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by Rod D. Martin
November 6, 2026

If you’ve listened to me for the last year, you know that I’ve been telling you a midterm loss was likely. The President’s party — regardless of party — has lost the midterms all but twice in the last 96 years. And contrary to the current handwringing, that loss has often been as bad or worse as the one this week.

I also told you how we could win. And we could have: we proved that in my home state of Florida, where we held every statewide office and the exact same number of U.S. House seats as before the election. The same can be said for the state in which I grew up, Arkansas. Defeat was likely, but plainly unnecessary.

That teaches us something about 2028. The “we’ve lost forever!” nonsense is repeated every two years, and every two years the out party wins, often by enormous margins, at which point we are promised that the other party is doomed for all time. And the cycle cont…

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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:

by Rod D. Martin
November 4, 2026

Democrat strategist Madeline Summerville and I debate the midterm results, the economy, Iran, socialism and Trump’s next two years under a Democrat Congress.

Madeline and I discuss:

• The Republican wipeout: turnout, affordability, and why 2028 looks very different

• Trump’s economic momentum: the “Greatest Story Never Told” soon won’t be possible to ignore

• Why Socialist victories may deepen the Democrats’ divisions

• Healthcare: Medicare For All vs. free market reforms

• America is not a parliamentary system: Article II, Trump’s veto power, and why the President’s agenda will just keep rolling.

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Our Full Discussion:

Stefania Cox: Last night’s results handed Democrats control of both the House and the Senate in a decisive wave. The question now is what those results will mean for the country.

Cary Dunst: And joining us here in the studio, we have Rod Martin. He’s the founder and CEO of Martin Capital. He’s also author of Trump’s New World Re-Order. We also welcome Madeline Summerville. She’s a Democratic strategist and the CEO of Georgia Trial Consulting. Thank you both for joining us. I know that you were burning the midnight oil. You were both up very late. So thank you for coming in so early. Rod, let’s kick off with you. What is the single clearest message that you think the voters sent last night?

Rod D. Martin: Well, the single greatest message is that we didn’t turn out. And we’ve got a lot of work to do on that. There’s no question. I mean, the Democrats just whipped us on that. On the other hand, the other greatest message is it’s still “the economy, stupid.” I mean, Carville was right. And so, look, I don’t know why some of our candidates failed to articulate the message as well as they could have, that the steam is gathering under the economy.

But this result doesn’t change that. Donald Trump is absolutely cooking on the economy. So with that in mind, I think what we’re seeing is very much like the 1982 midterms, where Reagan just gets wiped out and then comes back and [romps] and stomps two years later because the economy kicked into gear. So that’s the problem the Democrats face now. The economy is kicking into gear and it’s going to be about the economy, stupid.

Stefania Cox: All right. Well, turning now to you, Madeline, for your take on it, do you see this as a repudiation of the president’s policies or more of a move towards and a vote for, say, bigger government?

Madeline Summerville: So I think that based on Trump’s policies over the past year and a half, two years, it’s clear to me that even though it is a conservative value to have smaller government, that wasn’t necessarily what people wanted. Trump would send in the National Guard where he wanted to. You know, he was perfectly fine to exert power from the executive branch onto the states. So it wasn’t necessarily an issue of bigger government versus smaller for the Republicans that they were worried about, surprisingly.

But in terms of the message that was being sent, I think it was twofold. I think for some folks it was the economy. And for others, I think, you know, for example, in Minneapolis, they didn’t like what they saw from ICE. Or there were folks who stayed home. I think plenty of folks who stayed home who may have voted for Trump in the past, who didn’t like that he went to war with Iran after saying no more foreign wars, or who didn’t like how he handled the Epstein files.

Their options, right, were to stay home or to switch sides. And I think probably plenty of those people stayed home. And as a result, you had more Democrats who turned out. It’s hard to switch people from one side to the other. But I think overall, it definitely was a repudiation of Trump and his policies and what he’s done so far. And hopefully that’ll send him a message to, you know, have more compassionate and thoughtful and truthful promises that he follows up on in the future.

Foreign Wars and the Cost of Governing

Cary Dunst: Yeah. And Rod, I’d love to come to you after Madeline made all those points, because as Steph and I were reading the results, clearly, undoubtedly a blue wave. But if you look at the results, not too many of those battlegrounds were decided by 10 points. We’re talking three to six points, most of them, some of them just one or two points. But that difference that Madeline was describing, I’d love to get your thoughts on that. Are, you know, voters frustrated by foreign wars, prices, et cetera, or what is it that just didn’t get just a few more turnout for the Republican side?

Rod D. Martin: Well, there’s no question that hurt. I mean, I would dispute Madeline’s characterization of “no more foreign wars” because Trump was very clear: No more forever wars. We’re never again going to send 250,000 troops into Afghanistan or Iraq for 20 years.

You know, that’s no different from what he did in the first term, going after ISIS for, by the way, just less than a year. And most people didn’t even realize it was going on. So he’s been very consistent in that regard, but there’s no question that wasn’t the perception.

People perceived that he said what Madeline said. And that definitely depressed turnout on our side. I think we’re going to see that choice vindicated, though. Trump chose to do something he knew would have electoral consequences, but that he thought was right for the country. And honestly, every Democrat and Republican president since I was about 10 years old has said that somebody had to do something about Iran. Donald Trump actually did it.

So we’ll see how that plays out in a very different race in two years, because clearly Donald Trump is not going to be on the ballot. And it’ll be interesting to see how our primary shakes out.

Health Care and the Rise of the “Democratic” Socialists

Stefania Cox: And to this point about the Iran war — and you mentioned “it’s the economy, stupid” — of course, the Iran war having such a huge impact on the economy. But Madeline, at the same time, you’ve got so many of the Democrats who came through and pulled through and won in this election are aligned with, in some way, Democratic Socialist groups. And do you think that voters really fully understand what that means?

Madeline Summerville: No, not at all. I think that the alignment with the DSA candidates does not reflect a desire for socialism in this country, as much as the Republicans want the public to believe that, because it is a good message for the midterms to try to motivate turnout. But I think that actually most folks are like me, who are FDR Democrats, who believe in a strong social safety net. But I think the deciding factor really was health care. I think especially with Gen Z.

These are people, you know, millennials, too, and Gen X in particular, that believe that health care should be a human right, especially in the richest country in the world. And that if we have enough money to spend on wars that don’t need to be fought today, then we have enough money to spend on making sure that there aren’t people who are suffering needlessly. And I think it’s a moral conversation that our country is obviously ready to have. And I think that that’s the reason why they’re aligning with the DSA candidates.

And I think that’s the only reason. I don’t think that if you ask most people that they would want to abolish the Senate. Right. I really don’t think they want that. I don’t think they care, though. I think that they also want something to change, which is quite similar to how Trump was treated when he was first elected. I think Democrats are now where Trump voters were 10 years ago, saying we just want something to move. We want something to change.

So I’m not concerned about the socialist wing of the party winning forever. But I am certain that it’s going to upset Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer.

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Drug Prices and the Looming Democrat Civil War

Cary Dunst: Yeah, that’s such an interesting point about now what the Democrat Party’s tent looks like as they actually begin to try to legislate, knowing that pretty much anything that’s off to one side too far is going to get vetoed by the president.

So, Rod, when you look at this, separating the wheat from the chaff, where do socialist agendas fit in? Because as Madeline’s pointing out, people want to be able to go to the doctor and be able to afford that.

So how does that all come into play now?

Rod D. Martin: Well, interestingly enough, we’ve had the largest drop in prescription drug prices in history because of Trump’s policies, which did not involve price controls. And you heard a lot of Republicans say, oh, he’s talking about wage and price controls. No, he wasn’t. He never was.

Donald Trump was very, very clear. We’re going to rebalance our trade deals where these foreign freeloaders actually have to pay their fair share of our R&D costs so that the American consumer isn’t paying for France’s drugs. And he achieved that. And I think we’ll see that ramp up over the next two years, too.

But as far as the socialists, they’re going to make our life easier. You know, they’re going to do dumb things that annoy even the Democrats, because I think Madeline’s exactly right. The average Democrat is a “socialist” right now only in the same sense that during the Tea Party, a lot of Republicans were “libertarians.” They didn’t ever read Hayek or Mises. They never actually knew what that was. They wanted a more extreme version of conservative because “conservative” seemed to have become a formula for “sellout” under the Bushes and McCain and Romney.

And I think that’s what’s happening here. When the Democrats wake up and realize what Bill Maher already realized, what John Fetterman already realized, I think there is potential for a shift back to the mean. And then we can have a reasonable debate in this country across a range of issues.

Impeachment and the Limits of the New Congress

Stefania Cox: To that point, actually, traditional values on work, family, limited government, they still poll pretty strongly across America. And as you’re saying, many of the Democrats really do sit more in the center. So do you also feel, as Rod has sort of articulated here, that the country’s headed for a collision course once they perhaps see that those values don’t align with them?

Madeline Summerville: So I think that’s the appropriate question right now. I think that basically sums up what we can anticipate is that conflict. If they were smart, if the folks who just won were smart, then they’ll focus on one issue. It’s silly when you come in with a whole giant agenda, especially when you know it can’t be done, regardless. And I think people are very frustrated with the notion that anything can’t be done, right? It’s enough ideologically to want something at this point.

That’s how desperate people are for a change on the left. And I think that’s how people who are saying things like Medicare for All were able to make such headway. If they’re smart, they’ll push one issue and nothing else, because that seems to be the way that they’re successful. My guess is that they will end up not doing that, and that they’ll try to take on six or seven things and perhaps accomplish none, because there is that tension that’s going to exist with the balance of power.

But I think that it would be appropriate to bring impeachment proceedings against Hegseth. I hope that they don’t waste their time bringing impeachment proceedings against the president when they know that it’s not going to be successful regardless, and that it’s only messaging. It’s only to try to prove something to a base that they don’t need to prove anything to. Democrats have this problem. They advertise to their base so that they can get money to advertise back to their base. That’s what they do.

They don’t ever spend their time trying to convert voters from one side to the other, and they keep trying to engage voters who never want to take part in politics. And it makes me crazy. So I hope that they are able to stay the course.

Trump’s Ongoing Power and the Race for 2028

Cary Dunst: All right. To that point, Rod, as we start to finish up, not looking to the next presidential election cycle, but in the next years, as Madeline is saying how this, you know, she’s expecting an impeachment of Hegseth, what can the Trump administration do to try to accomplish things in this current environment?

Rod D. Martin: The president is going to use the full powers of Article II, Section 1, which, thankfully, we actually now have courts that recognize. We had, you know, for our video gamer audience, we had nerfed the powers of the president for decades. And that affects presidents of both parties, but not equally, because the Democrats have a Democrat bureaucracy that is happy to do what they want. And the Republicans have never had that. So now with certain key Supreme Court cases and just the president’s willingness to go do things, you know, we’re seeing an assertive executive again.

So the legislature can do what it wishes, but he still has a veto pen, just like Obama did in his last two years. The real issue for the Democrats is exactly as Madeline put it. Both sides, the Democratic socialists and the normal people, actually think they won. And so they’re going to fight for control of that. They’re going to end up fighting each other, I think, a good bit, and especially going into a presidential year. So it will be interesting in both sides what the presidential primary looks like.

But I think Jon Ossoff made his announcement for president last night. That speech sounds like an announcement. He’s not a Democratic socialist. He’ll vote with him on too many things for my taste, but he didn’t announce that way. And you saw a lot of the Democrats who did especially well last night had distanced themselves from the DSA. So I think Abdul El-Sayed may be a little more lonely than he thinks.

Cary Dunst: All right. Well, there’s so much to pick apart with this blue wave and what comes next. Rod Martin, Madeline Summerville, thank you so much for getting up early after staying up very late last night. We appreciate it.

Stefania Cox: Thank you, guys.

Rod D. Martin: Thank you.

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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:

by Rod D. Martin
November 3, 2026

Democrat strategist Robin Biro and I join Don Ma to discuss the battle for Congress, what it will take for each side to win — and common ground on the dangers of socialism.

Don, Robin, and I discuss:

• Why the House is still in play

• The Senate races that could decide control

• Why turnout can overcome a bad political environment

• Investment takes time to become jobs and paychecks

• Common ground against socialism — and for real debate

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Our Full Discussion:

Don Ma: Cook Political Report just shifted 12 more House races toward Democrats. It now favors Democrats in 222 seats, enough to take control of the House, with another 18 races rated as toss-ups.

Joining us now for analysis on where Republicans and Democrats stand is Rod Martin, political analyst and founder and CEO of Martin Capital. And we have Robin Biro, as well, Democratic strategist and former Obama regional campaign director. So good afternoon to you both. And Robin, if I may, I’d like to start with you today.

So do you think, in your opinion, Republicans can break historical trend this midterm cycle?

Robin Biro: No, I think it’s baked into the cake at this point. The polling is unanimous that Democrats are expected to win the House. I’m not seeing anything that says to the contrary. And they would all have to be wrong, Don. And that’s happened before. It happened in 2016. They were all wrong. But no, I don’t think that Republicans are going to be breaking with historical trend.

Don Ma: Okay, Rod, your comments here.

Rod D. Martin: Robin is probably right on both points. The first point is, the president’s party hasn’t won the midterms, but about twice in the last 96 years. And everybody says, well, three times. Well, three isn’t better, but three counts 1998, when actually Bill Clinton’s party did not win the midterms. They just didn’t do as badly as Newt Gingrich said they were going to. So really, the trend has only been bucked twice in a century. And so Robin’s definitely right about that.

At the same time, I think we’re in these races. I really have some hope here, as I’ve told you before, because midterms are low turnout races. And we are seeing elevated turnout this year, especially compared to ’22. But I’m not sure who that is. I’m not sure if that isn’t our people waking up and saying, oh, wait, we really need to do something. Now, if the Democrats take the House, I won’t be shocked at all. But we’re in it. And I think we’ve at least got a shot.

The Senate and the Limits of Forecasting

Don Ma: So, Robin, what do you think about the Senate? Do you think that’s baked into the cake as well, or it’s more of a coin toss?

Robin Biro: That is a coin toss to me. And look, I’m always skeptical about the polling, because as a Democrat, I have certainly been burned by the polling. I was celebrating Hillary’s victory in 2016 in downtown Atlanta when I had to quietly sulk away to my home and brace for impact. So, you know, I’m less optimistic about the Senate. We are projected to do well and maybe win by one or two seats. But I’ve got to say, Don, it’s got to be more than that, because John Fetterman, Senator John Fetterman, is sort of a great unknown right now in our party.

And President Trump has welcomed him with open arms to join Republicans and vote with them. And he may do that.

Don Ma: So, Rod, what do you think about the Senate? Do you think Republicans can take control or maintain control of the Senate?

Rod D. Martin: We absolutely can. I mean, again, the odds are against us, not necessarily against us to keep the Senate, but against us to actually come out ahead of where we are right now, certainly, or even to maintain exactly where we are. And the truth is, Jon Ossoff’s almost certainly going to win Georgia. Michael Whatley’s going to lose in North Carolina because he’s just running a terrible race. And Roy Cooper’s running a great one. But I still feel good about Sununu.

I still feel good about Tafoya. I think we win Kansas. I think we can beat Talarico. So I am not overly pessimistic about the Senate. We may have a terrible night. I mean, Robin’s exactly right. I mean, you’re talking about 2016 with Hillary, but also in 2016, Brexit. You know, the prediction markets are supposed to be all that and a bag of chips, but the prediction markets had Brexit losing with a 98 percent probability at the moment that the polls closed.

So you just never know. But, yeah, the odds are not in our favor.

Independent Voters and the Ground Game

Don Ma: Okay, so, Robin, you said earlier that for Republicans to win, all the indicators have to be wrong when we’re talking about the House. So what is your assessment? What is your characterization of the political environment right now for Republicans before November 3rd?

Robin Biro: They’ve all hitched their saddles to President Trump. And, you know, he’s got fantastic approval ratings within the Republican Party. But where he’s lacking, Don, is with independents. Independents, there’s been attrition among independents. And as you know, one-third of voters vote Republican, one-third vote Democrat, and one-third are independents or sit out. So, you know, that little sliver of independents that are swing voters really kind of define the elections. And ultimately, the people who don’t show up to vote at all but are registered are the ones who really we all and both parties try to capture.

So, you know, it’s anyone’s guess right now. But with the president having lost the favorability among independents, it’s going to be an uphill climb for Republicans.

Don Ma: So, Rod, President Trump, it seems like he’s more focused on turnout. It seems like he believes turnout will decide this election. Robin is saying that independent voters are the deciding factor. What do you think, Rod?

Rod D. Martin: I’m not sure that that’s a distinction with a difference, actually, because, you know, there are only so many Republican and Democrat voters. So you’ve got to turn out people in the middle. And in the middle, we’ve had some slippage. There’s no question. We’ve reverted to the historical mean among Hispanics in particular, which is definitely a significant deflation [from where] Trump was in ’24. On the other hand, again, it’s just the historical norm. In a midterm election, people are annoyed at the president, whichever president you may have.

So I think Trump really needs to focus on turning out that extra little bit of Republican voters that can be turned out. Robin knows better than anybody, you know, in a midterm election, your turnout usually drops something between a third and a half from a presidential year. I think we’re going to do a little better than that this year. But still, there’s enough of a drop-off that whoever has the best GOTV, get-out-the-vote effort, is going to win this in a lot of cases.

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There are some that we’re just not going to win for other reasons. But GOTV is everything. And the president is all over that. I mean, you look at some of these rallies he’s doing, and he’s just tireless. I don’t know how an 80-year-old man does half of what he does. But he’s out there. He’s packing 20,000 people into a stadium for a rally. My goodness. If we added about 1,000 votes in about 20 House races, we’d win the House. So, you know, he’s doing everything he can do.

I would just admonish average, everyday Republicans like me to go talk to your friends and drag four of them to the polls. Put them in your car and take them. The Democrats will be. Robin’s going to. You know, but we sometimes aren’t as good at that, and we’ve got to get better.

Affordability, Trump Opposition, and Iran

Don Ma: Okay, Robin, let me ask you this. So I was speaking to a Republican strategist yesterday. I asked him, for Democrats, what the election is about. There was no Democratic side to respond to his answer. But he said what’s unifying Democrats right now is Trump Derangement Syndrome. That’s what’s getting votes out for Democrats. So now that you’re here, I want to ask you the same question. This midterm cycle, midterm elections for Democrats, what is the election about? Is it just about Trump?

Robin Biro: No, thank goodness. No, I would not be still doing this if it was all about Trump. It’s about affordability. It is about medical care. It is about child care. We’re drawing parallels. We’re talking about right now the difference. Look, President Obama was getting some flak this week for saying that the Oval Office looked like a Cheesecake Factory because of all the gold. And what I’m saying to my fellow Democrats is, look, you’re struggling to put food on the table and feed your families and put gas in your cars while the president is gold plating and gilding everything that he can touch in sight.

The contrast is striking. I mean, he just was boasting that his own supporters can’t afford a meal at Mar-a-Lago and they cheered for it. So that’s what we’re drawing. The contrast is affordability, Don.

Don Ma: Okay, Rod, when Democratic voters go out to cast their ballots, from what you can see, what are they voting for?

Rod D. Martin: Democratic voters, I think TDS is very high on the list. And the affordability issue has just been fantastically successful for the Democrats. No question there’s irony in that. We had higher gas prices under Biden. We had all this inflation under Biden. But it doesn’t matter because, you know, two years after that, it’s like, what have you done for me lately? And Trump isn’t quite where they want him to be. Some of that’s because of the war.

Some of that is because of the Green New Deal and closing all these refineries that have shut down that artificially reduces the supply of gasoline and diesel, which I just think is insane.

But if I think that burning some gasoline is going to destroy the planet, then, yeah, I mean, that makes sense. It’d be nice if some of these guys would own up to that like they did for the last decade, you know, but that helped them in November. So I understand what they’re doing. But affordability hurts. There’s no question. That’s probably the biggest thing. And there are some other issues. They’re definitely depressing turnout among some Republicans, such as the Iran war. That’s not really affecting a lot of our people, but it is some at the margin.

And you see that with Tucker Carlson and some of these crazies on podcasts and their followers. Those guys feel like Donald Trump said there would be no wars ever, which is absurd because if you look at his first term, he spent the better part of a year rolling up ISIS. I mean, you know, he took out Soleimani. He did a bunch of similar stuff. And he’s been very, very clear on these things. But that doesn’t change the fact that some people feel like he told them something and did something else.

That is cutting into us.

Don Ma: So, Robin, you said earlier for Democrats, it’s about Democratic voters. It’s about affordability. Then why do I see a lot of Democratic campaign ads all about Trump?

Robin Biro: Because it brings in money. I mean, ads are all about bringing in money and voters. And, you know, anytime they run an ad that talks about specific things that Donald Trump is doing, the money starts coming in from Democratic donors because it takes a ton of money in this state of Citizens United to run viable national campaigns.

The Senate Map, and the Investment-to-Jobs Timeline

Don Ma: So what do you think, Rod, is the most realistic path for Democrats to gain a net of four in the Senate? Which races are you looking at?

Rod D. Martin: Well, if we lose Susan Collins, we’re in a lot of trouble. If we lose Ken Paxton’s race in Texas, we’re really in trouble. I mean, that’s ugly. And the Democrats have been really, really focused on flipping Texas now for a long time. And, you know, they’re doing good work. My hat’s off to their organizing skills. I don’t think they’re going to flip Texas. And I think Susan Collins is a fighter and I think she makes it. I also think, you know, I mentioned Tafoya.

I mentioned Sununu. Another one that I think probably ends up a Republican pickup is Mike Rogers in Michigan. So if those things were to break right for us, there would be no path for the Democrats probably to take the Senate. But if they don’t break our way — and I can’t predict that; those are real toss-ups — I think the Democrats could be in really good shape. I’ll just say this on affordability. And I’ve said it a lot to you and to others. You know, the truth of the matter is Rome wasn’t built in a day.

It does take a while. If Joe Biden were president, Robin would be making that case right now. The truth is the Household Survey shows us adding nearly a million jobs in August and September. I know that’s contradicted by some other numbers, but a million jobs is a million jobs. We saw $18 trillion in investment commitments into this country over the last year and a half that eventually turns into factory floors and big union jobs, which ironically may help Robin’s team a little more than mine.

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But nevertheless makes it possible for a middle-class blue-collar worker, which is the majority in this country to be able to support a family on one income again. Like my dad’s generation could do. Those things are wonderful trends. We were told by politicians in both parties for 30 years that those industrial jobs could never come home. It just wasn’t true. And we’re starting to see that accelerate right now. I would encourage Republicans to encourage themselves. Folks, we’re on the right track. We need to not blow it.

And we need to stay the course. We need to stay the course into ’28.

Don Ma: And one point I’d like to reiterate, to echo what Rod said, is that these jobs are private sector jobs. These are not government jobs. And it is the private sector that really grows the economy.

Socialism and the Need for Healthy Public Debate

And Robin, I wanted to ask you this before we wrap up here, because I know you’re not a far left person.

Robin Biro: No, no, no.

Don Ma: Karoline Leavitt said we have some of the most radical Democrats we’ve ever seen run in the history of this country. So I’m just curious, Robin, when you see a DSA candidate, for example, going up against a Republican, you yourself not being a far left person. Do you want to see the DSA candidate win or do you want to see the Republican candidate win?

Robin Biro: Oh, look at you asking the tough questions, Don. At the end of the day, it’s still about the numbers.

Don Ma: I know. I know. Right?

Robin Biro: At the end of the day, it’s still about the numbers. We have to have a majority. Even though I don’t like some of these candidates, I really don’t like the DSA candidates. I’ve fought against them for—now, how long has it been? It’s been over a decade. You know, what I’m hoping, Don, is that moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans can team up together to do something about some of the socialism problems that are happening in America. We’ve got to work together somehow to actually fight this.

Look, there have been moderate Democrats like me fighting this within the Democratic Party, and it is a losing battle, I’m telling you, because Democratic socialism has not only taken root, it’s like getting really baked into the cake here within the party, and we need help to do it. And, you know, we can’t just have a uniparty of the GOP or the Democratic Party. We need to have some sensible people in both parties, and I’m seeing an attrition within the Democratic Party of the sensible moderates.

Don Ma: Okay, Rod, I started with Robin, so let me give you one quick final thought. What do you have to say?

Rod D. Martin: Well, as on so many other things today, I agree with Robin. You’ve got to actually have two points of view. It’s essential because nobody’s right all the time. Nobody’s right all the time. And as a result of that, you have to have a healthy, robust public debate to pick apart different people’s positions and come to a consensus that makes sense for everybody. And if you get to a point where you just have a uniparty, as we kind of have from time to time, it’s not healthy for the country.

It is good that we’re having a debate, I think, between, you know, certainly between us and the socialists, but actually between [Fettermans] and Bill Mahers and the socialists. I think that’s healthy because I think they’re ultimately going to realize that socialism is a catastrophe. It’s never been anything but anywhere it’s been tried. And there actually is a healthy discussion to be had between traditional liberal Democrats and traditional conservative Republicans. It’s better for society if we have those debates. And sometimes we’ll win and sometimes we’ll lose.

But we get to something that works for all Americans. And I promise you, socialism is not that.

Don Ma: All right. Well spoken, both of you. Robin, Rod, it’s been a pleasure to speak with you guys.

Rod Martin and Robin Biro: Likewise. Thank you, Rod. Thank you, Don.

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NOTE: Learn five of these, tell your friends, and take them to the polls. Today. — RDM

by Rod D. Martin
November 3, 2026

I wrote my “Trump’s Top 25 Achievements” list two months ago…and he immediately topped several of them!

Yet with the midterms coming in mere weeks, an astonishing number of Republican voters cannot name three things President Trump has accomplished. Which is remarkable when you consider that Donald Trump has accomplished more in a year and a half than any other president ever did in four.

Indeed, he has accomplished so much, so fast, across so many fronts that most people can’t keep up. The Enemedia buries the victories, while Republicans do an abysmal job of explaining them.

So here’s the UPDATED cheat sheet. It barely scratches the surface. And yet each and every item here is a game-changer, and your befuddled black-pilling friends need to know it.

This is not a list of promises. It’s a list of laws enacted, poverty reduced, cases won, policies implemented, agreements secured, and measurable results.

You don’t have to memorize all 25. Learn five. And when somebody says Trump “hasn’t done much,” show them the receipts.

Topping the New List: Trump Reduced Poverty to Its Lowest Rate in ALL OF HISTORY!

1. Poverty hit its lowest rate in history, while real household income reached its all-time high.

In Trump’s first year back, America’s poverty rate fell to 10.2 percent — the lowest rate ever recorded. Real (inflation-adjusted) median household income reached $87,460, its highest ever. And child poverty fell to an historic low as well.

If that’s not worth voting for, nothing is. Surely you can round up four friends and get them to the polls over that alone.

But wait, there’s more…

Trump Restored American Safety and Sovereignty

2. He made the border a real border again and reversed mass migration.

The Border Patrol has now recorded 17 consecutive months without releasing a single apprehended illegal alien into the United States.

In a matter of months, Trump reduced illegal border crossings to their lowest level in half a century. Catch-and-release is finished. The wall is going up and even being expanded, “Remain in Mexico” is back, and the Administration reduced releases into the country by an incredible 99.9 percent!

So what’s the result? America recorded negative net migration in 2025 for the first time in at least half a century. Nearly 3 million illegal aliens have left the country, whether voluntarily or involuntarily: more than 675,000 forcibly deported and the rest “self-deported.” Many of those self-deportations were facilitated by the President’s innovative program to offer plane tickets and cash bonuses for illegals to leave, not only incentivizing good behavior but significantly reducing the cost of deportations.

3. He signed the Laken Riley Act — and required detention of criminal illegal aliens.

Named for an innocent girl murdered by an illegal alien, the Laken Riley Act requires federal authorities to detain illegals arrested for theft, burglary, shoplifting, assaulting police, or any crime causing death or serious injury. It also lets states sue officials who refuse to enforce it.

