years Americans and Europeans got to reap the benefits – as libertarians believe them to be – of mass migration.

Strangest of all, even as the public’s faith in the institutions of government has plummeted this century, the popularity of anti-government ideology hasn’t risen. Instead, populists and socialists have reaped the harvest of discontent.

Why? The puzzle contains its own solution: libertarianism has lost its raison d’être.

There are two halves to libertarian thought, although libertarians perceive them as logically identical. Anti-statism – the anti-government reflex – is one component. Absolute faith in the market economy, meaning voluntary exchange of goods and services of any and every kind, is the other. In theological terms, the state is satanic, and the market is the closest thing on earth to God.

The market is effectively omniscient; no one can second-guess its wisdom. It is benevolent even when it teaches us hard lessons, which are only for our own good. It is omnipotent and all-provident, supplying everything humanity needs. The coldness that libertarian economists exhibit toward ordinary human concerns about neighborhood or nation, and the fanaticism they display when defending free trade – as if tariffs are morally abominable, not just suboptimal according to their utilitarian math – are the marks of a faith that disdains worldly folly (natural loyalties) and finds salvation in a perfected system, from which the slightest deviation is a grave sin.

What made libertarianism so exciting, if never broadly popular, in its 20th-century heyday was that it was a reformist faith. It went against the grain at a time when most people believed that government was very nearly God. Armed with the best social science, there was nothing the mid-20th-century state could not achieve – the American public didn’t get into a “war on poverty” or “war on drugs” assuming they would be endless and unwinnable, just as they didn’t think the architects of the Great Society at home could fail to win the Vietnam War abroad.

The question was only which kind of big government the country should have: Republican or Democrat? Or, for those who considered more radical alternatives, as academics often did, whether western-style liberal democracy and social democracy could and should prevail, or whether the communist version of all-provident government was better – in principle, whether or not the Soviet Union embodied it perfectly in practice.

For Cold Warriors, the only way to thwart the Soviet superstate was with an American superstate, harnessing capitalism in the service of a growing government that would itself keep capitalism safe. There was no contradiction: that was a virtuous circle. (Though President Eisenhower, for one, had his doubts – he warned about the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell address because he believed America would bankrupt itself trying to fight a ceaseless series of conflicts like the Korean War.)

Libertarianism was shocking in this context – it was positively electrifying. The likes of Friedman, Hayek and Rothbard dared to argue government didn’t work, it couldn’t work, no matter how sophisticated the social science its bureaucrats wielded. Nor were ever-more military spending, the draft and wars like those in Korea and Vietnam necessary to keep Americans free and safe. On the contrary, freedom was really being lost in the name of fighting for freedom.

And freedom could mean much more than the average American realized. It didn’t just mean a choice of automobiles or soft drinks, a choice of churches or hairstyles for your wife. You didn’t have to smoke cigarettes or drink beer – you could smoke marijuana or, if you pleased, snort cocaine. You didn’t have to have a wife: you could have sex with anyone who consented, man or woman, and as many at a time as you like. Freedom didn’t demand that you do any of this but it required that it should be possible. This went beyond what even Hugh Hefner was offering midcentury Americans, though the Playboy impresario was thrilled by the implications and made much of the libertarian philosophy his own.

These were wild, bracing ideas for millions of Americans, and for others who had already begun to experiment with “alternative lifestyles” or countercultural rebellion, libertarianism offered a principled, coherent philosophical defense. But the ideology’s strongest selling point wasn’t its then almost unthinkable cultural openness, but its advocacy of something else that was usually called a vice: the profit motive, which, if unleashed, could bring unlimited consumer prosperity to ordinary people and would reward those strivers who dared to start new businesses.

As government proved unable to solve the nation’s problems, from stagflation to urban poverty and crime, the case for giving markets a chance grew more persuasive – enough to get free-market, libertarian-inspired conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher elected on both sides of the Atlantic.

Then came the internet, which seemed like the fulfillment of libertarianism’s promise. Yes, there was money to be made, and in the early days it felt like any risk-taker could make it. But the internet was more than just another proof of market principle. It was a demonstration of how freedom itself worked: a decentralized parallel world in which free speech was absolute and individuals could form new communities around any interest, no matter how obscure – or nerdy. The first wave of internet-based media, including the blogs of the early 2000s, had a libertarian flavor: the big-name bloggers might not be strict dogmatic libertarians, but they almost all took the gist of libertarianism for granted. Yet all these successes were libertarianism’s downfall.

In a world where government is widely understood to be paralytic or incompetent at best, libertarian skepticism doesn’t stand out. And instead of amusing a public secure in its faith in big government, the way a shocking new film or rock band might entertain a public with basically middle-class morals, libertarian anti-government ideology now only demoralizes Americans who don’t feel like they need any more disillusionment. This is why it’s not such a paradox that socialism and varieties of conservatism with a more positive view of government are enjoying a resurgence. They offer hope where there’s otherwise only despair.

