• I teach calculus at Berkeley. Some of my students can’t do middle school math - The San Francisco Standard

• Our collective statement on the death of Professor Jason Arday - Amnesty International

• National Museum of African American History and Culture Releases “Talking About Race” Web Portal - National Museum of African American History & Culture

• The Supreme Court Strikes Down Affirmative Action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina - Congress.gov

• Race Relations - Gallup

• Left Ramps Up Its Demands For Sweeping Online Censorship, From The US To UK To EU - Public News

• After a Scholar's Awful Death, Mistaken Calls for Censorship - New York Times

• Preferential Policies: An International Perspective - Thomas Sowell

• Intellectuals and Race - Thomas Sowell

• White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era - Shelby Steele

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We get into:

• Growing up in China during WWII and the rise of Mao

• Why the West is a “cut flower civilization”

• The golden triangle of freedom, virtue, and faith

• Why atheism conflicts with free will

• Whether Islam can adapt to Western norms

• The Hebrew Republic’s overlooked influence on America’s founding

• The rise of antisemitism on the left and right

• What it will take for the West to come home to its own roots

Order a copy of “Our Civilizational Moment: The Waning of the West and the War of the Worlds”: https://a.co/d/0bdSVQbY

Order a copy of “America Agonistes: America’s 250th and the Restoration of a Nation in Conflict with Itself and Its Past”: https://a.co/d/0eL4mAbN

Outline:
[0:00] Growing up in China in the 1940s
[2:34] Eastern VS Western Civilization
[6:53] The roots of the West have been cut
[16:14] Freedom, virtue, and faith
[27:51] Civility and truth in public discourse
[36:59] Can people be equal without faith?
[40:19] Christianity is anti-utopian
[48:21] Is an Islamic Reformation possible?
[59:07] Are there limits to free speech?
[1:10:21] The Jewish influence on the Founding Fathers
[1:17:35] How can Christians and Jews work together?
[1:25:48] Why are Jews so influential in the West?
[1:35:53] The elitist-populist divide
[1:42:04] The role of entrepreneurship in freedom
[1:46:32] Man’s Search for Meaning

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/-j-QB93yegU

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/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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This show began in response to the mental health crisis I saw emerging among my son’s peers. Then COVID lockdowns hit and turned my worst-case predictions into reality. Now, socialism is sweeping the Democratic Party and young women are marching in support of Hamas, all while social media continues to poison the minds of our kids.

As I like to say, the 1990s were the peak of Western civilization. The Cold War had been won, the economy was relatively stable, and our politics didn’t feel existential. Most importantly, both parties agreed that America was fundamentally good.

That consensus is dead. If the next generation no longer believes in the system that built the world they’ll inherit, what comes next?

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

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/PMpTTQQb3AI

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 get into:

• Why shame, done right, is essential to raising well behaved kids

• How gentle parenting and white guilt are burning down Western civilization

• Why the left refuses to try proven solutions in education

• The consequences of failing to teach our true history

• Why AI can never replace the relationship a great teacher builds with a child

• Her case for government intervention regarding social media and smartphones

• The vision behind Strictly Education and why she wanted to team up with Dad Saves America

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

My first interview with Katharine: https://youtu.be/uLmb3as-MQc?si=Qfd_7vXHLOcW7ym2

Watch “Strictly Education”: https://youtu.be/UpTqPSSOMn0?si=pUkovSuiHgCs2p0n

Follow Katharine Birbalsingh on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/Miss_Snuffy

Outline:

[0:00] Why launch Strictly Education?

[15:39] What’s happening to young women?

[20:40] Can free-range parenting work in 2026?

[30:56] What does “culture” actually mean?

[35:49] Bad behavior thrives on attention

[42:46] Why shame is useful in the classroom

[52:43] White guilt is destroying civilization

[1:00:07] Why the left attacks real solutions

[1:08:55] Kids are being lied to about our history

[1:18:26] You can’t teach critical thinking

[1:27:01] Is technology a net-negative in education?

[1:32:06] How do we keep kids off social media?

[1:50:55] Gentle parenting, adulthood, and the death of God

[1:58:05] How should we teach the Western canon?

