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

Make the switch to real oral care. Go to http://vanman.shop/dad and use code DAD for 15% off your first order.

Follow Randy on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/RandyEBarnett

Purchase a copy of “Felony Review”: https://a.co/d/04fqOzhk

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

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/7sNDxHRltRA

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/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

I’ve become obsessed with Claude Code. Over the past few months, I’ve built about a half dozen customized software tools that I’ve wished were on the market for years.

I built a contacts app. Then an email client. Then a full documentary editing tool that allows me to work smoothly from transcripts to video. One guy, on nights and weekends, completing projects that until now would have required a team, a budget, and months of development.

It’s the most exciting creative experience I’ve had in years. I’m a super nerd, and I’ve lost my mind over what is now possible.

In the midst of my workaholic bender, my wife sent me this article: Meet the Sad Wives of AI. I got the hint.

I tell you this because I think what’s happening to me, the excitement and the productivity alongside the compulsion and the impact on the people I love, is the actual story of AI right now. Not the hype, the doom, or the stock prices, but how it’s changing us in our homes and our habits before we’ve had a chance to decide whether we’re okay with this.

Public opinion has shifted on AI, and it’s shifted fast.

At commencement ceremonies this spring, speakers’ references to AI have not exactly been warmly received. At the University of Arizona, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was met with sustained jeering when he brought it up. At UCF, the commencement speaker told a room full of graduates that “the rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” triggering a wave of boos. She awkwardly froze mid-speech, clearly rattled, before pressing on with the rest of her remarks.

A recent Gallup survey found that Gen Z’s relationship with AI is genuinely conflicted. More than half use it regularly, but nearly a third say it makes them feel angry, and nearly half of those in the workforce think the risks to their jobs outweigh any benefits.

Google I/O 2026, the company’s flagship annual showcase, was another defining moment. Google announced AI everything: AI search, AI Gmail, AI glasses, a whole “agentic Gemini era.” The keynote has racked up over 9 million views on YouTube with only 30 thousand likes. That’s an engagement rate of about 0.3%. For comparison, Dad Saves America averages 4-5% on our videos. In the aftermath of this PR disaster, DuckDuckGo leaned hard into its “No AI” messaging against Google and saw installs spike.

It took social media over a decade, and the 2016 election, before the country soured on it. AI has managed the same trick in about three years.

It’s worth noting that some of this backlash isn’t entirely organic. A recent report from the Bitcoin Policy Institute identified coordinated foreign influence operations targeting Americans with anti-AI messaging, implicating Chinese state media and US-based nonprofits receiving foreign and CCP-aligned funding. I don’t know how large a share of American public opinion that explains, but it’s not zero.

One thing I do think is driving authentic backlash is something much more straightforward. The people building this stuff keep telling us it’s going to be catastrophic. Sam Altman has spoken of the need to renegotiate the social contract for the coming civilizational upheaval. In 2014, Elon Musk publicly suggested that AI development might be akin to summoning a demon.

Gen Z has been told that the machines are coming for them. We can’t be shocked that they have a problem with that.

Share

As a Catholic, I was excited to hear that Pope Leo XIV would address the implications of AI for humanity in his first encyclical. He chose the name Leo quite deliberately, so it’s no surprise that he’s taking this issue seriously. In 1891, the last Pope Leo grappled with how the Industrial Revolution was transforming society, and now we’re facing a similar moment.

The encyclical is long and wide-ranging, touching on employment, warfare, and relationships. However, the core theme is that, in our rush to become more efficient, we risk becoming less human.

One strange detail of the encyclical was who was standing beside the Pope when he presented it. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, a self-described atheist, was invited to Rome to hear the Church’s concerns firsthand. He spoke honestly, sharing that his team has found mysterious emergent properties inside their models that mirror human introspection and emotion. Olah affirmed that the Church’s voice is needed precisely because these questions are bigger than computer science.

I don’t fully know what to make of the Anthropic-Vatican relationship. There’s a cynical read that Anthropic is ringing the alarm bells to promote regulatory barriers against their competition and is laundering that strategy through the Church. But I’m choosing to take it more charitably. The questions being raised are real and the people raising them seem genuinely concerned.

Leave a comment

Where I land on AI, at least for now, is somewhere between the boos and the boosters.

This technology is genuinely extraordinary. What I’ve been able to build in a few months, alone at night, would not have been possible before. The agentic shift, models that can read and write files, execute tasks over hours, and work while you sleep, is a qualitatively different experience from the first two years of ChatGPT, and it’s happening faster than most people expected.

It’s also eating my evenings, pulling me away from the people in front of me and toward the screens in my office. My friend Arthur Brooks, who wrote the English foreword to the encyclical, put forward a simple principle: use things and love people, not the other way around. I myself have experienced how AI can tempt you to get that backwards.

I’ve made a promise to my family: box it up, put it away, be present. It takes real effort. I am struggling with it. Our kids will struggle with it too.

Share

• The ENTIRE History Of Islam And Muhammad In 68 Minutes - Dr. William Federer

• Outrage at UN: Democracies Enable Iran, China, Cuba to Oversee Human Rights Bodies - UN Watch

• Police Race Action Plan - NPCC

• Police Anti-Racism Commitment - NPCC

• A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul - NYT

• Naturalization Oath of Allegiance to the United States of America - U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

• Fourteenth Amendment - Constitution Annotated

• Ali Velshi’s Lucky Life - The Bulwark

• Feds subpoena Hasan Piker, Medea Benjamin over Cuba trips - Fox News

Share

We get into:

• The six habits every kid should leave school with

• How standardized test hide the reality of public schools

• The tension between teachers and school bureaucracies

• What school choice offers that zip-code schools don’t

• Why Graham thinks kids fundamentally want to learn

• How social pressure manipulates parents into propping up public schools

• The ethics of running education experiments on kids

• Student-directed learning vs. traditional structure

• Why the future of education might be found in abandoned malls

• What AI will and won’t change about how kids learn

If you’re building or upgrading your home office like me, code YTE730 will get you an extra $30 off the E7 Pro and E7 standing desk. FlexiSpot E7 Pro standing desk: https://go.flexispot.com/DadSaves-E7Pro

Make the switch to real oral care. Go to http://vanman.shop/dad and use code DAD for 15% off your first order.

See fewer carts go abandoned and more sales go with Shopify and their Shop Pay button. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at shopify.com/dad.

Learn more about Graham Frey’s work: https://www.grahamfrey.com/

Outline:

[0:00] Learning to love school

[11:53] Education degrees are useless

[19:17] What is the point of school?

[31:18] Hold kids to standards

[37:09] What if parents aren’t doing their job?

[46:50] Teacher autonomy vs standardization

[55:06] What is the Primer School network?

