Category: Commentary

Commentary: Trump’s Tariffs and Tax Cuts Spark Manufacturing Renaissance

American Greatness
Trump and workers

by Peter Navarro   America is in the midst of a manufacturing renaissance. Unprecedented in its speed, it is driven by Trump’s tariffs and factory-targeted tax cuts. Companies can now expense 100 percent of the cost of building a factory on American soil instead of depreciating those costs over 39 years. The year you pour the concrete is the year you write it off. For a chief financial officer deciding where to build the next plant, that one provision changes the location decision. The Trump tariffs are a protective wall. President Trump has said, If you are a foreign company and you want to avoid our tariffs, build here. Invest here. Hire here. You can see the Trump manufacturing renaissance in the macro data, in the micro data, and along highways across flyover country. Start with the macro. In the Biden administration’s last two years, America lost 230,000 manufacturing jobs. Since December 2025, American manufacturers have added 72,000 jobs, with factory payrolls rising in each of the last four months through September. Through most of 2023 and 2024, the ISM Manufacturing Index languished below 50, the line between contraction and expansion. In January it climbed back above 50, where it…

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Commentary: Trump’s Attempt to Stop Illegal Aliens’ Influence on the U.S. Census

The Daily Torch

Americans are well aware of the issues that stem from allowing large numbers of illegal aliens into the United States, from cheap foreign labor to abuse of welfare systems and legitimate concerns about illegal voting. But there is another glaring issue that illegal immigration causes, and President Donald Trump and his administration are proposing a way to fix it before 2030.

Illegal aliens are currently counted in the United States Census — the census count that is used to form a population baseline for each state and allocate U.S. House seats and Electoral College power among the 50 states every ten years. 

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Commentary: The Sidelining of the Working Man

American Greatness
blue collar work

The American work ethic was never simply about making money. It was a moral code: work hard, keep your word, master a skill, provide for your family, and leave the next generation better off. Alexis de Tocqueville observed it firsthand in the 1830s, noting that in democratic America “everybody works, and work opens a way to everything,” a sharp contrast to European aristocracies where idleness carried prestige. America became the land of opportunity by fusing that culture with liberty, property rights, open markets, and an unusual respect for ordinary labor. The man who built things, drove routes, and came home dirty was not a lesser citizen. He was the point.

I started working when I was twelve. In New England, that means you follow the seasons: mowing lawns in summer, raking leaves in fall, shoveling driveways in winter. All cash. All informal. Nobody asked for a resume. You showed up, you worked, and you got paid. Before I set foot in a college classroom, I’d been a busboy, a barback, a gas station attendant, a mailroom clerk, and a locker room attendant. None of those jobs was glamorous. All of them taught me something money can’t buy: what it means to earn your own way. That ethic now feels like a relic.

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Commentary: The Splendor of Rural America

American Greatness
rural America

The other day, I found myself facing two decisions. The first of these was whether I could take the time off work to drive four hours—two hours up and two hours back—for an event lasting less than twenty minutes. Given that the event in question was my son’s cross-country meet, it wasn’t a hard decision. He’s my youngest, after all, and in another blink of an eye, he’ll be done running high school meets and off doing something else, something I can’t take the afternoon off work to go watch, whether I want to or not. I’d have been a fool not to go.

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Commentary: Remembering the Courage of Christopher Columbus

Admin

Today we remember the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, who in October 1492 landed in the Bahamas and became the first Western European to discover what the Europeans would call the New World.

When Columbus and his crew of approximately 200 sailors left Spain in three crowded ships – the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria – they set their sails toward an unknown horizon. They expected to discover a trade route to India. (Most Europeans at the time knew the earth was round – but they were unaware of the North and South American continents.) Instead of finding a route to Southeast Asia, Columbus and his crew landed on a continent of new opportunities. Columbus’s accidental discovery opened a permanent passage across the Atlantic and redrew the known map of the world.

