AUGUST 19, 2026

“Let us pray, reflecting upon the grace of the Archangel, as we too are called to fight for the truth.”

–St. Michael.

The U.S. is actually moving in the right direction. You would not believe that if cable news and The New York Times were your sources of news, but it is true.

Moreover, because of Leftist cheerleading in the mainstream media for the Democrat Party, the U.S. is also on the verge of being irreparably damaged. If the Democrats regain power, believe them when they tell you that they will open the borders, “pack” the Supreme Court, enact wealth taxes, enact socialized medicine, and curb the military. If you think that the labor participation rate is low now at 61.4% (and it is), then just wait until there is a national minimum income guarantee. If you think the debt is unsustainable, what do you think it will be if the Left gets their wish list of $200 trillion in increased spending over the next 10 years?

Below I have shared commentaries on the current and emerging situation. I hope you find them informative.

____________________________________________________________________

You Can’t Have Democracy Without Free Markets. Why ‘Democratic Socialism’ Is an Oxymoron.

BY:          Dimitri Bolt (August 12, 2026).

Free markets are a prerequisite for political freedom. That simple truth is too often forgotten across the United States, and has become especially urgent amid the rise of so-called democratic socialism

. 

Over the weekend, Daniel Di Martino, an economist, Manhattan Institute fellow, and immigrant from socialist Venezuela, reminded attendees at Young America’s Foundation’s National Conservative Student Conference why. Political freedom, whether under a democracy or a constitutional republic, cannot endure without economic freedom: the ability of individuals to own property, build businesses, and exist independently of the state.

“Democratic socialism is an oxymoron,” Di Martino said. “You cannot have a democracy and a socialist economy. You can live in a country without democratic freedoms and with economic freedoms. It’s true, I mean, think about the Arab Gulf nations, right? Think about Dubai, you know, Kuwait. Think about UAE, right? Think about Singapore. You know, Singapore has much more political freedom than the Arab countries, but, you know, the same party has been in power for like 60 years. But in those countries, people don’t starve to death. In those countries, people actually immigrate. All those countries are actually richer on average than the United States.”

“But there is not a single example of a socialist economy that is democratic,” he said. “You see, economic freedom, capitalism, free enterprise is a precondition to democracy. It’s not a sufficient condition, but it’s a requirement. Socialists know this, and that’s why they implement socialism.”

How do economic freedom, and free markets lead to a politically free society?

What too many people take for granted is that private enterprise serves as a powerful check on government authority. It keeps a nation’s wealth creation, productive capacity, and economic decision-making from being concentrated in the hands of the state. Instead, it disperses power among millions of workers, consumers, investors, entrepreneurs, and business owners, allowing individuals to pursue innovation, creativity, and opportunity in ways no centralized government can replicate. 

That dispersion of power matters immensely. When the government controls the economy, it can easily control livelihoods: who receives a license, a loan, a job, a contract, or the ability to start and sustain a business. A society with independent businesses and private property creates institutions that exist outside the state that resist political pressure and give citizens a significant measure of genuine freedom.

Free markets also cultivate a belief in the power of individual agency, the conviction that people should be free to make choices, take risks, build something of their own, and keep the rewards of their hard work. That belief is not separate from political freedom; it is one of its very foundations. A public accustomed to economic independence is far less likely to accept a government that claims the power to direct any other part of life.

When a political movement like the DSA seeks to centralize economic power, it attacks one of political freedom’s essential pillars, based on the belief that wealth creation is inherently evil. In reality, private wealth, enterprise, and economic independence are tools for resisting the tyranny of the state. 

When the DSA claims to fight for the people, it does so in a narrow sense. Its vision reduces politics to mob rule: the tyranny of the majority, backed by the power to force its preferred vision on the rest of society.

Too many Americans ignore the free market’s role as the backbone of our constitutional republic. And it’s time to give capitalism its rightful credit, for without it, the United States ceases to be the country it was founded to be.

____________________________________________________________________

The Doomers Can’t Deny Trump’s Big Wins

BY:          Kurt Schlichter (August 13, 2026).