To hear libertarians go on about how government is only going to keep failing is like listening to a hypochondriac constantly telling you your organs are getting nothing but older and will sooner or later give out completely, with the grave lying in wait for us all.

That isn’t news to anyone, and however true it might be, dwelling on it hardly makes anything better. Libertarians may have trouble understanding this for the same reason some true believers lose the ability to relate to people who don’t welcome death despite believing in an afterlife. The psychology of hope or despair plays a greater role in human happiness than whether a redistribution program or some other government totem “works” or not.

And where the market has worked – as it resoundingly has, in many contexts – giving consumers what they want has often come at a high cost in a currency other than dollars. What was most attractive about the libertarian vision of freer markets wasn’t the possibility of getting rich or enjoying material abundance, as important as those things certainly were. It was the dream that such wealth would bring out the best in us all, creating a fundamentally more agreeable society. We have the wealth, but we don’t have the joy it was supposed to lead to.

The libertarian response to this disappointment is to prescribe more of the same medicine that didn’t cure the patient, yet whatever good the treatment could achieve has already mostly been realized. A friend notes that cutting taxes, for example, doesn’t have the political punch it used to because federal income tax rates are already much lower than they were before Reagan. Lower still might be better – I certainly believe so – but the public simply doesn’t feel the burden as heavily as it once did, and so doesn’t feel as much relief when it’s lightened further.

Something similar is true, to an even greater extent, with libertarian cultural victories. Once Americans got over their initial astonishment at what libertarians were saying about sex, drugs and consensual vice, many of them gradually began to entertain hopes that more liberal attitudes could indeed change everything for the better.

Weren’t too many black men being sent to prison because of the drug war? Didn’t homosexuals just want the same rights as everyone else? And was pornography or gambling really such a big deal? Today cannabis has been legalized or “decriminalized” to the point where it’s unavoidable in our cities: there are pot shops, dispensing the drug itself or selling paraphernalia, on almost every block, it seems – they’re some of the last brick-and-mortar establishments remaining, often lit up like Pachinko parlors with blinding LEDs. Potheads use their intoxicant everywhere, without regard for whether children are around.

Gay marriage is the law of the land, but that hasn’t stopped sexual revolutionaries from demanding more: if a man can replace a woman in marriage, or a woman replace a man, then it hardly makes sense to keep insisting on sex differences: men are women, and vice versa. People are just meat with different garnish. Pornography and sports betting, meanwhile, are freedoms that have made millions feel like slaves. Nothing remains of the optimistic marketing for the laissez-faire approach to vice; now there’s just the sordid reality.

And the internet? That decentralized free-for-all has given way to a manor system. Even Elon Musk doesn’t make it easy for anyone to wander off the X reservation by following a link. Social media now penalizes the very thing the World Wide Web was built upon: linking to other sites. “The internet” now means a handful of tech companies that determine the limits of speech. The libertarian promise of the early web is a fading memory – for Generation Z, not even that – yet libertarians are ill-prepared to offer a deep critique of censorship imposed by private companies. You can leave the baron’s estate by going offline. That too is true, yet doesn’t offer anyone the freedom they’re seeking.

Libertarians helped make the world in which we live today – which is why nobody looks to them to lead us to tomorrow.

The Spectator, Daniel McCarthy

We aren’t simply wasting money on Ukraine. The return on investment has been overwhelmingly negative.

Conventional wisdom is that “high gas prices” are the result of the war in Iran, that they’re going to result in heavy losses for the Republicans in the midterms, and that the cost of living is going to remain high for the foreseeable future.

This consensus view, while not entirely wrong, is actually a simplistic and very optimistic version of events. The truth is actually worse than what conventional wisdom says. The truth is that we are now careening towards a potentially historic energy crisis — and solving it won’t be easy because it’s a physics problem, not simply an economic one.

There are a lot of theories about where this potential energy crisis is coming from. We just spoke to a White House official who posited one theory, which we’ll discuss in a moment.

Before we do, we need to establish that, as hysterical as it may sound, a full-blown catastrophic energy crisis could be on the horizon. In fact, that has actually become something of a mainstream opinion if you know where to look.

According to analysts at major financial institutions, including JPMorgan, we could soon realistically hit the operational floor for the global energy system. In the worst-case scenario, this could lead to the point where pipelines lose pressure, refineries have to shut down to protect their equipment, and gas stations run out of fuel to sell. No one ever talks about this, but as it turns out, fuel infrastructure requires a certain minimum amount of fuel to function. Think of it like your body — it requires a certain amount of blood running through the veins, or it will shut down completely.

