The average American today lives better than John D. Rockefeller did in 1926. That is not an exaggeration. It is a fact. Rockefeller could not fly across the country in five hours. You can for $200. He could not video call his family from another continent. You do it for free. He had no antibiotics, no MRI, no air conditioning in July. He could not carry every book ever written in his pocket. You are reading this on a device that does all of that and more. Americans throw away 30-40% of their food. Not because they are wasteful, but because food is so abundant that waste is affordable. Your car has climate control, navigation, and safety systems that did not exist at any price a century ago. Your home has heating, cooling, refrigeration, and entertainment that emperors could not have imagined. None of this was voted into existence. None of it was redistributed from the rich. It was created by free minds operating in what remains of a free market. Every comfort you enjoy today is the product of a man who thought, invented, produced, and traded voluntarily. This is what the remnants of capitalism still deliver, even while it is being dismantled. Imagine what a fully free society could build.

"To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world." Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead Most men have "given" theirs away by default, through evasion and the refusal to examine the ideas they absorbed from family, school, and the culture. Accepting them unquestioned is a choice that has handed the future to the monsters who are cashing in on it.

None of this should surprise anyone. Ayn Rand told us in 1957 where this ends if the culture does not change its philosophy. Atlas Shrugged is the story of a country that holds self-sacrifice as a virtue and then wonders where its producers went. Her influence bought us time. From the early 80s to the turn of the century the trend went the other way. It did not hold, because the root premise stayed in place. Kant made selfless duty the essence of morality, Comte gave it the name altruism, and the universities have been teaching it ever since. That is how you get privileged socialists. Calling them privileged doesn't answer them. Altruism already tells them their privilege is a debt, and socialism lets them pay it with other people's money. As long as self-sacrifice is the moral ideal, socialism is the political result, and it keeps winning until someone challenges the morality and not just the economics.

He’s in luck: The ratio of total millionaires to billionaires in America is roughly 23,600 to 1.

Because nothing says “dignity” quite like having the government seize someone else’s earnings so you can evade the responsibility of earning your own, then calling the burden you imposed on them a human right.

Half the people on that call enjoyed a conversation with something that answered the question asked, checked a claim when given one, and changed position when the evidence changed. Much preferable to talking with people like you, who abandoned reasoning decades ago and now campaign on a feeling about a video call. Nothing was replaced. Someone built a thing that reasons well, and you want it stopped for that reason. PAUSE BS NOW!

But notice that he's not actually advocating privacy of the individual from the state, but further state control over the "AI oligarchs" who might be interfering with the state's total control of everying. He's actually consistent to the end in his quest for absolute centralized enslavement of everyone.

SMH. This is the same guy who wants to police every action by every producer, take most of your check, decide which hours you may work, outlaw the coverage you chose, halt construction on a building until Congress grants permission and every other control he can imagine over you. Now he discovers privacy. Notice the one thing he objects to. Not the government watching you. The profit someone earns from the camera. Strip the camera's vendor out of the story and his position vanishes, because the surveillance he opposes is the kind with a billionaire attached. A man who held the principle would say the state has no business tracking a citizen who is not accused of anything, and he would say it about every camera, every database, every bank reporting rule, every IRS lookup. He says it about license plates, this week, in a bill with a title designed to be shouted. The right to be left alone is the same right in every direction. You cannot invoke it against a traffic camera and spend fifty years voting against it everywhere else.

Ro Khanna wants us to believe that politicians like him can be trusted to regulate AI. He says we do not let airlines certify their own planes. Airlines do not certify planes, manufacturers do. And the FAA, with full authority over the 737 MAX, handed all 91 certification plans back to Boeing, including MCAS, then put its federal stamp on the result. Two crashes, 346 dead. The agency did not stop it. It certified it. He says we do not let nuclear operators police themselves. Under federal nuclear regulation every reactor ordered after 1973 was canceled, and no new plant was ordered from 1978 to 2012. He says we do not let drug manufacturers police themselves. Under the FDA a new drug takes ten to twelve years and over a billion dollars to approve while patients wait and many die. Those are his models of success. He says he has been in the rooms. He was there as a lawyer and a government official, representing tech companies, not building their products. Take it from Americans representing themselves. You cannot trust power lusters like Ro Khanna to regulate and write the rules for technology they could never create, or even understand.