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Commentary: Trust, but Verify the Machines

American Greatness
AI

On September 29, President Trump put the heads of the biggest names in American AI in one room, and six of them signed a one-page safety accord: Google’s Sundar Pichai, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, and xAI’s Elon Musk. I’m bullish on what these machines will do for us, and I think the accord points the right way. Industry should move first, and Washington shouldn’t write rules for technology it barely understands. But I gave every fund manager who told me his books were fine the same scrutiny I’m applying here. A pledge to police yourself works only when the people carrying the risk can check the work.

The upside deserves the lead, and biology comes first. In 2024, the Nobel committee honored David Baker for computational protein design and Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for protein structure prediction. Researchers are now building virtual cells, models that predict how a cell responds to a drug, a gene edit, or a disease process before anyone touches a pipette. The Arc Institute’s STATE was trained on roughly 270 million cells to forecast those responses. Its Evo 2 learned from 9.3 trillion nucleotides and showed better than 90 percent accuracy on the effects of BRCA1 mutations, and its code and weights are public, so any lab can test the claims. DeepMind’s AlphaGenome reads up to 1 million DNA letters at once and targets the 98 percent of the genome that sits outside protein-coding regions. Wet-lab validation stays indispensable, and the STATE’s own builders call it “just the first version.” If these tools hold up, they shorten the road from hypothesis to experiment.

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Commentary: Correctly Understanding the ‘Stupidity’ of the Left

RealClearWire
Ice Out protest

by Greg Salsbury   A long list of prominent conservatives have referred to leftists and Democrats as dumb, stupid, incompetent, crazy, and insane. In 2007, Ann Coulter wrote the book “If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans.” Both Rush Limbaugh and President Trump regularly referred to Democrats as “Dumbocrats.” More recently, the leader of the House Freedom Caucus called Democrats “the crazy party,” and JD Vance framed the contrast between the parties as “common sense vs. crazy.” Matt Margolis titled a piece in PJ Media this year “Democrats Are Too Stupid to Heed This Warning,” and posited that somewhere between the 1990s and today, the Democratic Party lost its mind. Some of this stuff gets a chuckle, but conservatives need to be careful with this narrative. Conservatives need to understand that this tactic can not only contradict the more serious messages they’re trying to convey about leftist policies, it can also remove responsibility from leftists for their malevolence. Consider a recent interview in which Representative Jim Jordan explained that the left’s open-border policy was part of a shrewd, long-term plan to bring in new Democrat constituents, with sanctuary-city policies as another step in that plan. Yet in the same…

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Commentary: Fixing Failing U.S. Schools

The Daily Signal
students questions

On Sept. 28, The New York Times published a story titled 30 Ideas for Fixing U.S. Schools, Ranked by Experts. The subhead read, “Math and reading scores are in a decade-long slump. We asked three dozen experts: What could turn things around?”

The pundits went through a litany of ways to improve America’s schools. They placed great importance on small-group tutoring, teaching the “science of reading,” expanding universal pre-K, and other measures.

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Marsha Blackburn Commentary: Help Is on the Way for Tennessee Families

Star News Contributor
Marsha Blackburn campaign event

Families are working hard, but too often they are finding that their paychecks do not go as far as they once did. Young Tennesseans are wondering whether they will ever be able to afford a home of their own. Seniors who spent decades working, saving and building a life in Tennessee are worried about whether they can afford to stay in the homes they worked so hard to purchase.

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Commentary: The Left Has a Political Violence Problem

The Daily Signal
left wing protest

They say politics can be murder. For a disturbing number of Americans on the Left, that seems to be an adage taken literally.

A new poll from the progressive Center for Strategic Politics indicates just how far some Democrat voters are willing to go to see President Donald Trump removed from power. Or, as the pollsters somewhat mutedly put it, “Democrats want Trump out by (almost) any means necessary.”

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Commentary: The AI Race Is Becoming a Race for Power

RealClearWire
AI

When Interior Secretary Doug Burgum toured LG’s manufacturing facility in Lansing, Michigan, last month, he wasn’t just checking in on an auto parts plant. He was carefully watching a plant originally built to make only electric vehicle batteries expand into battery production that can store power for the electric grid, a shift that could help America power the AI boom and compete with China.