Laken Riley should still be alive. This law will prevent tragedies like hers.

4. History’s biggest drop in violent crime, lowest rate in 126 years.

According to FBI data, violent crime in America dropped an incredible 9.7 percent in 2025 — the largest one-year decline in history. Murder fell 18.1 percent, robbery fell 18.5 percent. And America’s violent crime rate is its lowest since 1900.

And if that weren’t enough, since Trump took office, the FBI has captured all ten of its Top 10 Most Wanted — a first in the Bureau’s history. Under Kash Patel, the agency Biden weaponized against Americans is once again hunting the criminals it was created to catch.

This is what happens when you put the National Guard on the streets in crime-ridden blue cities: fewer victims, safer streets, and better futures for America’s poorest.

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Trump Launched an American Industrial Supercycle

5. He made the 2017 tax cuts permanent…and better.

The One Big Beautiful Bill locked in the largest tax cut in modern history, including the doubled standard deduction, the expanded Child Tax Credit, and 100 percent expensing for factories and equipment. It also delivered No Tax on Tips, No Tax on Overtime, an abolition of most taxes on Social Security benefits, and major relief for seniors.

Every Democrat voted no. With the 2017 act set to expire in December 2025, that would have resulted in the largest tax hike in American history.

6. He repealed 129 regulations for every new one.

In fiscal 2025, federal agencies finalized 646 deregulatory actions and just five regulatory actions: 129-to-1, and in nearly every case, the “one” was to repeal the others! OIRA says the savings exceeded those of Trump’s entire first term. That is more freedom, lower costs, and less bureaucratic sabotage.

Of these, the crown jewel was the repeal of Obama’s 2009 “Endangerment Finding”, the legal foundation for the Green New Scam’s vehicle mandates. EPA calls it the largest deregulatory action in American history and estimates that by itself, it will save Americans more than $1.3 trillion. Trump also killed the federal EV mandate, restored Americans’ freedom to buy the cars and trucks they actually want, and even eliminated the incentives behind the almost universally hated start-stop button.

7. He secured $18 trillion in investment commitments…and made reindustrialization real.

That’s nearly two-thirds the size of the entire American economy, building American factories, chip plants, data centers, energy projects, steel mills, shipyards, and supply chains employing American workers. Apple, Meta, NVIDIA, Micron, Hyundai, U.S. Steel, Ford, Taiwan Semiconductor, and many corporations and sovereign wealth funds are betting big on Trump’s America. And it’s just getting started.

Ford is moving Lincoln production out of China. Toyota is shifting Tacoma production from Mexico to Texas. GM, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and others are expanding U.S. production. Power plants and refineries are going up. The capital equipment pouring into the country is the machinery that’s building the growing boom.

It’s the greatest story never told!

8. He replaced lopsided trade deals with balanced, reciprocal trade.

Trump used tariffs as leverage to reverse 80 years of lopsided trade deals that favored everyone but America, and to win new or improved agreements with trading partners accounting for more than half of global GDP. Those agreements open foreign markets, attack non-tariff barriers, defend strategic industries, and make it more profitable to build in America than to export American jobs.

9. He shifted global energy dominance from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of America.

Once the world’s largest energy importer — “exporting” $700 billion a year to our enemies — America now outproduces Saudi Arabia and Russia combined. The U.S. is also setting new records in oil, natural gas, and LNG exports, becoming the first country ever to export more than 100 million metric tons of LNG in a year.

Trump also opened land, accelerated permits, expanded pipelines and export terminals, and made American energy a tool for prosperity and peace.

10. After four decades of nuclear paralysis, Trump brought five new reactors online in a single year.

For more than 40 years, not one new privately developed non-light-water reactor reached criticality in America. Trump ordered at least three by July 4, 2026. DOE delivered four by the deadline, then a fifth just one month later.

Decades of zero. One Trump summer: five. That is a genuine nuclear renaissance.

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Trump Made Elections Matter Again

11. He broke the Deep State’s power to defy the elected branches.

In Trump v. Slaughter, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time in 90 years that Article 2, Section 1 is still part of the Constitution: the President may fire subordinate officials in the executive branch, overturning the 1935 precedent that insulated “independent” agencies from voters’ control.

Ever wonder why elections often seem to change nothing? How about one President and 5,000 political appointees vs. 2.8 million unfireable, unaccountable bureaucrats? THAT is the “Deep State”.

Trump then made that victory real. For the first time in a century, all policy-making bureaucrats can now be fired for misconduct, incompetence, or defying lawful directives. The permanent bureaucracy no longer gets to veto the voters.

12. He ended nationwide injunction abuse.

In Trump v. CASA, the Supreme Court sharply limited nationwide injunctions. A single, local, district judge should not be able to block a national policy for everyone, everywhere; and yet that’s exactly what they’ve done, nonstop, ever since Trump (and only Trump) took office in 2017. In restricting that unconstitutional power, the Court kneecapped the Black Robe Bureaucracy’s favorite tool of unlawful judicial supremacy.

13. He shut down USAID as a left-wing slush fund and shadow government.

USAID had become a taxpayer-funded machine for exporting abortion, gender ideology, censorship, and left-wing politics. It had a bigger budget than the CIA and the State Department combined, absolutely no accountability whatsoever, and a penchant for overthrowing governments.

Trump terminated it — completely — and moved real humanitarian aid under the State Department. Immediately, seven socialist Latin American governments lost re-election, with another (Brazil) on its way out. Coincidence?

14. He shrank Federal employment to its lowest level in 60 years.

From a high under Biden, the federal workforce is now its smallest since 1966. Workforce reductions, agency closures, and spending cancellations mean fewer bureaucrats paid to resist the voters.

What’s more, when Biden left office, 94 percent of federal employees “worked” from home. The Trump administration cracked down: as Elon Musk put it, “you can work from the office, or you can pretend to work somewhere else.”

15. He expelled DEI from the federal government.

Trump eliminated federal DEI offices and barred race- and sex-based preferences across the executive branch. Government hiring and contracting are returning to merit and equality under the law, ending the grotesque Democrat idea that “fighting discrimination” requires the federal government to discriminate.

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He Defended Faith and Family

16. He delivered sweeping pro-life reform.

In his first term, Trump delivered the judges that overturned the abominable Roe v. Wade. Hardly anyone believed it could be done, or that Trump would do it. But he did, and a half-century nightmare finally ended.

Since returning to office, Trump has enforced the Hyde Amendment prohibiting the use of federal funds to pay for abortions, reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy prohibiting federal funding of foreign abortions, ended federal fetal-tissue research, strengthened conscience protections, protected Medicaid from funding large abortion providers, and pardoned 23 pro-life activists prosecuted by Biden’s weaponized Justice Department.

He’s also done everything within the Executive Branch’s power to defund Planned Parenthood. It would be nice if Congress did likewise.

No President has ever done more to protect life. No one.

17. He got men out of women’s sports, and restored biological reality to federal policy.

The United States government once again officially recognizes two sexes: male and female. Trump ended federal support for the chemical and surgical gender mutilation of children, stopped taxpayer funding of such irreversible abominations, and forced more than three dozen health systems to end or suspend their programs as well.

Trump also enforced Title IX as written: women and girls deserve their own teams, trophies, scholarships, and locker rooms. The NCAA and other athletic organizations changed their rules in response. After years of Democrats doing everything they could to destroy women’s sports and ruin girls’ lives, Trump’s administration protects women and girls again.

18. He opened investment accounts for nearly 70 million American children.

Trump Accounts give children a tax-advantaged ownership stake in America’s future. Nearly 70 million accounts have now been created, with more than $4.5 billion already deposited.

Eligible newborns receive a $1,000 federal seed, while families, employers, and philanthropists can add to the accounts: Michael Dell has pledged $6.25 billion, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell another $330 million, and Ray Dalio $75 million. The contributions keep pouring in.

Parents need only claim their child’s account to begin managing it. Children can watch their investments grow, learn first-hand about free markets, and acquire the future orientation that ownership encourages. Trump is giving the next generation a stake in capitalism, not another lesson in dependency.

19. He enacted America’s first nationwide school-choice program.

As part of the President’s One Big Beautiful Bill, Trump enacted America’s first-ever nationwide school choice program. The new Education Freedom Tax Credit helps fund scholarships for tuition, books, and other educational costs.

Parents gain power. Bureaucracies lose it. And kids get the best education available.

20. He targeted anti-Christian bias and discrimination.

Trump created the White House Faith Office, Religious Liberty Commission, and Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias. He restored conscience protections and made clear that Christians do not surrender their First Amendment rights merely by entering public life.

He Restored Peace Through Strength and Put America First

21. He drove China out of the Caribbean — and secured Greenland

China spent years building strategic beachheads at both ends of the Panama Canal, in Cuba, and in Maduro’s Venezuela. Trump forced Panama out of Belt and Road, expanded American security access around the Canal, and captured Maduro, who now sits in a New York jail cell awaiting trial.

Beijing’s planned encirclement of the United States collapsed. The Monroe Doctrine is back. Call it the Donroe Doctrine.

But then, on September 22, Trump signed an historic Greenland agreement giving the United States permanent control over security and all other U.S. needs there. It secures permanent basing rights and bars hostile military footholds or sensitive investments without American approval.

Greenland protects the northern approaches to our continent and strengthens the position from which America can build Golden Dome. Trump secured that strategic geography without buying the island. From the Panama Canal to Greenland, America is taking control of its own hemisphere again.

22. He forced NATO to stop freeloading and increase defense spending by 250 percent.

For decades, wealthy European governments underfunded their militaries, effectively sending America the bill and using American taxpayers to subsidize their bloated welfare states. Trump forced NATO to replace its old two-percent-of-GDP spending target with an enormous five percent by 2035.

Allied spending is rising, American defense orders are soaring, and Europe is becoming a partner instead of a dependent.

23. He brokered eight peace deals in just eight months.

In eight months, Trump brokered peace in eight conflicts spanning four continents, including wars that had gone on for as much as 40 years. It’s a record unmatched by any other President.

24. He launched and funded Golden Dome, the first-ever true missile defense for the U.S. population.

Ronald Reagan dreamed of making nuclear missiles obsolete through his Strategic Defense Initiative. Today, Trump is actually building it: a layered homeland shield with space-based sensors and interceptors, conventional defenses, and new technologies including microwave systems to destroy drone swarms and directed-energy weapons (yes, lasers) that can replace an $11 million missile with $2 of electricity.

Congress has funded the initial $25 billion, with far more on the way once it passes the NDAA this fall. Better a shield than a sword.

25. He restored the warrior ethos — and reversed the recruiting crisis.

After years of missed targets under Biden, every active military component met or exceeded its 2025 recruiting goal. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refocused the newly renamed Department of War on actually winning wars, while pouring resources into shipbuilding, munitions, drones, missile defense, and America’s atrophied industrial base.

Young Americans once again believe their Commander-in-Chief is worth serving. And they’re showing up en masse.

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Now Act Like It Matters

Those are not tweets or campaign promises. They are changes in law, power, investment, sovereignty, culture, and the structure of the Republic itself. And they’re just the top 25: I could easily give you a hundred more.

Midterms are turnout elections. We do not need to convince Democrats to love Donald Trump. We need Republicans and friendly independents to understand what is at stake — and to show up.

Just 1,000 more Republican votes than usual in just 20 competitive U.S. districts and we win. That’s just four voters per precinct! Put them in your car and take them to the polls.

And let’s be clear. When you say (as some of you will) “the Republicans need to do a good enough job telling this story”, you’re pointing at yourself. You are “the Republicans.” The Democrats don’t rely exclusively on their elected officials to tell their story: everyone from their media lackeys to their lowest-level supporters are constantly spreading their “news”, whatever that “news” happens to be.

Today’s conservatives have more ability to find whatever you want to know than any group of people in human history, yet half of them couldn’t name any of the accomplishments in this essay, and if they were to read it, they would just complain that something else they wanted hasn’t happened fast enough to suit them.

This is called “black-pilling.” It’s a loser mindset, and if you engage in it, you deserve to lose: horribly, painfully, personally. And guess what: you will, unless people who are serious step up to save you. Which is frankly pathetic, but for the rest of our sakes, necessary.

So tell people our story. Donald Trump is delivering great things, whether or not heaven on earth has broken out quite yet. Do the work, send the team he needs to Washington to finish the job, and get ready for 2028 afterward.

Take the time to learn at least five of these victories. Share this list with someone who needs it. And vote as though the most consequential Presidency in modern history depends on what you do.

Because it does.

Can’t get enough? Here are 25 More Trump Achievements you should know!

Recent Analysis:

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

by Rod D. Martin and Eric Metaxas
November 2, 2026

My latest interview on The Eric Metaxas Show. Sign up NOW for the Eric’s YouTube channel and don’t miss a single episode!

Eric Metaxas and I discuss the economic boom no one is reporting, the media’s coverage of Trump and Ilhan Omar, what is at stake in the midterms, PLUS my new book “Trump’s New World Re-Order”:

• Jobs, investment, and the economic boom the Enemedia won’t report

• Why gas prices remain high — and how energy dominance will change that

• Putin, Ilhan Omar, and the media’s double standard.

• Just four extra votes per precinct and the election is ours!

• PLUS, my new book, Trump’s New World Re-Order: order NOW!

It’s 30 minutes you won’t want to miss. Watch and share!

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Text of our full discussion after this:

Here’s our full discussion:

Eric Metaxas: Hey there, folks. Welcome to October 22nd in the year of our Lord, 2026. It sounds like the future, Chris Himes, doesn’t it? 2026 — that’s the future.

Chris Himes: Yeah, I think, you know, it is the future. It is very much the future. We have cars that fly and spin in the air now, so that checks out.

Eric Metaxas: We’re living in the dystopian future, folks, but hang on, because I think it’s going to get better.

Show intro/theme music.

We got a lot to talk about.

First of all, we’re gonna have Rod Martin on in a few minutes. Today — well, not today, this week — his book has just launched. It launched two days ago. It’s called Trump’s New World Re-Order. You need to buy a copy of Trump’s New World Re-Order. It just explains everything about what Trump is doing in bite-sized pieces.

I’m so excited that Rod exists. I didn’t even know about him a couple years ago. He’s just so amazing. Rod Martin and the new book is Trump’s New World Re-Order.

Chris Himes: He’s got a scalpel-type insight on all this stuff. He really is very sharp. There are only a few people out there like him.

Eric Metaxas: Almost too sharp, as Trump would say. He’s sharp, almost too sharp. No, he’s just great. So, we’re gonna have him on in a couple minutes to talk about everything in the news.

Hey there, folks, as promised, the man of the hour, the week, our friend Rod Martin. Rod, once again, congratulations on the launch, boom, of your new book, Trump’s New World Re-Order. Congratulations.

Rod D. Martin: Thank you. And thank you for publishing it and also writing the foreword. I mean, the book is like spectacularly better just because you’re associated with it.

Eric Metaxas: Well, now you’re illustrating why Steve Witkoff called Putin a humanitarian. It’s called BS-ing in the name of love. Just doing what you need to do. I’m glad you think that or you think that some people will agree that’s true. Whatever. I am honored. Listen, I mean this happens to me and people often, you know, kind of wonder why I do half of what I do. I do because I see things and I say that person or that book needs greater attention. What’s wrong with this stupid world, this broken world, that you know, this is not already a bestseller.

Your book, Trump’s New World Re-Order, you know, people know me well enough. Many of the people listening to this program know me well. I don’t blow smoke. I have so often been amazed at people, whether it’s you, Rod Martin, or John Zmirak, who ought to be household names because you have been given a gift. Tremendous, tremendous gift to see things that others aren’t seeing, to explain things that need explaining. And so you, when I first met you and encountered what you’re doing, I thought, my goodness, where did this guy come from?

So you have your finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the world and what Trump is doing.

Obviously, that’s what the book is about, to tell people, “Hey, if you want to know what this 5D chess is, or is it 5D chess, or what’s going on, or why is Trump doing this? What does Venezuela have to do with anything?” You explain it and you explain it in a cheerful way, in a way that is understandable to the lay reader. So that’s why I’m excited that you actually wrote a book, because normally I would say to somebody like you, “You know what? You need to write a book.

You need to get this out there so more people can read it.” So I hope whoever’s listening will order Trump’s New World Re-Order today. Folks, go to Amazon, order today. You need to understand why we are so behind this president.

Because the media, and this is what I want to talk to you about this morning, Rod, the media will not do what you’re doing. They will not explain to us any of this great news. They don’t — it doesn’t fit their narrative, and that’s why I guess you have to do what you do.

The Economic Boom the Media Won’t Report

Rod D. Martin: Sometimes it seems like Larry Kudlow is the only guy in anything we might call the mainstream media sources who actually gets it. And you know, Kudlow is awesome, always was awesome, but Kudlow keeps talking about “the greatest story never told,” and I just wrote another article yesterday on the greatest story never told, which is this incredible economic boom. We just created a million new jobs in 60 days. 60 days.

This is exactly what I’ve been talking about for two years, that if you get taxes right, if you get regulatory right, and if you rebalance trade in a way that incentivizes manufacturing to come back to America, eventually that turns into a jobs boom. And we’re seeing that now. We’re seeing it because we’ve had this CapEx boom going on for months now. Donald Trump went out and recruited $18 trillion in new investment from outside the country to create a manufacturing economy here and of course a high-tech technology infrastructure as well, that would support an industrial super cycle. Well, okay, it’s starting to kick in.

When you see a million new jobs in two months, you’re seeing it kick in. That’s not a one-day story. That’s not a one-year story. That’s a very, very, very extensive project, much like what Reagan achieved in the ‘80s. From the beginning of World War II to 1982, we had a recession, on average, about every two and a half years. Once Reagan got cooking, once he got things going the way he wanted them, which was just transformative in lots of ways, we had a 40-year stretch in which there were only four recessions.

And most of them were — well, actually, two of them were very mild. One of them was a little harsh, but it was over pretty quick. And the fourth one was a pandemic. I mean, you can’t plan around a pandemic. There wouldn’t have been a recession in 2020 and 2021 if there hadn’t been COVID. So it’s something that is transformative in the long run. And the point of the book isn’t just economics, it’s not just jobs, it’s not just anything.

It’s all those pieces of the puzzle that I was talking about, how this and this and this and this plus that equal such and such. Trump’s New World Re-Order upends business as usual in the United States, and also in the United States foreign policy globally, in a way that changes the rest of the century. And it can still be aborted. We could lose 2028, we could lose 2032, and then who knows what you get.

But it’s exactly the same thing that you see at the end of World War II, where Roosevelt dies, Truman comes in, so there’s a new guy, and then you’ve got a couple of election cycles in which it’s either going to stick or it isn’t. And it stuck. You know, the New Deal order mostly stuck. The containment policy of the Soviet Union entirely stuck because both parties ultimately got on board with that.

And honestly, you already see hints of that because a lot of what Trump is doing on steroids in the second term, he also did in the first term, and there’s a rather shocking amount of that, particularly with regard to China policy, that the Biden team didn’t undo. I mean, they undid a lot of it, but they actually saw the logic of some of it. And that’s how it starts. Eventually, you get to a new consensus and a new order, as it were, a reorder in this case. But it takes a little time. So, the next few years are going to matter a lot.

The next couple of election cycles are going to matter a lot. But Trump is reinventing the world, and it’s really extraordinary the magnitude of it because he really does see the whole board. He’s not just looking at a pawn here and a queen there.

Eric Metaxas: Well, part of the background of everything here, you just shared that okay, a million new jobs. Amazing economic news. The problem, and this is a big problem, is that just because something’s true, the problem is people need to know that it’s true. And most Americans are getting this steady drumbeat in the mainstream media of negativity. It’s all negative all the time. It’s anti-Trump all the time. So, there are many Americans who are convinced that the economy is in big trouble. They’re not hearing any of this news.

To me, the biggest issue is that you have so many Americans who have been fooled into thinking this kind of thing. And the only thing they can see is that the gas prices are about a dollar more than they should be. And that seems to be, you know, it’s like a mushroom cloud. They can’t see anything else.

Gas Prices, Refineries, and American Energy

Rod D. Martin: But what they don’t see is that gas prices are actually about three dollars higher than they should be. And the reason for that is that Democrats spent the last 40 years blocking construction of new oil refineries and shutting down half of the refineries in this country.

And they told you why. Obama said that prices will be “spectacularly higher if my policies are enacted,” and he thought that was a good thing. He said that was a positive thing. Why? Because “we have to destroy fossil fuels.”

We have to get away from the entire well, basically, you know, the modern economy, you know, and all have a solar panel. Well, okay. Solar panels are great. Solar panels are greater in space. They’re not so good here where you have clouds and rainstorms and this crazy new thing called nighttime. I mean, that’s not actually going to solve your baseload problem.

So, how are they going to power all their EVs? That’s bunk. You know, the world runs on oil whether you like it or not, and not just oil, but natural gas. So, Donald Trump has doubled down on making America energy dominant.

And for any of us who lived through the ‘70s, I was a little kid, but I remember sitting in the back of the car when my mother was in a gas line, and you could only get gas on even or odd numbered days depending on your license plate number. I mean, that was insane. Oil prices jumped fourfold in a year and never came down. And you know, we had double-digit inflation, double-digit unemployment.

Mortgage rates for normal people got as high as 26 percent at one point. This is just not okay, and it’s the result of bad policy that Donald Trump is reversing. When you shift the center of gravity of energy from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of America, it has a transformative effect in several ways, but I think the most powerful to me is this one.

In 2008, when everybody was talking about peak oil, and we got up to $147.50 a barrel at one point — which today, inflation-adjusted, would be about $240 a barrel — when we were there in 2008, before the big economic crisis, we were told there would be no oil in another five to ten years, and we had to go to EVs. Well, okay, in that year, we sent $700 billion out of this country to our enemies to buy the energy we were burning.

And then the fracking revolution comes along, making us the world’s largest producer and one of the world’s top three exporters. That’s extraordinary, and it shows you technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, plus the government just getting out of the way is a transformative thing.

Trump gets it, and what it means is that $700 billion a year that went to our enemies now comes from our enemies to Texas and Louisiana and North Dakota and Oklahoma and all the other oil-producing states. That’s monstrously huge, and it means huge numbers of great-paying American jobs.

It just changes the world. It also makes our allies more secure because they can buy from us and not from some hostile state somewhere.

Putin, Diplomacy, and the Media’s Framing

Eric Metaxas: Well, again, my thing is the media’s coverage of all this kind of stuff. I mean, I’m astonished. I was listening to Ralph Reed recently. We were hunting together, and he was showing the polls of what Americans believe. Most Americans are not hearing any of the stuff that you just said. There’s the steady drumbeat as I just said of negativity, no matter where you look. In the news yesterday, for example, anytime they can find anything on Trump that’s negative, they put it out there.

I’m in Florida in a hotel, so they give out free New York Times, you know, I never look at the New York Times, but once in a while if it’s free, I will look at it just to see what they’re saying. It is wall-to-wall negativity. Any negative angle they can find on anything with regard to President Trump, they put in there. It’s unbelievable. The news recently, I guess yesterday, Steve Witkoff is over with Putin, you know, they’re doing all these deals. And Putin, because of pressure from the U.S., released an American citizen who was in prison there.

I don’t know the details, but Witkoff called Putin a humanitarian for doing that. And all the news can report is that the Trump administration called Putin a humanitarian.

It’s the Russia collusion hoax all over again. Like, oh, we saw…

Rod D. Martin: Or “very fine people.”

Eric Metaxas: And you think, my gosh, this is diplomacy, ladies and gentlemen. This is, you know, you say anything to these narcissistic bums like Putin. You say whatever because you’re trying to get them to play ball, and it’s worth it if you can get them to play ball to release a hostage, which they did. So, but you’re not going to hear that. The mainstream media, all they want to do is pretend that Trump and his people actually think of Putin as a humanitarian. It’s just difficult.

Rod D. Martin: Which is clearly false from everything the man says. I mean, all we hear about is the slaughter in Ukraine. And you know, these same media people keep wanting to box him in and say, “You’re trying to get Zelensky to give up a bunch of stuff.” He’s like, “No, I’m trying to stop a catastrophic war. This has killed more people than any war since World War II. We want it to stop. And if we can find a way to make peace, we need to make peace.” Okay, that doesn’t say Putin is a humanitarian. That says Putin is slaughtering people.

And I don’t see how the man can be much clearer. But you’re exactly right, the media won’t say it. And you understand, the media is just an arm of the Democrat Party. It has been for a long time.

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Ilhan Omar, USAID, and Enemedia Accountability

Eric Metaxas: I was just going to bring that up. I was watching I don’t know what mainstream media source it was, but they were interviewing Ilhan Omar. And it’s so obvious that they want to help her. And you kind of think, that’s interesting because this is a woman who’s probably committed tremendous crimes. Try at least to be fair. Try at least to see, did she commit the crimes? But it’s sort of they seem to want to be carrying water for her. She came on yesterday, gave an interview, said that she was not related to her husband that she knew of, you know.

It really is interesting. I think I guess I want to know, what is your take on where she is? I don’t mean physically, where she is in the scheme of things. What do you suppose is cooking with Ilhan Omar?

Rod D. Martin: Well, she certainly illustrates your bigger point. I mean, just objectively, if media reporting is fair and we all care about corruption and no one is above the law — we heard all of that, you know, and it was fascinating to watch not just Democrat leaders, which would be hypocritical enough, but media personalities also being horrified that they executed a search warrant on Ilhan Omar’s house just on the heels of having celebrated the Mar-a-Lago raid, which in several respects was clearly illegal. Like they’re going through Melania’s panty drawer. I mean, that’s ridiculous.

And they actually had orders: if you hit any resistance at all, shoot to kill. Okay, so if Barron doesn’t want them to go through his closet, they’re gonna kill Barron. I mean, this is just crazy stuff, and the Democrats and the media ate it up. Ilhan Omar has a search warrant executed on her, and God forbid, it’s the end of democracy. Okay, you know, there’s no journalism in that at all. It is just advocacy.

Okay, so that being the case, the advocates in this case are very much taking a page out of the KGB playbook, which was all about this idea that in the long term we can demoralize the West. Demoralization is a key term. We’re going to demoralize the West such that they just give up. And that’s what you see happening here.

In Omar’s case personally, gosh, Eric, she looks guilty. I mean, she looks like she probably committed immigration fraud in at least two different ways. One of them might actually be having married her brother, but one of them is lying about her age.

She wasn’t actually eligible to be a member of Congress at the time she was elected, it turns out. So that’s a bit of a problem. And then there’s talk of a possible RICO investigation because of the money that was funneled to her sister from USAID the horribly corrupt left-wing slush fund USAID that Donald Trump just shut down. And you know, it turned out that about 90 percent of everything they were spending was anything but humanitarian aid. So, you know, none of this is as presented. And $20 million of that went to Ilhan Omar’s sister under suspicious circumstances for suspicious purposes.

And it looks pretty clear that Ilhan herself was part of that. So, there’s a real thorny nest of things here that even a biased media that cares about journalism would be reporting. And we would see that in the ‘80s. They grudgingly reported bad things on the left, but they did report them. That’s how you end up with a Speaker of the House, Jim Wright, driven from office. And you know, you couldn’t have that today. The media would just carry water for Jim Wright. As much as they did then and as annoyed as we were then, now they wouldn’t cover that story at all.

Eric Metaxas: And can we — I mean, I guess the reason it seems to me that Ilhan Omar and others did what they did is that they were pretty sure they would never be called to account. They were pretty sure they could get away with it. They were pretty sure Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, would run cover for them. That basically that it was, you know, the U.S. Treasury was theirs for the plundering.

Rod D. Martin: That’s its purpose. I mean, that’s becoming clearer across the board. If you see a welfare program anywhere, it’s increasingly clear that the purpose is not to alleviate poverty, it’s for the Democrats to be able to skim off the top. They use it to reward constituencies that vote with them. They use it to just fund whatever boondoggle they want, much of which is actually campaigning against us.

