• Representation and Inclusion Standards - Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

• ‘The Iliad & The Odyssey’ Deluxe Edition Soars to Top of Bestseller Lists Ahead of Christopher Nolan Adaptation - Variety

• Lupita Nyong’o Is ‘Honored’ to Be Your Helen of Troy - Elle

• Not Greek to them. Scholars question Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey' - ABC News

• Some Principles - Emily Wilson

• The Odyssey - University of Chicago Press

• Odyssey: Hanging of the Maids - Translation Station

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We get into:

• How the founders’ religious beliefs shaped the Revolution

• The paradox of freedom and faith

• Why the French Revolution ended in a bloodbath and ours didn’t

• The true role of slavery in the Declaration of Independence

• Why British elites despised the American colonists

• The role of populism in American history

• What it means to be an American, and how Mamdani fits into that picture

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Follow Eric Metaxas on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/ericmetaxas?s=20

Watch The Eric Metaxas Show on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/ericmetaxas

Order a copy of Eric’s new book, “Revolution”: https://a.co/d/02AgUEHo

Outline:

[0:00] Why is the U.S. the greatest nation in history?

[4:12] You can’t have liberty without Christian faith

[14:35] When did our culture take a wrong turn?

[18:57] We’re vulnerable to the enemies of liberty

[25:09] Can a theocracy be truly Christian?

[32:14] How religious liberty emerged in America

[35:34] Were the Founding Fathers hypocrites about slavery?

[40:21] British elites despised the Americans

[46:13] Healthy populism vs mob rule

[52:29] How popular was the American Revolution?

[57:46] What does it mean to be an American?

[1:02:43] Is Mamdani really an American?

[1:06:21] The collapse of American pride

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Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/U4IH041x7VE

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John Adams understood exactly what the Revolution was trading away when it abolished that arrangement. “Our Constitution,” he wrote, “was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Hierarchy backed up by force may not be desirable, but it’s stable. A republic of free citizens requires both engagement and restraint to survive. This means that citizenship isn’t just a legal status. It’s an ongoing practice. Whether native-born or immigrant, merely holding a U.S. passport isn’t what keeps this thing going.

But here’s the problem: national pride is at a historic low point, with only 53% of U.S. adults saying they are very or extremely proud to be an American. Along with that inevitably comes widespread disengagement from the American project.

Civic disengagement isn’t a character flaw. Nobody is born knowing what a republic requires of them. If we aren’t taught, few of us will arrive at the right answers on our own. A country that stops explaining what citizenship is for will produce citizens who hold the title and none of the substance, not because they’re bad people, but because the responsibility was never asked of them in the first place.

A distracted, under-formed citizenry is a problem, but it isn’t a crisis until someone decides to exploit it. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what’s happening.

NYC Democratic Socialists of America co-chair Gustavo Gordillo was recently interviewed on Fox News, and when asked whether the DSA supports abolishing the Senate, here’s what he said: “We think that the Senate should be reformed, that we should have a more democratic government system, but that’s a long-term change that we’re seeking, and in the short-term, we’re focused on issues like affordability.”

His answer was vague to the point of saying almost nothing, but it was also a lie. Just look at the DSA platform posted on their website. They say in no uncertain terms that they want to abolish the Senate. While frustrating, his non-answer on Fox was an effective, time-tested PR tactic.

Most Americans are frustrated with how the Senate operates, or fails to. Whether it’s D.C. statehood or the SAVE Act, everyone has a pet issue that’s died in the Senate. Likewise, on the “affordability” point, no one likes unaffordability. So his answer boils down to “I like good things and dislike bad things,” while signalling moderation by separating out short- and long-term priorities.

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This is the rhetoric that’s winning over previously disengaged young voters. It’s the playbook that Zohran Mamdani successfully ran to victory last fall. But behind the more tame messaging tailored for a Fox News appearance, there’s the reality of the DSA.

The rhetorical leap from affordability and procedural reform to literal communism may be jarring, but it’s the same people. Their rising popularity is exactly what we should expect when young voters, disengaged from civic life, settle into adulthood, face real problems, and then grasp for the closest “solution.” The DSA was ready and waiting to scoop them up into their ranks.

One of the godfathers of the DSA left, former domestic terrorist and professor of education Bill Ayers, understood this model of “community organizing” quite well. As he put it, “There’s power in the classroom, the college, the neighborhood, the workplace, the factory. And frankly, that’s the only power we have access to.” He’s outlining a twisted version of civic engagement. In his view, the actual levers of power and government institutions are out of reach of “the people,” but at the same time, he isn’t advocating passive disengagement. As a younger man, his preferred form of activism involved bombs. Today, he’s a bit more vague on what methods are best.

