Finding out that, by a 3-to-2 margin, Americans think the country is “evolving into a big government socialist state” is bad enough. Far more worrisome is finding out how many Republicans and self-styled conservatives are on board with one of socialism’s central tenets.
The latest IBD/TIPP Poll, which we are reporting on today, finds that nearly half of Americans agree that we’re sliding into socialism, and less than a third disagree. (See: “By 3-To-2 Margin, Americans Believe U.S. Is Turning Into A ‘Socialist State’: I&I/TIPP Poll.”)
It also finds that Republicans are more pessimistic about the future than Democrats, which strikes us as defeatism on the part of the GOP and willful ignorance by Democrats, whose party is now controlled by the Democratic Socialists of America.
The really disturbing findings in the poll were when we started asking about policy positions endorsed by the DSA.
We’re not too surprised that 51% of liberals say they’re “willing to pay higher taxes to support more social programs.” (Although the number should be 100%.)
But why do 30% of Republicans feel this way? And why in the world would more than one in five “conservatives” say they’d pay higher taxes for more services?
It gets worse.
The poll also asked whether respondents “believe the government should own key industries such as health care and energy.”
Incredibly, 43% of Republicans agree, as do 41% of conservatives. That’s barely higher than the share of liberals who want government ownership of key industries. (See the chart above.)
What in God’s name is going on here?
Does this reflect the rise of “nationalist” conservatives, who distrust the private sector and like big government almost as much as liberals? (Vice President JD Vance, who has described himself as “postliberal” conservative, was last seen bashing Milton Friedman in an interview that our friend Steve Moore described as “anti-free-market, big government gobbledygook.”)
Is it the result of President Donald Trump’s push to have the government buy up shares in companies? The New York Times reported this week that “over the past year, the Trump administration has made deals to acquire equity stakes in more than two dozen firms, an unusual practice that has extended the government’s influence over industries including semiconductors, nuclear energy, minerals, quantum computers and steel.”
Is it something in the water?
The only good news we can find in this poll is that your average Democrat isn’t at all on board with the socialists taking control of their party, which will become clear when we report on support for other DSA policy positions next week.
But what hope is there for the country if Republicans – and even more alarmingly, conservatives – have bought into a major plank in the socialist agenda?
Like the beginning of a cheesy Hollywood horror movie, Americans are about to see a gory transformation right before their eyes. In less than two years, the era of free, open over-the-air TV will come to an end and be replaced by a PPV-like experience.
Right now, on any given weekend afternoon, it is a glorious time to be an American television viewer. On local broadcast channels across the country, live (HD) high-definition sports feeds are able to be watched in our living rooms simply by using an antenna. For a growing community of modern cord-cutters, they are seeing a picture that is nothing short of jaw-dropping — nothing like the fuzzy picture quality of yesteryear. Watching a baseball game or a golf tournament over an indoor or outdoor antenna reveals deep, vibrant colors and fluid motion that easily rivals — and often defeats — the video offered with expensive cable packages or even internet streaming apps. Some of these OTA setups are so superior they rival 4k broadcasts.
It feels like a golden era of free consumer media choice. But this brilliant, high-definition view comes with a ticking clock. In the corridors of the FCC, local broadcasters are vigorously pushing a plan to permanently shut down our current broadcasting standard called Advanced Television Systems Committee 1.0 (ATSC 1.0). If media conglomerates get their way, February 2028 will mark the sudden end of free, open television as we know it, instantly transforming millions of perfectly functional smart TVs and local streaming tuners into a mountain of electronic waste — unless, of course, you pay a monthly fee.
The culprit is the impending forced migration from our reliable, foundational television standard, ATSC 1.0, to a new format known as ATSC 3.0, or NextGen TV. On its surface, the television industry markets NextGen TV as a highly progressive technological leap. Advertisements promise dazzling native 4K video, deep cinematic theater sound, and interactive, customized digital layouts. What the glitzy marketing completely omits, however, is that this entire ecosystem is wrapped inside a Trojan horse called Digital Rights Management (DRM) encryption.
This hidden digital wall introduces an entirely anti-consumer reality to broadcast television, resurrecting a corporate obsession with control that dates back forty years. In the late 1970s and 1980s, entertainment giants famously waged a scorched-earth legal war against the Betamax and the VCR, claiming that the ability to record free television at home would destroy the entertainment industry. The Supreme Court eventually stepped in, ruling that consumers had a legal right to utilize third-party hardware for home viewing and “time-shifting.” But while the courts protected the VCR, NextGen TV’s mandatory digital encryption all but undoes this landmark ruling for 21st-century home TV watching. It bypasses legal precedent entirely by programming your private wireless router to treat standard consumer electronics as immediate piracy threats. Because independent hardware companies cannot decode these strict digital keys without paying licensing fees, your existing whole-home streaming boxes will be instantly bricked, cut off from the local airwaves they were built to catch.