And speaking of the USAID thing, I mean, you look at Latin America. Since USAID was shut down, every single election in Latin America has kicked a socialist government out and put a conservative or libertarian government in.

Okay, what changed? Well, just the massive thumb on the scales from Washington. And they did think they could get away with it. You saw it in 2016, the horror, the shrieking over Trump winning wasn’t nearly as much about Trump as it was about they knew that Hillary was going to complete their revolution.

Hillary was the anointed one. She was the chosen one. There was no question she was going to win. She was “inevitable,” remember? And you know, you had the campaign workers going around in shirts that said “Spoiler alert, Hillary wins,” you know. And just they couldn’t imagine a different outcome. And if that had been true, it would be Hillary who had put three Supreme Court justices on the court. And they would all be Marxist hacks like Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. And this would have been our future.

Every good thing we have had happen in the last decade would not have happened, would not have had any chance of happening, and the socialist revolution would be complete. So, you know, they thought when they got rid of Trump with Biden, they were in again, and they just believe in this inevitability of communist progress.

It’s not inevitable. Resistance is not futile. And this is the thing: at the end of the day, the media is never going to tell these stories, so we have to. And I know you are, and I’m certainly trying, and lots of other people are. But the real bottom line is, you got to tell your neighbors. You’ve got to actually tell people you interact with every day, and then you’ve got to put them in your car and take them to the polls.

The Midterms: Just Four Votes per Precinct

Jeremy Boreing and I were talking about this last night. We had a great discussion, I thought, about the fact that 1,000 more votes in just 20 contested House districts gets you a Republican majority in the House. That works out to about four votes per precinct.

Every individual conservative should take responsibility for getting four people to the polls with them. This is not rocket science. This is not hard. This isn’t anything Abraham Lincoln wasn’t doing in the 1840s and ‘50s. This is just basic politics. We’ve got to quit waiting for the Republicans off in Washington to do our work for us.

This is a free country. This is a republic. We actually are the Republicans. We’ve got to turn out the vote, and we can.

Eric Metaxas: Well, that’s the thing. So, folks, a couple things here. First of all, if you need ammunition on what Trump is really doing, get it. You’ve got to get a copy of Trump’s New World Re-Order by Rod Martin, because we need to know why we should be excited about keeping Trump in, keeping Congress, keeping the Senate. It’s very important. And if you haven’t yet bought a copy of my book, for the love of Pete, get a copy of Revolution by Eric Metaxas. Why? Because you need to know where we come from, how we got here.

It is so important for us to be enthused about America, about who we are, about what we are, about what we stand for and care about. We need a reset, Rod, and you know that.

This is kind of where we are and this is where Trump is. We’re getting a reset. Trump is remaking everything because it has been falling apart for decades and decades. The RINOs that we once thought of as, you know, conservatives, whether it’s W or McCain or any of these folks, they have failed us dramatically. And so we have to go back.

But it’s interesting, Rod, I see Trump it’s kind of like, you know, daddy comes home from the war. People didn’t think he was ever gonna come back. People thought he had died. And he comes back and, you know, he’s painting the house.

He’s dealing with the stuff that has been falling apart and we didn’t ever think it could get better. I mean, and even doing so literally in the case of the fountains in D.C. and all the kind of infrastructure around the White House, he sees it, it bothers him, he fixes it. He makes sure that it gets done.

I have to say that we don’t deserve this, folks. We have gotten somebody of the highest caliber imaginable working for us. And that is why the midterms are so important because the left says this is our last chance to stop him. We will impeach him, we will impeach his cabinet. They will do anything they can to stop us from the trajectory on which we are happily finding ourselves at this point. They don’t like it and we’ve just got to be serious. And the main thing is turnout.

Folks, Rod just said it. It’s turnout. So few people vote in midterm elections, okay? So few people. It’s kind of like, you know, 60 million fewer people will vote across the country in the midterms than in the presidential election. That has to change. And if we who love this country will get out the vote, we’ll get our neighbors out to vote, get our family out to vote, that will make all the difference. That’s all it is. Can we do that? I don’t know what the weather’s going to be like on election day.

One thing that’s important is if you can vote early or you know anyone who can vote early, vote early if it’s possible early because you got to get that money in the bank.

Making Elections Matter Again

Rod D. Martin: Absolutely. Look, that’s the key. The generic ballot is not going to elect a Congress. Individual races are. Individual races, moreover, in which the normal number of people will not be voting. So every single thing you do individually has the potential to be the difference-maker. That’s not always true, but it’s true in a midterm and we can actually turn the tide here. And we should. I mean, that’s the whole point.

You say, “You know, how transformative this is?” I really want to stress the reason the Democrats are completely freaked out here is they very clearly perceive that they are on the brink of being able to complete a revolution. A possibly bloodless revolution, but a revolution nevertheless, that in Obama’s words “fundamentally transforms America.”

Okay, well, but Trump is actually a fundamentally transformative force. If they had gotten Jeb Bush, if they had gotten Mitt Romney, if they had gotten John McCain, those guys would have gone along to get along. They would have opposed the Democrats on a few things, but for the most part they just would have done the same thing.

Donald Trump is going after their centers of power. You know, the entire epoch we have just lived through, 90 years of time. This is not nothing. It has gone so long that it just seems like the way things must be, which is never true. But FDR set up this giant bureaucracy with enormous legislative, executive, and judicial power fused into unelected agencies that function as subject matter dictatorships.

Whether you’re talking about the environment or federal lands or you know, anything you want to talk about, there is some agency that has almost dictatorial control over that subject.

And all those people are Democrats. I mean, they’re basically all Democrats. Even the Republicans in those places are Democrats, really. And that’s because FDR set up a system where the president doesn’t even get to fire these people. They are self-perpetuating. So, everybody he hired was a Democrat, and then those Democrats all hire their successors for the next 90 years. Donald Trump is going after that, and he has. We’ve had a massive reduction in federal civilian employment. We’re at the lowest federal civilian employment level since 1966. It’s unbelievable.

And by going with this litigation strategy that they went with at the outset of this term, they’ve overturned landmark decisions like Humphrey’s Executor that enabled these agencies to operate with impunity and without accountability to anybody elected. Elections have to matter. And Donald Trump is making elections matter again.

Self-Government and the Warning from Europe

Eric Metaxas: Just to clarify, folks, just to give you the basics here, right? Elections have to matter. What does that mean? It means you, we, the people, we are the government. There is no government. We are the government. We, you know, if you can’t be a member of Congress, well, then you get to pick whom you like to be a member of Congress to represent you. We are Congress. We are the Senate. We are the executive and the judicial. We get to pick all that. We are free people.

And we’ve got to go back to the basics of understanding that it is we who govern ourselves. We’ve drifted and drifted and drifted from that. We need to understand that. It’s why I again, I hope people will read my book Revolution and understand it. It’s why people need to understand what is in Rod’s book. What Trump is doing to get us back to the basics of what we’re supposed to be like. We’ve got a long way to go, but we’re on the way and I am very, very hopeful.

What you see happening in Paris, my goodness, the forces of darkness, they are just screaming and writhing. They cannot — this is it, folks. You’re seeing it really clearly what is happening. The forces of Islamism, the immigration that has destroyed Europe, that’s on the verge of destroying Europe, anarchists, Marxists, all of this stuff is just screaming, hoping desperately to wreck things forever.

But my hope, Rod, is that it is waking people up on our side to say, “Okay, we see where this goes. We see what is happening. Now we need to take action.”

Optimism, Alternative Media, and Speaking to Your Neighbors

Rod D. Martin: Well, it is and I’m actually very optimistic about where we’re going. Even if we lose in November, I think what you’ll get from that is Democrats overreaching as they always do and provoking a reaction in ‘28. So, I’m not overly concerned about it. Although, I don’t want to lose. And I think that’s the president’s take. The president knows the odds. The odds are that the president’s party loses the midterms. The president’s party always loses the midterms. We’ve had about three exceptions in the last century.

But at the same time, the president knows perfectly well that all of this has happened before, but it doesn’t have to happen again.

Eric Metaxas: No.

Rod D. Martin: And this is a year where we have alternate media. We are not hidebound to watch NBC, ABC, or CBS, or even CNN. We actually can watch the Eric Metaxas Show. We can watch the Jeremy Boreing Show. We can watch The Daily Wire. We can get our media from so many different sources, it’s unreal. And because the Trump administration came in and eliminated the censorship complex that the Biden team was instituting, that just took people completely off social media up to and including an elected sitting president of the United States, just banned from social media.

Okay. Trump has undone that. And it means there is a plethora of voices and we can get the message out. But I’m telling you, the most important way to get the message out is actually person to person. Actually talk to people. Which, incidentally, the same skills necessary to turn out a winning majority in an election are also the skills needed to evangelize your community. And the people who aren’t doing the one also aren’t doing the other.

So we need to do both, and if we did both, we would have a better America in very short order.

Eric Metaxas: That’s what it’s all about. We're out of time here. Rod, just want to congratulate you again. This week, folks, let's make this book a bestseller, Trump’s New World Re-Order. This is the opening week. Get a copy, get a copy for your neighbor, for your relatives. Trump’s New World Re-Order. We'll leave it there.

Rod Martin, God bless you and talk to you soon.

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NOTE: My friend Alexander Muse is one of the most prolific and thoughtful voices online, and well worth following on all platforms. Please read and share. — RDM

by Alexander Muse
October 7, 2026

On October 22, the energy analysts at Kpler reported a number that the drive-by media refused to report. The volume of Iranian crude floating outside the blockade zone had fallen to zero, down from roughly 136 million barrels when the war began in February. No new Iranian cargo had loaded since August 25.

Because payments lag deliveries, Kpler expects the associated revenue to dry up by mid-December. For a regime that has spent 45 years converting oil into terror and rockets, that is the sound of the register closing.

President Trump’s decision to finish what the June 2025 strikes began was the right one. The price we are paying for it — higher gasoline, a drawn-down global inventory, and the regrettable loss of (shockingly few) American lives — is worth it, for one simple reason: the costs are temporary, while the gains are durable.

Thousands of lives will be saved. Oil inventories refill. Centrifuge halls, missile plants, and the financial plumbing of the world’s largest state sponsor of terror do not.

The governing principle is one every conservative understands from the schoolyard. A nation that can be held hostage will be held hostage. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has treated the Strait of Hormuz as its insurance policy, the threat that made every American president calculate the cost of an oil shock before deciding how many Iranian war crimes to tolerate.

The Navy’s own history of the 1987 Tanker War records Iranian mines in the shipping lanes and the escort mission, Operation Earnest Will, that followed. We fought that round and then went back to tolerating the rest. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis grew up under that umbrella. Treasury reported that the IRGC Quds Force moved more than $1 billion to its clients in 2025 alone, and that was a year in which Iran was significantly weakened by the fall of Assad.

Why now, rather than in 2027? Because the clock was running in Tehran’s favor.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell assessed in July 2025 that the June strikes had set the nuclear program back by one to two years, and the regime wasted none of that time. With oil money flowing, it simply started rebuilding. More alarming still was the pace of conventional production. Ballistic missiles and attack drones were rolling off assembly lines by the thousands, and the hard truth about even the finest air defenses in the world is that they can be saturated.

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Shoot enough objects at a Patriot battery at once, and some will get through. The campaign objective followed from that arithmetic: destroy the stockpiles, destroy the factories that replace them, and cut off the cash that would otherwise replace the factories.

Each leg of that strategy now has receipts. CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper said on October 16 that American operations had prevented $25 billion in Iranian oil exports and helped freeze roughly $350 million in cryptocurrency. Treasury’s October 8 action targeted what it called the regime’s remaining shadow fleet; its October 15 action targeted the banks and oil-sale intermediaries that turn tanker cargoes into usable currency.

The proxies are feeling it too. On August 20, the Treasury designated ten people running a cash network for Hezbollah that moved hundreds of millions of dollars across borders. On October 2, it dismantled a France-linked Hamas fundraising ring. On January 16, before the first bomb fell, it hit 21 individuals and entities financing the Houthis. And on October 27, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi told the Security Council that his agency had identified no effort by Iran to repair or reconstruct the facilities damaged in 2025 and 2026. A regime with no cash does not rebuild what it cannot pay for.

Now the bill, stated plainly. The International Energy Agency’s October 14 report puts global observed oil stocks 509 million barrels below their end-of-February level. Aramco’s chief executive, Amin Nasser, said on October 5 that replenishing those stocks while meeting demand could take up to two years once the strait fully reopens.

Those are the honest numbers, and they are smaller than they sound. Spread across 730 days, refilling 509 million barrels requires an average net build of about 697,000 barrels a day. The world consumes about 102.4 million barrels a day. The refill is 0.68 percent of consumption; the entire hole is roughly five days of global use. On March 11 the 32 members of the IEA agreed to release 400 million barrels of emergency stocks, which is precisely what emergency stocks exist to do. You draw the reserve during the storm, and you rebuild it in the calm.

Compare that bill to the one the Democrat Party handed Americans without any war at all. AAA’s national average for regular gasoline today is $4.20. Joe Biden’s record, set June 14, 2022, was $5.02. A driver filling a 15-gallon tank pays about $12.18 less today than at Biden’s peak, during a shooting war in the Gulf, with the world’s most important chokepoint disrupted. Adjusting the 2022 figure for the inflation Biden also gave us and his peak works out to about $5.70 in today’s dollars, making today’s pump price roughly 26 percent lower.

Crude tells the same story. Brent closed October 29 at $115.28 against a 2022 daily peak of $133.18; WTI closed at $105.51 against $123.64. Biden had no Hormuz closure and no Iranian campaign to blame. Instead, he waged a war on American drilling, and prices were higher.

The Democrats and their willing accomplices in the drive-by media promised something far worse than this. They promised $7 gasoline, a global depression, and a Middle East in flames from Beirut to Muscat. What actually happened is that American exposure proved limited: about 0.4 million barrels a day of crude moved through Hormuz to the United States before the war, around 2 percent of our consumption, and the Gulf adapted faster than the pessimists allowed.

The Energy Information Administration estimates Middle Eastern production shut-ins fell from 10.9 million barrels a day in May to 4.8 million in September, a 56 percent recovery in just four months. Its October outlook has Brent averaging $84 in 2027 and $74 by that year’s fourth quarter, with gasoline just under $3.60. Roughly half of American households heat with natural gas or propane, and the EIA expects them to spend less this winter than last.

The adaptation is the part of this story that will matter in 2036. The IEA recorded 5.6 million barrels a day of Gulf exports bypassing the strait in September. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline to Yanbu can carry 7 million barrels a day and was moving about 2 million early this year; the war filled it. The UAE’s Habshan-Fujairah line carries roughly 1.8 million a day to the Gulf of Oman. ADNOC’s second Fujairah pipeline, half-finished in May, has been accelerated toward completion in 2027, and Kpler puts the combined UAE bypass capacity near 3.6 million barrels a day when it is complete.

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Meanwhile, Chevron is rebuilding damaged, long-offline pipelines from Iraq across Syria to the Mediterranean coast. Kuwait’s oil minister is now discussing routes through neighboring states as well. None of this was happening at this speed in January. The Gulf states had tolerated concentrated transit risk for decades because the alternative cost a lot of money. The war made the risk cost even more. September’s attacks on the East-West Pipeline, after it was repaired, taught the second lesson in the same semester. Build redundant routes, and defend the pumping stations and ports that feed them.

The strongest objection deserves an answer, so here it is. Diesel sits at $6.32 a gallon, near its September record, and the truckers and farmers who burn it are carrying more of this war than the rest of us thanks to targeted attacks by Ukraine on Russian refineries. The IEA expects global demand to contract by 2.6 million barrels a day this year, and some of that is real hardship. Americans have died.

All of this is true, but all of it has to be weighed against the alternative, which was a nuclear-capable Iran with a treasury full of oil money and a missile force built to overwhelm whatever we could put in the sky. The price of that world would not have been denominated in cents per gallon; it would have been denominated in cities, and the people who would have paid it first live in Tel Aviv, Riyadh, and Manama, not in Georgetown.

Consider also what it cost the president to choose this. He launched a major campaign in February of a midterm year, with every pollster in Washington telling him that voters punish the party in power for gasoline prices and nothing else; he could have waited until November, run on peace and quiet, and left the missile factories humming for his successor. He did the opposite; he played the decade instead of the quarter. That is exactly what conservatives say they want from a president and almost never get.

What should Washington do with the ground it has taken? Keep the blockade on Iranian oil and lift it on everyone else; lawful commercial passage should be protected and prohibited Iranian trade should be strangled, and the Navy can tell the difference. Make Gulf producers finish and defend their own bypass infrastructure with their own money, since the pipelines serve their trade. Refill strategic reserves gradually as supply allows rather than chasing barrels at the top of the market. Keep Treasury aimed at the facilitators and shadow banks while leaving humanitarian channels open. Judge the nuclear question by inspector access, material accounting, and reconstitution indicators rather than by replaying footage from last June.

And then, if Iran creeps back toward a bomb, the United States now has an option it did not have for 45 years: go in and destroy it again, at a time of our choosing, without the strait as a gun to the world’s head.

At the end of the day, deterrence is a reputation, and reputations are built by paying prices that adversaries assumed you would refuse. Every administration since Carter did the math on Hormuz and concluded that the Islamic Republic’s proxies were cheaper to live with than to confront. Trump did the math differently, and the ledger now shows a terror sponsor with no oil revenue in sight, a nuclear program nobody is repairing, and a Gulf that is paving its way around the trap.

‘Two years of refilling tanks is a modest fee for that. The question for the next president, of either party, will be whether he has the nerve to keep the account current.

— Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com.

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by Rod D. Martin
November 1, 2026

This year — like every year — we are faced with imperfect candidates between whom we must choose.

I have been politically active since I was a teenager, and yet I’ve only rarely had the chance to vote for my preferred candidate post-primary, at least at the Presidential level. Didn’t matter: the Democrat was always worse. A lot worse.

Some suggest withdrawing from the process as a viable option. Others join third parties (and it’s important to note: in all of American history, no third party has ever elected, or come close to electing, a President, although several have caused the other side to win).

I contend, and have always contended, that these are almost never good options. The advocates of these “options” say they are voting their principles in the seeming assumption that those who disagree with them don’t have any. But I have written, spoken, and lived my principles on this for decades.

In 2016, I decided that it was finally time I write them down in a comprehensive form. Donald Trump vexxed a lot of people, partly for things he’d actually done, mostly for things he hadn’t and wouldn’t. That doesn’t reduce the conscience issue at stake then, but it does make a standard essential. In a difficult situation, how do we know what to do? The same holds for some of our candidates this year, and every year, forever until Christ returns.

So here are those principles. I encourage you to think deeply about them.

Principle 1: It is almost never “the lesser of two evils,” only the better of two choices. We hear this argument ceaselessly. But it’s less Christian than humanistic. It suggests there’s an option to have candidates who aren’t fallen. That isn’t going to happen.

Some say we should apply the Bible’s standards for elders to our candidates. Generally speaking, I agree. But we have to remember that they are not actually candidates for elder, and that unlike in a church setting, someone will be elected regardless of whether they meet our preferred standards.

If we wish for godly men to be electable, we should commit ourselves to sufficient evangelism and discipleship to produce a culture in which 51% want that too.

If we won’t, we cannot help but be a minority, and the best viable candidates will look less like David and more like Darius. That’s just reality.

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Principle 2: When it comes to the general election, you owe God two duties: gratitude to Him, and neighborly love for and protection of His saints. Voting is not about “rendering unto Caesar.” Caesar does not require, nor even want, us to vote. Self-government is an extraordinary blessing for which we owe deep gratitude to our God. We fling it in His face when we don’t participate.

Ask those living under dictatorships if you disagree. The alternative to involvement — the one preached by too many of our pastors — is to allow God’s enemies to rule over us, and by “us,” I don’t mean “you”: I mean your children and grandchildren and everyone you love and for whom you’re responsible. If that’s our choice, then we are going beyond the sin of the Israelites who demanded a king: we’re begging for that king to be Caligula, or Nero.

The better candidate might well not be good, just better. But the better candidate will do more good, or at least less evil. Our having a say — as Joseph, Daniel, Obadiah, Nehemiah and Mordecai each did — helps mitigate the unvarnished evil which might otherwise befall us, thus protecting the saints and, wherever possible, advancing the Kingdom, even in ungodly times.

Principle 3: Perfect is for the primary, consensus is for the general.

In the 2016 Republican primaries we had 17 choices, in my view the best field of our lifetimes up to that point. We had a robust debate. And statistically speaking, your guy probably lost.

The nomination process is a great argument, in which two broad coalitions dispute internally about what they believe matters most, and ultimately pick champions to represent their consensus position against the other side’s. Or to put that another way, primaries are about persuasion.

If you weren’t persuasive enough (and my guys were not), you have few gripes coming. Dust yourself off and start again.

In both primary and general elections, I subscribe to the famed Buckley Rule, that we should support “the rightwardmost viable candidate.”

But if my team has lost in the playoffs, someone else is winning the Super Bowl no matter how I “feel” about it.

Principle 4: We are not entitled to a “good” candidate: we have to earn one.

No one is entitled — not even us — to 51 percent. You have to earn it, just as you have to disciple your family, your church or your city with work, sweat and tears.

Some try to avoid this, longing for a multi-party system (and make no mistake, we don’t have one). But in fact, whatever its flaws, our two-party system is a great blessing.

Why? Because it’s more honest. Far more.

In multi-party systems (such as Italy’s), every party pretends to voters that it can do things it manifestly cannot, for the simple reason that no party will get even close to a majority. Afterwards, there is an election, and the most successful party (which frequently got 30 percent of the vote or less) begins cutting deals with smaller parties to form a coalition government for whom absolutely no one voted.

The coalition represents only the smoke-filled room, and the government after it will only represent some future smoke-filled room.

In America, we make our coalitions in public, with everyone’s full participation. That’s our primary. It’s better by every possible measure, even when our guys lose. And we have a better chance of persuading our countrymen next time if we don’t take our toys and go home today.

Principle 5: Yes, you are actually responsible for the likely outcome of your choices. I’m not sure why this concept is so difficult for so many of our people. If you drink and drive, you are responsible for any deaths you cause, even if you didn’t “mean” to kill anybody. If you’re a bartender and you serve too many drinks to someone who then kills somebody, you go to jail too.

So why do we not understand that standing aside and allowing a truly terrible choice to win is the same, no matter how “virtuous” your no-hope third party or write-in candidate might be? Even if you can’t stand Candidate X, there’s rarely a time you don’t need to vote against some worse Candidate Y. You must do that efficaciously or you’re voting for them in all but name.

“I’m not responsible for the outcome of my actions” is the cry of scoundrels and cowards everywhere.

Principle 6: Who will hurt us more? Beat them.

Southern Seminary professor Mark Coppenger expands on this well in his essay “Fiduciary Virtues”. He posits guardianship (“keeping safe our citizens, and hence our laws, borders, liberties, environment, strategic alliances, economy, and cultural treasures”) and stewardship (“making the most of our God-given resources, both personal and material“) as key.

Like Coppenger, I agree that the other virtues matter: I just believe these matter more in the electoral context. We are constantly told that Jimmy Carter was a “virtuous” man, in the way we use that term, but he was a terrible president, particularly by the measure of those qualities most needed in a nation’s leader.

More to the point, Carter degraded America’s defenses, enabled the Ayatollahs and the Communists (and their eradication of liberty and persecution of the church) in over 20 additional countries, trashed our economy (which is to say, our families) and placed all of us directly in harm’s way.

Was he “nicer” than Jerry Ford? I don’t know. But I also don’t care.

We could put that another way. America was right to choose to ally with Stalin against Hitler, even though Stalin was responsible for the murder of ten times as many people. Why? Because there weren’t any ICBMs in 1941, and Stalin was further away. It was not America’s duty to arbitrate eternal right and wrong: God has that quite covered.

Rather, it was America’s leaders’ duty to defeat the most immediate threat to America’s people, buying time to deal with the further threat in due course. And as it happened, God blessed that choice and wiped both evils from the Earth, the latter without the war we all feared.

Principle 7: As in all else, it’s not about you.

You may have noticed your friends fretting, in this election or some other, about “their principles,” which far too often means their preferences. They talk about irrational things, like writing in someone whose name no one knows, as a valid option to advance these.

They might as well write in Bugs Bunny, or Jed Bartlet. They need to stop kidding themselves. No one knows or cares about their personal made-up drama.

A variant on this is some people’s seeming belief that candidates are gods to whom their vote is a sacrifice, or in whom they are placing their faith. This is silly. They’re just candidates. You are not somehow cloaking them in your moral authority, certification, or blank-check approval. You’re just picking the better choice, like vegetables over popsicles (or vice versa depending on your point of view).

Our choice, however important, is more prosaic than our egos often think.

“Getting my way” is not important. “My primary candidate” is not important. Once we better understand how our system really works, once we grasp that the blessing of self-government requires our participation, once we understand that we are actually responsible for our small part in the overall outcome, all of this becomes easier.

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Perhaps, as some pastors are quick to say, they are personally ready for martyrdom. But are they ready to make that choice for everyone else? For their daughters? Needlessly?

Now of course there might be special cases. Perhaps Hitler runs against Pol Pot, for example. But this is a straw man: in America, we’ve never seen such an example, nor are we likely to. And indeed, Hitler himself did not run against Pol Pot: he ran against Paul von Hindenburg. And though few of us would find Hindenburg acceptable in isolation, in 1932 he was clearly the right and better choice.

My fiduciary, protective, defensive approach may not appeal to you. Manliness does not appeal to our culture generally.

But manning up is exactly what is called for. First in the primary, where Christians tend to lollygag, only to get needlessly bested by their worldly rivals. And second in the general, wherein we tend to whine about our choices, sit on our hands, and let the worse choice lead us needlessly further from God’s truth.

I leave to you to decide whether these principles apply this time. But the exception would have to be pretty impressive.

— An earlier version of this essay appeared in 2016.

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NOTE: Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with his perspectives (and he has addressed so many topics it’s hard to keep track), my friend Jim Jordan is one of the most brilliant theologians — and just one of the smartest men — of our time. I think his take on Halloween is valuable. Take a look. — RDM

by James B. Jordan
October 21, 2019

It has become routine in October for some Christian schools to send out letters warning parents about the evils of Halloween, and it has become equally routine for me to be asked questions about this matter.

"Halloween" is simply a contraction for All Hallows’ Eve. The word "hallow" means "saint," in that "hallow" is just an alternative form of the word "holy" ("hallowed be Thy name"). All Saints’ Day is November 1. It is the celebration of the victory of the saints in union with Christ. The observance of various celebrations of All Saints arose in the late 300s, and these were united and fixed on November 1 in the late 700s. The origin of All Saints Day and of All Saints Eve in Mediterranean Christianity had nothing to do with Celtic Druidism or the Church’s fight against Druidism (assuming there ever even was any such thing as Druidism, which is actually a myth concocted in the 19th century by neo-pagans.)

In the First Covenant, the war between God’s people and God’s enemies was fought on the human level against Egyptians, Assyrians, etc. With the coming of the New Covenant, however, we are told that our primary battle is against principalities and powers, against fallen angels who bind the hearts and minds of men in ignorance and fear. We are assured that through faith, prayer, and obedience, the saints will be victorious in our battle against these demonic forces. The Spirit assures us: "The God of peace will crush Satan under your feet shortly" (Romans 16:20).

The Festival of All Saints reminds us that though Jesus has finished His work, we have not finished ours. He has struck the decisive blow, but we have the privilege of working in the mopping up operation. Thus, century by century the Christian faith has rolled back the demonic realm of ignorance, fear, and superstition. Though things look bad in the Western world today, this work continues to make progress in Asia and Africa and Latin America.

