• ‘The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?’ - New York Times

• Hasan Piker: A Progressive Mind in a MAGA Body - New York Times

• Hasan Piker: a "himbo gateway drug" to the left? - NPR

• Hasan Piker Is Flirting With the Revolution - New York Times

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John is a long-time critic of media fear-mongering, creating the 1994 ABC special “Are We Scaring You to Death?” His more than 50-year career has taken him from Portland local news to ABC, Fox Business, and now his independent venture, Stossel TV.

Follow John Stossel on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/JohnStossel?s=20

Watch Stossel TV on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@stosseltv?si=IYpeyB-fUcmL9JNz

Outline:

[0:00] How John ended up in journalism

[4:10] Has journalism changed over the years?

[7:00] Liberty isn’t intuitive for most people

[10:44] Exposing media fear-mongering

[14:30] Was the media ever really trustworthy?

[16:47] Is “corporate greed” actually dangerous?

[21:40] The great communicators of economics

[23:39] Conservative vs libertarians vs liberals

[31:34] Steel-man the other side, then debunk it

[34:38] Why government is so inefficient

[39:07] Will we ever learn the lesson of communism?

[42:03] Social media has revolutionized citizen journalism

[46:19] The challenges facing Gen Z

[48:47] Bad news makes a better story than good news

[55:38] Rethinking the libertarian view on immigration

[1:01:25] John’s conflicted views on President Trump

[1:08:12] Kids should be working

[1:14:12] John’s upbringing and religious background

[1:19:42] How John approaches his interviews

[1:21:41] The iconic mustache and marriage

[1:28:03] Fatherhood should be playful

[1:29:21] Transitioning from TV to YouTube

[1:33:01] Should we be scared of AI?

[1:36:04] Dealing with the mess of the healthcare system

[1:39:56] Dads and moms have different strengths

Purchase a T-shirt, hoodie, and more over on our merch store: https://shop.dadsavesamerica.com/

Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/dYSTrFWHyqs

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When the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that the federal government could not prohibit online gambling, it opened the floodgates for a whole bevy of betting apps. Despite legal age restrictions, several workarounds make these apps available to minors. Boys especially seem to be getting into online gambling, leaving many wondering what to do about it.

Should the government impose stricter age verification rules? Should it ban gambling companies from advertising on television? Should individual states allow sports gambling at all?

For the mainstream media and politicians on both sides of the aisle, the knee-jerk solution to teen gambling is to impose new government regulations. Conspicuously absent from these discussions is the role of parental responsibility.

Outsourcing oversight of teens’ online activity has several drawbacks. Not only do politicians wildly overstate the problem of teen gambling, but many of the proposed regulations wouldn’t even work. If our society is serious about preventing boys from developing gambling addictions, then fathers, not the nanny state, need to step up.

So far, they’ve have been dropping the ball. When asked if their kids were engaged in online gambling, a mere 2% of parents said yes. Barely half were confident that they would know if their kids were betting online.

In reality, most parents are totally in the dark. According to a recent survey by Common Sense Media, more than a third of all teenage boys have made online bets within the past year. Among 16- and 17-year-olds, it’s around half.

Revelations about the ubiquity of teen gambling is kicking off a moral panic across the country. Personalities as divergent as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and conservative podcaster Michael Knowles have sounded the alarm, demanding that the government do something. But the matter hardly demands government intervention.

While Common Sense Media found that many teenage boys are gambling online, they’re not spending much money. The average boy who gambles spent $54 in the past year, which isn’t exactly the kind of habit that spells civilizational doom.

That being said, a small fraction of teens and young men do develop highly destructive gambling addictions. Anecdotes abound online of men who became obsessed with betting, spiraled deeper into debt, lost their jobs, declared bankruptcy, and ruined close relationships.

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But for most, gambling is a relatively harmless form of entertainment. Imposing broad, extremely strict government limits on online gambling would be like using a sledgehammer on a finishing nail. It might work, but it may destroy both the nail and the wood in the process.

Preventing kids from developing gambling addictions should be first and foremost a parental responsibility, not least because they will do a better job than an impersonal state. We have ample data showing that parental involvement and guidance, especially from fathers, lower the odds that kids will develop harmful addictions of any kind.

Of course, the government has its own role to play. By enforcing reasonable licensing rules for legitimate operators and going after illegal and violent gambling rings, they can protect both kids and adults from some of the worst aspects of the betting world.

But the government shouldn’t be relied upon to prevent people from making bad financial choices. Responsibility begins at home. Fathers who bet on sports themselves can model responsible gambling, in the same way that dads who crack open a beer or two on the weekend model responsible drinking.

It’s also about more than just setting a good example. Dads need to be aware of what their kids are up to online and what kinds of content they have access to. No sweeping ban on prop bets and sports betting commercials will guarantee that kids won’t develop gambling addictions. Instead, dads need to have hard conversations with their sons about the temptations of online gambling: when they should hold ‘em, when they should fold ‘em, and most importantly, when they should walk away.

It’s up to fathers to step up and lead, or else allow the nanny state to raise their kids for them.

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Tyler Curtis is a Senior Contributor at Young Voices.

• Sixteenth Amendment (1913) - Annenberg Classroom

• Zohran’s ‘Tax the Rich, White Neighborhoods’ Plan Opens a Side-Door for Reparations - The Polis

• Comptroller Levine Projects $2.2 Billion Budget Shortfall in Fiscal Year 2026 and $10.4 Billion in Fiscal Year 2027 - Office of the New York City Comptroller

• 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Federal Income Tax (1913) - National Archives

• Understanding Taxes - IRS

• Mamdani's Fix for Food Deserts: Opening a $30 Million City-Owned Grocery Store Near Other Grocery Stores - Reason

• Governor Hochul Announces Pied-à-terre Tax Proposal for Luxury Second Homes Valued at $5 Million or More - New York State

• Why Does the IRS Need So Many Armed Agents - America's 1st Freedom

• Red and Blue States Are Growing Further Apart on Income Tax - Wall Street Journal

• US Has the Most Progressive Tax System in the Developed World - Cato Institute

• Canadian provinces maintain some of the most progressive tax systems in the OECD - Fraser Institute

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Trisha breaks down how fracking revolutionized American energy production, reinforcing the petrodollar as the global reserve currency. While states like California have turned away from the energy security of fossil fuels in favor of unreliable, renewable “green energy,” the U.S. still is the top player on the global stage compared to Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Iran.

The Biden administration bet everything on a net-zero future of solar and wind, undermining American energy security in the process. Under the second Trump administration, the U.S. is rebuilding the energy abundance that made it a global power in the first place.

