Earlier this week, we discussed this case of Lindsay Clancy, a horrifying case in which a woman was, in my opinion, obviously suffering from postpartum psychosis and then killed three of her children and tried to commit suicide.
It&#8217;s a horrifying case.
There are differences between postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis. They have the same basic cause, but very, very different effects.
There are a bunch of women who are now taking advantage of the fact that there is sympathy for a woman who had serious psychosis, destroyed three lives, and then destroyed her own in the most horrible fashion. These women are trying to claim that they have the same issues that Lindsay Clancy did.
If you do, you should be hospitalized immediately.
That&#8217;s the reality. You should be in a mental hospital. Lindsay Clancy should have been in a mental hospital because she had postpartum psychosis, which made her dangerous to herself and others.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2490?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
If you are saying you are the same as Lindsay Clancy, that is because you are truly self-serving and narcissistic — or you&#8217;re dangerous. Those are the only two choices. That’s because if you&#8217;re pretending you&#8217;re the same as the person who killed her three kids with an exercise band and then tried to commit suicide by cutting her wrist and jumping out of the second story window, then either you really ought to be under professional care 24 hours a day in an institution or you are a bad person, because what you&#8217;re doing here is not the same thing.
Conflating these things is not rational, reasonable, or sympathetic. If what you&#8217;re trying to say is, “I&#8217;m suffering from postpartum depression,” you can do that without identifying with the woman who must wish she had never suffered from it.
TikTok is rotting brains, absolutely rotting brains. A woman released a TikTok in which she wrote, “Same, Lindsay.”
“Same, Lindsay” is not a trend. If you put out a video that says “Same, Lindsay,” we should immediately investigate you and put you in a mental hospital because one of two things is happening: Either you are saying that you feel the same way Lindsay Clancy did right before she murdered her children because she had postpartum psychosis — in which case you need to be looked at under professional care full-time — or you are searching for empathy from people who are bereft of any sense of rationality.
This is bad, self-serving, narcissistic — and it&#8217;s trash. It&#8217;s a trash thing to do. TikTok is making people stupid, narcissistic, and ridiculous. These videos are ridiculous.
Allie Beth Stuckey tweeted, “Your wife probably shouldn&#8217;t be on TikTok.”
Yup. If you&#8217;re taking a video of yourself saying, “Same, Lindsay,” with you crying, with you so depressed that you feel like you can&#8217;t handle things, what are you doing on TikTok?
Shouldn&#8217;t you be doing something else to make yourself happy? This is not where happiness lives. This self-centeredness is disgusting. It is gross and vile and morally wrong.
You&#8217;re making a category error again. Postpartum depression is real. Get the treatment you need.
Postpartum psychosis is real, and you should probably be in an institution until you are properly medicated and you reach a point where we know that you&#8217;re not a risk to yourself or others.
But if you&#8217;re a person who&#8217;s suffering and you don&#8217;t have either of those things, it’s wrong to identify as what you are not.
And if you are a person who has postpartum depression and you are likening yourself to the woman who murdered her children, what are you doing?

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TikTok Trend Rotting Our Culture From The Inside

Ben Shapiro

Lindsay Clancy

Opinion

You&#8217;re walking around a major city late at night. It&#8217;s supposed to be safe.
Suddenly, the entire street is filled with teenagers, disproportionately black, beating the living hell out of each other.
Welcome to teen takeovers, the hot new social media trend that is upending law and order and decency.
But if you comment on it, you are a racist.
Victimhood isn&#8217;t just a drug that intoxicates people with the feeling that they could get away with anything; it is used as a shield against criticism and against decency. This is how our idiot society works.
I was unfamiliar with teen takeovers until I was browsing online. My staff made me aware of this.
It is insane.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2489?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Videos from Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta, and Brooklyn show gigantic mobs of young people, almost all black, running through the streets, wailing on each other, and taking over intersections.
Heather Mac Donald wrote in <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/article/teen-takeovers-streets-us-cities-looting">City Journal</a>:
<blockquote>Takeovers are organized on social media, with anonymous flyers summoning mass gatherings. The exact location may remain undisclosed until the last minute. The notices sometimes draw on gangster rap and Black Power imagery, featuring masked men and raised fists. Others are less ominous. A flyer for a teen “trend” (another label for the phenomenon) on a South Shore Chicago beach this spring called for “no drama” and showed a cartoon figure with its naked butt thrust out in twerking stance.
Not all takeovers devolve into violence, but when they do, social media again snaps into play. Dozens of phones are held aloft in the hope of making a viral video. Violence has acquired a performative, specular quality, as though staged for maximum circulation online.</blockquote>
Detroit&#8217;s Memorial Day ended with a 16-year-old and a 14-year-old getting shot. In Edmond, Oklahoma, an 18-year-old was killed, and 22 were injured. In Florida, they were in Clearwater, Tampa, and Orlando; in North Carolina, they showed up in Charlotte. They occurred in Delaware. Children&#8217;s carnivals in Illinois, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Houston have been canceled in response to mass disorder.
Cities are now proposing new tactics and laws to eliminate the so-called teen takeovers.
When it comes to these teen takeovers, which are reminiscent of the flash-mobbing that happened for years, there are two issues.
The first is teen criminality. The second is how society reacts to teen criminality. These two issues reinforce one another.
A 2023 study from the Institute for Family Studies showed that a huge percentage of this stems from single motherhood. The total crime rate in cities with high levels of single parenthood is 48% higher than in those with low levels of single parenthood.
When it comes to violent crime and homicide, cities with high levels of single parenthood have 118% higher rates of violence and 255% higher rates of homicide.
I would suggest the vast majority of teenagers participating in this sort of criminality don&#8217;t have a dad in the home. Well over 50% of all black kids in America are growing up in a home with no dad.
That is not because of racism. That is because of government-driven welfare policy over the last 60 years.
The government is not a replacement for a father. The government cannot organize late-night teen get-togethers and pretend they are the same thing as a sleepover with your friends while your dad is at home.
When the government tries to be your parents, it makes things significantly worse because it acts as a permissive parent that lets you do whatever you want.
This is not a racial issue. It&#8217;s a cultural issue. But here is what brings us to the second issue: If you comment on bad behavior by teenagers, and those teenagers are predominantly young black males, ages 15 to 34 — a demographic wildly overrepresented among violent offenders — you are deemed a racist, even if you are not talking about race.
That&#8217;s the get-out-of-jail-free card, which brings us to the second part of this conversation: what society ought to do with teen criminality.
A normal society&#8217;s reaction to all criminality is quite simple. You punish the perpetrator. It doesn&#8217;t matter who&#8217;s doing the crime or whether they&#8217;re black, white, brown, or green.
The reaction of a broken society is that we can&#8217;t punish certain types of criminals, or even notice that the crime is happening, or even cover it in the news because it might cause racism.
This is a massive societal vulnerability. And guess who preys on that massive societal vulnerability?
The people who like to violate society&#8217;s rules.
This is where the conversation always gets sensitive. So I&#8217;m going to define some terms so we&#8217;re living in the land of logic, not the land of feelings.
That’s because whenever anyone talks about race in America, immediately everyone goes to racism and the accusation that you&#8217;re engaging in racism by even acknowledging a problem.
According to the great economist-philosopher Thomas Sowell, there are three types of discrimination. Only one of them is the really bad type that you&#8217;re thinking about right now.
The first is type I-A. This is when we judge things and people based on differences in quality. You judge each person as an individual, regardless of what group that person is a part of. That&#8217;s fine. It is the kind of discrimination you do every day, such as going to a restaurant and discriminating between menu items. You&#8217;re determining which one is better, which one is worse, which one you want, and which one you don&#8217;t.
Type I-A discrimination is a totally anodyne type of discrimination where you are judging a thing or person by its individual qualities.
Type I-B discrimination is when individuals are judged by empirical evidence about the group they&#8217;re part of, despite no animosity or aversion toward particular groups. This is where you don&#8217;t have any information about the person standing in front of you, but you know the group statistics about a person who fits those characteristics.
Sowell says that&#8217;s not morally wrong. That is you operating on the basis of information you have, not operating as though you are blind to information that you have. We do that all the time too. If you take it out of the realm of race, then it makes perfect sense.
Type II discrimination is the bad type of discrimination. This is treating people negatively based on arbitrary aversions or animosity. In this case, you have no basis for treating someone badly. The group identity you&#8217;re thrusting on someone doesn&#8217;t exist, or you have a bizarre version of that group identity that is not backed by data.
Type I-B is the one that makes us uncomfortable, because we&#8217;ve taught people that noticing group differences is a problem. If you notice them, then you are immediately categorized as Type II.
I understand the impulse. We don&#8217;t want to judge people based on immutable characteristics that have no bearing on behavior. But these are two separate types of discrimination. One makes sense, and one does not. Type I-B is not Type II.
Here&#8217;s an example that has nothing to do with race.
A woman is walking down the street at 1 a.m. A young man, no race mentioned, is coming toward her, walking down the street wearing a hoodie. She crosses the street.
If there had been a young woman walking down the street in the same hoodie, the first woman wouldn’t have crossed the street. Is that because she&#8217;s a sexist, or is that because she&#8217;s operating on the data that she has, which is that men are typically more likely than women to inflict violence on women late at night walking down the street?
It may turn out that the dude in the hoodie is actually a mathematician at MIT and the lady is a serial killer. But without individual data, she has to operate on the group data she has.
What we have trained people to do in Western civilization — to have an abundance of caution and a fear of our own innate racism — is to be moronic. Now you are a racist or a sexist if you make a decision based on group data in the absence of individual data. If you do Type I-B discrimination, you are somehow the bad guy.
This is what villains prey on. A villain would act in ugly, antisocial, criminal ways, but when you point it out, he would say that you&#8217;re only judging him that way because you&#8217;re engaging in Type II discrimination — baseless, evidence-free discrimination.
But you&#8217;re not even engaging in Type I-B discrimination. You&#8217;re engaging in Type I-A discrimination. You&#8217;re judging them as an individual. You&#8217;re saying, “You did a criminal thing. You should go to jail. And anyone who does criminal things should go to jail.”
This is not racist. But we have taught a huge swath of Americans that if they accuse you of racism, they can get away with literally anything.
This has become extremely common in everyday life.
Everyone ought to play by the rules, and it is not racist to say so.
And it is disgusting to charge people with racism for saying that.