This creates a massive, looming consumer hardware and environmental crisis that our regulatory agencies are actively ignoring. The public is completely unready for a February 2028 hard cutoff. Major electronics manufacturers continue to build and sell millions of budget and mid-tier smart televisions that operate with standard ATSC 1.0 tuners inside. When the signal switches off, these relatively new televisions will lose their core ability to receive free basic local news, sports, and even severe weather warnings. This coming mandate completely renders obsolete the existing hardware that consumers have paid good money for, solely to force you to pay a fee to see your local programming — the very reason many Americans have installed antennas in the first place.
The ultimate irony of this transition is that it completely subverts the legal pact of American broadcasting. Local TV stations receive free, exclusive licenses to use the public’s broadcast spectrum — an invaluable national resource — in exchange for a strict legal promise to provide free, open, and universally accessible programming that serves the public interest. By using digital encryption and charging fees to access, the broadcasters are breaking their agreement.
Advertisement
null
February 2028 is not far away. Right now, the National Association of Broadcasters is lobbying intensely to finalize these shutdown dates, betting that the average American won’t notice the trap until the screen goes black. The FCC has a firm regulatory duty to protect the public from this overreach. The FCC must step in to mandate that our public airwaves remain unencrypted, open, and completely accessible to Americans who refuse to pay cable fees for local television. If we stay quiet and allow this corporate capture to proceed unchallenged, free broadcast television will be quietly wiped away, and we will be forced to pay a ransom just to watch the very airwaves we collectively own. When a horror movie ends, we all leave the theater knowing that it was all just a scary story. What is coming for over-the-air broadcasting, however, is a real-world nightmare that won’t disappear when the house lights turn up.
Now more than ever, the ability to speak our minds is crucial to the republic we cherish. If what you see on American Thinker resonates with you, please consider supporting our work with a donation of as much or as little as you can give. Every dollar contributed helps us pay our staff and keep our ideas heard and our voices strong. Thank you.https://givebutter.com/embed/c/WhA2EO?goalBar=false&gba_gb.element.id=gkx27p
This hidden digital wall introduces an entirely anti-consumer reality to broadcast television, resurrecting a corporate obsession with control that dates back forty years. In the late 1970s and 1980s, entertainment giants famously waged a scorched-earth legal war against the Betamax and the VCR, claiming that the ability to record free television at home would destroy the entertainment industry. The Supreme Court eventually stepped in, ruling that consumers had a legal right to utilize third-party hardware for home viewing and “time-shifting.” But while the courts protected the VCR, NextGen TV’s mandatory digital encryption all but undoes this landmark ruling for 21st-century home TV watching. It bypasses legal precedent entirely by programming your private wireless router to treat standard consumer electronics as immediate piracy threats. Because independent hardware companies cannot decode these strict digital keys without paying licensing fees, your existing whole-home streaming boxes will be instantly bricked, cut off from the local airwaves they were built to catch.
This creates a massive, looming consumer hardware and environmental crisis that our regulatory agencies are actively ignoring. The public is completely unready for a February 2028 hard cutoff. Major electronics manufacturers continue to build and sell millions of budget and mid-tier smart televisions that operate with standard ATSC 1.0 tuners inside. When the signal switches off, these relatively new televisions will lose their core ability to receive free basic local news, sports, and even severe weather warnings. This coming mandate completely renders obsolete the existing hardware that consumers have paid good money for, solely to force you to pay a fee to see your local programming — the very reason many Americans have installed antennas in the first place.
The ultimate irony of this transition is that it completely subverts the legal pact of American broadcasting. Local TV stations receive free, exclusive licenses to use the public’s broadcast spectrum — an invaluable national resource — in exchange for a strict legal promise to provide free, open, and universally accessible programming that serves the public interest. By using digital encryption and charging fees to access, the broadcasters are breaking their agreement.
February 2028 is not far away. Right now, the National Association of Broadcasters is lobbying intensely to finalize these shutdown dates, betting that the average American won’t notice the trap until the screen goes black. The FCC has a firm regulatory duty to protect the public from this overreach. The FCC must step in to mandate that our public airwaves remain unencrypted, open, and completely accessible to Americans who refuse to pay cable fees for local television. If we stay quiet and allow this corporate capture to proceed unchallenged, free broadcast television will be quietly wiped away, and we will be forced to pay a ransom just to watch the very airwaves we collectively own. When a horror movie ends, we all leave the theater knowing that it was all just a scary story. What is coming for over-the-air broadcasting, however, is a real-world nightmare that won’t disappear when the house lights turn up.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have achieved some shocking successes in primaries in the United States this year, especially in New York and now Denver, where a youthful far-left radical defeated a 15-term incumbent and member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
The past is prologue and frequently a window into the future. The analysis provided here examines a specific historical claim: that the DSA’s decades-long push inside the Democrat Party follows the same “boring from within” logic the Bolsheviks used against the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in 1917—a small, disciplined vanguard using a broader coalition’s legitimacy and infrastructure to gain position, growing more candid about maximalist goals as it consolidates power, with no intention of remaining merely one faction among many.