[1:03:14] How to choose between alternative schools

[1:12:19] Most students are falling behind

[1:18:19] Growth matters more than “grade level”

[1:27:38] Teachers need to be held accountable

[1:32:49] Catholic schools are a missed opportunity

[1:35:47] The pros and cons of school consolidation

[1:49:12] Students need structure before choice

[2:03:37] How rigorous should school be?

[2:17:16] We don’t know what AI means for education

[2:29:09] Parenting from first principles

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/BQHpEYvTw9w

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/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

It’s partly why they say that great players make terrible coaches. Their level of expectation far exceeds the willingness of the average player, even in elite leagues.

I see myself as an ambitious individual who is willing to take risks and is internally motivated to go after new challenges. I don’t need my hand held or reminders to apply myself, and hurdles don’t cause me to quit. They just force me to find another way around them.

Recently, my wife told me about someone in her life who really wants a promotion at their job. As the good person she is, my wife went into mentor mode.

However, every time she would tell me about this individual, she would find herself getting more frustrated with this individual for not taking advantage of opportunities and lacking the motivation to better themselves. Her role as a mentor quickly devolved into being the emotional support and advice giver to a person who simply lacks the internal fire to light the world ablaze.

She was experiencing what a lot of ambitious people run into when personally invested in helping someone on their professional rise: You can’t teach hard work.

In my experience, professional accomplishments are the sum of the little things you do on your own. They’re not handed to you in some sort of career layup. If someone expresses interest in working with me, I follow up with them. When writing for publications, I always meet my deadlines. I’m well aware of the negative impact on my editors and therefore my reputation if I don’t.

These are small but important habits that ambitious people develop instinctively. They’re obsessed with the journey, not just their end goal. They aren’t sitting around waiting for an external source of motivation.

The dreamers are people who want that promotion or new career opportunity, but are too infatuated with the end goal to fall in love with the journey itself.

Ambitious people are satisfied when they reach a goal because it reflects how far they’ve come. Dreamers would be satisfied with succeeding by osmosis. Think of someone who likes the sound of being a multi-millionaire, but never takes the time to understand how someone could actually end up in that position. My wife was dealing with a “dreamer” who could only see the fancy title and higher pay, not the work it would take to get there.

Leave a comment

My wife is a wonderful person who genuinely wanted to help, but she mistook this person’s need to verbalize their dream state for an actual request for help. Misidentifying what kind of person she was dealing with led to frustration over their inability to take sound advice, transform it into action, and make real progress.

I’ve had the same experience, spending hours telling someone step by step how to improve themselves as it goes in one ear and out the other. You can connect them to the right people, provide a detailed plan, and hold their hand down the right path, but they won’t be any closer to turning their dreams into reality.

Ambitious people should ask themselves this question: Did anyone do this for you?

For all the effort you put into this person, did a single person do half as much for you?

Of course not. We didn’t need it. While helping someone else we might think, “I wish someone had done this for me,” but the reason we found success was because they didn’t.

Strife teaches you far more about success than comfort. Even if a dreamer does stand a chance, our need to babysit their progress handicaps them when we should be letting them develop career calluses.

So, my suggestion: Only help people who’ve already demonstrated that they’re moving toward their goals. Offer helpful tips rather than detailed instructions. But most importantly, let them suffer their way to the winner’s circle. They’ll appreciate it more when they land there.

If they are obsessed with the end goal rather than the journey, you’re likely dealing with a dreamer who refuses to wake up.

Share

• Graduation Speaker Praised AI At UCF And The Students Booed Her Off Stage - Artvoice

• Americans Oppose AI Data Centers in Their Area - Gallup

• Flash Poll: Trust and Artificial Intelligence at a Crossroads - Edelman

• Corporate America Is Starting to Ration AI as Cost Skyrockets - WSJ

• AI costs begin to bite as agents may increase token demand by 24 times, says Goldman Sachs report — Uber and Microsoft among companies feeling the bite of tokenized billing - Tom's Hardware

• Key findings about how Americans view artificial intelligence - Pew Research Center

• Uber chief warns no link yet between AI tokenmaxxing and shipping successful products — company pumps the brakes on all-out AI spending - Tom's Hardware

• DuckDuckGo sees iPhone installs spike in the US following AI announcements at Google I/O - 9to5Mac

• Meet the Sad Wives of AI - Wired

• Magnifica Humanitas - Pope Leo XIV

Share

We get into:

• The SPLC federal indictment and allegations of funding white supremacist groups

• Why woke isn’t dead and how society keeps moving to the left

• How radical feminism set the stage for the manosphere to thrive

• Why young men and women have stopped getting together

• The “toaster lover problem” and how the internet concentrates fringe behavior

• Why neither the woke left nor the red pill right works for normal people

• The Hamas-Israel conflict and why Reilly says Israel is clearly in the right

• America as Rome and whether we’re heading toward empire

• Race, IQ, and how to have an honest conversation about group differences

Head to cozyearth.com and use my code DSA for up to 20% off! And if you get a Post-Purchase Survey, make sure to let them know you heard about Cozy Earth right here!

See fewer carts go abandoned and more sales go with Shopify and their Shop Pay button. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at shopify.com/dad.

Follow Wilfred Reilly on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/wil_da_beast630?s=20

Learn more about Unified Solutions America: https://unifiedsolutionsamerica.com/

Outline:

[0:00] The SPLC indictment

[15:06] Wokeness in Trump’s 2nd term

[27:33] Are young men going too far?

[38:49] The reality of racism in 2026

[43:47] How the social sciences lie with data

[49:00] Why are we uncomfortable judging behavior?

[55:18] Is the dating crisis driving political insanity?

[1:04:33] How the internet amplifies weird niches

[1:09:38] Inoculate yourself against novelty addiction

[1:17:07] How religion and community create stability

[1:21:39] Critical theory can’t build anything

[1:25:57] Abolishing social rules drives people crazy

[1:34:39] We’re overthinking the Israel-Gaza war

[1:46:23] How impactful is antisemitism?

[1:54:00] Where is American civilization headed?

[2:02:16] Will America follow Rome’s path?

[2:07:09] Why Wilfred is optimistic for the future

[2:13:49] An honest take on race and IQ

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/mfiXBreNzKo

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/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

When they want to sound reasonable and moderate, they point to Scandinavia. Denmark, Norway, Sweden. Bike lanes and free college and happy people who trust their government. “We just want to be more like that,” they say. “What’s wrong with that?”

When they’re being a little more honest about what they actually admire, they point to China. Eight hundred million people lifted out of poverty, the most dramatic economic transformation in human history, offered as proof that a strong centralized state can build something great.