Follow Trisha Curtis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trisha-curtis-petronerds/

Follow Trisha Curtis on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/TrishaJCoffee?s=20

Watch PetroNerds on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@petronerds633?si=4L6gSOePdngmeG-L

Learn more about PetroNerds: https://petronerds.com/

Outline:

[0:00] Why oil and gas matter in our everyday lives

[14:25] The link between GDP and oil consumption

[21:43] Why coal is still relevant in 2026

[27:24] Is natural gas safe?

[29:56] Energy density and transportation costs

[36:42] Food production, fertilizer, and ethanol

[45:53] The reality of “drill baby drill”

[58:21] What is “fracking”?

[1:07:31] How do we know how much oil there is?

[1:16:50] What is the “petrodollar”?

[1:19:02] Oil drilling is different in Canada

[1:22:21] The different flavors of oil

[1:30:30] California’s assault on oil

[1:33:24] The petrodollar is the global reserve currency

[1:41:39] Renewable “green energy” fails on the physics

[1:55:58] The oil subsidy myth vs inflation reality

[2:01:47] Monopolies come and go in the oil industry

[2:05:47] Why don’t people notice when prices go down?

[2:11:41] The war in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz

[2:22:55] Selective focus in geopolitics

[2:30:24] Can we stabilize the Middle East?

[2:36:18] Utopianism can’t solve real problems

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America began with almost no immigration controls at all. The Naturalization Act of 1790 established who could become a citizen, but coming to the country was mostly unregulated. You survived the boat trip, you showed up, you worked. That was the deal. For about a century, that deal held and it produced something extraordinary.

Immigrants came in waves. Germans. Irish. Italians. But, as it turns out, there’s a natural social threshold you eventually hit. When enough foreigners arrive fast enough, there will be a backlash from the host culture.

You can debate whether it’s justified, but you can’t really debate whether it happens. My own great-grandparents were on the receiving end of it, arriving from Italy in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They were the Mexicans of their era: unwanted, suspicious, foreign.

The political reaction came in stages. First the Page Act, then the Chinese Exclusion Act, and eventually the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which set hard immigration quotas based on the ethnic makeup of the country in 1890. The law was specifically in reaction to the wave that brought over my great-grandparents, and it worked. Immigration levels plummeted, stayed low, and the country experienced four decades of demographic stasis.

The 1965 Immigration Pivot

Then in 1965, everything changed again.

JFK had popularized the phrase “a nation of immigrants,” partly, I suspect, because his own Irish Catholic family had been on the wrong end of the cultural backlash surrounding the 1924 restrictions. The sentiment was genuine.

The Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 eliminated the immigration quota system, among other things, and was to many a long-overdue moral correction, but it came with a promise.

Senator Ted Kennedy, morally compromised character that he was, stood up and told the American public explicitly that this bill would not fundamentally transform the demographics of America. That was the sales pitch. That was what got it passed.

Here is what actually happened.

In 1900, America was roughly 88% white. Keep in mind that “white” is a broad and messy category, which at that time included all sorts of people who actively hated one another over centuries-long feuds. By 1950, after a generation under the quota system, virtually nothing had changed. Then 1965 passes. By 1995 we’re at 74%. By 2005, 67%. Today, below 60%.

Whether you think that’s good, bad, or neutral (and I think it’s mostly fine), the promise was a lie. Like the promises about Medicare costs. Like the promise that Social Security was a real retirement account where your money was kept safe. The political class told the public one thing and did another. That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s just what the numbers prove.

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Welfare Complicates the Calculus

The other thing that happened in 1965 was the Great Society: Medicaid, Medicare, and all sorts of other welfare programs. Milton Friedman identified the inevitable collision with perfect clarity:

“The United States, as you know, before 1914, had completely free immigration. Anybody could get on a boat and come to these shores, and if he landed on Ellis Island, he was an immigrant. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? You will find hardly a soul who will say it was a bad thing. Almost everybody will say it was a good thing. But then suppose I say to the same people, ‘But now what about today? Do you think we should have free immigration?’ ‘Oh no,’ they’ll say, ‘we couldn’t possibly have free immigration today.’

Why is it that free immigration was a good thing before 1914 and free immigration is a bad thing today? Well, there’s a sense in which that answer is right. There’s a sense in which free immigration in the same sense as we had it before in 1914 is not possible today. Why not? Because it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both.”

That’s the whole argument. Open immigration works when it means arriving with nothing and building something. It breaks when it means arriving with nothing and immediately accessing a system funded by people who are already here.

To be fair, the data on immigrant welfare use doesn’t paint a clear picture that backs up one particular partisan narrative.

The Cato Institute has found that immigrants as individuals consume roughly 21% less in welfare and entitlement benefits than native-born Americans. Non-citizens consume even less, about 54% less. This tracks with what I’ve observed living in Texas since 2011. The guys waiting outside Home Depot are not lining up for SNAP. They don’t want to end up in a government database.

However, there’s another cut of the data, from the Center for Immigration Studies, which uses a household rather than an individual lens. The 1965 Act also created chain migration, so now that working-age male arrives and later brings his parents, his grandparents, his wife, and his kids. Analyzed that way, the picture changes. According to CIS, 59% of non-citizen-headed households access at least one major welfare program, compared to 39% of U.S.-born households.

Whether the household or the individual is the better lens through which to assess the effects of immigration on the welfare system is up for debate, but it’s clear that this issue makes the conversation about immigration more difficult.

That’s why, either way, my position is the same. If you come here, you should get nothing from the government.

Welfare access corrupts the selection process. It inverts the filter. Instead of drawing people who bet everything on their own ability to produce, it draws people who’ve learned to work the system. It also turns the native-born public against immigrants who mostly deserve their respect. The resentment isn’t irrational. The structure that produces it is.

Senator Rand Paul has proposed legislation barring refugees, asylees, and illegal immigrants from welfare altogether. Under the current system, church charities that “sponsor” immigrants focus their resources on signing people up for welfare programs. That’s charity-in-name-only. What if they actually spent their money feeding and housing the people they claim to care for?

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Culture Still Matters

Strip away welfare access and you’re still left with an important question: even if immigrants have the right financial incentives, how will they affect our culture?

The honest answer, based on the data, is that immigrants broadly hold up their end better than their critics assume. First-generation arrivals have as strong a sense of national pride as native-born Americans.

Interestingly, they have higher confidence in American institutions than the native-born, which isn’t so surprising when you think about where they’re coming from. Our government may have its issues, but it’s a far cry from the institutional dysfunction and corruption of a country like Mexico.