No, everything isn’t perfect, and we patriots should keep demanding more and more from the Trump 47 administration. Keep the pressure on. Keep the heat on. Don’t let anyone in Washington think that we’re just ready to settle. But on the other hand, don’t spaz out like a teenage girl whose parents just read her diary about what President Donald Trump has accomplished so far. Yeah, there have been disappointments. Here’s a flash: there are disappointments in life. You can’t always get what you want, but this administration tried really hard, and we might just get what we need.

Let’s review some of the typical complaints from Team All-Is-Lost. The war in Iran hasn’t yet been conclusively won. Millions upon millions of illegal aliens are still in the United States. We’re paying fat slobs to sit on their butts and gobble down Doritos that our welfare dollars pay for. Republicans are weak and soft, and haven’t passed the SAVE Act. Trust-fund communists are taking over the Democrat Party.

The economy under Trump 47 hasn’t yet matched the economy under Trump 45. The budget is still out of control. Bureaucrats keep interfering in our agenda. Judges keep getting in the way of progress. Democrats keep getting in the way of progress. Progressives keep getting in the way of progress.

So, we should whine and cry, right? After all, what has Trump accomplished?

A lot. I don’t need a column for that. I need a book.

Let’s look at the border. It’s closed. The argument isn’t over how many thousands of Third World invaders we let in every day. The argument is now about the walls we are actually building — they’re really mad that we’re going to put up barriers in a national park instead of letting thousands of invaders trash it as they traipse through it. We have net-zero immigration right now. More foreigners are leaving than coming in. Think about that. Back in 2024, it was inconceivable that we would be where we are. Yet here we are. The biggest problem America faced has been solved, at least until America is stupid enough to elect a Democrat again. If Trump did nothing else during the last two years, this would be enough to make him a success.

And he’s done a hell of a lot more just on immigration. He unleashed ICE to toss hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens out, and the boot-out rate is increasing. We’re putting the temporary back in “Temporary Protected Status.” We’re banning immigration from many garbage countries and putting limits on H-1B visas. We’ve got the asylum adjudication machine up and moving — no more six years to your hearing date and no more soft-touch judges who grant asylum to anyone with a sob story. ICE is only going to get bigger. The invaders who will only leave the hard way are going to get their wish, and as the administration tightens the rules on giving free stuff to invaders who shouldn’t be here, more of them are going to pick up and leave. We’ve already seen the results. Foreigner job numbers have dropped, but American jobs have risen. Crime is down. Hell, even traffic is better in LA.

Let’s look at the federal government’s pinko feeding trough. We used to have USAID funding transgender mime troupes in Bolivia. We’ve defunded that crap, and a ton of leftist NGOs, as a result. Look at the map. Latin America is turning red because American money isn’t going to fund leftist parties. You could hear about it on NPR, but we’ve stopped giving them government money. Trump didn’t cut everything he wanted to cut, but he cut a lot. Who the hell did that before?

On the economy, yeah, gas prices have gone up because we’ve got to deal with the world as it is. But last month, inflation dropped — again. Take a look at your retirement accounts. They’ve gone up, up, up.

Unless you’re a borderline mental defective, you understand that we’re not going to enter into a deflationary cycle. The way we’re going to have to deal with affordability is by growing wages, and that’s going to take time. Sorry, the good-economy wand is broken, but the good economy is still coming.

Trump has cut taxes, including the kind that hit working people hardest. If Kamala Harris were here, we’d all be holding our gruel bowls begging “More, please.”

Sure, there’s a giant problem with healthcare. You know healthcare — it was called “Obamacare” until the people who created Obamacare realized how much Obamacare sucked. Do we have a solution yet? No, thanks to weak Republicans who refused to repeal it. But Trump’s doing something hugely important — preventing the single-payer socialized-medicine nightmare. The only people bummed about this are the people who think that medicine should be run by the same people who run the DMV.

