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by Rod D. Martin
April 29, 2026

A relatively obscure headline crossed the wires last week, the kind most people skim past without a second thought. The Trump Administration is considering dollar swap lines with key Gulf and Asian allies, including the United Arab Emirates, much like the one executed with Argentina last year.

That sounds technical. It sounds arcane. It sounds like the sort of thing only central bankers, bond traders, and Treasury staffers need to understand.

It is not.

Reuters reported that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the United States is discussing currency swap lines after “a number of allies” sought help dealing with fallout from the Iran war. He added that additional swap lines could reinforce dollar usage and liquidity internationally, maintain smooth dollar funding markets, promote trade and investment with the United States, and serve as “a major first step” toward creating new U.S. dollar funding centers in the Gulf and Asia.

That last phrase is the tell: new U.S. dollar funding centers.

This is not just about the UAE, Argentina, or anyone else just named. It is about the architecture of global finance. It may represent the biggest shift in the global financial order since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971.

For half a century, the dollar has been the global reserve currency, the operating system of the world economy. Everyone complains about it. Everyone predicts its demise. Every few years, some new theory emerges about the euro, the yuan, BRICS, SDRs, gold, crypto, or the “petroyuan” bringing the dollar empire to its knees.

It isn’t going to happen. It wasn’t going to anyway. Now Trump and Bessent are restructuring the global financial system to ensure permanent dollar dominance.

The President and his Treasury Secretary understand something America’s foreign policy establishment long ago forgot, and the Enemedia never understood at all: that the dollar is not just a currency. It’s a strategic weapon, a diplomatic instrument, a commercial magnet, a sanctions platform, a military enabler, and the financial high ground of the entire global system. It is undergirded by the most potent military force in history, which Trump has made sure — in just one year — controls every important chokepoint on Earth. Energy flows, international trade, power projection, everything is within the power of the United States Navy.

That makes the dollar irreplaceable. An America willing to use that power — and Trump is certainly willing — is unstoppable.

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But that’s the foundation: it isn’t the point. The point is that the Trump Administration is sidelining (though not replacing) the International Monetary Fund. Crisis finance is moving in-house to the U.S. Treasury, in much the same way that Lloyd’s of London’s maritime risk business is getting “relocated” to the U.S. Development Finance Corporation, and the center of global energy is shifting from the Middle East to the Gulf of America.

Trump doesn’t just mean to put America “first”: he intends to make America dominant. Or in a phrase, “great again.”

What Is a Swap Line and Why Does It Matter?

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by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
April 28, 2026

My latest interview on Securing America with Frank Gaffney. Sign up NOW for Frank’s Rumble channel and don’t miss a single episode!

Rod Martin & Frank Gaffney discuss:

1. How Trump is pushing Iran’s regime to the point of collapse, the factionalization of the Iranian government as its cash dries up, and what happens when the blockade forces Iran to shutter its oil fields.

2. We also discuss the SPLC indictments: how the left has been funding the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party, creating the “hate” they pretended to fight. Turns out the left’s demand for white racism greatly outstripped supply, so just like Jussie Smollett, they funded their own and then raised hundreds of millions of dollars to “fight” it. Worse still: the SPLC was in Fortune 500 boardrooms determining who would be canceled, debanked, and generally ruined. And it was all a partisan scam.

3. We also look at the SPLC’s sister organization ActBlue, the nation’s largest Democrat fundraising platform, which appears to have money laundered billions of dollars in illegal foreign contributions: “foreign election interference”. The question: how high does it go?

4. Finally, we discuss why the Trump class battleship is a sound idea, and why the retirement of the Ohio class SSGNs adds urgency to the program.

It’s a jam-packed 20 minutes you won’t want to miss. Watch, like, and share!

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by Sam Faddis
April 28, 2026

In 2022, the election security firm True the Vote broke the story that a company called Konnech in Michigan was storing data on American election workers on servers in China. True the Vote leaders Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips were, of course, ridiculed by the so-called mainstream press.

Then it got worse.

Engelbrecht and Phillips were actually jailed because they would not give up the name of their source, who had blown the whistle on Konnech. The federal government didn’t seem to give a damn that a hostile foreign power might be able to influence our elections. It did seem very intent on making sure no one knew about it.

Now, four years later, we can see that it was much, much worse than that. According to John Solomon, at the time True the Vote was being silenced, the Intelligence Community had assessed the situation, recognized the risk, and issued a report outlining the danger we faced. And that report and that assessment were hidden from the public, even as patriots trying to protect the republic were being persecuted and jailed.

“We judge that U.S. adversaries, including, at a minimum, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as non-state groups, have the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure for the 2020 presidential election,” the National Intelligence Council wrote in the memo dated Jan. 15, 2020.

“Adversaries gaining access to U.S. election-related systems could disrupt the voting process, steal sensitive data, or undermine confidence in the election results, but we do not know whether any of them have specific plans to manipulate election-related systems,” the memo added.

The document was recently declassified by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who continues to expose examples of the intelligence community suppressing or misusing intelligence. The report in question was prepared by then National Intelligence Officer for Cyber. Chief Christopher Porter.

Talking to John Solomon, Porter had this to say.

“What is shocking is how uncontroversial some of these findings are to professionals—it is no secret that China and Iran compromise election equipment for a variety of intelligence purposes, nor was it controversial at the time that these systems had technical vulnerabilities. Every agency concurred on these findings, but because it was seen as potentially aiding the President’s reelection campaign, there was an active effort to damage him politically by refusing to share the declassified report with the public.”

Keep in mind what was known about Konnech when True the Vote blew the whistle. Konnech wasn’t just storing data in China. Konnech was using contractors inside China to do work in the United States on American election systems. This is the exact language in the criminal complaint ultimately filed by Los Angeles. (Charges were dropped against the head of Konnech after the federal government intervened.)

“On or about October 10, 2019, through October 4, 2022, Eugene Yu and other employees at Konnech, Inc. were providing these services to Los Angeles County using third-party contractors based in China.”

“…Konnech employees known and unknown sent personal identifying information of Los Angeles County election workers to third-party software developers who assisted with creating and fixing Konnech’s internal ‘PollChief’ software.”

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Konnech gave Chinese contractors in mainland China “super-administration access” to the electoral systems on which Konnech worked. It is incredible enough that Konnech itself ever had such access. It is literally almost beyond belief that Konnech would have been in a position to grant such access to other entities. Yet again, it is confirmed by the criminal complaint filed against the company.

“On or about August 18, 2022, Luis Nabergoi, project manager for Konnech’s contract with the County of Los Angeles, confirmed via the messaging app DingTalk that any employee for Chinese contractors working on PollChief software had ‘superadministration’ privileges for all PollChief clients. Mr. Nabergoi described the situation as a ‘huge security issue.’”

An individual with super administration access to a system can do (effectively) anything inside that system. He or she can delete data, steal data, alter data, change programming, etc. Perhaps most importantly, that individual can cover his or her tracks because they can potentially also access and alter all security protocols and programs (e.g., delete audit logs).

So, Konnech, which has numerous questionable ties to Chinese entities, was allowed to punch a hole into our election systems, and then Konnech was allowed to grant that same level of access to unknown “contractors” in China.

And yet, it got even worse.

Konnech didn’t only work for state and state electoral systems. Konnech also had access to something called the Uniformed And Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, (UOCAVA) program. Press reporting suggests that Konnech was hired on at least one occasion to do work for the Department of Defense pursuant to the UOCAVA.

In 1986, the federal government enacted the UOCAVA to provide special registration and absentee voting provisions for military and overseas civilians. The Department of Defense administers the UOCAVA program. Pursuant to the act, any uniformed and overseas citizen can register to vote and request an absentee ballot via the UOCAVA system. The individual simply submits what is known as a Federal Post Card Application. They are then sent an absentee ballot.

A person requesting a ballot under UOCAVA can, for some inexplicable reason, select any address they want when registering and requesting a ballot. Per the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP), an overseas non-military voter may claim an address of domicile “even if you have not physically been present at that address.” There appears to be no requirement that the individual requesting a ballot even prove they are a U.S. citizen. In 2020, the FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Election Assistance Commission, and National Institute of Standards and Technology described the UOCAVA process as “high risk” and “susceptible to fraud.”

Interestingly, the number of non-military UOCAVA voters skyrocketed to 573,000 from 228,000 between 2016 and the 2020 election.

If Konnech and contractors in China had super administrator access to the UOCAVA system, they could have done literally anything inside the UOCAVA system. The idea that we have a back door into our voting system with few or no safeguards to control who registers to vote is troubling enough. The thought that this back door could literally be under the complete control of entities connected to Communist China is chilling.

In the four years leading up to the 2020 election, roughly 350,000 “people” registered to vote using the UOCAVA system. That system may well have been compromised. All indicators point to mainland China.

Instead, not only did no one investigate, but action was taken against True the Vote for disclosing the threat. Catherine and Greg were, in fact, jailed and literally thrown into solitary confinement when they refused to identify the source of their information regarding Konnech. Federal agencies that were busy hiding intelligence regarding a grave national security threat apparently had all the time in the world to attack and imprison patriotic Americans trying to defend their country.

The Biden administration knew the Chinese could manipulate our elections, and they covered it up.

Why?

— Sam Faddis is Senior Editor of AND Magazine, where this essay originally appeared. A retired CIA operations officer, he is a Senior Fellow of the Institute for the American Future, and a member of the Committee on the Present Danger.

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by Rod D. Martin
April 27, 2026

I appeared on NTD Good Morning with Cary Dunst to discuss the third Trump assassination attempt. We look at:

• Why it happened

• Who is Cole Allen? And is he “crazy”?

• Why 26 percent of young Democrat men believe resorting to political violence is “justified”

• How Critical Theory replaced Critical Thinking and led us to this pass, and

• What must be done from here?

It’s nine minutes you won’t want to miss. Watch the interview, and pass it along!

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by Ido Singer
April 27, 2026

Imagine a group of women, fake scars applied to their faces. They looked in a mirror and saw themselves disfigured.

Then, as they were led out of the room to a job interview, the researchers quietly removed the scars. The women walked in looking exactly as they always had.

They came back reporting massively increased discrimination.

Many of them identified specific comments the interviewer had made that they were certain referenced their disfigurement. Comments the interviewer never made with any such intention. The scar was gone. The wound was not.