Good. For years, Washington treated the electric grid like something that would simply keep working no matter how much we demanded of it. That era is over. Between the AI boom, a manufacturing renaissance, and a Pentagon that needs more power at more bases, the United States is in a race for electrons — one that China is hoping we lose. 

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Commentary: Current High Energy Prices Were Decades In The Making

Daily Caller News Foundation
Gas Station at night

It is a common cliché to say that social media and the deluge of content we consume each day have significantly hampered, if not entirely destroyed, our attention spans. Sometimes it seems like memory itself may be a vestige of a bygone era, when we connected current events to past decisions and, almost like magic, learned to take different actions.

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Commentary: Texas ICE Shootings Deserve More Than a One-Sided Narrative

The Daily Signal
ICE agent

Legacy media outlets have been spinning tall tales about Texas Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in recent months, trying to stoke backlash against immigration enforcement. But they’re not telling the full story.

Two shootings of illegal aliens in particular have garnered extensive coverage: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston in July and Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez in Austin in September. In both cases, mainstream media cast the men as innocent victims and questioned the agents’ use of force.

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Commentary: GOP Needs to Counter the Left’s Economic Narrative

American Greatness
Donald Trump

In 1992, Bill Clinton won the presidential election partly on the basis of his campaign’s false accusation that George H. W. Bush had overseen “the worst economic performance since the Great Depression.” Or so claimed Clinton’s running mate Al Gore.

James Carville, chief campaign adviser to Clinton/Gore, amplified that message with the constant refrain: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

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Commentary: Varieties of Trump Derangement Syndrome

American Greatness
Trump speaking

One of the philosopher William James’s most popular books is Varieties of Religious Experience. Published in 1902 and subtitled “A Study in Human Nature,” the book is based on James’s Gifford Lectures in natural theology at the University of Edinburgh. It is impressive how many states of mind James is willing to group under the category “religious.” I suspect some people might cavil at the proposition that the book was really an exercise in theology, natural, supernatural, or otherwise. That said, James’s catalogue of heightened, or at least altered, states of mind does have the virtue of reminding us of how wide the spectrum of human experience, not to say eccentricity, is. And it occurs to me that James’s distinction between “healthy-mindedness” and “morbid-mindedness,” set forth in a chapter on “The Sick Soul,” is of particular pertinence at a time, like ours, when the effort to normalize various pathologies seems to be, as we have been taught to say, trending.

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Commentary: It’s Time to Tackle America’s $40 Trillion National Debt

Daily Caller News Foundation
congress spending

There is a reality we must acknowledge to begin moving toward national fiscal solvency and sanity — resources are finite. Accepting this fundamental fact is our Vince Lombardi moment to zero-in on the basics, just as his Green Bay Packers team did after he delivered his famous line, “Gentlemen, this is a football.” They then went on to win the NFL Championship that year.

Getting back-to-basics with our country’s finances means we first must deal with our unsustainable practice of borrowing $2 trillion each year to fill in the gap between spending $7 trillion while only bringing in $5 trillion. Adding $2 trillion to our debt annually over the last decade has quickly doubled our liability from $20 trillion in 2017 to $40 trillion now.

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Commentary: Individualism Versus Collectivism is on the Ballot in November

American Greatness
Vote Here

Six years ago, the rise of the “Bernie bros” supporting avowed socialist candidate Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) raised the question of whether decades of soft indoctrination about the “horrors” of capitalism by the Democrat-media complex and the oft-promised but never delivered benefits of socialism had finally produced enough voters willing to elect their way out of free enterprise.

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Commentary: International Study Shows America’s Education Crisis Is Getting Worse

American Greatness
classroom question

This year’s PISA results show that the United States ranked 13th in reading and science and 27th in math. Reading scores fell by 14 points since the last test in 2022. It’s not just the U.S. that’s moving in the wrong direction. The decline is part of a broader global trend, with the OECD average across 23 countries down 16 points.