How about Iran? I know, Trump promised no more forever wars. Well, Iran is about ending a forever war — one those 7th-century savages declared against us about 50 years ago. Oh no, they fought back. Pathetically, and tactically ineffectively, but yeah, they shot at us. They’ve actually killed a few of us. That’s why it’s called a “war.” But the United States has completely dominated the fight, and only idiots think that the Strait of Hormuz is somehow checkmated because a bunch of Iranians are saying so on X while millions of barrels of oil flow through every day. Yeah, finishing the job is hard, and it’s taking longer than our impatient society wants, but it will remove a huge strategic opponent from the board. Go short on the mullahs, if you’re smart — Trump’s going to finish this, and them.

Oh, and the Trump administration is still hunting down and eliminating scores of other terrorists. We have re-introduced something that has been missing on the part of our enemies for far too long — fear.

Let’s review some other wins. DEI is dead in the whole United States government. Trump’s defunding and banning gender mutilation. The U.S. military is back, not only putting up wins on the scoreboard, but posting record recruiting numbers after getting rid of the curse of DEI. We haven’t got the SAVE Act yet, but we’ve got Trump promulgating orders to curb some of the most blatant mail-in ballot abuses. We’re gutting regulations on everything from guns to mining to drilling and beyond.

Yeah, we’re getting resistance in the courts. Resistance doesn’t mean you’re losing. In this case, it means we’re winning. When some communist judge from the Eastern District of the Soviet Union decides that Trump’s not allowed to be president because of reasons and racism, and the DOJ appeals, the Trump administration wins about 95 percent of the time. Hell, the only time it lost, birthright citizenship, it still came out 5–4, which is closer than anyone with any glancing familiarity with the law ever imagined, and set the stage for new executive orders that will limit birth tourism.

We could go on and on. We could talk about the superstars that Trump’s brought aboard, from JD Vance to Marco Rubio, from Scott Bessent to Pete Hegseth. We could talk about tons of things that are driving the Left crazy, like beautifying Washington, D.C., and cutting crime. The persecuted patriots of J6 have been pardoned, as have the grandmas jailed for praying in abortion clinics. The FBI is no longer trying to frame the Commander-in-Chief and lock up moms who dared to raise their concerns at school board meetings.

We should be talking about these wins. Donald Trump should be talking about them, and when he holds his convention next month, I expect he will. That’s the real story: not the whining about the things we haven’t done yet, but about celebrating the things we have.

That’s why the blackpillers are so annoying. To be a doomer, you have to ignore the great things we have achieved. That’s ridiculous and unreasonable. Now, no one is saying that we can’t complain about mistakes and missteps. It’s saying that you have to understand that every human endeavor, especially something as complex and unwieldy as reversing course on the entire United States government, is going to have its share of mistakes and missteps. Adults understand that, and they don’t wet themselves every time some things don’t go their way.

Newsflash — some things are not going to go your way. Everything isn’t going to be fixed tomorrow. That doesn’t mean don’t complain — you should be complaining because that keeps the pressure on.

Complain that we haven’t thrown out enough illegals, complain that we haven’t locked up enough criminals, complain that we haven’t killed enough Third World savages who threaten America. But don’t undermine the morale of our side by dwelling on what hasn’t been done yet to the exclusion of all the many things that Trump 47 has done so far.

Be dissatisfied with Donald Trump if you want. Think that he could be doing more. Again, keep the pressure on. Yeah, there are lots of problems and lots of things to do. Welcome to the world. Here’s another newsflash: everything is never going to get fixed. You’re not going to get to that shining city on the hill until they plant you six feet under.

But understand that life is about choices. We face a stark one. It is the Trump administration, with all its imperfections, versus a potential DSA communist regime that’s going to take your guns, take your liberty, and take your son’s genitals if he looks sideways at a Barbie doll. We had that choice in 2024, and we made the right one. We need to keep making it in 2026 and 2028. We have a long way to go, but dammit, don’t ever think we haven’t come a long way already.