The Biblical day begins in the preceding evening, and thus in the Church calendar, the eve of a day is the actual beginning of the festive day. Christmas Eve is most familiar to us, but there is also the Vigil of Holy Saturday that precedes Easter Morn. Similarly, All Saints’ Eve precedes All Saints’ Day.

The concept, as dramatized in Christian custom, is quite simple: On October 31, the demonic realm tries one last time to achieve victory, but is banished by the joy of the Kingdom.

What is the means by which the demonic realm is vanquished? In a word: mockery. Satan’s great sin (and our great sin) is pride. Thus, to drive Satan from us we ridicule him. This is why the custom arose of portraying Satan in a ridiculous red suit with horns and a tail. Nobody thinks the devil really looks like this; the Bible teaches that he is the fallen Arch-Cherub. Rather, the idea is to ridicule him because he has lost the battle with Jesus and he no longer has power over us.

(The tradition of mocking Satan and defeating him through joy and laughter plays a large role in Ray Bradbury’s classic novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, which is a Halloween novel.)

The gargoyles that were placed on the churches of old had the same meaning. They symbolized the Church ridiculing the enemy. They stick out their tongues and make faces at those who would assault the Church. Gargoyles are not demonic; they are believers ridiculing the defeated demonic army.

Thus, the defeat of evil and of demonic powers is associated with Halloween. For this reason, Martin Luther posted his 95 challenges to the wicked practices of the Church to the bulletin board on the door of the Wittenberg chapel on Halloween. He picked his day with care, and ever since Halloween has also been Reformation Day.

Similarly, on All Hallows’ Eve (Hallow-Even — Hallow-E’en — Halloween), the custom arose of mocking the demonic realm by dressing children in costumes. Because the power of Satan has been broken once and for all, our children can mock him by dressing up like ghosts, goblins, and witches. The fact that we can dress our children this way shows our supreme confidence in the utter defeat of Satan by Jesus Christ — we have NO FEAR!

I don’t have the resources to check the historical origins of all Halloween customs, and doubtless they have varied from time to time and from Christian land to Christian land. "Trick or treat" doubtless originated simply enough: something fun for kids to do. Like anything else, this custom can be perverted, and there have been times when "tricking" involved really mean actions by teenagers and was banned from some localities.

We can hardly object, however, to children collecting candy from friends and neighbors. This might not mean much to us today, because we are so prosperous that we have candy whenever we want, but in earlier generations people were not so well off, and obtaining some candy or other treats was something special. There is no reason to pour cold water on an innocent custom like this.

Similarly, the jack-o’-lantern’s origins are unknown. Hollowing out a gourd or some other vegetable, carving a face, and putting a lamp inside of it is something that no doubt has occurred quite independently to tens of thousands of ordinary people in hundreds of cultures worldwide over the centuries. Since people lit their homes with candles, decorating the candles and the candle-holders was a routine part of life designed to make the home pretty or interesting. Potatoes, turnips, beets, and any number of other items were used.

Wynn Parks writes of an incident he observed: "An English friend had managed to remove the skin of a tangerine in two intact halves. After carving eyes and nose in one hemisphere and a mouth in the other, he poured cooking oil over the pith sticking up in the lower half and lit the readymade wick. With its upper half on, the tangerine skin formed a miniature jack-o’-lantern. But my friend seemed puzzled that I should call it by that name. `What would I call it? Why a "tangerine head," I suppose.’" (Parks, "The Head of the Dead," The World & I, November 1994, p. 270.)

In the New World, people soon learned that pumpkins were admirably suited for this purpose. The jack-o’-lantern is nothing but a decoration; and the leftover pumpkin can be scraped again, roasted, and turned into pies and muffins.

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In some cultures, what we call a jack-o’-lantern represented the face of a dead person, whose soul continued to have a presence in the fruit or vegetable used. But this has no particular relevance to Halloween customs. Did your mother tell you, while she carved the pumpkin, that this represented the head of a dead person and with his soul trapped inside? Of course not. Symbols and decorations, like words, mean different things in different cultures, in different languages, and in different periods of history. The only relevant question is what does it mean now, and nowadays it is only a decoration.

And even if some earlier generations did associate the jack-o’-lantern with a soul in a head, so what? They did not take it seriously. It was just part of the joking mockery of heathendom by Christian people.

This is a good place to note that many articles in books, magazines, and encyclopedias are written by secular humanists or even the pop-pagans of the so-called "New Age" movement. (An example is the article by Wynn Parks cited above.) These people actively suppress the Christian associations of historic customs, and try to magnify the pagan associations. They do this to try and make paganism acceptable and to downplay Christianity. Thus, Halloween, Christmas, Easter, etc., are said to have pagan origins. Not true.

Oddly, some fundamentalists have been influenced by these slanted views of history. These fundamentalists do not accept the humanist and pagan rewriting of Western history, American history, and science, but sometimes they do accept the humanist and pagan rewriting of the origins of Halloween and Christmas, the Christmas tree, etc. We can hope that in time these brethren will reexamine these matters as well. We ought not to let the pagans do our thinking for us.

Nowadays, children often dress up as superheroes, and the original Christian meaning of Halloween has been absorbed into popular culture. Also, with the present fad of "designer paganism" in the so-called New Age movement, some Christians are uneasy with dressing their children as spooks. So be it. But we should not forget that originally Halloween was a Christian custom, and there is no solid reason why Christians cannot enjoy it as such even today.

"He who sits in the heavens laughs; Yahweh ridicules them" says Psalm 2. Let us join in His holy laughter, and mock the enemies of Christ on October 31.

— Concerning Halloween appeared at Theopolis Institute.

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by Scott McKay
October 30, 2026

They’re calling it an upset. But nobody — nobody — should be surprised that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was “re-elected” to a fourth term as Brazil’s president in a stunningly irregular vote Sunday night.

Lula’s government is astonishingly corrupt and vicious. So much so that the last candidate to oppose him — former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro — sits in prison on a 27-year sentence for, essentially, thinking about a “coup” after losing the 2022 election to Lula under sketchy circumstances.

But nothing like what happened on Sunday.

This year’s Liberal Party candidate — the Liberal Party in Brazil is the main conservative party — was Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the jailed ex-president. The younger Bolsonaro won the first round of Brazil’s jungle-primary voting and was comfortably ahead in most of the polling in advance of Sunday’s runoff.

Tha…

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Our Full Discussion is Transcribed Below:

by Rod D. Martin and Col. Rob Maness (Ret.)
October 29, 2026

Former Air Force Wing Commander Col. Rob Maness and I discuss why Trump’s domestic and foreign policies constitute a single strategy: restoring accountable government, rebuilding American power, and opening a new age in space.

We discuss:

• Why Trump is the anti-FDR

• How the administrative state created de facto one-party rule

• Why America needs allies who act as partners, not teenagers in our basement

• The urgent need to rebuild the Navy, shipyards, and strategic supply chains

• The new space race is NOT like the old one — and what comes after the midterms

It’s a full hour of in-depth analysis you won’t want to miss! Transcript after the break.

Our Full Conversation:

Announcer: Having worked his way up from the enlisted ranks to full colonel, he served our country for more than 32 years. He served as a bomber squadron commander, bomb-disposal technician, Joint Chiefs of Staff operations officer, and assisted the national security team with the campaign plan for the Global War on Terrorism. He authored the first theater nuclear war plan and served as vice commander of America’s largest airborne intelligence wing.

Colonel Rob Maness is a true American hero. This is Rob Maness Live.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (recorded): More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment. And yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it.

Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. I am prepared, under my constitutional duty, to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.

But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me.

I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis, broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

Why Trump Is the Anti-FDR

Rob Maness: Welcome back to the Rob Maness Show, folks. We’re live on WorldviewTube and our X Spaces simulcast.

Well, America, it’s More War Monday, and we are giving this entire hour to one book because it explains the fight we are in better than anything I’ve read this year or previously. The headlines hand you a thousand separate fights: terrorists, deportations, firings, court battles, NATO, energy, China. It goes on and on. The legacy media calls it chaos. Well, my guest says it’s all one project.

Franklin Roosevelt’s generation built two orders we have lived under ever since. At home, a permanent government of unelected agencies and experts who keep ruling no matter who you elect. Abroad, a post-war system where America carries the burdens and is told that serving its own citizens is shameful. Donald Trump is dismantling both. He is the counter-FDR and this is the restoration. At home, elections have to matter. Abroad, nations have to matter. That American power has to serve the American people. Today, we walk the book part by part, from “The Dodged Bullet” and “FDR’s Coup” to “The Road to 2028.”

My guest was on PayPal’s startup team, served as policy director to Governor Mike Huckabee and runs Martin Capital and the Rod Martin Report from right down the coast in Destin. His new book is Trump’s New World Re-Order, Dismantling the Deep State and Ending Post-War Globalist Rule. Dr. Rod Martin, welcome back to the Rob Maness Show, sir.

Rod Martin: It’s great to be here. Thank you.

Rob Maness: You know, that clip, when I chose it and I listened to it all the way through the end the second time, I realized that we’ve been here before. He exercised the broadest executive power a peacetime president has ever exercised and he had a Congress at times that went along with him.

Rod Martin: He did. And, you know, I disagree with many of his decisions. I do applaud his courage and his boldness in trying to deal with a true crisis that was not of his making, although I think in many respects he made it worse.

I think the New Deal was flawed in its conception in the same way that Herbert Hoover’s measures were flawed in theirs and really weren’t that different. Just FDR won the election and so he took credit for the things that he claimed Hoover had not done and they were both wrong. They were both statists. They both wanted a top-down solution.

There’s a reason that in this country we call it the Great Depression and in many other countries they call it just the Depression because it wasn’t as bad in many other countries as it was here because of how government responded to it.

Nevertheless, that’s not the point. He did actually create an enormous bureaucracy, what we call the deep state. This permanent, unelected, unaccountable, and unfireable bureaucracy composed of millions of people who are there no matter who’s president. You can elect AOC or Ted Cruz, and the bureaucracy, as it has been composed, just keeps rolling along, just keeps legislating, usurping executive power, and even prosecuting people in their own courts.

Donald Trump has upended that both through his judicial nominees and his litigation strategy and also through direct legislative and executive action to restore the meaning of Article II, Section 1, that the executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States. The Founding Fathers understood what they were doing there.

You know, some people can complain, well, you know, that makes an incredibly powerful president. That’s actually the point, because you want the electorate to be able to decide the direction of the country, not a bunch of unelected so-called experts who were credentialed by other so-called experts who just happen to all be of the same political party.

So elections have to matter, and the most important thing Donald Trump is doing is making elections matter by actually restoring power to the elected president so if we don’t like what he’s doing, we can fire him and actually get meaningful change.

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Rob Maness: Yeah. Did I hear you right? So a Kamala Harris presidency would have looked pretty much the same as a Ted Cruz presidency? I think I agree with you on that.

Rod Martin: No, but as far as how the government responded to various things, it wouldn’t really change. I mean, you saw that with the Autopen. Joe Biden wasn’t in control of anything. I’m not sure he was even continent. And yet, the government just keeps rolling on. The policy positions are the same. Nothing’s really changed. And honestly, you know, I’m one of the guys who believes the 2020 election was stolen. I think that’s part of why. It also gave them an insurance policy in terms of the statute of limitations.

It certainly got rid of someone they hate. But it also gave the Deep State a way to say, look, we can run this without an elected government at all. And they did, but it didn’t work out quite as well as they expected. And Donald Trump came back.

Rob Maness: Do you think the Biden policies really are the truest reflection of just how leftist and out-of-control authoritarianism inside the unelected bureaucracy is in the United States government?

The Dodged Bullet: Censorship and Permanent One-Party Rule

Rod Martin: Unquestionably. And the first part of my book is called “The Dodged Bullet” for exactly that reason. The salient facts here, the Biden counterterrorism strategy. Once the Trump administration released it and let us really see the details, it was very clear this was a blueprint to not suppress domestic terrorists, to shut you down, to shut down anybody who dissented from, you know, the science or whatever they call it this week. You must not say anything contrary to the party. Two plus two after all equals whatever the party tells you.

So, you know, we had that. That was going in a bad direction but you also had this mass censorship and I’m sorry, I’m lawyer enough to think that, you know, just because you outsource an unconstitutional action doesn’t somehow baptize it and make it constitutional. The government can’t act through a third party any differently than it can act itself and they were using social media to censor everybody up to and including the sitting president of the United States.

The elected president of the United States gets banned from Twitter? That’s absolutely obscene, and it certainly violates the First Amendment. So, if you just look at those things, if you look at half of the country being defined as basically domestic terrorists and you look at the measures they were taking to censor any dissenting viewpoint, well, how is that different from Venezuela? How is that different from Cuba? It isn’t. It isn’t at all.

And you see where this goes. I mean, Vladimir Putin’s a bad guy. He does a lot of bad stuff. But in Great Britain, where the Democrats’ friends are very much in power, they now arrest 10 times as many people as Putin does for so-called speech violations. That’s not a country you want to live in. It’s a completely unconstitutional order, as is the Deep State generally. And thank God we have a president who’s doing something about it.

Rob Maness: Yeah, under the old Soviet Union, you would have seen people probably get arrested for praying on a sidewalk silently by the KGB and the GRU and those kind of things. But I think I’ve seen that a lot in the UK in the last five to ten years, but I haven’t seen many reports on it happening in Russia or anywhere else.

Rod Martin: No, it doesn’t happen that much in Russia. If you oppose Putin, they’ll come for you. Duh.

Rob Maness: Absolutely.

Rod Martin: But apart from that, you actually sometimes have more civil liberties in sort of a practical, rough-and-ready respect in Russia than in Great Britain or Canada. Are you kidding me? Britain is the cradle of our liberty. And admittedly, our Founding Fathers took it a lot further and perfected it rather dramatically. But they got those ideas from the mother country. And look how far the mother country has fallen. So, you know, praise God for Nigel Farage. I hope he wins the next general election.

Maybe he can fix it. But it’s just a train wreck and it shows you what the so-called Democratic Socialists really are. They’re not democratic. They’re just socialists.

Rob Maness: Yeah. Every time I see chest-beating from over that direction, especially on the UK’s part, I just think of the song Britannia Rules the Waves. Britannia can’t even field a submarine that can properly launch a SLBM test launch these days. So things have gotten really bad.

Allies, Partners and American Interests

Rod Martin: It’s ridiculous. And we saw when Cyprus was attacked, they couldn’t get a destroyer out of port and get it there for a month. I mean, come on. This is absurd. Can you imagine if Argentina had invaded the Falklands with Keir Starmer or Andy Burnham in power? I mean, they might have given Argentina Wales and Northern Ireland along with the Falklands. It’s just insane.

The truth is, Britain, which is the sixth-largest economy in the world and supposedly our most dependable partner, is in some ways now our most dependent partner other than Canada in that they now have twice as many admirals as warships.

They have presided over the slow death of the Royal Navy. Germany, same thing: they were showing up at NATO exercises just a few years ago with broomsticks because they didn’t bother to buy enough rifles. Why would they need to? The American taxpayer will take care of that.

And so everywhere you look — and this is a key point of the book, too. We’re not quite to that yet, but it’s a key point — American taxpayers have plenty of things that they need to pay for. They don’t need to pay for Germany’s welfare program. That’s insane.

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And those guys were charging us four times our auto tariff. Canada is charging us 280% on dairy even today. India was charging us 100 percent tariff on Harley-Davidson. I mean, really? Harley-Davidson? You know, and just nuking us everywhere.

These are friends? These are allies? You know, and I realize you know, the relationship with India is a little sketchier than that. But supposedly we’re buddies, and here we are. Look, Trump is the only guy who ever actually made NATO step up and hit 2 percent of GDP in defense spending.

Everybody else talked about it. Even Obama talked to them about it. Nothing doing. They weren’t interested. Donald Trump chest-thumped and threatened and cajoled and arm-twisted and got it. And now he’s got a 5 percent commitment that they haven’t hit yet, but they’re on their way. Some countries actually already have.

So that’s a tremendous sea change. And that is the other half of this new world reorder. It’s actually making our allies partners, not dependents. It’s actually making our foreign policy serve the interests of the people paying for it.

And it is certainly an Alfred Thayer Mahan chokepoint strategy to contain China and to keep the world’s oceans safe for commerce. We are a commercial trading nation. We have to have that. But the Chinese need it worse than we do, and they can’t provide it for themselves. Our containing them could ultimately bring about a collapse of communist China in the same way that Reagan contained and collapsed the Soviet Union.

Rob Maness: You’re absolutely right. We’re going to talk about that. But we’ve got to take a break real quick, Rod. When we come back, we’ll see President Trump, before he was reelected, his little statement about the Deep State, globalism, and what he was going to do. And I want to step through exactly what we’re seeing take place from a policy perspective real quick in that next segment.

We’ll be right back with Dr. Rod Martin. We’re talking about his new book. And you guys got to go get it.

We’ll be right back.

Trump’s Pledge to Dismantle the Deep State

Donald Trump (recorded): Here’s my plan to dismantle the Deep State and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all. And corruption it is.

First, I will immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats, and I will wield that power very aggressively.

Second, we will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them. The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled, so that faceless bureaucrats will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives, Christians, or the left’s political enemies, which they’re doing now at a level that nobody can believe even possible.

Third, we will totally reform FISA courts, which are so corrupt.

Rob Maness: Welcome back to the Rob Maness Show. It’s More War Monday. My guest today is Dr. Rod Martin. We’re talking about his new book, which is about Trump’s plan to re-order the globe, you know, setting up the new re-order, getting rid of globalism, getting rid of the deep state, making our allies step up to the plate so that America’s foreign policy serves its interests and its people.

There’s a lot to talk about, and Rod, welcome back. You know, you talk about Humphrey’s Executor and Chevron being the turning point in the whole attempt of the bureaucracy to permanently subvert the Constitution.

What are those, just for the audience, to refresh their memory?

Rod Martin: Well, first of all, I just want to say that if Donald Trump had not appointed a majority on the Supreme Court, we wouldn’t be talking about this at all.

Rob Maness: You’re right.

Rod Martin: It’s just transformative. So the Chevron decision came down when I was a teenager, and it says a bunch of stuff, but the thing that’s most important for our purposes is that if you get hauled before an administrative agency’s court, you didn’t have a right to appeal to a real federal court. I mean, can you just imagine? And it strips us of our rights as citizens.

And then you have Humphrey’s Executor, which strips the president of his rights as the elected chief executive.

Humphrey’s Executor came down in 1935, and ironically, it was actually a ruling against FDR. And FDR just said, hey, if they’re going to give me lemons, I’m going to make lemonade. So what it said was that FDR did not have the right to unappoint, which is to, say, fire, a member of the Federal Trade Commission. Okay, well, that’s just absurd. The FTC is definitely part of the executive branch. He either has all executive power or he doesn’t.

So that’s been standing law from 1935 until 2026. We’re talking about 90 years of unaccountable government that cannot be reined in by a president no matter who you elect. I mean, if you elect Bush, if you elect Obama, if you elect Reagan, if you elect Carter, that bureaucracy is still there doing what it wants, and it is not nonpartisan. That’s a lie. They’re all Democrats. They’re all Democrats. Even the RINOs in that system are all Democrats. They just don’t admit it.

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So, you know, you get the same result down in detail, decade after decade, going after these things matters.

So, he mentioned Schedule F in the clip. That is asserting that policymaking bureaucrats are actually subject to the president’s dismissal. That’s a really big deal. No prior president has even attempted it since FDR. And then overturning Chevron, overturning Humphrey’s Executor, that is because of a deliberate Trumpian litigation strategy and the appointment of good judges to the courts.

I have my issues with John Roberts. I have my issues with Amy Coney Barrett. Sometimes I don’t agree with a couple of the others, but the truth of the matter is they are a massive improvement over what we had before, and they rule correctly nearly all the time.

So, it’s a sea change. And the bottom line is it makes elections matter again. If you want to be able to peacefully overthrow your government every four years, now you can. And you weren’t able to for most of the last century.

Rob Maness: You’re absolutely right. So, you said something there. It got my attention. I know that there is a Department of Veterans Affairs veterans court system. What other federal agencies have their own courts?

Rod Martin: More than you can believe. The Environmental Protection Agency does. Most of these agencies fuse, and think about the just blatant unconstitutionality of this. I realize a lot of our younger friends didn’t have civics in high school, but, you know, we’re old enough we did. And the truth is that legislative power is supposed to be segregated off over here in the Congress. And executive power is supposed to be with the president. And judicial power is supposed to be with the federal courts under Article III.

And what we started doing in the 30s was fusing that into silos. Basically, subject matter dictatorships. So, you know, the EPA makes binding law. They then investigate, prosecute, you know, administer whatever you would expect out of the executive branch. And then, if they don’t like what you’re doing, they’re not going to haul you in front of a federal court. They’re going to haul you in front of an EPA court and no right to appeal?

Are you kidding? So, you know, all of our constitutional system just kind of got winked and nodded at, if not outright suspended, for about 90 years. And Trump is undoing that. It’s not going to happen all at once. It’s not all going to be perfect tomorrow. But he has made more progress against this than anybody.

And that’s really one of the bigger points of the book: that FDR didn’t create a different order for a term or even the three terms that he lived through. No, he created an epochal change in American life in every possible area, and we are still living under it. Donald Trump is doing the same thing.

If he pulls this off, and if we don’t screw it up in 2028 and maybe 2032, this is going to last through the end of the century.

Rob Maness: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think so. So, what’s stopping the president from just abolishing the court systems inside his own branch of government, which are blatantly unconstitutional, and sending it back over to the judiciary and saying, hey, we’re not allowed to do your job?

Presidential Power, Energy and the Courts

Rod Martin: I think that’s a great idea. And, of course, the president does so many things every single day, I think he runs out of time to do some of the things on his list.

You see that in countless areas. He invoked the Defense Production Act over the weekend to reopen some major refineries the Democrats have been closing. They want to complain about the price of gasoline and the price of diesel while they’ve closed three major refineries in California just in the last six months after the war started, when they know prices are high.

That’s all about the election, but it’s also about the Green New Scam. They are absolutely committed to their climate cult, and they have promised you they will abolish fossil fuels. They have promised you they are going to abolish the internal combustion engine. It is still a law on the books in California that you’re not going to be able to buy a normal gasoline automobile in California by 2035. That’s unconstitutional now. The Supreme Court has ruled on that, but it’s what they want.

And if they had power over the Supreme Court, which, of course, is what they’re talking about with these court packing plans we keep hearing about. Oh, well, let’s just make it 13 justices instead of nine. Yeah, the aim isn’t the number of justices. The aim is to give one president the power to appoint an entire majority and just turn it into a rubber stamp for the Democratic Socialists of America. That’s what they’re trying to do. Well, that’s a complete corruption of the process.

There’s nothing democratic, small “d,” about it. And that’s why elections suddenly matter more than ever. But if I were Donald Trump, I’m with you, I would actually abolish at least one of these agencies’ court systems, pick one as a test case, and run it up the flagpole to the Supreme Court. And let’s just see where we get. We have gotten exactly where we were supposed to get on nearly everything we’ve done that with, birthright citizenship being a notable exception. But I think we’ll get there eventually.

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And in general, that’s the right strategy, and it’s a very Trumpian strategy. Act, and then let’s see what happens. And, of course, nine nutty liberals go file a lawsuit, and we’re on our way to the Supreme Court.

Military Reinstatements and Defense Procurement

Rob Maness: Yeah, I’d also like to see them Schedule F some more policymaking, people in policymaking positions in the Department of War, quite frankly.

Rod Martin: Without a doubt.

Rob Maness: I know for a fact there are assistant secretaries, deputy assistant secretaries that are in positions changed to career that were Biden appointees, and they changed them at the end of the Biden regime to career positions. And they’re still there. And I wanted to ask you what you thought. I don’t know if you saw this or not, but Secretary Hegseth finally got to a general officer that he reinstated from the COVID vaccine shot.

Air Force Brigadier General Melissa Cunningham, who I interviewed a little bit over a year ago on this show, was reinstated last Friday, gets an opportunity to get her second star, get a second star look, which is fantastic.

But only a couple of hundred-plus folks have been reinstated out of about 9,000 official ones and almost 100,000 people that were forced out over the COVID vaccine. Rod, what are your thoughts on that real quick before we go to the next break?

Rod Martin: Well, you know, one of those guys is Tommy Waller, our friend at the Center for Security Policy. He was forced out. And I’m sorry, this is a conscience thing. This is the Democratic Party. They tell us every day that you’re supposed to keep your laws off their body, you know, until they want to do something to your body, and then anything goes. So there should be some conscience protection here.

And it was wonderful to see that reinstatement. I wish they had already done more. I realize you can only move so fast. But one of the good things that also just happened, you’re talking about flag officers and general officers, Pete Hegseth says he’s going to dismiss about 20 percent of them. We have about twice as many as we had during World War II. Why do we need that? Why are we so top-heavy? And Hegseth is making real progress.

The other thing on which he’s really making progress is defense procurement. This new Anduril shipyard just announced in Maryland. A bunch of other things they’re doing, the long-term contracts for shipbuilding. It really is transformative.

It really will make a difference. And it’s about time because we’re letting the American Navy atrophy every bit as much as the British have let theirs do.

Rob Maness: Oh, yeah. I’m glad you brought up shipbuilding. We’ll talk about some more after the break, man. But we need more commercial sealift ships and merchant marine ships and officers and sailors and all across the board. It’s not just in the Department of War. And it’s a big challenge when we start looking at China and what they’re doing. We’ll be right back with Dr. Rod Martin on the Rob Maness Show.

Daddy’s Home: A New Relationship With NATO

Deborah Haynes (recorded): Hello, Deborah Haynes from Sky News. Mark Rutte, the NATO chief, who is your friend, he called you “daddy” earlier. Do you regard your NATO allies as kind of children?

Donald Trump (recorded): No, he likes me. I think he likes me. If he doesn’t, I’ll let you know. I’ll come back and I’ll hit him hard, okay? He did it very affectionately. Daddy, you’re my daddy.

Deborah Haynes (recorded): Do you regard your NATO allies, though, as kind of like children? And they’re obviously listening to you, and they’re spending more. And you’re obviously appreciative of that. But do you hope that actually they’re going to be able to defend themselves, defend Europe on their own?

Donald Trump (recorded): I think they need help a little bit at the beginning. And I think they’ll be able to. And I think they’re going to remember this day. And this is a big day for NATO. You know, this was a very big day. They took it. One of the gentlemen said, you know what, we’ve been trying to raise money for, raise the rate for 30 years, he said, 20 years, from almost the beginning. And he’s been there for a long time. He said, until you came along, it never happened. What you did is amazing.

It’s been sort of an amazing day for a lot of reasons, but also for that. Yeah, go ahead.

Deborah Haynes (recorded): Do you think they can do it without you, though, in the future? Can they do it without the United States?

Donald Trump (recorded): Well, ask Mark. I mean, you have to ask Mark.

Rob Maness: Welcome back to the Rob Maness Show. It’s More War Monday. And that’s a great clip, because Rutte did say, you know, you’re my daddy, as opposed to, you know, the inflection of who’s your daddy. He said it out loud, because Donald Trump, in all seriousness, has flipped the script.

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That’s why my guest today’s book is called Trump’s New World Re-Order, Dismantling the Deep State and Ending Post-War Globalist Rule. And Dr. Rod Martin is the guy that wrote that book.

Dr. Martin — Rod — I think that little clip says more about where the relationship the United States is with our allies in the world because of Donald Trump in a good way than anything you can see. And you can even have a little chuckle.

Partners Who Can Take Care of Business

Rod Martin: Oh, absolutely. And by the way, here’s the book. It’s Trump’s New World Re-Order. And it came out this past week. So everybody needs to go get one.

We have a whole chapter in the book called “Daddy’s Home.” And it’s exactly what Rutte was getting at. That, you know, the people who are serious about defense in Europe have understood that, you know, they couldn’t defend themselves against a Cub Scout troop for years now. I mean, it’s just been a joke since the end of the Cold War. And it’s gotten worse every single year.