A senator and a congressman walk into a math problem. Neither comes out. Bernie misreported the Fed by a factor of fourteen and Ro endorsed it, which tells you the standard of review on the rest of the program. Now the program itself. Their own economists scored the wealth tax at $4.35 trillion over ten years, extracted from ownership stakes in American companies. They propose to extract several trillion dollars over a decade from ownership stakes in American companies. Those stakes are not money, they are the capital that funds payrolls, plants, and research. Convert capital to revenue and the plants do not get built and the payroll does not expand. Then the money arrives in Washington, where Medicare for All is scored around $3 trillion a year in new federal spending, and the plan for paying is a tweet with the digits wrong.

California has the highest gas prices, sky high housing costs, and now an executive order protecting the word artificial. Gavin had a choice and picked the word that fits his own intelligence.

Thirty-five years in Congress, and the man still cannot work a decimal point. The Fed publishes the number he cited. He cited it wrong by a factor of fourteen, in the direction that helped him, which is quite a coincidence. His own source is the Federal Reserve's distributional accounts. Series WFRBLB50107 puts the bottom 50 percent's net worth at $717.8 billion in 1989, not $317.8 billion. For Q2 2026 it reads about $4.28 trillion, not $313 billion. The error is the only way to make 37 years look flat. Here is the real series. Nominal net worth for the bottom half grew almost six times over. Adjusted for inflation, their real wealth more than doubled. What fell is their share, from 3.5 percent to 2.3 percent, because the total grew faster than their portion of it. He saw a percentage drop and concluded people got poorer, which is the reasoning of a man who declares himself robbed because his raise was smaller than his neighbor's.

Here are the polls you left out. All Gallup, except where noted. 54% say the federal government has too much power 54% say government does too many things better left to individuals and businesses, against 43% who want it doing more 53% prefer a healthcare system based on private insurance over a government-run one 46% say business is regulated too much, against 23% who say too little 69% named big government the biggest threat to the country over big business and big labor, the last time Gallup asked About 25% would take more services with higher taxes over fewer with lower 55% view the Democratic Socialists of America unfavorably, against 30% favorably, per Fox News this month Ask a thing as a free benefit and people say yes. Ask who should hold the power and they say not Washington. @SenSanders only cares about polls when they fit his narrative. But ultimately, rights are not up to any poll or any vote, which is the entire purpose of the Republic the founders created, something politicians in both parties, especially the Democrats, show no evidence of ever having read.

And we are supposed to trust power lusters like Bernie instead. The man demanding oversight of producers has never produced anything, and he offers as his credential the wreckage of every system he helped build. Be clear about what failed. The founders limited government to protecting rights, with no power to run a currency monopoly, finance medicine, or direct industry. What we live under is the collectivist remodel, built piece by piece since the Progressive era, and these results belong to it. The federal debt crossed $40 trillion in August. Health spending per person ran $353 in 1970 and $15,474 last year, while health care grew from 5 percent of the economy to 18 percent. The dollar has lost roughly 91 percent of its value since 1965, taking $10.63 today to match $1 then. Musk and Bezos need your voluntary purchase to earn a dollar. Bernie's colleagues take theirs by law and bill your grandchildren for the shortfall. Only one of those can be told no by you personally.

We are also a nation of rights, and that does not seem to matter to Ro Khanna. A congressman does not issue orders to a president. Under the Constitution the president negotiates, and a treaty binds nothing until two thirds of the Senate ratifies it. You know this. You sit in Congress. And bind China with what? Xi stood in the Rose Garden in 2015 and said China had no intention of militarizing the Spratly Islands, then militarized them. China bought roughly 58 percent of what it committed to in the Phase One trade deal. It called the treaty guaranteeing Hong Kong's freedoms a historical document with no practical meaning. You are the ranking Democrat on the Select Committee on the CCP. You know this too. A binding AI treaty with Beijing would bind exactly one party, and it would not be China. It would be American builders, held to terms the CCP ignores the day after signing. That is what your nation of laws would produce here. Chains on our own producers, and a pinky promise from Xi.