When it comes to our oil infrastructure, that buffer is now in danger of failing. And it’s not entirely because of the war in Iran — which becomes clear when you realize that the vast majority of oil exports from the Middle East are sent to Asia, not the Americas.

But there is a supply shock, and we need to discuss it because the magnitude of the risk cannot be overstated. Every civilization requires energy to function. Without energy, we revert to the Stone Age. Look at what’s been happening in Europe.

Just a few years ago, Germany — the biggest economy in Europe — got rid of all its nuclear power plants. They shut them all down in favor of “renewables,” and they laughed at anyone — including Donald Trump — who said they were making a fatal mistake. Around the same time, Germany ran out of firewood — completely. The price shot up 100%, and then no one could buy it anymore.

Loggers put GPS trackers on their firewood because theft became so rampant. People began using wood chips in desperation. In neighboring Poland, instead of lining up outside the Apple Store for the latest iPhone, people began queuing for days outside of coal mines, hoping for some fuel.

This statistic sounds too insane to be true, but it’s real: Every year in Europe, more than 360,000 people die from “cold-related excess mortality,” otherwise known as cold temperatures (That includes many elderly people living in their homes, which don’t have adequate heating). That’s more than 8 times the number of Europeans who die from heat-related causes, which is pretty inconvenient if you’re a believer in “global warming.”

In the United States, by contrast, we only have around 1,000 hypothermia deaths per year — mostly drunk people who get lost in the woods during the winter. Even by the most liberal estimates, only around 40,000 Americans die annually for a reason that can be linked, in some tangential way, to cold temperatures.

Here’s another way to measure the distinction: in America, around 44,000 people die from gun violence every year, including mass shootings and suicides. That’s a whopping 12% of the total number of people who die in Europe every year from cold weather. So anytime you hear Europeans claiming that America is dangerous because of all the “gun violence,” tell them that Europe is dangerous because people freeze to death all the time.

These are numbers that are unthinkable in the United States. But if we continue on this trajectory, they won’t be unthinkable anymore. We’ve taken our energy production for granted. And that could be a fatal mistake, in a very literal sense.

Before I go into detail about how exactly we might see a failure of global energy infrastructure, I want to start with this communication we just received from a former White House official. I don’t normally share communications with Washington insiders, for the simple reason that I don’t know any Washington insiders. Nor do I have any interest in knowing any Washington insiders. Most people in conservative media go to great lengths to cultivate relationships in Washington. My approach is essentially the opposite. But this former White House official got in touch with one of my producers over the weekend, while talking about high gas prices. And I thought this statement was interesting, so I’ll pass along what the official said.

“It’s Zelensky. It’s literal Western civilization suicide. Europe and the United States are funding their own energy crisis.”

At first, when I heard that, it sounded like typical White House messaging to me. Obviously, they want to distract attention from the war in Iran and blame Ukraine for high gas prices. But let’s take the claim seriously for a second. This is footage of President Trump speaking at a golf tournament one week ago:

One day after these comments, Trump posted the following message on Truth Social:

“Ukraine has agreed not to hit Russian Energy targets. Russia has agreed to do, likewise!”

We have no reason to think Trump was lying about this. It would certainly be a strange thing to make up. Indeed, if true, it would be a major breakthrough. Ukraine has been bombing Russia’s fuel infrastructure — their fuel depots, storage tanks, pumps, and so on — for a very long time now. They’ve reportedly taken out roughly 1/3 of Russia’s refining capacity, which has led Russia to ban the foreign sale of its diesel — which is no small thing, since Russia is (or was) the second-largest diesel exporter in the world. This is why diesel is now more expensive than it’s ever been in recorded history, at more than $6 a gallon. Yes, diesel is more expensive than ever before.

How does this affect you? Well, two ways. First of all, pretty much everything you buy was transported on a semi-truck, a cargo ship, or a freight train at some point — all of which run on diesel. When diesel supply goes down, prices go up, and costs are passed along to you when you buy things at the grocery store, Amazon, or anywhere else.

Secondly, refineries outside of Russia are now “yield switching” to diesel to maximize their profits, meaning they’re refining less regular gasoline as a result (which drives up the price of regular gasoline). Remember, diesel and regular gas come from the same barrel, but many refineries are capable of switching their output to some degree.

According to Goldman Sachs, the price difference between diesel and gasoline in the United States is now over $60 per barrel, when it was just $3 a barrel one year ago. So there’s much, much more money to be made by refining diesel right now. And because refineries are already operating at full capacity, any effort to refine more diesel means that less gasoline will be refined.