That experiment stopped me cold — not because it was surprising, but because it named something I had been watching for years without having the right language for it.

If we tell people constantly that they are oppressed, that the deck is stacked against them, that their skin color or their background or their faith makes them automatically disadvantaged, we do not need to oppress them. We just need them to look for it. They will find it everywhere: in neutral faces, in ordinary rooms, in a job interview where nobody is looking at a scar that does not exist.

That is not an accident. That is the point.

In 1984, a former KGB operative named Yuri Bezmenov sat down in front of a camera and explained, in precise detail, how to destroy a free society without firing a single shot. He called it ideological subversion. Four stages: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, normalization.

The first stage, demoralization, takes 15 to 20 years — exactly as long as it takes to educate one generation of students and expose them to the ideology of the subverter without any counterbalancing national values to weigh it against.

The goal of demoralization, Bezmenov explained, is not to convince people of anything. It is to make them incapable of processing reality accurately. Once a person is demoralized, he said, we cannot change their mind even if we expose them to authentic information. They are no longer receiving information. They are receiving confirmation of what they have already been programmed to feel.

He was describing 1984. He was also describing right now.

The demoralization does not require a KGB handler in every classroom. It requires only the adoption of one false idea and the patient installation of that idea into education, media, and culture over decades. Bezmenov’s chosen example was egalitarianism, the legislated insistence that all outcomes must be equal regardless of inputs, but the mechanism works with any false idea sufficiently installed.

The false idea currently running is this: You are a victim. The system is designed against you. Your suffering is not the result of circumstance, choice, or randomness. It is the result of oppression. And your oppressor has a face.

Once that idea is installed, the scar does not need to be real. The person will find it anyway. And they will report, with complete sincerity, that they saw it everywhere they went.

The Palestinian cause is the most successful current deployment of this mechanism in the Western world. I want to be precise here. There are Palestinians who have suffered. Real suffering exists. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is real. These things are not manufactured.

What is manufactured is the frame, which requires that Palestinians be presented as entirely agentless. Incapable of choosing differently, incapable of leadership that serves their people rather than perpetuating their misery, incapable of the kind of decision that Israel’s founders made in 1948 when they accepted partition and built a state, and that Palestinian leadership (back by several Arab states and others) rejected.

The frame requires that every rocket, every tunnel, every massacre, every hostage taken into a civilian home, be explained as the inevitable product of oppression rather than the chosen strategy of an ideology that has explicitly and repeatedly stated it prefers destruction (of the Jewish state) to the welfare of its own people.

To maintain this frame, Israel must be “the Nazi,” the oppressor, the singular cause of everything — not a small country surrounded by nations that have tried to destroy it in every decade of its existence, not a democracy that returned the Sinai to Egypt and withdrew from Gaza and southern Lebanon, not the country that offered a Palestinian state to the Palestinians multiple times (the last serious offer at Camp David in 2000) and was refused again and again. No, Israel must be the explanation for everything, because the frame requires a villain and the frame has already chosen one.

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This is not analysis. It is the oldest trick in the political playbook, dressed in the language of human rights.

Bezmenov named the tactic explicitly: The subverter’s goal is to turn a stronger force against itself, to take the West’s genuine commitment to justice, to equality, to the protection of the vulnerable, and use that commitment as the delivery mechanism for the ideology that will destroy it. You do not attack Western values directly. You hijack them. You convince the West that its own existence is the oppression, and then you watch it dismantle itself from the inside.

The Palestinian cause, as deployed in Western universities and streets, is not primarily about Palestinians. It is about the West. It is about installing the oppressor-oppressed framework so thoroughly into an entire generation that they can no longer think outside it. Everything becomes colonialism. Everything becomes apartheid. Everything becomes genocide. The words lose their actual dictionary meanings. The meanings lose their anchor in reality. And the demoralized Westerner walks throughout life, looking for the scar, finding it everywhere, and reporting, with complete sincerity, that they saw it in every face.

I grew up in Tel Aviv. In 1991, I wore a gas mask and sat in a sealed room while Iraqi missiles flew overhead under threats of mustard gas deployed within them. During the Second Intifada, I learned to read a room the way soldiers read terrain. I narrowly missed two suicide bombings. I left in 2003 carrying everything that experience puts in a person’s body and never fully takes out. These experiences are not unique to me. Almost every Israeli had them.

I did not grow up with a theory about victimhood. I grew up with a lesson: Nobody is coming to save me.

That is not bitterness; it is the founding principle of the only functioning Jewish state in human history. For 2,000 years, Jews waited for someone to come. In Alexandria and in Spain and in Poland and in Germany, they waited. The waiting did not go well.

The Zionist movement was not primarily a theological project; it was the conclusion of a people who had finally processed the data and understood that agency is not optional; agency is survival. When we have no agency, we have no safety. We are dead.

Israel exists because a few thousand people decided to stop waiting for someone to grant them safety and went to build it themselves. That decision, made under conditions of genuine persecution, genuine displacement, genuine historical trauma, produced a country. It produced the most battle-tested democracy in the world. It produced a population that is, despite everything, among the world’s happiest.

The decision to claim agency, even from the depths of the worst circumstances human beings have produced, produces life. The decision to embrace victimhood, even when the grievance is real, produces dependence, resentment, and a population that is permanently available to be aimed at whatever scapegoat the people running the system have selected this cycle.

The people running the system selected Israel. They always select Israel.

Yuri Bezmenov had a term for the people who carry the ideology without understanding what it is or where it leads: useful idiots. He meant it precisely. They are useful to the subverter. They are idiots about what they are being used for.

He also said something that should be tattooed on the wall of every university in the Western world: When the process is complete, when the new order has been established, the useful idiots are the first to go.

The Islamists who overtook Iran in 1979 Iranian Revolution and claimed to be “liberators” had no further use for the protestors. The people who burned the most things down, chanted the loudest, built the most public registries of enemies, were executed, quietly or publicly, because a stable authoritarian system cannot tolerate people who have demonstrated they will tear things apart for an idea.

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They were never building anything. They were demolishing. And demolishers are only useful until the demolition is done.

In the West, the students in the encampments, the professors who give them cover, the administrators who cannot answer a question about genocide in front of legislators, the Western politicians who chanted river-to-sea from government podiums — none of them are running the system they are building. They are useful right now. They will not be useful later.

Bezmenov watched this happen in country after country. He knew exactly how it ends.

Author and political commentator Konstantin Kisin, whom I learned about the scar experiment that I started this essay with, said very plainly: We have to teach young people in particular that they are strong, that they are capable, that they are able to overcome adversity — not that they are victims.

That sentence is the antidote, not the political antidote but the human one.

Because the most powerful thing the system can do to us is convince us, before we have even tried, that the outcome is already determined; that our skin color or our background or our faith or our address has already written the verdict; that the interviewer is already looking at a scar that we cannot see but that everyone else can; that the deck is so stacked, agency is a delusion the powerful tell the weak to keep them compliant.

That is the lie. And it is a lie designed by people who benefit from the paralysis manufactured by self-imposed victimhood.

The obstacle does not determine the outcome. The person does. They can only influence those who are already defeated. They need us defeated before they can use us. But we are not defeated; we have not even started.

The most radical act available to a human being right now is not the encampment or the protest or the hashtag or the boycott. It is accountability.

It is the decision to look at one’s life and ask not who did this to me, but what am I going to do about it. It is the decision to refuse the scar — not because the world is fair. It is not fair. It has never been fair. The Jews who built Israel did not build it because the world was fair. They built it because they had decided, finally and permanently, that waiting for fairness was a strategy that only produced more and more graves.

Yuri Bezmenov said the process of demoralization is irreversible for at least one generation once it takes root. I think he was mostly right, but not entirely, because demoralization operates on a population, and a population is made of individuals. And an individual can wake up.

We wake up the moment we decide that each of our lives is ours — not the system’s, not the oppressor’s, not the algorithm’s, not the professor’s, not the activist’s. Ours.

The scar was never there. They put it there. We looked in the mirror and saw it and walked into the world looking for confirmation. So let’s stop looking for the scar and start building something.

That is what they cannot stop — not the protest, not the petition, not the chant, not the hashtag. They cannot stop the person who decided to build something instead.

— Author and speaker Ido Singer is the child of a Holocaust survivor who has lived through two intifadas.

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by Rod D. Martin
April 26, 2026

The rumors of Christianity’s demise were not merely exaggerated. They may have been exactly backward.

A year ago, Pew Research Center released one of the largest surveys of American religion ever conducted, finding that after decades of decline, the Christian share of the country had stabilized. Christianity was no longer in freefall. The “Nones” — atheists, agnostics, and those who describe their religion as “nothing in particular” — had stopped their long march upward.

The secularization story every elite institution treated as inevitable had hit a wall.

Pew’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study found that 62 percent of American adults still identified as Christian, 29 percent were religiously unaffiliated, and 7 percent belonged to non-Christian religions. More importantly, Pew found that the Christian share had been relatively stable for five solid years, since around 2019.

Now the story has advanced.

Ryan Burge, statistician and professor at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University, finds that the secular surge may not merely have stalled. It may be going into reverse. His numbers, based in part on the newly released 2025 Cooperative Election Study, show that the share of Americans identifying as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular fell from 36.2 percent in 2022 to 35.6 percent in 2023, 34.1 percent in 2024, and 31.8 percent in 2025.

Burge notes that the decline is statistically significant, and that the General Social Survey points in the same direction, with religious “Nones” down to just 25.2 percent in 2024.

That doesn’t prove a full-scale revival. Not yet, anyway. But it does prove that the old story is dead.

For decades, it seemed America was following Europe’s path toward a post-Christian society: churches emptying, traditional belief systems collapsing, and no end in sight. The media, academia, and Democrat policymakers gleefully anticipated the day when Christianity would be an afterthought, a relic of an outdated era.

Meanwhile, a “Third Way” movement within the church, led by popular figures like Tim Keller and Russell Moore, sought to be “winsome” to people whose beliefs were not merely non-Christian but actively anti-Christian — sort of like begging a bully not to hurt you.

Every bit of that was wrong.

The Numbers Have Stabilized. There’s a Reason.