The flip from politics to revolution is the real danger of disengagement. The longer citizens disengage, the more the social fabric breaks down, so the more they disengage. Others eventually reengage, this time with hostility towards our constitutional republic. Not everyone gets swept up in the revolution, but few are left knowing how to fight back.

The founders bet the whole experiment on the idea that a republic can survive only as long as its citizens stay formed enough to run it. No constitutional clause can guarantee that will continue automatically, forever, at 250 years and beyond. That was always the part we had to keep doing ourselves.

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• New York becomes first U.S. state to impose AI data center ban - CNBC

• The AI Backlash Has Tech Executives Fearing for Their Lives - Wall Street Journal

• AI Data Centers: Big Tech's Impact on Electric Bills, Water, and More - Consumer Reports

• Americans Oppose AI Data Centers in Their Area - Gallup

• Electricity Data Browser - U.S. Energy Information Administration

• Marginal Revolution

• Mapped: Electricity Prices Across America - Visual Capitalist

• Who Were The Luddites? And Why Did They Hate Technology? - Well, I Never

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We get into:

• The historical context of Karl Marx’s writings

• Why surplus value theory made intuitive sense and why it’s wrong

• How the iPhone launch disproves Marx’s labor theory of value

• The unlikely story of how Lenin and the Bolsheviks took over Russia

• Stalin, Trotsky, and the “real communism was never tried” folks

• How Soviet propaganda helped resurrect Marx in the West

• Why Marx is read in every academic field… except economics

• How to minimize cost and Marxist indoctrination in college

Follow Phil Magness on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/PhilWMagness?s=20

Learn more about Phil’s work: https://philmagness.com/

Outline:

[0:00] The “best” of Karl Marx

[11:21] What was Marx’s actual vision?

[15:24] Socialism Before Marx

[24:50] Is “capitalism” a slur?

[28:54] What’s the moral argument for land ownership?

[35:23] Labor theory vs subjective value

[46:07] Why Marx was left behind

[52:53] Marx’s math doesn’t work

[1:01:10] Why did the Bolsheviks pick up Marx?

[1:09:49] How Lenin conquerors Russia

[1:20:29] Was Lenin “not as bad” as Stalin?

[1:23:30] What did Lenin actually think?

[1:27:41] “Real communism has never been tried”

[1:30:24] Why academia loves Marx

[1:49:16] Does socialism have anything to offer?

[1:56:28] Is Marxism a religion?

[2:09:38] Modern Marxism is just woke mad libs

[2:13:41] “Cracks in the Ivory Tower”

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

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

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The illustrations featured a young girl saying things like, “My dad did it [grew a beard] and he was a girl.” One image showed her asking, “How long did you have breasts for, Dad?” Another showed her looking at photographs of her parent pre-transition, trying to reconcile two entirely different realities.

What struck me was not just the rejection of biological reality, but whose emotions mattered. The child’s confusion was treated as something to overcome, while the adult’s identity was treated as something to affirm. The emotional burden rested squarely on the child. Rather than helping the child process an understandably confusing situation, the message was essentially, “This isn’t complicated. Accept it.” The child’s role was to manage the adult’s emotional needs. That is emotional role reversal, not compassion.

We rightfully worry about the harms of transitioning children. We know that it’s harmful to tell a child they were born wrong, to promote the falsehood that a person can change sex, and to lead vulnerable young people down a path of irreversible medicalization. However, trans-identified adults who expect children to affirm their identities cause harm in an entirely different way.

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You could argue that this, in fact, is the core problem of modern gender ideology. The movement places extraordinary emphasis on external validation. Pronouns, titles, appearance, and social affirmation are coerced, with children cast as supporting actors in a whimsical performance of an adult’s fake identity.

Perhaps you have already inoculated your child against the idea that he or she was “born in the wrong body.” Even so, it can be hard to shield children from narcissistic adults who expect them to participate in an identity the child can neither understand nor question.

To me, one of the most unsettling dynamics is when children in captive environments, like classrooms, family gatherings, churches, or community groups, are used to validate an adult’s sense of self. These situations invert the healthy adult-child relationship. Suddenly, it’s the child’s responsibility to manage the adult’s emotions.

The child is no longer free to simply be a child. Instead, he or she becomes a vessel for an adult’s emotional validation. Children should never be expected to carry the emotional burden of making adults feel secure about themselves. Developmentally, children do not understand abstract concepts like gender identity. They understand what they see. When adults insist they deny obvious reality in order to protect someone else’s feelings, children are left confused, demoralized, and emotionally destabilized.