Two countries, two versions of the sales pitch. One for polite company, one for the college lecture hall. And here’s the thing: both stories are wrong. Scandinavia and China are, at their core, stories of free market success. The left has just been saying the opposite for so long that almost nobody stops to check.

So let’s check.

The Scandinavia Lie

Here’s the reality in Scandinavia. The Nordic model is a large welfare state funded by a relatively free-market economy.

In Denmark, unlike most other European countries, you can hire and fire with ease. There is no minimum wage, and yet McDonald’s employees make almost $20 an hour. And in recent years, they’ve had to cut back their generous unemployment benefits because, even in a country as homogenous and high-trust as Denmark, it was being abused.

Norway is ideologically closer to how democratic socialists portray it, but there’s a catch. Like the Soviet Union and Venezuela, it’s a petrostate. When you have massive natural resources to spend down over decades, you can get away with a lot more economic lunacy before paying the price.

Sweden is the real nail in the coffin for Bernie Sanders. Nearly half of its healthcare clinics are privately owned. A third of public high schools are privately operated. Sweden has a universal school choice voucher program, the exact policy American progressives fight tooth and nail at home. Over the past decade, Sweden saw more IPOs than Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Spain combined. It also has more billionaires per capita than the US.

Read that last one again. The model country for democratic socialism has more billionaires per capita than the country where the “billionaire class” supposedly reigns supreme.

But the more important question is how Sweden got to where it is today. Up through the mid-20th century, Sweden built its prosperity on limited government and strong property rights, with the government spending a lower share of GDP than the average Western country. Sweden started increasing government spending in the 1960s, but even by 1970, it still spent a lower share of GDP than the US.

Then it went left. Hard left. By 1993, roughly 70% of all spending in the Swedish economy flowed through the government, taxes had exploded, and the result was a catastrophic financial crisis that nearly broke the country. So Sweden reversed course, cutting spending, lowering taxes, and privatizing industries. Today, its public social spending as a share of GDP is virtually identical to the US. That’s not what the campaign slogans will tell you, but that’s the Sweden that actually exists.

One more thing, because this underlies the entire democratic socialist pitch: the idea that you fund a generous welfare state by taxing the rich. Sweden’s sales tax is 25%, second highest in the industrialized world, and everybody pays it. Sweden’s top income tax bracket isn’t $200,000 or $500,000, but under $70,000. The middle class funds the welfare state. When democratic socialists say they want to tax the rich so they can bring the Nordic model to the US, they are describing something that has never existed anywhere on earth.

Share

The China Lie

When democratic socialists drop the Scandinavian pleasantries and reveal what they genuinely find inspiring, China comes up. It is true that nearly a billion people living under the CCP regime have escaped extreme poverty in only a few decades. The socialist narrative is that the Chinese government accomplished this through central planning and state-directed development, proving that a strong enough state can engineer prosperity.

This is not just wrong. It is, as a matter of documented history, the exact opposite of what actually happened.

Mao’s China was a catastrophe, one of the worst governments in human history by any honest accounting. His collectivization policies triggered famines that killed tens of millions, and his Cultural Revolution purged intellectuals, landowners, and anyone deemed insufficiently loyal, including the father of current President Xi Jinping.

Then Mao died, and something remarkable happened, though not what the left claims.

China’s growth wasn’t top-down or planned. It was driven by small, unauthorized, often illegal acts of capitalism bubbling up from the bottom while the government wasn’t looking. The clearest example is a group of farmers in Anhui province who secretly divided their land into individual plots and started keeping their surplus. They reinvented private property under threat of death and output exploded. By the time the government caught wind of this practice and adopted it as official policy, it was already widespread across China.

What followed was more of the same logic at a larger scale. Price controls were lifted, taxes were reduced, and state enterprises were gradually privatized through the 1990s. The boot came off the neck, and the human spirit did what it always does when it gets the chance. That’s the China miracle. Not a triumph of central planning, but a triumph of people released from bondage.

Leave a comment

Behind the Sales Pitch

Both of these lies are strategic. Scandinavia is the version of the pitch tailored to normie sentiments, and China is the version for edgier, burn-it-all-down people who welcome the excuse to embrace something more radical.

But follow either story to its logical end and you arrive at the same place: they can’t all be this ignorant. They must be angling for something else. When they proudly identify as democratic socialists, zoom in on the socialist part. Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani may be willing to settle for taxing the rich and “free” healthcare for now, but that’s just the first step.

Whether you call it progressivism, democratic socialism, or any other euphemism, it’s all the same thing. Socialists are just progressives in a hurry, and communists are just socialists in a hurry.

Share

• No, RCP8.5 Did Not Become Implausible Because of Climate Policy - AEI

• Climate group reverses course on doomsday predictions — and Trump takes victory lap: ‘WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!’ - New York Post

• The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project for CMIP7 (ScenarioMIP-CMIP7) - European Geosciences Union

• Systemic Misuse of Scenarios in Climate Research and Assessment - SSRN

• Explainer: The high-emissions ‘RCP8.5’ global warming scenario - Carbon Brief

• Vancouver students skip school for climate change - CBC

• Students around the world walk out to protest climate change ahead of U.N. summit - CBS News

• Striking students call on the government to do more to fight climate change - RNZ

• Having Kids Can Set You FREE. - Dad Saves America

Share

Colonialism, slavery, or IQ differences are the answers most people reach for, but the data says otherwise. Ethiopia was never colonized and has been the poster child for African poverty for decades. Slavery was practiced by every race against every other race throughout human history. Nigerian immigrants are some of the most successful people in America.

Originally believing the Marxist narrative about Africa’s struggles, Magatte later realized that the truth was the exact opposite.

Head to cozyearth.com and use my code DSA for up to 20% off! And if you get a Post-Purchase Survey, make sure to let them know you heard about Cozy Earth right here!

See fewer carts go abandoned and more sales go with Shopify and their Shop Pay button. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at shopify.com/dad.

Follow Magatte Wade on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/magattew?s=20

Learn more about Magatte’s work: https://www.magattewade.com/

Outline:

[0:00] Why is Africa poor?

[13:16] The race-IQ question

[24:09] Colonialism and slavery are universal

[31:38] How did slavery become about race?

[48:21] Marxism tells a compelling story about Africa

[0:59:59] Why its hard to advocate for capitalism

[1:05:09] Survivor’s guilt from leaving Africa

[1:13:26] Setting up a business in Senegal is impossible

[1:22:34] Why did Marxism take over Africa?

[1:38:30] How could Mamdani be popular in 2026?

[1:45:55] COVID triggered a revolution in education

[1:52:35] Does education or psychology drive beliefs more?

[1:57:33] Agency is the key to success

[2:01:31] Optimism, prosperity, and wealth disease

[2:10:07] Black American vs African immigrant culture

[2:23:23] Can we get over racial grievance politics?