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How One Word Became America’s Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Card

Lindsay Clancy murdered her three kids. This is not disputed, but the internet is doing what it always does, turning a horrific tragedy into a dumb morality play. The hot takes that you&#8217;re seeing everywhere are pretty much all garbage.
The case is about mental illness and postpartum psychosis and a field of medical care, psychiatry, that is far less competent and knowledgeable than people very often believe.
Many psychiatrists will tell you this: The human brain is a mystery. We don&#8217;t know very much about it. It is not like a broken leg. It is not as though you hurt your spleen.
Much of the narrative hot takes online about Lindsay Clancy have been disturbingly stupid and idiotic. There are real questions that we have to ask, about things like overdiagnosis of various conditions, or about relations between male and female, or the difficulties of childbearing and mirroring.
That is not this case.
This case is a very specific set of facts. And the big takeaway, for me, is that mental illness is real. The practice of psychiatry is rudimentary. You have to take extraordinary care when you&#8217;re dealing with people who have severe mental illness, and that includes psychiatrists, who have a tremendously difficult job because they&#8217;re dealing with people who are legitimately psychotic in many cases.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-2488?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
But it is also true that the care can be spotty sometimes. It&#8217;s not comprehensive enough. These are difficult problems, and sometimes there is no easy solution.
I know we&#8217;re always looking for the easy take or the easy solution. Sometimes there just isn&#8217;t one.
One reason the case became a hot topic was that Clancy&#8217;s parents started a GoFundMe for their living expenses while they cared for Lindsay.
Between her paralysis and the trial proceedings, the goal is $2 million. About $850,000 has been raised so far, with most of the accompanying comments coming from moms sympathizing with Lindsay because of her postpartum psychosis.
I don&#8217;t have a hot take on this situation.
If you are saying that this situation is “just like me,” it isn&#8217;t. It&#8217;s an actual psychological condition that is different from your own psychiatric condition.
It&#8217;s not the same thing.
There are some morons and lib women on TikTok who are trying to argue that Clancy shouldn&#8217;t be prosecuted at all, and that her husband is somehow the killer, because we have all frontally lobotomized ourselves with the internet. We&#8217;ve made ourselves massively dumber.
Then there is the generalized conservative response you sometimes see: “Lindsay Clancy was not the victim. Her children were.”
No one is denying the victimhood of the kids. No one, no one, no one. 
I can&#8217;t even look at the pictures.
I have five children of my own, including a newborn. I can&#8217;t look at the pictures. It&#8217;s horrific.
That is not the question in this case. The question is whether she was in her right mind enough to be held responsible for her actions in that way. She is likely going to go to a psychiatric ward for the rest of her life because of this.
The idea that she&#8217;s just going to be released and be out on the street waiting to kill again is not what we are talking about here.
And then there are some people who say that we should get rid of the insanity plea altogether and simply execute psychotic killers.
That is a vast gap from the traditional biblical response to the problem of human agency. If it were a binary choice between “Let psychiatric psychotic killers roam free,” or “kill them,”  I would choose to kill them. That’s because you have to prefer the interests of society over the interests of the psychotic killer.
But that is not the choice. One of the choices is involuntary commitment for as long as it takes, in order to ensure that the person is sane. That is likely to be, in this particular case, the rest of her life, because the psychotic break can happen at any time. As we know, she was under psychiatric care; she was released and then did the crime.
But all of this speaks to the difficulty that we have in not being able to deal with certain facts of life.
Not all problems are immediately solvable.

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The Darkest Question In The Lindsay Clancy Case

I know Rep. Nancy Mace. She’s a nice lady, but has always been a rather attention-seeking political personality. 
This goes all the way back to 1999, when she successfully integrated The Citadel – the men’s military academy. Then she ran for Congress, where she has been rather performative while in office. 
She made big headlines over the weekend because she decided to do a body reveal on national TV. According to the <a href="https://nypost.com/2026/08/16/us-news/rep-nancy-mace-reveals-new-tattoos-as-she-launches-youtube-show-after-losing-political-career/">New York Post</a>:
<blockquote>Back in February, she said she got nine tattoos in rapid succession to mark the exodus of staffers from her office <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/11/02/news/nancy-mace-memo-dubs-her-thought-leader-pushes-self-promotion-report/">who badmouthed her to the press</a> and the <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/12/08/news/rep-nancy-mace-splits-with-fiance-discussed-her-sex-life-in-office-report/">breakup with her fiancé</a> — among other bad experiences. The 48-year-old also described it as a way to “reclaim” her identity and body. “So my story is I am totally broken,” she bluntly <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/02/27/nancy-mace-trauma-election-governor-00799867?nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&amp;nname=playbook&amp;nrid=0bdff907-15ed-4eef-bfd3-524d1cf43cd3">told Politico</a> earlier this year. “I have PTSD over what I’ve been through.”</blockquote>
That&#8217;s a lot of tattoos. I admit I am not a tattoo fan, as you might have guessed. The book of Leviticus is not a fan of tattoos. 
I do think there are certain circumstances in which tattoos are more understandable than others: if you are a member of the military, if you&#8217;re a member of a police force, or if you are a rock star.
If you are a sitting congressperson and you show up with Hells Angels-looking sleeves, it&#8217;s a little weird. It&#8217;s a sign of something. 
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2487?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
One of those tattoos is the opening line of Virginia Woolf&#8217;s famous novel &#8220;Mrs. Dalloway,&#8221; which is weird because if I were going to get a tattoo, it&#8217;d be the first line of &#8220;A Tale of Two Cities&#8221; by Charles Dickens, which is 119 words and I would wind it all the way around my torso multiple times.
Or maybe something from Faulkner, a 1,300-word opening.
Or maybe the verse from Leviticus where it says “Don&#8217;t get tattoos.”
In the profile with <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/02/27/nancy-mace-trauma-election-governor-00799867?nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&amp;nname=playbook&amp;nrid=0bdff907-15ed-4eef-bfd3-524d1cf43cd3">Politico</a>, there was this exchange:
<blockquote>Politico’s Michael Kruse: “How’s it going?” I asked her.  
Mace: “That’s a very loaded question.”  
Kruse: “How are you feeling?” 
Mace: “Cautious. It’s a very, I would say, cautious time for me, because I have a lot going on, and I have a lot of folks that are trying to stop me.”</blockquote>
Kruse wrote:
<blockquote>By this point in late January, I had been talking to Mace, and to others around Mace and about Mace, for hours and hours, for months and months. I wanted to know what so many wanted to know and still do. What is happening with this woman? What is happening, or has happened, to her? Why does she say the things she says? Why does she act the way she acts? Is she … OK? Mace is a 48-year-old twice-divorced mother of two. She often walks with a gun. She sometimes shops in a wig. She always sleeps (the little she sleeps) under a 20-pound heavy blanket she thinks isn’t heavy enough. She says she does what she does because of “an engine” that she “can’t control” and that “just f*cking goes” and is “going to go and go and go.” She says she gets the tattoos that she gets because of “the pain that I need to feel.”
And in the wake of her shocking speech last year in which she on the floor of the United States House of Representatives accused her ex-fiancé and three of his business partners and friends of grievous sexual crimes against her and other women — in the spiraling subsequent litigation in which alleged abusers are suing Mace and other alleged victims and vice versa and a judge instituted a gag order for all parties involved and Mace has taken to representing herself — she at times has all but asked to get sent to jail.
She is, according to scores of ex-staffers and ex-friends, operatives and colleagues from both parties and a spectrum of people who know her and have known her for a long time, “unstable” and “unhinged” and “unwell.” “Something snapped in her mentally,” Charleston-based Republican consultant Chris Drummond told me. “I hope that she gets the help that she needs,” Charleston-based Democratic consultant Renee Harvey told me.</blockquote>
This is sad. If you are openly saying that you got tattoos in order to feel pain, there are lots of ways in life to feel pain. 
Over the weekend, my three-year-old decided to climb into a hamper. I don&#8217;t know why; he&#8217;s three. And then he lost his balance, keeled over, clocked his forehead on the floor, and got a bump. He felt pain. The difference is that those bumps will go away. He&#8217;s not going to have gigantic tattoos all over his arms. 
I feel like if you are a person in need of reclaiming your body and feeling pain, probably what you need is some psychiatric care, not the tattoos.
If one of your friends or a person you know did this, the responsible move is not to feature them on national TV. The responsible move is not to do gigantic profiles on them. The responsible move with people who are obviously going through pain is to sympathetically see that they actually get the treatment that they need. 
It&#8217;s not a matter of “personal choice.” Obviously, we live in a free country. Nancy has the right to do what she wants to do when it comes to getting her tattoos. 
I will say that she&#8217;s obviously going through something, and I really hope Nancy gets the care she needs because this is not healthy behavior.
That may be an unpopular statement. 
But it is not healthy behavior.