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As troubling as this is, it becomes even darker when you consider what these interactions teach children. From an early age, children are told to “be kind” and “be inclusive.” Applied correctly, those are admirable values. But when those slogans are twisted to encourage children to ignore reality and suppress their own discomfort, they take on an entirely different meaning. The message becomes: ignore your instincts, ignore your questions, and protect the adult’s feelings at all costs. Rewarding children for denying what they plainly observe is a dangerous lesson to teach.

Children need to learn appropriate empathy, but not at the expense of trusting their own perceptions. Teaching them to suppress discomfort in order to satisfy adults leaves them more vulnerable to manipulation. Children who learn that good kids ignore their instincts are children who may struggle to recognize unhealthy situations later in life.

Children deserve adults who provide stability, guidance, and protection, not adults who depend on children for emotional reassurance. Father’s Day should be about honoring fathers and the unique role they play in their children’s lives. Instead, one of America’s most influential newspapers chose to celebrate an ideology that blurs and even inverts those roles.

Teach your children kindness. Teach them compassion. But also teach them that genuine kindness never requires that they deny reality, suppress their own perceptions, or carry emotional burdens that belong to adults. That is a weight no child should ever be asked to bear.

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• Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn at Obama Center Opening - Axios

• American pride is no longer exceptional - Nate Silver on X (Twitter)

• Highest positive view of the U.S. - Stats Globe on X (Twitter)

• As socialism rises in popularity, GOP turns to a new attack: 'Communists' - Washington Post

• Centrist Democrats launch new pledge: ‘We are capitalist, not socialist’ - Washington Post

• Naturalization Oath of Allegiance to the United States of America - USCIS

• Chapter 3 - Immigrant Membership in Totalitarian Party - USCIS

• Amdt14.S1.1.2 Citizenship Clause Doctrine - Constitution Annotated

• Our Constitution Was Made Only for a Moral and Religious People - Hillsdale College

• My son is not a firang, we are desi: Mira Nair - Hindustan Times

• Mayor Mamdani’s map of NYC immigrant neighborhoods sparks outrage for ignoring Little Italy - New York Post

• A Working-Class Party Without Many Workers - New York Times

• DSA Member Survey Report 2021 - DSA Growth and Development Committee

• Democratic socialist Melat Kiros defeats longtime House incumbent in Colorado primary - PBS News

• 'Commie cadet' who wore Che Guevara T-shirt kicked out of US army - The Guardian

• The Promise To America Pledge

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We get into:

• How Phil caught a fabricated claim about Excel and plantations

• How the “new historians of capitalism” rewrote economic history

• Why Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, disproves the 1619 narrative

• Why libertarians and marxists united against the 1619 Project

• How Phil caught the Times quietly deleting its own claims

• The real story the Declaration of Independence tells about slavery

• How Britain and the US ended the slave trade

• The claim that slavery was the main driver of American wealth

Follow Phil Magness on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/PhilWMagness?s=20

Learn more about Phil’s work: https://philmagness.com/

Order a copy of “The 1619 Project Myth”: https://a.co/d/0itYMiLl

Outline:

[0:00] What is the 1619 Project?

[6:23] Was capitalism built on slavery?

[17:03] Southern culture was anti-capitalist

[23:02] Adam Smith on mercantilism and slavery

[33:04] How did the NYT get this so wrong?

[37:44] Was the revolution fought to preserve slavery?

[44:00] What did Jefferson think about slavery?

[49:26] The NYT refused to correct the record

[56:03] How slavery began to be abolished

[1:05:41] Slavery isn’t an American institution

[1:12:04] They hate capitalism more than racism

[1:20:02] Phil’s Twitter battle with Nikole Hannah-Jones

[1:31:48] The economics of slavery

[1:38:32] How should we teach about slavery?

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/ycJNLJ7bhKw

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/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Short is the bit that hit me the hardest. For documents that created the most powerful nation in human history, they are almost comically brief. But that brevity is the secret. The more complex a society, the simpler you want its foundational law to be. Complexity on top of complexity is an invitation for arbitrary rule under the facade of legalese.

Even with our straightforward constitution, we still face the problem of legal bloat, though not nearly as badly as the European Union with its tangled mess of committees, commissions, and councils. But despite our modern regulatory state, it wasn’t always this way.

Our founding documents are referenced by every political faction when convenient, even as we’ve strayed from the founders’ vision. The Declaration and the Constitution shouldn’t be treated as relics of the past, selectively quoted to dress up modern political rhetoric. These two documents track the path from abstract ideas to real-world implementation, and you cannot fully understand either one without the other.

We Are Not a Democracy

My grandfather Gino Papola used to tell me all the time, “We’re not a democracy, we’re a constitutional republic.” With the rise of “democratic” socialism on the left and various flavors of populism on the right, this distinction matters more now than at any other point in my lifetime.