That’s why global exports of gasoline have dropped 24% in the past year. Everyone’s switching to diesel if they can swing it. From March to August of this year, diesel yields in the United States are well above their historical averages, while gasoline yields have been cut. Meanwhile, demand for gasoline hasn’t gone down. In fact, it’s gone up, especially in Russia, since many of their oil refineries have been blown up.

So if Ukraine agreed to stop bombing Russian refineries, and allowed the world’s number-two diesel exporter to get back to refining diesel, that would be great news for the American consumer — unequivocally. That’s what Trump said was happening last Monday. But that night, Zelensky spoke to reporters and contradicted the president. He stated, “There is now a strong U.S. proposal for a mutual halt to strikes on critical infrastructure.” Zelensky added that “Ukraine is ready to support de-escalation,” but only if Russia would agree, in turn, to stop bombing Ukraine’s infrastructure.

Fast forward six more days, and Zelensky has clearly given up on the whole plan. He posted footage of burning Russian refineries, demonstrating quite clearly that Ukraine has actually doubled down on its strategy of destroying Russia’s fuel infrastructure. On social media, Zelensky then bragged about what he had done.

Our long-range responses had a very significant impact in the Moscow region last night. One of Russia’s key oil industry facilities and the aggressor’s logistics facility were hit. These are billions of dollars that sustain the war machine. … I thank our warriors for their accuracy: the Security Service of Ukraine together with the Unmanned Systems Forces, the Special Operations Forces, the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine, and the Foreign Intelligence Service. …I thank everyone who is strengthening Ukraine’s long-range capabilities. I am grateful to everyone who complements our long-range responses with responses through sanctions. Glory to Ukraine!

Remember when we were supposedly arming Ukraine with “defensive weapons,” and gave them explicit instructions not to escalate the war by bombing Russian infrastructure? Shortly before the Biden administration left power, they rescinded those restrictions. Apparently, under the Trump administration, Zelensky is happy to say one thing and do another. No one is stopping him. Now he is openly celebrating a military campaign that, in addition to raising the possibility of World War III in a very direct way, is also making day-to-day life much more miserable for millions of Americans. So why would he do that? Why in a million years would he dream of doing such a thing?

Let’s go through the numbers to provide some historical context. By some estimates, this year we’ve seen the largest surge in gas prices (in percentage terms) from January to the summer peak of any midterm election year in the past century. It’s not even close. Gas has now reached $4.48 a gallon on average, which is roughly $1.20 more than last year. The typical sedan is now around $20 more expensive to fill up compared with 2025. If you drive an SUV or a truck, you’re easily paying $30 or $40 more than you used to. You’re paying around 52% more for gas at the moment, compared to January.

The previous record in a midterm election year was dramatically lower — just a 27% increase in the price of gas all the way back in 2002. So we’ve doubled the previous record when it comes to the increase in the price of gas. This is uncharted territory in the modern history of this country. Don’t take my word for it — CNN brought out the nerd with the totally unnecessary smart board to tell you the same thing.

Matt Walsh, Daily Wire

In a new survey, homebuilders around the country say ramped-up Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdowns are creating huge headaches for their businesses.

…

What they’re saying: “ICE is becoming a very large issue and causing labor shortages,” says a Houston builder in a survey conducted earlier this month by John Burns Research and Consulting, which regularly asks homebuilders about market conditions.

A builder in Richmond, Virginia, says: “ICE has had significant impacts to vendors throughout Virginia/Maryland in the last 90 days. … This has had a major impact on cycle times and the ability to start new houses.”

Jacksonville, Florida: “Current immigration enforcement efforts in our region are causing a strain on both the labor force, labor costs and cycle times.”

…

More in Business Sep 22, 2026 – Business Homebuilders say they struggle to find workers amid ICE crackdowns

Emily Peck

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Data: National Association of Home Builders analysis of 2024 census data; Chart: Emily Peck/Axios In a new survey, homebuilders around the country say ramped-up Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdowns are creating huge headaches for their businesses.

Why it matters: The labor strain comes on top of other challenges for the industry: rising mortgage rates, higher prices for key inputs driven by tariffs and the Iran war, as well as growing competition for resources with builders of data centers.

What they’re saying: “ICE is becoming a very large issue and causing labor shortages,” says a Houston builder in a survey conducted earlier this month by John Burns Research and Consulting, which regularly asks homebuilders about market conditions.

A builder in Richmond, Virginia, says: “ICE has had significant impacts to vendors throughout Virginia/Maryland in the last 90 days. … This has had a major impact on cycle times and the ability to start new houses.” Jacksonville, Florida: “Current immigration enforcement efforts in our region are causing a strain on both the labor force, labor costs and cycle times.” The intrigue: The remarks in the homebuilder survey were unprompted, says Rick Palacios, director of research at the consulting firm.