Drawing on current reporting about the DSA’s 2026 platform, primary results, and funding ecosystem alongside the historical record of the Russian Revolution, this two-part series works through the questions of where that parallel holds structurally, where it breaks down (method, institutional context, and end-state most notably), and what the primary and midterm evidence to date suggests about the DSA’s odds of consolidating versus stalling out.
Let’s get cracking!
The Bolshevik Precedent—Mechanics, Not Metaphor
The term “boring from within” (an actual phrase used by Leon Trotsky and later by American Communist Party theorists like William Z. Foster) describes a specific tactic: a small, disciplined, ideologically rigid vanguard does not build its own mass party from scratch. It penetrates existing left-of-center organizations—trade unions, socialist parties, soviets—outworks and outorganizes the incumbent leadership and eventually either converts or discards the host organization once that organization has served its purpose.
In 1917, specifically:
The Bolsheviks were a minority faction within Russian Marxism, split from the Mensheviks since 1903 over organizational discipline (a small vanguard party of professional revolutionaries vs. a broad mass workers’ party).
Through 1917, they did not initially control the soviets (workers’/soldiers’ councils)—the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) held the majorities in the Petrograd and other soviets through much of the year.
Lenin’s strategy was to radicalize the soviet rank and file through agitation (“All Power to the Soviets,” “Peace, Land, Bread”), outflank the SR/Menshevik leadership, who were cooperating with the Provisional Government, and win soviet majorities district by district and city by city—Petrograd and Moscow flipped to Bolshevik majorities by September–October 1917.
Once they had put themselves in the right position, the Bolsheviks executed the October coup in the name of “the soviets,” then systematically eliminated the coalition partners who had enabled their rise: the Left SRs (briefly allied in the first Bolshevik government) were purged after the 1918 Left SR uprising; the Constituent Assembly, where the SRs held the actual electoral majority, was forcibly dissolved after one day in January 1918; the Menshevik and SR party structures were banned outright by 1921–22.
The declared and executed intent was never power-sharing—it was total, permanent seizure, codified in one-party rule and the elimination of rival socialist competition, not simply rival capitalist parties.
That last point is the crux of the historical analogy people reach for: the Bolsheviks used their coalition partners as a ladder and then kicked the ladder away. And those actions included suppressing all dissent.
Does that seem familiar?
The DSA Parallel, Structurally
Applying the same lens to the current DSA project inside the Democrat Party, here are the structural moves that conform to the historical claim made above:
Decades-long infiltration, not a sudden takeover. As one recent column put it, the DSA “weren’t spending their time trying to win over Republicans. They were quietly reshaping the Democratic Party from within, “building infrastructure through years of recruiting candidates, building neighborhood chapters, and identifying low-turnout Democrat primaries where intentional grassroots movements could have an outsized impact—following a trajectory from Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign functioning as a DSA recruitment vehicle to AOC and Rashida Tlaib defeating establishment Democrats in primaries to the 2026 primary wave.
The “long march through the institutions” pipeline. The same reporting frames this explicitly as a farm-system strategy: school boards become city councils; city councils become state legislatures; state legislators become members of Congress; members of Congress become committee chairs, governors, Cabinet officials, and eventually party leaders—which is functionally the Gramscian “long march” applied to the American electoral structure rather than Bolshevik soviet capture but aimed at the same outcome: control of the institution from the inside rather than building a rival party.
The DSA does not hide the endgame. Where Bolshevik intentions were disguised in Menshevik/SR coalition rhetoric until the moment of the coup, the DSA has become notably candid. Its newly adopted platform, “Workers Deserve More!,” commits the organization to scrapping the U.S. Senate, “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,” defunding the Department of War, providing amnesty for all immigrants, and “replac[ing] the president and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” It states outright that the goal is to “win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic,” requiring “building a new society from the ground up.”
One DSA National Political Committee member reportedly described the platform as “what a horizon of power looks like.” DSA co-chair Ashik Siddique, pressed on Soviet comparisons, distinguished the DSA’s goals from the USSR while confirming the destination is socialism, and confirming ambitions to make police and prisons “less necessary” in the United States. Moreover, according to video clips circulated by the Republican National Committee (not independently verified by me beyond the clip itself), Siddique reportedly stated that the movement’s goal is communism in a big-tent framing.