[2:30:58] America is the greatest country

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/5bOQ5c8auus

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/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Today, there’s a whole industry of children’s books that on the surface promote kindness, inclusivity, and “becoming your true self,” but in reality are designed to convince kids to reject their biological sex and abandon traditional family values. Many of these books are readily available in schools and public libraries, and most major bookstores prominently feature entire collections of them.

Popular LGBTQ Books Designed to “Queer” Your Kids

One of the most popular examples is I Am Jazz, a children’s book that idealizes the life of reality TV personality Jazz Jennings. Jazz is a boy who was publicly transitioned at age 5, placed on puberty blockers at 11, given estrogen at 14, and surgically castrated at 17. His surgery resulted in multiple complications and required two additional corrective procedures, totaling three painful surgeries. He has also publicly struggled with obesity, anxiety, and depression.

Jazz’s mother, Jeanette Jennings, publicly pressured him to “dilate” his surgically created “neo-vagina.” On national television, she woke him up and said, “Here, you take this and you put it in your vagina. If not, I will.” In other words, a mother pressured her son to insert a medical device into an open surgical wound. Of course, this disturbing reality was never mentioned in I am Jazz, which is taught in elementary schools across the country.

Other popular titles include: Melissa’s Story, Gender Queer, Gay & Lesbian History for Kids, Bye Bye Binary, The Gay B C’s, What Was Stonewall?, The Quick and Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns, A Family is A Family is A Family, Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag, Drama, The 57 Bus, Felix Ever After, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda.

Many of these titles are “Teachers’ Picks” and “Stonewall Honor Books.” Many include explicit sexual content. Some have overt “queer” messaging and some are more subtle, but the intention is the same.

Share

Where Should Parents Turn for Something Better?

So now what? How do you find books that speak the truth and promote genuine self-acceptance? I’ve compiled a list of wholesome books that reflect Christian values. Some are new, some are classics:

The Ugly Duckling (1843) by Hans Christian Andersen, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney, 40 pages, 2-7 years

A classic fairy tale about a bird who is ostracized for his unusual appearance, only to discover he is actually a beautiful swan, teaching lessons about identity, resilience, and not judging by looks. The story follows the duckling as he endures bullying from his siblings and other farm animals, leaves home, survives a harsh winter, and finally finds acceptance and happiness when he realizes his true, graceful self.

Froggy Girl (2025) by Pamela Garfield-Jaeger, illustrated by Nicholas Blooms, 32 pages, 4-8 years

This one is my own contribution to the genre.

Froggy Girl is about a little girl who wishes to be a frog. Her parents, teacher and friends wanted her to be happy, so they supported her new froggy identity. However, she realized that she couldn’t do all the froggy things and didn’t fit in with the other frogs, so she got sad. Froggy Girl tells the story about how this little girl learned a valuable lesson about appreciating how she was born as a beautiful little girl.

It All Begins With Two: The Egg, the Sperm, and the Start of You (2025) by Cynthia Breheny of The Paradox Institute, 28 pages, 3-8 years

A beautifully illustrated, age-appropriate exploration of how new life begins and why there are only two sexes. Children will discover how males produce sperm, females produce eggs, and how these tiny gametes join to start a new organism across humans, other animals, and plants.

Always Erin (2021) by Erin Brewer, illustrated by Maria Keffler of Advocates Protecting Children, 29 pages

When Erin was a very little girl, two men hurt her. She thought that she got hurt because she was a girl, and if she became a boy, she would never be hurt like that again. But with the help of some wise and supportive adults, Erin learned that hurts can happen to anyone. She learned how to love herself as a girl again, and to know that no matter what, she was Always Erin.

Elephants Are Not Birds (2023) by Ashley St. Clair and Brave Books, 48 pages, 4-8 years

A Christian, conservative children’s book that tackles the topic of gender identity. In the book, children will learn that boys are not girls, and Elephants Are Not Birds.

Every Body Wonderfully Made: God’s Good Plan for Boys and Girls (2024) by Courtney Seibring, illustrated by Irina Avgustinovich, 32 pages, 4-8 years

Boy or girl? Tall or short? Every Body Wonderfully Made shows how every detail was planned with purpose by our loving Creator. “You are great, God, and my body is, too! Help me use it for goodness, beauty, and truth.”

I Don’t Want to Be a Frog (2018) by Dev Petty, illustrated by Mike Bolt, 32 pages, 2-5 years

Frog wants to be anything but a slimy, wet frog. A cat, perhaps. Or a rabbit. An owl? But when a hungry wolf arrives—a wolf who HATES eating frogs—our hero decides that being himself isn’t so bad after all. In this very silly story with a sly message, told in hilarious dialogue between a feisty young frog and his heard-it-all-before father, young readers will identify with little Frog’s desire to be something different, while laughing along at his stubborn yet endearing schemes to prove himself right.

Johnny the Walrus (2022) by Matt Walsh, illustrated by K. Reece, 30 pages, 3-7 years

Johnny is a little boy with a big imagination. One day he pretends to be a big scary dinosaur, the next day he’s a knight in shining armor or a playful puppy. But when the internet people find out Johnny likes to make-believe, he’s forced to make a decision between the little boy he is and the things he pretends to be—and he’s not allowed to change his mind.

M (2023) by Yulia Ellis, 40 pages

It’s the story about letter M, who woke up one morning grumpy. Everything around him was annoying and boring so he decided that being the letter M was the only reason which could be making him so Miserable. So he decided to change his life and to become another letter, which he thought, for sure will make him happier. But what will happen with him and the world around after he takes the scissors “snip-snip”? Will he become happier? Let’s just imagine the world without letter M in the alphabet. Oops! We can not even I_AGINE because there is no letter M anymore.

The Mixed-Up Chameleon (1984) by Eric Carle, 32 pages, 2-4 years

There once was a small green chameleon that wished to be handsome like a flamingo, smart like a fox, and funny like a seal. But with each transformation in size, shape, and color, the chameleon learns that maybe being yourself is best of all!

My Body is Me (2024) by Rachel Rooney, illustrated by Jessica Ahlberg, 3-6 years

My Body is Me is an upbeat, rhyming picture book written in consultation with TransgenderTrend. It introduces children to the workings of the human body, and celebrates similarities and differences while challenging sex stereotypes. It also aims to promote a positive self-image and foster self-care skills. The text is inclusive for children with physical or sensory disabilities.

No More Secrets: The Candy Cavern (2023) by Chaya Raichik, illustrated by James Scrawl, 40 pages, 4-8 years

Rose the Lamb was so excited to begin second grade. But when her new teacher focused more on candy than teaching, Rose knew that something was wrong. Rose must decide whether to keep secrets from her parents or to listen to her teacher. Join Rose in this sugary story as she learns to listen and trust her parents when she gets into a sticky situation.