Last year’s Pew study surveyed over 35,000 American adults across all 50 states, making it one of the most comprehensive religious studies ever conducted. Its results were striking:

• 62 percent of American adults still identified as Christian, including 40 percent Protestants and 19 percent Catholics.

• The religiously unaffiliated — the “Nones”, or those identifying as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular” — held at 28 percent, virtually unchanged from multiple previous surveys.

• 7 percent of respondents identified with a non-Christian faith, such as Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism.

• The percentage of Christians remained stable over the five years from 2019-2024, marking the first time in decades that the decline had stalled.

Christianity experienced a severe decline in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In 1990, roughly 90 percent of Americans identified as Christian. By 2007, Pew found that number had already dropped to 78 percent. By 2014 it was 71 percent. In the latest Pew Religious Landscape Study, it stood at just 62 percent. It is not insignificant that the steepest declines took place in the Obama years.

That sounds grim until you notice the trend line. The plunge has stopped.

Now the secular side of the ledger appears to be shrinking. The “Nones” have not merely hit a plateau. They appear to be retreating:

• 36.2 percent nonreligious in 2022.

• 35.6 percent in 2023.

• 34.1 percent in 2024.

• 31.8 percent in 2025.

Burge calls that decline statistically significant. He also notes that the General Social Survey points the same way, with the religiously unaffiliated falling to 25.2 percent. In other words, this is not just one odd data point. It is a pattern.

But why? Why would it stop? If the problem is that Christianity is outdated or offensive to our culture, why wouldn’t we continue to collapse?

The answer is simple, as I’ve been telling you for decades. The people who were leaving Christianity were not leaving because conservatives were “mean,” or because Christians “lacked winsomeness,” or because the church failed to wrap historic orthodoxy in the therapeutic language of NPR.

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They left because they were leftists. The belief system of the modern Democrat Party is anathema to the Christian faith.

Or let me put that another way: the fakers have left.

There’s no longer any benefit to your business, or to your personal prestige, that derives from pretending to be a Christian. There is no financial gain that comes from sitting on the second pew. To be a Christian today means you have to really mean it, or you just wouldn’t bother.

And they don’t.

So the half-believers left. The brunch Christians left. The “Jesus was a socialist community organizer” crowd left. The people who wanted the church to baptize abortion, transgenderism, Critical Race Theory, and every other fashionable madness of the age left.

Good.

The Left’s Exodus from Christianity

Why does Woke Socialism repel Christian belief? Because the left’s worldview is completely incompatible with Christianity’s core tenets.

Progressivism champions moral relativism. Christianity demands objective moral law.

Progressivism deconstructs the family unit, asserts the right to murder children, and claims that all sorts of sins are “love.” Christianity actively opposes all these things.

Progressivism says objective truth is impossible, that “math is racist” and “2 + 2 = whatever the Party tells you.” Christianity asserts not merely objective truth but precisely one such truth.

Progressivism defines you by your skin color, sexual preferences, or other superficial or behavioral characteristics, asserting that there are oppressors and oppressed, and that the latter cannot sin and the former cannot repent. Christianity says we’re all one race, all descended from Adam, and that all who believe are adopted into one family whose Father is God. It also says that deviant behavior is not your “identity”: you are not a prisoner of your sins, you are not defined by them, and there is both escape and redemption in Christ.

Progressivism worships the state, because its adherents can control the state and “become like God.” Christianity acknowledges not just a higher but an absolute and sovereign Authority Whose laws are above any enacted by mere men, and cannot be changed by their whims.

But let’s put that another way. Have you ever met anyone who converted to orthodox Christianity and, as a result, suddenly started advocating for Drag Queen Story Hour, or abortion-on-demand, or the abolition of the nuclear family, or the deconstruction of the faith?

Of course not.

Typically, new converts leave progressivism behind and embrace the values and the issues generally considered “conservative” in our debased cultural moment. As Machen pointed out a century ago, Christianity and theological/political liberalism are completely different religions, even when they share the same terms. They cannot coexist in harmony, certainly not within a single person.

The Pew survey confirms what many of us have known for years — leftists are running from Christianity because their politics demand it.

Consider these statistics:

• 61 percent of self-identified liberals identified as Christian as recently as 2007; that’s now just 36 percent.

• More than half (52 percent) of liberals now identify as religiously unaffiliated, compared to just 16 percent of conservatives.

• Among Democrats, Christian identification has fallen from 74 percent in 2007 to 52 percent in 2024. Without African Americans, it would be a small fraction of that.

• Republicans remain overwhelmingly Christian (82 percent), with only 14 percent identifying as religiously unaffiliated.

Christianity’s decline was never simply about intellectual skepticism or an embrace of “science over faith.” Lots of so-called “Christians” never truly were. Now that Democrats feel emboldened to seize control of society, the modern left has openly treated traditional religion as an obstacle to its ambitions, not as a positive or even a neutral institution.

From attempts to coerce churches into endorsing same-sex marriage and abortion to outright hostility toward public displays of Christian faith, the message has been clear: Christianity must conform to Woke ideology, or it must be dismantled.

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Hence, for most white Democrats, church affiliation is a lot of effort for no reward. If anything, it makes you suspect or outright unacceptable to your peers. And if you truly believe in transgenderism, abortion on demand, Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality (not to mention ESG, DEI, SEL, etc.), why would you waste a perfectly good Sunday morning in a church?

Unless you just really like singing in the choir, you have better things to do.

Bottom line, particularly for white liberals, it has become much more socially acceptable to make snarky comments deriding “Sky Daddy” than to continue to feign belief.

Conservative values act as an on-ramp to Christian belief, while Woke ideology functions as an off-ramp. Since 2007, the percentage of self-identified liberals who claim to be Christian has plummeted by nearly half. Among conservatives, that decline has been minimal, from 89 percent in 2007 to 82 percent today.

The Pew data dismantles the tired claim that Christianity has suffered due to its perceived entanglement with conservative politics. If anything, it proves the opposite.

Young conservative men helped drive the stabilization, and they may now be helping drive the reversal. They are embracing Christianity as part of a broader rejection of leftist ideology, secular despair, and the cultural war against masculinity itself.

And that portends a much greater societal and cultural upheaval to come.

Young Men Are Finding Faith

Now the newer data make that point even sharper.

Gallup’s newest data show a remarkable shift among young men ages 18–29. In 2024–25, 42 percent of young men said religion is “very important” in their lives, up from 28 percent just two years earlier. Young women, by contrast, remained roughly flat at about 30 percent. Gallup says young men now surpass young women on this measure by a statistically significant margin, a stunning reversal of the long-standing pattern in which young women were more religious than young men.

Let’s put that in perspective. For the first time in 300 years, among young adults aged 18-24, the gender gap in religiosity has flipped. Historically, women have long been 15-20 percentage points more religious than men (which accounts for much of the church and the clergy’s feminization). But among Generation Z, those days are over.

This is a very, very big deal.

For generations, churches have been feminized. So has education. So has HR. So has corporate life. So has almost every “respectable” institution in America. Boys and young men have spent their entire lives being told that masculinity is toxic, ambition is suspect, leadership is oppression, and strength is dangerous unless it can be harnessed for the left’s political ends.

They were told to apologize for existing.

Christianity tells them something very different.

Christianity tells men they are sinners, yes. But it also tells them they are made in the image of God. It gives them a Father. It gives them a mission. It gives them discipline, hierarchy, purpose, sacrifice, courage, repentance, forgiveness, and ordered liberty. It tells them to become husbands, fathers, builders, protectors, providers, and leaders. It tells them that their strength is not a pathology. It is a stewardship.

No wonder they are listening.

The secular regime has produced loneliness, sterility, addiction, pornography, despair, broken families, cowardice, and an entire generation of young men who were told there was no higher purpose than self-expression and consumption. Then COVID came along and revealed the moral hollowness of the whole thing. The experts lied. The bureaucrats bullied. The schools closed. The churches too often complied. The media demanded fear. The state demanded obedience.

And millions of young people learned a lesson they will not soon forget: a life without God does not produce courage. It produces cowering compliance.

Those who obey a higher authority than government are harder to control. That was obvious during the pandemic. It remains obvious now.

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If you are a young conservative man in America today, odds are increasingly good that you also identify as religious, and probably Christian. Why? Because the war on Christian values, the war on masculinity, and the war on national identity have all been fought on the same battlefield. To be a conservative today is to reject the nihilism and moral relativism that Wokeness has imposed.

So suddenly, Christianity is a lot more attractive.

But not the “seeker sensitive” kind. Not the lukewarm, focus-grouped, skinny-jeans-and-fog-machine version. Not the “let’s apologize for everything the Bible teaches and hope the left likes us” version.

If you’re not getting the real thing, you have better things to do.

Not Just Identity, But Practice

There are other signs as well.

Barna’s 2025 State of the Church data show weekly Bible reading among American adults rising to 42 percent, up 12 points from a 15-year low in 2024. Among self-identified Christians, the number reaches 50 percent, the highest level in over a decade. Millennials rose to 50 percent, while Gen Z rose from 30 percent to 49 percent in a single year. And like the others, Barna also reports that younger men are now outpacing younger women in Scripture engagement.

This is all incredibly surprising, but it really shouldn’t surprise us. Materialism does not answer the questions human beings actually ask. It cannot tell a young man why he exists. It cannot tell him why he should marry, have children, tell the truth, master his appetites, or die for something greater than himself. Secularism promises liberation and delivers chaos leading to tyranny. It promises autonomy and delivers loneliness. It promises pleasure and delivers despair.

Christianity tells the truth about the world as it actually is.

That is why it endures.

The Future of Faith in America

Is Christianity in America experiencing a full-scale revival? It’s too soon to tell.

But what is clear is that the once-unstoppable march toward secularism has hit a wall. The easy deconversions are over. The low-hanging fruit has been picked. What remains are those whose beliefs run deep, who have weathered the cultural storm, and who are now finding strength in the very faith the elites told them was fading.

Ironically, the very people who’ve long decried “cultural Christianity” have gotten what they said they wanted, even while doing their level best to drag the Church to the left.

The battle for America’s soul is not over. Indeed, as the Book of Judges shows us, it is never over, not until Christ comes. But for the first time in a long time, Christianity is no longer retreating. And if history tells us anything, it’s that faith doesn’t just survive adversity — it thrives in it. What Aaron Renn calls “negative world” may be just the tonic the faith in America needs.