And all of a sudden, Donald Trump actually smacks some people around and they get with the program. I saw Ari Fleischer talk about this during Trump’s first term. You know, Trump was working on the 2 percent commitment then. And Fleischer was on, I think, CNBC. And he said, “Look, we cajoled these people in the Bush administration to do exactly this every single meeting, every single year for eight years, and they just blew us off because they knew we weren’t going to do anything about it. Trump is going to do something about it, and all of a sudden, they act. My hat’s off to him.”

Okay, completely agree. Daddy is home.

We’re going to kick the teenagers out of the basement and make them get a job. And no, we don’t want them to defend themselves without us. We want partners that can actually stand up for each other. They can stand up for us when we need it. We can stand up for them when they need it.

What we don’t want is an open-ended commitment to defend literally the other 96 percent of the planet when we have just 4 percent of the population. Now, we may be 26 percent of the world’s economy, so we can do more. That’s a fair point. And we’re happy to do a disproportionate share of the work for that reason.

But Germany’s the third largest economy in the world. Britain is the sixth largest economy in the world. Japan is the fourth largest economy in the world. Come on, guys. Act like sovereign nations, not like kids. That’s the message.

And by the way, to their great credit, the new German government is doing better. They’ve hit their 2 percent commitment. They aren’t showing up at NATO exercises with broomsticks anymore.

The Japanese are doing even better. They are fielding a real Navy now. They have made clear that they see Taiwan’s security as important to Japanese security. Better than that, they’re building frigates and selling them to Australia. They are taking older frigates and giving them to the Philippines, which is facing all this harassment from the PLA Navy. They are actually helping us become the arsenal of democracy again. And we need that help. We don’t have the industrial capacity we need yet. It’s getting rebuilt, but it isn’t there yet.

So if the Japanese can step in, the South Koreans can step in, the Poles can step in. It makes the alliance stronger. We don’t have to do everything. We need to be in a position to come in and be the decision-maker when there’s a real crisis. And they need to be able to take care of their own backyard when there isn’t.

Rob Maness: Yeah, that’s why I’m a little bit obsessed about shipbuilding, especially on the sealift side and merchant marine ships and creating more merchant marine crews and shipyard workers and those kind of things so that we can reestablish what we had at the beginning of World War II, which is what enabled us to be able to beat the Japanese in World War II while we were beating the Germans too, because we could control the sea lines of communication and the air lines of communication throughout the Pacific region. We can’t do that right now.

Rebuilding the Navy and American Shipyards

Rod Martin: No, we can’t. And the outset of World War II: that’s exactly the right comparison. You know, we had a terrible army. I mean, it was very professional, very good, that’s not what I mean. But it was very small. Actually, Bulgaria’s army was bigger than the United States Army at the beginning of 1940.

But our Navy was in great shape. And it needed to be, because we understood there are enemies in the world. There are hostile forces. You know, back then we didn’t even have full control of the Atlantic approaches, much less, you know, control of the Caribbean. There were actual potential enemies with basing in the Caribbean at that point. And to Roosevelt’s great credit, he solved that problem for us in 1940 and 1941.

But we had a Navy. We weren’t trying to build a Navy from scratch. And because we had that Navy and because we had that shipbuilding capacity, we were able to create the world’s largest-ever Navy in just three and a half years, which is amazing.

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But we couldn’t do that today. And I’ll just give you an example you’re, I’m sure, flawlessly aware of. We only have one shipyard in the entire country that can build or service a nuclear surface combatant.

Rob Maness: That’s right.

Rod Martin: Well, our whole Navy is built around 11 nuclear surface combatants. And of course, the Trump administration wants to take that bigger. We’ve been hearing all these people tell us how stupid aircraft carriers are since before I was born. Everybody always has a new thing that’s going to make the aircraft carrier obsolete.

No, that’s actually probably the most defensible real estate on planet Earth right now, especially with the new laser weapons we’re starting to deploy. It’s just really awesome. That’s impenetrable. If the Iranians could have gotten in a shot, they would have.

And so, you know, we don’t need 11 carriers, which is what we have. That means we can put six to sea at best. Frequently, it’s five. I’m sorry, you can’t cover the whole world with five carriers. That’s insane. We need what we had at the end of the Cold War, which is 15 or 16 carriers.

We need those Trump-class battleships. We keep hearing, oh, big hulls are terrible. No, they’re not. Big hulls give you the ability to put a nuclear power plant in there sufficient to be able to operate the next generation of directed energy weapons, railguns, and whatever else comes down the pike.

We don’t know what Elon Musk will invent next week. But we do need enough power plant and enough space in a hull to be able to carry those new inventions and make America safe again. This is crucial. We don’t have enough.

We don’t have enough of anything. We can’t even build enough submarines. We’re supposed to be building two Virginia-class boats a year. We’re now supposed to supply a bunch to Australia, which by the way, is a great deal. I’m all for AUKUS. But at the end of the day, we’re only able to construct 1.2 Virginia-class boats a year at a time when we really need to be able to build three.

So there’s a lot of work to be done here. I’m so proud of the president for getting it. Nobody else seems to have gotten it in decades. We’ve got to rebuild both the private and public shipyards of this country. And the president is very committed to an allied effort.

So you look at the trade deals with Finland and with Japan and with South Korea. And they involve those very advanced shipbuilding countries coming to the United States, taking control or building new shipyards here that can actually recreate the American shipbuilding industry. And the deal is very clear. They can bring their own people long enough to train Americans to replace them and not one day longer.

Rob Maness: Exactly right. Exactly right. Well, we’ve got a question in the live audience. Let’s go ahead and take that before we get to the break. Go ahead, Shell.

Audience Question: China’s Industrial Advantage

Moderator: We have AJ, sir.

AJ (audience question): Thank you, Shel. Thank you, Colonel. Dr. Martin, you guys were discussing the shipbuilding problem. And my question is, sir, outside of the notion that China has more facilities for shipbuilding than the United States does, last time I checked, the main proponent that China has in the form of an advantage is their metallurgy in regards to how they manipulate metal in order to build these ships. And in my understanding, nobody has a monopoly over the laws of physics or laws of chemistry and metallurgy. So where do you see us catching up and surpassing them if possible at all? Thank you.

Rod Martin: It’s like so many other things. Look at, again, gas and diesel prices. This is easily understood. It’s not the war. The war has an effect, but that’s not the problem. You shouldn’t be wanting $3 gas. You should be wanting 50-cent gas, which you would have if we hadn’t shut half the refineries in this country since 1977 and refused to build even one in all that time, a time period in which we added 100 million people in this country. And guess what? They all burn gas and diesel. So this is a problem.

And we did the same thing with rare earths, which is so, so stupid, because everything depends on rare earths. Your iPhone depends on rare earths. Your F-35 darn sure depends on rare earths. That new B-21 that the more we hear, the more amazing the thing is. I mean, Rob, you’re going to want to go back in just to command some B-21s. They’re awesome.

These things all depend on something that we get 92 percent of the world’s supply from China. I mean, that’s just absurd. The only thing that keeps us from just having their boot on our throat is that we control the Strait of Malacca. So 80 percent of their energy has to come through the U.S. Navy.

And also, we are the world’s biggest consumer market. Their whole economy is built on overcapacity and overproduction. They have to have somewhere to sell it. They have to sell it here. That’s the only thing keeping any modicum of parity in any of this. And Trump is working on that too. So, you know, you’re seeing significant improvement in the rare earth situation, not just at home, but also in allied countries like Australia and sort of allied Ukraine and of course, Greenland and Venezuela.

All of these different crises have that common thread of “let’s find rare earths sufficient to wean off China and let’s build the refining capacity.” By the way, new refining capacity is coming online right now in Fort Worth, Texas. All of that has to happen.

And, you know, same thing with pharmaceuticals, but you’re right to single out shipbuilding. China now has not 250 percent more shipbuilding capacity than the United States: it has 250 times more shipbuilding capacity than the United States. That’s mostly commercial. That’s mostly the merchant marine stuff that the Colonel is talking about. But it’s China. Everything is dual use.

So, you know, if they want to jump from three aircraft carriers to nine, if they want to stay on track to have more submarines than we do by 2030, if they want to keep building missile sites and nuclear arming them — they have increased their nuclear force threefold in four years, and they’re on track to be close to parity with the U.S. and Russia by the end of this decade — they have the means to do it, and we have let the means to do it atrophy.

We are in a game of catch-up even worse than the one Ronald Reagan faced in 1981.

Rob Maness: Absolutely right. You know, and 1,740 sealift ships to our five every year. That’s the reported version from a year and a half ago in Roger Wicker’s SHIPS Act report that he did. And he’s my senator for Mississippi, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. I hope to God they get the NDAA out, because the SHIPS Act is in there. And that’s one of the things that it addresses. But, you know, we brought up steel and I just wanted to mention before I go to this last break.

You know, the whole supply chain for ship manufacturing has to be rebuilt to be brought here at home so that none of our adversaries can control key points of that supply chain. And you brought up exactly one of them, rare earths, Rod, that I lose sleep over those things at night.

When people ask me, “What do you lose sleep over?” It’s ship manufacturing, but all of the manufacturing and supply chain resources that we have to put back together inside the United States in order to be able to compete and defeat China if necessary.

Thank God that hasn’t happened. We’ll be right back with Dr. Rod Martin talking about his book, Trump’s New World Re-Order, Dismantling the Deep State and the Global World Order. We’ll be right back.

A Very Different Race for the Moon

Major Garrett (recorded): NASA wants to send humans back to the moon for the first time since 1972. In this second space race, there’s a new competitor, China. Our Mark Strassmann spoke with Transportation Secretary and Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy about this and so much more.

Mark Strassmann (recorded): One of the goals, clearly, is to get to the moon ahead of the Chinese. The U.S. has been to the moon already. Does it matter this time if the Chinese get there first?

Sean Duffy (recorded): It does. So we won the first space race. We are going to win today’s space race and tomorrow’s space race because in the south pole of the moon, we have ice. Ice means water. Water means life. So we want to get there first. And again, we have great partners around the world that are working with us. But I think that matters. And again, there was a time when if you controlled the seas, you controlled the Earth. I think tomorrow, he who controls space is going to control Earth.

And again, America is never in the business of control. We’re a peaceful country. We’re a country that supports democracy. Obviously, we have the same vision in space, but not everybody has the same perspective that we do on Earth or in space. And I think that’s why it’s important that we lead the way, not just in low Earth orbit, but also as we go to the moon and to Mars.

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Mark Strassmann (recorded): Is NASA still...

Rob Maness: Welcome back to the Rob Maness Show. It’s More War Monday, and we’re talking about the book, you know, Trump’s New World Re-Order, Dismantling the Deep State and Ending Post-War Globalist Rule, written by Dr. Rod Martin, who is my guest today.

And, Rod, China is pushing big to settle with humans, the South Pole of the moon, for exactly the reasons then Acting Administrator Duffy of NASA was talking about.

Where are we in the race to get the United States and friendlies back on the ground there and settled permanently so that we can ensure that no one nation on the planet Earth gets to control that force?

A 1492 Moment in Space

Rod Martin: Well, I wouldn’t mind if one nation controlled it as long as the one nation is America. That would be okay.

You know, where we are in the race is perhaps less important than where we are in history. This moment is 1492. This is the moment at which we’re about to open up new worlds. And I know that just sounds like crazy talk, but trust me, it sounded like crazy talk in 1492. And yet here we are. And the reason is actually very simple.

It is cost. Before Elon Musk invented true reusability in rocketry, what we had was a cost per pound to orbit. That means every pound you send up costs $10,000 to send into space. $10,000. You’re not going to send much stuff into space. That’s just not going to happen.

Elon has brought that number down to just $200. $200 and dropping! Okay, what does that mean? You’re going to send a lot more to space. And that’s exactly what’s already happening.

SpaceX has now launched more stuff into space by weight than all of humanity in the entire period since the first satellite in 1957. Just Elon, more than everybody else combined, just in a 10-year span. It is absolutely breathtaking.

Now, what does that mean? Well, it means that cost is going to keep coming down. It means Starship is not going to be a one-off that you use and you throw away. So, as a result of that, you build a bunch of them, like you would build a bunch of airliners.

And you say, well, where do you have to go in space? Well, ignore that for the moment. Let me tell you where you have to go on Earth. If you use Starship like an airliner, you can travel from New York to London in 23 minutes. You can travel from New York to Shanghai in 47 minutes. You can travel from New York to Singapore in 49 minutes.

This is transformative. And it will knit the world together in a way that we can’t even imagine, but looks very similar to the beginning of the jet age. Wait, there’s more. Build a thousand of them for the War Department, and now you have enough lift capacity to be able to move everything we sent to Saudi Arabia in 1990 and 1991 for Desert Storm in an hour. In an hour. Not six months by sea. Not in those ships we didn’t bother to build.

No. In things that will get built because, you know, the Department of War isn’t stupid. They understand that rocket cargo is a really big deal. But once you perfect it, it’s also human transport as well. That’s when you get to space because that will bring down the cost ridiculously more.

And as a result of that, now you’re going to have a huge number of people living and working in space for the very good reason that there’s a lot of stuff out there. And if I mine a near-Earth asteroid and I manufacture something, I’m not polluting a stream. I’m not tearing down a rainforest. I am getting the benefits of microgravity and a whole lot of adventurous young people are going to want to go live there because they grew up on science fiction.

So you could have millions of people in space before the end of this century. You will eventually have billions over the next few centuries. And the reality is that the people who grab the most important real estate right now will control the future.

So some of that real estate is the South Pole of the Moon. Some of that’s the Lagrange points, which most people have never even heard of. There are other places that really matter. And we will discover more.

But the bottom line is the Chinese have discovered a lot. They know. They talk about it. It’s in their media. It’s in their military journals. We just don’t read it, partly because we’re dumb and partly because we don’t read Mandarin. So, I mean, it is what it is. But they’re all over this.

And we finally have an administration who understands that this isn’t a prestige project like Apollo. I’m not saying that prestige didn’t matter. We were at the height of the Cold War. And, you know, lots of countries were becoming independent. And they’re trying to decide whether to be free or communist. And the prestige mattered.

But we went to the moon and then we never went back. And that’s not going to happen this time. Because now it’s going to be cheap to go and profitable to stay. There’s going to be stuff that you get there and you sell here. That’s going to massively improve the life of every person on this planet. We will largely eliminate poverty in this century because space is going to collapse the price of just about every commodity you can point at.

And we aren’t going to be worrying about China and rare earths anymore because they aren’t rare in space. And we’re going to have plenty.

Rob Maness: Yeah, hopefully we can eliminate the mental health disease of communism and Islamism too.

Rod Martin: Absolutely.

Rob Maness: And don’t take that with us.

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Rod Martin: You know, Mars, I think of it as the new world like people in Columbus’s day and beyond in the colonial days thought of this place as the new world. And it’s a function of technology. If you have the right technology, you can make anything inhabitable.

And I am living proof of that because I’m sitting in Florida. Nearly the entire population of Florida was concentrated between Jacksonville and Pensacola for hundreds of years. And then somebody invented air conditioning, DDT, and bulldozers. And now the whole peninsula is just full of people.

Okay, that was just not possible without technology. Those same kinds of technological advances make Mars a really fantastic destination. But far from the only one, we are going to open up the entire inner solar system over the next century or so. And it is going to transform life on Earth in an incredibly positive way if America leads. And if the Chinese lead, it will result in tyranny literally everywhere.

Rob Maness: And we won’t know anything because we don’t read Mandarin.

Rod Martin: That’s right.

Rob Maness: We’re missing the Mandarin. So we got to win. We got to win.

The Midterms and the Road to 2028

Okay, so let’s assume — we’re going to make an assumption — the elections in a week and a day come out okay for us. Last two years of Donald Trump’s administration, this, I mean, this is the mission. Really, he outlined his mission in this. What are the next steps in the policy changes look like, and does he have a prayer of getting there?

Rod Martin: You get there in multiple ways. Congress has already pre-authorized the president to make these trade deals, to impose these tariffs. The tariffs are a key part of re-industrializing America because you saw this new Audi plant that just got announced for South Carolina, or Georgia, rather. That is the result of Audi taking a huge tariff hit and being told, but wait, if you’ll build your cars in America, we won’t tariff any of your cars that you make anywhere. Okay, so now they’re building an auto plant.

And the president has that authority. He has the authority to do a lot of the things that need doing with defense. He has the authority to keep going after the roadblocks in our system that prevent us from having truly constitutional government. He will do all that.

But if we do our job, if we’re responsible for our future, if we actually find four friends and drag them to the polls next week and do our part, it’s going to be better than if he spends the next two years getting impeached three times and every junior staffer gets, you know, a multimillion-dollar investigation, they’ll still get a bunch done.

Donald Trump gets more done than any human, I think, who’s ever lived except Elon Musk. So, you know, it’ll still be kind of amazing, but it would be better if we gave him the team to actually legislate, to get us that NDAA, to get us the supplemental we need for Golden Dome, to see it through year after year, and to get out to 28 and elect a successor who is worthy of that mantle.

Rob Maness: Absolutely right. Well, thank you, sir. We appreciate it. The book’s available on Amazon, right?

Rod Martin: Yes, sir. And Barnes & Noble and anywhere else you want to go.

Rob Maness: All right. Thank you very much. We appreciate your work and your service to our country, Dr. Martin.

Rod Martin: And yours. Thank you.

Rob Maness: All right.

Recent Articles:

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by Rod D. Martin
October 29, 2026

There’s a pretty big prize awaiting a Republican Party that maintains power through 2030.

For decades, Democrats have been protected by a map that inflated their strength. Racial gerrymanders spotted them dozens of deliberately non-competitive seats. Illegal aliens padded the population counts — and thus both House seats and electoral votes — of states their own citizens are fleeing. On top of that, the 2020 Census shorted red states and inflated blue ones.

That’s three huge, systemic cheats that are cracking all at once. And it gets even worse: America continues to move south, west, and right. The 2030 Census is going to be ugly for the blue states… unless they control the Census Bureau as they did last time.

Nothing matters more than educating the next generation with the values we cherish. The Herzog Foundation is making that possible. Learn more here.

Democrats can’t admit that. So everything has to be “voter suppression.” Voter ID is “voter suppression.” Cleaning voter rolls is “voter suppression.” Requiring citizenship is “voter suppression.” Ending racial gerrymanders is “voter suppression.” Refusing to count noncitizens for representation is “voter suppression.”

All of which is pure projection. The party of the Confederacy, Jim Crow, filibustering the Civil Rights Act, the KKK, CRT, DEI, and the SPLC desperately wants you to believe that you’re the racist.

But at some point, the Democrats’ endlessly crying wolf wore off.

No one actually thinks Voter ID — required in virtually every country on Earth except ours — is “voter suppression,” not unless they believe that black people are too pathetic to function in society. Everyone has an ID: they can’t even buy cough syrup without it.

Likewise, no serious person believes racial gerrymandering is necessary in a country that voted twice — by huge margins — for Barack Obama. Indeed, twice as many blacks are elected from competitive districts as from racially gerrymandered ones. The whole argument is nonsense. And slander.

But increasingly, it’s also desperation. The Democrats’ map is collapsing. The Woke NPCs don’t know it. Their leaders certainly do.

The NPCs were promised that “demography is destiny”, that “a brown America will be a socialist America.” Democrats racialized everything, to pit people against each other and rule the ruins. But as it turns out, white people aren’t the only Americans who can think for themselves and not just as some pre-defined group.

It also turns out that, when living under Democrat misrule, far too many of them vote with their feet, taking countless Dem House seats and electoral votes with them. Add in mass deportations and the numbers get ugly, fast.

That’s the story: the map is catching up with reality. Democrats have lived for decades on stolen representation. Now comes the reckoning. When it’s over, Republicans may find themselves with a generational majority, and Democrats in a wilderness of their own making.

But first, we have to understand the three frauds that wrongly inflated Democrats’ power.

1. The 2020 Census Stole 16 Electoral Votes and 15 House Seats By Itself

Start with the 2020 Census: from the first, the Deep State bureaucrats made sure the playing field wasn’t level.

The Census Bureau’s own post-enumeration survey found that it had significantly undercounted Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas. It also significantly overcounted Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Utah.

“Oh, this was just one of those things! See? There’s a blue state in the first group and a red state in the second!” Yeah, sure. Never mind the net result: large numbers of House seats and electoral votes shifted to Democrat strongholds well before the Census Bureau’s self-audit, and well after those thefts were set in stone.

Read more

Thank you to everyone who joined our live pre-election briefing and Q&A. If you missed it, or would like to watch it again, the full replay is above for Premium and Inner Circle Members. Transcript below for the video-challenged.

Welcome to Our First Member Briefing!

Rod D. Martin: Welcome everybody. Very glad you’re here for our first one of these. We’ll see if the equipment works. We’ll see if we know how to run our own software. We’ve got a good and distinguished crowd coming in. We’re getting more people to admit as I speak and we’ll get started here in a minute.

Break to allow members to convene.

Rod D. Martin: Welcome, everybody. We’ve got a room full of some of my very favorite people in the world, so glad of that. Thank you for coming.

We’re about to have a midterm election, you might have noticed. So I saw that that was a pretty good opportunity to try out our new software and see what we can do in terms of these private briefings we’re kicking off…

Read more

Our Full Transcript After the Break:

by Rod D. Martin and Ryan Helfenbein
October 28, 2026

In this Sunday interview on Real America’s Voice, Ryan Helfenbein and I discuss:

• How Trump’s strategy challenges unaccountable government and globalist rule

• How American energy dominance brings jobs and investment home

• Why confronting Iran serves American security and prosperity

• How Reindustrialization will restore the possibility of a single-income family

• The greatest story never told: lowest poverty, highest income, and a million new jobs

It’s 10 minutes you won’t want to miss. Watch, like, and share!

Nothing matters more than educating the next generation with the values we cherish. The Herzog Foundation is making that possible. Learn more here.

Our Full Discussion:

Ryan Helfenbein: Welcome to Real America's Voice News. This is Sunday: The Road Forward. With the midterm elections just a week away, Americans are being asked to choose a direction. And a lot of us are weary because the stakes could not be higher when you consider the threat of open borders, socialism, the sexualization of children, rising Islam, and a host of other issues.

Yes, elections matter. Yes, elections matter to you. And we know that politics matter because policies matter because people matter to God and they should matter to you.

Pray for our country. Pray for our president and understand the issues on the ballot, not just the candidates, but also the ballot measures. Pray, think, and go vote. Our system of government requires our participation in it. If we don't vote, someone else will. And the church cannot be silent when real moral and theological issues regarding life, marriage, family, and human sexuality are all on the ballot.

So go vote. Our scripture reading today comes from Proverbs chapter 14, verse 34. Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.

As always, we want to be an encouragement to our viewers to hold fast to the unchanging Word of God because a nation’s future is always built on what it believes. I’m Ryan Helfenbein. I’m filling in for Dr. Tim Clinton, and I’ll be your host today.

[Program theme music.]

Trump’s New World Re-Order

Joining us now is Rod Martin. Rod is an investor, technology entrepreneur, and futurist. He’s also the author of a brand new book coming out on Tuesday, Trump’s New World Re-Order, Dismantling the Deep State and Ending Postwar Globalist Rule. He’s also the founder and CEO of Martin Capital and editor-in-chief of The Rod Martin Report. Rod, thank you for joining Sunday: The Road Forward. It is great to see you.

Rod D. Martin: It’s great to be here. Thank you.

Ryan Helfenbein: Well, Rod, I know your book is coming out. I would be remiss if we did not talk about that first because I think that’s incredibly important. There it is, Trump’s New World Re-Order. Tell us about it. I do remember and recall, I’m old enough to remember the New World Order after the fall of the Soviet Union. How is Trump’s remaking of America and the world different?

Rod D. Martin: Well, it’s incredibly different. You’re exactly right. And this idea of a New World Order certainly wasn’t new in the 1990s. In fact, it’s exactly what Woodrow Wilson was pushing in the 1910s. It’s also what FDR actually accomplished in the 1930s and 1940s.

That’s the system we’ve been living under for the last 90 years, one in which most of the federal government is completely unaccountable to anybody, can’t be fired by any elected officeholder, just does whatever it wants. And since Roosevelt got to pick all the first people in those agencies, they get to pick their successors. And they have been for 90 years.

So you have a system in which there’s this unaccountable, unconstitutional fourth branch of government that actually runs most things.

And you also have a globalist order that emerged out of World War II, where you have all these multilateral institutions that make the decisions on far too many things. And America is expected to foot the bill, both the taxpayer bill, also the military bill.

All of that is whack. There’s no problem with us being a global hegemon if we actually are one, if we actually get to do things that serve the interests of the American people, and the American people actually get control over their government. So that is the macro picture of what Trump is doing. It’s extraordinary. And you mentioned the futurist credit a minute ago.

This is about the future. It’s certainly about the present. People think Trump’s some kind of chaos monster. They don’t understand how all these pieces fit together.

I show you how they all fit together. But more than that, I show you what the implications of that are for the rest of the 21st century. And I’ll guarantee you nobody else is doing that in print.

Iran, Energy, and American Workers

Ryan Helfenbein: Well, let me tell you, right now, there are all kinds of people on the left and the right who both are kind of looking, it’s varying degrees. The blackpilled out there that we have no business in Iran. There’s others that are just skeptical because they still love Trump, but they’re asking, what is he doing? Why is he focused on the Strait of Hormuz? Why is he focused on changing the regime in Iran? Is he focused on changing the regime?

You have been very bullish on getting good information out there, everything from national security to energy, to all the ways that this potentially, the outcomes that could benefit the United States and the American people first.

Tell us a little bit about what’s going on there right now.

Rod D. Martin: Yeah, Donald Trump isn’t focused on the Persian Gulf. He’s focused on the Gulf of America, shifting global energy flows to Texas and Louisiana from Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Iraq and Kuwait and Iran is a godsend to the American worker. American workers get those jobs. American workers get those raises. The end of illegal immigration means that the job market actually improves for regular folks. And you’re getting very quickly to a point where a single blue-collar worker can support a family again.

That’s not all going to happen by the end of the year, but you have to start somewhere.

And $18 trillion in new investment from overseas into the United States, and new trade deals that require foreign companies — if they want to escape tariffs — they have to actually build here.

That’s transformative. Nobody’s been willing to do that for decades. In fact, we had successive presidents, Clinton, Bush, Obama, the Autopen, all of these guys promised us that those jobs were never coming home. They could never come home.

Well, guess what? Now they are. And it’s just a matter of a policy course correction that is really, really fundamentally different than what we’ve had most of my lifetime. So Trump is focused here.

Now, if you get rid of the Iranian regime, you also wind down every armed conflict in the Middle East. And the net result of that is you don’t have to have a bunch of U.S. troops in the Middle East all the time. So, you know, we’re cutting off the head of the snake. We’re stopping pretending that they aren’t what they are. They arm, direct, and fund every armed conflict in the Middle East. You have to stop it.

A free Iran would be a boon to the world. It would also be the greatest investment opportunity of the 2030s, as we’ve written about on RodMartin.org quite a bit. And that means more wealth for Americans, too.

So, from beginning to end, it doesn’t matter what field of endeavor you’re talking about. When he said America first, he wasn’t kidding. But it’s not America in the abstract. It’s Americans. And especially those rank-and-file construction workers and factory workers and family farmers that have been shafted by the New World Order for the last 30 years.

Affordability and Generational Wealth

Ryan Helfenbein: Yes. One other thing, and we just have under two minutes here, but just real quick, I wanted you to touch on this. There is obviously a lot of information out there regarding the economy, affordability in America, Gen Z, all the way up, you know, millennial, Gen X, boomers. You just recently posted a comparison chart between even Gen Z and the boomers. I just wanted you to share that information for us this morning.

