The America I’m Trying to Save
Last week, Dad Saves America crossed 500,000 subscribers on YouTube.
What some of you may not realize is that this show is a project of Emergent Order Foundation, an organization I founded five years ago. Dad Saves America was my response to concerning political and psychological trends I’d noticed bubbling up throughout our society.
But the idea was always to eventually expand the roster with a range of voices dedicated to getting the West back on the right track. This week, we’re launching a brand new show, Strictly Education, hosted by Katharine Birbalsingh.
Known as “Britain’s Strictest Headmistress,” Katharine brings decades of experience pushing back against progressive schooling in favor of traditional wisdom. As she put it, “Strictly Education is about putting children on the map.” She’s working to revive the time-tested approaches to education, both at school and in the home, that too many teachers and parents have been led astray from in recent decades.
On Dad Saves America, I try my best to highlight all sorts of perspectives on our modern challenges, but I’m still just one guy. With the launch of Strictly Education, we’re moving into the next phase of our mission: to build a bottom-up movement that champions civilization and the potential it unlocks in each of us.
As I reflect on this milestone, I’d like to walk you through how our mission came to be in the first place.
The 2008 Financial Crisis
The first time in my adult life I felt like the world was crashing down was the 2008 financial crisis. I was working in New York at the time, listening to EconTalk on my long commute to try and make sense of what was going on. This habit developed into a sort of DIY economics education and eventually led to my collaboration with EconTalk host Russ Roberts on the original Keynes vs. Hayek rap battle in 2010, followed up by round two in 2011.
Both videos had their viral moments and have maintained a cult following to this day. We’re actually reviving the format at this very moment over on Radical Discourse, with Hamilton vs. Jefferson, Marx vs. Friedman, and more to come every Friday.
The financial crisis marked the end of what economists call the Great Moderation: a steady period of falling volatility and rising prosperity, roughly from Ronald Reagan taking office to 2008. The Soviet Union finally succumbed to the fatal flaws of communism and there was a real consensus that democratic republics and free markets were the recipe for success. Marxism, communism, and socialism were fringe positions in mainstream culture, only held by whack job academics. Now that consensus has been rejected, at least in part, by just about everybody.
In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the Occupy Wall Street movement gave us a glimpse of the socialist revival underway today. Our country had begun its slide into an identity crisis.
The 2020 COVID Crisis
The second time I, and everyone else, felt like the world was crashing down was when COVID hit.
In the years leading up to 2020, I was alarmed by the psychological state of my son’s Gen Z peers. America was raising a generation that, frankly, didn’t want freedom. They couldn’t handle the risks inherent in making choices for themselves.
Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind, arrived at just the right time to make sense of the generalized anxiety and lack of agency I was observing. I ultimately began producing a documentary on the topic and found myself interviewing Jonathan Haidt at NYU in March 2020. Ironic timing.
The world shut down, and everything I was worried about was about to get magnified a thousandfold. The anxiety, the social isolation, the tyranny, the collapse of freedom. And soon, the rise of a kind of radical politics America hadn’t seen since the early 1970s.
The 2026 Socialist Crisis
Wisconsin’s Democratic Party just barely avoided nominating Francesca Hong, an avowed socialist, for governor. She lost, which is good, but 300,000 Democrats voted for her anyway. The Democratic Socialists of America (+17%) now poll better among Democrats than congressional Democrats (+4%) do. Favorable views of capitalism among Democrats have fallen from 51% in 2010 to 42% today, while favorable views of socialism have climbed from 50% in 2010 to 66% today. And let’s not forget, Kamala Harris almost won in 2024. The “almost” might buy us some time, but it’s not much comfort.
It’s not just a series of close calls either. AOC, Ilhan Omar, and friends have been in Congress for almost a decade at this point. Zohran Mamdani won the NYC mayoral election on a socialist platform. “Progressive” Abdul El-Sayed won his Senate primary in Michigan just a couple weeks ago. While the original “Squad” leaned heavily on environmental and immigration issues, the current wave of left-wing victories is built around affordability messaging with a side of pro-Palestine virtue signalling.
On the issue of affordability, it’s easy to see why they’re succeeding. Groceries are up 33% since 2019, nearly half of renters spend over 30% of their income on housing, and 95% of Americans feel that we’re in a genuine affordability crisis. That’s the soil this movement is growing in.
Part of the problem is that, for decades, we’ve undersold how socialistic many parts of American life already have become. So when the socialist comes along and says, “Look how capitalism has screwed you over! Only socialism can save you!”, the pitch makes sense to a lot of young voters.
The Israel-Palestine stuff concerns me in a different way. The reaction after October 7th brought all of this to a head for me. I’m not Jewish and I don’t exactly have a dog in the fight, but watching young people who claim to care about social justice, feminism, and LGBT rights embrace Hamas outright was inexplicable.
I don’t even think it’s really about Israel, Hamas, or the Middle East in general. The moral logic is largely inconsistent, completely overlooking far worse tragedies and atrocities in conflicts like the Syrian Civil War. The reality is that this issue is being used as a wedge to drive a destabilized generation toward groups like the DSA, whose actual platform is to overthrow the constitutional order.
How to Save America
The documentary I began making before COVID ended up transforming into Dad Saves America. With the podcast boom during lockdowns, it made sense to take advantage of the new media environment.
Fundamentally, what I’m trying to do with Dad Saves America is to argue the case for Americanism. That includes liberty, limited government, a belief in equal human dignity, and an understanding that humans are fundamentally flawed. I will alternately call myself conservative or libertarian, but I think American is the best term to sum up my worldview.
Today’s political challenges highlight more than ever that the American project doesn’t sustain itself on its own. Young adults who’ve never been taught the worldwide historical reality of human suffering, whether through economic deprivation or violence, aren’t set up to draw reasonable conclusions about economics or geopolitics. They have no reliable context to interpret the world around them. Add in social media, AI chatbots, and the mental health issues that follow, and you can’t be surprised when they vote for radicals of all sorts.
Saving America means continually making the case for America. That’s what I try to do here.