The church may have been battered, but it is far from broken. In fact, it may be on the brink of something extraordinary.

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NOTE: My friend Fred Fleitz is a former Trump National Security Council Chief of Staff, a former CIA analyst, and a former senior staffer at the House Intelligence Committee. — RDM

by Fred Fleitz
April 25, 2026

In December 2025, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un toured a shipyard and inspected the completed hull of a supposed 8,700-ton nuclear-powered “strategic guided-missile submarine.” North Korea’s state-controlled media hailed this sub as a breakthrough in Pyongyang’s naval nuclear ambitions.

Just weeks earlier, President Trump announced that the United States would share closely held nuclear propulsion technology with Seoul, clearing the way for South Korea to build its own nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs).

Trump’s announcement was a long-overdue recognition of a strategic reality: in an era of nuclear-armed adversaries on the Korean Peninsula and a rapidly modernizing Chinese navy, South Korea cannot deter aggression with diesel-electric submarines alone.

For decades, Seoul has operated some of the world’s most sophisticated conventional submarines. South Korea’s KSS-III-class subs are quiet, heavily armed with vertical-launch cruise and ballistic missiles, and equipped with advanced air-independent propulsion. They represent a remarkable indigenous achievement.

However, diesel-electric submarines have significant limitations. Range and time at sea are limited by their diesel fuel. These subs must periodically surface to recharge their batteries, limiting their time submerged to days or weeks at best. In the shallow, confined waters around the Korean Peninsula — and in any broader Indo-Pacific contingency — the KSS-III subs are vulnerable to detection and cannot sustain the persistent, high-speed patrols required for naval deterrence today.

South Korean nuclear-powered submarines can change that equation. An SSN can remain submerged for months, travel at sustained high speeds, and operate across vast distances without fuel constraints. For South Korea, this capability is a necessity. North Korea’s growing fleet of ballistic-missile submarines already threatens to complicate Seoul’s defense planning. Beijing’s expanding submarine force, designed to project power far beyond the first island chain, poses an even larger challenge.

The good news is that South Korea is ready. Its “Big Three” shipbuilders — HD Hyundai Heavy Industries, Samsung Heavy Industries, and Hanwha Ocean — are global leaders in the shipbuilding industry. They already produce world-class conventional submarines and have invested heavily in U.S. shipyards, including the Philadelphia facility acquired by Hanwha. Transferring U.S. naval nuclear propulsion technology would help bring South Korea’s advanced shipbuilding industry to the next level.

However, building and sustaining a nuclear submarine fleet requires far more than hulls and reactors. South Korea must gain access to the full nuclear fuel cycle: the ability to enrich uranium to produce nuclear fuel and to reprocess spent fuel rods into advanced nuclear fuel. Without this, both its submarine program and civilian nuclear industry would remain dependent on foreign suppliers.

Access to the full nuclear fuel cycle would also be a boon to South Korea’s broader civilian nuclear ambitions. South Korea relies on nuclear power for about 30 percent of its electricity. It is also a leading producer of advanced nuclear reactors. Granting South Korea access to enrichment and reprocessing would boost its efforts in next-generation nuclear power technology, such as the production of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) and advanced nuclear fuel needed for Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and new reactor designs.

Moreover, providing South Korea with access to the full nuclear fuel cycle is not only a strategic imperative but also a matter of basic fairness and logic.

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South Korea operates one of the world’s most advanced civilian nuclear industries. Yet it cannot enrich uranium to make nuclear fuel rods or reprocess spent fuel. This makes little sense when other non-nuclear weapon states — including Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, Brazil, and Argentina — already possess these capabilities under IAEA safeguards. Meanwhile, North Korea has secretly developed both enrichment and reprocessing technologies in flagrant violation of international law.

It is both illogical and counterproductive to withhold full nuclear fuel cycle rights from a model NPT member and steadfast U.S. ally like South Korea while granting or tolerating them for so many other nations.

Access to the full nuclear fuel cycle also would allow Seoul to sharply reduce its growing spent fuel stockpiles, extract vastly more energy from existing uranium resources, cut waste volumes by up to 90 percent through closed-fuel-cycle technologies like pyroprocessing, and establish itself as a premier exporter of complete nuclear solutions — including SMRs — to allies around the world. Recent U.S.–South Korea agreements already support this peaceful pathway, but likely will require revisions to the U.S.–South Korea “123 agreement” on sharing peaceful nuclear technology.

Transferring U.S. naval nuclear propulsion technology would be an improvement on Australia’s AUKUS agreement, which focuses on building new submarines from scratch. By contrast, under the U.S.–South Korea submarine agreement, Seoul can quickly and cost-effectively build a nuclear-powered variant of its proven KSS-III design. Joint production or technology-sharing arrangements also would strengthen America’s own submarine industry, which is years behind in production and maintenance.

Naturally, critics have raised nonproliferation concerns. These concerns are unwarranted. South Korea is a model member of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). North Korea, by contrast, has blatantly violated its nuclear treaty obligations, has constructed an estimated 50 nuclear weapons, and is now reportedly building nuclear-powered submarines.

Denying South Korea the nuclear technology it needs to defend itself while North Korea races ahead is not responsible nonproliferation; it is strategic malpractice. The Trump administration’s October 2025 decision correctly recognized this fact by supporting South Korea’s pursuit of civil uranium enrichment and spent fuel reprocessing for peaceful uses as well as the production of nuclear submarines.

South Korea’s efforts to acquire enriched uranium fuel from the U.S., to receive technical assistance to enrich uranium domestically, and to obtain the right to reprocess spent fuel rods will also greatly benefit America’s nuclear power industry.

An AUKUS-style framework with updates to the U.S.–South Korea 123 agreement is the best way forward to provide Seoul with critical nuclear technology while ensuring safety, security, and non-proliferation standards.

South Korea has the industrial capability, the strategic need, and the alliance commitment to make this new nuclear technology cooperation work. The U.S. has taken the first step. The only remaining question is speed. The Trump administration, in consultation with Congress, should move ASAP to provide South Korea with the full suite of naval nuclear technology, reactor design support, fuel-cycle cooperation, and pathways for advanced reactors, including SMRs.

Security threats from China and North Korea are growing in the waters of the Asia-Pacific. A comprehensive U.S.–South Korea nuclear partnership is one of the best ways both nations can promote peace, security, and prosperity in this region.

— Fred Fleitz is a former CIA analyst and staff member with the House Intelligence Committee. In 2018, he served as the National Security Council Chief of Staff and as a Deputy Special Assistant to President Trump. This article originally appeared at American Greatness.

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by Joseph Trevithick and Hope Hodge Seck
April 24, 2026

Last December, President Donald Trump officially rolled out plans for the Trump class, the first of which is currently set to be named the USS Defiant, the world’s first new class of battleships since World War II. We just learned a lot more about them.

The Navy’s top leadership says they are working hard to avoid serious issues that have plagued previous shipbuilding efforts when it comes to the Trump class “battleship” program. Senior officials have focused, in particular, on the need to have a very firm design before any work on the large surface combatants, the first of which could cost a whopping $17 billion, actually begins. A lack of a finalized design, along with repeated changes to it along the way, contributed heavily to the demise of the Constellation class frigate last year.

Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Adm. Daryl Caudle and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, who left the Pentagon this week, both discussed the Trump class battleship, also known as the BBG(X), at separate roundtables on the sidelines of the Navy League’s Sea Air Space 2026 exposition this week.

“I think it is a necessary element to the force,” and “I think it provides real and needed flexibility to the force,” Secretary Phelan said about the BBG(X) effort at his roundtable.

From what the Navy has shared so far, the Trump class warships will displace approximately 35,000 tons, very roughly three times that of the newest Flight III subvariant of the Arleigh Burke class destroyer. They will also be between 840 and 880 feet long, have a beam (the widest point in the hull) between 105 and 115 feet, and be able to reach a top speed greater than 30 knots.

The armament on each of the ships will include a mix of nuclear and conventional missiles, including hypersonic types, loaded into large vertical launch system (VLS) arrays. They will also have an electromagnetic railgun, a pair of traditional 5-inch naval guns, laser directed energy weapons, and various additional weapons for close-in defense.

Navy officials also provided additional details about the costs and production schedule associated with the Trump class during yesterday’s rollout of the service’s proposed budget for the 2027 Fiscal Year. As it stands now, the Navy is looking to order the first of three of these large surface combatants in Fiscal Year 2028, at an estimated cost of $17 billion.

The Navy is currently projecting it will spend $43.5 billion on the program, overall, across the next five years. As a point of comparison, the estimated total procurement costs of each of the next three Ford class aircraft carriers range from roughly $13 to $15 billion.

The $17 billion figure “is the early initial estimate. We’ll see where we really settle down as we get through that and start to rationalize some of the costs,” Secretary Phelan noted at his roundtable at Sea Air Space. “So, let’s see where we land on that first ship, and then what the economies of scale get us to as we move through it.”

The Navy has already started “talking to two different vendors” about actually building the Trump class warships, he added. “Then it’ll be a function of how we get through that design process with them, and then their capacity in their yards, what we think they can do. Because we’re looking to really get moving on this and lay the keel in [20]28.”

The Secretary of the Navy and CNO Caudle have made clear that the BBG(X) design is still in the very early stages of being formulated. The ships are also set to incorporate a host of advanced capabilities, many of which, such as the railgun and laser directed energy weapons, have yet to be fully proven out, despite years of relevant work the Navy has done already.

“The ship needs to be designed. So, I got to put money toward the research and design of it,” Adm. Caudle said during his roundtable at Sea Air Space. “It’s really the design and how much pull-through I can do from previous efforts, like things that we already have on Arleigh Burke and DDG(X) designs that were already in the works.”

The Navy has previously confirmed that BBG(X) is a direct successor to the DDG(X) next-generation destroyer program. The service has also said that the new large surface combatant addresses shortcomings that had emerged with the previously planned DDG(X) design, which we will come back to later on.

“So all that has to go into a form factor in which we’re fundamentally changing the capacity, [the] vertical capacity of it, [and] the electrical plant and electrical generation for future large-scale directed energy [weapons] and other munitions that require a lot of power, like railgun,” Caudle continued. “So all that’s being baked into that design. And, because we’re taking it so seriously, we want to make sure that we have the right resources applied to the design.”