We have a written constitution that binds and restricts “our democracy,” securing the liberties and stability necessary to maintain rule of, by, and for the people for generations to come.

When people invoke “our democracy,” they usually mean one of two very different things, and neither reflects the values of the founding. The first is the institutional technocracy established under Woodrow Wilson and radically expanded under FDR and LBJ. This definition of democracy is perhaps a contradiction in terms, but it’s clear what’s actually being said. It’s “the people I like wielding power over the ignorant masses.”

The second definition is more honest. The populist notion of “our democracy” is that the majority should get what the majority wants. Every four years, progressives will trot out polls claiming that Medicare For All has supermajority support across party lines. And yet, when the polling questions focus in on the details of single-payer healthcare, you get the opposite result. So which is it? Which policy outcome reflects “our democracy”? That’s a problem.

Wilsonian “democracy” assumes that the people know nothing and the experts know everything. Populist “democracy” assumes the opposite. The founders knew that both were wrong.

A system where 50.001% of voters get to do whatever they want is not what the founders had in mind. They were terrified of majority rule. They had read the Greeks and the Romans. They knew that majorities can be a little crazy and that mobs can be as tyrannical as kings.

They also knew that distant, centralized governments are prone to both abuse and neglect, so they struck a balance, building friction into the democratic process while taking certain ideas off the table entirely.

The best example of this is the Congress as originally designed. The lower chamber, the House of Representatives, was built to serve our populist instincts. The upper chamber, the Senate, was built as a check on that populism, spreading out power equally among the states rather than by population. While that much is still true, the 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, seriously undermined the Senate’s core function.

For over 120 years, senators were elected by state legislatures. This provided some buffer between them and the messy business of horse race politics. The deliberative nature of the Senate made it well-suited to separate the wheat from the chaff coming out of the House of Representatives. But, except for a few specific powers, it couldn’t act on its own. Both the rebellious teens and the adults in the room had to come to an understanding.

Today, senators are popularly elected, just like representatives. Although they have the advantage of six years between elections rather than two, they’re still subject to the volatile preferences of voters.

If you couldn’t tell already, I’m not the biggest fan of the 17th Amendment. Another one I don’t love, the 16th Amendment, was also ratified in 1913, creating the constitutional basis for the income tax. The amendment process is itself a key example of how the founders tempered the democratic process. Amendments must first be approved by two thirds of both houses of Congress, or by a constitutional convention, and then ratified by three quarters of the states.

So apparently, supermajorities of Americans supported those amendments in 1913, however much I may hate that fact. I think if they could see today’s tax rates, they might change their minds.

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A Creed, Not Just a Complaint

The Constitution is the law. The Declaration of Independence is the soul behind it. One of the most important things to understand is that it wasn’t just a list of grievances against the king, though it contains plenty. It was a moral argument addressed to the world.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Bold is not a strong enough word for what that was in 1776. Most of the planet was still governed by monarchy. The idea that every human being possessed rights by nature, not granted by kings or governments but inherent to their humanity, was genuinely radical. The way of the world, for all of human history before this, was slavery, subjugation, the divine right of kings, and might makes right. What Thomas Jefferson was asserting was the exception.

That is what American exceptionalism actually means. Not that we’re superior people. Not that we’re always right. But that our founding, objectively and historically, was the exception to the rule.

Most revolutions fail. The French Revolution is how these things typically go: utopian dreams cashed out in barbaric despotism. Instead, we moved, imperfectly and at great cost, toward a more perfect union. That is exceptional, and we shouldn’t let anyone take it from us.

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What We Have to Do as Parents

Here’s where I’ll land the plane, since it’s the whole point of Dad Saves America:

Civics education has been thrown to the wayside in this country. When you go out and ask people basic questions about how our government is structured, you find out fast how bad it’s gotten.

That gap is on us as parents to fill, because the schools and the broader culture aren’t cutting it. The version that does come through those channels usually frames these documents first and foremost as records of hypocrisy rather than the revolutionary moral achievements they actually were.

Yes, Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal while holding slaves. That tension is real and worth teaching honestly. But so is the fact that just 85 years later, this country fought a bloody civil war to close that gap, and that Lincoln, Douglass, and King all reached back to this same document as the foundation for a fully free society. Our kids need both halves of that story, not just cynical criticism.

I also want to push on something that I think even civics-minded conservatives get wrong. The notion that we are simply a creedal nation, that we can teach our founding ideals as abstractions, and that the creed will sustain itself, does not work. Ideas do not survive in people who have no experiential frame to receive them.

Think about what it meant, practically, to declare independence. To throw off an outside authority and bear the weight of self-governance in the real, physical world. The founders weren’t just writing philosophy. They were living it.