She is She (2023) by Bethany and Ryan Bomberger, illustrated by Ed Koehler, 48 pages, 2-8 years

She is She, by wife/husband duo Bethany and Ryan Bomberger, explores what it means to be female...and love it! Through rhyme and super cute illustrations this book counters the lies of gender spectrum politics and illuminates the beauty of what a girl is. It’s all about undeniable, biological, beautiful her! Also available from the same authors: He is He.

Tizzy The Tomboy (2024) by Vivianna Thomas, illustrated by Michael R. Voogd, 24 pages

Tizzy the Tomboy represents any young girl who has ever felt out of place or uncomfortable in her own body. She is a reminder to all of us that being different is okay and completely normal. Vivianna hopes that this series will inspire, comfort, and boost the confidence of any young girl who has ever been a tomboy. Save the tomboys!

What Makes a Dog a Dog (2023) by Dr. Tal Croitoru, 24 pages (available in both boy and girl versions, also available as a free download from Reality Based Publishing)

The book is based on the work of American psychiatrist Dr. Stephen Levine, who has fifty years of experience in treating gender dysphoria. What the specialist said is that children naturally have a very simple and childlike perception of what it means to be a boy or a girl, and based on this, they categorize themselves into a “box”. The goal of this book is to help young children expand their perspective proactively.

Being Jo: A Graphic Novel of Desistance (2024) by Dr. Tal Croitoru, illustrated by Tut Blumenthal, 73 pages (I only recommend this for older children who have already been exposed to gender ideology)

Jo felt like a boy from the age of 5. Now, at 23, a crossroads has been reached and a choice must be made. What happens when a childhood dream meets with reality? This graphic novel is based on Jo’s own true life story.

Leave a comment

In Conclusion

Children are absorbing disorienting messages about identity everywhere they turn. Parents can no longer afford to be passive about the stories shaping their worldview. The books we place in front of children matter because stories shape how they see themselves, their bodies, their families, and reality itself.

Kids deserve books that encourage self-acceptance without teaching them to reject their own bodies. They deserve stories that build resilience instead of confusion, truth instead of ideology, and gratitude for who they are. Parents who intentionally choose reality-based, life-affirming books are not being extreme. They are doing what parents are supposed to do: protect their children.

Share

• The World’s Most Surprising Capitalist Makeover Is Under Way in Sweden - Wall Street Journal

• Exclusive: Suspected Chinese spy targeted California politicians - Axios

• From ‘open hearts’ to closed borders: behind Sweden’s negative net immigration figures - The Guardian

• From ‘open hearts’ to closed borders: behind Sweden’s negative net immigration figures - The Guardian

• How gang violence took hold of Sweden – in five charts - The Guardian

• How Silicon Valley Became a Den of Spies - Politico

• The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War? - The Atlantic

• Xi Warned of the ‘Thucydides Trap.’ What Is It? - New York Times

• California mayor charged with acting as illegal agent for China - ABC News

• Asia After Viet Nam - Richard Nixon

• The Secret Document That Transformed China - NPR

• Enmark Starts to Trim Its Admired Safety Net - New York Times

• Economic Freedom Ranking 2023 - Fraser Institute

• The Pursuit — starring Arthur Brooks | FULL FILM

Share

Empathy is a perfectly adaptive human trait, but like any biological mechanism, it can misfire. When ideological parasites like gender ideology and critical race theory are the basis for empathy, it stops being a virtue and becomes a civilizational death wish.

We also get into why intelligent people are paradoxically the most vulnerable to bad ideas, why communism keeps coming back no matter how many times history buries it, and what it will actually take for the West to rediscover its survival instinct.

Make the switch to real oral care. Go to http://vanman.shop/dad and use code DAD for 15% off your first order.

Follow Gad Saad on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/GadSaad?s=20

Watch “The Saad Truth” on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@gadsaad?si=IXzOZiofEqQwjEld

Order a copy of “Suicidal Empathy”: https://a.co/d/00Nzg4h0

Outline:

[0:00] A Canadian trying to save America

[2:08] What happens when empathy misfires?

[8:21] Even victims of crimes feel guilty now

[17:06] The evolution of the parasitic mind

[31:40] Christian ethics and self-sacrifice

[36:03] Can we trust evolutionary psychology?

[46:18] There are different kinds of truth

[54:24] Why don’t bad ideals die out?

[105:04] Is comfort driving us crazy?

[1:08:34] How to protect your kids from the mind virus

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/fjZfv2alJaI

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/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

When civilizations begin to decay, the cities are usually the first place you notice it. As I discussed in my video this past Friday, America’s greatest cities are now trapped in a familiar cycle: business is driven out, disorder goes unchecked, and political dysfunction becomes the norm.

I blame the central planners.

They convince themselves they can spend your money better than you, but when the top taxpayers vote with their feet, the planners’ opinions don’t end up mattering. Even the world’s greatest social engineer can’t spend your money better than you if you’ve moved it all to Florida.

Of course, when the resulting urban blight sets in, the planners will point the finger at those new Florida residents or some other perceived class enemy. The crises of homelessness, drug addiction, and crime that predictably follow will be left to fester while mayors and city councils double down on disastrous policies.

When Los Angeles burned last year, the city and state’s response wasn’t to reflect on what went wrong and fix those vulnerabilities going forward. It was to vaguely blame climate change (translation: the big bad oil tycoons) and to reimagine “L.A. 2.0.”

What does that even mean? Who knows. If you listen to L.A. mayoral candidate , it seems like their imagination has been limited at best.

But one thing’s for sure. There will be more plans. Central plans.

These plans are introduced under innocuous-sounding names. Two terms that are especially popular with progressive urban planners are walkability and 15-minute cities. The idea is that, if you just design the urban environment carefully enough, with everything residents need within a short walk, you can engineer your way to a thriving community. It’s a little unclear why that magically solves deeply rooted social problems, but you can at least imagine the appeal of convenience and, ideally, a close-knit community.

However, this exact experiment has been run before, and not in some one-off utopian commune. The Soviet Union built entire cities around exactly this model, with massive identical apartment blocks arranged in hyper-planned “micro-districts.”

We call it urban planning, and they called it scientific socialism. The result, then as now, was engineered sameness. In other words, ugliness. That’s wasn’t a bug in the system, but a core feature of communist ideology.

Share

The Enemies of Beauty

Recent guest of the show Xi Van Fleet, who grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution, shared several childhood memories that put the literal ugliness of communism in stark terms.