One of the “mistakes that we’ve done before, quite frankly,” is “we’ve started to build before the design is mature enough,” the CNO added. “And we want to make sure that we’re at [sic] least a very, very high level – I won’t try to give a percentage, but you can think like 80% or more design – before the first weld is done.”

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Caudle did not explicitly mention the Constellation class frigate, but the design of that ship was still being finalized as of April 2025, nearly five years after the initial contract award. Work had already begun on the lead ship at that time. This was all despite the Navy having explicitly chosen a derivative of an in-production frigate – Franco-Italian Fregata Europea Multi-Missione (FREMM) – specifically to help reduce risk and keep the program on track. Needless to say, that did not happen, as you can read more about here.

The Navy has also deliberately utilized a process known as “concurrency,” which entails starting production without having a validated design in place, on other shipbuilding projects. Concurrency has been presented in the past as a cost and time-saving measure, but has often produced exactly the opposite results. It has had notably negative impacts on the Navy’s newest operational aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, and both classes of Littoral Combat Ships (LCS).

“Look, we were doing work on railguns. We kind of abandoned it. We do have some directed energy [weapons] we are testing out right now,” Secretary Phelan also pointed out in terms of work the Navy has already done to develop key capabilities for the Trump class. “These are all things we have to get better at and need to do. So I think it’s just making sure that we’ve got the design down in an appropriate fashion, pretty locked down, and then making some trade-offs as we decide where to build that ship, when, how.”

The Navy just disclosed earlier this year that it conducted at least one new round of live-fire testing utilizing a prototype electromagnetic railgun currently at the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) in New Mexico. In the early 2020s, the Biden Administration shelved work on that weapon despite promising developments, citing technical hurdles.

Navy officials also continue to be very supportive of work on laser directed energy weapons, despite ongoing challenges with their development. The service is actively pursuing microwave directed energy weapons, as well.

At his roundtable at Sea Air Space this week, Phelan said that there are discussions ongoing about the possibility of the Trump class warships being nuclear-powered, though he said that was “unlikely” to be the case. Nuclear propulsion would have major impacts on the complexity and cost of the ships. Navy budget documents say the plan currently is for the BBG(X) to use a combined conventional propulsion system that includes diesel generators and gas turbines.

The Navy is also still fleshing out how it plans to employ the Trump class battleships operationally, which will also have impacts on the final design. This ties back into the aforementioned issues with DDG(X) that the service has cited in the past. The Navy has said it had previously arrived at a place with the next-generation destroyer program where it was considering building two subclasses with different armament configurations. This, in turn, had prompted questions about the limits that course of action would have imposed on the operational flexibility of the class as a whole.

“It’s something we’re trying to understand all the proper trade-offs, and then think about it as a Battleship Strike Group, Carrier Strike Group, how do they work in which different theaters,” Phelan said. “Look at how we’re deployed today, and ask yourself, how a ship like that, what it could do for us. If I had a ship like that today, I could park that off the coast of Venezuela, and I don’t need a ton of DDGs [Arleigh Burke class destroyers] to support it, and I can relieve some of the pressure on those.”

The Secretary’s comments here are in line with how the Navy’s latest budget request describes the current operational concept behind BBG(X).

“Adding capability at the highest end of the Golden Fleet high-low mix, the Battleship’s primary role is to deliver high-volume, long-range offensive fires and serve as a robust, survivable forward command and control platform. The expanded size and energy density of the new Battleship provide critical advantages for future naval warfare, offering a future-proof platform with distinct capabilities that enhance deterrence,” the line item for the program says.

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“Its advanced systems will enable true long-range strike with hypersonic weapons housed in new, larger vertical launch systems. Vastly increased power generation, managed by a sophisticated integrated power system with high-capacity energy storage, will support mission-critical directed energy weapons like high-output lasers and electromagnetic railguns, reducing reliance on costly single-use munitions.”

“Furthermore, its advanced naval gunfire offers cost-effective options for strike and defense, and its capacity to embark a fleet command staff enhances survivability by putting commanders closer to the fight. As a flexible command-and-control platform for both manned and unmanned platforms, the Battleship can lead a Surface Action Group, integrate with a Carrier Strike Group, or operate autonomously to secure critical sea lanes,” it continues. “To overcome the capacity limits of the Arleigh Burke class destroyer and the capability compromises of the previously planned DDG(X), the Battleship is designed specifically to accommodate these advanced weapon systems.”

Questions remain about the actual ability of a warship like the Trump class design to conduct independent operations, as well as the general utility of employing it in this way. These questions are compounded by the Navy’s plans, at least for now, to only acquire a very small number of these ships, which can only be in one place at one time. Moreover, with the plan now to order the first of these ships in Fiscal Year 2028, the decision about whether to proceed at all could fall to a new administration, as well.

The service does not appear to have ever put out a firm target for how many of the smaller DDG(X)s it expected to buy, but there had been talk of acquiring between 30 and 50 of those ships in the coming decades.

There are also industrial base and affordability concerns around acquiring such an expensive class of new large surface combatants amid the Navy’s other shipbuilding priorities. Naval shipbuilding capacity, or lack thereof, in the United States has been of growing concern for years, especially when contrasted with China’s industrial might in this regard.

“What we’re looking at more is this distributed ship building in modular [sic; modules], and I think that is a way to tackle that issue,” Phelan said at his roundtable in response to a direct question about these issues. “We’re going to need to really improve our ability to build ships.”

At a separate event earlier this year, Adm. Caudle also touted the importance of a greater focus on modular shipbuilding methods, which are not new. At that time, CNO was talking about how that could be used to help accelerate work on new FF(X) frigates that the Navy is now looking to acquire in place of the abortive Constellation class.

“An innovative strategy is guiding the new Battleship’s design and construction, centered on a state-of-the-art digital workflow. This utilizes modern digital engineering, AI-enabled design, and advanced production practices to reduce cost and schedule risk. Adopting best practices from Korean and Japanese shipbuilding, the approach emphasizes high design maturity before construction begins, precision modular construction, and tight integration between design and production teams,” according to the Navy’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request.

“This digital-first, modular approach allows for distributed construction across the industrial base, with U.S. shipyards focusing on final assembly and integration. The strategy is designed to stabilize the workforce, increase industrial resilience, and deliver the new capability more predictably and affordably.”

With the Navy now pushing to order its first Trump class battleship in Fiscal Year 2028, and insisting it won’t start work without a very firm design in place, more details about these warships are likely to continue to emerge in the coming months.

— This article first appeared at The War Zone.

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NOTE: I have long maintained that AI can’t replace you. But depending on what you do, it may very well replace your job.

That sounds like a contradiction. It isn’t. To quote Charafeddine Mouzouni, we’re entering a world where AI replaces tasks… but makes human accountability more valuable than ever.

To put that another way, AI has made me about five times more productive than I was two years ago. What it hasn’t done is replace me. It can’t. What I add is not just piecework, or even information: I add judgment. I’m creative in a way the software cannot be, because though it can execute, I must provide vision and direction. And at the end, I sign my name to the work, just as I would if I were assisted by human employees.

And in fact, now that I have these AI tools, I need to hire more humans to use them!

When farm automation began, we faced the same challenge. Legions of sharecroppers could be replaced with a few tractors. So where did the sharecroppers go? They learned new skills and got higher-paying jobs in tractor plants. Their kids went to college and became doctors and professors. The old world ended, yes. It was replaced by a far better one.

That’s happening again. There will be disruption. There will also be opportunity — for everyone — to a degree it’s difficult even to imagine today. — RDM

The Biggest Job Creation Event Since the Internet Is Hiding in Anthropic’s Data

by Marco Kotrotsos
April 23, 2026

So last week, Anthropic published its labor market impact study and the internet did what the internet does. Headlines about a “Great Recession for white-collar workers.” Lists of the ten most exposed occupations. Think pieces about whether your CS degree was a waste of money. I wrote one of those pieces myself. It’s easy to get caught up in the flow of opinion if you don’t stop and really think about the other side of the messaging.

There’s a thing about the Anthropic data that got buried under all the alarm: the same numbers that measure displacement also measure opportunity. And the opportunity side of the ledger is potentially enormous, if you know how to read it.

The 61-Point Gap Is Not Just a Threat

Anthropic’s key finding was the distance between what AI can theoretically do and what people are actually using it for. In computer and math occupations, theoretical capability sits at 94 percent. Observed usage is 33 percent. That’s a 61-percentage-point gap.

The doom reading: that gap is closing, and when it does, jobs disappear.

The other reading: that gap represents trillions of dollars in unrealized productivity. And closing it requires people. Lots of them, doing work that mostly didn’t exist three years ago.

Think about what the gap actually consists of. It’s not that organizations looked at AI and said “no thanks.” It’s that deploying AI at scale requires integration work, compliance frameworks, quality assurance pipelines, change management, training programs, security audits, and a hundred other things that someone has to build, maintain, and operate.

And every percentage point of that gap that closes creates work before it eliminates it.

We’ve Seen This Movie Before

In 1970, the United States had roughly 250,000 bank tellers. Then ATMs arrived. By the early 2000s, there were over 400,000 ATMs installed across the country. The number of tellers per branch dropped from 20 to 13.

And the total number of bank tellers roughly doubled.

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What happened? ATMs made it cheaper to operate a branch. So banks opened more branches. Urban bank branches increased 43 percent. The tellers who remained did different work, more relationship-oriented, more advisory, less cash-counting. The technology didn’t eliminate the category. It transformed it and expanded it.

Spreadsheets tell the same story. When VisiCalc launched in 1979, there were 299,000 accountants and bookkeepers in the U.S. Excel arrived in 1985. By 1989, that number had grown to 524,000, a 75 percent increase in a decade. Today there are 1.28 million, and the profession is still growing at 4 percent per year. Spreadsheets didn’t kill accounting. They made it so much more accessible and powerful that demand for accountants exploded.

Electronic discovery software was supposed to eliminate paralegals. Paralegal employment grew. Scanning technology was supposed to eliminate cashiers. Cashier numbers increased. Every previous abstraction layer in software, from compilers to frameworks to Stack Overflow, was supposed to eliminate developers. Developer headcount grew through all of it.