Our job is to help our kids live it too. A generation that has never felt genuine independence cannot fully understand why independence is worth protecting. The abstractions stay abstract. And then we wonder why they vote away the very life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness that this country was founded to secure.

Our comfortable, on-demand world has systematically removed the experiences of real independence that used to be typical of childhood. The experiences of being bored, taking risks, and earning something tangible through your individual efforts are the soil in which the ideas of the Declaration can take root.

That’s what “saving America” will actually look like.

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• Declaration of Independence - National Archives

• Pocket Declaration of Independence and Constitution - Heritage Foundation

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We get into:

• Why he left Harvard and joined the Hamilton School in Florida

• How fear of student backlash silences even tenured professors

• What happened to Harvard’s commitment to Western civilization

• Why teaching “global history” misses the point of education

• The link between Christianity, liberalism, and capitalism

• The classical education movement as antidote to institutional rot

• Why America needs to reclaim its Western heritage

Ready to give MASA a try? Get 25% off your first order by going to https://www.masachips.com/dad and using code DAD.

Follow James Hankins on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/JamesWHankins1?s=20

Read James’s Harvard resignation article: https://www.compactmag.com/article/why-im-leaving-harvard/

Order a copy of “The Golden Thread”: https://a.co/d/06ypgCWv

Check out James on Substack: https://substack.com/@goldenthread

Outline:

[0:00] Why he left Harvard after 40 years

[7:51] The decline of elite higher education

[18:12] The big lie about Western Civilization

[25:27] Global history vs. narrative history

[42:04] Does history help us predict the future?

[49:45] What is Western Civilization?

[1:01:23] Islamic conquest and the Dark Ages

[1:05:20] The origins of liberalism

[1:19:07] How did the Church enforce canon law?

[1:24:42] The evolution of usury laws

[1:33:19] America’s role in Western Civilization

[1:39:45] The French Revolution’s societal self-hatred

[1:47:30] The Radicalism of the American Revolution

[1:54:04] Do Catholics belong in America?

[2:01:20] Is the “Protestant work ethic” real?

[2:07:32] What to prioritize when educating 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/B9itx1ljE5E

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/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

In recent years, New Jersey has been nicknamed the “Warehouse State” for its rapidly expanding warehouse industry. The question no one seems to be asking is: who’s actually working in all these warehouses?

Years ago, I worked as an IT manager for a company that was directly involved in this industry throughout the state.

I would occasionally visit the warehouses of bigger clients and saw firsthand how illegal immigrant labor had become a core part of the workforce for even the largest corporations. If I were to name names, you’d recognize every single company and be shocked. The people picking and packing your goods in America aren’t Americans.

Even without the inside knowledge I had from co-workers, anyone with an ounce of common sense could recognize that the people working in these warehouses and factories were illegal immigrants.

For one, the language barrier was obvious. Most of them only spoke Spanish, and the agencies supplying workers to the warehouses knew this: every one of their employees had to be bilingual.

The companies that contracted with the workers would sometimes organize daily travel vans to get them to and from work because they couldn’t drive and the jobs were far from public transport.

Everyone worked as a day laborer earning minimum wage. This system provided plausible deniability to all sides, operating with the appearance of legality while in reality engaging in a massive illegal labor scam. How did this happen?

These agencies would go into highly populated Hispanic neighborhoods, market jobs that were less favorable for the lowest legal wages, and only verify legal status if their client demanded it (shocker, most didn’t). Even then, they weren’t verifying whether or not the licenses workers provided were valid. They just needed to check off a box stating that they’d seen something that looked close enough.

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Over the years I worked there, I saw only a handful of black people in any of these warehouses and maybe one white guy. They technically didn’t discriminate based on race in who they hired, but they did do everything possible to cater to the illegal Hispanic market and abandon the American worker.

These were jobs that years ago would have been a stepping stone for someone to find gainful employment and eventually progress into management roles within the company. But instead, they’ve commodified these jobs into day labor contracts while turning a blind eye to all legalities, since they’ve offloaded that responsibility to a third-party recruiter.

The great lie is that Americans won’t do these jobs. They would do these jobs if they were competing in a fair labor market where everyone plays by the same rules. But when Americans have to compete against illegal immigrants for the same jobs, we always lose.

The situation isn’t getting any better. New Jersey continues to be dominated by the very Democratic politicians who have allowed this problem to grow substantially over the quarter century I’ve lived here. Illegal labor is hidden in plain sight in my state, but Democrats treat it as a point of pride. To them, it’s charity for the less fortunate seeking refuge in our country, rather than the betrayal of American citizens. Phil Murphy, our previous governor, even bragged publicly about harboring an illegal immigrant in his home.