The 2024 election reset the longtime predictions of “demographics is destiny” cheerleaders on the left. President Trump made historic gains among Latinos and Asian Americans, the exact populations that exploded after 1965. The coalition the left thought they were building turned out to be their greatest weakness.

That said, not all immigration is equivalent, and pretending otherwise is its own form of dishonesty. Countries that are overwhelmingly Islamic and have been stuck in ongoing religious civil conflict for generations are in a different category. Islam is both a religion and a political doctrine, one that sits in serious tension with the constitutional order we’re asking people to join.

Just because the average immigrant may be a good cultural fit doesn’t mean that our judgement goes out the window. Being welcoming and cautiously discerning are not mutually exclusive.

Again, much like the welfare question, there isn’t a clear-cut answer to cultural concerns. And again, my solution is to simply take the question off the table. I don’t think first-generation immigrants should vote or hold public office.

I know that’s a hard line, but consider the logic. You came here because you wanted what was already here. The system, however broken, produced something worth pursuing, even at great personal danger and expense. You don’t get to show up mid-game and immediately start renegotiating the rules.

Build a new life here. Leave it to your children, who are actually of this place, to shape the country going forward.

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Reset the Nation of Immigrants

The old formula was simple, and it worked. The natural filter was severe and effective. It selected for exactly the people you’d want, the ones willing to bet everything on themselves in a country they’d chosen freely.

We can run that filter again. The door doesn’t have to be closed, but has to be calibrated. The people who make it through, the ones fleeing actual communism in Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, and Cambodia, will be the most patriotic Americans in the room.

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• Gavin Newsom to spend $19M in taxpayer funds on New York PR firm to polish California’s image - NY Post

• Gavin Newsom’s Empire of Fraud - City Journal

• California Dem lawmaker proposes bill to decriminalize welfare fraud below $25K over administrative errors - Fox News

• Gavin Newsom’s high-speed rail humiliation deepens — as aide admits blunder and $126B line dubbed ‘Stonehenge’ - NY Post

• Other countries have 200 mph passenger trains. Why has high-speed rail not tracked here? - CBS News

• Funny or Die Closes Shop in New York Year After Layoffs, Relocates Staffers to LA - The Wrap

• Anthropic says new AI model too dangerous for public release - The Hill

• Behind the Curtain: AI’s scary phase - Axios

• Digital hygiene - Andrej Karpathy

• Log Book With Computer Bug - National Museum of American History

• HHS Replaces Legacy COBOL Payroll System, Delivering Faster, More Reliable Services - U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

• Obama’s devastating Nasa cuts - The Guardian

• NASA’s Artemis II Mission Around the Moon - NASA

• Artemis II Journey to the Moon - NASA

• Image of the Day - NASA

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Matt spent about a decade studying and working as a journalist in Russia, witnessing the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Vladimir Putin. When American meddling in Ukraine led to Russian military intervention in 2014, he was uniquely positioned to understand what was really going on.

This conflict set the stage for over a decade of American politics, from the rise of Donald Trump, to Russiagate, to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and the FBI censorship plot that followed. Matt saw Soviet propaganda up close, and he’s convinced the fight for free speech in America is more urgent than ever.

Stay ahead of the spin. Go to ground.news/dsa to cut through media bias and see the full picture. Use my link to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan.

Follow Matt Taibbi on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/mtaibbi?s=20

Check out Racket News: https://www.racket.news/

Outline:

[0:00] Matt’s journalism origin story

[5:06] Why Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was censored during COVID

[13:23] What the Missouri v. Biden ruling actually means

[19:19] The government wants to control your mind

[25:39] Free speech used to unite Americans

[31:28] The unbridled arrogance of elite journalism

[43:54] Studying and working in the Soviet Union

[54:28] Russia’s financial crisis and the dot-com bubble

[1:02:19] Witnessing the rise of Vladimir Putin

[1:13:12] Taking over Hunter S. Thompson’s job at Rolling Stone

[1:16:21] Obama, NATO expansion, and the road to Ukraine

[1:20:48] The real reason Russia annexed Crimea

[1:30:20] Is American influence in Ukraine overblown?

[1:37:16] Biden family corruption in Ukraine

[1:44:31] How Matt knew Russiagate was a scam

[2:02:14] Elon’s DM and getting access to the Twitter Files

[2:12:30] No one wanted to cover the censorship crisis

[2:18:05] Figuring out what was actually in the Twitter Files

[2:25:54] How the Hunter Biden laptop story was censored

[2:39:30] Proof that government is behind social media censorship

[2:46:55] Did Trump’s reelection actually strengthen free speech?

[2:52:17] How Wilsonian liberalism overtook populist liberalism

[2:57:07] Fight for American values for the sake of your kids

Purchase a T-shirt, hoodie, and more over on our merch store: https://shop.dadsavesamerica.com/

Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4mh_MBdjdHM

Make a tax-deductible donation to Dad Saves America: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://secure.anedot.com/emergent-order-foundation/dad-website?⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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This national organization pretends to be a suicide prevention resource for “marginalized LGBTQ+ youth,” but in reality, it’s more focused on transitioning minors, breaking up families, and gathering vulnerable children for groomers and predators.

The Trevor Project is not some marginal player in the LGBTQ+ machine. It’s heavily funded and, as of this year, every California public school is required to list the organization’s hotline number on student ID cards.

When you first log on to their website, a pop-up window instantly appears. It’s a quick escape button for kids to click if their parents walk into the room, encouraging secrecy from the start.

Once you’re past the pop-up, the home page opens with a love-bomb: “You deserve a welcoming, loving world.” That sounds so nice…

However, given their targeting of vulnerable kids, you should recognize that as the cult initiation it actually is. The Trevor Project asserts that families who question a child’s transgender identity or have valid concerns about the long term effects of hormones and surgeries are “unwelcoming” and “unsafe.”

Their hotlines and chat groups are full of trained “counselors” who are happy to tell your child that you don’t love them and they should seek out a chosen family, also known as a “glitter family,” instead.

The Trevor Project defines chosen family as:

“A common term in the LGBTQ+ community used to describe people who are not related by birth or marriage yet whose bond is like that of family. Oftentimes, LGBTQ+ people may find and build their chosen family out of necessity, due to a lack of understanding or acceptance, or by being kicked out or disowned by one’s biological family.” (I found this on their website in 2023)

The underlying message is clear: if your parents don’t fully affirm your transgender identity and have some questions, you should run to a chosen family instead. This is deeply predatory.

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The Trevor Project also offers unmonitored chat groups in their “TrevorSpace” community, marketed for participants ages 13-24. This raises an obvious question: why are minors and adults interacting in the same online space?