Rod D. Martin: Yeah, I actually just saw that this morning. It was really quite remarkable that millennials in particular have almost a third more net worth at the same age that the boomer parents and grandparents had. They’re doing even better than that compared to Gen X.

So, you got to kind of scratch your head. What’s happening here? How much of this is things aren’t affordable, and how much of this is just a lack of budgeting ability? How many of these people should actually just go to a Dave Ramsey seminar and cut out the lattes and the avocado toast?

You know, this is a really important point because what we just learned last month is that, because the Census Bureau puts out this data once a year, every single year, we know that the American poverty rate just hit its all-time low. Lowest poverty rate in American history, but it gets better. Highest inflation-adjusted median income in American history. It’s remarkable what we have.

And no, gas prices are too high. Lots of things aren’t perfect. We know that. Duh. I mean, Donald Trump wasn’t going to come in and wave his wand and make the whole world perfect in a year. That’s just stupid.

But we’re on the right track. We’re moving into an industrial supercycle that really is transformative and will be especially transformative for regular, everyday Americans who have been left behind for decades.

Ryan Helfenbein: We’ll leave it there. Rod Martin, the one and only, I’d encourage folks, again, hold up that book. Trump’s New World Re-Order. Check it out. It’s going to be in Amazon.com. Where else?

Rod D. Martin: It’s at Amazon. It’s in every other fine bookseller in America. But you can go to TrumpsNewWorldReorder.com and get your copy today.

Ryan Helfenbein: Thank you, Rod. God bless you.

Rod D. Martin: Thank you.

Recent Analysis:

NOTE: Today (October 28th) is the anniversary of Khrushchev crying uncle in the Cuban Missile Crisis. At the time, Soviet missiles in Cuba would have been able to destroy 95 percent of the American nuclear deterrent before it could get in the air. It was an existential crisis that almost became a nuclear war.

Today we face a different nuclear danger from China, which has tripled its strategic nuclear force in just four years. That creates all sorts of seemingly insoluble problems. This week, the President is proposing to open three-way arms control talks with Russia and China. But China has never agreed to any arms control regime, there’s no reason to think they will now, and as the following essay makes clear, a three-way nuclear race might make meaningful arms control impossible.

There is a solution. Trump is on top of it. But Congress has to fund it. Here’s what you need to know, originally published this summer. — RDM

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by Rod D. Martin
August 27, 2026

Deep in the Xinjiang desert, China is building a nuclear fortress.

Reuters recently identified more than 80 new pads near China’s Hami missile fields, possible launch positions for mobile missiles and air-defense batteries. They are surrounded by bunkers and facilities analysts believe may support electronic warfare, satellite communications, command and control, maintenance, and storage. Nearby airfields and railheads knit it all together.

No one outside Beijing knows how every pad will be used. But they know exactly what it means. China has tripled its strategic nuclear force — the weapons that would target and destroy American cities — in just four years. Nor are they slowing down: the construction continues, fast.

That would be alarming all by itself. But when combined with Russia’s nuclear forces, it complicates arms control calculus almost impossibly, and threatens to force a costly global arms race of ruinous proportions.

The uncertainty is a big part of the point. The Chinese are dispersing, hardening, concealing, and multiplying the forces around Hami, one of three vast new ICBM silo fields. The Pentagon believes they have likely already loaded more than 100 DF-31-class missiles into silos across those three fields. China’s nuclear stockpile has reached the low 600s and is on track to exceed 1,000 warheads by 2030.

This is not China’s historical “minimum deterrence.” It’s the construction of a survivable, rapidly expanding strategic force designed to complicate every American calculation and give China real first-strike capabilities. It’s also sufficiently concentrated so as to make it readily defensible by antiballistic missiles (ABMs).

Does China want to fight a nuclear war with the United States? Doesn’t matter. It absolutely wants nuclear cover for conventional aggression: a force frightening enough to keep America out of a Taiwan invasion or other adventure while Beijing changes the map.

This is exactly the danger Donald Trump has sought to pre-empt in Iran. But China is a tougher nut to crack. And the danger is not limited to China’s fast-growing arsenal.

For half a century, nuclear strategy has rested on bilateral arithmetic. Washington counted Moscow’s launchers and warheads. Moscow counted ours. Each side knew roughly what the other could destroy, what would survive, and what would come back.

China has turned that equation into a nearly unsolvable triangle, in which any two powers could gang up on the third. Traditional equal arms-control limits become almost meaningless when any two parties can combine twice the firepower permitted to the third.

That makes the world very dangerous very fast. And since China and Russia don’t trust each other either, all three countries have to try to outbuild the others, not individually but combined. That rapidly spirals to numbers of weapons far in excess of the Cold War peak, with staggering economic costs and vastly higher risk of miscalculation and conflict.

This is why President Trump’s Golden Dome is the most important defense project in the world.

Arms control can’t solve this problem. And China has never participated in any arms control agreement anyway. They’re pretty clear on the point that they don’t mean to start.

So if the old ways won’t work, we need a new one. And it just so happens that American technology can solve the problem…if we use it.

Why Arms Control Is No Longer a Solution

I have long asserted the utter uselessness and counterproductivity of arms control. There are really only two significant exceptions.

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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:

by Rod D. Martin and Tom Del Becarro
October 27, 2026

My latest interview with my friend Tom Del Becarro, acclaimed author and former Chairman of the California Republican Party. Sign up NOW for the Politics in Perspective YouTube channel and don’t miss a single episode!

In this wide-ranging episode, we discuss:

• The larger strategy to Trump’s “chaotic” negotiating tactics

• The fight to make the federal bureaucracy accountable

• How energy, trade, and stronger allies are rebuilding American industry

• Containing China without a war

• The midterms and the prospects for a long economic supercycle

It’s a full half-hour you won’t want to miss! Like, share, & subscribe!

Our Full Discussion:

Tom Del Beccaro: All right, everyone. Welcome back to “Politics in Perspective.” You know, anytime you’re in the middle of an administration, you’re in the middle of those woods and you want someone who sees the forest. And that’s what I love about my friend Rod Martin. He sees the forest on markets. He’s kind of a — I don’t want to blow his head up too big — but he’s kind of a Renaissance guy when it comes to — he can talk about a lot of subjects, the market, foreign policy, domestic policy. And he’s got a new book out, which instead of waiting and thinking about it in his head, Rod’s a doer.

So I have similar thoughts in my head, I think, than him, but he puts out a book and takes command. So Rod, welcome back to the show. How are you?

Rod D. Martin: Good to be here. Thank you.

Tom Del Beccaro: Congrats on your new book and all the interviews. Thanks for taking time with us.

So, you know, you and I both have lots of friends on the right, who worry about us being involved in foreign policy. You know, it would be great, you know, I posted some comments about wouldn’t it be great if, if the world would just leave us alone. But when you become president, you see a lot of stuff in these national security briefings, and it wakes you up. And Trump, I think you will agree with, didn’t want to kick the can down the road.

And so I’m thrilled to have your book on if we could put the cover up again. And go for it. Tell us what your inspiration was, and say anything as long as you want about this book, because I think it’s important for people to understand the motivations.

Trump’s Negotiating Strategy

Rod D. Martin: Well, you know, honestly, probably the biggest motivation for me to write a book like this was just that I’m tired of everybody claiming that Donald Trump is some chaos monster, which is just not the case. He’s told you his negotiating strategy for basically our whole lifetime.

He wrote Art of the Deal in 1987. He wrote Surviving at the Top in 1990. He wrote Art of the Comeback in 1997. Then he wrote a bunch of other books and had the number one show in America, which was all about negotiating, for heaven’s sake. Why didn’t any of these people do the homework?

Donald Trump has a meticulous plan for absolutely everything. What he doesn’t do is tell you. He is absolutely committed to keeping everyone as off balance as possible and making maximalist demands so that he can get what he actually wants.

This has always been true. This is how he got the air rights for Trump Tower. This is how he’s done everything in his career. And it’s all been wildly successful. I mean, there might be a few things that weren’t like Trump Steaks. But in general, I mean, this is a guy who took a small fortune and turned it into an incredibly large fortune.

And then in his first run for public office gets elected president of the United States and then is wiped out and supposedly going to go to prison in four different places and comes back anyway. This guy knows what he’s doing.

So so part of my motivation was just I am so sick of these stupid, stupid takes on Trump. Whatever you think of Trump, whatever you think of Trump, the idea that it’s just all chaos is stupid. It’s foolish. And why are we indulging that a decade into this process?

Now, the idea of the book, as you know, is Trump’s New World Re-Order, as in getting rid of the New World Order. And that’s really fundamental to everything Trump is trying to do. Because in his first term, I think he had a lot of the right instincts. And honestly, those are not new instincts. Those are instincts that you can read about in great detail, except on the life issue, in the final chapter of Art of the Comeback in 1997.

He really hasn’t changed his political opinions since then. And if you look at some of his statements in the 1980s, it’s the same thing. This is a guy who imbibed deeply from Reagan, saw the benefit in how Reagan conducted foreign policy, saw the things that prevented Reagan from doing some of the things he wanted to do domestically, and then was president for a full term in which the entire Deep State came against him nonstop.

So, okay, he spends four years in exile, and he basically choreographs every moment of the next four years. And that’s what we’ve been seeing. That’s why he’s gotten more done in a year and a half than any other president ever did in four years. It’s really, really remarkable, and it is on two very different fronts.

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The Deep State and Accountable Government

The first one, domestic. You have this unconstitutional fourth branch of government that was created under Franklin Roosevelt that has dominated American politics ever since. Elections, in some senses, just don’t matter because there is a permanent bureaucracy. There’s one elected president, there are 5,000 political appointees, there are nearly 3 million federal civilian employees who make policy and carry it out every single day.

Those guys are unaccountable. Those guys are unfireable. And only Donald Trump has taken a meat cleaver to that. So, that’s the litigation strategy with going after Humphrey’s Executor, going after Chevron, going after all these things, so that the federal bureaucracy is actually accountable to one or both of the elected branches.

That is vital. That’s a sea change. That is an epochal transformation. And we know that because just in the case of Chevron — which, if you’ll recall, prevented you from having the right to appeal an administrative law court’s ruling to a real federal court for half a century — just that alone is breathtaking. But it also illustrates that the kind of rulings that we’re seeing now could very well last for half a century or even more. Humphrey’s Executor was on the books from 1935 until this June.

So, what he’s doing there is somewhat transformative. And what he’s doing with the federal bureaucracy is transformative, as evidenced by the fact that we’re at the lowest federal employment number since 1966. That’s kind of a big deal. But on the...

Health Insurance, Energy, and the Cost of Policy

Tom Del Beccaro: Wait, before you get to that, just to put a bow on this, the magnitude of what you’re talking about has changed. When Obamacare passed, it was something like 2,300 pages. And the regulations were over 30,000.

Rod D. Martin: Yeah.

Tom Del Beccaro: And those regulations were not written by a single human being who was ever on a ballot.

Rod D. Martin: No. And they have the full force of law. And they affect real people’s lives. I don’t know about your situation, but I bet it’s similar to mine. I was paying about $640-something a month for health insurance for a family of four. Thanks to Obamacare, that went up to $2,600 a month, which is just ghastly. And it forced everybody, you know, you didn’t get to keep your doctor if you liked him. You didn’t get to keep your insurance plan if you liked it.

And there was no political consequence paid for that. Because, honestly, Mitt Romney whiffed in 2012. It was just ridiculous to watch. Consequences for real lives. And you see it at the pump, too. Because where are we right now, if not in a Democrat-engineered energy crunch?

Yeah, we’re pumping more oil than anybody in the world. But we can’t refine it because California keeps closing refineries. And they’re not the only blue state to do it. We’re actually at about half the number of refineries we were at in 1977. And we haven’t built a refinery since 1977. So why do you think gas prices are high? Come on. I mean, this is insanity.

Tom Del Beccaro: And in the first section, I talked about our energy policy. Along with the Great Society, our energy policy is probably the worst policy we’ve ever had by enriching the Middle East and not developing our own. And all we did was make them more provocative and drive up our defense costs and drive down the number of people working in this country.

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Rod D. Martin: Well, Obama would actually say crazy stuff like, “it would be better to keep it in the ground.” Really? I mean, is that kind of like saying, “hey, it would be better to have cancer?”

The truth of the matter is, we are better off with more energy than less. Everything that advances human flourishing depends on the expenditure of energy. Every single thing. The reason you’re not a sharecropper somewhere picking cotton or whatever is because somebody had the good sense to invent an internal combustion engine and a tractor.

I mean, everything is about energy. And Donald Trump gets it. So on the foreign policy side, we’ve been reorienting a whole lot of things. And honestly, a lot of what’s going on in the Middle East conflict is redirecting the center of the energy industry from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of America. It really is, in some respects, that simple. But it isn’t that simple.

Reordering Trade, Alliances, and American Industry

Because really, the big sea change is the repeal of the postwar consensus. FDR gave us the Deep State. He also gave us this modern globalist order, which is just, you know, “like Topsy it grew.” We have all these multilateral institutions that control everything. And Americans pay for it, both in money and in blood.

We’ve been doing that now for all these decades. And that was fine during the Cold War. It made perfect sense. All our allies were flattened.

We wanted Germany and Japan to be allies. We had flattened them. These guys needed help. So it made sense to let Germany charge us four times the auto tariff that we charged them. It made sense to let India charge 100 percent tariff on Harley-Davidson. It made sense to put up with Canada charging 280 percent on dairy, which is just absurd and obscene. We don’t do that to any of these other guys.

But the Cold War ended. And not recently. It’s been a while. And nobody rebooted. Nobody actually restarted the computer.

And so Trump has to come in. He has to rebalance trade. And everybody freaks out about tariffs because, you know, we’re all free traders. We’re all for that.

But guess what? So is Donald Trump. He put it as plain as day at the 2018 G7 meeting where he said to all these Europeans, look, the ideal trade barrier is zero. I’m a Wharton guy. I get that. We’re not the problem. You are. And until you start treating us right, we’re going to make it harder for you.

So that’s where we are now. And I believe that over a 25, 30-year period, we will see that incentivize a dramatic fall in tariff rates all over the world. I think this is the biggest step toward actual free trade, which we’ve never had, that we’ve ever had.

So that’s a thing. But it’s also part of the defense picture where, you know, Germany was showing up at NATO exercises with broomsticks because they didn’t bother to buy enough rifles. The British now have twice as many admirals as warships. I mean, this is just a joke. They’re teenagers living in our basement. And Donald Trump is telling them to move out and get a job.

That’s what’s really happening. So we expect our partners to be partners, not dependents. We expect our trading partners to be fair to our producers. And, of course, in the process, we’re reindustrializing America with that $18 trillion in new investment that Donald Trump has recruited.

So, yeah, that’s a reordering of the world. And the net result of it, more than anything else, is accountable government to our voters.

But our voters also deserve the opportunity to have a middle-class blue-collar job like our parents’ generation did and their parents’ generation did, where they can support a family on one income because we actually have industry here at home and we’re not dependent on China. This ain’t rocket science. This is just common sense.

And that’s really, I think, what is going to define the rest of this century, just as this technocracy, this expert class that is better than us and should rule us, dominated the last 80 years. I think we’re going to see a much more common sense approach that is accountable to the electorate and a foreign policy that serves the interests of the electorate. And that’s going to be the new normal.

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Tom Del Beccaro: Yeah. It’s hard to upset these many apple carts. And I think —

Rod D. Martin: Yes, yes.

Tom Del Beccaro: Say whatever you want to say about Trump. He figured he knew how much time he had in office and he wasn’t going to kick too many cans down the road, especially as you point out that many of these things that are hanging around these structures of doing business wasn’t helpful to anyone. You had Tony Blair basically take power away from the voters in England and push it into this, as you call it, the “expert” class. And who was benefiting from that?

Not the average voter. Right. And so Trump’s doing the same.

AI Risks, North American Security, and China

Now, I want to dive a little deeper in foreign policy with you and talk a little AI. We saw this last week in France. Somebody hacked grocery store chains, destroyed tons of food, started fires, and demonstrated how vulnerable things are. And I’ve seen you on TV talk about it. You know better than I do. The risks are potentially significant in the years to come with AI in the wrong hands. And I think, and this is where I want you to take off, I think Trump wants to get some of these bad guys out of the way…

Rod D. Martin: Yeah.

Tom Del Beccaro: before they have a chance to get their hands on it. And so, yes, he said, I don’t want any forever wars. But at the end of the day, when Venezuela is no longer with China or Cuba or Iran or whatever it is…

Rod D. Martin: Panama.

Tom Del Beccaro: he’s going to save lives. And 50 years from now, historians will see that.

Rod D. Martin: It will be obvious, the sea change. We had the Chinese increasingly building their own “First Island Chain” around America in the Caribbean, which is just absurd and obscene. And what were Trump’s predecessors thinking? We certainly know what Hunter Biden was thinking: he was taking lots of Chinese money.

The Greenland thing matters because of the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap. You don’t need to know more than that. There is more than that. There’s Golden Dome. There’s mining. There’s all kinds of oil. Lots of good things can happen there.

But the truth is, we watched what Keir Starmer did with Diego Garcia. We were successful in blocking it. But we didn’t have any desire to let some future Eurabia or Denmarkistan do something similar to us with Greenland. You’ve got to control the approaches to North America. And you’ve got to do it in an increasingly contested Arctic where the Chinese are using the Northern Sea Route along the north coast of Russia. They’re not just doing that with cargo ships. They’ll be doing that with naval vessels in good time, certainly their growing submarine fleet.

So, you know, Panama was in Chinese hands. That’s crazy. How did we let that happen? Well, Trump fixed it. So you first focus on North American security because without that, you really have nothing. You focus on our supply chains, making sure that we are reasonably self-sufficient. Or if we aren’t self-sufficient, our foreign dependencies are on allies, not enemies. And crucially, you’ve got to actually deal with some of these very real conflicts.

You mentioned Iran. That’s not a forever war Trump started. That’s a forever war Trump’s ending. They have been at war with us for 47 years. Donald Trump is putting an end to it. This is going to be the end. I don’t know if it’ll end in a month. I don’t know if it’ll end in six months. But it will not be another 47 years. And it certainly won’t be 20 like Bush in Afghanistan or Iraq. So you’ve got that.

But ultimately, all Trump’s roads lead to China.

And the reality is they are the existential geopolitical threat of the day in very much the same way the Soviets were. And until you contain that, you have the risk of a global war we could potentially lose. So what he’s doing with Taiwan, what he’s doing in Luzon, what he’s doing with the Japanese, and the Japanese are really stepping up. They are doing a tremendous job all of a sudden, not just in building up their own military, but in arming our allies in Australasia and East Asia.

And it’s really phenomenal what we’re seeing there. There’s a defense structure we need, one of partners, not dependents. And one that contains China such that the risk of war — the risk to China of a war — are too great for them to launch. And I believe Donald Trump looks at that the same way Reagan looked at the Soviets. If you can just prevent them from going to war long enough, communism is going to collapse. And I think it will in China, just as it did in the Soviet Union.

Reagan’s Example and China’s Economic Weaknesses

Tom Del Beccaro: Yeah, I got to stop you right there, because that’s a very underrated statement. It doesn’t surprise me that you would make it, that China has a low — you notice when we took back the Panama Canal, there really wasn’t that big — China didn’t really say very much, did they? They’re not as powerful as they would have the world believe. You have to be careful, but how did Reagan beat the Soviet Union? By revving up the economic engine, right? And that’s what Trump’s doing in a way, do you agree, with China?

Rod D. Martin: And also by eviscerating Russia’s economic engine. They were running the whole thing on oil exports. That was their thing. They were making a fortune exporting oil because they have long been the world’s largest producer.

Well, guess what? They aren’t anymore. We are. That’s a sea change. At the time, we were the world’s largest importer. Now China’s the world’s largest importer, and we’re the world’s largest exporter.

That is a game changer. That means that the oil shocks of the 70s can never happen again. We can never be held hostage by some dippy third world country that hates us. That’s a big deal.

But the Chinese, did I mention, are the world’s biggest importer. So it’s a little different situation. With the Russians, Reagan went to King Fahd and cut a deal to collapse the price of oil, which deprived the Russians of the hard currency they had to have to compete on Star Wars and other things while he was ramping up a military buildup here that was largely unprecedented.

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And they simply couldn’t compete, which meant they couldn’t invade West Germany. They couldn’t attack us. And once they were unable to expand, they collapsed.

I think you see the same thing in China over time, but it’s a little bit different problem. They know they need our export market desperately. They don’t have domestic consumption sufficient to maintain their economy. They are also losing people. They have a serious demographic crisis in progress. It will only pick up steam over the next decade. Too few working age people supporting too many elderly and a real estate market in freefall.

This is not the picture of a healthy economy. So if you can just outlast them without having a war, you actually get to a point where they probably do collapse under their own weight. And you get to a free China that is a great partner in the world. But we have to get from here to there. And this is the witching hour.

Tom Del Beccaro: And they killed a lot of those younger generation that they need to support the older generation. You know, one thing, the left will complain about anything. I’ve always said, if Trump gave away the winning lottery numbers, they’d scream that it took them too long to do it.

Rod D. Martin: And it’s corrupt somehow, and he should go to prison. But Omar should not. How dare we raid her?

Markets, the Midterms, and an Industrial Supercycle

Tom Del Beccaro: Yeah. So let’s go to the markets. We were on together. You came on the show a year ago. I said the market would finish at 48,000 last year. The Dow Jones, it did. It’s midterm election year. It goes sideways. So what are your thoughts on where the market is at this stage in 2026 and what you see after the election?

Rod D. Martin: Well, the markets are going to be sideways for a little bit. And, you know, first you have the midterms. If the Republicans somehow pull out a victory in the House, I really think we’re winning the Senate. I don’t think there’s a lot of danger there. You know, we can go race by race if you want, but on the House side, we don’t have to lose, though history tells us we will. I mean, I think the president’s party has won the midterms three times since I was born.

You know, it’s just…

Tom Del Beccaro: No, 96 years.

Rod D. Martin: Oh, well, there you go. I’m not that old, but, you know…

Tom Del Beccaro: I was going to say, what?

Rod D. Martin: You know, very long time. And Trump assumed we were going to lose the House. He knew what our margin was in 2024, and he knows that if the Democrats have a perfectly normal year, they take control of the House. They’ve planned for that. Everything they’re doing is planned based on that.

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But that doesn’t mean we have to lose. As you know better than anybody, a midterm is a low-turnout election. If we turn out 1,000 extra people in just 20 U.S. House districts, we win.

And people just aren’t used to thinking in those terms. I hear people talk about, “oh, well, we shouldn’t be exporting oil. That just raises prices here.” Like, okay, so should Ford not export cars because that somehow raises the price of cars? No, that’s nonsense. What that does is it increases production. And if you have more production, you bring down prices.

That’s what we’re seeing in energy. We’re not seeing it at the moment in gasoline or diesel because we closed down half our refineries over the last 40 years. My gosh, what is wrong with us? Oh, wait, we elected Democrats. That’s what’s wrong with us.

So until you deal with that, you’re not going to see gas where it ought to be. But the truth is, if we had the refining capacity we should have right now, gas would be under a dollar. I mean, it’s just nonsense what we’ve done.

Refining Capacity, Permitting, and Venezuelan Oil

Tom Del Beccaro: So why hasn’t he declared a state of emergency on refineries?

Rod D. Martin: I really think he should. I think he should have invoked the Defense Production Act on those newly closed refineries in California. I don’t know why he didn’t. I think he should have.

[NOTE: This interview was taped on Friday, and the very next day, Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to re-open those exact California refineries. — RDM]

But at the same time, the biggest thing is just making permitting possible again. We’ve got a big new refinery coming online, but it won’t be till 2029, in Brownsville, Texas. And I love it. It’s literally named the America First Refinery. That’s going to add something between 600,000 and 700,000 barrels a day capacity.

That’s a really big deal. We’re also seeing permitting eased and stupid environmental regulations. There are good environmental regulations, but lots of them were just engineered to destroy fossil fuels and lead us into socialism. We’re getting rid of those. So you’re able to expand existing refineries.

The Venezuela deal is brilliant too. That will start coming online over the next 24 months in a way that really matters. And people don’t realize: America’s Gulf Coast refineries were built to be optimized for Venezuelan and Albertan crude, which is heavy sour, unlike the light sweet crude we produce in the Permian.

So that really meaningfully helps. It also is the logical place for that oil to go because nobody else can provide that refining capacity to Venezuela. And we start seeing that country, and other countries, become prosperous again and move away from socialism and actually contribute to the peace and the security of our friends around the world.

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So I think you see markets trend dramatically up over the next 24 months, in a way that’s very similar to the mid-1980s after you got past the recession in 1982 and 83.

Immigration, Crime, and the Long Economic Outlook

Tom Del Beccaro: I’m going to ask you a really hard question. You’ve outlined a ton of stuff that Trump has done. Are you trying to tell me if Kamala Harris had been president, none of this would have occurred?

Rod D. Martin: Literally none of it. Yes. [Laughter]

Tom Del Beccaro: You remember, she was the AI czar. Could you imagine?

Rod D. Martin: Yes. And immigration also. And I don’t know if you caught this, because it was just announced. We just completed the first full year on record in which the Border Patrol released zero illegal aliens into the country. Zero.

Now, we have reduced illegal border crossings 99.9 percent. Honestly, we’ve actually cut legal immigration even more than illegal. We’ve deported 3 million illegals. That’s a big deal.

A lot of them self-deported, but that’s a Trump administration accomplishment, too, because he incentivized that by handing them a plane ticket and some walking-around money: $3,000 cash now, and go home and we won’t trouble you. If you make us arrest you and go through the legal process, we’ll never let you come back. If you do it yourself, you can get in line to return.

This is good stuff, and it reduces the cost of deporting somebody by something between $7,000 and $10,000 a person. Over 3 million people. That adds up. And we’re just getting started.

So what does that do to housing prices? What does that do to fuel prices? What does that do to wage growth? Every single one of those things is positive. Kamala would have flooded the country with even more illegal aliens. They brought in 10 million under Biden. Under Kamala it would be 10 or 20 million more.

Tom Del Beccaro: And don’t forget about crime. Don’t forget the drop in crime that’s directly associated with this crackdown.

Rod D. Martin: Oh, absolutely. And in case you missed it, and I know you didn’t, but some of your viewers might have, we now have lowest violent crime rate since 1900. The biggest one-year drop in murders in history. Unbelievable stuff. And you bet the immigration policy has a lot to do with that.

But it's more than that. You know, deploying the National Guard to D.C. made a real difference. Deploying the National Guard to Memphis made a real difference.

You go around and you talk to people in these neighborhoods, and they’re very clear on that point. You know, my neighborhood wasn’t safe, but now I can walk down the street at night. You know, it’s just a different world. Well, you want to talk about impacting real people’s lives? I don’t know how you top that.

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Tom Del Beccaro: How about lowest poverty rate ever?

Rod D. Martin: Lowest poverty rate ever. Yes, that tops it. And also, highest inflation-adjusted median income ever. You know, this is remarkable. Now, I realize not everybody’s feeling it yet, but that’s not the point. The point is the trend line. Trump was never going to wave a magic wand and instantly make everybody happy. That’s not how that works. But you get the right things moving in the right direction, and you create, as I said, an industrial supercycle that could last 30, 40 years like the Reagan boom.

We had been having, since the end of World War II until the first couple years of Reagan, we had been averaging a recession about every two and a half years. And from Reagan to today, we had a recession in 1990 because of the invasion of Kuwait. We had a recession in 2000-2001 because of the tech bust, which honestly is Alan Greenspan’s fault more than anybody’s. We have the 2008 recession. Then we have COVID.

Tom Del Beccaro: Which I blame on regulators, which I blame on regulators. They knew exactly how many of those mortgages that they were going to cause to flip, and you had that housing crisis.