The system that facilitates and profits from illegal immigration isn’t a great deal for the illegal immigrants either. Their immigration status forces them to live and work in the shadows of society. Some are handcuffed with cartel debts for years on end at the threat of violence against themselves or their families.

Meanwhile, working-class Americans looking for opportunities are shut out as a consequence of weak immigration enforcement and corporate greed.

The sad reality is, this state doesn’t care about either the illegal immigrant or the American worker.

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• The Constitution of the United States - National Archives

• The Bill of Rights - National Archives

• Pocket Constitution - The Heritage Foundation

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We get into:

• Why Jack launched a podcast to read American history from the very beginning

• How the New York Times weaponized the 1619 Project to reshape history education

• How Spain’s conquest of the New World set the stage for English colonization

• Why the Puritans and the Virginia planters built two completely different Americas

• How the Dutch built the most important city in history trading beaver fur and guns

• What the arrival of Africans at Jamestown in 1619 actually tells us about the origins of slavery

• Why conflicts broke out between Native Americans and European settlers

• What the great men of history can teach us about our own blind spots

Follow Jack Henneman on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2?s=20

“The History of the Americans” podcast: https://thehistoryoftheamericans.com/

Read Jack’s writings on Substack: https://jackhenneman.substack.com/

Outline:

[0:00] The History of the Americans podcast

[4:11] The fundamental flaw of the 1619 Project

[15:59] Spanish settlement of America

[30:41] The rise of English America

[34:45] Why New England Puritans were so successful

[44:41] The aristocratic culture of the South

[49:55] How slavery became the norm in the South

[55:56] What was Bacon’s Rebellion?

[1:00:58] The Native Americans of New England

[1:08:10] Where did Thanksgiving actually come from?

[1:16:03] The 400-year decline of Native Americans

[1:20:47] Dutch settlement of New York

[1:30:09] John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill”

[1:34:47] Why Pennsylvania was Quaker

[1:46:16] The Catholic colony of Maryland

[1:49:17] Why slavery became more violent

[1:56:14] How to read history as an amateur

[2:08:37] What’s the point of studying history?

[2:15:56] Ideas, ideology, and identity

[2:21:12] What is an “American”?

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The study worked like this. Participants were shown a photo of a scantily clad woman posed provocatively and then were asked to score her on a one to ten scale for intelligence and morality. The same exercise was repeated with a photo of a woman dressed in professional business attire. The first photo produced slightly lower scores across the board. Conclusion: objectification causes dehumanization.

Before we even address what “objectification” means, there’s something worth sitting with about the study design itself. Participants are shown a single photo of a stranger and asked to make judgments about how intelligent or moral she is. They have no other information. They probably wouldn’t consciously ask themselves these questions if they simply encountered her in real life. But they’re being prompted to answer, with these photos as the only available signal.

A perfectly non-judgmental person should give anyone they’re shown the same score or refuse the task altogether, but I have yet to meet that person. More likely, someone who wants to appear non-judgmental and is willing to lie would score the women equally. A normal, honest person would look at the two photos, understand that these are likely two very different kinds of people, and then judge accordingly.

The researchers compared scores and declared the gap a moral failing of the participants. You were asked to judge. You judged. How dare you.

So what do these results actually show? That people generally consider modesty good and promiscuity bad. Not that being modest means you’re good, or that promiscuity means you’re bad, but that all else being equal, one is a positive trait and the other is a negative. In other words, the sexual morality of any moderately traditional culture.

Of course the woman in business attire scores higher. Without any additional information, what other inference is available? Sure, it’s a judgment. In a real-world scenario it might even be an unfair judgement. But judgment and dehumanization are not the same thing, and the study never earns the right to conflate them.

Here’s where it gets better. Wilfred checked the footnotes and found that almost 80% of the participants were… women. To be specific, it was 46 women and 14 men.

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Whether or not the researchers themselves would admit this, everyone knows who’s being criticized when people rail against “objectification.” A related phrase, “the male gaze,” gives away the game. Whenever those terms come up, the conversation is usually focused on how men are too beholden to their animal instincts, men haven’t been sufficiently trained out of those instincts, and therefore men are bad. The first two points may have some merit, but the overall attitude is just about the definition of “dehumanization.” It’s just targeting men, not women.

Modern progressives often present themselves as maximally non-judgmental, treating any negative assessment of a person’s behavior or lifestyle as a form of oppression. They insist that people cannot be held responsible for their behavior because they are fundamentally shaped by forces beyond their control. If their basic assumptions were correct, you could call that compassion. But if you believe, like I do, that people have individual autonomy over their choices and actions, then the progressive perspective is itself dehumanizing. Noticing a pattern?