Coalition partners as vehicles, then targets. The Bolshevik-SR/Menshevik dynamic—use the coalition to gain position, then displace it—maps onto the DSA’s current posture toward establishment Democrats. Analysts note the DSA and other like-minded insurgent operations unseating incumbent Democrats in primaries, with a Washington Post columnist framing it as “a left-wing movement . . . poised to remake a national party in its own image. “New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s blunt response to critics who cast him as the new face of the party—”Let them“—indicates that the DSA no longer feels a need to disguise their ambition to be the party, not simply a faction within it.
Nonprofit/dark-money infrastructure as the “community organizing” layer. The tactic used for this—nonprofits channeling donor and public money to activist networks—is well documented, though mostly outside the DSA’s own corporate structure. Investigative reporting on adjacent movements (BLM, Antifa, campus/anti-Israel protests, Stop Cop City, etc.) has traced a decentralized network of agitators politically and financially supported by a vast web of progressive nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, and dark-money groups ultimately backed by big-money donors aligned with the Democrat Party, with fiscal sponsorship arrangements—where a large 501(c)(3) like the Tides Center “sponsors” smaller activist groups and thereby shields the sponsorship from independently disclosing its donors or filing a Form 990—used repeatedly to obscure the money trail.
A Georgia RICO indictment in the Stop Cop City case alleged that ostensibly charitable bail and defense funds were front groups controlled by anarchist organizers who used millions in tax-exempt funds raised for ostensibly charitable purposes to further a criminal conspiracy, and the EPA under Biden was reported to have entrusted $50 million in federal grant money to a coalition (Climate Justice Alliance) that maintained a page soliciting donations for that same bail/defense fund network.
That is the “taxpayer and donor money to left-wing activists” pattern that is well developed and continuously exploited for the BLM/Palestine protest and anti-ICE/open borders ecosystems.
What Is Genuinely Similar
The structural parallels between 1917 Russia and 2026 America are close enough to be worth stating plainly. In both cases, a small, ideologically disciplined vanguard operated inside a broader coalition rather than building a rival party from scratch—the Bolsheviks inside the Russian socialist movement alongside the SRs and Mensheviks, the DSA inside the Democrat Party (claiming 100,000-plus members against a party of tens of millions).
Both captured territory incrementally before making any national claim: the Bolsheviks won soviet majorities district by district, city by city, ahead of the October coup; the DSA win city councils, state legislatures, and low-turnout Congressional primaries, seat by seat, ahead of any national ambition.
Both used the host coalition’s legitimacy and infrastructure instrumentally. The Bolsheviks operated under the SR/Menshevik-dominated soviets’ banner until they no longer needed to; the DSA runs its own candidates on the Democrat ballot line and draws on the party’s fundraising and institutional infrastructure, increasingly primarying and replacing the incumbents whose party structure it relies on.
In both cases, the public platform grew more radical as power accumulated rather than more moderate—the Bolshevik line hardened from “all power to the soviets” into a one-party state; the DSA’s 2026 “Workers Deserve More!” platform is markedly more radical than the party’s earlier, softer messaging, timed almost exactly with its accumulating string of primary wins.
Both relied on a form of community organizing and street-level agitation as the recruitment and mobilization engine—agitation among soldiers and factory workers for the Bolsheviks, Alinsky-descended organizing models (OFA, Wellstone Action-style trainings) for the American progressive movement.
And both make explicit, stated claims to goals that would concentrate power in a body the movement expects to dominate: the Bolsheviks’ declared intent to never relinquish power once captured and the DSA’s institutional demands—abolishing the Senate, subordinating the courts and the executive to Congress—that would functionally concentrate power in the legislative branch it is working hardest to capture.
Concluding Thoughts
This ends Part I of this two-part series. Part II will discuss what’s genuinely different (especially tactics), the possibilities for DSA success or failure, and speculation on whether the DSA endgame will ultimately end in Bolshevik-style violence rather than a clean electoral outcome.
The LGBTQ+ cruise ship that Patti LuPone is performing on has been blocked from entering Egypt after being banned from entering Turkey.
CNN confirmed Friday that Egyptian authorities did not allow Virgin Voyages’ Scarlet Lady to enter its waters. Rich Campbell, the president and CEO of Atlantis Events, told the outlet, “We had full approval and they denied us clearance at the 11th hour.”
The news comes after LuPone took to Instagram on July 2 to reveal the ship had been turned away from Turkey. The Tony Award winner wrote, “I am shocked. The Atlantis cruise I am performing on next week has been banned from entering Turkey. A ship — a magnificent ship — full of gay men. And me. Denied entry to Turkey simply because of who is on board.”
She continued, “I am furious, but I am sailing, as the ship will make other ports of call. I am ready to perform for all the wonderful men on this Atlantis cruise, who deserve so much better than this.”