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Commentary: The Disingenuous Left-Wing Attacks on Trump’s Housing Policies

American Greatness
home buyers

This past week, Democrats and the mainstream media had their daggers drawn at the Trump administration over high prices for new homes.

Unfortunately, their smear campaign is proving effective. Fewer than two months before the midterm elections, voters are telling pollsters that housing costs are among their top concerns. Voters also say that the administration is tone-deaf to their concerns because, as they put it, mortgages and rents continue to rise.

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Commentary: America’s Chronic Disease Crisis Is Largely Man-Made and Reversible

The Daily Signal
obese person

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has done many things in a year and a half in office. But perhaps none is more important than highlighting our man-made chronic disease crisis.

Modern life has brought countless blessings. Clean water, sewage systems, antibiotics, refrigeration, and more have tamed many deadly diseases. In the last two centuries, lifespans doubled. Doctors can now manage diseases that once killed our ancestors, so they become “chronic.” Better testing also finds problems earlier, while broader diagnostic rules can inflate the numbers, making things look worse than they are.

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Commentary: Wall Street Is Ready to Invest In America’s Energy Future If Washington Permits It

Daily Caller News Foundation
geothermal energy

U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune just put permitting reform on the Senate agenda before Election Day. This news comes as next week, America’s leading investors, policymakers and energy developers will fill Manhattan for Climate Week NYC to advance the technologies that can meet America’s surging power demand. American innovators are transforming nuclear energy, drilling geothermal wells faster and more efficiently, and bringing once-novel energy technologies closer to commercial reality. While American technology has rapidly improved, our permitting system has not. Fixing that should be at the top of everyone’s agenda.

There is a path there to do something that is long overdue for the country.

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Commentary: Free Markets Beat Foreign Mandates in Drug Pricing

Star News Contributor

When I was five years old, my family fled communist Cuba. We left behind a regime built on government decrees, central planning, and the false promise that state mandates could magically cure economic pain. I learned a lesson early in life that has stayed with me ever since: government can order a price to be lower on paper, but it cannot order a scientist to discover a cure, an entrepreneur to risk capital, or a business to survive in a broken or fixed market.

That history drives my work today. At Latinos for Tennessee, our advocacy is rooted in free enterprise and free-market principles—limited government, fiscal responsibility, and individual liberty. When we talk about healthcare affordability, we have to be careful. Well-intentioned policy ideas can easily destroy the very engine of scientific progress that makes American medicine the best in the world.

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Commentary: The EPA Just Removed a Billion-Dollar Barrier to Reliable Power

The Daily Signal
Power Plant

Energy deregulation is not simply about eliminating rules. It is about removing regulations that exceed statutory authority, impose overly burdensome costs, and make it harder for Americans to access affordable and reliable power, often with little or no environmental benefit.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s repeal of the 2024 greenhouse gas standards for power plants does exactly that, according to the EPA. 

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Commentary: The Fantasy House of Mark Carney

American Greatness
Donald Trump and Mark Carney

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney now believes he is more than just the Western foil to Donald Trump and his MAGA movement—he is the global one. Accordingly, he seems determined to demonstrate to the world how to stand up to Donald Trump, to force Trump to lose the midterms, and to hurt the U.S. economy to such a degree that Trump will never again bully other nations.

So, at the eleventh hour, Carney stormed out of an apparently completed tariff deal with the United States that would have privileged Canada over almost all of America’s other trading partners. Canada, we recall, has enjoyed a $50 billion goods trade surplus with the United States for years in a supposedly free and equitable North American trade zone.

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Commentary: The Madness of the Anti-AI Crowd

American Greatness
Anti-AI

In the course of these hebdomadal bulletins, I have often had occasion to mention Charles Mackay’s 1841 masterpiece Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The title should be inscribed as a talisman somewhere in the homes of the credulous. Mackay’s account of various “moral epidemics”—the South Sea Bubble, Tulipomania, Witch Hunting, etc.—is amusing until one steps back and realizes that we modern sophisticates are just as susceptible to the sorts of “folly and delusion” Mackay anatomizes as was any seventeenth-century Dutchman who mortgaged his house to purchase a single tulip bulb.