[2:05:51] We’ve literally dumbed-down 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/WrCd_oec5VE

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/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

On Wednesday, July 29th, Republican senators questioned the lying weasel about his time as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci didn’t answer one question. Instead, he repeated over 100 times, “Under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”

More than six years after the world shut down, a moment like this should’ve felt cathartic. However, all it did was drudge up the insurmountable anger, loss, and grief that many of us have tried to put behind us. This sociopath was pardoned and continues to face no real consequences, so yes, people are still mad.

Dr. Fauci is certainly the highest-profile villain of COVID, but he isn’t the only villain. Perhaps it’s easier to be angrier at him than at the people whose betrayal was the most personal: our friends, neighbors, coworkers, and even family members who would have gladly turned us into the gulag for refusing to comply with lockdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates. It isn’t healthy to hold onto anger and resentment forever, but it also isn’t healthy to be abused for years and then pretend that nothing happened, allowing the abuse to be repeated in the future.

The most disturbing and eye-opening aspect of the COVID era was how children were treated as sacrificial lambs. Viewing COVID as an existential threat, otherwise normal adults forgot basic principles of childhood development. Children were locked in their homes, forced onto screens, masked, deprived of important life events, pitted against one another, told they were going to kill Grandma, and taught to fear the air they breathed. Then they were given experimental shots, all for a virus that posed virtually zero threat to them.

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The total damage COVID policies did to children is impossible to measure. According to an Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health meta analysis from 2021, “A high prevalence of COVID-19-related fear was noted among children and adolescents, as well as more depressive and anxious symptoms compared with prepandemic estimates. Older adolescents, girls, and children and adolescents living with neurodiversities and/or chronic physical conditions were more likely to experience negative mental health outcomes. Many studies reported mental health deterioration among children and adolescents due to COVID-19 pandemic control measures.”

In the name of COVID “safety,” children’s physical health was also compromised. Ironically, COVID had minimal health effects on children, but keeping them isolated at home, out of the sunlight, away from sports, with limited access to healthcare services had a significant negative impact on their health. In May of 2021, the NIH concluded, “Harms of school closure on child and adolescent health seem to exceed some indicators of positive health care system effects.” This study emphasized the damage from decreased access to school-based services, especially for lower income families and children with disabilities.

Many people hope that one day, Anthony Fauci will answer for his role in the tyrannical government overreach of COVID. But what about everyone else? What responsibility belongs to government officials, school administrators, healthcare leaders, employers, journalists, and ordinary citizens who enforced or cheered on these policies? At what point does “following orders” stop being an excuse? Those are uncomfortable questions, but they are necessary to ask.

If you still feel angry, you’re not alone. Don’t let anyone convince you that remembering what happened is the same as refusing to heal. Sometimes it’s a sign that something profoundly wrong happened and was never acknowledged, let alone corrected. Forgiveness and healing do not require pretending that the abuse never occurred.

The goal is not to remain consumed by resentment. It’s to learn from the past, demand accountability where it’s warranted, and make sure that children are never forced to bear this kind of burden again.

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

• 2021 DSA Member Survey Report - DSA North Star

• Progressive Candidate Wins Michigan Democratic Senate Nomination - Wall Street Journal

• The Road to Serfdom - F. A. Hayek

• Abdul for US Senate

• We're on you side! - Reddit

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We get into:

• What masculinity is really all about

• The moment Nick’s co-host changed the way he gives advice

• Why conservatives aren’t getting through to radicalized young men

• What he’s observed raising both a son and daughters

• How he and his wife built a successful marriage and family

• Why Christianity gets results, even if you can’t see it yet

American Hartford Gold can help you protect your wealth with precious metals! Contact them today to get up to $20,000 in free silver on your first order! Call 888-650-9836, or text DAD to 65532, or click here find out more: https://offers.americanhartfordgold.com/content-affiliate/?Leadsource=Affiliate&utm_sfcampaign=701Nv00000hAYCcIAO

Order a copy of “The Manbook”: https://a.co/d/0iZo3I5Y

Follow Nick Freitas on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/NickJFreitas?s=20

Watch “Making the Argument” on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Nickjfreitas

Outline:

[0:00] What does it mean to be a man?

[2:59] How can we speak effectively to young men?

[16:56] The woke revolution in corporate America

[30:19 30:22] Compassion has become victimhood worship

[38:30] Is ideology downstream of technology?

[47:22] Men blame objects and women blame themselves

[55:45] How do we protect girls from bad influences?

[1:05:58] Gen Z’s expectations are off

[1:15:09] Are we overthinking our problems?