The pattern is so consistent that economists have a name for it. The Jevons Paradox: when technology makes a resource cheaper to use, total consumption of that resource tends to increase, not decrease. William Stanley Jevons observed this with coal in 1865. It applies to knowledge work in 2026.

The Jobs That Didn’t Exist Yesterday

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by Rod D. Martin
April 22, 2026

I appeared on NTD Good Morning with Cary Dunst to discuss the President’s extension of the ceasefire with Iran. We look at why that happened, the blockade’s effect on both the regime and its oil production, how long it will take to restart Iran’s oil fields if they have to be closed, and why the regime is on the verge of collapse.

What we did not discuss (and this is entirely my fault, because Cary asked me: I just got sidetracked) is Iran’s firing on several container ships in the last 24 hours. Iran attacked (but failed to sink) three ships transiting from the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

My take: This is utterly counterproductive on the part of Iran. It reinforces the UAE and Saudi position that the Iranian regime must go. It also strengthens Trump’s blockade. If there is actual danger to ships passing through the Strait, insurance rates skyrocket (or insurance simply becomes unavailable), America sells more oil and gas, and Iran’s financial strangulation quickens.

So why would they do it? Because they think by putting pressure on America’s allies, they can force Trump to stand down. To which I can only say, they clearly do not get Donald Trump.

It’s nine minutes you won’t want to miss. Watch the interview, and pass it along!

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by Rod D. Martin
April 22, 2026

I told you they were guilty.

House Republicans have spent months digging into ActBlue, the premier Democrat fundraising machine that has raised over $16 billion for Democrat candidates and causes. What they’ve found is every bit as bad as I’ve told you. And ActBlue’s leaders felt the need to invoke their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination an incredible 146 times.

The just-released interim staff report from the House Administration, Oversight, and Judiciary Committees lays out vast illegal foreign donations and money laundering — “election interference” — and illegal “straw donor” schemes, followed by a massive cover-up to prevent Congress and the DOJ from catching on.

Two ActBlue officials, including Alyssa Twomey, the former Vice President of Customer Service who oversaw the fraud-prevention team during the 2024 election cycle, along with three former company lawyers, refused to answer even a single substantive question in sworn interviews with investigators.

It gets worse. According to the interim report, every member of the legal and compliance team "appears to have left the platform after the 2024 election because of its 'knowing and willful' acceptance of illegal foreign contributions, and the subsequent cover-up." Chairmen Bryan Steil (R-WI), James Comer (R-KY), and Jim Jordan (R-OH) also allege that CEO Regina Wallace-Wells made false statements to Congress and that ActBlue withheld subpoenaed documents…some of which were later uncovered by the New York Times. Ouch.

This Congressional report is just the latest in a longrunning scandal. Last year, President Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to open a formal criminal investigation of ActBlue’s operations and its role in potentially facilitating foreign interference in U.S. elections. A grand jury is widely rumored but so far unconfirmed.

Nor are the amounts small. The presidential memorandum cites damning evidence that ActBlue accepted thousands of donations from foreign IP addresses using prepaid credit cards — an ideal tool for money laundering. And records uncovered by the committees show that ActBlue’s lawyers worked with the platform’s fraud prevention team explicitly for the purpose of implementing even “more lenient” standards during the 2024 campaign than ever before.

Generally speaking, you don’t subpoena the lawyers if the other shoe isn’t about to drop.

In addition to the DOJ and Congress, 19 state attorneys general are investigating ActBlue for allegations related to fraudulent fundraising practices, including potential money laundering and misuse of donor identities. And on Monday, Texas AG Ken Paxton filed suit.

The question is no longer whether ActBlue is corrupt. The question now is how deep the rot goes, and how far up the Democrat food chain it reaches.

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Serious people could do serious prison time. And Democrats’ fundraising could drop dramatically if limited to just legitimate donors, during a time when other giant taxpayer-funded Democrat slush funds (USAID, NED, EPA, Planned Parenthood, etc.) are rapidly being cut off.

The Democrats thought they were untouchable. They acted on that. Big mistake.

ActBlue: The Shadow Bank of the Left

ActBlue, founded in 2004, was initially billed as a grassroots platform to help small donors pool resources and support Democrat candidates. In practice, it has become the unofficial treasury of the Left — a centralized conduit for billions of dollars in political contributions. According to FEC records, ActBlue processed over $1.5 billion in the 2020 election cycle alone.

It’s not just the biggest player on the Left; it’s the biggest political fundraising platform in the country, period.

But here’s what sets it apart.

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by Rod D. Martin and Kevin Freeman
April 21, 2026

My latest interview on Economic War Room with Kevin Freeman. Sign up NOW for Kevin’s Rumble channel and don’t miss a single episode!

From the episode description:

“A strategic breakdown of U.S. operations in Iran, the regime’s vulnerabilities, and how precision operations could enable change without large-scale deployment. Rod Martin analyzes the regional cascade — from Hezbollah and Hamas to the Abraham Accords — and the global ripple effects on China, Russia, and oil markets.

“Discover how Shadow Fleet tanker interdictions, sanctions, and technology shape a broader containment plan aimed at Beijing. Economic implications, midterm politics, and the path to a free Iran are insightfully assessed.”

It’s the briefing you need, all in just 24 minutes! Watch and share!

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by Rod D. Martin
April 21, 2026

Iran is certainly the topic du jour, but it’s only one piece of a much larger puzzle. It’s also serving as a useful distraction while the President engineers a separate, though connected, revolution. His latest target is America’s abominable foreign aid regime, and the socialist mindset that drives it.

The blowback would be intense under normal circumstances. But who can keep up with Trump?

As I’ve been describing over the last year, Donald Trump is carrying out a comprehensive reset of American foreign policy, the broadest since the end of World War II. Some of the smartest geopolitical analysts I know believe he’s intent on withdrawing from the world. They’re wrong. Trump is simply rejecting the liberal internationalist and neoconservative approaches to American engagement.

Think more Ronald Reagan, less Woodrow Wilson. Or Dick Cheney.

Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio opened a new front in that revolution, with a sweeping reset of America’s approach to foreign aid: “Trade Over Aid.” Rubio ordered U.S. diplomats to line up foreign signatures for a formal end-of-April UN declaration. The document commits aid-recipient governments to making themselves investable: freer markets, lighter regulation, lower taxes, stronger property rights, enforceable contracts, reliable courts, and real engagement with private capital. Bottom line: no reform, no more money.

The point is so obvious only a Harvard professor could miss it. Real aid should make itself unnecessary. Just as there should be no more “Forever Wars”, there should be no more “Forever Aid”.

See Rod discuss Trump’s initiative — PLUS an Iran war update — on NTD News.

After World War II, America rebuilt Western Europe and Japan as economic powerhouses capable of standing on their own two feet. Others like South Korea and Taiwan followed suit. Their people became prosperous, their children gained a future.

But in the Third World, American diplomats took a far more condescending, paternalistic approach. Marinated in socialist nonsense, they designed a system of permanent dependency on handouts, encouraging the sort of Marxist nightmares that long ruled former colonies from Algeria to Zimbabwe, from Bolivia to Bangladesh. In Europe and East Asia, America created systems that look like Texas and Florida. In the rest of the world, Democrats created quagmires that look like inner-city Detroit.

That contrast is the heart of the matter. The issue is not whether America should help poor countries. Of course it should, when doing so serves both moral and strategic ends. The issue is whether the help actually helps.

Real aid is supposed to be a bridge to strength. It is supposed to create functioning societies, honest institutions, productive economies, and citizens who can build lives without waiting for their next check from Washington. It is supposed to end, because it’s supposed to become unnecessary.

But the modern foreign-aid racket — and by “modern” I mean “the entire postcolonial era” — does the exact opposite. It doesn’t just fail to solve the problem: it preserves and perpetuates the dependency.

A system built around grants, agencies, NGOs, and bureaucratic prestige will always behave just like every other permanent bureaucracy: self-preservation first, mission second if at all. If weakness justifies the budget, weakness will be preserved. If dependency keeps the machine humming, dependency will be moralized. And if failure enriches the people running the system, failure will be renamed compassion.

Democrats designed that, just as they designed America’s bloated, corrupt welfare system. We have seen in Minnesota and California how money meant for the poor actually enriches the political machine wrapped around it. USAID worked the same way on a global scale. The poor were the moral pretext. The winners were the NGOs, the contractors, the Deep State bureaucrats, and the leftist ideologies they served.

That’s why “Trade Over Aid” is so offensive to the aid priesthood. They hear the phrase and act as though America is turning its back on the poor. What horrifies them is something else entirely: the possibility that the old model may finally end. They don’t object because the system has worked. As in the rest of the foreign policy establishment, they object because it hasn’t, and because too many of them have built careers, institutions, and fortunes atop that failure.

“This time will be different,” they assure us, the refrain of socialists everywhere. But socialism has failed everywhere.

If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he can feed his family, build a business, educate his children, and grow a whole country that doesn’t need Uncle Sam dropping off fish forever.

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Why should this obvious truth that worked so well in Germany and Singapore be ignored in Guinea and Sudan? You know why: because teaching people to fish threatens the livelihood, the control, and the skim of the fish-delivery bureaucracy. In its own perverse way, Forever Aid makes sense: it successfully and permanently exploits the recipients.

If you believed in Critical Race Theory, you’d call that systemically racist. But the Critical Race Theory crowd created that system. They don’t just defend it. They want to double down.

Those defenders always try to blur the line between two very different things.

One is emergency relief. If there’s a famine, a war, a flood, or an earthquake, civilized nations help. Americans in particular help, and rightly so. This aid, like disaster relief at home, is intended to bridge over a crisis. It’s also intended to end.

The other is a permanent architecture of donor dependency in which entire societies are treated as wards, their elites are rewarded for failure, and their people are taught to wait on the next aid cycle rather than build the institutions that make flourishing possible. Will there be a better tomorrow? Certainly not. But there will be another aid shipment tomorrow, and next year, and forever.

The first of these saves lives. The second destroys them, preventing people, families, and countries from ever becoming strong enough to prosper, or even just live on their own.