“All we asked about on the topic in our survey was construction cycle times,” he says. “The comments on ‘ICE and immigration’ were completely unsolicited.” Zoom in: The strains come after three straight months of record ICE arrests — in August the agency said it arrested 50,925 people across the country, the highest number of “illegal aliens” arrested in a single month.

Between the lines: These arrests have been less conspicuous than high-profile raids that came early in the year, but impactful — called a “shadow surge” by one of the administration’s opponents.

Zoom out: Immigration raids discourage legally authorized workers from reporting to job sites, Bill Owens, chairman of the National Association of Home Builders, recently said.

Higher mortgage rates and rising material costs are also weighing on the industry, he said. Building material costs are up by a median 6.7% from last year, according to one NAHB survey. The other side: “ICE is not arresting people legally in the country,” said White House spokesperson Lauren Bis.

“There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force.” The administration has said its new Office of Immigration Policy will help employers navigate immigration policies. The big picture: Immigrants made up more than 26% of the construction workforce in 2024, the most recent Census Bureau data on the industry.

But in certain trades, the share is much higher — immigrants make up 57% of those working on drywall and 53% of roofers, according to an analysis of that data released earlier this year by NAHB.

Emily Peck, Axios

Just weeks out from the November midterm elections, a socialist insurgency appears to be taking the Democrat Party by storm. But instead of honestly reporting on this shocking and newsworthy development, the liberal media is instead criticizing Republicans for noticing it.

That was the upshot of a New York Times story earlier this month titled “Seeking Jolt, G.O.P. Turns to a New Red Scare.” (Perhaps because of backlash, the Times changed the headline on the online version of the article). The piece cites the warnings of numerous prominent Republicans, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and No. 2 House Republican Steve Scalise (R-LA), that the rise of so-called “democratic socialist” candidates for Congress (along with local officials like New York Mayor Mamdani) threatens the United States with the adoption of communist policies.

“Next year the communists will be in Congress — that’s what’s so frightening,” Speaker Johnson said at the GOP midterm convention in Dallas, Texas, earlier this month. That sentiment was echoed by other Republicans who took the stage.

According to the Times, those charges have “little overlap with Democrats’ actual platforms,” yet “some Democrats… worry that the rise of democratic socialism in their party could play into Republican efforts to cast them as extremists.” But as the Times acknowledges in the very same article, “in some ways, far-left leaders have fed the argument.”

In 2020, for instance, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (who notably spent his “honeymoon” in the Soviet Union) “praised elements of the Communist Cuban revolution.” Meanwhile, “Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist who unseated a Democratic congressman in a New York primary in June, once maintained a social-media account that circulated a post suggesting that public libraries should carry more Marxist literature.” (As some readers also will no doubt recall, 2024 Democrat vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, the current Governor of Minnesota, spent extensive time in China and praised its communist government.)

The Times column nonetheless cites a University of Virginia presidential scholar who takes Donald Trump to task “for speaking so frequently and forcefully about communism in a way that recalls the Cold War” – and even “the so-called Red Scare” of the 1950s, during which Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy led a series of investigations into domestic communism “that became notorious for their overreaches.”

Senator McCarthy was indeed a demagogue who persecuted often-innocent individuals through his hearings. But the “Red Scare” wasn’t merely an irrational case of “paranoia,” as the Times maintains.

The American government post-World War II had indeed been infiltrated by a limited number of highly placed individuals who served as communist agents – including the atomic spies the Rosenbergs (who were executed for treason), longtime State Department official Alger Hiss, and individuals who influenced American policy that aided Mao Tse-Tung’s rise to power.

When the Russians obtained the means of manufacturing nuclear weapons thanks to their spy network, Americans, not knowing how far the network extended, had good reason for worry. Initially, this concern was not strictly partisan. In the 1950s, journalist Irving Kristol, writing in the then moderate-liberal journal Commentary, wrote that American voters with some justification felt that prominent Democrats seemed less trustworthy than Republicans on the need to confront the communist threat.

The Times would now have readers believe that the “Red Scare” was totally baseless – thus justifying the paper’s claim that current Republican warnings about “communist policies” similarly have no merit. The Times – as well as the news and editorial pages of the more conservatively inclined Wall Street Journal and New York Post – have even played along with calling professed socialists by their preferred name – “democratic socialists” – blurring the actual threat that they pose.

As the policies initiated by Mayor Mamdani have demonstrated, there is nothing necessarily “democratic” in these socialists’ policies or stated goals – nor is there much distinguishing them from policies seen in communist regimes throughout history. In Mamdani’s case, this includes publicly financed groceries that will drive private competitors out of business, strict rent control policies that will similarly drive private landlords out of business, and so on.