[1:22:38] Marriage is hard because life is hard

[1:36:10] Cause and effect is a good guide to truth

[1:41:45] What does a healthy identity look like?

[1:56:28] Why losing his Congressional election was a blessing

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/-GC5BjyhctA

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/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

That’s true. He should’ve stopped there. But Mamdani kept going, arguing that the past few months have shown that, to the contrary, socialists do understand economics. The supposed proof was that he’d solved “years of [capitalist] mismanagement through the embrace of [socialist] principles.”

So how did he pull off this “socialist miracle”? Well, he convinced Governor Hochul to provide a multi-billion dollar bailout, he used some accounting magic to delay pension payments, and he implemented new taxes on the rich. We’ll see how many of them actually stay to pay those taxes.

One potentially good thing he did was install “chief savings officers” in city agencies, tasked with finding 2.5% in wasteful spending to cut for 2027 and 2028. Not exactly a high bar, but we can hope, right?

Balancing the budget by asking the state to bail out NYC reminds me of how, until January of this year, Venezuela used to subsidize the Cuban regime with oil shipments. So I guess he’s right that “socialist principles” have come to his rescue.

Expanding on his budgetary miracle, he said, “There’s nothing fiscally responsible about balancing the budget on the backs of working people.” In context, he was referencing the fact that they’d refused to cut any of the countless services the city provides for its residents. But he revealed something deeper about his worldview with that statement. He’s implying that budgetary sanity, a matter of hard numbers, is somehow subject to a timeless battle between the rich and the working class. The oppressor and the oppressed.

Socialism. Communism. Marxism. Call it what you want, but that’s the Mamdani playbook.

The Zombie Labor Theory of Value

Let’s start with the idea underneath all of it: the labor theory of value. Marxism holds that the value of something is measured by the cost of its inputs, chiefly labor. Work harder, work longer, and the thing you made is worth more. It sounds intuitive, and it’s true in a very limited sense. All else equal, working harder or working longer hours does result in more value created. But working eight hours using primitive tools is unlikely to be more productive than two hours using cutting-edge technology. Digging holes in the desert for a whole day is worth exactly the same as spending just 15 minutes on the task: $0.00.

In the 1870s, three economists working independently, the Austrian Carl Menger, the Englishman William Stanley Jevons, and the Frenchman Léon Walras, all converged on what’s now called the Marginal Revolution. They showed that value isn’t set by the cost of inputs at all. It’s set at the margin, at the intersection of supply and demand. It doesn’t matter how hard I worked or how long something took to make. If nobody wants it, it isn’t worth anything. Value rises as supply contracts or demand expands, and it falls as supply expands or demand contracts, regardless of the production cost.

So the founding assumption of Marxian economics was overturned before the Soviet Union ever pulled Marx out of obscurity and put him to use. Somehow, that theory is now baked into the politics of our country’s greatest city.

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Supply Creates Demand

There’s an even older idea underneath all of this: the law of markets, also known as Say’s Law. Properly understood, it says demand is made possible by supply. Your income is a function of how much you can produce. If you want to buy more, you have to get better at making more.

This is where Marxism runs into its deepest problem. Because it starts from a faulty theory of value, it also assumes the world is a zero-sum game.

If the labor theory of value were true, then anyone profiting off your labor would be stealing from you in some sense. Under that framework, labor has a one-to-one relationship with value creation, so any “surplus value” must be the result of a conspiracy against your interests. The next logical step is that, if you want to claw back your stolen wages, wealth must be redistributed, either through negotiation or by force.

Of course, that’s not actually how the material world works. The average American is wealthier today than a century ago because of technology, not because workers got better at collective bargaining. Income is a direct function of how much we can produce, and we increase what we can produce through technological innovation. The Industrial Revolution let us make more with every hour of effort. Capital, what Adam Smith called stored labor, gets invested in tools and machines so we can level up our productivity.

Here’s how the mechanism actually plays out. Say I’m a farmer and I invest in a tractor. I’m suddenly producing five times more wheat than before. I’m not the only one who can see the opportunity. Every other farmer either makes the same investment or loses market share to whoever can sell for less. Total output climbs, and food gets cheaper across the board.