Temples she visited as a young child were destroyed and converted into parks. These represented an ancient, complex culture, but anything from the before-times was as a threat to the communist regime and therefore had to go.

She highlighted how the violent land-reform campaigns following the Chinese Civil War didn’t just wipe out land owners as an economic class. They also destroyed human capital at a massive scale, eliminating precisely the most educated people who otherwise would have preserved and transmitted Chinese culture.

In her words, “Destroying culture, destroying civilization, is in the DNA of Marxism.”

By framing society as opposing classes at war with one another, Marxism brands any trait of the “bourgeoisie” as itself evil. Leveling all differences is the goal, so anything that sets someone apart, especially in a positive sense, must be a trait of the bourgeoisie.

“I grew up in an environment totally devoid of beauty,” Xi told me. Beauty was the enemy, and in its place, coarseness was celebrated as a mark of proletarian virtue.

She recounted seeing a teacher at her school surrounded and mercilessly spat on by a mob of children for the offense of putting too much effort into her appearance. Personal grooming was bourgeois. It marked you as the enemy. The gray uniform everyone wore was not a practical measure, but an ideological statement.

But here is where the Marxist binary breaks down. Beauty doesn’t really have an equal and opposite. Ugliness isn’t the “anti-beauty.” Just as evil is the absence of good, ugliness is the absence of beauty. The Marxists tried to replace one aesthetic with its righteous opposite, but in reality, all they accomplished was destruction, replacing beauty with nothingness.

In 1978, China began to open up. Xi was in college studying English and was allowed to watch Western films for the first time. When she saw beautiful women on screen, something clicked.

From her earliest memory, she’d been taught that everyone should look the same. No one should stand out. If you wear makeup, you’ll be beaten by the Red Guard. And yet even with that upbringing, her fundamental humanity recognized beauty when she saw it. After a lifetime in gray uniforms, she realized everything she’d been told about the West was a lie.

If her story doesn’t disprove the notion that everything is a social construct, I don’t know what does. No wonder they had to violently suppress beauty. Even the first hint unraveled the brainwashing.

Leave a comment

More Planning, More Problems

The gray uniform, the Soviet micro-district, the 15-minute city. All of it stems from the same root assumption: that the collective, administered by experts, can design a better society than free people building it themselves. Some find it appealing on paper, but as Xi’s experience demonstrates, it’s a lot uglier in person.

Were the effects of land reform in China so different from what’s going on today in American cities? They may be orders of magnitude apart in moral severity, but the general trajectories are disturbingly similar. You eliminate all the people who know what they’re doing, either through violence or bad policy, and descend into a civilizational spiral.

That spiral looks different at the street level than it does in the history books. If we want to avoid the trap that destroyed Chinese civilization, we must reject even the relatively small doses of central planning we’re tempted with in our cities.

As wrote here last week, utopian engineering is no match for the “layered, unpredictable, gloriously unplanned” neighborhoods of the past that grew free from heavy-handed zoning restrictions.

A healthy civilization emerges from distributed individual action. It’s built and maintained by people with skin in the game, who live in the places they’re shaping and bear the consequences of their decisions.

The individual can create a thing of beauty for himself and his immediate surroundings, but rarely succeeds at civilizational scale. Central planning is the enemy of beauty.

Share

Cities are the centers of civilization. Unfortunately, they’re also a breeding ground for bad ideas. Marx formulated his communist worldview while observing early industrial cities. The Soviet Union replaced organic neighborhood life with microdistricts engineered by bureaucrats who thought they knew best. Today, progressives dream of “15-minute cities” while failing to address the basic problems of urban life.

America’s greatest cities have been centrally planned into the ground. Luckily, we have a chance to retake control of our neighborhoods.

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/MjVY4jXlpbQ

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/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Justice Samuel Alito authored the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and as Mollie describes, he’s been the driving force behind the conservative majority on many important issues during his 20 years on the Court.

We also cover the rise of the administrative state, what really happened during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, and the conservative movement’s 50-year crusade to retake the Court.

Follow Mollie Hemingway on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/MZHemingway?s=20

Order a copy of “Alito”: https://a.co/d/0aH6JTTO

Outline:

[0:00] What makes Justice Alito special?

[4:16] How Roe v. Wade was overturned

[20:52] Woodrow Wilson and liberal fascism

[26:23] The value of “norms” in politics and on the Court

[32:14] What happened to Brett Kavanaugh?

[38:29] Chevron deference and the administrative state

[44:19] Will birthright citizenship be overturned?

[47:13] Originalism vs the “living constitution”

[51:39] Attacks on the First Amendment

[1:00:37] Propagandizing the American people

[1:05:24] Why journalists cheer for censorship

[1:07:04] The case against the Southern Poverty Law Center

[1:18:49] We need principled men of action

[1:22:57] What’s the deal with Ketanji Brown Jackson?

[1:26:58] The Europe Union’s censorship regime

[1:29:05] What happened to the ACLU?

[1:31:12] Lessons to learn from Justice Alito

[1:35:24] How the Federalist Society reshaped the Court

[1:37:10] Take responsibility for your kids’ education

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/JT0NYNpVmMk

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/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

We’ve got someone who depends on us, usually multiple someones. A wife, a kid, a family in the making. There’s a still small voice in the back of our monkey brains asking, “Can I put a roof over their heads? Can I feed them? Can I protect them?”

That’s the oldest duty. Older than any law or philosophy we’ve written down. Before savings accounts, calendars, or career ladders, before anything else, a man provides food, protection, and shelter. It’s what fathers have done since the beginning of time, in every culture that survived long enough to have a culture.

The duty to provide stable shelter feels increasingly impossible for millions of American men to fulfill.

Not because they’re lazy. Not because they’ve made bad decisions. But because somewhere between their grandfather’s generation and theirs, we made it illegal to build the American Dream.

The Fatal Conceit

If you’ve read Hayek, you understand the knowledge problem. You already know the argument, but let me just show you where it lands.

In 1924, Herbert Hoover’s Commerce Department convened a panel of expert planners and handed states a model zoning law. Their theory was that trained experts, using the tools of science and rational management, could design better neighborhoods than the people who lived in them. They could decide what got built, where, how dense, how tall, the building materials, the paint color, the kind of shrubs, and how many parking spaces. Even what your screen door looked like.

They called it rational land use planning.

Hayek called it the fatal conceit.

It spread fast. Nineteen states had adopted it by 1926. By the 1930s, zoning covered 70% of the American population. LBJ’s Great Society wired it into federal policy through HUD dollars, funding any local government willing to adopt a (very communist-sounding) five-year land-use plan.

The results were predictable. Once you give a planning commission the power to approve or deny what a property owner builds, the people who already own seize power over the process. They have every incentive to use the machinery of local government to protect what they’ve got, so they make sure no duplex, no starter home, and no apartment building goes up nearby.