Such policies show little regard for the principles of economic freedom – the opportunity to get ahead through one’s own efforts rather than political connections – that most Americans associate with democracy. This is to say nothing of the sympathy displayed by Mamdani and various other democratic socialists for Muslim terrorists abroad and violent lawbreakers at home, which seriously endanger our rights to freedom of speech and religion, as well as life itself.

Most alarmingly of all, the official Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) platform calls for abolishing the Electoral College, Senate, presidency, and Supreme Court, along with “public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries” and wealth taxation of the rich.

Moreover, it must be emphasized, as we see in Marx’s and Engels’s own writings, including The Communist Manifesto (see parts 3 and 4) and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, there is no clear line between socialist policies and communist policies; they used the terms almost interchangeably.

As they portrayed it, “communism” referred to the ultimate paradise, wherein all private property would have been abolished, along with social classes, religion, and government itself. This was to be obtained by means of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that would first establish socialism.

Historically, communists have understood this progression. That is why the Evil Empire was the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” At the 1961 meeting of the Soviet Communist Party, it was proclaimed that the final stage of communism, including the abolition of government, would be attained within the next two decades. Needless to say, the “Party” – the real governing authority – would remain just to “administer” things. But of course, it was the communist state itself that would wither away, along with the Party, not long after the predicted date.

It has been commonplace, but is quite wrong, to identify the social-welfare states of Scandinavia as instances of “socialism,” when they aren’t so at all: major private corporations flourish there, despite relatively high tax rates. (And Sweden is now cutting back on those taxes, for the sake of leaving more money in people’s pockets.)

Since, as the Times observes, polls show that “most Americans have unfavorable views of socialism,” it isn’t surprising that most professed socialist candidates are intentionally vague about the extremes of the policies they may pursue (both domestic and foreign) once elected. But the media should stop cooperating with the socialists’ smoke-and-mirrors campaign by calling them “democratic” just because they run on the Democrat ticket and ascribe that label to themselves.

There is solid ground for Republicans and independent-minded journalists to expose these “democratic socialists” for the danger that they pose to our democracy and our liberty – particularly given their growing influence in that party.

Ultimately, Americans should look past the dubious labels and judge these candidates by the policies they actually support. As socialists gain influence within the Democrat Party, the debate over what those policies would mean for private enterprise, individual liberty, and the structure of American government is likely to become only more consequential.

David Lewis Schaefer, AMAC Newsline

Most people I went to high school with did not go to college. Unless you grew up someplace incredibly wealthy, I bet it’s the same for you. It wasn’t expected of me; it wasn’t even really discussed because the concept was foreign to my family, and I only ended up going full time after a few years of floundering, drinking, and job after job I hated and was miserable doing.

I lost touch with most, but not all, people from high school. But losing touch doesn’t mean not knowing what they’re up to. Many went on to big careers and families, and I’m genuinely happy for them. Many of those careers are in the trades — the kinds of jobs you shower from, not for. If you’ve never had one of those, you’re missing out.

The satisfaction you get from completing a physical task is unmatched in the white-collar world. It’s why so many rich guys play dress-up and hunt, fish, or do some kind of craft involving woodwork. To this day, as I drive through Detroit on visits, I point out, with pride, to my kids the various apartment buildings I helped put roofs on. Naturally, they couldn’t care less — one of the joys of being 9 and 7 is not understanding much about things beyond your friends and toys — but someday in the next decade, if I do my job as a father right, they will.

It will be more difficult for their peers to understand that satisfaction and pride, as the number of those jobs in the physical trades continues to exist, they’re just no longer available to Americans.

In my life, I worked more jobs than most families — upwards of 82 at this point — and among them were roofer, electrician’s assistant for a local IBEW, and concrete work. When I did them in the 1990s, the crews were a rainbow of people that could fill a Benetton ad. We didn’t “celebrate” it; we lived it, and it didn’t matter.

Most importantly, we were all Americans who could communicate with each other, as we all spoke English. Go anywhere near a job site today, or roll down your windows as you crawl through a construction zone now, and you likely won’t hear English spoken. Maybe from the supervisor, if they happen to be on the job site at that moment, but otherwise you’ll likely hear Spanish.

While not impossible, the likelihood of an American only being able to speak Spanish is incredibly low. By law, though seemingly not enforced, you have to have a working understanding of English in order to become a citizen. That means any logical person should assume the crews on these construction sites are made of up, in the most generous scenario, Green Card holders or, in a more likely scenario, illegal aliens.

The good jobs that were available to me and my classmates who weren’t cut out for college right out of the box are gone. Well, not gone, just not for us anymore. American kids graduating high school who don’t know what they want to be when they grow up, or know what they want to be and are a journeyman, don’t have the chances that once were. Now, they have to learn Spanish in order to have a shot at one of these jobs.