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When ‘My Body, My Choice’ Becomes Something Much Darker

Nancy Mace

I want to talk about the responsibility of our political leadership when it comes to conspiracies.
That is perhaps the biggest issue in today&#8217;s politics, with ramifications far beyond whatever benighted crap Candace, Joe Rogan, or Theo Von dump on their podcast.
“Whatever the spin is about Tyler Robinson, there&#8217;s some bullsh*t to it,” Rogan said. “I don&#8217;t know how much of it is bullsh*t, but there&#8217;s some bullsh*t.”
I like Joe personally. He&#8217;s a nice guy.
Also, this kind of stupidity ought to immediately make you question Joe&#8217;s capacity to discern truth from fiction. This is essentially the same as endorsing the theory that staring at hieroglyphics can solve your health problems.
Joe did that recently.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2486?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
I&#8217;m not super shocked by this kind of stuff. Joe tends to believe pretty much every conspiracy theory that he can find, because let&#8217;s be real, conspiracies are fun. They’re chatty. You can fill five hours talking with your comedian friends about how the moon landing was fake, and underwater demons who might be aliens control our lives.
Joe’s shtick is that he is basically a caveman discovering the world by talking with everyone — which never results in any firmly held beliefs. Thus he&#8217;ll endorse James Talarico, the psychotic Left-wing Howdy Doody of Texas, but also Donald Trump within two years of each other.
But it&#8217;s fun to watch the journey. It&#8217;s just sitting with your friends in college and popping open a beer or, in Joe&#8217;s case, smoking a blunt and waxing philosophic on “whether your chair really exists, man,” or “whether when you see the color red and I see the color red, is it the same color red, bro?” Or, “Which Kardashian sister is the hottest?”
Under normal circumstances, that&#8217;s fine and fun; it’s a free country; you can listen to what you want.
But.
Two things make this kind of stuff a problem for America more generally: first, when people start treating it seriously, and second, when politicians start treating it seriously.
Part and parcel of Joe&#8217;s comedic world is black-pilling. This is very common in comedy because comedy is about making fun of the world as it is. It&#8217;s not about offering solutions. It&#8217;s not about trying to come to a consensus. Comedy is inherently black-pilled.
I&#8217;m not going to blame Joe for any of this sort of stuff. One of the things that makes Joe such a successful podcaster is that he contains multitudes, including a variety of totally conflicting viewpoints.
But a bunch of young men use Joe Rogan as a sort of political litmus test. It turns out that young men will follow pretty much anybody — even using the alleged sex-trafficking Tate brothers as a moral litmus test.
Following these people is stupid. If you&#8217;re not doing it for fun, if you&#8217;re using them as political guides rather than gossipy buddies, there’s a problem.
But the more dangerous problem is when our political leaders decide to follow this group.
Which brings us to the modern GOP.
Top members of the GOP, most prominently the vice president, think the path to political victory lies in winning over the Rogan bros. And the vice president has made this pretty clear — over and over and over.
The New York Times reported: &#8220;Vance made clear to colleagues he feared losing some of the so-called low-propensity voters, the young men who were not traditional Republicans, but who had voted for the Trump-Vance ticket in 2024. This was an audience tuned into the &#8216;manosphere&#8217; podcasters like Joe Rogan, and it was worrisome that the podcast hosts themselves were now rebelling.&#8221;
And of course, the vice president has recommended that everyone ought to listen to the benighted musings of Theo Von, a double-digit IQ comedian whose discernment is on par with that of a brick.
Vance said a few months ago, “You know, I think if you want a good laugh, I love Theo Von, like he&#8217;s one of my favorite — He&#8217;s just incredible. He&#8217;s got one of these senses of humor where like 30% of the time it goes completely over my head and 70% of the time he&#8217;s the funniest person imaginable. But I think Theo has a good heart. And that&#8217;s one of the reasons why I really like listening to his show.”
So, so, so much great stuff in Theo Von. Here&#8217;s Theo Von with Joe Rogan, rapping on the conspiracy theories:
<blockquote>People are like, we’ll elect the Democrats next time. It&#8217;s like, but it&#8217;s all the same sh*t that has been happening forever. They haven&#8217;t been helping anybody forever. They&#8217;re letting politicians slurp on kids. All of our f*cking money goes to Israel and they&#8217;re using it f*cking genocide people. It&#8217;s like everybody is scared out of their wits right now. It&#8217;s like our religious leaders are afraid to speak out. And it&#8217;s like a time where it&#8217;s like Satan is amongst us and our religious leaders are talking about bullshit. It&#8217;s just like, I don&#8217;t know, man.</blockquote>
The black-pilling. This is what you need more of. You need more of the black-pilling, more of the conspiracies. Here’s more of his drivel:
<blockquote>But I think that this starts to happen. News stories get created, right?  Whether they&#8217;re fictional. Whatever goes on, you don&#8217;t even know a lot of times what&#8217;s news stories. You can send actors out to create a scene. You see a video; you believe it &#8230; then you see movies and stuff come out later about it. So it&#8217;s like you&#8217;re almost creating your own news to, then, make like a based on a real story. You know what I&#8217;m talking about?</blockquote>
This is what you need. You need a guy who tells you that news stories are actually created by actors. That&#8217;s what you really need.
Says the guy who literally acts for a living.
I can see why the vice president is recommending this genius-level talk. It is definitely edifying for the young male population of the United States to listen to people who may be borderline retarded talking about politics.
I think that Vance’s particular strategy is flawed for a couple of particular reasons.
First, you have to build your own coalition. You can&#8217;t just duplicate President Trump&#8217;s. I know the vice president of the United States thinks that if he just keeps Trump&#8217;s coalition, he wins in 2028.
This is wrong and politically stupid. No politician can duplicate the coalition built by another politician. That is not how this works. If you take Donald Trump&#8217;s coalition and you map JD Vance onto that coalition, JD Vance loses participants in literally every area of that coalition. He wins fewer women, fewer Hispanics, fewer blacks, and fewer blue-collar voters.
You can&#8217;t outcompete President Trump with blue-collar white voters; Vance does worse with the manosphere. He wins fewer of everyone.
Second, if you try to follow the people around, remember that they are fickle.
Take Joe Rogan, for example. Trump has been in three elections. Joe Rogan voted for Donald Trump once. He is now endorsing James Talarico for Senate in Texas. The notion that if you go on Joe Rogan’s show and you mirror his conspiratorial musings and black-pill super-hard the way that JD Vance actually did on Joe Rogan’s show, that all the &#8220;Joe Rogan voters&#8221; will end up with you is silly. People can change their minds.
Joe Rogan is fickle. Theo Von is fickle. All these people are fickle because they don&#8217;t have any consistent worldview.
Thus, if you just try to follow them around, there&#8217;s a very good shot they will run away from you, just on a pragmatic level.
Third, successful leaders lead, and the coalitions follow in their wake. Politicians who tend to pander and chase the crowd do not work.
This is where President Trump is unique. President Trump doesn&#8217;t go on Joe Rogan and mirror what Joe Rogan is saying. President Trump says whatever President Trump wants to say, and then whoever follows him wants to follow him. That&#8217;s how it works.
Trump is the same dude everywhere. He doesn&#8217;t change what he is saying whether he&#8217;s on Joe Rogan, Theo Von, my show, or anyone else’s.
Fourth, and most importantly, it is immoral and wrong as a leader to forego truth in favor of popularity. I know sticking to the truth has fallen out of favor. We&#8217;re supposed to just believe that our politicians’  job is to chase the people around with a butterfly net.
That is wrong. It is politically stupid, and it is also morally wrong.
There are a bunch of people purportedly on the Right now who say things like “vox populi, vox dei&#8221; meaning the voice of the people is the voice of God.
That is stupid and nonsense. It actually comes from an eighth-century letter to Charlemagne, in which the author called that idea and crowds following crowds around “madness.”
It turns out that people are often wrong. This is why we have a Constitution. You wouldn&#8217;t need a Constitution if the people were awesome all the time.
Our founders feared and despised the mob. They wanted a Constitution because they knew certain rights had to be off-limits, so the people could not run roughshod over them.
That&#8217;s why checks and balances exist. That is why they&#8217;re still there today, after the last century and a half.
But we, in all our great wisdom, decided to dismantle many of those checks and balances in pursuit of a far more activist and centralized government that does things, but then has some pretty bad side effects.
I believe that the truth always wins eventually, because reality always wins.
But the key word there is “eventually.” I get the logic as to why politicians pander and why they lie, and why they always follow the people around with the butterfly net — why they&#8217;re always chasing the parade.
This has always been true. There is nothing new about this. This is what demagoguery is.
But if you try to follow the people, you likely won&#8217;t catch up with them, especially if what you&#8217;re doing as a Republican is just pitching a softer version of what Democrats are hard-selling.
Even if you do win on that platform, you&#8217;ll lose the country, because running that car toward the cliff at 60 mph is only marginally better than running that car at the cliff at 90 mph.