Certain insects undergo periods of dormancy before suddenly erupting in a destructive swarm. So it seems to be with society’s appetite for panic. How long can we go without indulging in the catharsis of a panic? How many society-wide panics have we witnessed in the last few decades? There was the “global cooling” scare when we were warned that a new ice age was upon us. Then there was the “global warming” scare, which is still going strong. “Some say the world will end in fire/Some say in ice.” Al Gore is going with fire. Chicken Little warned about a “population bomb” in which untold multitudes would precipitate mass starvation and lead governments to force sterilization upon their polyphiloprogenitive charges. Now we are being warned about a terrifying birth dearth. I can imagine that, should a new Charles Mackay arise, such episodes would be included in an updated edition of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. 

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Commentary: Washington Has Another Job to Do for Tennessee’s Teachers and Nurses

Star News Contributor
students and teacher

Tennessee’s pension system is one of the best-funded in the nation, and that is no accident. Every session, my colleagues and I on the Finance, Ways, and Means Committee make hard choices, keep our commitments, and make sure the numbers pencil out because the people depending on Tennessee’s retirement system spent decades earning those benefits and deserve to know they’ll be there.

Our discipline has paid off. In fiscal year 2025, the K-12 teachers’ pension plans were funded at approximately 106%. We’ve made a secure retirement a top priority, and we need Washington to do the same.

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Commentary: CDC Undercounts Defensive Gun Uses

RealClearWire
gun range

Whoever controls crime data can shape the political debate. The Trump administration has already reversed some of the changes the Biden administration made to federal crime and gun data, including information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But politicization of data at the FBI and Justice Department still deserves attention.

Gun-control activists have long tried to “debunk” what they call the “good guy with a gun myth” as they push for stricter gun-control laws. The federal government and much of the media have reinforced that argument by downplaying evidence that armed, law-abiding citizens stop public attacks.

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Commentary: Chaz Molder’s Recent Poll Gives Voters a Big Reason to Not Trust the Columbia Democrat

Star News Contributor
Chaz Molder

Mark Twain famously published that “There are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Were Twain with us today he might add a fourth type of lie – political polling. Specifically, those polls released for public consumption.

Most campaign polling is internal, unpublicized, and genuinely used by campaigns to understand where a race stands. You will likely never hear about most of it, because that isn’t its purpose. These are legitimate benchmark and brushfire polls. 

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Commentary: The Enemy Invasion of Our Schools

American Greatness
classroom instruction

The pervasive homegrown progressive forces, which emphasize politics, sex, and race—all from a radical perspective—have become entrenched in our education system in recent years. But growing evidence shows that foreign enemy influence has also become a factor in the indoctrination of our students.

A report by DefendingEd, released in August, reveals that for decades the Chinese government and its affiliates have been engaged in a global campaign called the ‘Belt and Road Initiative,’ designed to advance Red China’s political and cultural agenda. This ongoing effort includes programs intended to influence how young people in the U.S. view China, targeting K-12 and university students.

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Commentary: We Are in World War Xi

American Greatness
Putin and China

As the Russo-Ukrainian war continues, Americans may blame Russian leader Vladimir Putin for starting “World War III.” It is correct that World War III has started, but its cause is the People’s Republic of China (PRC), not Russia.

The war did not start with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 or with the appeasement of Russia in the years before Putin’s foolish aggression. It started with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The CCP has been at war with the U.S. since coming to power in 1949 and has employed many fronts in this war to undermine America and the West. The CCP’s May 2019 declaration of “People’s War” against the U.S. was CCP leader Xi Jinping’s call for a maximal effort against America. Not coincidentally, the COVID-19 outbreak soon followed. The CCP lied about COVID’s origins, refused to share information with the world, and used Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), as its willing accomplice. Another front is CCP election interference.