One group, called “littles,” is self-described as for “people who age regress.” This is a haven for pedophiles. In fact, the Trevor Project was reported to the Riverside, California district attorney after Celeste Fiehler, a local parent, did some investigating. She captured a screenshot of a predatory chat between an adult and a minor seeking a boyfriend.

There have also been other reports highlighting potential safety risks. According to Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a department member in his 40s was able to register as a 13-year-old and immediately access chat features, including private messaging and user-generated content. Minimal verification requirements and unrestricted communication create a “breeding ground for grooming.”

Former law enforcement officer Kevin Brown conducted a similar test. Posing as a teenager, he quickly connected with other users and was encouraged to move conversations to external platforms such as Discord. Based on his experience investigating human trafficking, moving targets to less-moderated platforms is a common tactic of predators and significantly increases the risk of exploitation.

Concerns also extend to how the Trevor Project responds to individuals who express regret about gender transition.

On March 17, 2026, detransitioner Jonni Skinner testified against California AB 1540, a bill that would further expand the organization’s services. Skinner is a young man who was placed on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones as a minor and faced devastating physical and emotional effects. When he started to hate his body even more and became suicidal, he called the Trevor Project for help.

In his testimony, Skinner stated that they were supportive and affirming at first, but when he brought up his transition regret, they hung up on him. A nationally recognized suicide hotline actually hung up on a suicidal teen because he wouldn’t carry out their agenda.

Parents, consider this a warning. The Trevor Project is not some innocuous mental health support system. Its content promotes a predatory ideology, while its online community places vulnerable youth at risk of exploitation. It is essential that parents keep their children away.

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• Marc Andreessen: The World Is More Malleable Than You Think - David Senra

• Live Not by Lies - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Bankruptcy and foreclosure were once seen as shameful events, not standard parts of the American dream of homeownership. By the time of the financial crisis, signing up for a mortgage you obviously couldn’t afford had been normalized on all sides: lenders, investors, and even “average Americans” themselves.

We dig into how easy money, government backstops, and cultural decay fueled a nationwide housing bubble and, in the end, turned both the left and right against free markets and toward populism.

Follow David Bahnsen on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/DavidBahnsen?s=20

Order a copy of “Crisis of Responsibility”: https://a.co/d/04GlVHsW

Outline:

[0:00] The financial crisis broke the American economy

[10:12] What is “neoliberalism”?

[15:20] Was Ron Paul right about the financial crisis?

[20:21] The moral failing of the financial crisis

[29:07] Low interest rates and government-backed mortgages

[37:40] Wall Street really believed their own lies

[41:20] The crisis of responsibility and the cult of housing

[47:25] How can we make housing more affordable?

[55:42] The generational shift in home ownership

[1:06:09] Populism, elitism, and luxury beliefs

[1:18:15] Is government too big to fix?

[1:27:18] The death of policy debate in America

[1:33:15] Can liberalism survive without Christianity?

[1:45:08] Freedom and virtue have to go together

Purchase a T-shirt, hoodie, and more over on our merch store: https://shop.dadsavesamerica.com/

Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/esf-68sJZls

Make a tax-deductible donation to Dad Saves America: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://secure.anedot.com/emergent-order-foundation/dad-website?⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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Resilience in children should never be assumed when making changes or disrupting their lives. Resilience to stress is not evenly distributed across childhood. There are windows of neurological vulnerability, when the developing brain is especially sensitive to disruption, stress, and loss, as well as windows of relative stability, when children are better equipped to absorb and adapt.

Understanding these windows matters for every parent navigating major family change, whether that’s going back to work and finding childcare, moving, changing schools, or traveling. It matters most for those facing separation and divorce, which is one of the most disruptive and stressful events a child may face.

The first three years of life constitute the most critical window of brain development. During this period, children are building the neurological foundation for emotional regulation and their future capacity to manage stress, soothe themselves, and recover from adversity. This architecture is constructed through the attachment relationship with a primary caregiver and is exquisitely sensitive to disruption.

When young children are separated from that primary attachment figure (usually their mother) for extended periods, cortisol levels spike in their developing brains. Chronic early stress of this kind doesn’t just cause short-term distress. It reshapes the stress-response system itself, with consequences that can persist for decades.

Fathers are also essential during these early years, but in a complementary rather than identical way. Where mothers tend to orient toward soothing, reassurance, and emotional regulation (driven partly by higher oxytocin surges during caregiving), fathers characteristically engage through stimulation: physical play, roughhousing, the kind of exciting, slightly unpredictable interactions that build resilience and teach children to regulate arousal.

Both roles are important. Both are necessary. But they are not interchangeable, and pretending otherwise doesn’t serve children.

For parents who are separating, this science has direct implications. The current legal system tends to treat custody as a question of adult fairness. Developmental neuroscience suggests it should be treated as a question of what the child’s brain actually needs. In the first three years, that typically means protecting the child’s access to their primary attachment figure while giving as much access to the non-primary person as possible. Biology matters, but so does presence.

As John Bowlby, the founder of attachment theory, defined it: the primary attachment figure is the person who soothes the child in distress from moment to moment throughout the day, their safe harbor in moments of fear or pain. The young child needs to be wherever that person is the majority of the time.

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The adolescent brain presents a different kind of vulnerability. Between roughly nine and eighteen, the brain undergoes a second major reorganization: pruning the neural overgrowth of early childhood and rewiring for adult complexity. Teenagers navigating this process are simultaneously managing academic pressure, social hierarchies, identity formation, and nervous systems that are, quite literally, under construction.

Family disruption during this period lands differently than it does in middle childhood. The years between thirteen and sixteen are the most psychologically volatile stretch. If intense change, separation, or divorce during adolescence is unavoidable, there’s real value in trying to complete the transition before sixteen so that you leave time before the child leaves home to process and stabilize their emotions.

The least neurologically risky period for major family disruption is middle childhood: roughly ages five to twelve. The brain is neither in its early explosive growth phase nor in adolescent reorganization. Children in these years tend to have more emotional resources, stronger peer relationships, and a greater cognitive capacity to make sense of what is happening around them. In addition, it leaves a great deal of time to adapt to the new situation before leaving home.

One timing error I see repeatedly is waiting until a child leaves for college to announce a divorce. Parents who do this almost always believe they are being protective, that they are holding the family together until the child is safely launched. In practice, they are often doing the opposite.

The transition to college is one of the most psychologically demanding passages of young adulthood: separation from family, identity formation, and the task of finding one’s footing in an entirely new world. Young people in the middle of that passage need to feel tethered to a stable home base.