Per Atlantis’ website, the Egypt stop on the cruise was added to the itinerary after the ship was not allowed to dock in Turkey.
Egyptian officials have not shared why the cruise ship was blocked, though the Aydin government shared a post on X, which read, “The organization, planned by groups known for behaviors that do not align with the structure of our society and our moral values and which has come to the agenda in the press and broadcast organs and social media platforms, to dock a cruise ship rented by these groups at Aydın Kuşadası Port on July 7, 2026, and which has caused great discomfort in various segments of our society, has been canceled.” The organization in reference is Atlantis, an LGBTQ+ cruise line.
Of the ship being turned away by Turkey and Egypt, passenger Greg Morley told CNN, “My mind went to the LGBTQ communities in Egypt and Turkey where LGBTQ individuals don’t have the opportunities to just sail away.” Morley added, “Discrimination and the lack of opportunities that come with the shortsighted marginalization of LGBTQ people and other minorities damages far beyond a cruise ship rescheduling.”
The Agatha All Along actress shared a photo on Instagram Friday of herself and the cruise ship passengers, though she did not mention the ship being turned away from Egypt in the caption.
“A ship — a magnificent ship — full of gay men,” she wrote. “And me.”
The Hollywood Reporter reached out to LuPone’s rep for comment.
Virgin Voyages’ Scarlet Lady set sail on July 5 and will finish its voyage in Italy on July 15. The cruise was described as “an epic all-gay voyage from Athens to Venice to the Mediterranean’s most iconic destinations — Mykonos, Santorini, Istanbul, Dubrovnik, and more. We’ll dazzle 2,500 guys with stellar entertainment, the world’s best parties, and awesome experiences aboard Virgin’s Scarlet Lady” in a May Instagram post made by Atlantis.
The Left has repeated its pattern of attack against conservatives so many times that it has become formulaic. Its tactics include, but are not limited to, using Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, logical fallacies, complicit judges, stenographers in the legacy media, and figures in the entertainment and education industries. I believe these tactics are ultimately aimed at implementing the Cloward-Piven Strategy to dismantle our representative constitutional republic and replace it with some form of socialism.
Activists on the left use psychological and rhetorical tactics to reshape public perception. Taken together, these tactics form a predictable pattern that transforms ordinary disagreements into moral condemnation. This pattern facilitates ridicule, leads to social exclusion, and, in extreme cases, provides justification for harm.
The sequence dehumanizes and invalidates honest emotions and responses, making harm feel deserved and even rendering violence conceivable. It starts subtly but then escalates. It bypasses rational debate by attacking the target’s humanity rather than the target’s arguments.
How many times have we seen the left repeat baseless allegations that quickly devolve into name-calling? They’re the primary arrows in its rhetorical quiver. Leftists repeat unfounded accusations, such as the Russian Collusion hoax and the “Very Fine People” lie.
Then they employ caricatured labels to accuse Republicans and conservatives—not the same thing—of being racists, xenophobes, homophobes, “literally Hitler,” pedophiles, fascists, and, as Dan Bongino so eloquently put it, “istaphobic phobic phobophobes.” They use these terms to evoke revulsion, reframing a person as an archetype of evil. This makes balanced discussion impossible.
Activists on the left reduced Erika Kirk from a mourning spouse to a “pageant girl”—a superficial glory hound. They erased the authenticity of her loss so that she was no longer viewed as a grieving human being but as a symbol to be mocked or opposed. Saul Alinsky told his adherents to “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
This isolates the person and sends the signal that normal social protections no longer apply. Pick any prominent figure on the right and look for this pattern. They do it to anyone who disagrees with them.
Once they have dehumanized their target, those on the left will then undermine the target’s emotional responses. Any emotion the target expresses, such as grief, anger, fear, or even joy, becomes suspect and is seen as manufactured or manipulative. They ridiculed Erika Kirk when she grieved and criticized her when they saw her smiling.
They view any emotional response as illegitimate, invalidating personal experience and framing their target as insincere or mentally unstable. They called Mrs. Kirk an “emotional asset,” and Jimmy Kimmel once said that Melania Trump had “the glow of an expectant widow.” Public sympathy is eroded when a person’s vulnerability is mocked.
We’ve seen this used against ICE officers enforcing immigration laws and against conservative or Republican political figures. Aging pop star Madonna once said she dreamed of blowing up the White House. Johnny Depp asked about the last time an actor assassinated a president. Joe Biden said he wanted to punch Donald Trump.
At some point, the mere presence of the targeted individual is interpreted as a trigger. Before long, some members of the public begin to feel that opposing the target warrants more direct action.
This is the fourth and final point at which things shift from a generalized taboo to direct action. Assaults against ICE officers who are carrying out their lawful duties have skyrocketed. UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk were assassinated, and President Trump has survived three, possibly four, assassination attempts.