IMG_6055

The Political Gamble That Could Backfire Spectacularly

black-pill

Conspiracy Theory

JD Vance

Joe Rogan

President Trump

Theo Von

Let’s talk about the actual American Dream, what it is, what it means, and what it most certainly isn&#8217;t.
I spent yesterday in New York, talking business with some of the most successful and brilliant businesspeople in America. You know what my main takeaway was? America kicks ass. America is great. This is a great country.
I know, we are all supposed to be demoralized and upset, and we&#8217;re all supposed to believe and claim that no one has any shot at getting ahead in America anymore, that the American Dream is dead, and that we need something brand-new –  by which most people mean some idea that was tried centuries ago and then failed over and over again.
Most of those bad ideas revolve around a basic failed idea to which people are addicted,;that there ought to be a special cadre of elite people who direct the economy toward their specific ends; that your individual freedoms are actually destructive; that you ought to have your choices circumscribed so that they can build whatever it is they want to build for us.
You&#8217;re constantly hearing the American Dream is the house and the white picket fence and the dog and the 2.2 children.
That&#8217;s not what the American Dream is. The American Dream is a process. It is not an outcome.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2485?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
That process says there is a relationship between cause and effect: that you make good, virtuous, smart decisions; that if you perform dutiful, smart things throughout your life, you will end up better off than your parents were. And then, if you pass those values on to your kids and they do the same, they will be better off than you.
That is the American Dream. It is not that you will instantaneously go from being the poorest person in America to the richest person in America. That might happen to some people, but that&#8217;s not the American Dream.
The American Dream says that your talents and abilities should be able to take you as far as possible, and that you will be better off if you do all those things because the process is what matters. As long as you protect the process, you get your shot.
When my great-great-grandparents arrived in America at the beginning of the 20th century, they came here without a dollar to their name. They only knew Yiddish. And then they did those things – made smart decisions, used their talents and abilities, performed dutifully and with virtue throughout their lives – and they weren&#8217;t rich. Their kids did better than they did, and they weren&#8217;t precisely rich. And my parents did better than my grandparents.
But they weren&#8217;t rich. But I became wealthy. It&#8217;s an intergenerational process. Very often this is true for all Americans. And that process, in order to work, has to include certain preconditions, and there are certain conditions that make the process work: Free markets. Private property. You own your labor. You own the products, goods, and services that you produce. Your innovation is your own; you can trade it with others and rent it if you want. That&#8217;s what wage labor is.
You can build businesses.
We also need things like equal justice before the law. We need a law that is equally applied, not “There&#8217;s justice for my friends and just beat down for my enemies.” That is not equal justice. And it doesn&#8217;t protect the process, because that&#8217;s not a process; that is just the friend-enemy distinction.
We need freedom of mind, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion so we can think things through and debate them out, so we can actually pursue that process.
And of course we need a social fabric that promotes virtue. You need people doing good things. You need to know what a good decision looks like and what a moral decision looks like.
Those are all the preconditions for the American Dream and free markets. Free minds. Equal justice before law. Social virtue. Those are the preconditions.
And when you have that, and a government that protects those things and the process, that&#8217;s when the American Dream happens.
The process not only protects and promotes freedom but also has the happy effect of fostering unprecedented human prosperity. That’s because the best path to innovation and competition is to access the diverse knowledge and opinions of all of humanity, which free people use to innovate and compete. Free people can access each other&#8217;s knowledge levels; they can aggregate those levels.
Free markets mean that everyone can prioritize what they want on a material level. You get to make your own decisions about what makes your life better. You get to decide whether you wish to trade your labor for X number of dollars, or whether you wish to trade X number of dollars for a lottery ticket or for a share of stock.
You get to decide what you are willing to do. That&#8217;s what the free market pricing system is. It is a set of aggregated choices by millions upon millions of individual consumers.
This is the process we have to preserve. It is not an outcome. And that&#8217;s exciting because the American Dream, a process that is reliant on your freedom, makes it your adventure. It&#8217;s your journey. You make the decisions about your life. You make the decisions about what you think is important. You make the decisions about what you think things are worth, or what you are willing to trade for, what or which profession to go into.
Do you understand how rare that is in human history? For most of human history, people were just told what to do all the time.
The American Dream isn&#8217;t that. 
I want the shot to make the choice. I think that&#8217;s what we all want. We want the process protected. And guess what? That process still works.
There are people who lie to you, and they say the process doesn&#8217;t work.
It does, and we must protect it.