Rod D. Martin: Absolutely. So you have three legit recessions between 1982 and today. There’s nothing like that on record, and none of them were really deep recessions. We talk about the Great Recession. That was politics. It was bad for a few people, no question. It was mostly business as usual for most people, and that’s the thing. We used to have recessions where you got double-digit unemployment and double-digit inflation and all these horrible things. Reagan ended that, and he ended it way beyond his own term.

That’s what Trump is doing now, and the tax policy, of course, is key to that. We haven’t even touched on the One Big Beautiful Bill. But I guarantee you, if you want to take care of poor people, you can start by eliminating taxes on tips, on overtime, and on Social Security. Donald Trump did it. It’s done. It’s the law. And this is transformative. He isn’t getting enough credit for this. He needs to.

The Newsletter and the New Book

Tom Del Beccaro: Yeah, absolutely. Rod, we’re out of time, which is unfortunate because I enjoy our conversations like no others. Tell people where they can get the book. And also, if you’re not on his newsletter list, then you’re just flat out missing out. So tell them about that as well.

Rod D. Martin: Well, thank you for that. Everyone should come to RodMartin.org. That’s RodMartin.org. We have hundreds of thousands of followers, we have tens of thousands of subscribers, for daily geopolitical analysis Fox Business calls “absolutely phenomenal.”

The book is coming out next week. You can preorder it now on Amazon and lots of other places. Or you can go to the book’s website, TrumpsNewWorldReorder.com. That’s TrumpsNewWorldReorder.com. I think you’ll have a ball. Everybody who’s read it so far thought it’s, you know, not only a bunch of stuff they hadn’t thought about, but also really entertaining.

So get a book and get three more for Christmas gifts.

Tom Del Beccaro: All right. You’re the best, boss. Thanks for sharing some time with us. And we’ll have you back after the first of the year when things are underway. Hopefully, we’re both wrong about the midterms, but hell, there’ll be impeachment hearings we can talk about. Thanks so much.

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by Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D.
October 27, 2026

The following is adapted from a speech delivered at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Dana Point, California.

At the root of the scientific revolution was the idea that there was not and should never be a scientific authority. For centuries, a small number of ecclesiastical powers had decided such questions as whether the moons of Jupiter move. The scientific revolution placed these questions in the hands of a lot of very smart scientists, including those with telescopes.

Unfortunately, we find ourselves back in a situation today, as demonstrated a few years ago by the COVID lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination requirements, where a relatively small number of people — directors of government agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), heads of international agencies like the World Health Organization (WHO), and editors of prestigious journals — have the power to say what is true or false in science.

But before I go on, I want to make a historical defense of the National Institutes of Health, which I now lead. The history of the NIH is incredible. Almost every modern advance in biomedicine has, at its root, an NIH investment. NIH is, by far, the single largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, providing 85 percent of funding in every single area of biomedicine. The development of heart attack prevention and treatments came out of the NIH. Almost every cancer advance and cancer treatment came out of the NIH.

Because of the NIH, we now have advances in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis that, when I was a medical student in the 1990s, seemed beyond reach. Because of the NIH, we can now treat cystic fibrosis, a terrible disease that used to kill young people in their teens and 20s, allowing those who have it to live full lives. We have not one, but two cures for sickle cell anemia, a disease that primarily affects African-American children. So I am strongly of the view that the NIH is an institution worth saving. It is, however, an institution that has not done its job well in some time.

The mission of the NIH is to fund research that improves the health and longevity of the American people. But when we look at life expectancy in the United States since 2010 — and this is not the case in most European countries — we find that there has been no improvement despite the huge investments we have made in medical research. (See, for instance, the accompanying graph comparing life expectancy over time in the U.S. and Sweden.)

If we continue as we have been, the prospect of our children living shorter, less healthy lives than we do is a real possibility. “Make America Healthy Again” can be seen as a political slogan. But it can also be seen as a cry for help from the American people. We have huge chronic disease problems. We can solve them — but we can only solve them if we fix science, which suffers today from three great problems.

The Replication Crisis

The first of these problems is the replication crisis. Scientists publish studies today; we hear about their findings on TV, in newspapers, and on podcasts; and we (and even our doctors) take them for granted. But then when other scientists ask the same questions and perform the same experiments, they do not come up with the same results. That means that a lot of the science we (and our doctors) take for granted is not actually true.

Are eggs good for us? I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, when eggs were considered the next worst thing to poison. I didn’t eat an egg until I was 19, and then it was a tasteless egg-white omelet, since only the whites of eggs were considered healthy in the 1990s. But today eggs are considered a superfood! There are so many examples like this, and at the root of the confusion is the replication crisis.

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How do we address this? We begin by recognizing the fact that most ideas hatched by scientists do not work or are not true. That is completely normal in science and always has been. John Ioannidis, a former colleague of mine at Stanford and one of the most frequently cited scientists in the world, wrote a paper in 2005 entitled, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” He was correct, and the reason for this is that science is hard. That is why it is frustrating to be a scientist — and why, to be a good scientist, an essential requirement is epistemic humility.

We also need to recognize that just because a study is published in a prestigious journal, it does not mean the study is true — not even if it is peer-reviewed! Peer reviewers do not double-check the data of a study. They just look at it and then accept or reject it. Peer review is not a measure of scientific truth; it is basically a measure of approval by an editor. It is not meaningless, because presumably the editor has some expertise in the subject. But it is in no way a confirmation of truth.

The only effective way for scientists to check one another is through replication. If I write a paper proposing a theory, I will present the experiments that I used to come up with that theory. If I am right, other scientists should be able to replicate those same experiments and come up with the same answer. That is narrow replication. Even better is reproducibility, by which other people use a different method to come up with the same answer to the question. This is how science operated in the past, and we must return to it if science is to regain the public trust.

The NIH can do a lot to achieve this goal. We can do it first by funding replication. And scientists should welcome this. If someone wants to replicate a study I produced, I should not view that as a threat because it might prove me wrong. I should look on it as an honor because replication is a source of advancements in science. If my study turns out not to be true, then maybe we can figure out why. That kind of collaboration is how science advances.

Let me give you an example of something we are doing already. We funded a project called the Autism Data Science Initiative. The goal is to figure out the causes of the increasing rates of autism. As part of this initiative, we funded replication teams to look at new and promising studies scientists are undertaking to see if they can be replicated.

In addition to funding replication studies, we have to make it easier to discover whether scientific ideas have been replicated. There is a popular database called PubMed that people use to look up biomedical papers. Currently, when you look up a paper, you can see where it was published and cited but not whether it has been replicated. So the NIH is going to add a replication button, and when users click on it, they will be able to see the related replication studies if any.

Scientific Stagnation

The second problem we need to address is scientific stagnation — the problem that for every dollar we spend on science today, we get far less scientific advancement than we did over the past five decades. Another way of looking at this is that for every additional research paper in biomedicine, there are fewer improvements in health per paper.

In the 1960s, for example, we were making great advances in breast cancer survival per research paper addressing breast cancer. Today, per paper, the advances are dramatically smaller. We need to keep funding breast cancer research, but we need to make that research more effective. I think this problem can also largely be solved through reforms at the NIH.

First, we must recognize that most scientific papers, far from introducing new ideas, rely on old ideas. I once collaborated on a study that looked at every word and phrase published in biomedicine in 1940 and 1941. When we subtracted all the 1940 words and phrases that were published in 1941, we were left with the ideas introduced in 1941. Doing this for every subsequent year up to the present produces a kind of history of biomedicine.

What we see in that history is that in the 1990s, about 55 percent of NIH-funded research was based on new ideas — zero-year-old or one-year-old ideas — and that research in which the newest ideas were ten to 30 years old received much less funding. And that is as it should be. The NIH is supposed to fund ideas that are on the bleeding edge of science. But what has happened since then — especially since 2000 — is a collapse in NIH support for new ideas.

In addition to this, the average age at which scientists receive their first NIH grant has risen from the mid-30s in 1980 to the mid-40s today. This is not a good development, given that younger scientists are the most likely to have new ideas. In a 2019 paper, Mikko Packalen and I showed that the probability of trying out new ideas declines monotonically with career age. The great theoretical physicist Max Planck once said that new scientific discoveries triumph only because “their opponents eventually die.” We have to make sure that is not true if we are going to reverse scientific stagnation.

To address this problem, the NIH needs to adopt something like the Silicon Valley financing approach, in which young people attract investors and start their own firms. Even if those firms fail, they often do so in a productive way — a way that pays off when investors bank on those smart young people again based on a useful discovery made through the failure. Similarly, the NIH needs to start funding ideas on the bleeding edge of science — ideas that may not work but that offer the greatest chance of advancing science.

The NIH receives about 100,000 funding applications each year, out of which only eight to ten percent are approved. In recent years, the winners have been chosen by scientific reviewers who score each application based on two factors: (1) the strength of the proposed methods and (2) the innovation involved in the proposal. Looking at the results of this process, the overall score has correlated very strongly with the methods score, and innovative ideas have been left by the wayside.

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To fix this, the NIH is replacing that process (called the payline method) with a new approach called the Unified Funding Strategy. The scientists who review applications will now be empowered to approve projects on the bleeding edge of science — projects that may very well not work but that will produce a fundamental advance in biomedicine if they do.

As a result, we will have a portfolio of projects that may all fail but that will have a much greater potential to solve type 1 diabetes, reduce the mortality rate from breast cancer, and prevent heart disease. Funding decisions will not be judged by how many projects succeed, but by whether and how they improve the health of Americans.

Funding Concentration

The third problem to be addressed is that about one-third of all NIH grant money goes to about 20 institutions, despite the fact that there are excellent scientists all across the country. In order to make the kinds of advances that lead to better health for Americans, we have to empower young and innovative scientists wherever they are. If they have a new and promising idea, we should be funding them.

The reason the NIH has such a concentrated funding portfolio is largely a matter of economics. Scientists who receive NIH grants need to have access to labs with expensive equipment, such as electron microscopes, that make their research possible. For this reason, when the NIH awards grants, they cover both direct costs — for the research studies themselves — and indirect costs for facility or lab expenses. This gives scientists a strong incentive to work at institutions that have great facilities, where it is often the case that priority lab access is given to older rather than younger scientists. And scientists who do not work at these institutions have much less of a chance to secure NIH funding due to the lack of high-quality labs where they teach.

Our solution to this problem is to sever the link in the NIH grants between the direct money for research and the indirect money for facilities. Institutions outside of the top 20 will be able to compete for facilities support, leading to a dynamic market. The number of institutions that receive NIH money will increase, and funds will go to wherever the best scientists are. This will supercharge science across the country because NIH seed money attracts other investments.

* * *

We can solve the nation’s health problems if we establish gold standard science. When I say gold standard science, I mean science that is replicable, at the bleeding edge, and supports scientists with new and promising ideas wherever they are. Achieving these goals will amount to launching a second scientific revolution.

— Jay Bhattacharya is Director of the National Institutes of Health and prior to that was Professor of Medicine, Health Research Policy, and Economics at Stanford University. He is one of the framers and principal signers of the Great Barrington Declaration. This essay is published in cooperation with The Epoch Times.

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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:

by Rod D. Martin
October 26, 2026

Don Ma interviews Eric Metaxas and me about my new book, Trump’s governing strategy, the challenge from China, and why American liberty must define the future.

Don, Eric and I discuss:

• Why America is at a multi-generational turning point

• Restoring constitutional government and rebalancing America’s alliances

• Eric Metaxas explains why he published my book.

• Is Trump a “chaos monster”? Negotiating by keeping opponents off balance

• The stakes of the midterms

• China, the space frontier, and the future of human civilization

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It’s 18 minutes of the in-depth analysis you need: watch it, and pass it along!

Our Full Discussion:

Don Ma: And next, joining us to discuss his new book, Trump’s New World Re-Order, is Rod Martin, founder and CEO of Martin Capital. He’s a member of the team that started PayPal.

And we also have Eric Metaxas, host of Socrates in the City and the Eric Metaxas Show. He’s also the author of the new book, Revolution. So good to have you both here this afternoon, this Friday afternoon.

So, Rod, I want to start with you to talk about your book. It talks about how President Trump is fundamentally reordering how America is governed and how the United States exercises power around the world.

So why do you say America is at a turning point, Rod?

Rod D. Martin: Well, this is absolutely an epochal change. And this happens every so often in American history. The American Revolution, about 80 years later the Civil War, about 80 years after that the Great Depression and World War II. These things changed America in fundamental ways: how we do the business of America, how we govern ourselves, if we govern ourselves.

One of the biggest things that came out of the Depression in World War II, though, was ceasing to govern ourselves, in part at least, by creating what we call the Deep State. But it’s this giant administrative state composed of allegedly independent agencies, for which the Constitution makes no provision whatsoever, that fuses executive, legislative, and judicial power in unelected bureaucrats who can’t even be fired.

Donald Trump is changing that dramatically, taking us back to a constitutional understanding of government, both by his own actions and through his litigation strategy before the Supreme Court, which has resulted in the overturning of cases like Chevron and Humphrey’s Executor that have been with us 50 and almost 100 years respectively.

At the same time, globally, he’s reorienting our foreign policy, really for the first time since World War II, where we actually made things lopsided against America and in favor of our friends. We wanted to rebuild them after World War II. We wanted to win the Cold War. We wanted to prevent these flattened countries from falling to communism.

And then we forgot what we’d done and why. And we left everything out of balance, everything lopsided against America, both in our trade and our alliance structures.

And Donald Trump is reorienting that, too. The net result is a country that’s much more accountable to its voters, and a foreign policy that is vastly more defined by what’s best for America than it has been since the end of the war.

It is truly transformative. And assuming we don’t blow it and lose in 2028, this is actually going to define the rest of the 21st century.

Eric Metaxas: Understanding Trump’s Larger Strategy

Don Ma: So, Eric, let me go to you now. I understand you wrote the foreword of Rod’s book and you’re publishing it. So I want to know from your perspective here. Talk to us about how you got involved in this and why.

Eric Metaxas: Well, I guess the simple answer is I love America. I love liberty. And my book, Revolution, gives the story of the birth of the greatest nation in the history of the world. We have to understand: what is American liberty? What is America? And I think we’ve drifted away from that.

Rod’s book tells us how we get back. We’ve drifted and drifted. How do we get back? And what Rod is doing in his book, which I am so thrilled that this book is out. I hope everybody will buy a copy.

In his book, he is telling us what President Trump does not tell us because President Trump is too clever. He doesn’t want to tell us everything he’s doing. He wants to confuse people on purpose. It’s the art of the deal.

But what Rod does is he helps us understand what the president actually is doing. And it is 5D chess. It’s so many things happening. The mainstream media cannot cover this. Usually even the conservative media cannot cover it.

But Rod, in his book, masterfully explains how many things the president is doing. But again, the president will not explain what he’s doing because he wants to get it done. His issue is he wants to get it done. He has the authority to do it. He is doing it. What he did in Venezuela, what is happening in Iran, all of these things are fitting together.

And it is absolute genius. It is absolute genius. And in these midterms, we need to encourage people, this president is a gift from God to this country.

We don’t deserve this president. We’ve had a lot of very average Republican presidents. We’ve had a lot of evil Democrat presidents. This president is doing things that have been deferred for 50 years and more. He is doing what should have been done decades ago. It takes tremendous courage. It takes tremendous zeal and passion to pull it off. And we see this president, he’s doing it.

But to understand it, to really appreciate it, you have to read Rod’s book. It’s called Trump’s New World Re-Order.

It’s brilliant. I’m just so grateful that Rod wrote it because so many of us were trying to make sense of what President Trump is doing. And the president’s not, he’s not helping us. He’s just, he’s just getting it done. That’s the good news. But the book explains it.

Negotiation, Surprise, and the Art of the Deal

Don Ma: Well, I’m impressed, Rod. You just got a glowing review for your book. And I want to follow up on Eric’s point because you talk about this as well in your book about chaos, right? What seems to be chaos is actually order, what you’re saying in your book. Tell us more about this.

Rod D. Martin: Well, Trump has been telling us exactly how he negotiates since the 80s. I mean, there’s just no end to how much he’s told us. You can read it in The Art of the Deal from 1987. You can read it in Surviving at the Top in 1990. You can read it in Art of the Comeback in 1997. You can watch it for about 15 seasons of the top-rated show in America, The Apprentice. He never stopped telling us exactly what he was going to do.

And nobody paid attention. So they’re just expecting him to act like a politician. He doesn’t act like a politician. He acts like a wildly successful real estate developer. And in that vein, he is phenomenal at keeping people off balance, demanding things that are beyond what he actually expects to get, and getting the deal he really wants. And he does it again and again and again. We heard about this just a moment ago on this show, talking about the eight peace deals he got done in just eight months last year.

That’s phenomenal. Some of those wars, especially, you know, the Congo-Rwanda conflict, the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. Nobody in America can pronounce the names of those countries, much less knew they’d been fighting a war for 40 years.

Donald Trump went in and made peace. And he did it again and again and again in other conflicts that just seemed intractable, one of which, between India and Pakistan, could have become a nuclear war. All of this requires a degree of bluffing, a degree of concealment, and certainly the art of surprise.

And it’s Donald Trump who’s told us again and again that “the dumbest thing our presidents have done is tell the world exactly what they will and won’t do in advance. You will never see me do that.” Well, guess what? He is constantly throwing everyone off balance. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be explained. It just means that you’re not going to get it if you look at the superficial moves he’s making.

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Results, Moral Clarity, and the Stakes of the Midterms

Don Ma: So, Eric, and Rod, he was talking about this as well in the rally earlier. We were playing that. He was talking about how he ended eight wars and he didn’t get a Nobel Peace Prize. And a woman nobody’s heard of got the Nobel Peace Prize. Those are his words, not mine. I just wanted to throw that in there.

But, Eric, you said every American should read this book. What do you think they would see the world differently, or America at least? What would they see differently after reading this book?

Eric Metaxas: Well, I think what it really boils down to is results. This president is not about appearing to be a good president. He’s about actually getting things done. And his attitude, he has enough confidence. He doesn’t care what people think. And so he’s accomplishing staggering things all the while his critics carp and criticize and carp and criticize. He doesn’t care. He just gets it done and gets it done and gets it done. And it’s brilliant. It’s also quintessentially American.

I mean, you have to think of a character like a Bugs Bunny or Groucho Marx. They win and they bamboozle their enemies constantly. And it’s delightful to watch. It’s entertaining. You don’t know how they do it.

Trump is like that. You don’t know what he’s going to say. He’ll say something. He’ll spin around, say the opposite thing. The media explodes with fury. They can’t bear it. “He’s being inconsistent!” “He doesn’t care!” His point is, look at my results. Look at what I’m getting done.

And let’s be honest. We are dealing with evil. I don’t need to tell the folks watching this station. Communist China has no values except power. They will murder people. They will murder people for their organs. They do not care. They don’t look at things the way most Americans do with a biblical worldview, that we’re created in God’s image, that every human being is sacred and we have rights.

We’re dealing with actual enemies, whether it’s North Korea or China or Putin. They don’t think the way we do.

And so President Trump has to deal with evil actors, not to mention the mullahs in Iran, who have no values that are comparable to our values. And so the question is, how do you deal with lunatics? How do you deal with evil? The Democrats, the left, and many of the RINOs, they’re ignorant, they’re naive, and they’re ineffective.

This president is tremendously effective. He’ll say whatever needs to be said. He’ll play whatever game needs to be played, and he gets it done.

And to me, the most amazing thing is he’s doing it for us. He’s working for us. We elected him. He’s not doing this for the Trump Organization. Yes, he cares about his legacy. But all of the effort that he’s putting in, all of the brilliance that he brings to this job that he is doing, he’s doing for the American people. He’s doing it for his kids and his grandkids and for posterity. And it’s a glorious thing. And in Rod’s book, he explains it.

This is the thing that why I love this book, Trump’s New World Re-Order, because many people are kind of wondering, and you’re never going to find this in most of the media. We just don’t have the time to cover it. The left doesn’t want to cover it. They don’t understand it.

But in the book, Rod explains it. And you think, my goodness, there is a method to Trump’s madness. This is brilliant. We should be celebrating it. We should tell our friends, make sure you vote in the midterms, because if we lose the momentum, we will lose the nation.

This president has been, I believe, appointed by God to save America, to save liberty, that we would be a beacon of liberty to the people around the world, that we would stand strong. That is happening under this president. It is a gift from God. Rod, we’re in an existential crisis, and I believe we will win, but we are in a battle. We’re in a war.

China, Reagan’s Strategy, and the Space Frontier

Don Ma: So, Rod, Eric brings up China, and I’m very glad he did, because early on in your book, you have a few chapters, relatively early on, about China, their strength, the possibility they might overcome the United States and become the top country in the world. So, talk to us about China. What are you saying in your book about the CCP?

Rod D. Martin: Well, the book is divided into sections, and one of them is entitled, “All Trump’s Roads Lead to China.” Donald Trump understands that China is the principal existential geopolitical threat of our era in exactly the same way that the Soviet Union was in a prior time, Reagan’s time.

And Donald Trump understands exactly how Reagan defeated the Soviet Union. He dried up the access they had to the hard currency necessary to compete in an arms race, and then he launched one of the biggest arms races ever. And he did that all while making it too risky for the Soviets to go to war, as a result of which they actually had to deal with their own problems internally without capturing any foreign soil and therefore wealth.

As a result of that, they collapsed. That’s what will happen to the CCP. I can’t guarantee it will happen next Tuesday. It might not happen next decade, but it’s coming because communism doesn’t work. It is a philosophy of power. It is not actually useful for running a country except in the near term.

And so they can murder 65 million people. They had the power to do that. They can continue their genocide against the Uyghurs as they are at this moment. They can continue going after Christians and Falun Gong practitioners and actually harvesting their organs. My gosh, I mean, how evil does it get? And they can do that right now.

But at some point, the overbuilding of ghost cities, the complete command and control economy starts to come apart. And we’re beginning to see that quite a bit, as you and I have talked about a lot on this show.

We’re starting to see that Trump wants to push it over the edge. And the long-term result of that is a pretty simple question: Will the future be communist or will the future be free? So another thing the book deals with is the aspect of space. Elon Musk is bringing down the cost per pound to orbit so much that you’re getting radically more stuff launched into space. Pretty soon, that’ll be people. Pretty soon, that’ll be a city on the Moon, a city on Mars, real manufacturing and mining out there.

And if the Chinese control it, they control the Earth with it. Donald Trump gets it. He talks about it. He just launched this new United States Space Academy. That’s a big deal. All of this is about the future. It’s not about the next election. It’s not even about the 2028 election. It’s about making sure that the future is free and that America leads that and doesn’t sit passively while the Chinese dominate the world.

Don Ma: Okay, Eric, I have to get your reaction before we leave here. Rod making some very strong, very powerful points saying China’s rule, it’s good for its power. It’s not good for the people of China. And talking about China’s organ harvesting using the word evil. I mean, some of these victims, they’re still alive, actually, when their organs, some of them are being harvested. Let me just get your final reactions here.

Eric Metaxas: Well, I think we have to be very blunt and very clear. There is good and there is evil. There is a God who is a judge. If you don’t believe in that God, you think you can do whatever you like to human beings, but they’re created in God’s image and he loves them and he died for them. And if you side with evil, as China has done, eventually it will catch up with you. And that is what we’re seeing.

It can only last so long. The Soviet Union lasted for decades. You need people with courage to stand against it, to call it what it is. There is no question in my mind that there are millions and millions and millions of people in China longing and praying that the corrupt regime will fall. And the fact of the matter is you cannot, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. It’s enslavement. It’s cruelty. It’s sadistic. But the point is, if you don’t believe in God, who’s to say what’s right or wrong?

The communist leaders, they don’t believe there’s good and evil. They just believe in themselves. They believe in power. This country, the United States of America, which I love and I will die for, this country stands for something beautiful and good and true.

It’s why I wrote my book on the American Revolution. We need to understand that this country, which celebrates liberty, the opposite of slavery, the opposite of communist tyranny, this country stands as a beacon in the world to lift hope up for the hopeless, for those in places like China who are wondering, will there ever be justice?

I know there will be justice, but we have to fight. Now we’re in a time we have to fight. We have a president who understands this. He’s doing everything he can. We can’t do it tomorrow, but we can do everything we can. We need to give him our support. People better vote in these midterms so we can keep Congress and keep the Senate. If you do not vote, you are complicit with evil. You’re complicit with the evil of China and North Korea and Iran.

We’re living in a very, very important historical time. We have to stand with the president.

Don Ma: You’re so right, Eric. If history has proven anything, is that good truth and justice always prevails. Gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure to speak with you guys. Eric, Rod, thank you very much.

Rod Martin and Eric Metaxas: Thank you. Thank you.

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NOTE: Tomorrow is yet another Israeli general election. Benjamin Netanyahu deserves Donald Trump’s endorsement, our friendship, and his own re-election. This essay, which I wrote one year ago, demonstrates a rather important part of why. It’s a story few Americans know, and every Israeli socialist hates. — RDM

by Rod D. Martin
October 7, 2025

Lost in the current debate over Israel and Hamas is the utter transformation of the former over the last two decades.

For years, Israel was a Socialist backwater. A welfare case, filled with smart, hard-working people whose economic system rendered them dependent on the charity of others.

But that was before Benjamin Netanyahu.

The MIT-educated Netanyahu, a longtime friend of Donald Trump’s father Fred, believed strongly in the power of freedom and free markets to transform Israel’s future. He dreamed of the day when Israel might be the Hong Kong, Singapore, or Silicon Valley of the Middle East.

Beginning in the 2000s, he began to make it exactly that.

The Israel Test

My friend George Gilder — tech guru, father of Supply-Side Economics, and Ronald Reagan’s most-quoted living author — described this transformation in The Israel Test. In it, he posed a moral question that doubles as a growth model: When you encounter excellence — the engineer who invents, the founder who amasses a fortune by creating value — do you admire him or resent him?

Societies like the United States, Taiwan, and Israel that choose admiration unleash compounding prosperity. Societies like Gaza, or Venezuela, or Cuba, that choose envy punish their builders and slowly die.

Whatever its other virtues, mid-century Israel answered that question wrongly. It was born under siege and then cemented into a command-and-control economy by leaders who equated collectivism with survival. Ration books, price controls, and the Histadrut labor federation’s omnipresent grip held back a people famed for genius. By the late 1970s, inflation was raging, talent was emigrating, and the promise of Zion looked like it might be squandered by the leftwing ideology that had midwifed the state.

Then the answer changed. Likud’s political earthquake in 1977 broke the Labor Party’s longstanding monopoly on power. Emergency stabilization in 1985 proved reform was possible. And beginning in 2003, Benjamin Netanyahu set out to complete the transformation: to replace envy with admiration — cheerleading the success of others — in law, policy, and culture.

What followed — the rise of what has been called “the Start-Up Nation” because despite having only 9.5 million people it produces more start-ups than Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada, or the UK — is not a mystery. Rather, it is the predictable fruit of freeing human capital.

From Labor to Likud

The founding generation had reasons for what they built. In many cases they were refugees, they were pioneers in a desert, and they were completely surrounded by enemies. The kibbutz was both a farm and a fortress; central planning looked like discipline and unity. The Histadrut grew into a state within the state, running factories, clinics, ports, banks, and schools. The government owned the “commanding heights,” as Lenin put it, fixing prices and rationing goods, but subsisting on a sea of foreign aid. It was egalitarian on paper and suffocating in practice.

By the mid-1970s the bill came due. Inflation spiraled into triple digits. Government and Histadrut conglomerates hoarded credit and stifled competitors. A young coder or physicist found fewer paths forward than in Boston or Silicon Valley, where many in fact went, including (for a time) IDF special forces hero Benjamin Netanyahu.

In 1977 the public said enough. Menachem Begin’s Likud, speaking for the “second Israel” — Mizrahim, religious Zionists, working-class voters long talked down to by the Socialist elite — broke Mapai’s lock on power. Begin was not yet a Thatcherite, but his victory shattered the presumption that Labor’s model was the only option.