____________________________________________________________________

Fresh proof that ‘democratic socialists’ will act like communists once elected

BY:          Victor Davis Hanson, The New York Post (August 10, 2026).

It is not difficult, these days, to see the neo-communist flipside of “democratic socialists” — once they find power.

Indeed, the more the ossified Democratic Party claims that its growing cadre of socialist renegades are not really socialists, the more they act like — and even appear comfortable being called — communists.

With every new policy they propose, the socialists have been dropping the pretense that they are not Marxists.

Declaring capitalism a failure? All the socialists now do that.

Confiscating private property? New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani claims he will do just that if New York’s landlords, in his opinion, are poor custodians of their own property.

Dismantling the Constitution? Almost all Democrats have long called for destroying the 238-year-old Electoral College.

And now the socialists openly brag that, when they take over the Democratic Party and then the nation, they will, as good Bolsheviks, go much further: destroying the Senate, destroying the Pentagon, prisons, the police and our borders.

And they want to take over utilities, break up or absorb corporate agriculture and own major industries.

Apparently, socialists believe that with a snap of their fingers they can destroy key elements of the US constitutional order.

They also seem to have taken their cue for such radical change from “mainstream” Democrats — for example, Kamala Harris.

Now in her third vain bid for the presidency, she has adopted the doctrine of “if you can’t beat them, join them.”

So Harris now promises that if she is elected, she will pack the court, admit two new blue states (to snag four liberal senators), end the filibuster and junk the Electoral College.

How she plans to amend the Constitution to that effect she never tells us.

Like all good Marxists, these “ends-justify-the-means” leftists show an utter lack of principle: If two new red states wished to join the United States, they would lecture us on the sanctity of a 50-state union.

If they were a permanent Senate minority, they would, as in the past, honor the filibuster.

How about making “enemies of the people” lists and forcing sales of private property?

Mamdani just sent out a public list of nearly 1 million New York homeowners.

He sent official warnings to 17,000 of these property owners that, if they cannot prove they have lived full-time in their own properties, the city will levy a huge surtax on them to drive home the point that no one should own a second high-value home.

Are show trials next for those who decline to reply?

Mamdani has flipped the American tradition of “innocent until proven guilty.”

Almost 20,000 New Yorkers are now automatically presumed guilty of being house-hoarding, capitalist leeches who owe the exploited classes tens of thousands of dollars a year in reparations, unless they can prove themselves innocent.

Welcome to Mamdani’s revolutionary court.

Recently, on cable news, the national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, Megan Romer, was asked about her group’s agenda.

Far from denying its communist radicalism, she gleefully confirmed it all — from destroying the border to ending prisons, the military and the police.

But it is in Spain, and Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s corrupt and unpopular regime, where we see what one-eyed-jack socialists can do when they are finally in power, especially when they are hated and on their way out.

Sanchez has given amnesty to 600,000 illegal aliens. One result was that 60,000 Muslim men from North Africa in a single day recently swarmed Spain’s colonial outpost at Ceuta, demanding amnesties — while looting and vandalizing businesses and attacking Spaniards.

Why do European socialists and American leftists, once elected, destroy borders, create conditions of mass chaos and welcome in millions of illegal aliens — poor, often angry and unassimilated — from the Third World?

Aside from their belief that the capitalists and their bourgeois hirelings deserve violence and upheaval, they hate the fact that capitalism is too class-fluid to furnish a permanent exploited proletarian underclass.

And so they import a huge victim class, and virtue signal their purported moral superiority.

Then they spend lavish social largesse upon the influx, and, in quid pro quo fashion, thus bind their imported underclass with their welfare-state assurances.

Socialist candidates (as opposed to registered socialist activists) hide their communist-adjacent agendas during elections.

But once in office and drunk with power, they find socialism too wishy-washy and go full communist.

They destroy borders, institutions, names, dates, statues, norms, customs and traditions to replicate the illiberalism and concomitant failures of a new Haiti, West Bank or Morocco in the West.

In sum, to make a new socialist America, you must first destroy everything that made Americans — and all that they hold dear.

GFK