The pathway to the middle class for people who grew up like me has been orange-coned and detoured away from what is one of the best ways forward for a high school graduate or dropout. Those jobs, those industries, have been ceded to illegal aliens with a wink and nod from the political class, or both parties.

If you’re good at your job in a skilled trade, you will always have work. Americans no longer have those opportunities.

We’re told illegals are “doing the jobs Americans won’t do.” This is a lie; I’ve done those jobs and know people who do them. They aren’t hiring Americans anymore, white, black, or Hispanic (if they aren’t fluent in Spanish).

The companies hiring these people need to be fined into oblivion, the illegals deported immediately, and I do not care how many crying neighbors chant as it happens. If they get in the way of federal officers enforcing the law, arrest and throw the book at them. Make enough harsh examples out of lawless leftists, and even the dumb ones will begin to pick up on the concept of consequences.

When I see stories like the one in Austin, Texas, about the illegal alien with a final deportation order (meaning he should’ve been long gone already) being shot in a confrontation with ICE, I can’t bring myself to care. He should not have been here; he should not have resisted; he should not have been hired by a food delivery app to deliver food. I do not care — the bleeding needs to be stopped, and then he needs to be put on a plane.

Democrats can whine all they want about how mean it is to people they consider their constituents, but it won’t change anything. That dumb Americans elect people to government positions where they will fight harder for illegal aliens with no business being in this country more than they will actual Americans is not my concern; I can’t save stupid people from themselves. My concern is everyone else — the people who have to live in the wake of morons; those who suffer the results of the stupid decisions these elected idiots impose on others.

I care about the Americans victimized by illegal alien crime. If they only attacked Democrats who support them being here, I’d care a lot less, but those people are insulated from the violence of their gardeners by heavy police patrols and private security. It’s normal people assaulted, never their kids.

As such, when I hear about an illegal alien or left-wing protester hurt “confronting ICE,” or whoever they feel “brave” taking a swing at, I don’t care.

I look at it the same way I look at a “bullfighter” being gorged — what did you expect to happen? Bullfighting is savage; it is disgusting and stupid. They drug the bull, poison the bull, wound the bull, then a weakling comes out in a costume with a sword to pretend to “fight” the drugged, confused animal, eventually killing it to make up for physical shortcomings elsewhere.

But every once in a while, the bull catches one of these “men” and inflicts real damage through the haze of the poison. I’m on the side of the bull.

ICE is the bull, just doing their jobs. And the illegals and the agitators are the “fighters” comfortable in the knowledge that the bull is restrained by law and professionalism, not to mention the human desire to not harm anyone and just get home at the end of a day’s work. They taunt the bull, they antagonize the bull, they resist the bull, and every once in a while, they cross the line and threaten the bull. For that, there are consequences.

The only real shock I’ve seen is that it doesn’t happen more often, given how many illegal aliens are taken into custody and how many cosplaying leftists have no understanding of how laws work and where the lines for self-defense are.

But ultimately, I don’t care. If you don’t want to get hit by a train, don’t play on the train tracks. If you don’t want to get deported, don’t come into the country illegally. Don’t want to lose in a physical confrontation with law enforcement, don’t start a physical confrontation with law enforcement.

Most of life’s questions have obvious answers; this is no different. It’s just a matter of acknowledging them and moving on. I invite you to join me in actively not caring and making your unambiguous disinterest known on social media. Don’t click on their stories, don’t fall for the outrage, just express your disinterest and then ignore them. Maybe they’ll get it then?

Probably not, but maybe.

And then vote against them in November and make sure everyone you know who agrees with you votes that way, too, even if they don’t want to vote. Ultimately, that’s the only way to really beat these people.

Derek Hunter, Townhall

Elizabeth Dwoskin, (c) 2026 , The Washington Post

Mon, September 21, 2026 at 1:59 PM EDT

Tyler Hassen’s initiation into Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, started as a series of tests.

The Houston oil executive says he was given vague instructions to show up at an unfamiliar D.C. address. He hastily packed three suitcases and flew east, taking an Uber to a building that he soon learned belonged to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. He was whisked to a private office, acutely aware that his tailored suit stood out among the hoodie-clad engineers “too locked in” to their laptops to look up. He was ordered to go through the website of the Department of Commerce and, within days, find two to five ideas to present to Musk.

He checked into a nearby J.W. Marriott and told his wife he didn’t know how long he would be gone.