When that base collapses at precisely the moment they are trying to leave it, the consequences can be severe. I have seen more emotional breakdowns at college triggered by a parent selling their home or announcing divorce than by almost any other single event.

If you are waiting, wait longer. Ideally wait until your child has genuinely established themselves, past the college transition, closer to their mid-twenties when the developmental work of early adulthood is more consolidated.

None of this is a rigid prescription. There are circumstances, such as abuse, severe conflict, safety, or financial pressure, where timing cannot be the priority. But for parents who do have some choice in the matter, the research is clear: children are not uniformly resilient. Their capacity to absorb disruption depends heavily on when it happens. Getting that timing right is one of the most consequential parenting decisions you can make.

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Erica Komisar is a psychoanalyst and author of The Parent’s Guide To Divorce: How To Protect Your Child’s Mental and Emotional Health Through a Breakup or Separation.

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Join Arthur’s free “The Meaning of Your Life Virtual Experience” on March 27, a live, immersive journey designed around the groundbreaking findings in his new book, “The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness.” Learn more at http://themeaningofyourlife.com/

Follow Arthur Brooks on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/arthurbrooks?s=20

Preorder a copy of Arthur’s new book: http://themeaningofyourlife.com/

Outline:

[0:00] Reflecting on making “The Pursuit” together

[2:13] What does it mean to be an adult?

[7:40] What are your emotions telling you?

[11:37] Left vs right in 2026

[19:48] Are we more in need of policy reform or cultural repair?

[27:48] The psychogenic epidemic and the cycles of history

[37:47] No period of history is all good or all bad

[40:58] How to be masculine in a feminine era

[44:58] We’re living in a gnostic simulation

[47:03] What does “meaning” actually mean?

[52:02] How to raise your kids in your values

[55:04] Contempt destroys marriages

[1:00:39] Getting back into religion in middle age

[1:06:53] Choosing persuasion over coercion makes us human

[1:13:37] Exit the Matrix, find your mate, and find meaning

[1:20:41] 4 strategies that will save most marriages

[1:24:46] Finding your career calling in the AI era

[1:33:17] Is Bryan Johnson is right about mortality?

[1:36:34] The fight between fear and love

[1:41:20] Why men struggle to “feel” their faith

[1:48:15] Science and faith aren’t in conflict

[1:53:30] Has the Enlightenment gone too far?

Purchase a T-shirt, hoodie, and more over on our merch store: https://shop.dadsavesamerica.com/

Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/H0jgDwtGNqM

Make a tax-deductible donation to Dad Saves America: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://secure.anedot.com/emergent-order-foundation/dad-website?⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Visit our website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.dadsavesamerica.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

This Thursday’s interview is with an old friend of mine, Arthur Brooks. He was generous enough to share an excerpt from his new book, The Meaning of Your Life, for all you here on Substack. Enjoy!

The Meaning of Life comes out on March 31, 2026. Click here to preorder.

The Garbage Disposal

Marc, age thirty-two, is exactly what you would conjure up in your mind if I asked you to imagine a textbook striver: He’s college-educated, hardworking, and healthy. He’s a “bootstraps” guy, too. His parents broke up when he was young, and they never had much money, but Marc avoided trouble, went to a small state college (unlike most of the people he grew up with), and landed an excellent job as a data analyst. He is physically healthy, eating right, and exercising a lot. If you were writing an advice column for young men on how to succeed in life, Marc would pretty much be the poster child for what you’d recommend.

But when we spoke recently and he told me all this, something sounded off. As he described his situation—on paper, a list of carefully managed accomplishments—his voice was hollow, as though he were describing a scenario he didn’t really believe. I pressed him to go deeper.

He paused and then said, “My life feels empty.”

I asked him what was missing. He thought for a minute, then told me a story. A year or so ago, he was on a first date with a woman he’d met on one of the dating apps. Over dinner, she mentioned to him in passing that her garbage disposal was clogged, and she didn’t know what to do about it.

He volunteered to help her with it and ended up fixing it for her that very evening. He said that this gave him a deep sense of satisfaction. Later, at his own apartment, he remembered that his own garbage disposal was clogged as well. The fix was easy, but he had just never gotten around to doing anything about it. A year later, he still hasn’t.

Maybe that sounds like a random anecdote, but I understood that he was expressing something profound. He wasn’t saying that he felt some existential need to be a handyman. What he craved was the sense of purpose and significance that came from being needed by someone.

The garbage-disposal date never went anywhere, unfortunately. Nor had any of his dates in years, he told me. The only way to meet women, he felt, was on a dating app; by his own count, he’d gone on fifty first dates. But the connections always felt somehow fake. He never felt any authenticity with people he met that way, so he’d given up on the idea that his soulmate was somewhere online. Maybe, he feared, his soulmate simply didn’t exist.

His friendships haven’t fared much better. During the lonely coronavirus lockdowns, he moved to a new city he’d never been to, hoping to meet new people. He didn’t, at least not real humans in three dimensions. His job went fully remote and never came back in person; his work colleagues were and still are two-dimensional avatars on a Zoom screen. He established only a few social relationships in the new city, and now rarely sees anyone more than once a week. He feels stuck on the outside of life, viewing the world through a double-paned window.

To pass his overabundant free time, Marc, like almost everyone these days, is online a lot: scrolling social media, watching videos. To simulate a social life, he spends hours listening to podcasts of other people having interesting conversations, but it leaves him feeling empty. He calls it “social pornography.” But like all digital distraction, it’s hard to avoid without something better to do. And most of the time, there’s nothing better to do. He craves a big, meaningful project—building something, writing something—and dreams of finding that project and immersing himself in it. But he can’t come up with any ideas for what that project might be … so it’s back online.

Occasionally, he panics. Is this it forever? Will I die alone? Will I ever find what I’m looking for? But when the fear inevitably subsides, he falls back into the Zooming, scrolling, and isolation. And the months click by.

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Just Stay Busy

Maria’s parents are probably bragging about her to the neighbors right now. Their twenty-seven-year-old daughter has always been a bright light: top grades in school, never in trouble. She was always a leader and ambitious, completing a bachelor’s and a master’s in mechanical engineering, joining the military, and rising fast as an officer in the cyber and information sciences. She holds multiple associations in prestigious academic societies and think tanks.

On the personal side, however, things aren’t going well for Maria. Her extraordinary energy—the envy of others—isn’t her way just to succeed but also to distract herself. The hustle diverts her attention from an intense sense of emptiness that grows every year. She appears hyperfocused, a woman on a mission, but she confesses privately that her life has no coherence: She has no idea where she is going, nor what she even wants. She hopes that through her work, a sense of purpose will emerge, but it never does. She feels no passion for it, no calling, no sense of vocation.