Now, say I’m the blacksmith down the road. I still need to eat. As the cost of food collapses because farmers have new technology, my wages effectively rise as a share of what it costs to put dinner on the table. That’s how wages actually go up across the board. They’re the product of supply, not negotiation. We can’t all bargain our way to more if the total amount of stuff to go around is fixed. All you can do is redistribute what already exists. Growing the total requires making more, and making more requires technology.

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Good Luck, NYC!

A state bailout doesn’t create new wealth, it just moves next year’s problem onto Albany’s balance sheet. Delaying pension payments doesn’t the obligations disappear, it just kicks them down the road. Treating the rich like the city’s piggy bank works great, until they leave. Rebranding DOGE as “responsible socialist governance” isn’t the worst option for NYC, but the targets Mamdani has set are nowhere near the size of the hole being papered over.

Every piece of Mamdani’s “socialist miracle” is the same move: treat the city’s finances as a fixed amount to be divided differently, rather than something to grow. The only way NYC can actually get the numbers to work past 2027 is the same way the farmer, the blacksmith, or any economy ever has.

Building beats bargaining every time, and no accounting trick can change that.

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• Tony's Diary - Senator Rand Paul

• Research on Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Influenza Virus: The Way Forward - National Library of Medicine

• Blumenthal and Whitehouse Call on Twitter to Inform All Users Who Interacted with Russian Accounts Promoting #ReleaseTheMemo and #SchumerShutdown - Senator Richard Blumenthal

• 'I'm not a progressive': Fetterman breaks with the left, showing a maverick side - NBC News

• Public Opinion - Walter Lippmann

• Propaganda - Edward L. Bernays

• Dr. Anthony Fauci: The Highest Paid Employee In The Entire U.S. Federal Government - Forbes

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We get into:

• Why University of Florida ranks #1 and Harvard lands at #37

• What the 68 variables in this new ranking system actually measure

• Why US News & World Report rankings almost never change, even as elite campuses melt down

• How faculty became activists, and why even tenured professors self-censor

• What DEI bureaucracies did to schools like the University of Michigan

• The three competing purposes of the university: personal development, job training, and politics

• Why universities are alienating the students they need most

American Hartford Gold can help you protect your wealth with precious metals! Contact them today to get up to $20,000 in free silver on your first order! Call 888-650-9836, or text DAD to 65532, or click here find out more: https://offers.americanhartfordgold.com/content-affiliate/?Leadsource=Affiliate&utm_sfcampaign=701Nv00000hAYCcIAO

City Journal College Rankings: https://collegerankings.city-journal.org/rankings

https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/college-rankings/PDFs/CollegeRankings.pdf

Outline:

[0:00] Universities have lost public trust

[6:59 7:12] What happened on campus in 2015?

[16:38] How universities became ideological

[24:33] What is the purpose of education?

[37:00] Should we think of college as career training?

[45:38] Campus politics is a status game

[53:51] The self-censorship tipping point

[1:07:40] Why don’t academics like debate?

[1:19:09] How academics view American society

[1:26:43] Has a diploma become a meaningless credential?

[1:35:29] How colleges stack up in 2026

[1:57:35] University governance is broken

[2:06:48] The tension between public funding and academic freedom

[2:19:23] Higher ed is about to drop off a demographic cliff

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/IaLNRUlScJk

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/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

While “bipartisanship” is usually invoked to describe a handful of moderate Democrats or Republicans voting with the other party on a particular issue, often something most voters don’t even support, in this case it’s real. Recent surveys show that 63% of Americans support a one year moratorium, including 67% of Democrats, 66% of independents, and 58% of Republicans. Asked in a slightly different way, 71% oppose the construction of AI data centers in their local area.

An important fact to keep in mind is that popularity is not some infallible metric of right and wrong or good and bad ideas. Fads and moral panics come and go all the time. A poll is not an argument. Even when a bipartisan consensus correctly identifies a problem, the rushed “solutions” politicians offer probably won’t help. They’re more likely to be stunts they can tout in their reelection campaigns to prove they’re on the “right side of history.”

According to those surveys, more Americans worry about data centers in their neighborhoods (71%) than data centers in general (63%). So should we be talking about one-size-fits-all national policies or practical problem-solving on the local level?

The Energy Question

Of all the worries about data centers, spiking residential electricity prices have dominated the public conversation. These facilities draw enormous amounts of power, so following the laws of supply and demand, you’d expect prices to rise accordingly. Elizabeth Warren has claimed that in some areas, electricity bills have increased by up to 267% over the past five years. Her solution, as always, is to increase taxes on data centers, since they were “built on American land using our shared resources,” whatever that means.