A disturbingly high percentage of leftists view these as reasonable responses. They’re actually developing an assassination culture.
It is rare to see explicit calls for violence, although they do occur. The “8647” message that James Comey (and others) spread is one example. The message bearers always preserve deniability, claiming variations of “I never called for violence” and “This is not who we are.”
However, by this point, the targeted individuals have been so thoroughly demonized that some listeners interpret it as permission. Extremists on the left absorb the subtext—that certain people represent such severe threats that violence is necessary and justified. We’ve seen the results: public harassment, doxing, and even physical confrontations.
The pattern works because we are wired to reject evil and protect our group. Extremists hijack these instincts by casting their targets as existential threats. Social media, legacy news organizations, and celebrities all parrot the message and perpetuate the cycle.
What starts as mere pejoratives evolves, step by predictable step, into the normalization of violence. The targets are isolated, their emotions are invalidated, and their existence is framed as an existential threat so that some on the left begin to see their fellow citizens as obstacles to be removed. We’ve seen where this road leads when left unchecked.
Countering these tactics requires that we re-embrace the principles of classical liberalism, “the ideology advocating private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press, and international peace based on free trade.” The more we fail to interrupt this pattern, the more likely it is that we will descend from debate into tribal conflict.
We must be able to engage in reasoned debates and argue against principles, not people. Unfortunately, there are very few, if any, on the left who appear willing to do so.
We can’t wait around and hope they return to sanity. We must break this pattern at multiple points, responding with principles and evidence, not counter-personal attacks.
Here are some suggestions:
• Ask questions to force the conversation back to policy outcomes: “How has this policy affected crime rates, inflation, or education outcomes?”
• Continue to support and create alternatives to legacy media, businesses, and content creators that don’t self-censor.
• We must aggressively pursue legal accountability for violence, doxing, threats, and clear lawfare abuse. This can be achieved through strategic litigation and state-level action.
• Call out specific journalists, celebrities, academics, or officials who amplify dehumanizing rhetoric. This makes it harder for them to continue using the “this is not who we are” defense.
• Frame issues around universal principles, such as fairness and color-blindness, which undercut moral-monopoly claims.
• Humor and targeted ridicule weaponize mockery effectively. We can use them without descending into the same dehumanization.
• Engage the undecided and persuadable, especially among the working class and minorities, with results-focused arguments. People respect competence and character at scale: delivering objectively better results on crime, the economy, borders, education, and family stability.
• The strongest interrupter is raising people who value evidence and logic over tribal signaling. School choice, homeschooling, and classical education models are already showing results.
When enough people experience the gap between rhetoric and reality, the pattern loses its hold.
A federal appeals court struck down the higher education restrictions of Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” that restricts critical race theory (CRT) indoctrination in the state’s public colleges and universities.
Breitbart News reports that the ruling pertains to the Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees Act (Stop WOKE Act), which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed in 2022.
CRT is a Marxist ideology which “claims that all of our institutions — our government, our economy, our culture — are based on racial hierarchy, with whites on top and blacks at the bottom. Even things that look race-neutral are, on closer inspection, racist.”
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the law’s salary-for-speech provision violates the First Amendment, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The decision came in response to two lawsuits brought by professors, students, and a student group who claim the law is unconstitutional censorship and applies specifically to Florida’s public colleges and universities.
Judge Britt Grant, a Trump appointee, wrote on behalf of the majority:
Florida’s salary-for-speech rule is a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse in the very places the State’s own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry — classrooms where students are trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth.
Judge Barbara Lagoa, a Trump appointee, dissented, contending that Florida has interest in regulating state-sponsored instruction.
Lagoa wrote:
To be clear, the First Amendment protects all viewpoints in the public square, whether they are conventional or uncontroversial. But it does not compel all viewpoints to be worthy of state-sponsored endorsement.
Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, in a post on X, argued that the ruling was a “clear and unfortunate” example of judicial overreach, stating, “Florida was correct to bar CRT and DEI. We have a right to do so.”
The split ruling leaves open the opportunity for Florida to pursue a rehearing or appeal to the Supreme Court.
I admit without shame that I’m one of those people for whom classic philosophy is a closed book. That’s my excuse for being unfamiliar with Aristotle’s Politics, an eight-volume work from the middle of the 4th century BC that analyzes various political systems. Fortunately for America, many of the Founders had read Politics and applied it to the Constitution.
I mention Aristotle now because I learned yesterday that Aristotle, looking at examples in the ancient world, predicted the growing threat of leftist tyranny in the U.S. and Europe. He also answered a question I’ve been asking myself as I think about Europe’s imminent downfall because its leftist leaders decided to erase all borders and welcome in the entire Middle East and Africa to replace the native populations. Here, too, Democrats (and some Uniparty Republicans) tried desperately under Joe Biden to do the same, only to be foiled when voters insisted on reelecting Donald Trump.