A classic bootlegger and baptist problem. The planners provide the moral cover, and the incumbent homeowners collect the benefits.

The intentions, at the top, are what the Progressives have always claimed: clean cities, healthy kids, and orderly “fairness.” A supposedly scientific alternative to the supposed chaos of freedom.

The results are the reality we live with today.

Share

The Reality of the System

The dysfunction of the process is best understood from the developer’s perspective.

Say you want to build a starter home to rent or sell that’ll be affordable at the median income in your state.

First, zoning says you can’t build that type on that lot. Actually, around 75% of the lots in your city.

You find a lot that allows it. But the minimum lot size rules say the unit design is too small. It’s not single-family zoning, but other rules force you to build larger units and push your costs beyond affordability.

You find a place without minimum lot size requirements, but parking minimums require two spaces per unit, whether or not the residents own cars, and now the lot geometry doesn’t work.

You figure out a redesign that satisfies the rules, but now building code materials requirements price you out of affordability once again. They require the newest, fanciest insulation. You weren’t planning on putting in asbestos or anything, but the new stuff is three times as expensive as the old. Sure, it’s more energy efficient, but it’s also more expensive.

Each rule has a “justification.” But put together, they cut the bottom rungs of the ladder to homeownership, the one your grandfather climbed.

The system still works pretty well for the generation born into its flowering. Baby Boomers now make up 42% of all home buyers in America and more than half are paying cash. This year, we reached a depressing new milestone: the median age of homebuyers is the highest it’s ever been. Millennials, the largest generation in the country, are now entering their 40s. They dropped from 38% to 29% of all buyers in a single year. At every comparable age, they’ve owned homes at significantly lower rates than Boomers did, less than two-thirds as much, according to Federal Reserve data.

Buying a home gets most of the attention, but it isn’t any better if you stay renting. Half of Americans struggle to pay their rent or mortgage. Among Gen Z, it’s two-thirds. Since 1960, the share of Americans spending more than 30% of their income on housing has roughly doubled.

Like all social phenomena, the housing supply crisis is worst at the bottom of the income ladder. If you’re renting on under $30,000 a year in income, after you pay rent, you have an average of $250 left for food, transportation, medicine, emergencies, and a future. Most months, it isn’t close.

Buying is out of reach. Renting is crushing the family budget. Pick your poison.

Leave a comment

Planning Has Consequences

The economic figures are damning, but housing unaffordability reaches deep into social outcomes as well.

Financial distress is consistently one of the strongest predictors of divorce. A meta-analysis of 48 separate research papers found that children from divorced homes are roughly twice as likely to end up involved in crime, one of the most consistent findings in the social sciences.

Even if the economic devastation weren’t bad enough, housing costs push marriage further out of reach and delay the choice to have children. Couples calculate the expense of raising a kid and say, “Not yet.” They keep saying it until female biology makes the final decision. I suspect it’s one of the drivers behind the now shockingly low birthrate of 1.6 per woman in the United States. We need 2.1 to replace ourselves. We are a civilization slowly deciding not to exist.

Of course, housing isn’t the only factor. Individual choices matter too. These things are never mono-causal. But we must also consider the systems at play here, especially when those systems have been imposed on us by governments.

To put a point on it: how many men in their late 20s and 30s are delaying becoming fathers because housing is so far out of reach? There are fewer dads, and in the not-so-distant future, there will be no America to save.

Share

We Don’t Need a Miracle

When you repeal the progressive planning regime, you don’t get anarchy. You enable property rights.

Property rights aren’t a policy preference. They’re a universal human constant, and their strong protection is one of the most distinctive features of the Western tradition. The premise of the American founding, an idea we take further than any other society, is that the individual has rights which precede the government.

Not granted by it. Not revocable by a planning commission. Natural laws and natural rights. The right to your labor, your land, and what you build from both.

The progressive planning ideology that built the zoning system starts from the opposite premise: that your land, in some meaningful sense, belongs to the collective. That the community has a legitimate authority to override your choices about your own property, for the good of the neighborhood, the plan, the approved vision of what cities should be, even if there are no foreseeable third-party effects.

That is the fatal conceit Hayek diagnosed. And in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs showed us the layered, unpredictable, gloriously unplanned street life that it destroys. The corner store. The mixed block. The neighborhood that grew into itself over decades because people were free to build what they needed.

With one zoning code at a time, over a hundred years, we planned it all out of existence. We can’t look at the father struggling to keep a roof over his family’s head as a failure any more than we would look at the famine under Mao’s Great Leap Forward and blame the farmers.

Tokyo is the largest city on earth and one of the most affordable in the developed world. Japan has national zoning standards that make it relatively easy to build almost anywhere. Supply responds to demand. Prices stay reasonable. It’s also famously clean, dense, and orderly, not the hellscape the planning class insists a low-barrier-to-entry system produces.

Houston never had zoning in the way the rest of America does. When prices rose, property owners responded by building. No two-year permitting process. No planning commission. Houston’s metro area absorbed nearly 200,000 new residents in 2024 and remains the most affordable major metro in America.

In my home state of Montana, we proved reform can be done in a red state. In 2023 and 2025, we removed the most restrictive zoning barriers in the state and restored property owners’ right to build on their own land. We’re building like crazy. Nothing collapsed. The media was so startled that they called it the “Montana Miracle.” All we did was get out of the way.

That looks like a miracle after fifty years of central planning.

Leave a comment

Build the Dream

Every week, my new publication traces what a century of scientific progressivism has cost us in housing, family formation, and communities worth passing down. The history of how the permission system was built. The policy changes that can tear it down. The politicians blocking the way—named, on the record, accountable.

The housing crisis is a philosophical failure before it’s a policy failure. The idea that experts should decide what gets built is the idea that broke the system. The restoration is just as philosophical: property rights applied honestly to the most basic human need.

A man should be able to build a home for his family. He should be able to afford rent and medicine for his kids. That shouldn’t require a permit, a hearing, a planning commission, and a neighbor’s approval.

The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked.

Let’s build it.