When we speak, I ask her what big change she would like to see in her life in a year’s time. She pauses for a long time and fails to come up with a definite answer. Big questions like this make her feel afraid, she says, so she avoids them by staying busy. “What if I never find the answers?” she asks me. “Or if there are no answers?”

What about her relationships? Maria has a boyfriend, but she doesn’t know where that relationship is going. It’s just okay for now. She is an extrovert and has friends but, she says, they are more “deal friends” than “real friends.” She rarely goes deep with anyone in her circle. She is not very close to her parents or siblings. Although she is in theory a religious believer, she doesn’t practice her faith at all. I ask why not. She doesn’t know.

When she’s too tired to work, Maria tells me that she would like to read books or do something productive and creative but somehow doesn’t know how to get started. Instead, she finds herself simply on her phone—scrolling social media and watching YouTube—sometimes for hours at a time. This fills her with guilt for wasting her time, but it keeps her mind off something she knows she’s missing but can’t quite name.

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A Long Hike to … Somewhere

Marc and Maria are among the typical young adults I have met in my teaching and travels over the past seven years. Their lives look enviable from the outside, but they feel empty on the inside. They are waiting for their purpose to find them, but it never does. As they wait, they distract themselves with work and soothe themselves with tech.

I feel a paternal concern for Marc and Maria; after all, I am old enough to be their father. Paul, however, is closer to a peer—he could be a younger sibling to me, in fact—and because of that, his story leaves me still more shaken than the others.

At forty-seven, Paul would appear to have everything figured out. He is smart and friendly, is married with three kids, and has a successful career as a social scientist at a top university. Before I met him, I knew about him and admired his work.

But scratch the surface, and a darker narrative emerges.

Paul’s parents divorced when he was very young, and he grew up in poverty, without much adult attention. A clever kid, he quickly figured out that adults gave him the approval he craved when he excelled in school. Love, he figured out, is earned through achievements. So all of his sense of purpose came from getting good grades, good test scores—“the next gold star,” in his words. And to maintain that sense of purpose, he essentially never left school, winding up as a professor.

Ten years ago, Paul was ambitious and full of passion for ideas, writing a series of books in his academic field. They weren’t bestsellers because they were too specialized and academically rigorous to sell by the millions. But he was proud of them and, he told himself, the “right people” were reading them. The recognition he got for these books were his grown-up gold stars. But their luster faded over the following decade as his career progress slowed. Each new book began to feel like the one before, and they all began to seem “pointless” and “rote.” Today, he feels like his research has little impact, that it makes no difference to the world and wins little recognition from other scholars. He is way behind schedule on a major writing project but doesn’t have the motivation to work on it. His sense of purpose and direction are fading away.

It’s not as if Paul has no time to work. The problem is how he spends the time he has. It’s as if something is eating his brain, so that he can’t focus. An hour that he would have once used to read a research paper he now uses to anesthetize himself, looking at social media to block the growing ennui. This distracts him from his melancholy but, like Maria, he feels enormous remorse for wasting the time. With the eloquence of Franz Kafka—he is a thinker and writer, after all—Paul sums up his absurd-feeling predicament: “Life is like a factory churning out days of my existence, indifferently prepackaged for my mandatory consumption.”

“What do you want?” I ask him. He pauses, struggling to find the words. “I want to go hiking,” he says at last, “for a long time.” I ask him where he wants to go hiking. Paul’s answer might be literal, or it might be metaphorical—I can’t tell: “To where I might find what I’m looking for.”

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The Penny Drops

Marc, Maria, and Paul are real people, and these are their real stories and words. There are dozens more. On the surface, nothing seems wrong with any of their lives. On the contrary, they haven’t experienced terrible deprivation or grave trauma. Their needs are met, and then some. They are strivers—not necessarily graduates of elite schools or earning a fortune, but taking life seriously—and on paper at least, should be living a good life and looking forward to an excellent future. Many of them actually express a sense of guilt over being miserable, given all they have going for them. As one told me, “I have everything but feel nothing.” They have a sense of deadness about life, as if One Big Thing were missing.

There is a core emptiness to life as they drift from day to day. What they describe to me is something akin to waiting in an airport terminal for a delayed flight that never leaves; they try to stay occupied to keep themselves from going mad, always in the hope that boarding will finally be called and the flight will take off. That’s where their distraction tactics come in—filling time with social media or streaming video or simply by working grinding hours at their jobs in the hope of the next gold star—which keep them from thinking too much but which make their sense of emptiness worse.

When I do interviews like those with Marc, Maria, and Paul, I just listen. What generally happens is that people say the same things over and over. But then, out of the blue, somebody says one thing that illuminates the real problem. One of the young strivers I talked to—not one of the three above—had a hard time expressing his feelings. Most of his interview isn’t worth recounting. Matter-of-factly, he told me about his virtual job, dating apps, social media friends, and video gaming.

But then, flatly, he said this: “I feel like I’m living in a simulation.”

I asked others if they felt the same way. “Yes, yes—that’s it,” they told me. Life felt unreal: full of false rewards, empty accomplishments, therapeutic talk, and fake experiences, all curated to pass the time as painlessly as possible. I drilled down further: What exactly was missing? And this is where the penny finally dropped for me. What was missing was the one thing that can never be simulated: meaning. Again and again, people said that life was busy but not meaningful. That experiences and relationships felt meaningless. Or that they didn’t know what they were meant to do in work and life.

The meaning of life: such a big question that it is the root of a lot of jokes. But it’s no joke in real life, especially when you can’t find it, like millions of people today. To understand why, let’s back up a little to talk more broadly about happiness, which happens to be the subject I study and teach.

Researchers define happiness in a variety of ways, but the clearest characterization for me is one that brings meaning into the happiness equation, literally:

Happiness = Enjoyment + Satisfaction + Meaning

In other words, the happiest people enjoy their lives, take satisfaction in their activities and accomplishments, and have a sense of the meaning of their existence. Enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning are like the macronutrients of happiness. I use the metaphor of macronutrients for a reason. If you’re feeling tired and run down, you might go to a nutritionist to ask about your diet, and they will start by trying to figure out if you’re getting your dietary macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates, and fat) in good balance and sufficient abundance. If you’re found to be underconsuming protein, say, you will get instructed on how to add more of it to your diet so that you feel better.

When I see an explosion in unhappiness, which I do in the United States and so many other places around the world, the first thing I look for as a researcher is a lack of one of the macronutrients above. I have found zero evidence indicating that enjoyment and satisfaction have declined at all. Young people have as much fun as older people—maybe more. And they accomplish a lot—especially the strivers I teach and meet every day.