Crisis forced a second shift. In 1985, with inflation nearing 400%, a national-unity government froze wages, cut subsidies, pegged the shekel, and reined in spending. Likud’s Stabilization Plan worked. Price stability returned.

But stabilization is not liberalization. Israel had cooled the fever without curing the disease. The state still owned too much. The banks still owned the pensions. The incentive structure still punished work and capital formation. Israel needed an architect who would rebuild the system from the foundations up, not just patch the roof.

How Netanyahu Achieved His Vision

Before he ever touched the Finance Ministry, Netanyahu had a plan. He had lived the American experience — MIT, consulting, Wall Street — and he had seen what free capital and open competition could do. He talked openly about turning Israel into a “mini-America”: a place where enterprise was celebrated, where capital markets funneled savings into risk, and where the state served citizens rather than smothering them. His speeches from the late 1990s read like a blueprint: cut marginal tax rates, privatize state assets, break monopolies, open the capital account, and treat entrepreneurs as national assets rather than necessary evils.

He took office as Finance Minister in 2003 in the teeth of the Second Intifada’s economic wreckage: collapsing tourism, fleeing investment, skyrocketing unemployment, deficits blown out. Lesser politicians reached for subsidies and slogans. Netanyahu reached for a wrench.

First, taxes. Marginal income brackets were flattened and lowered; the corporate rate fell; capital gains were rationalized. The point was not to favor the rich but to favor growth — to make the next factory, the next VC fund, the next hiring decision easier, not harder.

Second, welfare to work. The system of child allowances and transfer payments had been intended with compassion, and as in other countries, ended as a trap. For many households, rational calculation meant staying home paid better than working. Netanyahu cut allowances, tightened eligibility, and paired the change with job programs. As with Reagan in the early 1980s, the politics were brutal, but the economics worked. Employment rose, particularly among communities with historically low labor force participation.

Third, the Bachar capital-market reform. For decades, the big banks both collected household savings and lent those savings to themselves, locking retirement money into captive bank bonds. Competition was anemic. The stock market starved. Young companies went begging.

Netanyahu and his deputy, Haim Ramon, forced the banks to spin off their mutual and provident funds, birthing a modern asset-management industry. Suddenly, billions of shekels looked for returns in equities, corporate debt, and venture investments that financed a booming cohort of founders.

Fourth, privatization. El Al and Bezeq — symbols of statist pride and Socialist dysfunction — were sold. Service improved. Innovation resumed. And just as importantly, a signal went out to would-be founders: you will not have to compete with your own government.

Fifth, deregulation in the trenches: fewer permits, faster approvals, simpler import rules. Entrepreneurs began to experience the state not as a brick wall but as a set of rules they could understand and navigate.

The reaction was ferocious. The Histadrut called strikes. Editorial pages predicted social collapse. Demonstrators denounced “Bibi the butcher.” Even allies wondered whether the coalition could survive the pain. Netanyahu’s reply was clinical and consistent: “The medicine is harsh because the disease is fatal.” He promised not utopia, but a future in which work, savings, and risk would be honored and rewarded.

The results came quickly. Growth returned. Unemployment fell. Israel’s credit outlook brightened. But the deeper change was cultural. When the banks lost their grip on pensions, ordinary people became investors. When privatization ended the ministry’s role as national CEO, ministers stopped pretending they knew how to run airlines. When welfare tilted toward work, families recalculated their futures. The country’s posture shifted from defensive crouch to forward lean.

The Start-Up Nation

Netanyahu’s long prime-ministerial tenure entrenched his earlier reforms. It also translated abstract policy into felt experience. Ask an Israeli in 2011 what Capitalism looked like and he might not quote Milton Friedman — he would likely show you his phone bill. When Likud opened mobile telecom to real entry, prices collapsed and service improved. That was competition you could feel in your pocket every month.

The tech ecosystem thickened. First-time founders could hire seasoned executives who had already scaled a company or two. Military units that incubated elite technical skills spun out alumni who formed world-class cyber and data-science teams. Venture funds found abundant limited partners at home as well as abroad, because the Bachar reforms had created actual fund-management industries with mandates to seek returns. An Israeli founder no longer had to move to California to raise a Series A. He could do it in Herzliya or Tel Aviv.

Macro indicators mirrored the street-level story: inflation tame, unemployment at multi-decade lows, the shekel strong enough to annoy exporters, GDP per capita converging with and then passing G7 stalwarts.

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But those numbers are only the shadows on the wall. The true substance was and is cultural. Builders came to be admired and imitated. Wealth was no longer seen as a sin but as a driver of opportunity. Envy was preached against not just from pulpits, but from paychecks.

And any who would live peacefully could share in the rising tide.

The Snags

The transformation is real, but there is still much to be done. A candid audit is part of any serious success story. Israel faces real growing pains, and real threats.

Aside from the war, housing is the loudest. Planning monopolies and glacial approvals throttled supply just as tech-sector wages rose, pushing prices out of reach for young families. Productivity outside tech and finance lag, in part because infrastructure has not kept pace with growth. Labor-force participation remains too low among some communities. Education and skills pipelines are uneven. And the venture cycle is unforgiving: easy money can cover structural sins for a while. Hard money can expose them in a quarter.

War shocks are real. They raise risk premia, drain budgets, and pause investment committees. Yet the striking fact of the last twenty years is resilience: the machine slows, it does not stall. After the initial shock of October 7th faded, funding resumed; when exports wobbled, the domestic market picked up the slack.

That is not luck. It is what happens when an economy is wired for adaptation, and when individuals have the freedom to get ahead and invest in their own futures.

Energy: Tamar, Leviathan, and the End of Isolation

Nothing dramatizes the link between markets and security like natural gas. For half a century, Israel’s enemies tried to starve it by boycott. The Tamar discovery in 2009 and Leviathan a few years later inverted that relationship. Israel would no longer be starved. It would supply.

The economic effects are straightforward: cheaper electricity, new industrial inputs, royalties that seed a sovereign wealth fund. The strategic effects are profound. Jordan and Egypt now buy Israeli gas because physics beats propaganda. Pipelines create constituencies for normal relations. European buyers, looking to diversify away from Russian coercion, treat East-Med molecules as not just energy but security.

Equally important is how that gas was developed: not by a bloated, nationalized oil company, but by private risk-takers under a contested but durable regulatory regime. The capital flowed because the rules were legible; the gas flowed because entrepreneurs believed contracts would be honored. Capitalism — not resource nationalism — turned geology into statecraft.

Energy has also begun to knit Israel’s periphery into its core. Ports, processing facilities, and skilled jobs sprout in places that were once afterthoughts in the central-coast success story. That diffusion matters. Spreading opportunity is better and more durable than prosperity piled into a single tech corridor.

The Duty to Admire, Not Envy

Here the moral and the practical merge. Israel’s security does not float above the economy: it stands on it. Iron Dome and Iron Beam batteries are made of atoms bought with tax receipts generated by growth. R&D for lasers, interceptors, and cyber defense comes from profits the state does not confiscate and talent it does not drive away. Joint development means America no longer subsidizes like a benefactor but invests as a partner and buys as a customer.

You can measure this, crudely, in budgets and exports. But there is a subtler ledger: the decision of a 23-year-old captain to stay in Israel, start a company with his unit buddies, and hire twenty compatriots — instead of taking a one-way flight to New York or California. The decision of a world-class chip designer to return from Nvidia or Apple because he believes he can do his life’s best work in Tel Aviv or Haifa.

Those choices are moral acts as much as economic ones. People vote with their feet for polities that celebrate achievement, eschew envy, and encourage opportunity.

This is why Gilder’s Israel Test is not just a slogan but a survival strategy. A country that cheers for winners makes it possible for everyone to win. A society that blesses wealth-creation multiplies its defenders and its inventions. A nation that punishes success eventually cannot afford its own shield. It becomes a basket case dependent on charity.

The Jewish state learned this the hard way. It chose a better path — and lived.

What Must Come Next

Picture an Israel that fixes its housing choke point with American-style “by-right” approvals where infrastructure exists, and fast-track corridors where it doesn’t. Young families buy near where they work. Commutes shrink. Wages buy more life.

Picture the periphery tied to the core by high-speed rail and reliable freight. A biotech lab in Beersheba partners with a foundry in Kiryat Gat and a seed-stage fund in Jerusalem — and none of them feel like they’re operating from the edge. Productivity rises not just because of code, but because trucks, data, and people move faster.

Picture education that is unafraid of excellence: rigorous math and science in every school, entrepreneurship tracks that start in tenth grade, and civics education that explains why markets are moral — because they reward service to others. Haredi and Arab students, without surrendering identity, plug into high-value work because pathways are clear and incentives aligned. School choice becomes the norm.

Picture capital markets deepened again: pension funds with larger domestic mandates for growth equity; a second wave of Israeli limited partners who want to own more of Israeli scaling companies, not sell them prematurely for lack of capital at home.

Picture the natural gas story maturing into a full energy strategy: expanded production, resilient contracts with neighbors, and a credible framework for the next wave of technologies, all built by Israeli firms that already live at the frontier of power electronics, photonics, and control software, and all tying former enemies together as suppliers, customers, and friends.

Perhaps most of all, picture Israel’s neighbors learning the lessons that Israel has pioneered. Damascus and Beirut could become wealthy and peaceful. Gaza could become an Arabic Tel Aviv or Riviera.

The only thing standing in the way is envy, the centerpiece of Socialism and the engine of all hate. It is not without reason that the Lord our God has told us, “Thou shalt not covet.”

A New Day of Freedom

Israel chose admiration over envy and was reborn. It turned ration books into cap tables, state monopolies into competitive markets, kibbutz romance into a different kind of heroism — the builder who hires hundreds and exports resilience to the free world.

Netanyahu’s reforms were the hinge. But the door that swung open was cultural: dignity over dependency; responsibility over grievance; the pride of serving others well enough that they gladly pay you for it.

The work is not finished. No free economy’s work ever is. The temptations are familiar: to sandbag the winners, to regulate the vitality out of new industries, to smother the next Tamar or Mobileye in committees, to retreat to the false comfort of the state. We must all resist them. Keep admiration not envy at the center of both policy and pedagogy, and Israel’s future will be larger than its already astonishing present.

There is a final reason to keep faith with the capitalist transformation. The world is darker than it ought to be. It needs positive examples. A small nation that was poor, besieged, and socialist became rich, resilient, and free by blessing excellence and clearing the way for it. That example is not merely good for Israelis. It is good for everyone who hopes for a civilization where genius is thanked, not shackled; where wealth comes from service, not plunder; and where security is purchased not by tribute to tyrants, but by the prosperity of a free people.

Israel has crossed over from its Socialist nightmare into its bright new day of freedom. Its neighbors can do likewise, if they can but summon the courage to try. Will they?

The secret is simple: Admire your builders. Bless your wealth-creators. Cheer one another’s success. Reward those who take the risks that lift everyone else. Never succumb to resentment or envy.

Make that your policy, not just your opinion. If it worked in tiny, impoverished Israel, surrounded by enemies, it can work absolutely anywhere.

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NOTE: I wrote this essay eleven years ago to commemorate the 600th anniversary of one of the ten or so most important battles in human history, Henry’s triumph at Agincourt. — RDM

by Rod D. Martin
October 25, 2015

Today in 1415 on this, St. Crispin’s Day, King Henry V triumphed at Agincourt. The battle is one of the defining moments in the history of the English-speaking peoples. It is a victory like unto Marathon or Arbela; or for Christians, and certainly for the devout King Henry, a postcanonical deliverance comparable to the victory of Gideon, or to the parting of the Red Sea.

Historians speak of the First British Empire, which began in Jamestown and ended at Yorktown, and of the Second British Empire, of which India became the keystone and which died very quickly once its heart was removed.

But eight decades before Columbus and Cabot sailed to the Americas, the victory at Agincourt established an earlier, English, empire. The high point of the Hundred Years War, from the English perspective at least, it brought about the Treaty of Troyes, which settled the claims of the previous century and granted France’s throne to Henry’s heirs.

The battle itself still captivates. Four eyewitnesses wrote accounts, agreeing in the major details and leaving historians little doubt as to what took place.

Though successful, the siege of Harfleur — then the principal port city of France — had taken longer and cost more than hoped (“Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead!”). His numbers diminished to barely 6,000, many of his men sick with dysentery, Henry decided to retire to Calais and thence to England.

The French, led by an insane king and an arrogant, wicked court, had failed to assemble their forces in time to relieve Harfleur, but now stood astride Henry’s rain-soaked path. They outnumbered his single line of men-at-arms plus archers by about five to one, including cavalry the English lacked. They wanted vengeance. And they offered him two choices: give himself up as a captive for ransom, or face certain annihilation.

It is Shakespeare, of course, who has shaped our memory of these events, but his account is faithful enough. In the words of Plantagenet scholar Dan Jones, “if we read the letters the real Henry dictated...there is a stridency and grandeur to his tone that is unmatched in dictations by any of his other aristocratic captains. Shakespeare’s grown-up Hal thunders true to the spirit, if not the letter, of his real-life counterpart.”

We remember Henry’s response to the French herald Montjoy: “If we may pass, we will. If we be hindered, we shall your tawny ground with your red blood discolor . . . The sum of all our answer is but this: We would not seek a battle, as we are. Nor as we are, we say we will not shun it.” One can hear this echo, 525 years later and one month to the day after the French abandoned Paris to the Nazis, in Churchill: “We shall defend every village, every town and every city. The vast mass of London itself, fought street by street, could easily devour an entire hostile army; and we would rather see London laid in ruins and ashes than that it should be tamely and abjectly enslaved.”

In a rather striking departure from medieval norms but consistent with his Christian character, Henry had prohibited his men from looting, and had even executed a friend for having done so (“In our marches through the country, there [must] be nothing compelled from the villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of the French upbraided or abused in disdainful language”). But by the time of Henry’s answer to Montjoy, the English army had marched 200 muddy miles on increasingly empty stomachs. They were exhausted. And they were certain of defeat by the well-rested, well-fed, well-armed French.

Even so, Henry would not yield. “If we are marked to die,” he told his beleaguered men, “we are enough to do our country loss — and if to live, the fewer men, the greater share of honor.

“This day is called the feast of Crispian. He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, will stand a tip-toe when this day is named . . . strip his sleeve and show his scars and say, ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day!’ Old men forget — yet all shall be forgot, but he’ll remember with advantages what feats he did that day . . . And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by from this day to the ending of the world but we in it shall be remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition. And gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accursed they were not here — and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day!”

And so trusting their fates to God despite the certainty of death, they fought. And fighting on, they won.

Scholars marvel at the magnitude of their victory. Some attempt to explain it away, but the evidence against them is overwhelming. Others attribute it to the technological advantage of the English longbow, and yet the great military historian John Keegan has shown that Harry’s archers could not have been enough.

At the outset about 6,000 English faced roughly 30,000 Frenchmen. Half an hour later, 10,000 Frenchmen lay dead. 2,000 more were prisoners, among them the marshal of France, two dukes and two counts. Indeed, more French knights were taken prisoner than the total of all English knights. Among the French dead were both the constable and the admiral of France — their commanders-in-chief — the master of longbowmen, the master of the royal household, three dukes, eight counts, 90 members of the lower nobility, and 8,400 “knights, esquires and gallant gentlemen.” It was, in Henry’s words, “a royal fellowship of death.”

And the English dead? “Edward the duke of York, the earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Ketley, Davy Gam, esquire; none else of name, and of all other men, but five and twenty.”

Having themselves been in the thick of the battle, the news of this astonishing deliverance reached Henry and his men only after. It moved them profoundly. The king prohibited any man from boasting of the victory “or tak[ing] praise from God which is His only.” When asked whether Henry would permit the telling of the numbers killed, he replied “Yes, but with this acknowledgement: that God here fought for us.”

In Agincourt’s aftermath lie some of history’s greatest questions. What if Henry had not died young? What if his son, the infant Henry VI, had not been a tragically weak king who lost not only France but also England? What if the disinherited French heir (the Dauphin) had accepted the settlement at Troyes and with it peace, rather than rallying his forces, fighting on for three more decades and ultimately ending the war on his own terms?

From our perspective as sons and daughters of Albion (as all Americans surely are), even the questions seem tragic. But one cannot know from what else God might have delivered all of us. Perhaps English culture and tradition would have been wiped out by the more numerous French. Perhaps serfdom would have made its way across the Channel. Perhaps there would have been no English Bill of Rights, no American Revolution.

Perhaps Virginia would today look like Haiti.

Either way, in that hour, God certainly delivered Henry, the English army and likely England itself from utter destruction. And most of a century before Ferdinand and Isabella completed the Reconquista in Spain, half a century before the last bit of the ancient Roman Empire fell to the Muslim Turks — in that same summer of 1453 in which England’s dreams in France were finally shattered — the union of France and England thus achieved offered not only lasting peace between the two but the prospect of a truly dominant European power, one which might have changed every detail of the last half millennium.

It was not to be. But like a latter day Alexander, though those who came after couldn’t keep it, Henry won it. As with Churchill later, he won it not merely against all odds but when all continued resistance seemed futile. He won it through his indomitable character and the valor to which he inspired his men. Perhaps he won it at least somewhat through technological advance and innovative tactics. But in his own estimation and that of any reasonable observer, he won it only because his Father won it for him.

Agincourt and King Harry have shaped the Anglo-American character as few things could. There are few days we should keep with as much reverence and honor as the Day of St. Crispin. And so we shall, as Henry promised, from this day to the ending of the world.

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by Stacy Robinson, Emel Akan
October 24, 2026

Alejandro Rios’s father had a decision to make: It was 1962, his family was living in the United States, and every year they traveled back to Cuba to visit extended family.

But this year was different. The island nation’s leadership had recently been overthrown by communists, and U.S.–Cuba relations were breaking down.

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Rios said his father spoke to an official at the Cuban consulate, who warned him: “This is maybe the last time you can go over there and return … but maybe you won’t be able to come back.”

Concerned he might not see his parents again, Rios’s father decided to move the family back to Cuba. It didn’t take long for them to realize something was terribly wrong, but it was too late, and they were trapped.

Amid the rise of socialism in some sections of American society, Rios and others who escaped communist rule in Cuba and Venezuela sat down with The Epoch Times in a new documentary, “Red Flag,” to detail what life was like under those regimes and to issue a warning to Americans enamored by socialist and communist ideology.

‘From Heaven to Hell’

Fidel Castro toppled Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in a communist revolution in 1959.

Ninoska Pérez Castellón said that, contrary to Hollywood film portrayals, there was no party atmosphere when the revolt broke out in Cuba. Officials were somber, and the people knew something was coming.

Her father, an official with the Batista regime, was summoned for a meeting on Dec. 31, 1958, the night before the government was overthrown. Castellón recalls her mother immediately putting his passport in his pocket and telling him: “If Batista leaves, you don’t stay. We will be fine, but don’t stay.”

“Sure enough, they get to the meeting; That’s when supposedly the American ambassador had told Batista it was better if he left,” Castellón said.

Batista fled to the Dominican Republic, and her father took a flight to New Orleans.

“And the next morning, it was like [going] from heaven to hell,” Castellón said.

A mob gathered outside her home — some were armed, and some attempted to ransack it. The rebels kept returning, searching for her father. At one point, two revolutionaries began to argue over who would take possession of the family’s car; one fatally shot the other.

Castellón said that, although she was only eight years old, she immediately understood.

“If these are the good guys and this is a revolution, something is wrong here,” she said to herself. “Sure enough, they come in a few days later, and they confiscate the house.”

Castellón is now a radio host and prominent member of the Cuban exile community in Miami.

Over the past 25 years, Venezuela’s political path has closely mirrored Cuba’s move toward authoritarianism.

Unlike Castro, however, who took power through armed revolution, Hugo Chávez was democratically elected. After previously failing to overthrow the government, Chavez was elected president of Venezuela in 1998, running on a platform of addressing poverty and government corruption.

Francisco Poleo, a media executive and journalist, said that he knows many Venezuelans, whom he now describes as “ultra-conservative,” who were willing to give Chavez a chance.

“They were extremely hopeful. … They voted for Chavez because they wanted a radical change in Venezuela,” Poleo said.

Chavez nationalized many of the country’s industries, and introduced price controls to lower the cost of goods. Those policies ran the nation’s economy into the ground, but alliances with China, Russia, and Cuba kept the regime afloat.

The Modus Operandi

The exiles said Castro and Chavez initially garnered popular support by promising change and prosperity, a tantalizing prospect for the poor who were fed up with government corruption.

But neither dictator delivered on those promises and both countries descended into far greater poverty than ever before.

“Here comes Fidel. Oh wow, rock star, right? He’s a rock star. He just shows up. He’s going to fix everything, right? Which is the modus operandi of every socialist and communist,” Rick Gonzalez, an architect in West Palm Beach, Florida, said.

Soon after the revolution, government agents arrived at his grandfather Enrique’s farm, ready with paperwork.

“Here are your bonds,” they told him, Gonzalez recalled.

“‘You need to sign them over, so that we’re going to occupy your farm. … Yeah, this is your farm, but you’re generously giving it to the government, so that we can reorganize everything in our authoritarian world that we’re creating here in this country.’ He had no choice.”

After Castro’s revolution, the new regime carried out executions by firing squad.

“The firing squad began very early in the revolution, like the first days,” Castellón recalled. Those executed were not always aware of any charges, she said, and no trial was held.

“At the beginning, they targeted Batista’s regime, but then eventually it became everybody. So it was the guy that spoke against it, the doctor that refused to do something they wanted, the attorney that wanted to defend someone,” she added.

Mario Iván Tabares grew up under the communist regime in Cuba, identified as a rising tennis star from a young age. He wanted to advance his career, but in the 1980s, government officials clipped his wings.

The regime wanted him to remain at amateur status rather than go professional and bring “glory for the country.”

“I was supposed to play like eight more tournaments, big ones, big tournaments in Europe to finish the year, and then the government says ‘no, no, you’re not allowed to do that,’” he said.

“We need you because you represent the Cuban socialists, to support our communist system,” Tabares said the officials told him. “We don’t need the money. We need the medals.”

Tabares, once a successful tennis player on the world stage, escaped his Cuban team during an international tournament in Mexico in 1994. He crossed the border in Tijuana and sought asylum in the United States. He now lives in Miami and works as a tennis instructor.

Poleo’s family had to flee, one by one, as they became targets of Venezuela’s administration. His oldest sister left first — she was an investigative reporter and was looking into the government, he said.

She fled by boat to Curaçao, and then in 2005, to Miami. His father, a former politician and newspaper owner, fled in 2008 after a comment warning Chavez he might end up like Italian fascist Benito Mussolini.

Eggs Per Month

Food scarcity and communism go hand in hand. After the Khmer Rouge seized control of Cambodia, for example, the country was plunged into a famine that claimed the lives of between 500,000 and 1.5 million.

Even more drastic results occurred in the Soviet Union — up to 10.8 million between 1932 and 1933 — and in China — 36 million between 1958 and 1962.

“That’s the way it works,” Rios said. “For making your life hell, they have a lot of resources for that. They don’t have resources for rice, for sugar, or for food, but they have resources for control.”

In Cuba, he said, people were forced to rely on ration cards to procure food. The cards were meant to promote the idea that everyone was equal by giving everyone the same provisions.

“You have this card, and they say for this month you have three eggs per person,” Rios said. “Okay, but maybe next month it will be six eggs. ‘Oh, we’re better because we have six eggs per person!’ Can you imagine?”

His father befriended the man in charge of distributing eggs and once procured more by obtaining already-broken eggs to help feed his family.

“He felt happy because he had his ration of eggs, but he had this bunch of broken eggs,” Rios said.

“Corruption became a way of life. It’s not a political corruption. It’s a daily corruption, and you have to do it because otherwise, you won’t eat.”

Many Cubans and Venezuelans were forced to turn to the black market to get enough, the exiles told The Epoch Times.

“In Cuba everything is black market,” Tabares said.

He recounted that at times, his breakfast was a shot glass of milk so that the rest of the bottle could go to his daughter.

Rios described a meal that his family called “rooster soup.” “Rooster soup is water with brown sugar,” he said.

In Venezuela, the bachaqueros, who ran the black market, only accepted American dollars — which were also illegal and traded via the black market.

“I left 10 years ago, in 2016,” Poleo said. “It was the peak moment of this black market economy. The richest oil country in the world has basically become a state where you needed a connection to find toilet paper.”

“If you wanted milk, you needed to overpay a guy that was trafficking with milk. I mean, not with drugs, no, with milk, or toilet paper. It was insane.”

Trust Not Thy Neighbor

Gonzalez said that both countries are able to quell dissent through the use of “block captains,” citizen spies who “listen to the conversations of the neighbors when they’re on the porches outside” and reported any criticism back to the government.

“You couldn’t trust your neighbor,” Gonzalez said. A slip of the tongue over a cup of coffee could land you in trouble if you said the wrong thing or complained.

“They have people everywhere,” Rios added.

“They have people in the church. They have people in cinema. … There’s always someone from the government, listening in. Always, always.”

Parents taught their children to keep quiet in public.

“They learn it really early,” Rios said. “If you speak something against the Cuban government or whatever opinion that you have, that is not in favor of Castro and all that … let’s talk here at home, but never outside.

“You begin to have a double life,” he added.

“There’s a life, a truth, in your home where you’re protected, and then there’s the life outside, where you were afraid, and guarded,” he said.

Similar to Cuba’s surveillance system, Chavez established a system in Venezuela that turned ordinary people into the eyes and ears of the state.

The people called them “sapos,” literally toads or frogs. Poleo said these are “the snitches.”

Chavez passed a law in 2008, known as the “Sapo Law,” requiring citizens to spy on one another if the government requested it. It was repealed almost immediately, but other laws under Maduro expanded surveillance networks.

“They created this law against hate. Hate is whatever they believe is hate. … I was accused of that: treason to the motherland,” Poleo said. “That could mean anything because they believe that they are the motherland, they are the state, they are the government, the political party. Everything is the same. So if you are against them, you’re a traitor to the motherland.”

What Free Speech?

Poleo was referring to the Constitutional Law Against Hatred for Peaceful Coexistence and Tolerance, enacted by Venezuela in 2017. It prohibits various forms of hate speech, such as racism or criticisms of gender identity, but also contains a catch-all prohibition on “hatred of any other nature.”

The law also requires media outlets, upon command by the government, “to broadcast messages promoting peace, tolerance, equality, respect, and diversity,” for up to 30 minutes a week.

The policy has been criticized for its vague definitions and the stiff penalties it imposes.

“It got really, really difficult after the presidential election in 2024. People were being imprisoned for a tweet … for a WhatsApp status,” Poleo said.

In Cuba, Castellón said, Castro knew he had to shut down the free press, and he did so.

“It took him a few years, maybe a couple of years. … Some of them went to prison, and the owners of those papers, even the sons of the owners of those papers, went to prison, but the press was instrumental in controlling everything for him,” she said.

The inflow of newspapers and magazines from the U.S. dried up too.

“Communists do not accept a free press because they don’t want people telling the other side,” she said.

She came to believe that communism ultimately feeds on envy, and people accept it because they hope to acquire goods without working for them.

“And that’s a very bad combination because they’ll do anything,” she said.

As socialist and communist ideologies gain influence in the United States, Castellón and many other exiles in Florida hope their personal stories will warn those who romanticize systems based on violence, control, and deception.

“When I hear people in free countries like the United States, and they’re praising communism, I love to tell them, ‘I will pay for a one-way ticket for you to Cuba, and you can know what communism is,’” she said.

Poleo agrees.

“Don’t praise communism while you’re drinking Starbucks coffee and tweeting on your iPhone,” he said.

Gonzalez counts himself lucky. He is grateful that his parents and grandparents left Cuba soon after the revolution because they saw the dangers early.

“Getting out of a communist country or getting out of a socialist country is probably the best thing you can do,” he said. “Why would America go into that direction? Blows my mind.”

— This essay is published in cooperation with The Epoch Times.

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