I was asked by someone why I think Elon Musk holds a badly flawed philosophy. We should take Mr. Musk seriously, because he is one of the great producers of our age, and that is exactly why his philosophy matters. A man who builds the future and cannot defend it on principle leaves that future to be seized by men who do have principles, even if they are the wrong principles. So I will go through the branches in order, because each one rests on the branch before it. Begin with epistemology, the theory of knowledge, because that is where his method splits in two. In the factory he is a model of the rational method. He asks what the laws of physics permit, discards the conventional answer, and reasons from the facts upward. That is rational thinking. Now watch him leave the factory. He tells you there is a 10 to 20 percent chance that artificial intelligence will end humanity. Ask him how that figure was derived. What evidence, what method, what calculation? He has none because there is none. In 2016 he announced that men would walk on Mars by 2025 and that fully autonomous cars were two years away. These are arbitrary assertions, claims put forward with no evidence whatever, as if the act of asserting them gave them standing. An arbitrary claim is not true and not false. It is nothing, and the proper response to nothing is to dismiss it rather than argue with it. A mind that reasons rigorously in one field and asserts freely in another has not grasped its own method as a principle. It has compartmentalized. It applies reason where reality will check the answer, in a rocket that lands or does not, and suspends it where no check is coming, in predictions about the future of the species. Objectivism regards that split as a failure of integration, and integration is not automatic. It is something a man chooses to do or chooses to evade, and the choice is the whole of epistemology at the level where a life is lived. Now metaphysics, the branch that asks what exists. Mr. Musk has said the odds that we live in base reality, meaning reality, are one in billions. Observe what such a statement does. It treats existence as a probability, something that may or may not be the case, as though there were some other vantage point from which the question could be settled. There is none. Existence exists. It is the starting point of all knowledge, including the knowledge required to build a simulation. He has also said that man may be no more than the boot loader for a digital superintelligence, and called that increasingly probable. Notice that both claims share a premise: the world you perceive and the man perceiving it are provisional, less than fully real. A builder needs the opposite premise. He needs reality to be firm, and it is. Ethics is where his errors become dangerous. He says he accumulates wealth to make life multiplanetary and to ensure that the light of consciousness is not extinguished. He says the goal of his companies is to maximize the probability that civilization has a great future. Look at what this does. He has made humanity the purpose of his life. Here I will be precise, because most men blur this. In the Objectivist ethics, the standard of value is man's life, life as a rational being, that which is required to sustain and further it. But the purpose of ethics, for each man, is his own life and his own happiness. Standard and purpose are not the same thing. Mr. Musk has kept no purpose for himself. He works for the species. And a man who tells the world he works for the species has told the world that the species may take what he makes. Every wealth tax, every seizure, every subpoena is written in those terms. He cannot answer them, because he has already granted the premise. Politics follows from ethics, as it must. He calls America a democracy, constantly. It is not. It is a constitutional republic, and the difference is not a technicality. A democracy is unlimited majority rule. A republic is a system in which certain things are placed beyond the reach of any vote, and those things are the rights of the individual. Now look at what he proposes for Mars: direct democracy, every citizen voting on every law, any law removable by 40 percent. He believes he has designed freedom. He has designed mob rule with an arithmetical safeguard. A supermajority is still a majority, and a right that survives only because enough people voted to let it survive is not a right. It is a permission. He even claims the founders chose representation only because they could not communicate quickly enough. Read Madison. He chose the republic on principle, because pure democracies, in his words, had ever been found incompatible with personal security and the rights of property. Mr. Musk has the history backward because he has the philosophy backward. Add his declaration in 2016 that a universal basic income would be necessary, his present prediction of universal high income with money made irrelevant, and his past endorsement of a carbon tax. Each treats wealth as something distributed rather than earned. Observe the pattern, because it is the most instructive thing about his philosophy. In 2014 he said that with AI we were summoning the demon. In March 2023 he signed a letter demanding a six month pause, two weeks after quietly incorporating his own AI company, which he announced that July. He voted for Democrats for years, then backed Mr. Trump, then broke with him and announced a third party. What does it mean when a man's positions change this often? It means they are not derived from principles. They are responses to circumstances, and circumstances change. A principle is a general truth about reality, and it holds regardless of the news. Esthetics I will gladly give him. A rocket that lands on its own tail is the heroic made visible, and that is what art and engineering share at their best. Mr. Musk lives like a producer and explains himself like an altruist. The living is admirable. The explaining is what is already being used against him and will continue to be used against him, and against every man like him.