But meaning has collapsed.

More and more people—especially young adult strivers—have expressed an increasing sense of meaninglessness over recent decades. For example, the research group Monitoring the Future has shown that from 2008 to the present, the percentage of teenagers who agreed with the statement “Life often seems meaningless” approximately doubled, to more than one in five teens, exactly in tandem with the increases in depression and anxiety. Move up to college students and the pattern is the same; indeed, most have given up even looking for life’s meaning. According to data from the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, the number one goal of American undergraduates in the mid-1960s was “developing a meaningful philosophy of life,” an aim that was shared by nearly 90 percent of students. Today, fewer than half of undergraduates say this is their goal.

Among my students and their friends—strivers, all—these alarming numbers clearly underestimate the problem. While one in five straight up say their life is “meaningless,” when I ask people if their sense of meaning has risen or fallen over the past five years, I never hear the former.

More than the other elements of happiness, meaning predicts active engagement with life and an ability to cope with suffering. If your life feels meaningless, you will be disengaged and unable to deal effectively with your problems. You will almost certainly be depressed and anxious. Your life will have a void to it, a hollowness. Maybe you will seek the salve of therapy, which might help a bit with the symptoms of unhappiness but which can’t instill the deep meaning you crave. To pass the time and distract yourself, you will probably scroll or watch videos or game. But these self-soothing behaviors are in fact self-defeating, because they are just a simulation of a life with meaning, not the real thing. And thus they will only make your feeling of emptiness grow more acute.

Why? Because meaning cannot be simulated.

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Special thanks to Trisha Curtis, host of PetroNerds on YouTube, for helping me research this video!

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Follow Ian Rowe on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/IanVRowe?s=20

Purchase a copy of Ian’s book, “Agency”: https://a.co/d/0cWhn8dy

Outline:

[0:00] Ian and I have a lot in common

[2:58] What is agency and why does it matter?

[6:04] How religion breaks the cycle of disfunction

[14:52] Entrepreneurship is a problem-solving mindset

[18:07] Is the mental health crisis a self-fulfilling prophecy?

[25:08] How do kids transition into adulthood?

[35:37] Why is the “success sequence” controversial?

[39:21] We need to bring back shame

[43:48] The problems facing black Americans

[59:22] Are black voters shifting politically?

[1:05:59] How racial guilt gets in the way of teaching

[1:11:45] Teachers have forgotten how to teach

[1:17:04] Identity obsession vs universal virtues

[1:25:58] Truth, nihilism, and the black market of ideas

Purchase a T-shirt, hoodie, and more over on our merch store:

https://shop.dadsavesamerica.com/

Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/TKXE5FBwy50

Make a tax-deductible donation to Dad Saves America: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://secure.anedot.com/emergent-order-foundation/dad-website?⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Visit our website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.dadsavesamerica.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Every time we ended a phone call, he would give me the same three instructions:

1. Don’t do drugs.

2. Don’t get AIDS.

3. Don’t get anyone pregnant.

That was it.

He barely ever asked about my grades, but he must have told me that thousands of times, so it’s still seared into my brain over 25 years later.

Life is complicated, but a few catastrophic mistakes can derail everything. Avoid those mistakes and you’ll probably turn out fine.

The problem is that telling people not to do drugs and actually preventing them from doing drugs are two very different things. For more than 50 years, the United States has tried to close that gap by waging war against drugs, dealers, and addicts.

The War on Drugs Is Back

The war has heated up again since President Trump retook the White House. He’s designated drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, targeted alleged drug boats in the Caribbean with airstrikes, captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and most recently, provided intelligence to the Mexican military that led to the death of cartel boss “El Mencho.”

The instinct behind this escalation is easy to understand.

Cartels aren’t just trafficking drugs. They are violent criminal organizations involved in kidnapping, extortion, human trafficking, and murder. They corrupt governments and terrorize communities.

If you’re an American parent who’s watched the fentanyl crisis unfold over the past decade, it’s natural to want to see the cartels destroyed.

But there’s an uncomfortable question sitting underneath the entire debate.

Why has the war on drugs been so hard to win?

The answer has a lot to do with economics.

When people think about drug trafficking, they often imagine criminal masterminds or violent gangs. That’s what we see on the surface, but underneath it all, there’s a market responding to powerful incentives.

I spent time in Colombia this past June. Colombia, of course, is the number one producer of cocaine worldwide. Along with its neighbors Peru and Bolivia, it has the ideal altitude, soil, temperature, and humidity to grow the coca plant.

When you talk to people in Colombia about what can be done, the first thing they’ll point out is the economic incentive that coca farmers face.

Growing coca pays.

Growing legal crops does not.

These farmers aren’t exactly rich. Convincing them to accept a thousand-fold reduction in income by switching from coca to wheat is a losing battle. For someone trying to support a family in rural Colombia, that’s not much of a choice.

Once those crops are processed into cocaine, the supply chain moves north. Colombian trafficking groups transport the drugs through Central America. Mexican cartels act as middlemen, moving the product into the United States, where the real profit is.

Police officers are bribed. Local officials are intimidated. Entire economies are propped up by the drug trade.

This isn’t just corruption around the edges. These are societies built on fundamentally corrupt foundations.

How should someone who wants to “do the right thing” respond when presented with the cartel’s brutally simple offer? Take the money or take the bullet.

In that kind of environment, it’s impossible for normal institutions to function.

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It’s a Brave New World

In recent years the economics of the drug trade have shifted because the drugs themselves have changed.

“Plant-based” drugs like cocaine and heroin require large farming and shipment operations. Methamphetamine and fentanyl, on the other hand, are synthesized, eliminating the complex agricultural process. With a much higher potency compared to traditional narcotics, synthetic drugs are also much easier to traffic at scale.

Manufacturing in labs rather than growing in fields means much lower detection risk. Higher potency means higher profits.

This revolution in drug production helps explain why overdose deaths rose so sharply during the past decade. In 2023, fentanyl killed more than 70,000 Americans, accounting for the vast majority of overdose deaths.

Faced with numbers like that, policymakers want to take action to break the supply chain.

Arrest traffickers. Seize shipments. Capture or kill cartel leaders.

But supply side enforcement has its limits.

Remove one leader and another replaces him. Shut down one trafficking route and another opens. Short of a complete surveillance state, you won’t stamp out the drug trade in the continent-spanning nation that is the United States.

This is why, even though I still heed my dad’s warning to this day and I believe that drug use is an unholy desecration of your sacred body, I’ve come to believe that we really should just legalize it all.