Trump’s “Trade Over Aid” initiative overturns all of that like the moneychangers’ tables. Poor countries don’t become prosperous because Western bureaucrats feed them (while skimming off the top). They leave dependency and become prosperous when they have governments that reward production instead of predation.

In a word: capitalism.

And as in the domestic welfare disaster, the aid regime’s socialist presuppositions are not just economically debilitating but morally degrading. They assume poor people are objects of pity to be managed by self-appointed elites. They assume a handout is ethically superior to ownership, thrift, productivity, and responsibility. They assume that people are somehow nobler when poor than when free (a nobility, one should note, that the bureaucrats see no need to share).

That worldview is poison.

Capitalism made a world of poor people rich. Prosperity came not from redistribution but from production, trade, investment, industrialization, energy, technology, a legal system that supports private property, and virtuous cultural habits, all of which are anathema to the left.

That’s a big part of why blowing up USAID mattered. But that was only the first step. If all Trump, Rubio, and Musk had done was smash one particularly corrupt agency, the Deep State machine would have reconstituted it under a different name and with softer rhetoric (and indeed it tried). The deeper task was always philosophical: to replace a foreign-aid model built on dependency with one built on prosperity. To replace socialism with capitalism.

All of this fits perfectly inside Trump’s broader redesign of American foreign policy. His administration is not changing things randomly or piecemeal. It is changing the entire postwar order: alliances, trade, burden-sharing, supply chains, border security, energy, deterrence, multilateral institutions, the Western Hemisphere, the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific, even space. Venezuela is one battlefield. Iran is another. NATO is another. Ukraine is another. Taiwan is another. Gaza is another. Greenland, the Panama Canal, Indonesia, India, the Moon: each is one part of a much larger whole.

Commerce Not Chaos was never just a line. It was a governing logic. Countries who prosper together rarely fight each other. Prosperity deters aggression from those who would fight, and funds the defense that defeats them. Truman and Kennan understood this. Generations after them did not.

That logic now reaches foreign aid. The old model asked how America could manage poverty. The new one asks how poor countries can become rich.

That’s why “Trade Over Aid” matters. It’s not about abandoning the world. It’s about abandoning a failed way of pretending to help it. It’s not about cruelty. It’s about rejecting the lie that permanent dependency is compassion. It’s not about turning away from poor countries. It’s about finally taking them seriously enough to want more for them than an endless welfare check, about caring about them enough to want them to have a future.

No nation was ever subsidized into greatness. No civilization was ever built on dependency. Men rise by building. Families rise by producing. Nations rise by rewarding the habits that make prosperity possible.

That is what Trump and Rubio are now saying at the UN, and it is why the aid priesthood is horrified.

As with Trump’s demand that Europe be able to defend itself, the President is not withdrawing American power, or even its beneficence. He believes allies should be real partners. He also believes in the old idea of “the deserving poor.” The liberal internationalists indulged, and the neocons embraced, a world dependent on America, and an America that served everyone’s interests but its own.

Trump believes in nations, not colonies, and certainly not unaccountable global governance. He believes countries should be strong in their own right, making themselves better able to serve their people and better partners as a result.

Our alliance structure should be built on that principle. Our foreign aid philosophy should match.

The goal of aid should never have been to perpetuate the status quo. It should have been to help establish independent individuals and nations that don’t need aid at all.

That’s a vision worthy of America.

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by Rod D. Martin
April 17, 2026

I appeared on NTD Evening News with Chris Beers to discuss President Trump’s radical makeover of U.S. foreign assistance, an initiative called “Trade Over Aid” that aims to end dependency and create prosperity. The plan rejects both socialist western aid models and the CCP’s Belt and Road debt traps.

I provide an update on the Iran war, and what Trump has really been doing behind the scenes during the ceasefire.

The dismantling of USAID, which turned out to be a giant Democrat slush fund, was just the beginning. Worse still is the entire postcolonial U.S. foreign aid racket — “Forever Aid”, like the “Forever Wars” Trump is also ending — which, through socialist presuppositions, traps countries in dependency in exactly the same way that Democrat policies have trapped the inner city poor.

Note well: this is NOT how America helped Western Europe or East Asia after World War II. Those countries were helped to become modern economies that could stand on their own and offer a future to their children. By contrast, the Third World was treated paternalistically, with disastrous results.

Trump wants partners, not dependents. If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he can feed his family, build a business, educate his children, and help build a country that no longer needs Uncle Sam.

That’s how aid should work. The help should actually help. And it has truly helped when it’s no longer needed.

It’s eleven minutes of analysis you won’t get anywhere else. Watch, like, and share!

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NOTE: This incredibly encouraging piece from our friends at The Baptist Report deserves two additional statistics. According to the Iranian government’s own data, 54 percent of Iranians are now “non-religious”: whether that actually means only “non-Islamic” is unclear. But according to that same data, 50,000 of Iran’s 75,000 mosques have closed over the past decade.

The Ayatollah has long told Iranians that he and his government are Islam. It seems that the Iranian people have come to agree with him. And that presents some unprecedented opportunities. — RDM

by The Baptist Report
April 19, 2026

War is hell. But more importantly, the impact of war results in deaths of those who do not profess Christ as Lord, condemning their souls to eternal torment in hell.

As the United States and Israel carry out significant and potentially regime-changing military action and political pressure intensifies in Iran, speculation grows about the future of the Islamic Republic. Christian leaders and regional analysts are increasingly asking a consequential question: What would the fall of the Iranian regime mean for the spread of Christianity across the Middle East?

Across multiple sources — from the Denison Forum’s Faith & Clarity podcast to reports from osvnews.com and other sources — a theme emerges: Iran may be on the brink of the most significant spiritual shift in the region in centuries.

A Nation Under Pressure – and Spiritually Awakening

For more than four decades, Iran’s clerical regime has enforced strict religious controls, criminalizing conversion and driving Christian worship underground. Christians face severe persecution, including arrests and harsh penalties for practicing their faith.

Yet paradoxically, this pressure has fueled unprecedented spiritual openness. Hormoz Shariat — often called “the Billy Graham of Iran” — told the Denison Forum that despite persecution, “many Iranians are turning to Jesus through underground churches, dreams, and personal encounters with Christ.”

According to Persecution.org, Iran now has the fastest‑growing evangelical population in the world, a trend that predates the current conflict but has accelerated as disillusionment with the regime deepens. Estimates suggest there are more than a million Iranian converts to Christianity despite the country’s severe persecution. The growth is largely attributed to house church movements and personal connections among believers.

If the Regime Falls: A New Religious Landscape?

Analysts agree that a post‑regime Iran would likely experience a dramatic shift in religious freedom and spiritual exploration. Here’s how:

1. Could Freedom of Worship Expand Rapidly?

Under the current system, even attending a house church can result in years‑long prison sentences. One Iranian mother, Narges, received 17 years simply for participating in a home gathering.

A new government — especially one not rooted in Islamist ideology — could dismantle these restrictions. As one observer puts it, “A new government could lead to greater religious tolerance, allowing Christians to worship freely and openly.”

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2. Underground Churches to Public Communities

Iran’s house‑church movement is vast, decentralized, and resilient. Shariat’s ministry alone has documented more than 100,000 conversions through satellite broadcasts. He notes that believers exist “in every city and town,” ready to form public congregations once it becomes safe.

Shariat predicts that within months of regime collapse, “we will be able to plant tens, maybe hundreds of churches.”

3. Disillusionment with Islam Fuels a Search for Alternatives

Multiple sources highlight a profound spiritual shift: millions of Iranians are rejecting the regime’s version of Islam. A survey cited by the Denison Forum found that 84% of respondents expressed negative views of Islam, while 92% held positive views of Jesus and Christianity.

This cultural moment — rare in the Islamic world — creates fertile ground for Christian growth.

Regional Ripple Effects

Iran is not an isolated nation. Its religious, political, and cultural influence extends across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the Persian Gulf. A post‑Islamist Iran could:

• Reduce pressure on Christian minorities in proxy‑controlled regions

• Shift regional narratives about Islam and religious identity

• Inspire reform movements in neighboring countries

• Open new pathways for Christian media and missions throughout the Middle East

As a Denison Forum commentator noted, “Perhaps God is stirring in a fresh way… to bring spiritual awakening, religious freedom, and a whole sense of flourishing to Iran and the surrounding region.”

Challenges Ahead

A regime collapse would not automatically usher in a Christian renaissance. Several realities need to be taken into consideration:

• Secularism may surge first, as Iranians seek distance from all organized religion.

• Political instability could delay open worship.

• Decades of surveillance and distrust will take time to heal.

Still, Christian leaders inside Iran remain hopeful. An observer summarized, “The fall of the Iranian regime could create a more favorable environment for Christianity to flourish.”

A Historic Opportunity

If Iran’s regime falls, the Middle East may witness something unprecedented: the first modern Islamic nation to experience a large‑scale turning toward Christianity.

Shariat puts it bluntly: “History is in the making… Iran will be the first nation that rejects Islam and comes to Christ.”

Whether that vision becomes reality remains to be seen. But the spiritual groundwork laid quietly through decades of underground faithfulness suggests that the fall of the Iranian regime could mark a watershed moment for Christianity in the region.

Watch “Iran, War, and the Surprising Growth of Christianity” on YouTube:

— This article first appeared at The Baptist Report, which you should follow.

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by Pete Feigal
April 18, 2026

On this 84th anniversary of the Doolittle Raid, it is well worth considering how dramatically different things might have been but for a courageous attack some saw as an ineffectual publicity stunt.

In this context, few ever mention the incredible Japanese victory in April 1942 in the Indian Ocean and the potential nightmare an extended attack could have caused there. Things in ’42 could have been much worse for the Allies if Japan had chosen not to attack Midway but Ceylon, British East Africa, Madagascar, even the Suez Canal.

The Doolittle Raid was a brilliant piece of strategy, thought up, planned and executed in record time. (“Aqaba..from the land!” — Lawrence.) It was a plan of genius, of military propaganda, even theatre, and was as crucial an event as anything in the entire war. Indeed, it started a chain-reaction that eventually led to Hiroshima.