IMG_5988

The Lie That Could Destroy The American Dream

American Dream

Capitalism

Free Markets

Capitalism is under heavy fire today.
It is perfectly obvious that we are in the middle of an all-out assault on free markets. It&#8217;s coming predominantly from the Left, but not just from the Left. A large segment of the Right is very anti-free markets now.
A chart of global average GDP per capita starting in roughly 1600 through 2025 shows that people had zero GDP per capita essentially all the way through the early 19th century. And then free markets happened, catalyzing the exponential explosion of GDP per capita.
That was not because of government centralization of resources, which had been practiced throughout human history. It wasn’t because of vast thickets of bureaucratic regulations.
It came from a very simple proposition: You own your own labor and the product of your labor. You own your own innovation and the products of that innovation, and you should be free to sell, rent, or trade them.
Period.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2484?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
There are now a variety of arguments being leveled against capitalism. They come down to basically two arguments in the end.
The first: Capitalism creates inequality.
You might say to yourself, “Hold up. If capitalism creates inequality, but everybody&#8217;s wealthier, isn&#8217;t that still better than the alternative?”
The answer is yes, but not according to Bernie Sanders, who wrote:
<blockquote>The economic system with its excessive corporate greed and concentration of ownership and power destroys anything that gets in its way of the pursuit of profits. It destroys the environment. It destroys our health. It destroys our democracy. It discards human beings without a second thought.</blockquote>
Says the millionaire with the lake house.
From Zohran Mamdani:
<blockquote>We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one where children go to sleep hungry while the world&#8217;s first trillionaire hungers for more. We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans. We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands, those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone. And we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands.</blockquote>
It&#8217;s all about the poor versus the rich. It&#8217;s inequality, it&#8217;s cruelty, and it&#8217;s monopoly.
And of course, this is not just from Mamdani; it&#8217;s also from Tucker Carlson, who does not understand how economics works and doesn&#8217;t care to understand how economics works. He says it&#8217;s unfair that people in finance make more than wage earners.
That, of course, is putting aside the fact that people in finance are the ones who actually bear the risk, while wage earners earn a wage guaranteed by someone else.
Carlson: 
<blockquote>So if you have a tax code, for example, just to name one example, if you have a tax code that taxes wage earners at more than twice the percentage it taxes investors, what are you saying? Well, you&#8217;re saying it&#8217;s twice as virtuous to invest money or to inherit money and keep it in the markets as it is to go to work in the morning. Really? Of course, that&#8217;s what you&#8217;re saying. Because any tax code penalizes the impious acts, the bad things, the vices. Cigarettes cost $18 a pack because we&#8217;re against smoking. So if being an ordinary wage earner, driving in from the suburbs to make 80 grand a year, if that&#8217;s taxed at twice the rate of being a private equity baron, what are we saying? That it&#8217;s twice as virtuous to be a private equity baron and to inherit money.</blockquote>
That&#8217;s just stupid. There are plenty of taxes that you pay that are not a tax on vice. There are taxes on property. Is it a vice to own property in the United States? There&#8217;s a tax on death. There&#8217;s an estate tax. Is it a vice to die?
The reason why capital gains are taxed at a lower rate, for example, than wages, is because they&#8217;ve mostly already been taxed.
Carlson believes that capitalism is also evil because capitalism somehow empties you of your soul, as he told the New York Times.
That&#8217;s argument one. Capitalism causes inequality.
Argument number two is that capitalism is not spiritually fulfilling. It&#8217;s not providing you your meaning in life. Carlson, 2019: “Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool like a staple gun or a toaster. You&#8217;d have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets, just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.”
The idea that capitalism weakens and destroys families and undermines religion is not new. Tucker is not the only one who has said this historically. Here is a quote. Guess who said it?
<blockquote>The Western way of life founded, in effect, on practical and technical knowledge, discovery, invention and the flooding of world markets with mechanical products has remained incapable of offering to men&#8217;s minds a flicker of light, a ray of hope, a grain of faith, or of writing anxious persons the smallest path toward rest and tranquility. Man is not simply an instrument, among others. Naturally, he has grown tired of purely material conditions and seeks spiritual comfort. But the materialistic life of the West could only offer him as reassurance a new materialism of sin, passion, drink, women, noisy gatherings and showy attractions which he has come to enjoy.</blockquote>
It sounds like Tucker Carlson, but actually it is Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who called for an international armed struggle against colonial rule by Muslims and argued for full-scale jihad.
This is where we are right now: a gigantic coalition of people who despise capitalism. People who find it spiritually unfulfilling, who claim that it robs us of our individuality, or say that it is what creates inequality. They are all uniting. They are their own unique party. Everyone from communists to post-liberal integralists to quasi-fascists to radical Muslims.
Why?
Because in essence, capitalism makes two arguments. One: You are an individual created in the image of God with individual desires, wants, needs, and capabilities. Two: As long as those desires, wants, needs, and capabilities do not harm anyone else and do not violate basic morality, they ought to remain in your control.
The new red-green-brown anti-capitalist party believes that&#8217;s not true.
They believe the same thing that the French revolutionaries believed: that the collective vision of man is paramount. Private property and free markets run counter to that vision.
These folks can&#8217;t build utopia without destroying that vision. They promise Utopia, either a communist utopia with government-owned grocery stores like Zohran Mamdani, the “warmth of collectivism,” or an Islamic utopia with the Caliphate at the head, or the agrarian utopia run by kind-hearted feudal lords.
It&#8217;s all garbage. So why are people believing it?
There are a few reasons. First, ingratitude. Human life in its natural state is nasty, brutish, and short. On a material level, pretty much everything was awful for all of human history until property rights, contract law, and credit were invented and turned large swathes of the world, including places difficult to live in, into semi-bearable places for the first time ever.
Here&#8217;s the truth: Most people living in the West right now have never spent time in truly poor places that lack the things we think of as vital. When you start thinking that human life in its natural state is a microwave, a central AC, a car, two TVs, a cell phone, a furnished apartment, or a house, you start comparing yourself to what could be in a Utopia.
This is why, when you hear Gavin Newsom, a very, very wealthy man, say capitalism does not work — I don&#8217;t believe him.
People have incredibly short memories. There are a lot of other models that have been tried elsewhere and are still being tried, yet they still fail, but we keep bringing them back.
Why not try centralized government with price controls? Because we&#8217;ve done that a thousand times and it&#8217;s crap.
Why not try a religious theocracy? A lot of countries did that for several centuries, and there are still some places on Earth trying to do it, and it&#8217;s really garbage.
Why not try economic fascism with the bureaucratic government that picks winners and losers? We&#8217;ve tried that too, and it&#8217;s terrible.
We have just not yet felt the consequences of all this interventionism. We are trying a bunch of these experiments right now, and they are going to fail. We are going to crash and burn.
But when you jump from a burning building, the first few stories are fine. It&#8217;s the last one that&#8217;s a doozy.
So what should we do differently?
It may be worth conceding that a lot of young voters with a predilection for the DSA haven&#8217;t ever had a positive case made to them about capitalism; many of them have been living with the political effects of the 2008 financial crash and the stagnation of Obama and the subsequent bailout and how it was perceived by the public, and then COVID.
It’s time to teach them.

IMG_5925

The Economic Experiment America Will Regret

Woke Right

On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order that backed fewer routine vaccines for kids.
I&#8217;m actually rather indifferent to this. The reason I&#8217;m indifferent to this is that different countries have different standards for the number and the schedule for childhood vaccines.
Some of these vaccines are recommendations; they&#8217;re not mandates. But when you are talking about the vaccinations that are most likely to prevent health problems, they&#8217;re not all equivalent.
The HPV vaccine is for a sexually transmitted disease that typically leads to cancer. Thus, it seems it should be a matter of parental choice. If you are deeply worried that your kid is going to get HPV from something based on their activity, that is not quite the same as the MMR vaccine, which is for something that is infectious.
The reason the Europeans do it differently very often has to do with their nationalized health care systems: how often you are expected to visit the doctor, the prevalence of particular diseases in particular countries, etc. So that’s a little more complicated than people may think.
But I will tell you what is not particularly complicated. There is no data, none, that links vaccines to autism. This is not a scientifically-backed concept.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2483?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
But this is what the president was promoting on Monday. I object to this because data and science show this is inaccurate.
This has been a big push by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for years. The president suggested that breaking up the vaccine schedule would decrease the prevalence of autism. The data do not exist for this proposition. They don&#8217;t.
Trump stated, “It is essential to our research efforts that we have the very best vaccine recommendations in the entire world. So we&#8217;re reducing them. We&#8217;re changing it to visits over a period of a year or year and a half so they get 20% of what they would have gotten in one big shot.”
When he says “one big shot,” he says that as though it&#8217;s a water bottle filled with vaccine.
I don&#8217;t have a problem with changing the vaccine schedule, but suggesting that this is going to reduce autism diagnoses in the United States is not backed by any evidence.
The person most associated with promoting this nonsense is gone — Andrew Wakefield. He published a paper in 1998 suggesting that there was a link between vaccination and autism. In the original paper — which was later retracted by The Lancet — Wakefield and 12 co-authors <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2831678/">claimed</a> to have investigated a consecutive series of 12 children referred to the Royal Free Hospital and School of Medicine with chronic enterocolitis and regressive developmental disorder. The authors reported that the parents of eight of the 12 children associated their loss of acquired skills, including language, with the MMR vaccine.
Number one: That was self-reported. Number two: That was an extraordinarily small sample size. Number three: Wakefield had been selecting these people, and his research had been funded by lawyers acting for the parents who were trying to sue the vaccine manufacturers.
The British General Medical Council found that Wakefield had acted unethically and had shown callous disregard for the children in his study, upon whom the invasive tests were performed. And all of this was fueled by Wakefield pushing single vaccines rather than, for example, the combined MMR. The new schedule that Trump is suggesting separates M from MR, measles from mumps and rubella, as opposed to one shot.
The reason all this was combined was to minimize inconvenience and ensure kids got the full battery of vaccines. Separating them off, the idea goes, means three separate visits. How many parents want to go to the doctor three separate times, as opposed to just doing it once and being done with it?
I&#8217;m not arguing that we can&#8217;t make changes to the vaccine schedule based on the best possible science or good decision-making, but the attempt to link this with autism diagnosis is not scientific.
RFK Jr. argued that there has been a skyrocketing increase in autism diagnoses after 1990.
The reason that exists is that the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1975. It funded schools to a greater extent because of disability claims. In 1990, the federal government reset the standards for disability claims in schools, and they included autism.
So it turns out that if you are a school and you wish for additional federal or state monies, a great way to do that is through additional autism claims. It’s the same thing with ADHD, by the way.
How do I know that this is a case of incentives creating outcomes? Because there is a study done this year that compared autism prevalence by functional severity.
Anyone who has ever met kids with actual severe autism, moderate to profound autism, knows it is real.
But if you&#8217;re weird or if you have a particular skill set or if you&#8217;re kind of smart, people will say that you&#8217;re autistic now, which is stupid.
Autism is a real thing, and severe autism is disabling. Kids with severe autism very often cannot talk. They cannot interact in society. Having moderate autism means that you largely cannot fully interact. You very often need full-time care.
It is not the same thing as “You&#8217;re a weirdo with a 158 IQ.” Autism is not just “Your buddy’s a little bit weird around people.”
Guess what? It turns out that prevalence by functional severity, meaning diagnoses of moderate to profound autism, has been down since 2000. The diagnosis of moderate to profound autism was 1.5 per 1000 children in 2000. It is 1.2 per 1000 children in 2016.
Real hardcore autism is actually slightly down between 2000 and 2016. How about mild autism? The diagnosis rate for eight-year-olds has more than doubled. In 2000, it was 3.1 per 1000 children. Now it is 7.3 per 1000 children. Borderline autism has absolutely skyrocketed.
If autism diagnoses are increasing across the board, wouldn&#8217;t you expect more moderate to profound cases? Why is moderate to profound declining, while mild and borderline are wildly increasing?
So if you’re mild, borderline, or have no significant challenges, there has been a massive increase in diagnoses; if you&#8217;re moderate to profound autism, a decrease in diagnoses.
What could explain this? Could it be the possibility that, just as the number of COVID-attributed deaths skyrocketed when the federal government started paying hospitals based on COVID deaths, and so people started mislabeling heart attacks as COVID, could it be we&#8217;re getting a mass overdiagnosis?
It turns out that public policy has this impact on a wide variety of maladies. There was a pretty massive increase in disability all the way up to about 1978-79. That’s because the federal government started making Social Security disability more widely available then.
It turned out that a lot of people were engaging in fraud. And so a bunch of restrictions were imposed, resulting in a complete flatlining of disability spending between 1978 and roughly 1990.
Then there was a recession, and people started claiming disability to get the money; the government loosened it up, and boom, exponential growth.
It&#8217;s almost as though people respond to incentive structures.
Why am I pointing this out? Because data matters.
And this, to me, remains the greatest sin of people like Anthony Fauci. They destroyed any faith in data.