Bootleggers and Baptists

The 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which came into effect in 1920, was our first nation-wide experiment with drug prohibition. Constitutional amendments require mind-boggling supermajorities of support at multiple levels of government, so it’s safe to assume that banning alcohol was fairly popular at the time.

And yet today, you’d be hard-pressed to find an American who looks back fondly on Prohibition. As we all know, alcohol became federally legal once again with the 21st Amendment, ratified in 1933. So what happened?

During Prohibition, the demand for alcohol didn’t disappear. With legitimate supply chains drying up (pun intended), a massive black market emerged to fill the void.

Bootlegging became one of the most profitable businesses in the country. Figures like Al Capone built criminal empires supplying alcohol to millions of Americans who still wanted to drink.

The economist Bruce Yandle has described this dynamic with one of my favorite economic concepts: Bootleggers and Baptists.

The Bootleggers stood to benefit from the restricted supply created by prohibition.

The Baptists were the moral reformers who supported prohibition out of a sincere belief that drinking was sinful.

And so this accidental coalition formed between the Bootleggers and the Baptists, where they both got what they wanted and the rest of us got it good and hard.

The Baptists weren’t entirely wrong: alcohol is deeply destructive. I have members of my family who have destroyed their lives with it. However, the criminal side effects of bootlegging weren’t worth the payoff and eventually the political system was forced to reverse course.

Once alcohol returned to legal markets, organized crime lost one of its most lucrative industries.

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Prohibition, Decriminalization, and Legalization

By definition, drug prohibition turns every dealer into a criminal. Does that necessarily mean that they’ll turn to violence?

Violence isn’t inherently a part of drug manufacturing, transportation, or sale. However, if drugs are illegal, then the market operates outside of the institutions that keep legal markets safe, trustworthy, and competitive.

If you’re involved in the illicit drug trade, you can’t turn to the courts to resolve disputes. You can’t turn to the police to deal with theft if what was stolen is itself illegal. You’re already committing crimes, so why not use a little intimidation here and there to get your way?

When you operate outside of the law, violence, threats, and coercion are now all on the table. “Might makes right” becomes the only law of the land.

Another institution you don’t have access to in a black market is the financial system. You don’t have insurance companies, banks, and investors breathing down your neck making sure that you don’t take on excessive risk.

Your insurance company wouldn’t want you selling drugs to kids, causing deaths, and then getting sued out of existence by their families. As imperfect as the system is, that’s generally what happens when legal pharmaceutical companies misbehave.

This is America and we like to sue each other. Legal legitimacy is what makes that possible.

One popular proposal among drug policy reformers is “decriminalization.” Oregon went down that path in 2021 and the streets of Portland only got worse.

They’ve since repealed their sweeping decriminalization law, but the Portland disaster likely set back the cause of pro-legalization people like myself by decades. So why did it go so wrong?

One thing to note is that the wave of fentanyl deaths that peaked in 2023 had started back in 2016 and really took off in 2019. The 2021 decriminalization law came right in the middle of a massive spike in deaths but didn’t necessarily cause the devastation.

What the law did do was take away police officers’ legal grounds to deal with disorderly drug addicts, often shooting up in public around kids. That’s obviously unacceptable and insane. You won’t hear any excuses from me on that point.

The fundamental flaw of decriminalization is that all of the problems with prohibition I laid out above are just as bad whether or not drug possession for personal use is legal. The product is just as dangerous, the dealers are just as violent, and the cartels get just as rich.

Only legalization can solve these problems. Nobody wants to deal with criminals when they can buy a product legitimately. The cartels would not be long for this world.

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Anti-Drug, Pro-Legalization

If you’ve made it this far and you’re still with me, you’re probably in a tiny minority.

If you usually like my point of view but think I’m off the reservation on this issue, I understand.

I’m with you in spirit. I don’t want our kids to use this poison. I don’t want families ripped apart by addiction.

But the reality is that the only durable solutions to drug abuse are individual willpower, family support, and healthier social norms. We as parents have to set better examples ourselves and guide our kids toward healthy habits, especially around drugs and alcohol.

On a brighter note, according to CDC data, the numbers have started to improve along several dimensions. Since the peak in 2022-2023, total drug overdose deaths have fallen rapidly.

This trend predated President Trump’s return to office and crackdown on drug trafficking, so it’s not about ramped-up law enforcement.

It’s also important to remember that we still tolerate alcohol, and that kills a heck of a lot of people. In 2024, there were over 45,000 alcohol-induced deaths, compared to about 80,000 drug overdose deaths.

But even there, since the peak following the lockdown madness of COVID, we’ve seen a steady decline in alcohol deaths.

A silver lining of the lockdowns appears to have been that they disrupted teens’ access to drugs just long enough to reset social norms around substance use. The Monitoring the Future survey has found that alcohol, drug, and nicotine use among high schoolers still hovers around the generational low reached in 2021.

One last thing I need to mention: if you’re a parent, and if you catch your kid with something, it’s because they’ve gotten lazy and sloppy. That means they’re further down the road than you think.

We have to be vigilant as parents, no matter what laws are on the books. I’m anti-helicopter-parenting on almost everything else, but I am all for it on this issue.

Watch them like a hawk.

And maybe share my dad’s wisdom:

1. Don’t do drugs.

2. Don’t get AIDS.

3. Don’t get anyone pregnant.

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Follow Mia Hughes on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/_CryMiaRiver?s=20

Read “The WPATH Files”: https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/wpath-files

Outline:

[0:00] The JK Rowling backlash woke Mia up

[11:05] The trans issue isn’t just a fringe culture war issue

[21:19] Does trans identity have any historical basis?

[28:46] Why trans activists deny “autogynophilia”

[39:08] The “vibe shift” doesn’t mean trans madness is over

[42:24] John Money and the origins of gender ideology

[50:44] How gender identify became a civil rights category

[1:01:57] Why did gay people support trans activism?

[1:10:02] Normal puberty distress is twisted into “gender dysphoria”

[1:20:01] “Gender-affirming care” is full of ethical contradictions

[1:30:54] Doctors are emotionally blackmailing parents

[1:38:36] What is WPATH?

[1:46:10] Are randomized controlled trials possible in gender medicine?

[1:57:14] How WPATH captured the whole medical establishment

[2:09:35] We need a new Nuremberg trial

[2:15:27] The role of severe mental illness in gender transition

[2:26:25] Doctors know that kids can’t consent to transition

[2:38:21] Why it’s impossible to hold anyone accountable

[2:43:06] Is the whole field of psychology basically a scam?

[2:48:26] Canada hasn’t backed down from trans madness

[2:57:07] Why can’t the left let go of transgender politics?

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