After the tremendous victories of Dec ’41, Jan-Feb ‘42, much of the incredibly powerful Japanese fleet twiddled its thumbs at anchor near Hiroshima. Not until the last weeks in March was Admiral Nagumo, victor of Pearl Harbor, given a real mission. He and his fast carriers had zoomed around in minor carrier strikes, “smashing eggshells with a sledgehammer,” as Mitsuo Fuchida wrote. Precious time was ticking away for the Japanese, who needed to make a strategic design fast: East against the Americans, or West against the British in the Indian Ocean and on to the Suez Canal.

Finally In late March Nagumo was ordered to sail west around Singapore and hit British forces, sea and air, in the Indian Ocean. The orders read “To support the Japanese Army’s advance into Burma.”

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It was a huge victory. On 5 April 1942, Nagumo’s Kidō Butai dive-bombers sank an aircraft carrier, HMS Hermes, two heavy cruisers, HMS Cornwall and HMS Dorsetshire, a destroyer, and a corvette in an Easter Sunday Raid.

The Japanese totally destroyed two British bases in Ceylon, and 93,000 tons of merchant shipping. The Zeroes wrought such chaos among the defending Hurricanes, Swordfish, and Spitfires that Churchill in his memoirs confessed the RAF was never so totally outfought over Europe.

British aircraft losses were heavy. The surviving British battleships and rest of the surviving Indian Ocean fleet fled in confusion and panic to British East Africa. British Naval seapower, after 200 years of hegemony, disappeared entirely from the Indian Ocean. The Indian Ocean was, for all practical purposes, a Japanese lake. Western historians rarely give this the gravity it deserves…except for Winston Churchill, who quite honestly wrote of his own complete shock and fear at the time.

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by Rod D. Martin
April 17, 2026

I appeared on NTD News with Arleen Richards to discuss DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s criminal referral of former Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson and the original “whistleblower” who misled and withheld key information from Congress leading to the first Trump impeachment.

We discuss the latest on FBI Director Kash Patel’s “grand conspiracy” investigation targeting Obama’s team and the Deep State coup plotters for their long-term effort to improperly remove a duly elected President.

We also discuss why government must be de-weaponized, how and why we must make government trustworthy again, and how this entire Democrat plot was an effort to transfer power from voters and the officials they elect (and can replace) to an untouchable Deep State bureaucracy.

It’s six minutes of analysis you won’t get anywhere else. Watch, like, and share!

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NOTE: One of the finest geopolitical minds of our time, George Friedman, has a unique connection to Hungary, having fled Communism with his parents at a young age. Here are his thoughts on the meaning of this week’s elections, Hungary’s past, and Europe’s future. — RDM

by George Friedman
April 17, 2026

Viktor Orban, after 16 years as prime minister of Hungary, has lost an election and will soon be replaced by Peter Magyar. Orban was a man of the right, opposing large-scale immigration into Hungary, holding negative views on homosexuality and, according to many, suppressing democracy with authoritarian tendencies.

In addition, he maintained friendly relations with Russia and President Vladimir Putin. In this sense, he was an outcast in Europe, or least in the places that many in the U.S. think of as Europe: Britain, France and Germany.

Although Russia, under communism, had occupied and to a large degree controlled Hungary, Orban viewed Moscow in much friendlier ways than most of his European peers, even after its invasion of Ukraine. From Orban’s point of view (and, given that he was elected, the majority Hungarian point of view), Russia was not the Soviet Union, and it was a critical source of oil and gas. In addition, it was an extremely powerful nation, and a friendly relationship was essential to Hungarian security.

Hungary also had tense relations with Ukraine. The western part of Ukraine had been part of Hungary until the end of World War I. Ethnic Hungarians still live in that area, speaking Hungarian. Orban wanted, among other things, greater protections for the Hungarian language in Ukrainian schools. The Ukrainians were unwilling to go as far as Orban wanted, and I suspect that Orban had hoped that if defeated by Russia, the Hungarian part of Ukraine, if not returned to Hungary, would at least ease restrictions on the use of the Hungarian language in education.

Hungary, therefore, had a fundamentally different view of Ukraine than did the rest of Europe. It saw its relationship with Moscow as an asset, despite their bad history, and Ukraine as, if not an enemy, in no way a friend. As a result, it also saw Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a very different light. Thus, Hungary has repeatedly been a stumbling block for tougher EU sanctions against Russia, and most recently, it has blocked an EU loan (which required unanimity) to support Ukraine’s war effort.

In some ways, this allied Hungary with the interests of the United States under President Donald Trump. Trump likely does not care about Hungarian-language schools, but he regards Russia as too weak to threaten the rest of Europe and prefers a negotiated settlement to the conflict, allowing Russia to keep the parts of Ukraine it has occupied. On this, he and Orban could agree.

And here, too, Orban was an outsider, this time relative to other countries in Eastern Europe once occupied by the Soviet Union. Poland, on the eastern edge of NATO, was profoundly concerned about the invasion of Ukraine, as was Romania, another Eastern European country bordering Hungary. However, from Hungary’s perspective, shielded by greater distances and harsher terrain, Russia did not look so threatening.

Despite many commonalities with Orban, the election of Peter Magyar represents a fundamental shift in Hungary’s stance. He is a Europeanist, which means he is likely to go along with the European consensus. The problem is that the consensus ignores a fundamental difference in European nations and in the nature of Europe. The most important difference is between the nature of Western and Eastern Europe in their recent histories.

Western Europe was occupied by the British and the Americans at the end of World War II. Under the umbrella of NATO and its main power, the United States, the economies of Western Europe developed rapidly. But Eastern Europe emerged from the war occupied by the Soviet Union, under much harsher political conditions and, given the economic weakness of the Soviets after the war, with far less economic development possible.

This difference between Western and Eastern Europe was not really new. From the late 15th century, Western Europe, with maritime access to the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, imposed a colonial system on parts of Africa, Asia and the Western Hemisphere at varying times. It is difficult to comprehend the wealth generated from those empires, but just consider that a small country like the Netherlands owned the vast expanse of Indonesia. Eastern Europe, with far less maritime access, did not have colonialism as the engine of economic development.

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In spite of the destruction of World War II, these differences persisted. Given the American interest in reviving the economies of Western Europe to prevent communism’s spread, an entire political and economic system — known today as the European Union — developed alongside the NATO military alliance. In time, the west emerged far wealthier than Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the newly independent Eastern European countries were incorporated into this Western European system, but after decades living under communism they were effectively at the mercy of their richer relatives in Western Europe.

This was the foundation of Orban’s hostility to the EU, as well as his caution about NATO. We can assume that Magyar will take a different track. At the same time, there is an ingrained difference in the perception of the world for Western and Eastern Europeans, due mostly to the disparity in economic development. This gap is slowly closing, but while it exists, it is difficult for the EU in particular to create policies beneficial to both regions.

This is actually an old story. Jozef Pilsudski, a Polish general, argued after World War I that Eastern Europe was fundamentally different from the west and that the nations between the Baltic and Black seas should join together in recognition of this fact to form what he called the Intermarium. He argued that under the economic domination of Western Europe, the countries of Eastern Europe could not prosper or be secure from predator nations, but that united, they had the cultural and resource capabilities to evolve economically and defend themselves. Nothing came of that proposal, which was followed by a global depression that further weakened the east, World War II and the Cold War.

The reality has changed in one sense: Poland has emerged as one of the 20 largest economies in the world, as well as a significant military power essential to NATO’s powerful eastern frontier. An Eastern European power has for the first time entered the upper ranks of nations.

The other Eastern European countries have also evolved to some extent but are far behind Poland and certainly Western Europe. Given that the center of gravity of the European Union is in the west, the emergence of an economic and military alliance in the east remains a fundamental imperative. However, the nationalism within and mutual mistrust among Eastern European nations have blocked this union, despite their common military and economic realities.

Orban realized that the system created by Western Europe existed for its own benefit and could not serve Hungary, and so he sought a different path for the country. He drew it away from the West, but Hungary is a small country, and there were limits to its economic and military power. This is something it has in common with other Eastern European countries like Romania, Slovakia and the Baltic and Balkan states.

The truth is that Hungary alone cannot evolve as Poland has. It is smaller in size and population than Poland, and even Poland remains far behind Western Europe by economic standards, even if it is to some extent its equal militarily.

Pilsudski understood the fundamental difference between Europe’s east and west but was ignored. Oddly, Orban also understood the profound difference, but he could not overcome his focus on his own nation and had less than cooperative relations with countries like Poland and Romania. The region is intellectually and culturally gifted. Poland and Hungary rank 13th and 14th in the number of Nobel laureates, which is extraordinary given their size. It is not a lack of intellect that limits the region, but size and mistrust.

The election of Magyar, after Orban’s significant efforts to develop Hungary alone, opens the door to an understanding that an alliance structure similar to that of Western Europe, applied to Eastern Europe as a whole, might lead to massive development if it is not hindered by European institutions. Where Orban understood the limits that Western European institutions placed on Hungary, and Poland has demonstrated what is possible in Eastern Europe, Magyar might usher in a new era by recognizing the potential for integration among similarly developed countries (as opposed to the vastly unequal relationships implicit in union with Western Europe).

Hence, the emergence of Eastern Europe as a first-rate power may be possible. It is not Magyar’s persona that is the key, but rather the possibility that he might combine his preference for multinationalism with Orban’s understanding that Hungary is not a Western European nation. Thus, the first item on the table might be mending Hungary’s relationship with Poland.

This is not a forecast, given the nature of the region, but it is an imperative for the region nonetheless.

— George Friedman is an internationally recognized geopolitical forecaster and strategist on international affairs, a many-time New York Times bestselling author, and the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures, where this article first appeared.

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by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
April 16, 2026

My latest interview on Securing America with Frank Gaffney. Sign up NOW for Frank’s Rumble channel and don’t miss a single episode!

Rod Martin & Frank Gaffney discuss:

• Why the ceasefire talks were a ruse and the blockade is a masterstroke

• How the MOSAIC defense backfired on Iran

• Why Trump is still angling for a free Iran

• The NATO angle: forcing a real partnership…or a divorce (and yes, Casablanca is nicer than Ramstein)

• Why the U.S. Navy is the real maritime insurer but London reaps the profits, and will Trump end that arrangement?

• The Indonesia deal provides the means to strangle China

• Why China’s fall is making Mexico rise

• The Reagan-Trump playbook for ending CCP rule

This may be the best 30 minutes we’ve ever done. Watch, like, and share!

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