What’s interesting is who ends up being the truly judgmental party in all of this. The researchers presented the subjects of these photos as passive objects to be evaluated, asked participants one-dimensional questions about them, and then condemned the values implied by their answers. They aren’t condemning judgment itself. They’re specifically condemning judgments made by average people with conventional opinions.

This is the logic of Herbert Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance,” the idea that the only thing a society shouldn’t tolerate is intolerance itself. It also resembles the logic of George W. Bush’s claim that he “abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.” Neither of these comparisons are compliments.

Maybe non-judgmentalism isn’t built on airtight logic, but does it at least have the desired outcome of an overall less judgmental world? Well, the last 15 years of woke non-judgmentalism has seemed to me like the most judgmental era in living memory. You can argue whether “cancel culture” was justified, but you can’t argue that it wasn’t judgmental.

So what happens when it’s no longer acceptable to publicly judge behaviors that trigger the judgmental instinct in most people? And what happens when you combine that with the internet’s near infinite potential for niche subcultures? Things. Get. Weird.

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Wilfred laid out how, in generations past, if you told your buddy about a peculiar interest you had, you’d be told in no uncertain terms to keep that to yourself. Today, however, anyone who has some strange fleeting impulse can immediately go to the internet and indulge it, often discovering whole communities of people who’ve had the same impulse and have gone down the rabbithole. This dynamic helps explain everything from transgenderism to eating disorders and fringe politics of all sorts.

These problems couldn’t spread far and wide without the internet, but non-judgmentalism prevents us from fighting back. If you cannot judge behavior, you cannot correct it. If you cannot correct it, the fringe grows. And if you spend enough time in spaces where the sum total of the fringes has become the majority, you start to wonder whether you’re the weird one.

As Wilfred described the objectification study, “the entire thing is garbage.” Unfortunately, the social scientists that produce this kind of work have serious sway in our culture, especially in education. Their worldview does real damage, providing legitimacy to the childish idea that the highest good is to never make anyone feel bad about what they do (unless, of course, they have the wrong opinions).

The solution is not complicated. Stop pathologizing normal human instincts. Start holding people accountable for their choices. And if you’re feeling the pressure to withhold judgment even though you know something’s wrong, don’t give in.

That would do more good than a thousand objectification studies.

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We get into:

• Why federalism was the Founding Fathers’ most important contribution to governance

• Whether Mamdani’s New York will teach Americans the pitfalls of socialism

• The truth about political polarization and geographic sorting

• How federal agencies regulate your life without a single vote or legal basis

• Why we should shrink school districts back to the neighborhood level

• How revolution vs status quo is replacing left vs right

• The libertarian blindspot for community and interdependence

• What happens to a father when he can’t protect his child

• The moment that changed how Tony raises his son

• How the Orthodox Church helped Tony put his life back together

• What makes the Constitution work, and where things break down

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Outline:

[0:00] Why the American creed works

[5:33] Does Mamdani have a place in America?

[17:37] Are Americans really that divided?

[31:26] What do left and right mean in 2026?

[46:00] What is the State Policy Network?

[58:38] The real political fight is local

[1:12:38] Why did Democrats abandon the police?

[1:21:31] Boys and young men need to hear this

[1:28:23] The turmoil of losing a child

[1:40:37] Freedom, pain, and faith

[1:47:52] Protecting kids through divorce

[1:55:58] Why join the Orthodox church?

[2:06:28] Liberty is a tool, not the goal

[2:14:56] Is history cyclical or cumulative?

[2:19:44] How did Christianity spread worldwide?

[2:31:51] Is there hope for America’s future?

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Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/fYR31dCFVEM

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Most people readily recognize the problems with explicit sexual content taught in classrooms or the medicalization of children. However, many of those same people view playing along with “preferred pronouns” as innocuous, failing to recognize that it serves as an entry point into a destructive ideology.

Telling young children that they can use any pronoun they want for themselves, and demand others to do the same, is a dangerous road to go down. As a seasoned mental health professional, let me explain why:

Choosing pronouns is an initiation ritual into an ideology that encourages dangerous and irreversible medical interventions.

If a child is praised for identifying as a different gender and going by a different pronoun or name from an early age, it’s more difficult to reverse course as the child gets older and deeper into the ideology. The stakes get higher.

Alternative pronouns teach children to reject who they are and seek attention for being something they aren’t.

This is a harmful message to all young people during an impressionable time while they are forming their sense of self. It’s also the exact opposite of what traditional feminists have been trying to teach little girls for decades, to love and embrace themselves as girls.

Insisting on alternative pronouns is the first step in dividing children from their families.