follow the science

The Cardinal Sin That Shattered America’s Trust

Anthony Fauci

COVID

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Vaccines

There was a huge announcement yesterday. 
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — no longer So Fresh, So Face — and the heir apparent to Bernie Sanders, announced she is running for president in 2028. 
She did not do so by announcing it formally, but by doing two other things: she broadcast freezing her eggs on Instagram, and she laughed off Woke 1.0 as if it were no big deal.
Welcome to the 2028 Democratic presidential campaign, where biology is an obstacle to your happiness, and we&#8217;re substituting third-worldism for Woke 1.0. 
This is her announcement that she was putting her natural biology on hold to pursue the presidency.
She&#8217;s 36 years old. She&#8217;s perfectly healthy. She&#8217;s been in a relationship with this dude she is not married to for the last five years, for a reason no one can discern. She could just go have a baby the fun and easy way. Instead, she&#8217;s choosing IVF – freezing the eggs and then later undergoing in vitro fertilization.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2482?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
IVF is really expensive. It is time-consuming. It is tough on the body for a healthy 36-year-old woman. Let&#8217;s say that you wanted to do it the old-fashioned, natural way. The chances of conceiving and having a healthy baby within one year of starting to try are somewhere between 75 and 80%. Now, let&#8217;s say you harvest that same 36-year-old woman&#8217;s eggs. The chances of a live birth per IVF round are around 40%. And the process is really, really not pleasant. 
But Ocasio-Cortez went on national TV and showed what she is doing.
It was a little crazy.
Let&#8217;s start at the beginning with the public — and very weird — announcement that she was freezing her eggs. 
Yes, we&#8217;re allowed to say it&#8217;s weird. It’s her decision, but deciding to Instagram your egg freezing is weird.
She stated:
<blockquote>So I&#8217;m aware that just by me choosing to not keep this private, there may be a consequence. But you know what? I&#8217;m okay with that. This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life. And if people want to make assumptions about my decision, let them make those assumptions. I feel empowered to make this choice. I think it&#8217;s a very privileged position that I&#8217;ve been able to make.</blockquote>
We&#8217;re going to take the bait because we&#8217;re going to explain what the hell she&#8217;s doing, which is clearly bait.  This is all girlboss: real girl-bossing is when you inject yourself with hormones on Instagram Live to start a process that will cost tens of thousands of dollars to take control of your own life because biology is unfair and mean. 
And if a man comments, it is because he is sexist in some way. 
Now again, she&#8217;s the one who chose to make this public. It&#8217;s an obvious trap; this is the game that she is playing: to post, wait for people to comment, and then claim that they’re sexist for commenting.
We all know the game. It&#8217;s a really stupid game, but she&#8217;s also doing it publicly because she is saying something important about American society. She injected herself with hormones on Instagram Live for egg freezing. People do this privately. Why is she doing this in front of millions of people?
“Don&#8217;t be weird about this,” she admonished those watching.
You&#8217;re being weird about this. Why are you talking to me? Why am I watching this? This is none of my business. You&#8217;re the one live-streaming medical procedures on Instagram. You&#8217;re being weird. Are we allowed to say you&#8217;re being weird? 
She’s announcing her presidential run. 
She suggested that this is all because of men, you see, because men run for office and people don&#8217;t wonder if they want to have children. 
Most men running for higher office already have a family because they&#8217;re mostly in their 40s or older and they&#8217;ve been married for a while.
Nobody is asking whether a man is going to get pregnant during his campaign because men can&#8217;t — despite what the Left thinks — get pregnant.
The most powerful feminist thing she could do, if she really wanted to be totally feminist, is run for president and be pregnant at the same time, because then she could say, “Why are you bothering me just because I&#8217;m pregnant?”
When the Left says “right to privacy,” they never mean “Leave us alone. We just want our right to privacy.” They mean “We want you to approve of every decision we make and imitate it in public policy.”
Why isn’t she doing this the natural way? She is not doing this for medical reasons; she is not doing this because she is having fertility issues. This makes a mockery of those who are truly having fertility issues and are pursuing this process for medical reasons. 
This is not a decision to feel “empowered,” unless by empowered you somehow mean that biology itself is an obstacle to “living your fullest life,” which is a leftist idea.
The leftist idea is that biology itself, like normal maturation, is unfair and cruel. This is why they treat puberty as some sort of biological obstacle.
It&#8217;s why they are now treating pregnancy as some sort of biological barrier for women to overcome. 
I can&#8217;t think of anything more anti-woman than the idea that pregnancy is a biological burden on women and that it is something horrible to be overcome. 
It is a superpower. It is unbelievable. It&#8217;s an incredible gift.
Demeaning that so that you can compete in a &#8220;man&#8217;s world&#8221; is terrible.
She is trying to valorize herself for putting off pregnancy indefinitely, expensively, and more dangerously than the natural way. She doesn&#8217;t want you asking about whether she&#8217;s going to get pregnant while she&#8217;s running. Thus, she&#8217;s preemptively saying she won&#8217;t get pregnant.
She&#8217;s making the point that biology is unfair, womanhood is inherently unfair, and that there is no moral issue with fertilizing embryos you will discard.
This is all part and parcel of a broader agenda: Rebelling against reality by assuming that if we just fix reality, Utopia is right there. 
Which brings us to Ocasio-Cortez’s second big presidential announcement. She said Woke 1.0 was so over. It&#8217;s no longer “cool” or even “fetch” or anything like that.
The problem for the Left is that Americans ended up rejecting Woke 1.0. That is because Americans don&#8217;t believe that the Declaration and Constitution are rooted in racism. 
The reason woke died is because it was taken to the logical extreme, which is that everything was discrimination. 
Now there is a different phase. Think of the faces of Woke 2.0. Who are they?
Zohran Mamdani, Abdullah El-Sayed, and Hasan Piker.  
The leftist Edward Said said that America&#8217;s failure is that we are basically a corrupt empire whose capitalism corrupted the earth, and everything that happens everywhere else on earth that&#8217;s bad and at home is due to our terrible free market system.
And who better to represent America as a corrupt empire than victims of that corrupt empire? People from outside America who can come back to America and tell us what we do wrong.
Woke 1.0 forced Americans to say, “Am I racist or am I not?” Woke 2.0 is, “Is American capitalism inherently corrupting and bad? Is the West&#8217;s system of freedoms and free markets inherently imperialistic, colonialist, genocidal, and racist?”
It&#8217;s easier to pitch woke 2.0 than woke 1.0. Why? Americans have been convinced over the course of the last 25 years or so that America is the bad guy, that we and our allies are fundamentally evil, that our foreign policy decisions of the past two decades and maybe longer, going all the way back to World War II, according to some, are actually terrible and horrible, and we&#8217;re the bad guys in the world.
Add the economic angst right now, combine those two things, and you get woke 2.0, Ocasio-Cortez’s new program. It is about hatred of America.
Ocasio-Cortez is trying to capitalize on all of this. 
Her idea of Utopia is women freezing eggs and a communist agenda.
It’s more than weird.
It’s a Utopia that we should reject with all the strength we have.