Defending the men who burned families alive by accusing their innocent victims of the same crime makes you morally complicit, and you should be ashamed. And the facts tell a different story. Hamas hides its guns behind children, and you are doing with words what they do with bodies, standing in front of the guilty so the blame cannot reach them. The Kirya has been the IDF headquarters since 1948. Tel Aviv grew up around it. It is fenced and marked, and Israel has never claimed it is off limits, not when Iran hit the area in 2025 and not this year. Every capital has its defense "ministry" in a city. The Pentagon sits among Arlington's neighborhoods. Human shielding means using civilians to deter attack: firing from hospitals and schools, storing weapons in them, and keeping people in place so their bodies cover yours. Hamas does all three. Israel does the opposite on both ends. It shelters its own people and warns the enemy's, with millions of texts, calls, and leaflets before strikes, more than any military in history has done for civilians deliberately placed in front of its targets. Iran, meanwhile, hit Soroka hospital and apartment blocks in Bat Yam.

Exactly. Hamas put its command posts under hospitals, schools, and homes, then massacred 1,200 Israelis. Anyone who blames Israel for the destruction that followed is defending the terrorists who hid behind their own people.

Fox News has given a prime time show to a man who answers his critics with smears. A network maintains its reputation by what it chooses to sanction. Can anyone imagine Madison answering an Anti-Federalist this way? The men who built this country argued in essays, thousands of words at a stretch, from principle to conclusion, and trusted their readers to judge. This is the opposite. A man with an argument makes it, and a man without one reaches for a label. Ayn Rand named the tactic the argument from intimidation, a smear offered in place of a refutation so the audience recoils from the man instead of weighing his case. Gaetz answers with a cartoon of a Jewish man that looks like Levin in a Star of David costume, which is no better, but no one should be surprised by this. And Levin deserves credit for defending the war. But he excuses every pause, retreat, and negotiation from Trump that he would tear apart from any other president. A man who has abandoned his own standard has nothing left to argue with except labels. Fox News should hold its hosts to a higher standard than this, and a host who argues this way should not keep his time slot.

Grant every item on that list. The navy, the air force, the missile plants, the frozen assets, all real, and all a credit to the men who flew those missions. Now notice what is missing from the list, which is the regime itself. Everything you named is hardware, and hardware can be rebuilt. Missiles get manufactured, ships get bought, and frozen money gets released in the next deal. What cannot be bombed is the premise that built them, and the men who hold it are still in charge in Tehran, still chanting death to America, and still firing on tankers weeks after signing agreements. We have run this exact experiment. In 1991 we destroyed Saddam's army, stopped short of Baghdad, and left him in power. He crushed the uprising we had encouraged, rebuilt, and twelve years later we went back and did it again. Germany and Japan in 1945 were defeated, occupied, and remade under constitutions protecting individual rights, and they have been peaceful allies ever since. So no, Iran has not won yet. But a regime that starts a war and survives it gets to rebuild and start the next one, and if we let that happen, the pundits will have been right. Wars are not decided by what gets destroyed. They are decided by what is still standing when the shooting stops, and right now the regime is still standing.

Other. The number one enemy is the philosophy taught in our own universities, that reason is impotent, self-sacrifice is virtue, and the individual belongs to the state. Iran and Russia survive only because that philosophy leaves us unwilling to defeat them.