With these thoughts in mind, I asked myself (literally, I spoke the words out loud), “Has there ever before been a country in which the leaders simply replaced the native population?” I couldn’t think of one—but Aristotle could. He revealed that one specific type of leader desperately wants to be surrounded by foreigners: the tyrant.
Having alienated his own people, writes Aristotle, the tyrant can no longer trust them, and he feels safe only when surrounded by those to whom he imputes the virtues he believes his own people lack—and whom he believes (probably naively) will not destroy him as his own people will eventually be driven to do.
Picking my way through Harris Rackham’s translation of Politics as it relates to tyranny (a task, thankfully, done with help from AI), I found the key language in §1314a: “And it is a mark of a tyrant to have men of foreign extraction rather than citizens as guests at table and companions, feeling that citizens are hostile but strangers make no claim against him.”
Indeed, §1314a, after making this point about a tyrant’s preference for citizens other than his own, adds this, which also sounds remarkably like leftist politicians across the West:
[F]or tyranny aims at three things, one to keep its subjects humble (for a humble-spirited man would not plot against anybody), second to have them continually distrust one another…and the third is lack of power for political action (since nobody attempts impossibilities, so that nobody tries to put down a tyranny if he has not power behind him). These then in fact are the three aims to which the wishes of tyrants are directed; for all the measures taken by tyrants one might class under these principles — some are designed to prevent mutual confidence among the subjects, others to curtail their power, and others to make them humble-spirited.
We see all this daily from Democrats in culture and politics.
There’s the forced humility. We’re taught that the climate is out to destroy us, so we must be cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and use one sheet of toilet paper; that we don’t even know the true meaning of what’s in our own underpants; and most significantly, we are taught that we are uniquely evil because our behaviors, despite having raised more people out of poverty than any other societies in the world’s history could do, are morally bad. We have sinned, and only our elite can save us.
There’s the distrust. Once, Germans trusted Germans, the British trusted the British, and Americans trusted Americans. Assimilation and shared cultural histories bound these groups together.
Now, though, among all the little bits and pieces in the salad bowl that replaced the melting pot, hatred is endemic. Because the government has become the fount of all good things, women, LGBs, transgenders, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, differently abled…all the little intersectional pieces are savaging each other. The only thing that binds them is that they all hate white men and Jews (and Christians aren’t getting any love letters either).
And finally, there’s the lack of power for political action. From a conservative perspective, there was the disaster of 2020, which culminated in the even greater disaster of January 2021. In 2020, we saw violent leftist street protests that were given a pass, only to experience the opposite outcome on January 6, 2021, which was much less destructive, but ended with a militarized government hunting down every granny whom the Capitol police invited in. 2020 also brought us the devastating systemic changes to elections (mail-in ballots, late voting, no ID, etc.) that destroyed faith in the system.
Leftists have their own issues. There was Kamala Harris’s anointing after primary voters were sold a decrepit, senile Biden. This year, the pattern is being repeated in Maine, where a sex-fiend Nazi whom the base preferred is summarily being replaced with someone (anyone) that the solons in the smoke-filled backroom prefer.
The left is a new tyranny, but the nature of tyrants is unchanged. In the upcoming election, it’s up to ordinary Americans to change what Aristotle (and, presumably, the Democrats) see as an inevitable drift toward tyranny.
Start by showing up. When Normal Americans stay home, they feed the tyrants. Let’s make November 2026 different. And for those who are unhappy with Trump, I won’t argue with you. I’ll just remind you that the Democrats are infinitely worse, and the election presents only a binary choice.
Image created using AI.
When you subscribe to American Thinker, in addition to helping support one of the oldest online conservative sites in America (a site Rush Limbaugh loved), you’ll also get (a) the ability to post comments; (b) no ads; and (c) our weekly subscribers-only newsletter with unique, insightful essays from American Thinker’s editors.
Now more than ever, the ability to speak our minds is crucial to the republic we cherish. If what you see on American Thinker resonates with you, please consider supporting our work with a donation of as much or as little as you can give. Every dollar contributed helps us pay our staff and keep our ideas heard and our voices strong. Thank you.https://givebutter.com/embed/c/WhA2EO?goalBar=false&gba_gb.element.id=gkx27p
There’s the forced humility. We’re taught that the climate is out to destroy us, so we must be cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and use one sheet of toilet paper; that we don’t even know the true meaning of what’s in our own underpants; and most significantly, we are taught that we are uniquely evil because our behaviors, despite having raised more people out of poverty than any other societies in the world’s history could do, are morally bad. We have sinned, and only our elite can save us.