GettyImages-1009938924

The New AOC Is More Dangerous Than The Old One

Feminism

President Trump just scored a major win.
Yesterday, he ended birth tourism.
It is long past time. Birthright citizenship has become a loophole you could drive a truck through, and President Trump just shut down one of those gigantic loopholes.
Here&#8217;s some of what that loophole has produced:
Hasan Piker: Birthright citizen, born in New Jersey, raised in Turkey and now here, ready, willing and able to destroy Western civilization.
Abdul El-Sayed: Parents immigrated from Egypt, born in Rochester Hills, Michigan. He could end up as our first fully anti-Western senator.
Rashida Tlaib: Born in Detroit, Michigan, her parents came from Judea and Samaria. She is in Congress stumping for the destruction of America&#8217;s foundations each and every day.
Francesca Hong: Running for Wisconsin governor; despises America and is a birthright citizen.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2481?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
These are just some of the big names. Birthright citizenship has meant that people come across our border, have babies, and then are tied into the U.S., all without ever explicitly having to embrace America in any way, shape, or form.
The most obvious symptom of that flaw in our system is birth tourism. That&#8217;s where people come here just to have babies.
Birthright citizenship is not mandated by the Constitution. It is not implicit in the 14th Amendment. The Founders did not contemplate the idea of vast illegal immigration to the country, because that concept did not really exist in 1789; many people came to open territory. Nor did the framers of the 14th Amendment in the post-Civil War era consider the idea that there would be a huge tsunami of immigrants from other countries coming here, dropping babies and receiving backdoor citizenship.
All of that was well before the federal government was providing these gigantic government benefits.
Thus the Supreme Court was wrong earlier this year when it ruled that birthright citizenship was mandated by the Constitution.
Now the Trump administration has to do what it can within the bounds of that decision to curb the exploitation of our system, because this is a problem.
There is no federal data on birth tourism, which is astonishing, given that we keep data on pretty much everything. But the Center for Immigration Studies estimated somewhere between 20,000 and 26,000 birth tourists per year back in 2020 by combining CDC birth certificates with American Community Survey data on births to foreign women.
The State Department in June 2026 uncovered birth tourism networks run out of Africa and Europe, where hundreds of foreign nationals would obtain fraudulent visa documents in order to give birth in the United States.
Obviously, we&#8217;ve seen huge birth tourism networks springing from China.
A lot of this could miss long-term undocumented or non-citizen residents who were missed by the census. Birth tourism often serves as both the beginning and a hook-and-ladder system for chain migration. It&#8217;s the first link in the chain. You put a baby in the U.S.; the baby has a right to stay. Then you make the case that the family also has to stay, and eventually you import the rest of the extended family.
This is true all over the West: Kids are the peg upon which chain migration rests. That&#8217;s certainly true in Europe right now. Take Ceuta, for example: after that vast wave of Muslim migrants came from Morocco, the minors are being sent to Spain for processing. Presumably, many of them will end up there, and then their parents will apply to enter as well.
I know there are many people on the Right black-pilling about President Trump. I get it. Let&#8217;s be clear: Trump as president is so vastly superior to Kamala Harris that it would make your head explode to consider the alternative.
Let&#8217;s start with some white-pilling. On border policy, Trump is the best president of our lifetime, and it is not close. He put out a statement touting this yesterday while pointing out that for 15 straight months, no illegal aliens have been released into the country. This is directly opposed to the Biden border policy, which was essentially releasing anyone who showed up at the border claiming asylum.
The White House stated: 
<blockquote>The Trump administration has deported over 3 million illegal aliens, including thousands convicted for violent crimes. The Trump administration strengthened visa programs and their screenings and paused visa processing for 75 high-risk countries to protect the homeland and deter overstays. The Trump administration terminated taxpayer-funded benefits for over 1.4 million illegal aliens improperly receiving public assistance and banned illegal aliens from more than a dozen taxpayer-funded healthcare programs.</blockquote>
These are all things that never would have happened under Kamala Harris.
Elections have consequences. And one of the tremendous benefits of the last election cycle is that the Trump administration came in and decided to act on Trump&#8217;s fundamental promise to crack down on illegal immigration.
Yesterday, the president put out two new executive orders targeting birth tourism.
The first executive order states:
<blockquote>It is the policy of the United States that no executive department or agency shall issue documents recognizing United States citizenship to, or accept documents issued by State, local, or other governments or authorities purporting to recognize United States citizenship regarding, persons when neither parent of that person is a citizen and any of the following applies: either parent of that person is an alien enemy, defined to include any member of a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization; either parent of that person is a foreign government employee, &#8230; either parent of that person engaged in a commercial transaction to purchase or access birthright citizenship for the person, or engaged in fraudulent activity to obtain citizenship, to include: when the parent(s) of the person engage in a commercial transaction to ensure that the person’s mother is present in the United States, or a territory of the United States, to give birth.</blockquote>
The second executive order is really an attempt to strengthen the federal government&#8217;s hand against people who are engaged in birth tourism. The goal here is to allow the secretaries of state and homeland security to use all legal authority possible to prevent the entry into the United States of, or the granting of any visa or other travel authorization to, any alien entering or attempting to enter the United States for the purpose of engaging in birth tourism and revoking the visa or travel authorization, and permanently barring entry of any alien who enters or attempts to enter the United States for the purpose of engaging in birth, tourism and all the like.
This is a win.
When people pretend the parties are exactly the same, this is why no, they are not.
They absolutely are not.

IMG_5820

America’s Biggest Backdoor Just Got The Deadbolt

birth tourism

birthright citizenship

Illegal Immigation

Senator John Fetterman, the last rational human in the Democratic Party, said he didn’t think it was his job to come together with somebody who thinks that America basically deserved 9/11.
He was speaking of Michigan Democratic senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed campaigning with Hasan Piker, who literally said that America deserved 9/11.
Fetterman was asked by Wolf Blitzer, “How should members of your party, the Democratic Party, come together to defeat the Republican candidate?”
Fetterman answered, “I can&#8217;t come together with someone if you are willing to embrace people that love Hamas or that think America deserved 9/11.”
Fetterman did win a very competitive race in Pennsylvania, yet his own party is ready to go after him because he is pro-Israel.
Fetterman has voted with the Democrats on every economic matter. He simply doesn&#8217;t want to break the filibuster or destroy Israel.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/radical-islam-invades-the-us-senate?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
And this is why El-Sayed wants his head “on a pike.”
That is a direct quote. El-Sayed said during a Zoom call:
<blockquote>And that&#8217;s the best thing about the way they&#8217;re doing this is if I win, you&#8217;re just like, well, you all came at me, so now I get to come at you and primary people like John Fetterman. I have no problem with that. Like, I&#8217;m looking forward to it. And people are like, “Oh, we don&#8217;t primary in the Senate.”
Like, watch me do it. You know what I mean? Like, tell me, tell me why I should stop. I mean, you&#8217;re gonna spend 60 million to beat me, two can play at that game, you know what I mean? So, you know, and then what happens is, ideally, you put one ogre on a pike, and then everyone else gets the message and all of a sudden starts to sound a lot different.</blockquote>
And here’s a shocker: Jon Stewart also blamed Fetterman. That’s because all Jon Stewart cares about — because he&#8217;s such a partisan hack — is the maintenance of the Democratic coalition.
It turns out that coalition includes people who — if they had a shot and were in a foreign country — would behead Jon Stewart because he is a Jew.
But that doesn&#8217;t matter to Jon Stewart, whose willful ignorance about all of this is incredible. 
It should be noted that Jon Stewart is as Jewish as a ham sandwich, the same as Bernie Sanders. He doesn&#8217;t practice Judaism. He has no relationship with Judaism. He doesn&#8217;t care about Judaism. He doesn&#8217;t care about Israel. He doesn&#8217;t care about any Jewish principles.
He just puts on the Jew hat every so often so that he can claim to speak in the name of the Jews while excusing antisemitism or Islamism.
So he attacked Fetterman: “Why are you blaming them when in some ways you could be blaming yourself and your colleagues?”
“I&#8217;m not blaming. I&#8217;m describing here where we’re at and what&#8217;s happening,” Fetterman answered. “When we have people winning elections, saying absurd kinds of positions that were absolutely toxic back in 2020 — stop saying these kinds of extreme things that are not workable in the real world. Don&#8217;t we want to win?”
Meanwhile, another person born a Jew, but not really a Jew, Bernie Sanders, is out there saying that you have to ride or die with people who say that America deserved 9/11.
He was asked, “Piker has said America deserved 9/11. Are you comfortable with that association?”
“No, I am not. I think that&#8217;s a dumb statement,” Sanders responded, but then added, “On the other hand, he has a whole lot of followers, and there&#8217;s a lot of things that he&#8217;s saying that are making sense to a lot of people. I think, you know, we have to get above cancel culture. You know, when you&#8217;re doing radio, whatever they do, podcasts three hours a day, you say dumb things. I suspect if you go back over your career, there may be one or two things that you said that you may have regretted. But I think what we have got to do is look at the totality of where people are coming from and go forward.”
It&#8217;s all about the coalition, the “big tent.”
Sanders is the moral leader of the Democratic Party at this point.
Meanwhile, Piker says that everyone who doesn&#8217;t vote for El-Sayed is Islamophobic.
This is always the last resort, the cheap last resort of people who wish to take advantage of America&#8217;s tolerance and our free systems in order to try to rip those things down.
Piker is the guy who literally wore the uniform of Chairman Mao, one of the great mass murderers in all of history.
He lectured Americans about “Islamophobia”: “Like everyone being like ‘Abdul has a ton of work to do mending bridges.’ Here&#8217;s the f*cking take for you: You are all unbelievably Islamophobic pieces of sh*t. You literally called the dude a terrorist for months on end and like, called him a sexist, misogynist, terrorist, bad candidate, fake doctor when he has, like two f*cking degrees and now you&#8217;re going to sit there and be like, ‘Well, you know, you&#8217;ve really got to come to me now.’ Like, what are you talking about? Do you want to f*cking win or not? Lock the f*ck in.”
If you take this garbage seriously or take this person seriously, you&#8217;re a moron.
Hearing him fume about people saying that El-Sayed is pro-terrorism when he’s the guy who is pro-terrorism and campaigning next to him is really remarkable.
But the biggest issue here is not Piker. It&#8217;s not even El-Sayed.
It is the Democratic Party that is willing to do literally anything to maintain its presence on the national stage, including fellow-traveling with people like El-Sayed.
Their “big tent” is now Islamized.