Families who don’t agree, or who simply have questions, often get torn apart over this ideology. When children are divided from their most important support system, their family, they end up instead aligned with outside adults, including teachers and therapists who can never care about them in the same way.

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Even families who initially agree with the premise of different gender identities later learn that their children are being groomed to view their own family as an enemy.

On the Substack , a mom published an essay titled “How it Started, How Gender Ideology has Ruined our Right to a Family Life.” She wrote, “Don’t get me wrong, it started off fun and interesting. Pride marches, badges, posters, music, and flags. So many flags! … Then the lockdown happened. I started intensely researching and I, a lifelong, radical, alternative woman and feminist did not like what I was learning. … I am not denying anyone’s existence, we are still loving supportive parents, but I regret not realizing sooner what was going on. … It became clear, despite all the support and information and discussions, that things were not improving, and we compromised and permitted them to use their new names at school.”

Changing pronouns prevents children from forming authentic social connections.

The pronoun issue also contributes to social anxiety. With peers frequently changing identities, children are pressured to join in and end up feeling locked into an impulsive choice. If they are pretending to be something they aren’t just to fit in or get attention, children cannot form healthy relationships. Pronoun policing then further increases the social pressure and sense of division.

Unchecked self-identification legitimizes the idea that anyone can enter private, vulnerable spaces.

At best, allowing people to arbitrarily choose gender puts girls in the uncomfortable position of sharing their private spaces with people who wouldn’t otherwise be present. At worst, this is an open opportunity for predatory boys and men to take advantage of vulnerable girls. Unfortunately, the worst case scenario has indeed happened. The highly publicized 2021 case in Loudoun County, Virginia, in which a high school boy who identified as a girl raped two girls in school bathrooms, is one such example.

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Choosing new pronouns provides an incredible sense of power, but it’s a recipe for narcissism.

It sends the message that the world revolves around them, that their perspective is more important than everyone else’s, and they have a right to wield power over whomever they choose. This is especially enticing for a child with a trauma history who already feels powerless, but it’s not healthy for a floundering teen in need of guidance and structure.

The notion of gender fluidity divorces children from reality.

If a child can choose an obviously “wrong” gender, what reality do they have to accept? “Neopronouns” (or made-up words) are becoming more popular among young people and are blurring the lines between imagination and reality. CNN validated neopronouns in an article dated August 12, 2023, titled “A guide to neopronouns, from ae to ze.” The article highlighted how some neopronouns, such as “xe” and “em,” actually date back several centuries, introduced by writers to refer to subjects without referring to gender. However, the modern phenomenon includes neopronouns like “frog/frog-self,” “peach/peach-self,” “ghost/ghost-self,” and other whimsical identities, which are taken seriously in certain circles.

This practice is also harmful to the small percentage of children who struggle with genuine gender distress.

Many of these children have a history of sexual or other trauma and need help. If large numbers of children are using alternative pronouns for fun or to wield power, how can we identify who needs attention and support?

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Throwing up your hands and saying “it’s just a pronoun” overlooks how chaotic and confusing it is for children to grow up in a world where reality seems to change by the day. As preferred pronouns become normalized, children face increasing pressure from teachers, peers, and institutions to adopt new beliefs about identity and gender. Friendships and families are divided, girls are often expected to suppress their discomfort in private spaces, and vulnerable young people can be set on a path that leads to lifelong medicalization.

This isn’t some nitpick about modern slang or declining grammatical standards. As George Orwell said, “There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language.”

Children need structure, and they look to adults to provide that for them. Encourage your children to stand up to the pronoun pressure and teach them to say “No.”

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• BlackySpeakz on YouTube

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We get into:

• How George Soros changed prosecution from a nonpartisan job into an ideological one

• The missing Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment

• Why the DEI framework contradicts the original meaning of the Equal Protection Clause

• What libertarians have gotten wrong about public infrastructure and private power

• The meaning of “subject to the jurisdiction” and why Trump’s argument is stronger than the media admits

• Why creed and culture have to reinforce each other for a free society to survive

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Outline:

[0:00] Working as a prosecutor in Chicago

[6:58] The Warren Court and the rise of originalism

[16:44] George Soros prosecutors are dangerous

[21:46] How prosecutors build strong cases

[34:16] Power corrupts even good prosecutors

[41:17] Libertarians ignore the problem of private power

[45:51] The 14th Amendment and the first civil rights laws

[57:28] Disappearing constitutional limits on government

[1:03:59] What is “equality under the law”?

[1:09:53] What kind of discrimination should be legal?

[1:17:57] We still need intellectuals and academics

[1:28:46] Will the Supreme Court end birthright citizenship?

[1:42:09] Rethinking immigration as a libertarian

[1:58:24] Utopianism and “ideal world” libertarians

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