So are data centers causing a nationwide energy crisis? The truth is more complicated. First, the number Warren cited is extremely misleading. While whole-sale electricity prices have increased by up to 267%, that only represents a fraction of the bills paid by households. It doesn’t account for the costs of transportation, distribution, or taxes.

Her claim also ignores inflation, which peaked during the exact time period she was referencing. If you look at nationwide average prices adjusted for inflation, they’re up about 10-15% from the most recent low point in 2021. However, that was preceded by a roughly equivalent decline during the first Trump administration. Today’s prices are just around where they’d floated from 2007 to 2017.

But that’s just the national average, which could be obscuring localized spikes near data centers. Virginia leads the country in data center buildout, followed by Texas. So those states must have out of control electricity costs, right? In reality, both states are 10-15% below the national average. California, which has a similar number of currently operating data centers as Texas, has double the electricity costs. Whatever the impact of data centers may be, other factors clearly play a much larger role in the bills households have to pay.

Part of why data centers don’t appear to be spiking electricity costs is also a function of supply and demand. Earlier this year, the Trump administration negotiated the Ratepayer Protection Pledge with the biggest players in AI to encourage the buildout of new power sources to cover their electricity consumption. This is a win-win: increased supply and economies of scale mean that both residents and data center operators can avoid massive price spikes.

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An Undeniable Problem

So if electricity costs aren’t really the problem they initially appeared to be, what are all the complaints about? Unfortunately, building a power plant next to a data center instead of connecting to the grid has one big downside: it’s loud.

In Sterling, Virginia, there’s a new data center located just across the street from a residential neighborhood. Its generators run 24/7, forcing residents to listen to a constant high pitched ringing, “almost like you have a headache.” This is obviously a disaster for quality of life, and if they want to move elsewhere, they’ll likely take a price hit when they try to sell their homes.

I lived in New York City for many years, and when I later moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, I discovered the simple luxury of quiet. Without the horn honking and trucks driving over metal plates outside of my apartment all night long, I experienced dramatically lower ambient levels of stress and anxiety. That luxury has been stripped from these communities. Living in NYC, I knew that was part of the package. But for this community in Virginia and elsewhere across the country, the noise has radically changed the deal they signed up for when they bought their homes.

Again, however, like Elizabeth Warren’s claims about electricity prices, there remains the question of how prevalent this problem actually is and whether there are fairly straightforward, win-win solutions on the table. It’s not obvious why you don’t just… build a data center away from residential neighborhoods. The United States isn’t exactly known for having too little land. Halting data center construction nationwide is treating a paper cut with amputation.

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Our Ancient Anxieties

All of the practical concerns about AI data centers, reasonable if not always accurate, distract from a much more fundamental anxiety: what will be left for humans to do once AI advances far enough?

If we can trust centuries of historical precedent, there’s an economic concept to answer this question. It’s known as the Jevons paradox: when technology allows us to use a resource more efficiently, we use more of that resource, not less. William Stanley Jevons noticed in the 19th century that, as steam engines were improved to run more efficiently, we didn’t consume less coal. That would be the intuitive result, since you could do more work with less. We also didn’t consume the same amount of coal, even though we could again do more work with that. Instead, we consumed more coal, because there now was an economic incentive to find new industrial applications of steam engines.

The question here is: does AI replace human labor, or does it amplify the power of human labor?

In my experience, it’s both. Over the past year, I’ve been building apps to improve my everyday workflow and doing deep research for Dad Saves America that I never could have done before. I’m not just not spending time on tasks I had before. I’m doing completely new tasks, while getting everything else done in less time, because of AI.

The uncomfortable reality is that, yes, many jobs will disappear as we know them today, but the concept of a job will not. New ways to mix human labor with technology will continue to be discovered, as they always have been.

This is the story of every technological revolution in human history. It’s the story of the Luddites, the 19th century English textile workers who smashed the new machines. The irony is that they themselves relied on stocking frames, a technology that had put the old hand-knitters out of work less than 200 years earlier. The people fighting the new machines were, as usual, living off the second-to-newest ones.

Their anxiety was understandable, just as ours is now. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t step back, see the historical pattern, and realize that “this time is different” is what we’ve always said.

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• 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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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

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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

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• 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/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