IMG_5762

The Democrat Civil War Just Got Much Darker

Abdul El-Sayed

antisemitism

Bernie Sanders

Democrats

Islamization

John Fetterman

Jon Stewart

Grocery prices are too high; we all know it; we all get it.
They&#8217;re up about 35% since 2019 — first because of COVID-19, then because of Joe Biden&#8217;s inflationary policies. Inflation has slowed; grocery prices are up about 2.7% for the year right now.
But let’s set the record straight: Grocery prices are never coming back down to where they were in 2019. The only way for them to do that would be for us to experience a serious, actual deflationary episode, which generally means an economic depression.
Food inflation started to level out in 2023 while Joe Biden was still president, and has continued at a relatively tepid pace since. Yet the impression persists that the Trump administration isn&#8217;t doing enough to address inflation, in part because of the tariffs. Tariffs don&#8217;t target consumer prices; they target fairness in the production process and a level playing field with foreign countries
But there’s a far worse and more serious problem in the United States: Unrealistic, inflated utopian expectations.
Many young people have a completely broken set of expectations about life right now.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2479?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
One student wrote, “A burrito shouldn&#8217;t cost 20 bucks.” Andrew Kolvet of TPUSA commented, “Yeah, a lot of this is a hangover from Covid and Biden-era inflation, but the lived experience is the same: It just feels like basic things cost too much.”
I agree things cost more than they should. But there is only one way in the United States of America in 2026 for a burrito to cost $20: You went to an expensive restaurant.
A burrito at Chipotle probably tops out at about $13. A top-shelf burrito option at Taco Bell runs $5.99 plus tax.
Let’s pretend that you&#8217;re a poor young student, as I once was. Or pretend you&#8217;re a dude who is just starting his work life and wants upward mobility, as I once did.
This is what you do: If you want a burrito, you head to the supermarket. Here are today&#8217;s prices via Instacart: You buy a package of 10 tortillas for roughly $4. You also grab a can of refried beans for $2.50, then grab some cheese, salsa, maybe an avocado, and nuke it in the microwave.
Boom, you&#8217;re talking about a pretty good burrito for less than $2, one-tenth of the price that student was talking about.
So what the hell are we even talking about here?
Unfortunately, this has become the mode for a lot of young people: “Why can&#8217;t I afford what my parents could afford when they were my age?”
Spoiler alert about groceries: You can. And even in areas for housing where deregulation has been the rule, you still can.
In fact, today you have more restaurant options, your food takes up a smaller share of your disposable income, and it is probably significantly better than it was back in 1950, when your grandparents were consuming, on average, about 1,000 fewer calories per day than you do now.
Food expenditure as a share of family disposable income in the United States has been flat at well under 10% since the mid-1990s. If you go back to when your parents were doing this, it was roughly 13% to 15%. But we&#8217;re constantly being told that we can&#8217;t even afford food, which is a wild exaggeration.
We are, if anything, a very overweight country, and all of this is yet another form of black-pilling.
Things can get better. There are things we can do to get government out of this business, and we should. But insane, outsized expectations of reality wreck politics. That’s because if both parties are promising you something that can never be achieved via politics, you will inevitably be annoyed. You will swivel over to the other side, and then they&#8217;ll fail, and you&#8217;ll swivel back to the first side.
Here is the deal: In the United States of America, we are fatter and richer, and we have nicer houses and nicer cars than in the past, and the food we eat is much, much better than it was for our parents, in general.
There are secondary distortions that follow from that. “You know what? We need to go back to the way it was. Our food system is broken. We need to go totally domestic. We&#8217;re talking about chicken coops in the backyard.”
I think our ancestors would have laughed at us trying to cosplay the 1850s, when it turns out that if we had lived in the 1850s, we all would have been miserable and smelly, crapping in a hole in the backyard.
Life was not great back then. In fact, if you take people from poorer countries today and you bring them to the United States, they&#8217;re not complaining about the status of our food supply.
There&#8217;s a woman we know from the Philippines. She&#8217;s wonderful, and she just brought her mom over from there. The family grew up in a shack in the Philippines with no actual floor, along with 10 siblings. When her mom came over, she walked into an American supermarket, and it blew her mind.
Why?
Because for most of the world, the luxury that we experience on a daily basis here in the United States is utterly unthinkable.
Our system is not broken. It is working really, really, really efficiently. We have one of the most efficient food production and delivery systems in the history of the world — and the cheapest.
According to the Foundation for Economic Education, the price of eggs declined 96% between 1919 and 2019. That means an unskilled laborer today can buy 24 times as many eggs as an unskilled laborer could a century ago for the same amount of work.
Does this mean everything is perfectly ideal? No. We could probably reduce food prices by 5% to 10%. All you&#8217;d have to do is eliminate tariffs and ramp up American oil production.
There is so much black-pilling, so much doom-scrolling, so much “America is terrible. Everything&#8217;s awful. No one can afford anything.”
None of this is to claim that everything is ideal.
But there&#8217;s no such thing as ideal. Everything is comparative.
Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris. Trump is far better.
America versus other countries. America is far better.
America&#8217;s living situation now versus your parents’ living situation. Comparatively, America is far better now.
Economics is a study in trade-offs. If you&#8217;re on the Right and you spend all day complaining about the production side — “What if all of our labor was both domestic and unionized and we got rid of technology? And what if all of our food was produced in Iowa and was totally organic?” — then you don&#8217;t get to complain about the prices being too high. All of your inputs just doubled.
If you want prices to go down, end the tariffs, ramp up market-based incentives for innovation, and break up useless unions. Prices will go down.
There&#8217;s one kind of silly critique that I&#8217;ve heard online. “We need to stop being distracted by foreign wars. It&#8217;s the foreign wars that are causing the food inflation.”
No, it isn&#8217;t. The war in Iran has had basically no impact on food prices in the U.S.
Here&#8217;s the food inflation percentage increase between 2016 and 2026: 2023: 2.7; 2024: 2.5; 2025: 3.1; 2026: 3.0.
That is not a gigantic bump based on the war in Iran.
If you actually want the prices to go up, you should leave Iran in charge of the Strait of Hormuz so it can keep throttling up or throttling down our prices at will, based on oil shocks.
Losing wars to failed dictatorships seeking nuclear weapons is not a brilliant trade strategy.
But put all that aside and go back to the larger point: The Right is doom-pilling; it is black-pilling, and right now it is having an impact.
Not everything in America does, in fact, suck. Things are quite good by any historical standard — much better than if Kamala Harris had been president.
That may not be a winning message in 2026, but I can tell you what a losing message looks like: “America totally sucks under Trump, and if you elect more Republicans, it will surely continue to suck. What we need is a Tucker Carlson third party. What we need is a common-good conservatism third party that totally changes everything that&#8217;s been done. Elect Democrats. Split the GOP vote. Then it&#8217;ll get better.”
This demoralization is what the black-pillers are doing right now.
Don’t buy into it.

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