Thus began an 11-month stint at the center of a national firestorm – an exhilarating, chaotic and sometimes scary experience, Hassen told The Washington Post, in his first major interview detailing his forthcoming memoir and plans. The memoir, “Inside DOGE: The Real Story From a Senior Insider,” which recounts his time working for the secretive cost-cutting group, is the first tell-all to emerge from one of the most controversial periods of President Donald Trump’s time in office – a moment Hassen said he would gladly live through again.

“There’s this misconception that we all just went in there and didn’t really think about what we were doing,” Hassen said, speaking virtually from a hotel room in San Diego. “I spent 24/7 thinking about it, waking up at 3 in the morning thinking, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ … And I know I did.”

At the heart of the book is a split screen: For many Americans, Musk’s project was a callous showcase of bending government to a billionaire’s will, associated with tens of thousands of federal layoffs, reams of lawsuits, an AI-enabled effort to kill off wasteful contracts and the gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

But Hassen’s memoir enters a different vision into the historical record: He portrays a period marked by a clash in worldviews, in which hardcore capitalists are granted unprecedented power to change a system that they argue operates under completely different incentives, logic and norms.

To Hassen, whose pre-government career involved turning around distressed companies, “DOGE was not radical,” he writes in the book. It was “not a wrecking ball, but a catalyst.”

In conversation, Hassen comes across as mild-mannered, a distant temperament from Musk, who famously brandished a red metallic chainsaw as a metaphor for cutting government waste. A 43-year-old dad with Boy Scout energy, he doesn’t cut the image of the nerd-engineer DOGE bro. He spent his entire adult life “hiring, firing, reorganizing and rescuing failing businesses” in industrial manufacturing and the energy sectors – a skill set that appealed to Musk, his longtime deputy, Steve Davis, and Baris Akis, a venture capitalist who served as a volunteer recruiter.

But for years, Hassen seethed with rage over the national debt, now at $40 trillion. He felt angry that the amount the U.S. spends annually just to service that debt is more than the government spends on national defense and many other public benefits.

So he raised his hand – making a cold outreach to Musk through a network of business world connections, he said in the interview, and pressed the point.

its speed, “faster than Washington was ready for and faster than its defenses could absorb.”

But Hassen insists that DOGE was not cruel, a word that appears six times in the memoir, often in relation to laying off federal workers. The refrain can read as a plea for reconsideration of an effort he argues was poorly understood.

“In the private sector, there’s an understood bargain,” he writes. “You’re hired to create value. If the value disappears, so does the job. It isn’t personal. It isn’t cruel. It’s the operating system of capitalism.”

Government, he argues in the book, runs on a different logic. Value is “presumed,” “permanence is the default,” and “the moral burden of proofs falls on anyone who questions headcount – no matter how bloated the system becomes.”

After the screening process, Musk and Davis deployed Hassen to the U.S. Department of the Interior, a sprawling agency that manages roughly 500 million acres of federal land and property, national parks, and tribal territories. He took the assignment, he wrote, because he knew “very little” about the agency and the challenge was appealing.

Hassen was eventually promoted by Doug Burgum, the wealthy businessman who heads the agency, whom Hassen described as something of a kindred spirit. He became acting assistant secretary of policy, management and budget and stayed on until November – months after Musk himself had left Washington.

During his tenure at DOGE, Hassen says, he put in 14-hour days, working nights and weekends. During the chaotic period he saw his then-4-year-old daughter only a handful of times. He said he relished the minutiae of the job: poring over grants written in what appeared to him to be bureaucratese, disassembling bloated org charts and consolidating departments.

He says he encountered a bureaucracy more labyrinthine and redundant than he could have ever imagined. He caught spelling errors in a project description written by a vendor charging hundreds of millions of dollars, which he saw as proof of a systemic malaise. The contract, he writes, “stopped me cold.” (To drive home the point, a photo of the paperwork with the spelling error is published in the book.)

He told The Post he was exhilarated to get deep into the bowels of the bureaucracy and deploy his corporate-honed skill sets to attack a problem that had long troubled him.

the project in the lurch. The night of that split, Hassen said, he paced around the Interior Department like a ghost. The next morning, he went to the agency gift shop and bought his daughter a T-shirt that said “Future Secretary of the Interior.” He thought it might be his last night in D.C.

Hassen’s experience working with AI for the first time at DOGE led him to take a new job leading Zone Frontier, a former cleaning supply firm with a new mission to provide infrastructure and permitting to the data center industry. Musk’s longtime lawyer, Alex Spiro, has also joined the board of directors, something Hassen said was a pure coincidence.

He says he hopes the legacy of DOGE will be that the country’s most gifted citizens will seek to serve their government. Instead of draining the swamp, he says, he wants to flood it with talent and energy.

“These are some of the best and brightest we have in America,” he said of the DOGE team. “I’m honored to be even a part of them.”

Faiz Siddiqui contributed to this report.