There’s the distrust. Once, Germans trusted Germans, the British trusted the British, and Americans trusted Americans. Assimilation and shared cultural histories bound these groups
Now, though, among all the little bits and pieces in the salad bowl that replaced the melting pot, hatred is endemic. Because the government has become the fount of all good things, women, LGBs, transgenders, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, differently abled…all the little intersectional pieces are savaging each other. The only thing that binds them is that they all hate white men and Jews (and Christians aren’t getting any love letters either).
And finally, there’s the lack of power for political action. From a conservative perspective, there was the disaster of 2020, which culminated in the even greater disaster of January 2021. In 2020, we saw violent leftist street protests that were given a pass, only to experience the opposite outcome on January 6, 2021, which was much less destructive, but ended with a militarized government hunting down every granny whom the Capitol police invited in. 2020 also brought us the devastating systemic changes to elections (mail-in ballots, late voting, no ID, etc.) that destroyed faith in the system.
Leftists have their own issues. There was Kamala Harris’s anointing after primary voters were sold a decrepit, senile Biden. This year, the pattern is being repeated in Maine, where a sex-fiend Nazi whom the base preferred is summarily being replaced with someone (anyone) that the solons in the smoke-filled backroom prefer.
The left is a new tyranny, but the nature of tyrants is unchanged. In the upcoming election, it’s up to ordinary Americans to change what Aristotle (and, presumably, the Democrats) see as an inevitable drift toward tyranny.
Start by showing up. When Normal Americans stay home, they feed the tyrants. Let’s make November 2026 different. And for those who are unhappy with Trump, I won’t argue with you. I’ll just remind you that the Democrats are infinitely worse, and the election presents only a binary choice.
Image created using AI.
When you subscribe to American Thinker, in addition to helping support one of the oldest online conservative sites in America (a site Rush Limbaugh loved), you’ll also get (a) the ability to post comments; (b) no ads; and (c) our weekly subscribers-only newsletter with unique, insightful essays from American Thinker’s editors.
Now more than ever, the ability to speak our minds is crucial to the republic we cherish. If what you see on American Thinker resonates with you, please consider supporting our work with a donation of as much or as little as you can give. Every dollar contributed helps us pay our staff and keep our ideas heard and our voices strong. Thank you.https://givebutter.com/embed/c/WhA2EO?goalBar=false&gba_gb.element.id=gkx27p
Iranian and Middle East diplomats held crisis talks in Oman Saturday to respond to the US demand that Tehran issue a public pledge to keep the Strait of Hormuz open – while reportedly weighing whether to propose a new travel route along the critical waterway.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was meeting with Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi in Muscat to discuss “safe navigation through the Strait of Hormuz,” according to state media in Tehran.
There were no indications top US officials were involved in the negotiations.
Qatari officials, who have sometimes served in a mediating role between the warring countries, are taking part in the discussions that included the possibility of creating a “median lane” through the strait, Axios reported.
The plan could represent a compromise – but it is unclear if it would satisfy the Trump administration.
The US wants shipping to travel through a southern route along the Omani coast, while Tehran wants vessels to hug the coast and go through areas it can control.
The US is demanding the Iranian regime issue a public statement acknowledging the waterway is open for business and pledge not to fire on any more ships – following a series of Iranian attacks in the strait that have drawn withering responses from the US military.
“They’re either going to give us that statement, or we’re not going to have a good outcome,” a US official told reporters Friday.
The developer of a sagging Midtown Manhattan skyscraper has been accused of carrying out unauthorized construction after two columns buckled and several floors collapsed.
The owner of the the 37-story office building on East 42nd Street performed construction that went beyond previously approved plans, according to a complaint filed by the New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) on Tuesday.
Specifics of the complaint against the owner, listed as 235 Fee Owner LLC, are not yet publicly available but the DOB’s portal stated that ‘no support of excavation has been approved.’
Construction crews evacuated the skyscraper just after 8am Tuesday after they discovered that two columns had begun to buckle.
The 21st to 26th floors of the building near Grand Central Terminal caved in under stress, officials say. Multiple cracks and sagging floors have been reported throughout the high-rise.
Footage filmed by workers showed the massive silver beams on the 21st and 22nd floors buckling and bending just moments before the floor started to crumble.
The building remains unstable, but experts insist that any collapse would be localized and that, due to its steel supports, the high-rise won’t come toppling down.
The skyscraper, which once housed pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, has been under renovation since 2024 and is being converted into a 1,500-unit luxury apartment complex.
The DOB has issued 22 violations at the address, dating back to 2022, according to the agency’s public portal. A majority of the violations stemmed from failing to file elevator inspection and testing reports.
Thirteen complaints remain active, with 235 Fee Owner LLC owing the city $39,000 in penalties.