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Commentary: Trump’s Blockade Could Break the Iranian Regime

American Greatness
Trump and Iran

Pundits on cable news keep insisting that President Trump’s economic strangulation campaign against Iran cannot work. Sanctions, they say, have never brought down a regime. They note that Iran has survived decades of economic sanctions due to weak compliance and selling discounted oil through a shadow fleet, mostly to China.

That argument misses what is happening now. After the Iranian regime rejected President Trump’s diplomatic offers—including a generous Memorandum of Understanding and the substantial financial incentives that accompanied it—he turned to a different strategy. This is not another round of paper sanctions. It is a naval blockade, backed by asset seizures and targeted strikes. It does not merely ask governments and banks to comply. It stops tankers. That is why the campaign has a realistic chance of forcing a political rupture in Tehran that sanctions alone cannot produce.

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Commentary: The Forgotten Meaning of Labor Day

The Conversation
Labor Day Celebration

Labor Day is a U.S. national holiday held the first Monday every September. Unlike most U.S. holidays, it is a strange celebration without rituals, except for shopping and barbecuing. For most people it simply marks the last weekend of summer and the start of the school year.

The holiday’s founders in the late 1800s envisioned something very different from what the day has become. The founders were looking for two things: a means of unifying union workers and a reduction in work time.

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Commentary: Tennessee’s Veterans Have Found Community and Connection in an Unexpected Place

Star News Contributor
Video Gaming

I spent 21 years in the Army before I spent years representing Montgomery County, a district shaped by Fort Campbell. In that overlap, I sat with more veterans than I can count who told me some version of the same thing. The hardest part of coming home wasn’t the transition itself. It was learning to live without the people who understood them.

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Commentary: Don’t Believe the Polls Showing a Massive GOP Midterm Defeat

The Daily Torch
Trump in suit

“THE FAKE POLLS USED BY OUR CROOKED MEDIA ARE OUT OF CONTROL, AND SOMETHING MUST BE DONE ABOUT IT. FCC TO THE RESCUE!”

That was President Donald Trump on Truth Social on Aug. 30, suggesting the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could be looking at television and radio over-the-air licenses for stations that publish what the President is calling “fake polls”.

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Commentary: Progressive Regression and the New Medievalism

American Greatness
New York City

For most people, the story of the medieval world was one of cramped cities, constant violent crime, and episodic outbreaks of deadly plagues—the dividends of unclean urban conditions, rotting food, fouled water, open sewage, and unchecked rats, fleas, and lice. Most of each day was spent simply trying to survive until the next.

Castles and walls dotted the landscape to protect kingdoms from marauding tribes and foreign invaders. City gates were usually closed at dusk to keep out nocturnal marauders. Public executions drew massive crowds. And religious schisms and conflicts often turned deadly.

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Commentary: Higher Education Is Likely Doomed

American Greatness
Syracuse University

The public exposure, resignation, and subsequent death of the British fabulist Jason Arday have reignited the longstanding (if not eternal) debate about the purpose of higher education in our society and whether it is fulfilling that purpose. On the one side, conservatives are frustrated because, to them, the Arday case is emblematic: universities today are overwhelmingly leftist; leftists dominate the humanities and liberal arts faculties, and leftists are rewarded for poor or even fraudulent scholarship simply because it reinforces the preexisting beliefs of their contemporaries and superiors. On the other side, progressives and other leftists insist that the pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment is definitionally a left-leaning enterprise, at least in contemporary society. Of course, leftists are overrepresented in academia; leftists seek awareness and understanding, while conservatives are simply less inquisitive and less interested in attaining knowledge, both temperamentally and practically, the latter for fear of learning that what they perceive as fairness and equality is, in reality, prejudice and discrimination.

Ironically, the progressives’ explanation is itself bigoted, in addition to being trite and largely self-serving. At the same time, however, the conservative account is inadequate. It describes the problem within academia today reasonably well but fails to explain why that problem exists. Indeed, it fails even to acknowledge that the problem has an underlying cause and isn’t merely the result of choice or happenstance.

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