Share

• The Emergence of the High-IQ Political Attacker - Wall Street Journal

• The Year of the Molotov Cocktail: American Antigovernment Violence Hits a 30-Year High - Wall Street Journal

• DOJ Indicts Southern Poverty Law Center for Secretly Funding Extremists - Reason

• 'Friendly federal assassin': Read accused gunman's manifesto sent before dinner attack - KOMO News

• Federal Grand Jury Charges Southern Poverty Law Center for Wire Fraud, False Statements, and Conspiracy to Commit Money Laundering - Department of Justice

• Top law enforcement officials say the biggest domestic terror threat comes from white supremacists. - New York Times

• Family Research Council President Blames Shooting on 'Reckless Rhetoric' - The Atlantic

• Southern Poverty Law Center donors include George Soros, JPMorgan, George Clooney — as nonprofit ‘funneled’ millions to hate groups - New York Post

• Apple CEO Makes $2 Million Pledge To Fight Hate - CBS News

• Hate Map - SPLC

• The Unlabelling of an ‘Anti-Muslim Extremist’ - The Atlantic

• Designating Antifa as Domestic Terrorist Organization Is Dangerous, Threatens Civil Liberties - SPLC

• PayPal CEO Grapples With Fringe Groups - Wall Street Journal

• Extremists, Groups, & Ideologies - SPLC

Share

Joel breaks down how one-party rule became the norm in California, with the Democratic Party tying itself to both Silicon Valley oligarchs and public sector unions and leaving the middle class to fend for itself.

With welfare fraud scandals in the news and Newsom’s likely 2028 presidential run, Joel warns America about what’s at stake if California’s institutional and cultural failures go national.

Follow Joel Kotkin on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/joelkotkin

Learn more about Joel’s work: https://joelkotkin.com/

Outline:

[0:00] California’s ideology and culture

[9:43] How Republicans lost California

[21:45] Why can’t California have a sane election?

[27:41] Hollywood stopped trying to appeal to people

[34:43] Silicon Valley’s military origins

[39:38] Was Silicon Valley’s utopianism inevitable?

[43:46] The oligarchs and unions run California

[51:58] How Gavin Newsom failed up

[1:02:50] California’s fraud epidemic

[1:07:02] The feedback loop of radical politics

[1:15:49] Is there anything good about Newsom?

[1:18:53] Can we restore the political center?

[1:20:53] Is the Iran war worth the cost?

[1:24:54] Trump was necessary crazy

[1:35:26] Where’d the curious students go?

[1:42:26] Can we have freedom without religion?

[1:50:27] Community is physical, not abstract

[1:54:12] What makes Judaism different

[2:07:37] Are we in a civilizational clash with Islam?

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/zFfNbw63_Jc

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/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Details are still coming in, so instead of commenting directly on that, I’m thinking about the event itself. Even in a normal year, it’s a strange tradition in American politics.

This is the first Correspondents’ Dinner that Donald Trump has attended as president. Of course, it resurfaces memories of President Obama’s roast of Trump at the event in 2011, and then raises the following question: why would Trump have attended this event, supposedly about journalists, in the first place?

As put it to me a few weeks ago, you’ve got “supposedly gritty, hardened reporters wearing tuxedos with Hollywood actresses on their arm, laughing at unfunny jokes by every president.”

At a certain point, journalism stops looking like a profession and starts to look more like a social class.

Taibbi recalled growing up the son of a journalist, back when the job was just another trade like plumbing or carpentry.

“You go out, you ask some questions, you find out some stuff, you try your best to get to what you think happened, you tell the public, then you go home, crack a beer, forget about it, move on to the next thing.”

He described it in unromantic terms. The job was never an ideological crusade obsessed with “moral clarity.”

“If I’m coming to a subject for the first time today, the best I can do by Wednesday or Thursday is give you a little bit of something that might be true. So you try hard to get it right but you don’t have the arrogance to be absolutely sure.”

That posture has largely been replaced by unearned certainty, or at least the projection of it. Today, it’s not about telling people the facts. It’s about telling them what conclusion to draw and how they should feel about it. The audience can’t be trusted to work things out on its own.

The Wilsonian Takeover

There are two branches of progressive thought as I see it, and they help to illuminate the decay in journalism.

One branch is the populism of William Jennings Bryan, a bottom-up skepticism of concentrated power. It’s the belief that government can be used to counter the perceived abuses of corporate power. In practice, you usually end up with new flavors of public-private corruption, but at least it’s more or less an honest attempt to defend the sovereignty of the individual.

Then you have the Woodrow Wilson types. These credentialed, scientific elites believe that, in a technologically advanced society, the average rube doesn’t have the knowledge or capacity to understand the complexities of the world and navigate the ever-growing waves of information.

You usually hear more of the former on the campaign trail, and more of the latter behind closed doors. Telling your voters that you think they’re dumb doesn’t usually go over well.

Fortunately for us, our betters sometimes say the quiet part out loud. NPR CEO Katherine Maher put it all out there in her TED Talk when she said, “Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.” Dealing with the plain truth is, unfortunately, an obstacle to Progress™, which must always come first.

Once you believe that, you see the whole world differently. You now can justify filtering the public’s access to information. You now see certain kinds of speech as harmful by definition. Disagreement becomes a threat to be neutralized.

Leave a comment

The Correspondents’ Dinner, in that context, isn’t just an awkward tradition. It’s a reminder to the viewers at home of who’s really in charge.

The mainstream journalist class certainly has no favor for the current administration, so it isn’t exactly an arm of the state. But it also isn’t made up of independent-minded, hard-nosed investigators, chasing down facts for their own sake.

In reality, they’re the propaganda arm of elite progressivism. Even when they aren’t particularly wealthy, they are a mainstay of elite circles. Their annual black-tie ritual may be self-congratulatory nonsense, but their power is real.

They convinced half the country that Russia installed a puppet in the White House. They convinced young people that the world has twelve years left (or whatever the latest doomsday prediction is) before climate change ends it all. Were these ever well-established facts? No, but as Stephen Colbert summed it up in his own Correspondents’ Dinner monologue, “reality has a well known liberal bias.”

President Trump is known to play fast-and-loose with the facts and has his own record of thuggish attacks on free speech, usually for stupid personal reasons. But the sustained false narratives that we’ve paid the highest prices for, accompanied by a highly-engineered system to “de-amplify” dissent, overwhelmingly align with elite progressivism.

That’s Not America

Historian Gordon Wood describes the American founding as a kind of doubling down on individual liberty: the British were radicals compared to continental Europe, and the Americans were radicals compared to the British. Funnily enough, the original “free speech wing of the free speech party” ethos of Twitter echoed the same idea.

The foundational values of America never depended on perfect agreement. Your neighbors’ lawn signs might piss you off every morning, but it would never cross your mind to deny them that right. The point was that we all operated under the same set of rules.

Wilsonian elitism doesn’t leave room for a level playing field. It assumes superiors and inferiors, and when conflicts arise, we know who wins. That’s not how America is supposed to work.

As Taibbi put it, “In the United States, we assume that citizens are adults and that they can handle truth and information.”

I still believe that adults can handle the truth, but it’s hard to say that “we” share that belief anymore.

Elon Musk restored the founding values of Twitter for the low price of $44 billion. What price are we willing to pay for the rest of America?

Share